this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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4 years later: "THIS election is super important. We'll talk about the trains in another 4 years."
Haha! Yeah, fuck lgbtq people, disabled people, people on medicare, black people, hispanic people, non-christians, and the poor. Put them in camps. They just bitch and moan anyway. I'm sure there are other people calling this a dangerous election who just say it every year, stuff them in the camps too! We gotta make them trains run on time!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The argument for Trump isn't that he'll make the trains run on time. He's more like the guy who'll shut down the trains and sell them for scrap.
Trump is the guy you vote for because he hates the same people you hate.
The lack of an /s in your comment worries me, especially since the entire conversation is about the fact that there are those among us who say what you just said with no hint of sarcasm.
Then I guess a bit of critical thinking will need to be applied. My comment was very obvious sarcasm.
Are you worried because someone might think me, a trans woman, is advocating for the internment of everyone who is not a white cishetero male Christian nationalist in favor of trains running in time? Cause... Me too honestly.
I get that the state of the US is abysmal, but if anyone is taking that comment seriously I hope they choke on a shotgun. /srs
The mistake is thinkkng that critical thinking is a common reaction these days.
There are latinos who are supporting trump. Trump is the same guy who already seperated families, detained them in what ammounts to essentially a metal box in the Texas heat, without release, or water, until they died. Children seperated from families, still to this day not reunited, some of which never will be, because some died.
That's not some hyperbole "this could happen" dramatic statement. I'm saying 2016-2020 he already DID do these things, and bragged about doing them. He bragged about killing people because they were latino.
There are latino trump voters and supporters in 2024. So, no. I don't assume everyone will automatically know your comment was dripping in sarcasm, I don't assume anyone will know your life story, and I don't assume everyone will vote in their best interests. People play politics like sports teams these days.
Ask me more about my life story! So far you have this:
As for your sports team context, if I played this like sports, I'd turn the TV off. Unfortunately, I was kidnapped and placed on the field in a cage, and if one side wins I get shot. The other side wins and I get to hang out in the cage some more. There's a small contingency in the crowd calling to burn the stadium down with everyone on the field (including me) and half of the crowd going down with it. /m
Oh, also, apologies about missing all of the tone tags. /gen
/nbr, /ay but also /nay
/gen
/nay
Do you honestly think people would take my first comment seriously? /gen A simple perusal of my post history shows how much I fucking loathe Trump and republicans and I'm starting to get sick of hearing solutions to our government that amount to "stop compromising and burn it to the ground" without any regard for the consequences or reality. /lh
EDIT: That last portion after my question was /nay, just to be clear. There's others in these comments who are basically saying that because everything sucks or kinda sucks we need to end it, even if it hurts other people. /gen
We're here because people keep supporting a broken system. We keep getting elections with gerrymandering and candidates that don't represent people because people are unwilling to take action outside of them or even exercise that power in its most basic form. Even if you maintain that things are genuinely good when Democrats win (we'll circle back on that one), it's such a brittle system. Any progress that has been made can be wiped out every few years due to elections which have been gerrymandered to create the 50/50 coin-flip when the actual population doesn't support the right at nearly that rate. Plus, because of the messed up process of supreme court appointments, we sometimes lose rights even when Democrats are in office because of a fundamentally undemocratic institution. You could argue that's all the more reason to have voted against Republicans in the past and why we should vote against them now, but once again: In a system that is supposedly based on constitutional protections, why are our rights contingent on the random time an old judge kicks the bucket? Or the supposedly illegal actions of a president?
Because there's nothing to actually stop any of it. Rights are hard to establish and enforce and really easy to be taken away or ignored. Republicans will "break the rules" and then Democrats will decide to be bound by not only the rules their "opponents" won't follow, but by the new rules that come out of their actions. If you truly believe your opponents are fascists, and you're genuinely opposed to that, then nothing should be off the table for resisting them. At the tamest end of things the least they could have tried to do would be to break the power of the court or anti-majoritarian rules in the legislature. But again, if rules don't matter to fascists, you should be willing to go way further than that to stop them. Instead, the "#resistance" under Trump largely consisted of tweets, protest signs, and a call to vote differently in 2-4 years while simultaneously questioning if we'd even have an election to vote in. If Trump wins are liberals going to get out there and do something about it? Are they going to storm the capital to boot out the fascists? Fight cops and feds from taking away minorities? No. That's way too "uncivil" for them. We're just gonna have to vote harder next time!
And if only all we had to talk about were the trains being on time!
Circling back to how things are under Democrats: Sure, maybe they're a bit nicer to minorities publicly, but we still get:
An ever expanding military, police, and surveillance state. Bush might have started the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and enacted the Patriot act, but Obama continued the wars, including the torture and indefinite detention he said he'd end. We also learned about the NSA's mass surveillance program under Obama and when confronted with the public outcry about an assault on our fundamental rights or the war crimes being committed by the military, he chose to go after whistleblowers instead of doing anything about it. Since then has ANY president or major presidential candidate even talked about the NSA or given any indication that they'd cut back on surveillance or imperialism? In my lifetime over 3 Democratic and 2 Republican administrations, the military budget has tripped. And of course support for Israel's genocide has continued with little more than hand wringing and empty promises.
Anti-immigration policies continued under Obama and Biden. Biden in particular continued the detention centers and even allowed for the wall to keep being built.
Climate legislation that isn't good enough to meet the existential threat posed by the problem. Far from being "something is better than nothing," these compromise positions obstruct efforts to implement the necessary changes. Plus whatever "advancements" are put in place tend to be fairly temporary in nature. A regulation can be easily overturned by a future administration or court. It's a lot harder to go around destroying public transportation and clean energy infrastructure after it's already been built. We are facing a global crisis and the system is going to get us all killed eventually, and poorer countries even sooner.
There are a lot of people who are hurt by US capitalism and imperialism even under Democratic administrations. It's a decision to not value those people. And it's not even like they're always different people. The surveillance state hurts everyone, but in particular it makes it easier for the government to target undesirable groups like immigrants, LGBT people, or say, women who want to get an abortion. There are certainly LGBT people, disable people, women, PoCs, etc amongst those the US has bombed, sanctioned, or caused to live in chaos after a coup. Lack of adequate healthcare means that accessing abortions or gender affirming care harder even if they are completely legal.
But don't worry, just vote for the Democrat then push them to the left! By... uh... holding up signs? Making tweets? You definitely need to unconditionally vote for them again next time, so you can't pressure them that way.
It's ok, next election we'll talk about ~the trains~ the military, surveillance state, healthcare, the environment, etc.
dun dun dun, dun
"Wow, that's a lot of words."
dun dun dun, dun
"Shame I'm not gonna read any of em ."
Anyway, all joking aside... This system is problematic and needs to be worked on. But I promise you the fix is not "abandon our most vulnerable citizens and our sovereignty for my mental picture of a utopia".
No. Clearly the solution is to continue to abandon anyone outside the US because they don't matter. /s
But more directly: HOW are you going to work on it? Who is gonna do that? The capitalist/imperialist who you've pledged your vote to unconditionally?
Good to know our American citizens mean fuck-all to you then.
It's not unconditional. If you root yourself in reality for a few minutes, you'll see we have three choices:
Which are you picking? I don't see any actionable grand solutions or saints coming from you and your ilk. I do not have answers on how to fix it, and I doubt :checks watch: 6 days before the election is enough time to figure it out.
To be abundantly clear, I do not like these choices. None of them. The only one I can stomach is the second one, and there does not appear to be any viable alternatives right now.
It's almost like the only way the world makes sense is to assume that both parties are actually wings of the same party
You can actually hold protests about the trains, and talk about them immediately after the election...
...and you'll be doing so with someone who is slightly more likely to be concerned with their image, and hence slightly more likely to listen.
But only if you get out and vote in that direction. If you don't vote - there may be a chance you just never get to talk about the trains again. Or even that talking about them is seen as illegal criticism of the state.
That's the nature of fascism, you can't be sure of what freedoms will be taken from you.
Why would they be concerned with their image if people are going to vote for them anyway? We have a candidate who supports literal genocide and that's not bad enough for people to do something. What exactly, precisely, practically, is the mechanism for holding a politician accountable when you will always vote for them and won't take any actions outside the electoral system?
This really cuts to the core of the issue. Why would they need to listen to what people are saying if they've already won the election? To bolster their chances of being re-elected? But then the next election will most likely be a repeat. Vote for me or else the fascists win. Then we elect them, even though they state while they are running that they plan to do [x]. We make a big fuss to tell them we don't want them to do [x]. They follow through with what they clearly stated while campaigning. And then next election it's the same thing again. The only bargaining chip we really have as the American people is our vote.
If the situation is really that dire. (And I absolutely believe it is) And American democracy as a whole is at stake, who is really the one to blame? The people holding steadfastly to their beliefs and saying that they don't feel comfortable/ good voting for someone who is saying they will continue to support genocide? Or the person that sees people saying that and points the finger at them as the problem instead of hearing them out and changing your policy to gain their votes? I understand that also poses the risk of losing votes, but do you really want the votes of people thirsting for genocide?
All of this being said I do completely understand that this is the choice that we've been stuck with, and that things will be massively worse if Trump does get elected. I'm voting for Harris, but I can't say that I really blame people who feel like they can't in good conscience. And I hate seeing everyone telling them to just shut up, vote Harris and worry about it after.
I like how you're upvoted because you're the even comment, so people assume you're continuing the argument without even reading the post.
What fucking trains do we have in America? Inter city passenger rail's been on life support for a century here. Just vote to keep the Nazis out of the White House.
The trains were just keeping with the metaphor of the OP. (Although we do need much better trains too.)
Acting like the only thing wrong is train schedules is really reductive. People who insist on voting as THE prime form of political participation will often say that not voting for a lesser evil is a privileged position because you're not going to be impacted by the stuff the other party will do. But I'd argue there is an inherent privilege to being someone who won't be materially impacted by US imperialism.
We've all been conditioned to view the violence the government inflicts on the rest of the world as normal. Maybe you don't agree with it, but only as much as you don't agree with, say, tax policy. It's an abstract thing. We're removed from the constant horror it represents. We'd like it if it wasn't happening, but we don't have to think about it most of the time and will clearly not do anything about it any time soon if everyone left of Hitler's position is "vote for the Hitler that's only going to do the bad stuff to other people."
In general I take issue with people framing this as protecting democracy from fascism. The US is not a democracy.
For starters, a constitutional democracy shouldn't be able to end through a simple vote that doesn't even include most of the country. If voting in fascists is an acceptable outcome of the system, it's not a good system.
From the ground up, the US was built to be as anti-democratic as possible while still technically having voting. Obviously it started with only land owning white men being allowed to vote. It's expanded slowly over the years, but it STILL explicitly disenfranchises people such as prisoners. The electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the longer, staggered term limits in the senate, and the lifetime term limit for supreme court justices are all mechanisms which were explicitly designed to filter out the will of the masses from influencing government. To bring in a personal example: I live in NY. My vote doesn't matter. I don't say that as an excuse for not voting because I know I won't have an effect of the election. I say that because I don't even get a vote! Even if there was a candidate I cared about, just because of where I was born I can have zero influence on their election into government.
Finally, I'd argue that an imperialist country is definitionally not a democracy. The core principle of democracy is that the government rules over only those who have consented to it. An imperialist state such as the US takes actions all around the world in other sovereign countries that have major influences on people who never consented to be subjects of US power. An Iraqi who's house got bombed didn't get a chance to vote against Bush. A person in Latin America didn't get a vote on the US invalidating the vote in their country with a coup. Cubans, Vietnamese, etc. didn't get to vote on the US making sure they couldn't trade with the rest of the world.
As a related point to the last point: This is why I think it's philosophically wrong to vote for candidates who don't represent you in the US elections. In a democracy you are still considered to have "consented" to being governed even by an opposition party you didn't vote for because you consented to the process. By voting you are saying that you agree that this is the way we will choose our government and that you will abide by the results even if you don't get the outcome you want. That's fine if the process was truly democratic and you can live with any of the outcomes even if you'd prefer something different. But if all outcomes are systematically unacceptable to you and the process itself is flawed, then still casting your vote within that framework is consent to the government and the process that produced it. When you go vote, there's no box for "I'm only voting for this person because they're technically better than the other one. I'm not actually ok with them." You simply vote for Harris and the implicit choice of "I will not try to enact change in any other way."
If you think Trump represents the rise of fascism and the end of democracy, then you shouldn't be willing to abide by the results of the election anyway. But could you imagine any of the people telling you to vote against fascism taking up arms to storm the capital to protect that democracy and it's people? Could you even imagine those people symbolically supporting leftists if they did this? I can't. Because they didn't do shit last time. Because they spent years talking about the right wing coup attempt in terms of it being treason rather than it being a problem because they're fascists. Because civility and rules are more important than anything else to these people. If Trump won, the day after the election the same people who said it'd be the end of democracy will be saying "We'll get em' in 2-4 years."
„We can vote third party when we fix this imminent threat”.