I hadn’t seen the original. Great meme. =D

We need more people to say stuff like this. Trump’s entire stick is controlling the narrative and getting everyone to bend the knee so they say nice stuff about him. Any attempt at a counter narrative, no matter how mild mannered is a threat to his narrative and control over the discourse.

His social media response is damage control. We’ll be in a better place if we start talking about how immigrants are great and trans people want to be ourselves. Talking about how we would all have more money if we taxed billionaires would help to. The fact billionaires remove wealth from the economy by never paying taxes, never paying wages, and price gouging us all at the grocery stores.

The same is pretty much true with my family as well. However thanks to the internet we have access to a larger subset of people than just our families.

It isn’t a system we should want to continue anyway. Immigration should be an opportunity for equality, not indentured servitude.

That’s the thing. It’s not enough to only be against something, although we still need to do that too. We have to be for something. We should definitely pick things we would be happy with too.

Thinking back to school, I had an ethics teacher ask the class what we thought the meaning of life is. The consensus from the class was whatever we believe. Then our teacher asked a follow up, in that case, what do we believe it means. No one had an answer.

We need to decide what we believe is important to us, what we value, and then figure out the most useful strategy to making that reality. We want to dismantle hierarchies, but that means thinking about what our lives would be without those hierarchies.

Right now, people are being told to imagine a world without certain groups of people, on the false promise that the elimination of people will improve their lives. We need to get people to imagine a world without certain classes of people. The elimination of class will give us economic freedom so that we will have the means to improve our lives.

Put a hold on that popcorn. It’s not a civil war. Elon and Trump are in agreement. What’s happening is some MAGA supporters are going through the five stages of grief. They seem to be somewhere around anger and bargaining. Trump conned his supporters like he conned his employees before them. Now Trump supporters are working their way to accepting Trump was always going to enrich himself and billionaires at their expense.

Now would be a good time to start pulling people away from MAGA. People need an alternative. Taking the wealth of billionaires as well as the source of their wealth would be a good start. Not to mention systemic change to our government’s institutions.

There can more than one lesson to learn from an election. Democrats need a populist narrative to push a progressive and socialist agenda. Leftists need to learn to exercise power and keep fascists out of power. The only way to get the DNC to stop being neoliberal is to co-opt the party the way MAGA did to the Republicans. Not voting lets the fascists win and allows the Democratic Party to shift to the right.

We had the ability to stop Trump’s second term, but we failed to counteract the spread of accelerationist propaganda and impress the need to exercise power on the behalf of underprivileged people. No amount of fuck ups from the Democrats and their consultants justifies refusing to use our only tool to win political power during elections.

Only if we assume the only way to convince people of anything is to brainwash them as children. I would like to give people more credit than that. People can be convinced that they’re wrong, but it takes time. To that end, it’s useful to be vocal sooner rather than later.

With 4B in South Korea I think it was bad from the start and not a case of co-opting. With people championing 4B in the US it’s a case of it’s still new, but unfortunately has roots in a bad movement. Hopefully 4B in the US will reject the terf aspect of 4B in South Korea, but that will take work.

And socialists too! =)

The main issue is that 4B in South Korea specifically is a manosphere esq movement for woman. It ends up with the same reactionary bent to it as it is not about equality but separation. It ended up with terf rhetoric as well.

Here’s some articles to read:

https://www.them.us/story/how-4b-actually-leaves-trans-people-behind

https://time.com/7177557/4b-us-women-resisting-patriarchy-essay/

Shepherd, who is trans, notes that the many South Koreans participating in 4B have developed hateful anti-trans, anti-gay views, given the “bioessentialist ideology” that places immense import on child-bearing as a marker of womanhood. “Korean women aren’t transphobic or homophobic, I have friends there and they love me and my transness,” he adds. “I’m saying that the most stalwart members of the 4B movement, those who champion it the most passionately, usually fester in queerphobic forum spaces like Womad. This wasn’t intentional in the creation of the 4B movement, but a separatist movement based in biological essentialism is a movement that can very readily foster that environment.”

To clarify when I refer to leftists I mean, from left to right on the political spectrum, anarchists, anarcho-communists, communists, socialists, democratic-socialists, social democrats, and progressives. Of people with these political positions probably democratic-socialists, social democrats, and progressives were among the leftists that voted for Biden in 2020 in the greatest numbers.

Authoritarian communists or tankies are not leftists, but red fascists. They occupy the same position on the political spectrum as fascists and of course didn’t vote for Biden. Both red fascism and fascism are the same in that they both build hierarchies and then start killing people at the bottom of those hierarchies. The fascists build racial hierarchies. The red fascists build ideological hierarchies. Neither qualify as leftists because leftists want to deconstruct hierarchies.

We need people with better ideas. Progressive and socialist ideas specifically.

I’m not thrilled about the 4B movement as it’s transphobic, but I support women making decisions for themselves. Ideally this trend in the US will be lgbtq+ aligned.

I would assume lemmy would be supportive of this trend for people in the US in at least broad terms, but I remember the Man v Bear discussion. Bear by the way.

Here’s a challenge for anyone reading this, start by empathizing with these women and what they’ve been going through that would make this a popular trend for them.

I’ve had a couple swimming as a mermaid recently. I usually see from my perspective in dreams, so I don’t usually have a view of what I look like. Also, like aliens invade in my dreams or I’m going to classes and doing homework so I’m not really in the mindset to check. edit: typo

Let’s both hope your democratic non-voter buddies are pissed off enough at trump during the next cycle to show up and vote this time, because leftists definitely won’t if the dnc keeps going rightwards; again.

My argument is referring to leftists. They are the non-voters. By definition, a non-voter isn’t affiliated with any party.

The DNC will keep shifting right if leftists don’t vote for them. A tit-for-tat strategy will keep leftists out of power and Democrats moving to the right until one group changes strategies. The DNC isn’t going to systemically change unless it is co-opted by socialists and progressives, but the DNC can change who they cater to. The DNC can start catering to leftists incrementally if leftists start voting for Democrats.

I can understand how daunting of a task it may seem to get your own people to vote from where you’re sitting on a horse so high that you’re unable to understand that you’ve bought into an alienating stereotype of your most needful allies to defeat the trumpers,

Your argument’s horse is dead. Your argument’s position was shown to be false this election. Leftists didn’t vote for Democrats in 2024 and now Democrats are catering to moderates and conservatives who voted. Democrats are not catering to leftists. I recommend you get of your dead horse. Until then we will be ruled by fascists.

but I have faith that Americans will come to see how we keep shooting ourselves in the foot; eventually.

As long as we still have elections, leftists will learn to vote for the most left leaning viable mainstream political party or they will watch fascists kill us all with death camps and climate change. Unfortunately it’s not enough for bad things to happen to people to learn their lessons.

I recommend you take the time to understand how the 2024 election disproves your argument’s position. No amount of bad election outcomes, death, or destruction of the planet will do that thinking for anyone.

Studies have shown that new evidence that contradicts a person’s beliefs is both as painful as physical pain and is not effective at changing a person’s position in the short term. People have to take the time to internalize that they were wrong. If we start now people should understand they need to vote for Democrats by the 2026 and 2028 elections.

The Democrats are going to follow the people who vote. They get money from corporate donors to be neoliberals. We need a socialist and progressive movement to co-opt the Democratic party. But in the mean time, as long as we still have elections, we can kick fascists out of power and get the Democrats to cater to leftists incrementally.

This isn’t enough to solve climate change or wealth inequality, but until the Democratic party is co-opted the way the Republican party was by MAGA we need to exercise power by voting for the candidates the furthest to the left in elections. Between elections we need grassroots movements to get better candidates.

The party platform shifted to the right in 2024 despite getting progressive votes in 2020. By your hypothesis this shouldn’t have happened. Progressives voted for the DNC in 2020 and yet were abandoned by them in 2024.

This ignores the incremental shift to the left by Biden after the 2020 election which supports my arguments and refutes your argument.

The Democrats won in 2020 when more people voted for them and shifted left.

The Democrats lost in 2024 when fewer people voted for them and shifted right.

That aside your assumptions here are game theoretically false. You cannot get someone to act in your best interest if you promise to support them no matter what they do. It simply doesn’t make sense, as we have seen from how the DNC treated progressives this election.

The 2024 election is the evidence that refutes your argument’s position. People didn’t vote for Democrats and the Democrats are now looking for moderate and conservatives who voted. It was the people on the left claiming they wouldn’t vote so it’s reasonable that leftists are making up part of the difference in the popular vote count.

People always act in their self-interest. The goal is to get people to understand that voting for the viable mainstream political party that is the furthest to the left is the most useful strategy to forward their self interest.

The evidence from this election in fact demonstrates my argument to be correct. My argument is that if progressives don’t vote they won’t be catered to by Democrats. Progressives didn’t vote and now they aren’t being catered to by Democrats.

The DNC doesn’t follow leftist (or really working class) votes because they’re behold to their corporate donors (and because they’re led by fossils who should’ve retired or died decades ago), not because it’s successful electoral strategy.

While both parities are beholden to the owner class, the corporate donors can only provide money to seek out votes. Democrats still need a voting base to cater to. The votes are still the essential resource to win elections as that is what is counted in an election. We still need to co-opt the Democrats to get a socialist and progressive agenda to get rid of the owner class.

The DNC doesn’t seek out leftists because leftists don’t vote. The DNC seeks out people who vote.

Doesn’t mean it can’t change now. No, lemme rephrase that: It has to change or y’all are absolutely fucked.

The way we do that is by voting for Democrats and telling other people to vote for Democrats.

Bernie is independent. He’s not a democratic, yet he’s winning elections in Vermont without “splitting the vote”. That’s what I meant by having deposed them.

Exactly. He is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. He hasn’t deposed the Democrats, they are still here, in fact Bernie works with them. The goal is not to get rid of the Democratic Party, but to control it.

For local office, and only two states doing it for state office. This doesn’t mean much for federal office, which is where you will see resistance from the DNC.

My point is that the claim that

DNC will absolutely not, never pass election reform

is demonstrably false. Democrats have passed election reform which means they can pass it again at the federal level. Things that gets done at the federal level can find their root at the state level, such as gay marriage.

Yeah, and they decided that was too much snd tried to go back to the right while thinking they’ll still get progressive votes,

Because people didn’t vote for them.

when progressives by your claim were supposed to have leverage.

I do not claim anyone has leverage over political parties via voting. There is no fulcrum on the political spectrum. People who vote have power. People who do vote have given up their power.

Biden also led the US’s support for Israel’s genocide, again when progressives were supposed to have “leverage”.

Biden was following 70 years of US policy. To be clear, Biden is complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. But the idea that a US President would drop a long standing ally is not a serious one. Especially when taking into account that the ally is Israel and Biden is a life long zionist. Biden was undermining negotiations with Israel during the Obama administration.

Biden is not representative of non-zionist Democrats. Unfortunately thanks to the useless strategy of non-voting we are going to see a lot more zionists in power in Congress for at least the next two to years. This will have devastating consequences for Palestine and the Middle East in general.

Also again, there is no leverage. Only political power. There is no fulcrum on the political spectrum. Without something to pivot on there is no leverage. There is no reason why non-voters or third party voters would compulse any mainstream political party to do anything when there are voters that can be targeted.

They’re shifting left one step and back three, as seen by Harris’s support for that idiotic border wall and democrats coopting Republican immigration policies.

The Democrats take one step forward to the left, while the Republicans take three steps back to the right. The Democrats refusal to embrace any populist narrative or any narrative at all means they can never shape the discourse. All they can do is try to comprise on the issues laid out by the Republican’s narrative. The Democrats need to be co-opted by a socialist and progressive movement and then be given a populist narrative to win votes.

Progressives (and many other groups) voted for Biden in large numbers for the DNC, and what came out of that was the 2024 shitshow and a lame duck president.

Fewer numbers than in 2020. Biden got 81,283,361 votes in 2020. Kamala only got 75,000,783 votes in 2024.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/president-results

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/president-results

The DNC thinks, only partially correctly, that as long as progressives don’t have a viable third party they’ll be forced to vote blue like it or not

The Democrats look at who votes. Democrats don’t think about leftists, because as far as Democrats are concerned people who don’t vote don’t exist. The Democrats want political power and they are willing to chase voters, not non-voters, to get it.

that as a result the party can shift right as much as it wants.

They don’t just think they can shift right, they think they have to shift right in order to win. If leftists can’t be asked to vote for Republicans or Democrats then the Democrats thinks they are a lost cause.

You say that voting for them gives you leverage, but what good is leverage that you can’t use?

It is not about leverage. It’s about power. Voting gives people power not leverage. If a group votes for a political party then that political party caters to that group. If a group doesn’t vote then political parties chase other groups that do vote. Grassroots movements can get better candidates between elections.

This whole idea of leverage has been demonstrated to be false in this election. There is no fulcrum on the political spectrum. Democrats should be clambering to get leftist votes right now according to the hypothesis of leverage, but the evidence shows the opposite, the Democrats are frantically looking for moderate and conservative votes.

Political parties have to be shoved in the desired direction. The way to shove political parties during elections is by voting for them.