FAQ
Q: why not organize and stop treating the bus as a legitimate entity? why aren’t you working to stop the bus?
A: do both. cut the fuel line. break windows. put oatmeal in the gas tank. but maybe your efforts don’t succeed this election cycle. and if so don’t fucking throw away your vote if it can help your neighbors fucking survive. “harm reduction” is not a political strategy for action. it is a last minute, end of the line decision to save lives, after all other resources have been exhausted.
This is a long established problem with FPTP voting (FPTP = First Past The Post: One voter = one vote). You don’t really get to vote for your choice candidate, rather you vote against the worst of the two popular candidates by voting for the other guy.
Now there are plenty of election reform solutions, but in the US, both parties are weakened by the people having more choice, so neither party is willing to back amendments to the Constitution of the United States that would install a more public serving voting system.
This also means, according to CIA analysts who have studied nations on the brink and how they can avoid civil war, the US is very likely to see a civil war in its near future (next decade). But then we’re also likely to see elections neutered anyway, so that the Republican party controls all elected positions (and appointed ones after that). And then local genocides can get underway.
So yes, if you’re voting to make a point (other than you want the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to play out or want to delay it for a while) the point won’t be heard. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign national propaganda machine supporters are probably very glad you’re willing to withhold blue votes to make a point. It won’t make that point, but they’re glad for you for trying.
i don’t disagree but this is also a long established problem with people not showing up to vote, so jot that down.
Taking a wild guess here, I suspect people not voting comes from a number of addressable causes. Here in the States, we are far more enamored with capitalism than Democracy, and the way we regard our civic duties (e.g. trying to get out of jury duty, mostly due to the hardship it would cause by skipping work without pay). We work our labor class so hard they are too exhausted to parent, cook or engage in health activities, much less engage in civics. It doesn’t help that this is exactly how our plutocratic masters want it.
After we address allowing people the time to think about what they want from government, and voting accordingly, then we can start looking into giving the people actual agency in their destinies, toward which election reform is only one front.
But all this is to say the United States doesn’t really try very hard to get the people to engage in civics. Rather, it would really prefer that we lie down and let ourselves be ruled by the wealthy according to their ideals and business interests. That, of course, brings us back to the same problems feudalism has: one Joffrey or Caligula or John of England / Richard II can bring to ruin all that a dozen prior generations have built up. Even Charles III is living up to the traditional standards of monarchy, and the UK has a parliament and a constitution with which to keep his shenanigans in check. (Parliament is up to its own shenanigans to turn the UK hardline fascist, but that’s another discussion.)
In elementary school government and western civilization class, we learn that we vote so that the government does what we want it to. But we quickly learn (sometimes as soon as intermediate or high-school) that our agency in selecting our government is very, very limited, and historian careers have been built on the corruption of government into an oligarchy with trivial democratic features.
Except right now, those trivial democratic features are the last line of defense between the two party state and a one-party autocracy. It’s a state of affairs that shows not only did we take a wrong turn, but we’re on a fast train to somewhere we never should have gone. Curiously, the never-Trump conservatives have been pouring billions into the proverbial railroad that lead us to Trump and the next line of Musolinni-wannabe strongman dictators. They didn’t just buy the ticket, but laid the rails.
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As much as you really fucking hate to hear it: Biden won both his primaries handedly. The only way Bernie had a shot is if they clowncarred it too long like the Republican nomination that led to Trump. The DNC did not drop the ball, the American voters chose Biden.
The Democratic Party chose Biden, what was a tactical choice. The DNC uses FPTP for its primary as well (then has a list of 2000 principal party members whose votes are given additional weight. The DNC is a far right coalition party that still is guided by the interests of its monied contributors. But since the 1980s we’ve only been allowed to choose between them and the Christian Nationalist monsters.
Even after Occasio-Cortez won her primary, the DNC and DCCC changed their policy to prevent young upstarts like her from pushing aside establishment Democrat candidates. (Some of those policy changes were reversed due to pressure, but still the Democratic party is not interested in serving the public.)
How do we get a public-serving government? Dunno. Some say supporting our community mutual-aid organizations will help. (It will, actually) but in more contentious states law enforcement are looking for ways to harass and arrest mutual aid organizations, even for doing benign things like feeding the homeless. Civil war will lose the plot quickly, and will end up (typically) in a string of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next until everyone is related to casualties of war and are just plum tired of fighting, and we might get a democratic election out of it if we can fend off all the foreign influencers trying to pressure their puppets into power.
There are a few active anarcho-communist coalitions out there doing their thing, but they are continuously attacked by plutocrat financed militants and mischief-makers looking to make an example of them much like FBI’s assassination campaign on the Black Panthers. We humans may just be too easily tempted by corruption to create a functional public-serving government that doesn’t depend on a labor caste. (But do please keep working on it!)
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What is your source for the CIA analysts/brink of civil war claim?
A PBS interview of retired analysts who’d spent their life studying regions of civil unrest and the conditions that lead to civil war. It was since the Biden administration began so it shouldn’t be too hard to hunt down.
As for the neutered elections, this had been part of the Republican project REDMAP, but is laid out in the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 as well.
And RCV (ranked choice voting) isn’t really that much better. It has potential to be better if everyone voted honestly, but voting is a game.
STAR (score then automatic runoff) is the best we can feasibly achieve. It’s easy to teach and our current voting systems can account for this with little to no update (unlike RCV). Please look into star and push for this locally, then we can get this on a state by state basis.
https://www.starvoting.org
Wrong. Democrats consistently support & pass RCV, while Republicans repeal & ban it. If you want RCV, you need to support Dems in the meantime.