KillingTimeItself

Oh, ok. So when mid terms come around, and Kamala’s done nothing I want, then you’ll be fine with me withholding my vote, right? Or are you going to be telling me the exact same thing you’re telling me now? If you’re genuinely alright with me withholding my vote during the midterms, what’s the difference between then and now?

yeah no fucking go for it. Do whatever the fuck you want, you can even do it now if you feel like it. Especially if you’re protest voting for that specific issue, i think that would be a warranted mid term activity to partake it. I mean i might make fun of you for grenading the ability of the government to solve problems, but that’s something we’re both going to do anyway lmao. That parts free real estate.

The difference between then and now, is that voting now has the substantial potential to prevent trump from being elected which is obviously going to have very negative consequences in this case. Whereas not voting in the midterms, or even changing your vote in the mid terms is going to have a much less significant effect as it’s only really going to slow/lessen the ability for the federal government to create and push legislation, although probably specifically with the IP thing. Depends on how that goes.

How? What method do you expect me to use to push her? And why should I have any confidence in that method working when it’s not working during an election year, when she most needs people’s votes and support?

the same way you’re doing it now, just then, signal discontent over certain policy. There’s no reason to have any confidence in anything, but in this case it’s just basic strategic leverage. If kamala losses, and trump wins, it wasn’t your fault, and you didn’t have anything to do with it. If kamala wins, and you don’t get the IP thing you wanted, then you at least didn’t get trump, and you had your part in that. And if kamala wins, and you do get the thing you want, then obviously you’re going to get most of everything that you wanted.

As opposed to the current line of thinking where you’re more likely to put trump into office, or if kamala wins, do nothing midterms because you’ve stopped caring by that point. Or maybe you would, but that would be up to chance more than anything.

We take the wins we can get, and we line ourselves up to get the best shots that we can, that’s the name of the game.

There was a major wave of campus protests this year over the genocide in Gaza, all over the country.

i know there have been a large number throughout the year, i’m curious about the last 3 or so specifically. Or have those pretty much died down. I know they were all over the place for a few months a while back though.

Again, you just want me to give them everything they want while asking nothing in return and you’re trying to pretend otherwise without offering any sort of coherent strategy. If that’s not what’s happening, walk me through what you expect me to do and when.

i mean you can view it like that, i guess, but ultimately that’s not really how it works, politics is mostly a take game for the civilian. We don’t really give them much, aside from tax dollars, but they give us legislation and policies that reflect our ideals. If your ideals don’t match at all you’ve either got a failure of ideals, or a failure of government, which one probably depends on which one is at a larger scale.

as for the last bit, see previous.

Whereas if republicans win this election, the US has a very dark future that may unite extremists and the death of the party would be less of a mess and more of an uphill battle for the entire country. At that point a third party would almost be irrelevant under the threat of a fall of democracy.

yeah, idk what would happen under a republican win, either this is going to be the most lame boring term ever, and then trump gets kicked out, cant do it ever again (according to ben shapiro of course) and the republican part has to figure out what to do after this. Or the entire governmental institution literally gets over thrown. And we end up in a civil war type scenario, in which case we probably know what to do lol.

You see this when Kamala is supporting fracking live on stage despite the ecological impacts that most of her party claims to be worried about.

i’m not sure honestly, i think something like fracking, while there would be a difference in opinion over it, i think federal legislation of fracking is bad, unless it’s done under something like the EPA, assuming they have any power anymore lol. Aside from that i think you would want to leave it to a state/city/county basis, since that’s going to be where the localized impacts are going to be at. I.E. Probably where the most effective legislation is going to happen.

oil is also one of those things that’s going to be consumed regardless of whether or not it’s good for the planet, so if we don’t frack, someone else is likely to frack anyway. Shit’s going to happen one way or another, but i guess in this case it’s probably just NIMBYism.

Obviously there’s going to be a difference, but i don’t think like we see with the political right that it’s going to heavily fracture the political party, both of those people are probably going to vote for kamala at the end of the day.

mid terms are a pretty common swing point for an unpopular candidate. Between the late term push for legislation to increase the chances of re-election, and the initial push after getting into office to appease the voter base, the midterms are the biggest impact in a governmental term. Plus further down ballot votes can harm the institution as well.

regardless, even ignoring this, if you don’t think this is going to help. It’s going to be a net positive over somebody like trump winning, so it’s basically what you’re left with here if this problem is so important to you.

This is just, “You have to give them everything they want while asking nothing in return” with extra, nonsensical steps.

no this is “you have to give them your vote, and only vote, in the hopes that you can push them later down the lines, to be more useful to your ideals. And considering that the other option is going to be worse, might as well try for this one”

Of course, there’s already been widespread protests during an election year and the democrats not only did not give an inch, but forcibly suppressed them.

protests over what? I haven’t heard about any, but i guess i also haven’t been paying much attention. Unless you mean the vote protest, in which case nobody cares. It’s not going to be a significant percent of the voter base anyway.

I have been nothing but deeply disappointed with American politics for the entirety of my adult life.

yeah, that’s just politics, idk what you really expect it to do lol. It’s not going to do your homework, and it isn’t supposed to, it simply isn’t made for that. Global geopolitics are even more complicated and the potential ramifications are even more significant so we can’t even really begin to talk about those.

That’s nothing new. More like par for the course with American elections.

nothing new since 2020. And maybe 2016 with the russian interference, but that’s been pretty typical and not really subversion of democracy.

Maybe the bush V gore election, but that’s it really. Everything else has pretty much “worked as intended” except for that one apparent McCarthy plot but that never went anywhere.

What’s different this time is how many “moderate” Republicans are endorsing the Democrats.

they are moderate btw. That the reason they’re supporting dems. Normally they would be swing voters, but given the nature of this election, you would expect some percent of the republican voter base to push more democratic.

The Democratic Party is over, they’re giving up on their left wing to chase anti-trump Republicans. After this election they might as well be the Democratic-Republicans ressurrected. One big neoliberal party with no real competition from the right or left.

i don’t think the democratic party is over, i think you’re just either being wildly over dramatic here, or simply wrong about how the democratic party works. There is a substantial difference in the parties, that i simply do not have time to cover in this comment. See this thread

but TL;DR is that the left wing is a lot more nebulous than the right wing, which can make it very flexible in how it functions, which is good for general party cohesion. Unlike the republican party (again, see the previously linked thread)

it also seems like, and this is adding to those previous thoughts, that the left party is generally moving away from “SJW ideals” things like CRT and social inequality, which are still important, but just not actively being pushed through in any sort of legislation or anything, as we’re focusing more clearly on social aspects, things like abortion and queer rights, which are being targeted right now. But i think we will see a small shift going into the future with this as well, pushing more for “socially progressive ideals” rather than the previous “socially progressive governmental ideals” which i think are a bit iffy.

like to be clear, kamala is pushing hard for the independent moderate voter (which is at least 50% of the left party) and capturing a lot of the more moderate republican vote, which is going to be essential to the upcoming election strategy. It seems they think removing votes from republicans is probably going to be more valuable than insuring farther left voters (which are probably already voting for her anyway, since her ideals roughly align anyway) which on a few levels, makes a lot of sense. It also gives really strong social presence as well, just watch a rally that she’s done.

Polling is accurate enough, everyone who was surprised that Trump took the presidency in 2016 was just insufficiently cynical about American politics.

polling is really hard normally, and it’s even harder when talking about elections, because more often than not, elections are won by one or two percentage points. Polling has a margin of error of probably about < 5% which is going to make that pretty random by nature. This is also ignoring reliable data collection as well.

I don’t need polling to see which way the wind is blowing, this election has been a done deal since Pelosi convinced Biden to drop out of the race. That itself being an event I predicted as the longshot that the Democrats would need all the way back in 2015 when the DNC started openly conspiring against Bernie.

that’s a possibility, but i feel like that probably veers into the usual conspiratorial areas of things. As far as the polling and public sentiment goes, getting rid of biden probably saved this cycle. It’s certainly really stressed the republicans a lot, and will continue to do so even more in the future. I feel like bernie probably just wasn’t popular enough to win, certainly a beloved candidate, but idk if people would’ve genuinely voted him in. Maybe if he was the primary candidate, but they obviously didn’t pick him, to whatever consequence that had.

I like your root instance though.

fistbump

hell yeah brother!

i would like to take a moment to consider that republicans are currently doing shit, and then projecting that shit onto democrats, as we all know.

I would like to remind everyone that this is even nested, republicans are projecting their own projections onto the democrat party, and accusing them of doing the same thing that they’re literally doing.

the republican party is fucking over.

i got banned for a rather unfortunate string of comments regarding IP, though i will say, it was my fault.

IP people are in my experience entirely single issues voters. They do not care about anything else, and cannot be made to care about anything else. It’s pretty par for the course as far as issues voters go.

My ideal outcome is that Harris caves and stops the Israeli version of Auschwitz which is already happening.

the correct strategy here would be to push for full support on harris, under the pretense that “she will do something for palestine” and then after she gets into office (assuming she does) when the “inevitable” nothing gets done for palestine you can then rally support while in office in order to drum up what is more than likely going to be more effective support. Bargaining for something that currently exists in front of you is simply going to be much easier.

Though this still doesn’t solve the whole problem of shooting yourself in the foot and ending up giving the republican congress more say, or just doing nothing at all, instead of something minor that would’ve been impactful.

Israel has already slaughtered a full 10% of the population of Gaza.

idk why you put full here, i feel like just saying 10% would work just as well, seems more semantically confusing to me more than anything lol.

I’m not sure what it’s trying to imply.

A moderate cannot appeal to their voter base anymore so their only choice now is to find another populist and those aren’t super common.

and this is why i think it’s going to fracture aggressively, they won’t find someone capable of replacing trump, and if they do, i will eat my pants. In return whoever they pick is going to appeal broadly to the maga hardliners, but only them, and it’s likely going to drop some of the extremist crowd, and most of the more moderate people who are going to toe off somewhere else.

But also people are mostly ignoring that Trumps existence has raised the voter participation numbers. I think after his disappearance, republicans will face far less participation and excitement.

this is actually a really good point, but it’s also important to remember that trump doesn’t just energize the democrat vote. If trump gets out of the running, that’s likely to kill a good chunk of the dem voter party, unless whoever they pick is moderately popular and has a decent chance of winning. On either side.

I only get to talk about these things rarely but it’s interesting to think about. See once the Republican Party realizes it can’t win with votes and it can’t just cheat its way upwards, we get interesting results.

yup, it’s why i mostly focus on these kinds of things within politics, it’s what i find most interesting at the moment. Unfortunately, cheating upwards seems to be an incredibly viable strategy, which is probably less than ideal.

That’s when they must pivot on things that appeal to moderates. They’d have to drop their anti-LGBTQ stances. I can’t see a world currently where they aren’t forced to give up on abortion. Basically most of their social issues would have to go. The party would look very different.

this is basically what i foresee in the more moderate camp, it’s either going to kill the republican party, or as some have suggested, kill the maga party entirely and it’s going to shift more moderately, but it’s hard to be sure. In basically every fascist leadership, once the leader dies or loses power, the party collapses. Everything becomes a free for all and all the real estate is free so to speak.

But then that all will piss off their extremists and they can’t do that. So this is what I think splits the party.

yeah, a big problem i haven’t yet considered, is that nazis and far right extremists may try to capitalize on this really heavily, and if they do that might be a big problem…

We talk optics though and I’ve always criticized the left on its optics. They aren’t good. And that outward representation reflects inwards. Let me tell you right now that being in the middle of discourse, the right doesn’t argue with itself often. The left does.

this is true, but i think the general benefit it provides in strength outweighs the negatives, as long as single issues voters like the israel palestine people for example, don’t become a significant number in the majority, it really shouldn’t matter all that much, and most of those people would rather vote dem anyway.

We pushed out biden, and now kamala is a really strong contender, and it seems like the trump camp is about to implode on itself any day now, but maybe i’m just not used to republican rhetoric lol.

We’re a lot more broadly cohesive, and while we might not be collectively cohesive, like the republican party, we generally don’t hold animosity towards anybody. I give the israel palestine people a lot of shit for what i consider to be “bad think” but at the end of the day. They’re still people, and they still have the right to hold an opinion and vote for the people and problems they want. We both agree on that aspect. That’s something that trumpers won’t agree on. Certainly not with dems, this is why RINO is a thing.

My main example is this genocide situation with Biden and Gaza. Plenty of leftists and democrats are still prepared to waste their votes because of that situation despite the harm reduction argument. The right won’t do this.

yeah, this is definitely a concern, but i honestly don’t think it’s all that many people, it seems to mostly be college students that care about it, as well as people just barely old enough to vote. And those who aren’t yet old enough to vote. I think a lot of them who do exist, will probably vote for kamala, since it’s the obvious choice, but those who don’t are probably more of a fringe than the far right extremists are. I’m just not convinced there’s enough of them out there to make a substantial difference. Something on the order of taylor swift endorsing kamala for example. I think is going to have much more push in that direction.

It’s weird to say that the left is more cohesive as a base when the current MAGA people are basically in a cult and I don’t know what’s more cohesive than a cult. That’s at least half of their current party voters. So aside from them splitting, they value loyalty and nationalism, both of which create an alliance within them. They also aren’t sophisticated voters so they’re unlikely to break rank because they aren’t really thinking much about positions.

i think you’re probably conflating cohesiveness, and conformity here, cults value conformity almost exclusively. Cohesiveness is just the ability of a group to broadly stick together, fans of a certain sports team for instance, they have a certain cohesiveness. Linux users as well. ETC.

The maga people are kind of like a single ship in the middle of the ocean, everybody they like that conforms gets brought on and boosted, and the people they don’t get thrown off. The left is a lot more like a fleet of boats, all working towards the same general concept, just in different manners. It’s not that we aren’t collectively cohesive. It’s that we’re cooperatively cohesive.

I agree that the right is on more shaky footing than people think but it’s due to their current position I assume. For instance, consider if they had a young populist in their ranks. Think about if Trump was 45. We’d all be scared and rightly so because that cultist behavior would prevail and unite the party.

that could very well be a real concern, but i don’t think any old populist would be able to replace him, trump holds an almost god like status, whoever replaces him will never satisfy that. It might pick up the remains of the base, but they haven’t yet won a single election in the popular vote, and they didn’t win the 2020 election. They’re only going to lose worse, unless some god fearing event happens at this rate.

Mark my words, the only thing saving the party from not splitting is a new populist and that would be very bad for everyone if they found one.

i’ll consider it, but i think it would lead to an extremely turbulent period, and it would at best, be a complete rat race to the bottom. And at worst, dissolve within a few months. The only real alternative is literally trying a military coup i think.

man, this has been a wall of text lol, gotta love political analysis and theory though.

As much as I think that the right is going to split after trumps loss, I think they’re also more cohesive than the left is by far.

i highly disagree. There is a fundamental divide in how the parties manage. The left is more bottom up, and the right is more top down. It’s much easier for the right to appear “unified” but it’s much easier for them to also fracture, we’re seeing this be a problem in the house already.

Whereas on the left, it seems highly disjointed, but it’s relatively homogeneous. We have much more flexibility when it comes to “unifying” as a party, than the republicans do.

if trump drops out there are two primary paths that are taken, trump runs as a third party, pulling like 20% of the vote, while a primary candidate pulls most of the votes, or a replacement for trump, who is more likely to be less inflammatory than trump, and more moderate, who maga people aren’t very likely to like. But might vote for in large numbers.

Regardless the entire MAGA base will collapse overnight and have to find something new, likely fracturing in the process, so i would expect to see a lot of turnover in the house and senate in the years after trump drops out long term, assuming he does.

I think your general assumption is correct, but i think you’re forgetting about rhetoric and public image. People who think cats are being eaten by Haitians in ohio are simply going to have a different worldview from those who don’t and just think it’s a “meme”

i think the moderate voters, both republican and democrat would immediately fuck them over, though the moderate dems are more likely to align and side with current democratic representation, and possibly future as well, just due to fundamental values, so it’s less of a problem for the left.

I’m a single-issue anti-genocide voter.

you are going to be deeply disappointed when any number of things happens. Notably when you discover that israel probably isn’t just flagrantly committing genocide. When you discover other issues like climate change, and human rights abuse. Or like, nestle.

I can think of a few things that would spook you more than like 40,000 people dying. Notably the roughly 300,000 causalities in the russo-ukraine war that’s still ongoing.

The election can’t be subverted, it’s already been decided that Harris is winning.

it most definitely can be, see: 2020 election and the jan 6 plot (a video covering the excessive extents of jan 6th, it’s 3 hours long, and straight information)

there is already work being done to potentially subvert the will of the voters: see Georgia, i don’t have to explain this one, the board committee thing overseeing elections is trying to usurp total control over the certification of the votes.

yes, harris is already winning that’s how polling works. Unfortunately for you, polling is never perfectly accurate.

I like your root instance though. Real recognize real if you know what i mean.

it would probably fuck them harder, as they would have to “collectivize” for lack of a better term that i cannot remember right now. Far right and MAGA might. But moderate republicans are extremely unlikely to do this, as well as swing voters. It would probably single handedly kill the chances of trump ever winning again.

Cool. Tell all your Democrat friends that they can have my vote when they start doing the bare minimum and embargo arms sales to Israel.

i’ll be sure to tell them that once i’m convinced you aren’t a tankie trying to subvert the election.