6mo ago

Just a reminder

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I do think there is a constructive way to talk about how both sides accommodate the interests of the ruling class. We are at the point where our choices are corporate shills and fascist corporate shills. I am going to vote for the non-fascists every time, but don't tell me I am harming the conversation when I expect the corporate shills to be better too.
- We need to start pushing other parties. This doesn't change for as long as we keep dems and repubs.
  However, I'm voting blue for prez and over any repub for the foreseeable future.
  
  The way to actually make progress in this regard is to start at low level. City, county, and eventually state positions have to be the focus if we want to get a broader range of parties into the conversation.
  
  Better yet join political organizations like unions, get involved. Voting does barely anything.
  
  Good luck. You need other people to want to do that as well and when democrats and republicans are throwing "fuck you" money at anyone that isn't beholden to their shared investors you are gonna get nothing done.
  We do, we really do, need something to change and we need it to flow through multiple levels from low to to high government positions.
  But I just don't see it happening until the next large scale cultural upheaval makes space for it and that seems like it's gonna be a nightmare or lots of groups that have waited for that moment.
  
  Oh shit, nuance, here?
  
  First past the post favors 2 parties. You can vote for other parties but you'll just end up with the side you disagree with more winning.
  
  Right. Not without truly shifting a substantial amount of people. Maybe there's a way to start shifting the republican base and get them to wake up and change how they vote. Maybe there just needs to be a huge education campaign.
  There's so much that can be done that is difficult and might ultimately have little to no impact, but if no one does nothing, then nothing happens.
  
  You generally do this in primaries and within the parties. Blue dog democrats, the squad, the tea party.
  
  Pushing for voting for other parties in most of the US gets you nowhere because of the way our elections work in the first place. At least, outside of elections where parties (and policy in general) barely matter at all, like very small municipalities; but generally unless you get the entire city council and judicial system in that town/county progressive it's pretty hard for small-town politicians to make much meaningful change anyways. Although it's not impossible – recently an "independent" (I think Republican but idk) city council member I directly voiced my concerns to right before the election about the lack of investment in sidewalks, public transport, and other non-car infrastructure in our small extremely conservative town actually got some sidewalks built which was great.
  With the state level, though, it's not coming unless you live in a state with some sort of multiple answer voting like RCV (like Instant-Runoff Voting / IRV), approval voting, cardinal/rated voting (like STAR voting or score/range voting, etc.. Or if you live an extremely progressive state where candidates that advocate for that kind of system are able to get voted into office, almost always a Democrat or sometimes an Independent aligned with Democrats.
  IMO the ideal voting system would be Condorcet Single Transferable Vote / CPO-STV (same exact thing as STV to the voter, but implementing a variation of the Condorcet Method under the hood, which would be the most proportional system in both multi-winner and single-winner elections) but I don't think that's actually used anywhere, and a system with such computationally heavy internals would be a hard sell to people who already see IRV as "controversial". As long as we get anything other than FPTP, we can make it better later, the specifics don't matter too much.
  For the curious, STV (Single Transferable Vote) is essentially the same as IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting, known simply as ranked-choice in the US although there are other ranked-choice systems) except it's multi-winner instead of single-winner, where you can "rank" multiple candidates, and if your first choice candidate is eleminated or if they have surplus votes, your vote is instead "transferred" to your second candidate. The Condorcet system is basically a voting system that takes into account every possible candidate match-up, and makes the winner whoever has the most votes in each individual match-up – it's very computationally heavy since, especially in elections with many candidates and in multi-winner variations, you can have extremely large amounts of matchups. You can combine STV with the Condorcet method and get CPO-STV, which would theoretically be the system which would be the hardest game/"tactically" vote in (a.k.a. people wouldn't have any incentive to vote against a candidate they like in order to make a different candidate more likely to win, thereby increasing the chance of a candidate they don't prefer winning) and achieve the most proportional/happiest-choice voting.
  
  You can't vote your way out of this one America, time to get serious
- I am going to vote for the non-fascists every time
  As if the Dems aren't. They're literally passing bills right now to limit free speech and crack down on people condemning Israel for their genocide, by classifying that as antisemitism. US imperialism is a bipartisan issue, it literally doesn't make a difference in terms of geopolitics if you vote for either.
  
  That's one characteristic of fascism, but not the whole story. The Dems have slight authoritarian tendencies for sure, but they are explicitly fascist by the actual definition. Republicans are.
  I don't agree with their authoritarian policies, but by the actual definition of fascist, they aren't fascist, they are just shitty.
  So my point stands, I will vote for the non-fascist every time.
  
  aren't*

762 comments