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Democrats have refused to stop Trump at every juncture. Id really should be appalling to us that we allowed democracy to be on the ballot when we had four years to patch every exploit in the system.
This is not what success looks like. Im just very tired knowing that Democrats never seems to push anything beyond half measures that fail.
The stakes were simply too high, and we've let the cancer metastisize too long.
Lets hope we can shove it into remission, but we really should have done it earlier.
Yeah, no! The simple fact is that actually changing something is a lot harder than simply obstructing. Just look at the Ukraine aid bill. One guy was able to hold it off for more than half a year.
Actual change requires buy in from a lot of people and that means talking, compromising and then doing it. If there is one obstructionist fuck in your path, everything slows down or even grinds to a halt.
That is why Trump wants to be dictator (for a day, or maybe a few.. and the a few more) and why they have the 2025 plan. To eliminate the need to talk and compromise but simply bulldoze your plans through.
Your narrative is false and hurts democracy a lot.
Your down voters have been propagandized to their entire lives that there is always a 'team good' and a 'team evil', and that the lathe of heaven cuts just so. Its the rebels versus the empire and the rebels always just. Its David versus Goliath, and the underdog always wins.
Its a fantasy. Democrats as a functional political party, in practice, are not allies of the people. They've supported and promoted effectively an identical slate of polices to Republicans for almost 50 years. It was RBG that refused to step down from the supreme court. It was Obama who didn't pressure her to do so. Its the Democrats who refused to fully investigate Trumps involvement with Russia in the Mueller investigation, because they needed to take the 'high road'. Republicans are there to represent a convenient excuse, while its Democrats who fail to do what they need to do when its the right time to do it. They aren't your friends, they aren't even your allies. Stop engaging in these masturbatory fantasies of what you think this institution represents.
Muller is a Republican, was made director during a Repub admin, and was working in a Republican DoJ. You might want to choose a different example if you'd like to give the impression you know what you are talking about?
I'm pissed off about RBG as well, but they are lifetime appointments. Not sure what the Dems as a collective group were supposed to do on that one. By the time Obama had an obstructionist Senate it was too late.
Hows the water doing? Getting heavy yet?
Oh, no, I think it's pretty rewarding to educate young children such as yourself. Feels good.
You live in a fantastic delusion regarding your relationship to power.
Yeah except that what you've described is a delusional fantasy. The 'lazy asshole' in your metaphor has been enabling and empowering the tyrant asshole the entire time, and when it comes to draw swords, they'll be turning cloak to try and retain some semblance of power and position.
They aren't your allies and they never have been.
Yeah thats not what their comment described.
The 'lazy asshole' in their metaphor is never coming to your aid. They'll vote to call protestation against Israel hate speach before they'll ever consider reforming the system that keeps them in power. This is the solipsistic delusion I'm highlighting. ALL of the evidence suggests that Democrats will maintain support a tyrannical Republican agenda before considering the kind of critical systematic introspection necessary to actually reform the system. Democrats are not interested in reform of a system that keeps them in power.
The only place in which Democrats are a reform party is in the deluded minds of their aquarian sycophants. There is no external evidence to suggest that Democrats are a reform party, because at every given opportunity to do so, Democrats refuse. Its a Marvel-tier fantasy that the Democrats writ large are the heroes in this story.
The problem is that a majority of those vocally supporting Biden can't just be happy with people agreeing they'll vote for Biden over Trump, but they insist that people live in the fan-fiction fantasy land with them.
My dude, fascism is here, it doesn't just have its foot in the door it's sitting in the living room wiping its ass with Biden's throw pillows. Genocide is already being carried out in your name.
People need to start getting into a resistance and preparation mindset, not thinking Biden's going to help reverse our course towards fascism. There's a long road of direct action ahead if people hope to turn the ship. Lesser of two evils isn't cutting it, they're both leading us to the same place
Then you'd concede that if they are leading us to different places, lesser of two evils does cut it.
You're playing chess. You have a choice - lose a pawn, or you can keep the pawn and the next move you'll lose by checkmate. I dunno about you, but I'm saying goodbye to that pawn.
That's the choice, except instead of keeping the pawn you lose it anyway because Trump likes Israel even more. Biden wins, there will be a different Democratic nominee in 2028. And if you want it to be someone more in line with your thinking than Biden, well you know what you gotta do in 2028.
But if Trump wins, he's gonna do everything in his power to make sure the choice in 2028 is his and not yours. Not stopping him is game over.
Exactly. OK, we get Biden again. Now use the next 4 years to REALLY push ... for ranked voting, age limits for reps, or anything! Because you still can.
No, like chess, at a certain point it becomes clear that you've lost the game you're playing. It doesn't matter if you save your metaphorical pawn or not in this scenario, delaying with the lesser of two evils will not create any further opportunities to turn things around.
It is the end game, and it turns out that the using the lesser of two evils as a strategy for the past 7, 8, 9 election cycles has been a definiteively losing strategy. It has produced no favorable results, instead it has simply allowed fascism to creep in at a pace which the general public will acclimate to it. And once the majority is acclimated, there is nothing that anyone who cares can do.
Instead, you should not be playing a game with rules rigged by two parties, neither of whom actually have an interest or will to preserve democracy. Instead you should be turning the board over and refusing to play
Voting for the lesser of two evils has been the strategy since day 1. In 1860 both Lincoln and his opponent Douglas wanted to keep slavery (Lincoln only wanted to limit its spread), and worse, only some Americans were allowed to vote. Forget the far left, a modern moderate might refuse to vote at all in that election - why vote for Lincoln if you're voting for someone who wants to keep something as abhorrent as slavery?
Yet voting for Lincoln nevertheless did move the needle against slavery and eventually led to its abolition. And voting for people we'd almost certainly see today as the lesser evil eventually would lead also to improvements in worker rights, universal suffrage, social security and medicare, ending segregation, gay rights, and the right to abortion - before refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils took that away.
It's your right not to vote. But what happens - or doesn't - is your responsibility.
You understand the needle didn't move because of moderates and voting the lesser of two evils, right? Every major shift in progress in this country was accompanied by protest, conflict and refusal to go along with the status quo.
What about all the struggle and violence that directly led to those outcomes? The moderates who presided over those changes didn’t enact them out of the love of the game, they were compelled to in order to put a stop to the unrest.
The irony here is you're the one who doesn't understand the situation we're actually in.
The house is on fire and you're telling people "Don't worry guys, if we just stay in the kitchen there's no fire here so it'll be ok. It's vitally important everyone stay in the kitchen, don't listen to that extremist firefighter telling you to leave the building. Quick, someone grab that sieve, we can use it to splash water from the sink on the fire, we can save the house if we all just grab a sieve!"
Your political strategy has failed though, again and again and again. Why the hell should anyone listen to you when people following your prescription in the past, is what produced the very situation we find ourselves in?
Look, it's really important that you understand this; what you're doing right now, this political strategy, is an abject failure. People have done things just how you're arguing, have gone along with it for literally decades it it has failed. So the only reason I can think that you continue is because you want that failure to continue.
Also, you can't on one hand write an entire essay of a response to something and then claim it's no big deal and "not making waves". Remember Clinton? How'd that work out for you?
Your suggestion to fix this failure of a system is literally "do nothing". Please try to recognise that: You are advocating for fighting the status quo by doing nothing.
It will not work. If you want change you need to take action. Not voting is the exact opposite of attempting to change things. Use the influence you have to push for a change in the right direction.
Who said do nothing? I'm saying your suggestion of continually rewarding corporate dems with power has failed.
If your political strategy has brought us to the point where we're literally condoning genocide with our vote then it's a failure. You understand that, right? If the Chosen One the Dem establishment has forced on us is nevk and neck with Donald Trump then that establishment is a failure and continuing to reward them with power for these pied piper bullshit strategies is not going to lead to progress.
They've been doing it for forty years and all we've gotten for it is a tightening noose around our freedoms as they jerk off to corporate lobby money and insider trading, playing grab ass with fascists.
That's your "progress".
And your solution to the problem is literally not vote, which is doing exactly nothing. I have a really hard time seeing how you can expect yourself actively not influencing the system to somehow influence the system.
It's literally the only way you can can communicate that you will not play the game they've rigged. And yes, that has an influence whether you are willing to admit it or not.
Because here's what's going to happen if Biden gets his next term; Democrats will take that as a signal that they can be complicit in literal genocide and voters will still vote for them as long as they keep propping up worse options on the otherside. And so they will keep propping up a worse option and acting with complete disregard to their base.
You are not going to "turn things around" at some point in the vague future, there is not going to be "slow, generational progress", there's going to continue to be a choice between Fascist and Fascist Lite because Fascist Lite understands they do not need to change anything about how they're doing things in order to win elections.
Is it a terrible and costly choice to call the Dems on their game of chicken? Yup. But that's where your politics have put us. It's degraded our democracy to the point that our only remaining choice to stop the vehicle from going off a cliff is to veer it into a tree.
We could've hit the brakes earlier, there were plenty of opportunities and warning signs where the road was going, but people like you kept saying "oh no, pressing the brakes isn't viable, the corporate media told me that brakes are extremist. Just keep going this next mile and then we can slow down a little after. Just go around this one last bend and it'll turn into a U-turn."
Your politics don't work and the threats and condescension have simply lost the effect, I cannot emphasize this enough; it's not a viable political tactic any longer. If you think it's that important that Biden win then you need to be doing everything you can to influence him to radically change his behavior, not sitting here trying to convince other people to deny what they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and play make-believe with you that "just a little genocide" is ok for Democrats to support. Enough of the trolley problem bullshit, no one is buying it.
I never said the current system is great: But given the choice between driving off a cliff and veering into a tree, your response seems to be to not tough the wheel and letting whatever happens happen.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that someone will win the upcoming election. By not voting, you're leaving it up to everyone else to choose.
By all means: Something needs to be done to fix the broken system, but saying that we should have pumped the brakes long ago, and then doing nothing about the most immediate issue - who the next president will be - doesn't help. We need to ensure that we get some president that doesn't persecute political opponents if we want to have the option of electing an actually good president in the future.
By all means: Start or join a movement to get better candidates in the future, vote for other candidates in local elections and primaries to lift them up. The fight you're talking about has to be fought long before the final two candidates are locked into the ballot, and complaining that it's lost won't effect who wins in the end.
You realize that people can also go vote for Trump too, right? Do you understand that? Do you understand that "go vote" does not mean your man is the target?
Taking no action in a genocidal cult-for-a-government is better than taking action for what either side believes is the right side.
Back off of fascism for a second and respect people's autonomy. None of us asked for be a part of this half-baked, misguided mechanism, but we have a choice to stop using it. You have no right to say otherwise.
A no-vote IS a vote.
Did you really just link me to NBC news?
How are so many people still plugged in to this nonsense?
Do people really still believe that space age nations with access to AI, nuclear, and semiconductor technologies should follows the dramas of individual human leaders?
Does this primitive practice really, actually appeal to people? Are you people actually real? You actually care about the sayings and doings of clearly theatrical and phony leaders?
There is no such thing as a leader of 300 million people, you understand this, right?
The dog and pony show of elections is a theater of puppets orchestrated by a global elite that owns the US government and most governments of the world.
Do you know how easy it is to capture the soul of a single meat and bones, weak human entity with a family and a physical time and place?
Do you know how easy it is to capture 10,000 souls? How many representatives and senators do you have again?
ALL of them are captured.
Most with money.
The more stubborn ones, with blackmail. Some of them are so principled and stubborn they would rather die than compromise their values. But those ones have sons, daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and while they won't compromise for their own lives, they do compromise for the lives of those they love.
You have no clue, do you, the reality of this world? You have no idea of the evil hidden in plain sight within the hearts of man?
Your "government" fell a very long time ago.
Why do Biden Bros get so offended that people don't want to live in a make believe world where they're happy to vote for Biden? No where did they say that won't vote for him over Trump.
You don't say...?
Since you need me to explain the joke, here it is.
It comes across as you making the assumption, "there are no biden bros in this thread".
You then say not to make assumptions about people you know nothing about.
So unless you know everyone in this thread, you are making an assumption about people who you know nothing about.
It's comedic.
I'm not invested in the thread whatsoever. I made a joke about your comment and you are once again making assumptions about people you know nothing about.
Really sounds like a you problem.
OK, now go finish your Cheerios.
After that, you can go give the smoke to someone who deserves it.