this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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United States | News & Politics

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[โ€“] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

One thing I gotta say... here we are, two people of different backgrounds and very different opinions, but we're still both interested in finding the best way to help people we probably don't even know, while arguing the topic in a civilized manner. Imagine what could be done if the corrupt politicians in DC started acting more like adults and less like petulant children... Ah well, it was a nice thought anyway.

[โ€“] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

I will get to your other comment before too long, hopefully, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say that this is exactly what I meant when I said that your perspective was distorted by Sorkin-ism. In the ways that really matter, the political class are nothing like "petulant children" and nothing in DC would be solved by people just "hashing their problems out." They are, as you say, corrupt, and they are both largely getting their money from the same sources, resulting in their goals being mostly the same, whatever their professed positions are.

Paraphrasing from a source you rightly don't care about, people talk about "diverse interests", but generally what do those "diverse interests" look like? Typically it's not something indifferent like "I like spaghetti" vs "I like hamburgers", typically it's something more like "I own this copper refinery and want to dump industrial waste into this river" vs "we live downstream of that refinery and don't want to be poisoned" and typically, assuming that action isn't already illegal (and sometimes even when it is), the Republican position is siding with the factory owner and the Democrat position is pretending to side with the people but really doing nothing. If you think that's an exaggeration, remember they promised that they fixed the pipes in Flint but plainly did not.

You're getting hung up on kabuki theater, a good cop/bad cop routine, rather than looking at how the system demands the oppression of working people and the ruling class is united on that front.

Anyway, if you want to have conversations with communists, Hexbear is good for that (see the askchapo comm), you just need to signal that you're being sincere and unassuming. Most of them are better at being nice than I am, though in all respects there is a variance in quality.