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It is befuddling reading the sentiment for the majority of the comments on this post.
Having a chief executive in office in 2000 who was super concerned about climate change would have made a big difference.
But hey that’s just like my opinion man
Yeah. Seeing them come out of the woodwork to say “Yeah but Gore was just another rich white blah blah Lieberman blah blah center-right, all the same” really throws it into sharp relief how little connection there is to reality there.
It would literally have changed the world. At this point we’re scrabbling around from the outside desperately trying to get the leaders to care, when it’s already too late for a lot of the semi-good outcomes. We missed a chance to have a guy in charge who understood the science, and cared a lot about it, back when there was some time to change the trajectory.
Edit: Now a bunch of different users have independently come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because the Republicans would have defeated anything he did in congress, and now they all want to share that message with all of us, as their current explanation for why it is that elections don’t matter anyway.
(Edit 2: Guys. You get to vote for congress in elections, too.)
IDK, maybe I am reading too much into it and it really is a bunch of people who are motivated to post about politics, but whose brains are also just wired to search for defeatism wherever they can find it, and that’s the message they want to share. Maybe.
Defeatism and cynicism are very effective defense mechanisms, and the internet has made some people absolute experts at both.
All we can do is keep loudly pointing out how daft and counter-productive these behaviors are. Even if it’s true, saying “x is useless” is also useless unless you propose to do y instead.
Foresight is often mistaken for cycicism by those that lack it.
Who said cynical opinions are always factually incorrect? You’re making up an argument.
Thank you for illustrating my point brilliantly; you have contributed nothing of worth, but your feeling of superiority.
It’s just a simple piece of advice, no need to get spikey.
I get the same message that people think capitalism under Biden is the same as capitalism under Trump. It’s honestly bizarre.
As someone who’s guilty of thinking ‘both sides are the same’ I think you’re definitely right.
For context I am Australian and while I still think our labor party is better than our liberal party the differences are small, which is why I always vote for our further left party whose votes ultimately go to labor anyway.
Australia has ranked choice voting, does it not? I’d vote for the farthest left option too if the US had RCV.
I’m voting every single far left party before I even hit labour. If you have ranked choice voting may as well use it.
Yeah, that’s why I don’t understand people voting labor here.
It works pretty well, too. Sure there’s still a two party situation going on, but recently the amount of votes not going to either is making it clear they’re slowly losing voter confidence as the older generation fade out.
I think younger voters actually understand how important the senate is too and how powerful ranking it with some detail can be.
Would the world have been different with Al Gore? Probably. But it’s easy to make up perfect hypotheticals. Look at what the Democrats actually did in the years after. They basically all voted for the Iraq war, and then when they had a filibuster proof majority in 08, they did practically nothing on climate change.
Yeah, but we did get the War on Terror, so… That was fun /s
Cool, then explain what he could have done that Obama and Biden didn’t do already. You’re massively overrating the impact one president has. It’s not like he even campaigned on climate change in the first place. He didn’t pull that schtick until after he lost the election.
There’s no chance whatsoever that an Al Gore presidency would have averted the climate crisis. Absolutely none. I’m actually shocked that any adult could be this naive.
Especially considering it’s a GLOBAL phenomenon lol.
Progress is cumulative, and it happens slowly.
Even if he didn’t accomplish anything other than preventing the regression that happened under Bush, it would have allowed Obama and Biden to make more progress than they did.
If he did manage to accomplish anything, no matter how small, then Obama and Biden could have made even more progress.
Here’s something that just came up in another thread, that shows Al Gore’s climate bona fides
Except that the Republicans would shit-can any legislative initiatives - because they controlled both chambers - and would hamstring any executive actions. Hell, they’d probably have impeached Gore for it.
Our system of government is simply incapable of dealing with a problem on the scale of climate change.
The EPA is part of the executive branch. They could have regulated carbon emissions like they regulate other emissions.
They could have done that under Obama or Biden too then. So why haven’t they?
There were things like this
And it di pd go forward, until repealed by Trump
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that? Do you think industry won’t tie the change up in the courts for decades?
Yes, the executive can attempt these things but with two coequal branches, one of which swings between the parties pretty regularly every couple years, it wouldn’t stick.
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that?
Trick question! It’s not up to the legislative branch to decide the limits of Executive authority. That’s up to the supreme Court. Speaking of which, president Gore would have gotten TWO SEATS appointed.
My first thought. Oh no! The oil industry had to double its lobbying budget while still making record profits.
Gore won, but lost to a judicial coup.
One thing that I learned from that election is the small perforated dot in the ballot that is punched out with the little pokey thing is called a chad.
Some ballots were thrown out because of the “hanging chad”; meaning the chad was still attached to the back of the ballot. Pretty sure all those ballots were for Gore.
And the butterfly voting machine where candidates were on the left and right side of a centre column of buttons. Causing many people that intended to vote for Gore to vote for someone else
as a non american, I learned that from how I met your mother
Supposedly he lost because he asked for recounts only in counties where he was polling well, but then they should have ordered a general recount.
He shouldn’t have to ask for recounts when the initial counts are suspect. Was never a real democracy to begin with.
Everyone makes mistakes, even election officials who are trying their best. It’s good that it’s possible to ask for a recount
SYSK just did an episode
[Stuff You Should Know] The 2000 Presidential Election: A Real Cluster https://podcastaddict.com/stuff-you-should-know/episode/169274063
I’d also like to complain about the electoral college again. Anything but going by popular vote is anti-democratic. The American system is so damn infuriating to me and it’s not even my country. But it affects us globally.
In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women’s reproductive rights, and now in 24 they’re angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can’t see.
If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn’t really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.
If only being told that were enough to finally get the idjits to pull their heads out of their asses.
Honestly, at least on Lemmy, I think a lot of the ass-headers are just a mixture of shills and edgelords. In what proportion, I have no idea.
The ratio of beliefs on the issue is very different among the people who are genuinely engaged with it, than among the people who quick post a punchy message or two and then scuttle away. There’s just a lot of people coming in for a moment to do the second activity; that’s the only thing that makes it seem like the opinion poll is as mixed as it looks like at first.
(I’ve been spending way too much time paying attention to this today.)
Lemmy is such a small market compared to others like reddit, twitter, and facebook. Two of them have gone full fox news. Reddit wants to but can’t afford to lose any users. The battle for social media is over and the fact that disrupters even make their way to lemmy shows how far their reach is.
Russia and other bad actors are dragging the USA off its throne and their doing it from the inside. The GOP are like fully hopped up junkies at this point and if we tried to remove the mainline of the propaganda feeding their dilusion they’d just as well claw your eyes out.
Just sucks no one in our government is willing to do anything about it.
Edit: If I had one guess it would be that lemmy exists to push a red scare caricature version of a communism that’s why you see all these communists with awful takes all the time. Some of them radicalized but mostly just bad actors trying to portray lemmy, one of the last hide outs for lefties, as radical communists.
Every 4 years is really a choice between conquest or making the economy go brrr.
The dems are definitely consistently better for the economy though.
Centrist Democrats will always blame progressive discontent for their losses, even if their losses are caused by the Supreme Court undermining democracy itself.
Quit moving to the right, and we’ll quit pointing it out.
Yeah so what about Gore and climate crisis? We got a sweet ass pointless Iraq war with Bush. We got to do the most American thing ever, bully a small country for natural resources and stage a regime change. Would have Gore given us that? Pft no. We would have a serious conversation about climate and taken some steps to mitigate everything.
Hey now, killing all those people in the Middle East was worth it, wasn’t it? I mean, if the US hadn’t invaded Afghanistan, it would probably still be controlled by the Taliban to this very day! Good thing we avoided that scenario, right?
Humans are some of the worst polluters, so killing all those Middle Easterners saved thousands of tons of CO2 emissions! /s
I’ve read that Ghengis Khan, while he was responsible for the killing of 20–40 million people, that actually resulted in the lowering of global CO2 levels and led to reforestation in many parts of the world. So maybe a little genocide every now and then helps… (I’m not seriously suggesting this)
A calm and rational discussion and response to 9/11 instead of making up lies, going on the war path, and telling allies that they’re either with us or against us? Lame. Pass. (/s)
I honestly don’t think Gore could kept the country out of Afghanistan. The public wanted justice for 9/11, by justice they wanted blood. The public would have forced Gore to do something about 9/11.
It would have been very easy for Gore to get sucked into Afghanistan even after trying to put forth rational explanations of why we shouldn’t have occupied the country. The end result of would have been somewhat similar, 20 years of war, and nothing really accomplished.
The Iraq war on the other hand would have never happened on Gore.
There would also not have been an invasion of Iraq, things like Isis would have probably remained an unkicked hornet’s nest.
License to torture at will would not have been granted to government goons.The threat of hijacking airplanes and smashing them into iconic buildings would have been taken seriously. Which opens up the possibility that 9/11 could have been averted. Then maybe the mouth-breathers at TSA would not have been given the power to profile and harass at airports.
The list goes on: Katrina and New Orleans; the neutralizing of the Consumer Protection Bureau; the typically republican financial free-for-all that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
Then there are Supreme Court appointments, which we get to keep for life, like goddamned herpes.
But since so many ignorant and smug lazy assholes stayed home on Election Day bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe, everybody got a succession of utterly preventable shit sandwiches.
I keep comparing Casablanca to New York City. One reason is that they’re both the biggest cities in their respective country without being the capital, and that they suck, but also because before 2001, they both had twin towers (the ones in Casablanca are still standing btw).
We can also imagine a reality where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were collectively not elected and global neoliberalism failed to crystallize.
But this is just day dreaming. The reality is those things didn’t happen and here we are.
It’s also the old story, the same that many governments faced during COVID, if you do a lot and actually stop something from happening, people say it was a waste of time, nothing happened, you over reacted etc.
If you don’t do anything and it all goes badly, people say you didn’t do enough etc.
So theoretically even if Gore did start to fix climate change, if he had real impact, there’s a chance the world would’ve turned against climate change as a hoax and waste of time.
The sad part is, we’d still probably be better off overall.
Bush appointed Roberts and Alito.
I wonder if Citizens United would have come about to cause such damage had Gore been able to appoint two different justices.
I know that’s not climate related, but it’s a pretty big deal result of the 2000 election shenanigans.
Citizens United and Voting Rights Act both. Even with Trump’s nominees we would currently have a 5-4 Liberal court.
We would still have Roe Vs. Wade.
Liberals would have “played it fair” and been all “across the isle” and appointed on “conservative” (reactionary corporatist) judge together with the corporatist judge they appoint.
Democrats could add more supreme court judges and run with that but they don’t want to. They can not just run on “not trump” and win.
Fyi I think it’s aisle.
Yet another fuck up by the Boomers. Interesting how it always come back to them being a piece of shit generation.
I was so disappointed as a Canadian to see Gore lose. That stolen election was stolen from all of us not just America.
Imagine how different the entire world would be now if Bush/Chaney had never happened.
Yeah I was one of those, was young and edgy, still feel bad about it sometimes but then remember AlGore was a pretty different dude then too. Like, he picked Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate ffs, so I harbor no illusions that he would have been anything other than status quo. Better than GWB? Oh fuck yeah, in retrospect it’s not close, but their campaigns they were basically trying to out-center the other, and both seemed like just slightly different versions of each other. Assuming he would have been a major disruptor in terms of climate initiatives is naive I think.
were basically trying to out-center the other
I mean that is and has been the post Reagan political paradigm. It worked once for Democrats (Clinton), every other election before and after (at least as far back as Carter), Democrats win when they step to the left. Yet they still think they should be fighting for some imagined center.
Oh for sure, he was following Clinton’s lead, so that’s why it’s somewhat funny to hear people talking about him like he was some kind of super environmental progressive, when that just wasn’t the case, or it at least isn’t how he ran, which was really quite the opposite.
Yes, I agree. I’m also not sure that running as a super environmental progressive would have been possible at the time. We were just coming out of the timber wars, where the timber industry had spent millions convincing the US that a few hippies chained to trees trying to prevent the last bits of old-growth redwoods from destruction were the problem.
It was a different time and we were very desensitized to the concept of hippy punching etc.
How high do you have to be to erase everything al gore did to prove he wanted to do something about climate change? Why are you rewriting history like this? It’s preposterous
You’re the one rewriting history. Al Gore didn’t run on climate change. Ordinary voters don’t give a single shit about climate change in 2000. There was never any chance Gore was going to spend his political capital on climate change legislation.
The most we would have gotten from him is more incrementslism on the topic, like we got from Obama and Biden. The op is utterly delusional for posting such garbage.
Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process… or something like that, maybe?
Like, didn’t he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden’s “then you ain’t black” comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.
Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.
Gore was one of the senators who saw early on the potential of the internet and fought for funding for it. Vint Cerf said that Gore’s actual statement (which, of course, was not that he “invented the internet”) was completely accurate in terms of taking credit for what he’d accomplished and the value of it. It’s the same quality he had that put him ahead of the curve on climate change (he would actually still be ahead of the curve today, in terms of the woeful bullshit people in Washington consider “the curve”).
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed. I think a better approach would be uprooting and demolishing as much as possible of the powerful media systems that are engineered and funded to take good politicians’ words and twist them around to produce malevolent results and make those politicians artificially look bad. How to get that done, I wish I knew.
I think Obama’s approach was to bypass the media, and reach out directly to the people themselves, even if through them. That way, the media dared not make fun of him. Ofc they did anyway, but quite often, it did not stick as a result.
Here I have to ignore Faux News b/c they just ruthlessly tried to tear him apart - e.g. a black kid dies by violence, and Obama sheds a tear in sympathy, and they accuse him of it being faked. Which even if so, so what? We should have, and demonstrate, sympathy to people - imagine if that were a competition, and he was winning it, rather than the exact opposite of that which is the reality that we had:-(.
So the more mainstream media made fun of Obama’s pauses, and how white his hair had turned while in office. Obama himself played along, especially in the White House Correspondents speeches. Those were great relations:-D.
Somehow Gore never managed to do that. I imagine him more like an engineer (which I am myself), who might be technically quite proficient, but struggle at the more “people” aspects of the job. Nixon too in a fashion. The people want a JFK/Bill Clinton/Obama/Trump, they don’t want someone who will actually get the job done, more’s the pity:-(.
And now we have Biden, who similarly is quietly getting things done, though the media is eating him alive whenever/however they can. After that, whether in this upcoming election or the one after that, it’ll be a GQP member - you just know that, b/c of Dems never winning successive elections in history. Rinse & Repeat.
UNLESS libs learn this lesson, finally, and put forward someone who is electable? It very much IS a popularity contest, no matter how much we may wish, demand, expect, or hope otherwise:-|.
The attitude of the Greek Stoics impresses me: we cannot impose our views upon the entire world, we can only change what WE can manage to change ourselves. Maybe that means skirting the government at the federal level - like individual states right now could pass protections against future anti-abortion laws, so why don’t they? Or coalitions among cities could accomplish a lot - e.g. we can’t force people to take vaccines, but we can work to make them cheap, effective, and available to anyone that will.
Navel-gazing back into the past does serve a purpose, but only to the extent that we learn from our mistakes as we move forward.
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed.
You’re not going to succeed, nor will you ever care about anything that matters
He never said he invented the Internet. You saying that kinda shows how much you know.
didn’t he say that he invented the internet?
No, he didn’t say he invented the Internet. What he did say was that as a young congressman he took the initiative to create the Internet, by providing the funding to expand the military’s Arpanet for civilian usage - a perfectly true and reasonable statement for him to make since that is actually what he did. Literally months after Gore made this perfectly true and unremarkable statement, Bush advisor Karl Rove twisted it into “I invented the Internet”. There is no “supposedly” about this.
that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do
Gore simply talked about one of his biggest accomplishments (perhaps the biggest accomplishment) of his long career as a politician. It is not reasonable to expect a Democrat to never mention the best parts of his record out of fear that the Republicans will twist his words - that will happen regardless.
a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him
The problem is he didn’t. Go back and look. Republican Party twisted his words and successfully made the twisted version into the popular narrative. That’s also a time tested political trick, but when it’s not what you actually said, you have no control over it.
The only thing that would have worked then was out-blustering his opponents, turn something else into the meme of the day…it’s a very powerful trick for getting elected, but really not one we should reward in a national leader
At the time you didn’t have to be major disruptor like we need major disruption now. What you needed to do was move the needle, which could be done. Moving the needle early on drastically changes the path decades later.
There’s also what you say during the election and what you do. I’m pretty sure Bush played it up (I’m amazed at what I see him say in old videos). Gore played down what he intended to do, or didn’t make a big deal about it, because that’s not what got votes at the time. So they may sound similar but not actually be similar.
Also since Al Gore invented the internet (well not really, but it was something he did care about) so maybe there could’ve been some standards and requirements for inter-operation (which was the direction things were going before Bush) and maybe the internet wouldn’t have become the shithole it is now. Yeah it would still be a shithole, but we might’ve had a shithole that corporations actually had to do a little competition.
Climate Commitment. We’ve been screwed since the ‘90’s. Gore may have mitigated the warming, but a certain amount of warming would have occurred regardless, and will continue even if we achieve net-zero emissions. There is an amount of latent heat already trapped in the atmosphere. The warming we are experiencing now is from the early 2000’s.
I know. I suck. But the science is clear. We done screwed up. Much love to all.
Tell that to SCOTUS. The people voting or debating each other didn’t decide 2000.
Could have if more people voted though
Gore received 540+k more individual votes than Bush did, but he lost in the electoral vote.
People’s votes are not weighed equally for the presidency, so that ‘more’ has a lot of work to do, unfortunately. Given the electoral college system for presidential elections that sentiment has to be qualified with “in the right places/districts”.
Which is exemplary of the case that led to Bush v Gore deciding the election.
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they’ll be able to actually do anything about it. The US government, and all governments to a greater or lesser extent, fundamentally serve capital and are beholden to the interests of capitalists.
No president, no matter how far to the left, could possibly save us. They will always delay action as long as possible, when not actively accelerating climate change. We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Voting does help, because a hostile government will systematically murder people who resist climate change while a “friendly” one will only imprison some of them. Voting is helpful, but not sufficient. We don’t have any more time to waste begging for our lives.
Edit: also, he did win and then there was a coup. This was at least the third right wing coup in the last 60 years. So… Yeah…
also, he did win and then there was a coup
Brett Kavanaugh helped with that coup and now sits on the supreme court.
And? Whet exactly is the point of this post? You might not get EVERYTHING you want, but you’ll get SOMETHING, VS voting for assholes who’ll actually be working AGAINST fixing the problem.
From civil rights, to healthcare, to climate, to pretty much any issue that matters Republicans will ONLY make it worse.
In my decades of living I have not seen Republicans offer a solution to a single issue. It’s always just fear mongering and hate.
Tell us “something” we got. Everything continues to get worse under Biden. Just more slowly.
Until Trump the whole country had been getting steadily more progressive. We went from a Democrat signing an order to kick gays out of the military to legal gay marriage nationwide in just 20 years.
We were slowly getting better, and the GOP was fuming over it. When Obama won in 2008 despite the GOP putting up their most centrist, electable candidate in generations, they abandoned Democracy entirely and started burning everything down.
Occupy was under Obama. DAPL was under Obama. Prism was under Obama.
Obama did some good things, but he presided over the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in history. That was him. He facilitated the police crackdown on occupy. He facilitated the police attack on the Standing Rock tribe to push through the pipeline that ultimately poisoned their water. The NSA was caught actively spying on American citizens under Obama.
Republicans have been burning everything down since the 70’s. That’s not a new thing. Nixon carried out a coup and started the drug war specifically as a cover for political violence against his opponents, and people in his cabinet have literally admitted as much. Every fire Republicans have started, Democrats have tended.
Obama was probably the best president the US could elect, and the best he could do was pave the way for Trump. The problem is America. Republicans have been fascists for a long time, but Democrats have been paving their way and enabling them the whole time. The system is broken beyond repair. The best you can do with voting is delay the collapse. You have to organize outside of the system if you want to survive.
Since before Clinton housing, education and healthcare has gotten more expensive while wages have stagnated. The wealth gap has been expanding for years.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact the republicans are doing everything they fucking can to hurt democracy and Biden so they can say we told you so… THE problem is the republicans that refuse to do their fucking job and represent the people of this country. Cancun cruz? That fucking zombie from Kentucky??? The dipshit in florida??? Gym fucking Jordan??? It’s embarrassing.
Biden has no excuse for calling to block the rail strike and continuing to supply Israel with weapons.
Sounds like someone watches too much fox “news”…
Yeah all those Fox News watchers known for their lack of support for Israel. /s
Do you even know what you’re talking about?
That’s basically what I said. The important thing here, that most liberals fail to understand, is that there will be no government solution. Ever. No matter who you vote for.
You have to actually organize and take direct action, not just beg for some authority to do something. Liberals tend to miss this. They just invest energy in getting people to vote, then they go to brunch. If you only focus on voting, you’re not actively moving towards survival you’re just delaying death. That’s my point.
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they’ll be able to actually do anything about it.
Having someone who doesn’t understand (or, more likely does but doesn’t give a shit) IS a guarantee that nothing is done about it.
Great, but I literally said voting helps. Pointing to where I start saying “voting is not sufficient” and repeating something I said later doesn’t add anything.
Can you explain to me why you felt this was necessary to say?
We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Great! Lemme just let the trans folks in my life know that alls we gotta do is elect the fuck who threatens to erase their existence entirely!
Bc the untenable systems at play in Russia, S Arabia, DPRK, RSA, etc. have done wonders towards the citizenry in those countries rising up and rebelling… oh… wait… thats right… its damn near impossible to rise up the closer your state is to the fascist mark. Congrats, ur right that the liberal system blows. Replacing it with something worse will only make things worse.
How successful have you been at bringing ur fellow comrades together to organize for direct action? And thats going to go better after we go full fascist?! After our minority allies are straight up outlawed?
You have the same level of comprehension for nuance as maga cultists. We are on the brink of fascism because liberals are useless.
But me? Oh, I organized an antifascist groups that organized one of the largest antifascist protests in the US the day after the murder of Heather Heyer, helped organize an antifascist self defence training group, I organized a police oversight group that de-anonomized thousands of complaints about police allowing for the identification of highly problematic officers, one of whom was fired after our efforts. I helped get the data for SPD.watch. I organized several public records request trainings. I started a food security committee that helped a bunch of people get food when they didn’t have money, which expanded to canning food for houseless folks and supporting camps. oh, I also organized the protest where I was shot by a fascist. That and about a hundred other things, all of which I did with my trans comrades who were organizing for their own survival because they knew that liberals would not ultimately protect them.
What the fuck have you done?
Edit: your vote against murdering the trans folks is great, but you know what would help the people in your life when the voting eventually fails to stop fascism? Why don’t you talk to them about what hormones they need and work on figuring out a plan to smuggle it in. As a cis person, you’re the right person to risk yourself for them. Even today you could work with them to organize a safety group that they could call for support if they don’t feel safe walking home or end up in an unexpected sketchy situation. You could organize a hate watch group to track fascist activities. You could do a ton of shit RIGHT FUCKING NOW instead of waiting to vote and then just seeing what happens.
Oh boy, let me try and reply here without losing my cool. If youre actually putting in effort into direct action, u deserve a serious reply. I have infinite respect for that, please keep that in mind as you read this.
You accuse me of a lack of nuance, while implying that i am against direct action and only favor voting, all in the efforts of getting upset at someone because they encourage others to vote and still ignoring the crux of their point. But its easier to compare me to maga. That way, the onlookers now know to side with u, after all u just egoized about all these wonderful things that i never told u not to do! This is hardly fostering comraderie between the working class. Please check my (admittedly short) comment history. I am in favor of always more direct action, but i am always against disparaging ppl ffom voting.
You say things like smuggle hormones, great. I am in favor, but guess what? That very word implies u are taking something from somewhere where it is legal, to somewhere where it is not. You are still beholden to the laws of wherever it is you are smuggling from. I.e. you need hormones to not be outlawed everywhere.
Im not trying to tell you your actions are useless. Far from it. Clearly u do more than most, certainly more than me, and i concede that. Your actions would only be more meaningful if done by more people. What i keep trying to hammer thru to all you other leftists pn here isnt to stop, but to simply understand that these efforts are NOT more easily undertaken in a system that is “untenable.”
You didnt address that point for a reason. You complain about how awful libs are. Who? My shitty coworkers? The ones who believe in this system bc thats all they know and are exploited and taken advantage of and made to think their neighbors are the problem? 50+ yrs of very concerted propaganda have gotten them to this point. Hate em all you want, when u talk about the things that need to happen to topple the system, thats who you are depending on awakening. These same brainwashed folk who want nothing more than to end the day knowing their families are still provided for.
And again, look at the countries that do tend towards fascism harder than the States. Do you see more enlightened proles? More direct action? Because reality tends to disagree. Youre sitting here shitting on another leftist bc god forbid he votes, ur shitting on the liberals who perpetuate the shitty system we’re forced into, but youre espousing values that all predicate on working together. Do you not see the dissonance there? We are NOWHERE near revolution, further still from utopia. We can cry that the climate is killing us, or that the system is too slow. Great. But right now, that system is only out to exploit you, not make your existence unliveable. If we get to that point, which under trump, it is likely, no amount of direct action is going to help. Not in a time when all the powers that be need do is take a look at their preferred mass surveillance system to find the rabble rousers and send out a drone or two to quell whichever protest gets to crazy.
Tldr: Thanks for your efforts, please dont disparage voting.
I literally said “Voting helps,” and talked specifically about how it helps. At no point did I ever say not to vote. I even kind of said that I think people should vote. Why the do you think I’m telling people not to vote? Take a look at my post and ask yourself where this is coming from and maybe you’ll understand why I’m calling you out.
I’m not saying anywhere, at any point, that people shouldn’t vote. I’m not saying anyone is bad for voting. I’m not even hinting at the idea the voting is not at least a little helpful. I’m just fucking sick of everyone focusing on voting when it’s one of the lowest valuable type of action you can take after canvasing and posting shitty memes.
I organized, I got shot, I kept organizing. The whole time I watched liberals tell queer and trans folks, black and brown folks, and all kinds of other marginalized folks and every intersection of those to vote harder any time they’d call out liberals. Liberals got Biden, stabbed radicals in the back, and went back to brunch. They had fucking years to organize, and instead they just got disappointed again and again by the failure of the system they believe in to address existential threats against it. Whenever they get called out for this shitty behavior, or whenever anyone points out that voting isn’t enough, they hold up those same marginalized people they’ve been throwing under the bus between election years.
When I’m saying “make the system untenable” I’m meaning that you have to make oppression impossible by organizing. You have to make ecocide impossible by making it so expensive to extract petroleum that it stops being an option.
You think that you have to be close to revolution to make the system untenable? It took one person attacking an immigration facility to stop Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan. Slavery didn’t end because people voted against it. It ended because people formed a guerilla resistence that attacked plantations and smuggled people out, illegally. The civil war started because John Brown lead an armed assault on Harpers Ferry with the intent of creating an armed slave insurrection. They, and a lot of other people carrying out direct action, made the system untenable.
You know how they got to the point of making the system untenable? They organized. You should absolutely vote if your conscience lets you. I will shame you for not voting if you’re as privileged as I am, but I won’t if you’re not. But for fuck sake, organize. Organize small groups. Organize too many groups to infiltrate. Go fill jails like XR until they can’t afford to put people in jail anymore. Make this shit expensive. Organize locally to abolish free parking.Make perpetuating climate change so expensive that every oil company is forced to invest in renewables. That’s what making the system untenable means. The fact that you jumped immediately to assuming I could only have meant something like “don’t vote,” even though I explicitly said voting has value, says something. Please take a minute to reflect on why you’ve spent this much time and effort arguing against something I did not say.
Very fair points, theres been a lot of ppl on this site yelling at me in a short period of time. I got a little fixated on making the system untenable bc in this very same thread theres no shortage of shitheads arguing against voting, all while countless other russian shills all across the web eg them on in hopes of enabling russian imperial interests.
Im just very frustrated, as i can tell u are. Im looking for leftists to come together regardless of how far left they swing. Ur points on making the system on tenable sound more like the types of direct action i seem to most believe in. Its about making life untenable for the capitalist owner class, not the poors foghting for their lives down below.
On that point tho, i still would urge you to find room for some more sympathy/empathy for those, erm- lets say, highly misguided poors still simping for the neoliberal way. With the amount of propaganda they consume, its no wonder they are the way they are, but that doesnt mean that theyre entirely lost. Ppl are fickle and change their minds drastically all the time, especially when their ego is in play. Ive gotten far right wingers to agree with me on dismantling insurance agencies, enacting a maximum wage, shit even to abolish currency altogether and trans rights. Its about how its presented to them, and by whom. Im not going to tell u to waste ur time convincing them actively, that is a waste of time.
But a newly found culture based on sympathy and kindness isnt necessarily all that far away. Anarchist theory is largely based on assuming that humans are naturally inclined to cooperate with one another. Theyre just never going to if u call them out for being the hypocrites that almost all of us naturally are. My 2 cents, anyway.
Thanks for ur time, but more so for ur energy irl with what u do. Continue yelling at everyone else in here, ur energy is wholesome.
Thank you for this. People are using short term fear to try to trump the long term fear and it’s such a backwards perspective. It’s like someone who is afraid of the kitchen being a mess while you’re trying to stop the leak in the roof. And the moment we try to explain this to people they act as if we’re signing their death warrants not realizing they’re signing their own.
america’s been fucking its education system in the ass (unconsentingly) since 1980, and now you’re a country of redneck morons, exactly per the plan you made. Good job!
