Thank you! Is there a reason Dale Earnhardt is in these memes? Is he a leftist Nascar driver? (Maybe your video will answer my questions, but I don't have the time to watch an hour long video essay right now, though I'm quite interested and hope to in the future, thanks for the link!)
I see he died in 2001, so all the reasons I could think of as to why he's in two memes representing the Left are falling short ...
It's not for no reason. It's because they have stuff we want. Whether that's resources, land, strategic locations, etc., that's the reason. Furthermore, we have the means to acquire those things we want. On the great stage, that's often justification enough.
Rail workers tried to use their collective bargaining power in negotiating with rail companies, Biden made it illegal and forced them to accept the rail companies terms.
A lot of my American friends are buying into this both sides thing, they say prices are up and the democrats aren't doing enough to deal with the climate so neither really care about anything...
I've been an eco obsessive since the 90s so to me it's painfully clear the night and day difference between the two parties, trying to explain it is so hard because they've got their talking points like more drilling under Biden than Trump but when you try to talk about the lag effects related to leased land it's all just hand waved away - they've seen people talking about it as true and not mentioning that lease sales are at all time lows which will result in significantly less permits in future years so it's 'Biden bad, end of story.' Saying 'they say there'll be less but they say anything, they said there would be less now' totally ignoring the logic of the argument.
Right wing psychological experts plan these talking points and seed them, the left falls for them every time it's so frustrating.
I think part of the problem is people want the world to be simple, the immigration issue is another thing a lot of my left voting friends are struggling with at the moment, blaming the housing crisis on immigration for example then I point out immigrants working construction is super common and they say why don't they work instead of being put up in hotels so I say there's a complex process involved in getting a right to work designed to protect American jobs and many are rejected and returned to their country of origin without obtaining this right... but again 'it's super complex and messy but they're trying to improve things' is easily shrugged off just like with the climate argument by saying 'they only say they're trying, trying means nothing only actions matter'
The problem is the two parties play totally different games with totally different objectives. One is trying to tangle a ball of yarn into.a mess and the other is attempting to untangle it and knit a cardigan.
The issue that I am passionate about is election reform. Including things like getting rid of gerrymandering, making voting more accessible, making the houses more representative of the people, and breaking down big donor influence on elections and policy. Neither of the big two parties comes close to making any of this happen.
If these things are not fixed, the parties in control can do whatever they want. They can keep us divided by shouting about one passion-based issue in public then doing nothing about it while serving big donor interests in legislation.
I don't see how any mainstream issue matters when you can't trust elected officials to act on any issue you care about. That is unless you are one of the self-interested donors who writes your own bills. Then it still doesn't matter which party is in power because you can control them both.
Off topic slightly, but I've seen on Lemmy lately where people are saying "get rid of gerrymandering" and I'm curious about the argument for this.
Honestly, I'd love for it to happen, but I assumed it was impossible in a Representative Democracy because of how the system/math worked. Kinda of an inherit problem. Mostly because the ways I've heard to remedy this issue is to distribute districts in such a way that they more closely resemble their population ratios. However, isn't this also a form of gerrymandering? Districts are getting set to way we think they should be. Not saying that wrong persay, just feel like a bandage solution. Like we're beating a nail in with a wrench. In a way though, this reminds me of the Observer Effect in a way
There isn't a perfect way to draw districts. I like sortest splitline for its simplicity and impartial strategy.
The best solution I can see is to evolve the House of Representatives into a body of proportional representation. This could be done in state level houses as well. Single winner, or other small number of winners elections should have ranked choice to make it harder for parties to maintain dominance.
gerrymandering is editing the borders for your party's gain.
If it's done to be balanced and representive, then it isn't gerrymandering.
there's a super simple solution: stop having the ruling party be allowed to draw the lines. Have the whole thing be controlled by ordinary government bureaucrats. No-one elected involved at any point.
then, suddenly, impossible for gerrymandering to exist, outside of criminal interference.
One is trying to tangle a ball of yarn into.a mess and the other is attempting to untangle it and knit a cardigan.
Building on this metaphor, one of my single biggest frustrations with the left is how many of them won't accept anything short of a fully knit cardigan; unless they get exactly what they want, they'd rather just hand it over to the tanglers.
The fact liberals are riding and dying for genocide joe is proof that the democrats deserve the bloodbath they've set up for themselves when they inevitably lose to the worst candidate possible. The bar is literally underground and they still managed to dig to get under it.
I mean, trump seems obvious. Unstable wannabe tyrant/dictator from a party of evangelical theocrats, criminal, fraudster, blatant liar, thief, rapist, sycophant of dictators, insurrectionist, wife beater...and we haven't even dug in to the party that supports this behavior along with their LGBTQ hate, restricting womens' rights, voter fraud, election fraud, gun rights > your life, handing everything to the billionaires, environmental destruction of most every kind, and of course their NAZI underpinnings.
Joe is a career politician with all the baggage that goes with that, but he's not actively and willfully sabotaging the country.
One has worked with Bernie Sanders and helped get some his goals achieved in policy and legislature.
The other hired his own children despite their inability to get security clearances, cheated on his wife while she was at home with their newborn, paid illegal hush money over that matter, stole classified documents and likely gave them to adversaries, likely compromised national security multiple times, sowed doubt in our elections with zero evidence to back it up, blew up the debt, fucked up the Supreme Court and has said he’d ignore the constitution, term limits all of that.
“I let my hatred willfully blind me to admitting trump is a sack of shit and I’d prefer a dictatorship to democracy if that pisses off the libs. Bonus: I get to be a bastard too because the libs will be shut up unless they want to go to a reeducation camp.”
More likely.
E: I re-read what you said and realized I didn’t get it right. Do Dems really think like that, or is it just general apathy of some Dems and the independent voters?
The bad parts of capitalism are the authoritarianism and the grift. Venezuela, like any soviet structured entity is not an alternative to capitalism, its just imperialism wearing a different coat of paint
Both are objectively terrible, the Democrats are tepid liberals that are trying to put band-aids on gaping holes in a sinking ship rather than solving the underlying issues.
The GOP is, of course, fascist, and thus far worse, but in the sinking ship that is America, continuing to sink without fixing the underlying issues is bad as well.
Actually fixing the problems is far greater than the DNC, which is far greater than the GOP.
Edit: no, I'm not advocating for third party voting, I plan on voting for Biden, because I believe change must come from below. Begging the DNC to fix the gaping problems with American society will never get anything done, ever. Organize, donate to strike funds, actually try to build pressure from below.
People really seem to think Biden should have a magic wand, or should somehow impose things the majority of Americans are against and when he can't they say he's the devil. It's so silly.
I'm far more radical left than most people and I've come to accept that, I have faith in the strength of my ideas and that they'll displace capitalism but understand it'll be a struggle and a fight. Biden has very likely literally no concept of the ideals I value, I imagine it'd take me hours to explain the importance of open source software for example and I don't expect he'd take it on board very seriously even at best so of course I wouldn't pick him as the leader of my.movememt but that's not what people are being asked to pick, they're picking the president of the whole country so of course he's also going to have to work in the existing frameworks and with the many factions that exist.
I don't expect Biden to do anything other than continue the American Liberal project, but I'm also not a reformist, I don't believe it's possible to vote Capitalism into Socialism. I only vote for Biden because it appears to me that it is easier to organize a grassroots movement under liberals than under fascists.
Liberalism won't make America better, it just won't make it fascist as quickly as the fascist party.
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
Proving that liberals like fascism when it's not pointing at them. To them, it is a weapon that should be wielded against their opponents rather than a blight that needs to be eradicated before it kills us all. Your irresponsibility will have devastating consequences.
So for anyone other than that guy who might actually be interested..
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
( a ) Killing members of the group;
( b ) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
( c ) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
( d ) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
( e ) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
There is video evidence of 1-3, and I would personally say that the intentional, wanton destruction of hospitals, almost 20 years blockade with restriction of caloric intake, escalating into a famine. Guess who is specifically called out in a recent report by MedGlobal:
But we are also seeing that pregnant and lactating women are suffering from this, as well, and there’s a rapid increase in malnutrition across mothers, as well.
That depends what you think the greatest threats to quality of life for the average in American are. I believe the greatest threat is the corrupt system, which gives more power and money to the rich and screws over almost everyone else, and both of those candidates are firmly entrenched in it.
They both know and embrace their role in that system, although they would phrase it in different terms.
Finally, you asked about objective terribleness. But there is no such thing. This is all subjective, because of course it is, the country has hundreds of millions of residents who all have different priorities.
If it wasn't for his position regarding Israel and Palestine, I would have been pleasantly surprised by Biden overall. His administration seemed to be making a lot of good moves for a bunch of liberals.
Joe is a self-admitted Zionist. He's also a U.S. President and unfortunately for the Palestinians, U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is entirely predicated on a stable U.S.-friendly Country (i.e Israel) in the region.
"If we didn't have an Israel, we'd probably have to make one." ~Joe Biden
It's a shit-trap, for any POTUS regardless of their personal beliefs
As bad as establishment candidates tend to be, trump is far far worse. The problem with the trump supporters is they boil everything down to "X bad, so not X good!" Trump was an outsider which is why they supported him, but just being an outsider doesn't automatically make you good, and in his case he's far worse.
