Lol, I definitely didn’t interpret you coming in hot at all. I made the mistake of engaging in on a few other ‘hot button’ threads the last couple of days and you have been, by far, the most pleasant, insightful and willing to engage in good faith. It’s very much appreciated <3.

Action for action’s sake just makes everyone tired and unable to act when it’s necessary. I’m not advocating “doing nothing” I’m advocating for intentionality, thoughtfulness, a hefty dose of cynicism and acting out of evidence instead of idealism.

I’m not saying don’t vote, I’m saying be realistic about what it can and cannot accomplish. The reason I often end up in these sorts of conversations is due to the common trend of people refusing to engage or help those directly in front of them because of some variation of ‘they voted for things to be different’ and so feel entitled to not get their hands dirty as well as a smug “not my problem, I did my part” or “that problem has already been solved, it’s just not fully implemented”. In either case it often leads to them being an active barrier to helping others and intentionally choosing to harm others. Which makes even doing small things like providing food, first aid, escape etc. sooooo much harder than it needs to be.

The problem though is it doesn’t matter how many individual fires you put out, it doesn’t scale up and doesn’t affect the root cause of any of them and that’s what I was replying “I don’t have a good answer to” to. Especially since each individual problem is probably going to end up needing a different approach.

So until we can figure out how to turn off the ‘light everything on fire machine’ it seems like we’re pretty aligned on putting out fires where we can, when we can. Keep fighting the good fight, and good luck!

I don’t have a good answer for you, I have a:

Your thesis is fundamentally flawed, if we are ever going to get an answer you need to stop getting mad at the people working to help you find a solution.

What I (and others) are trying to tell you is that the christofascist fuck cult goes much deeper than the surface level that you are fixated on. The “deep flaws” you see in the Democratic party aren’t bugs, they’re ‘features’.

The current status quo is deeply broken, I think we can both agree on that, yes?

The threat of violence (along with capability) has historically been a very effective tool for change (for better and worse), but I do no not see it being effective in a world where drone strikes, autonomous murder copters and nuclear weapons are a thing.

I also argue that the concept of electoralism is fundamentally broken and so electing more Republicans, Democrats, 3rd parties, goldfish, etc. is not going to solve/change anything either.

Accelerationism replaces current problems with worse ones, but my understanding is that if you’re focus is on your grandchildren and thinking in the timescale of centuries then maybe. IMO it’s one hell of a big gamble with an incredibly high cost and low odds of substantial/any progress.

What are your thoughts?

You talked right past the inherent contradictions and did not see them.

Assuming the US election process remains unchanged for the foreseeable future how do you get electoral reforms using the electoral process that you agree needs reforms?

They aren’t the same, one’s a sword and one’s a shield. The shield can’t effectively stab, but the sword can’t either if it’s forced to parry instead.

I engaged because it seemed like there was agreement, just miscommunication. Glad I was able to help cut through it :D. Appreciate you!

The difference is the viewpoint:

attacking the Dems aren’t helpful because they currently have no power. The other party is causing a lot of damage and there seems to be no stopping them

If you buy into the underlying premises of how a liberal democracy functions (liberal used here as a technical term, not as a perjorative) then the only ones who have the power to stop the other party is the Dems and they actively choose not to. They’re neither down, nor out they’re doing their job of controlled opposition exactly as they are supposed to.

Lol, while technically true there’s a big picture you’re missing… The start of his presidency did co-incide with some things like the child tax credit etc. that did drop the official measurement to a historic low of 5.2% in 2021, but was then quickly repealed by bipartisan support in Congress causing it to skyrocket to 12.4% in 2022.

In the US the child poverty rate had been slowly, but steadily, declining since the peak of the great recession… Until the Biden presidency circa ~2022 at which point it skyrocketed by the end of his presidency reaching ~2012 levels.

While technically true that “Biden came into office and reduce[d] child poverty [sic] by half as his first action.” It ignores that immediately afterwards he did “destroy the economy”. Don’t get me started on ‘removing due process, open up national parks, cutting departments with corruption, invading other countries’ because also yes!

Not to say Trump is better (we can all agree fuck that guy and all his cronies), but Jim Crow Joe is/was also evil, you’ve just been tricked into thinking otherwise…

Do you have a plan for that “electoral reform” that doesn’t involve said ballot box?

Do you not see the inherent contradictions there?

I mean, let’s assume that we somehow regulate AI so that people have to pay to use copyrighted works for training (as absurd as that is).

ISBNDB approximates there to be 158,464,880 published books in existence.

Meta’s annual income was ~156 billion last year.

Assuming a one time purchase scenario and a $20 average cost that’s ~3.2 billion dollars. ~2% of their annual revenue.

Or you could assume assuming a $0.2 annual license (similar to a lot of technology licenses), or a 0.002 per “stream” (which I. This instance would be ‘use of data to train model’)

I agree with most of what you said, but if you buy into a lot of the economic paradigms your arguments are based on you must also realize that those require the copyrighted works must be paid for and it’s not unreasonable to do so.

My bad: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&amp;type=pdf&amp;doi=f1b1f2dfb9c92c8aae42188a9e00ab305ee22085

I don’t think it’s crazy in the slightest and see no reason why it “would never work”, it’s just not a conservative idea. Why did you feel the need to minimize it so?

Not the intention. How would you prefer I had responded?

The argument is when there are more than 2 options a majority of people would not have selected the “winner” over any of the other individual losers. Therefore majority rule is an illusion, democracy is self-contradictory!!!

However, by reducing the options to just 2 you no longer have the same result and “democracy” is more “self-consistent”. You can do this in a fair/Democratic way by “simulating” the pairwise interactions (IE ranked choice voting, pairwise majority rule, etc.) or by establishing a false dichotomy (2 party systems, left v right spectrum, etc.).

This is not ‘not a thing’ but it’s a really old idea and is largely solved (ie. Distributed networks like the social media platform we are currently on, or stuff like this).

However, the claim isn’t entirely misplaced as modern social institutions refuse to implement any of those methods because it would be against their best interests as those in power are deeply unpopular (yes, especially your favourites whoever that may be). So yes almost all “Democratic” systems you interact with on a daily basis are inherently self-contradictory on the most cursory of examinations, but they dont have to be.

Yeah, the longer it takes the worse it gets. That’s one of the points the parent meme is getting across. But that response tells me you missed what I was saying.

Reread and try again.

We’ve been living in an authoritarian right wing country for 25-50 years. Historically the tactic of “we must sacrifice [insert marginalized group here] or it’ll get worse for us all!!!” has been very effective.

I find it very hopeful that this was the year that people were finally very vocally opposed that tactic and think it’s a good sign going forward that things might actually get better. However, that is reliant on people like you waking up to the fact that no amount of time and effort put into reinforcing the sacrificial machine will ever change its fundamental nature and that what you view as “being entitled brats” is often simply refusing to participate in the death, enslavement and marginalization of others.

Is active resistance better? Yes! But token resistance while actively reinforcing the authoritarian right is worse than nothing. The vast majority of those “opportunities to volunteer and donate” are doing just that; a $5 donation to “lesser evil INC.” is still actively funding evil.

Your frustration and anxiety for the future is perfectly valid, and I appreciate that you are at least a little mad about the state of things. But I would ask that you step back, reevaluate, and redirect that rage and start punching up instead of looking for who to punch down at.

1. Get started. Don’t waste both our time with numbers pulled out of your ass and wild speculation. So long as the Soviet Union is our example, how many hours of work did it take to purchase a vehicle? How many hours would you actually need to stand in the “banana line”? Was that even a thing?
2. 5 year plan was a perfect example because it highlights that maybe “productive output” isn’t the best/only metric to judge by ;)
3. Sure, I’d argue that’s a bit different but fair enough. However, you should look into if it was better or worse under communism and whether that was a causative effect or correlative with other events going on at the same time?

1. “Under comunism every one is equal” No. It follows the “from each according to their capabilities, to each according to their needs” idea

2. The “phenomenon” you describe is not the cause nor related to the causes of famines within the Soviet Union or China.

3. Compare “production output” from pre-soviet to Soviet Russia. It was one of the most rapid and dramatic increase in productive output in known history. The first 5 year plan saw gross industrial output increase by 118%.

4. “It also creates parallel economies of bribes and favours because well connected and productive people still want to be above every one else, this gives unfair advantage mafias and criminals.” That very accurately describes the post soviet kleptocracy and modern Russian capitalist state.

5. “In my opinion, no pure system is good if it’s comunusim or capitalism. You have to have a bit of everything” then it stops being communist or capitalist at that point but something else entirely like socialist, syndicalist, communalist, etc. putting every possible form of socioeconomic organization on a capitalist-communist spectrum is extremely reductionist.

Overall wildly inaccurate, uninformed and heavily biased take. Second paragraph shows you have good opinions and solid instincts, you should work on making them a bit more informed.

International history is filled with examples like this. The history of the Russian gulags is probably the most stark example, they were actually pretty decent (comparably) before everything outside went to shit…

Hell, nowadays most major corporations do this. Just nobody uses the scare word “propaganda” to describe it.

One look at that website should be pretty obvious it’s an incredibly biased and low effort source. I don’t doubt the general outline of the article as this seems like pretty standard colonizer/empire shit, but it also isn’t the “gotcha” you seem to think it is…

Exactly, hence the root of the problem the original meme is getting at…