BulletMagnet wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 11:59 pmIn similar fashion, I am increasingly convinced that for some people there's nothing the Dems, odious as they are in countless ways, can do
You're right of course. But the
can part is a consequence of having the same employers up their butts as the republicans. They're paid to lose. When Trump cuts the taxes on capitalists again, the democrats will keep it in place.
But in theory, if they were actual human beings appointed to their place by sortition or we lived in a country that wasn't evil, sure. They could do things that would be overwhelmingly positive and overwhelmingly popular. 60-40 elections, all the time. They did it in the past, before Bill Clinton purged the party and turned them 100% into Ronald Reagan republicans.
It will be interesting to see if Trump will genocide harder than Joe. The only way that he could is by deploying our military to help. Or by nuking Gaza.
And of course, the current topic of this thread: The Iran war. You... are aware that Netanyahu wants to instigate our war with Iran, right? You're not one of those TV sheep following the current fad they tell you to care about, that aren't aware of the goals and incentives of all parties involved, right?
You're talking about means-tested marginal relief, and we're over here watching
the end of the world.
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On the voter side of things, try to look at things from their perspective. The only people who care about the genocide are the hippies, genociders, and genocidees. Nobody else cares. It doesn't effect them personally. The same is true of Trump's tax fraud, it didn't make the price of their groceries more than double.
Everything's shit and only getting worse. Many tossed Biden a vote hoping things would go back to "normal". And it turns out "normal" is the people at the top get more, and the people on the bottom get less. Who'd a-seen that coming, eh.
Hasan Abi's recent rant about the supreme court is a perfect encapsulation of how fundamentally fucked everything is. Blocking student debt forgiveness with every excuse under the sun ("Wouldn't be fair to those who paid their debt in full. Just like it wouldn't be fair to cure cancer to all the people that it's killed."), but the people who got PPP loans? They didn't even have to ask, it was a
given they wouldn't have to pay it back.
Yeah sure, I don't want to live in a theocratic hellhole. But like I constantly keep saying:
I have no power whatsoever to prevent that outcome. Maybe you should go nag the people with all the money and all the power who're supposed to "defend" us from becoming that. Maybe they could do something about it.
They "could", but we both know they won't.
In "normal" times, when a house is on fire, the guy in charge gets blamed for it. The only reason they have a chance this year is that the republicans are so bad.
You're always going on and on about "why do republicans still win elections?!?!?" but you never ask yourself "why do democrats still win elections?!?!?!" While our president is supplying weapons and money to help a genocide. To a degree that
Ronald Reagan, bad as he was, never did.
Nothing about this is "normal".
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And of course I'll never vote for genocide or to give the banks more money. It's purely symbolic, but not giving consent to such things are crucial to my emotional well being. You're a "I'll vote for more concentration camps, as long as it's one less than the other guy" guy. You don't like feeling like you have no power. I get it, we all cope in our own ways.
But surely...
surely there's some small part of you that understands genocide is a line too far for some of us. And even for those who it isn't, we'd have to feel like there's some
real hope of things getting better, to get us to spend $20+ of our time and money to go vote?
There's a reason the voter participation rate correlates so strongly with affluence. They have the money and free time to spare to go do it, and the more money they make the more their interests are represented. They have means to do it, and the incentive to
want to do it. It isn't complicated.