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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Why?
Why does everyone have to get used to and just blindly accept that the system is shit and doesn't serve them or make their lives any better?
Why are you so comfortable settling for so little?
Why don't you want better for yourself, and worse, think you get to demand the same of others?
(I don't need your answers, these are all for you and those who agree with you to ask yourselves)
This is an imperfect world.
Democracy is necessarily the function of creating coalitions of compromise between literal millions of people, all with different interests and concerns.
Politicians, as a career, self-select for ambition and ego, and that comes with certain implications in even the best of them.
Jesus fucking Christ, is it really so little to not want to die or see my friends and family horribly oppressed?
Plus getting upset about this shit is fucking exhausting.
then don't
literally, just don't. You don't need to care, nobody is asking you to care. It may seem brash, but sit down and think about it for a bit.
Tons of people are asking me to care. They say that I’m not a good citizen if I don’t pay attention to the news, even if it upsets me.
“If you’re not angry you haven’t been paying attention.”
ask them why they care if you care.
Ask yourself why you care if they care.
unless the problem is directly related to you, there is simply very little that can immediately be done about the problem, and if there is very little that can be done about it, do the minimal amount of effort needed to accomplish something and move on, or simply don't worry about it.
Not everybody in society has to care about the same problems. Find something that you can make a difference in, and make a difference in that thing. You'll be doing your part for society.
Be mad about things that you can be productive on, not things that you can't be, otherwise you can't be productive.
well i mean it depends on what you mean by this, you will inevitably die, so, idk how you plan on getting around that one. Oppression is an incredibly broad and complex topic, or the simplest of them with no indirect explanation. The answer is the same though, do shit to change public sentiment.
Look, I will tick the Kamala box. I do indeed believe that Trump is a bad candidate and will oppress many people. But I don't want people to feel like this shit is normal. Back in the late 1970's to the 1990's, nobody would have thought that both parties would end up supporting the same genocide, with one being a little less pumped. Or maybe even the 2000's, when the War on Terror was thought to be conducted humanely. We have lived in an imperfect world before, along with millions of people, and politicians self-selecting for ambition and ego, and there was nobody calling to wipe an ethnicity off the face of the Earth. I'm not surprised at the Dem party, I'm surprised that there are fascists in the White House and I'm supposed to just accept it as a normal part of democracy. Well, I won't! Both parties in the United States supporting a genocide requires voting to solve, but it's purely abnormal! I'm not wanting a world any better than a world we used to have, one where the United States did not conduct ethnic cleansing!
We live in a nation with the Internet, fast food wherever you go, products that arrive at your door when ordered, touchscreens, full 3D videogames, V-Tubers, the Moon Landing, nuclear reactors, and the White House lighting up in rainbow colors to support LGBT+ rights--yet when asked to stop a genocide, it's suddenly too much to ask. I would give up so much of these fleeting pleasures to protect human lives. Should I just become a lotus-eater, and neglect the outside world to "act humane"?
Man, I can absolutely cite examples of both parties supporting genocides in that time period.
I... would count myself as an American patriot, but I'm pretty sure the US not committing ethnic cleansing is an extremely recent phenomenon.
Man, if you want to pour all your time and energy into this cause, unironically, go for it. But part of understanding just how vast and fucked the world is also requires one to accept and understand that we can't fight every battle simultaneously. Hell, most battles aren't even our's to fight. And no amount of martyrdom from an individual can change either of those things. I've been calling the Israeli genocide for what it is for years now. I'm not exactly sitting here telling you to shut up about it. But we have to be realistic both about what we can achieve and about what we will sacrifice to achieve it.
You could sacrifice every waking moment of your life, every meal above the level of gruel, every social connection and personal property unrelated to the cause, all for the sake of a .0001% contribution to ending another country's genocide, but the onus shouldn't be on you to kill yourself to correct every sin in the world. At some point, it's not on you or me as individuals.
In what world will a politician never disappoint you?
I'm generally in full control of myself and even I disappoint myself - fringe third party candidates are not the political messiah some people think they are.
I don't understand how this is the argument against third party. Why does the candidate need to be the Messiah to be better than Kamala?
The question was why do we need to accept that politicians will disappoint you, implying that they had something they believed would not disappoint them.
I thought it was a third party candidate.
Apparently it was anarchism.
Rookie Lemmy mistake.
In a world where "politician" isn't a career, or even a thing that exists, and instead people make decisions communally and horizontally. It's called anarchism.
You not knowing or being able to imagine alternatives, doesn't mean none exist.
Being able to imagine alternatives doesn't mean they're realistic.
How realistic do you think this is?
Any real-world examples of a society structured this way?
They won't be able to provide any larger than a few hundred people because those systems are extremely vulnerable to malicious actors.
Communism and anarchy work for small groups where people know and trust each other and are able to compromise.
I think it's more that people are profoundly emotionally uneducated which leaves them open to social exploitation.
In the US, children are legally their parents' property and are a type of slave class. If you are groomed to be a slave your entire formative years, don't you think this will make you accept controlling fascists? Probably if we worked on communicating what abuse is and worked on community itself, bad faith actors would have a harder time. We know this because the US dissolving their communities for capital has made the country weak and uneducated.
You asked if there are real life examples of community - it's so silly because it's everywhere. Humans are naturally social. It's capitalism that is new and rare, looking at human history. Please remember that capitalism isn't a synonym for trade or economy.
There's a reason capitalism favors psychopaths and abusive people. Anyone who's lived with such people knows that's not sustainable. Living with people who are emotionally mature is much better and more sustainable, and less likely to receive reactive violence.
Even educated people are vulnerable to misinformation on topics for which they are not experts, and propaganda is a numbers game. Socialism is a better scaling economic system because it basically creates a lot of small communities (workers who own the company). Democracy scales better than anarchy because it creates a system for the decision making of anarchy that wouldn't be possible for more than a few hundred people. Both also have downsides, but handle scaling issues better than the other options.
Socialism doesn't "create" communities, it empowers them. Those communities already exist in the workplace. The difference is who is granted power in government.
It's not capitalism that grants better "scaling," it's that our government is modeled after old Roman laws which are all rooted in military structure. Our government functions like this due to ancient restrictions with communication (before cars and electricity) and due to the warlike nature of western/Roman society and all Abrahamic religions. The entire point of sacrificing Abraham is to convince people to send their sons off to war. Jesus is about sending your son off to war. If we want a peaceful society we have to structure ourselves like one and not like we are actively inflamed and wanting to attack others.
Governments are whatever people want to agree to as a collective. The reason democracy and anarchy "fail" to our military trained eyes, is because people can decline or disrupt government at smaller scale. This is a good thing unless you want to mobilize against another country. Hard to force a 19 year old to shoot another 19 year old if they can just wall away and still get things like food and healthcare.
Yes exactly. The only politician who will believe as you do 100% is yourself. You must run for office if this is your goal. Anything else is actually kinda fascist/controlling. In a better world, we'd have a direct democracy and everyone would get a voice.
even if it goes perfectly, you'll be left wanting more.
Cuz it's democracy. If you wanted someone to be in office who would get everything done with no obstacles no roadblocks and no delays then you wouldn't be looking at democracy you'd want a dictator. You can want that if you want but just be honest about it.
Lmfao, except you don't have democracy. You have oligarchy and kleptocracy and plutocracy. You also don't have a government that is "getting everything done without obstacles", but pretty much the literal fucking opposite. The fact that the only alternative you can imagine to the current (non democratic, slipping in to fascism) state of affairs is a dictatorship is a problem with your lack of imagination and narrow view of the world (though granted, you were heavily indoctrinated that way), not a reflection of reality, nor the array of other ways that society can not only exist, but thrive.
There was good reason I told you people to ask yourselves these questions - you are the ones standing in your own way with your insistence of living according to a full blown fallacy because you're just comfortable enough with the way things are, and are too scared of change, specifically no longer holding the privileges the current system grants you in exchange for your compliance, and the idea that you might not have anyone to feel superior to.
Until you're willing and able to face that within yourself, I can't help you, nor am Interested in hearing the mental gymnastics you do to justify your actively maintaining the status quo. ¯\(ツ)/¯
none of these are accurate, except for maybe plutocracy.
Gerontocracy would be more accurate.
It's fundamentally not an oligarchy, that's just not true. Trump didn't do fuck all during his term for this exact reason. It's obviously not a kleptocracy, unless you have like, actual proof of this. Trump being a good one, but that's not a historical precedent.
If Trump did nothing then why are people so scared of him winning the election?
How do you figure we don't have an Oligarchy? There is more than just the executive branch of our government by the way. There's also the Legislative, Judicial, and Black Rock.
because a leader that does nothing is an ineffectual leader. You want a leader that does something not nothing.
this also ignores the part where he tried to like, overthrow democracy, and ruin the government, but nobody likes to talk about that part.
an oligarchy would be something like russia, The US as you said has multiple branches, the executive being the most front facing. You've got the judicial and legislative branches as well. The legislative branch (congress) is literally made up of hundreds of people. People that WE vote in.
black rock is also not a branch of the government, they're a private investment firm.
With citizens united, don't you think it's relevant that campaigns can accept large amounts of money? Like voters can see endless ads of one candidate if they have enough money. Campaigns can hire PIs to dig up dirt and air it. Money in a capitalist country confers power.
thats probably relevant, but this removes it even further from an oligarchy. And closer to a plutocracy, and if it does work it's more of a commentary on the average populous than it is the collective society.
Also super pac laws are pretty vague, so unless you donate directly to a campaign, which is pretty well regulated, though probably not enough. You can't run any ads that aren't just "tangentially relevant"
Okay that's fair about plutocracy vs oligarchy (I wasn't the person originally arguing with you). And fair about campaigning. Thank you
yeah, really the only arguable states for the US government is plutocracy depending on how you look at it, and gerontocracy based on the sheer age of the politicians in office right now.
Nothing else is super applicable aside from the usual, democratic republic and various other shenanigans the US and state governments pull.
campaign funding is a nightmare though. They have also been opened up significantly in recent decades, which a lot of people aren't too happy about. Personally i just think we should ban campaigning entirely.
What would you replace campaigning with? Or what would a ban look like to you?
idk, the obvious answer is a "policy resume" or something like that. Perhaps make a federal distribution system that is very structured and regular in order to provide something similar to this but for the admin instead.
anything that makes this a more regular and structured system seems like it would probably be beneficial in terms of this problem to me.
Amen
Because people in office are individuals and morality is relatively subjective. The only politician who will do everything you want and believe everything you believe is yourself. Run for office.
Right, as if the system isn't very deliberately designed to withstand reform and will not hesitate to weaponize every tool it has at its disposal (from the courts to the media to the police and the other alphabet agencies) to assure no leftist ever actually makes it in to a position of real power (not that we would want to, since we believe the state should be abolished, not joined, for precisely the reason stated above).
For the however many'th time, you die hard liberals can tell yourselves as many fairy tales you want to make yourself feel better, it won't change the reality - the system is not designed to serve you, but to keep you placated with nothing but an illusion of choice. Those with power and money wrote the rules, what on earth, and at this point in time with history unfolding right in front of our eyes as it is, again, makes you think that following those rules will ever work in your favour?
First, I'm not a liberal by any definition. A democratic socialist isn't a liberal and if you think so, you're uneducated or just ad hominem attacking. Either way, null.
There are options, it's just difficult to implement them. The Black Panthers were doing it. The first step is having community as its base.
I live in a place with a lot of "undesirable" folks. I don't want to see my community here get hurt because I didn't do anything. And ofc I don't want to be hurt either.
Voting does grant power. If it did nothing, then they'd allow felons to vote. They wouldn't engage in voter suppression. If leftist organizing didn't work, they wouldn't have imprisoned people like The Black Panthers. We actually know it indeed does and will work BECAUSE the state responds violently. Even in Russia, where the votes don't matter, someone like Navalny is a threat.
Don't be a coward. Vote. You can still organize for other stuff too while voting.