I feel this. My in-laws voted for Trump because Biden was going to outlaw Catholicism in the United States. Absolute lunatics.

Yeah, like I went down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole because of all the fuckery around 9/11 but then left the Alex Jones part of it when it became clear he didn’t really gaf about changing anything, which meant he either didn’t believe it or was working with them instead of against them (leaning more towards him just making shit up, though I did still believe that things weren’t what they seemed with how society was run). The nail in the coffin for me was a very high production value video explaining what was going on that ended with a “but I have an answer, wait for the next video to find out!” And I’m thinking “wait, cliffhangers are engagement bait, not something you should say after talking about how the elites want to reduce the world population to like 100 million. He’s just in it for the money, also how the fuck is he producing such high production quality videos?”

It wasn’t aligned with either US politics “side” and subscribed to the “it’s all an act, they are all buddy buddy behind closed doors” point of view, but I came out of it around the end of the Bush era, was happy to see Obama win but disappointed in how his actual presidency went (he seemed to have the resolve of a wet noodle when it came to actually fighting for the right things.

It was baffling as fuck when the conspiracy theory crowd was aligned behind fucking Donald Trump, of all people. Seemed like the poster boy for the elites rather than a saviour. I didn’t watch a ton of the apprentice but none that I did see gave me any kind of positive impression of him. He just seemed like the asshole type of boss.

Pizzagate was also stupid as fuck (why the fuck would a pedophile ring for rich people operate out of the basement of a public building?). And gamergate was one of the lamest whiny things I’ve seen (though not sure how much of that came from the conspiracy side, it might have been going after a different audience).

Like I get how it feels going down that rabbit hole, things that were confusing can make more sense and there’s truth at the core of it, but you need to continue using critical thought or you just end up becoming someone’s tool. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend!

They aren’t stupid, they are selfish and ego driven, and they base success/goodness on the number in their bank account.

The fact the most Americans sell their morals is a part of the culture and something that needs to change before things get better.

Like, why should I respect or align myself with such a stupid group of people?

Which is exactly the question they were asking. You want someone to blame, it’s the DNC.

If your only options are the fascist or the guy who promised to bring the fascist to justice but actually didn’t even try, then your problem isn’t getting solved by voting in that election.

What’s stupider? Trying to kick Lucy’s football again or walking away?

What would the Democrats be doing differently if they were actual fascist collaborators? I can’t think of anything. The Democrats make up excuses for why they can’t intervene, then they blame the voters. Voting D hasn’t solved the fascist problem for 50+ years. Democrats have overseen some of the most brutal genocides and mass murder campaigns against non-Europeans. They have total continuity in funding and protecting the military-industrial-media-complex. They have total continuity in ensuring there are no consequences for the most egregious violations of human rights, civil rights, and human decency.

Mass incarceration is a bi-partisan consensus. Prison slavery is a bi-partisan consensus. Black ghettos are a bi-partisan consensus. Solitary confinement is a bi-partisan consensus. Solitary confinement for toddlers is a bi-partisan consensus. Starving children and elderly around the world is a bi-partisan consensus. Spying on all US citizens through warrantless surveillance dragnets of all communications is a bi-partisan consensus. Militarizing local police is a bi-partisan consensus. Undermining labor unions is a bi-partisan consensus. Maintaining legacy apartheid structures in funding elementary and secondary education is a bi-partisan consensus.

At what point do we conclude that the Democrats couldn’t be worse if they were actively supporting fascism? At what point do we say that their limited and milquetoast rhetoric against a few bad things, and only some times, and only some of them, is not a sufficient reason to believe they are on our side?

Scratch a neo-liberal a nazi bleeds. The fact ANY Dem has voted for any Trump nominee is a disgrace. They’ve lost the argument they’re the paid opposition with me entirely. I don’t subscribe to their BS talking about the actual left now because they marginalize us when we’re winning or they’re in charge, the whip us as the blame for losing.

But what if we can find a way to scream at people that agree with us on 80-90% of issues instead? That seems more productive than focusing on the actual Nazis!

There were more non-voters than there were voters for Orangina

I’m going to keep holding them accountable too!

Not lifting a finger against fascism is actively voting for fascism. Yes, the choices were all bad, but one was obviously much, much worse and they made a choice. Nobody gets a pass for gross negligence simply because irresponsible decisions were lower-effort than others.

Like you, I was a consequentialist before the election. I’m struggling to stay that way and now I might be a virtue ethicist who hates all US citizens who were not consequentialist before November 5th 2024 because I think they’re just shit fucking people not worth saving.

Part of me wants to be wrong. I want to be convinced. And yet I’m always going to be deeply fucking resentful if I find myself helping these people ever again. I shouldn’t have to lift a fucking finger. Doing so literally psychologically hurts.

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And they consider anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their very specific form of leftism to be a “liberal.”

Even without trump, ICE is designed to be abused like this legally speaking, it needs to be abolished.

It sounds an awful lot like you don’t want people to vote.

This isn’t the point that was made prior though. This is an okay take It’s just stapled to a bunch of bad ones prior.

If voting doesn’t work, why does the Right work so hard to stop people from voting?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict_voting_following_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election#%3A~%3Atext=The+bills+are+largely+centered+around+limiting+mail-in%2C"under+the+radar"+approach+to+achieve+their+goals.

Nah, just putting words together doesn’t make them true, and they aren’t. The parties consistently vote differently & non-cooperatively on legislation as roll call votes & their analyses show.

• According to roll call analysis, non-cooperation in Congress has increased exponentially over at least 6 decades, and dissatisfaction with weak congressional productivity may be due to harder ideologues failing to realize that.

  Excerpts

  partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing

  See graphs of probability distributions of cross- & same-party pair agreements increasingly diverge over congressional sessions. See networks of pairwise agreements between members for each congressional session increasingly split by party over time. From historical heights of cross-party cooperation around the 1970s, cross-party agreement has declined significantly at an exponential rate as same-party agreement has grown.

  Cooperator prevalence has decreased by two orders of magnitude from the 1970s to 2000s. From 1967 to 1979, Congress often had over 10,000 cooperators (max: 12,921) and was comprised of at least 10% cooperators (max: 13.4%), i.e. at least 10% of CP pairs agreed on more issues than SP pairs. In comparison, 2001–2010 held fewer than 1,500 cooperators (min: 181) with fewer than 1.5% (min: 0.2%) of CP pairs acting as cooperators (Table 1). Longitudinally, partisanship/non-cooperation has been increasing at an annual rate of about 5% over the last 60 years. The average number of disagreements on roll call votes between CP pairs is increasing exponentially (Fig 3A), as illustrated by an exponential growth model in the form of y = c₀e^γt which exhibits a fit (F₃₁ = 236.22, α = 0.05, R² = 0.88, p < 0.0001).

  The harder ideologues who claim their parties aren’t partisan enough instead of recognizing the partisanship is peaking may paradoxically be contributing to their own dissatisfaction with congressional productivity.

  Our analysis shows that Congressional partisanship has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years, and has had negative effects on Congressional productivity. This is particularly apparent in the steady reduction of the number of bills introduced onto the floor, suggesting that the primary negative effect of increasing partisanship is a loss of Congressional innovation.

  This increase in non-cooperation leads to an interesting electoral paradox. While U.S. voters have been selecting increasingly partisan representatives for 40 years, public opinion of the U.S. Congress has been steadily declining.

  Voters might believe that highly partisan candidates will ‘tip the scale’ in one party’s favor. However, based on correlations shown here, a partisan candidate may lack cooperation needed to pass legislation.

  Current affairs do not explain this height in party division.

  Certainly current affairs do not seem to divide potential cooperators, as cross-party relationships peaked in arguably the most tumultuous period in recent U.S. history, marked with numerous political assassinations and Vietnam War and the resignation of President Nixon, as illustrated by others, such as [23–25].

• DW-NOMINATE scores of congressional voting records confirm increasingly polarized party voting.

• An analysis of party conformity over the last 2 decades finds higher party unity among Democrats.

  In the House and the Senate, the average party conformity score was higher for Democrats than Republicans over the nearly 18,000 total votes taken. Democrats in the House voted with their party 90.4 percent of the time; Republicans in the House, 89.3 percent of the time. In the Senate, the gulf was wider: Democrats lined up 89.8 percent of the time while Republicans did so only 86.6 percent of the time.

  Over the past 20 years, Democrats have, in fact, been more likely to stick together on votes than have Republicans.

Not voting as hardline ideologues would want doesn’t imply they aren’t the representatives people voted for or the parties are cooperating. More than ever, the parties largely aren’t cooperating, because they’re as partisan people voted (particularly on the right).

I actually never ate the crayons when I was a kid. But if you want to go out and buy them and eat them, then I respect your right to choose

Enjoy your crayons. Never had them myself.

Because they had no point and deserve to be ridiculed. That thought process is precisely what got us here, and they decide to continue to double down.

Of course Gaza would still be a humanitarian nightmare, but none of the other things happening right now would have been happening if Harris won, and if you can’t see that then you just should never vote again period.

Here’s the thing. You take enough steps in the right direction, and eventually you are on the right path. It sure as hell beats standing still and letting some jackass drag you in the wrong direction. If you let that happen once, then you have to get back on your feet and starting waking in the right direction just to get back to where you were before.

People say that Democrats are just controlled opposition, and that’s not true. Non-voters are the controlled opposition. Not advocating for themselves, not advocating for basic decency and accountability allows us all to be governed in an indecent and unaccountable way. They’ve been tricked into this by troll accounts saying “both sides are the same”.

I get it, and I agree to a large part, I’m not sure what part of my post was “militantly democratic” though. It’s entirely situational, and without a doubt, the moment it’s viable to dump them, I will. I just don’t think our system nor electorate is capable of the large shift that necessary. Instead think it needs to die a death of a thousand cuts.

The problem is, everyone only seems to want the sea change, the one weird trick. It’s exactly that mentality, that we can fix it all at once, that is why we’re here. If people understand that real change takes time and effort, they might see the forest for the trees and we could all fight against this bullshit together.

But the mentality you have keeps us divided, and insists on a drastic, divisive and impossible strategy. Sorry to be a dick about it, but that’s how I see it.

I would vote dem while condemning their actions if it meant an extra 2 million jews weren’t killed. The reality is your argument is literally just the trolley problem and instead of focusing on an issue where either decision is bad and instead focus on everything else

Again, the only logical conclusion to this “pragmatic” utilitarianism is reaching a point where you’re talking yourself into voting for dem candidate Ted Cruz as he runs against mecha Hitler

What an absurd and stupid slippery slope

Oh damn you right we should’ve voted for the magical third party that definitely would’ve won

That’s a shit fucking point. A better point: fascists won and they did not need to.

Neo-liberals are not fascists. They’re greedy, nihilistic, empty husks. But they are not frothing at the mouth for killing gay’s and gassing brown people. Neo-liberals can actually be relied upon to be capitalistic and not give a shit about nationalism or “traditional values” and are generally easier to fight because they don’t operate a cult (or at least not like the fascists do).

Some non-voter’s justification of “they’re both the same” is pants on head regarded.

So the Dems as a whole aren’t a party we can rely on until we primary them out.

Not happening before 26 or 28.

So your solution?

And please don’t say 3rd party. It’s obvious to anyone that pays attention that no 3rd party is viable and won’t be for a long, long time, if ever. No 3rd party has made themselves a household name. No 3rd party even has a SINGLE member in Congress. In the 2024 election the most popular 3rd party candidate only got 0.5% of the total votes cast.

Not happening.

So…

They won’t embarass America on the world stage every day, they won’t fund the Gestapo to assault minorities and they won’t threaten allies with invasion.

Yaaay we get decorum and stability at home so we can ignore the Palestinians / Yemenis / Somalis / etc being bombed overseas! Hopefully the bomb will even be dropped by a diverse team under the Dems!

I wouldn’t advocate for not voting, voting third party would be my advice if you don’t want to personally get involved in politics.

Democratic voters might be decent people, they at least have good intentions for the most part. That does not mean that the solutions their politicians propose are effective or helpful. I’m glad you had cheap healthcare then, but if I starved you for a month and then gave you a meal you’d be thankful for that too.