timemachineyeah
drives me up a wall living in a very very red district, like "no democrat is ever going to win any local election, let alone a real leftist" district, like "our school board members ran on who was the most anti-mask" red, like "I pass white supremacist signs on the way to buy weed" red
and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote
the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work
going "okay, they're both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position" or "they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough" like we don't even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can't.
and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn't going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???
we didn't build this system, we just live in it. we're just trying to survive. a vote isn't a statement of your values, it's not an endorsement, it's not a marriage contract, it's a strategic play you make to keep alive.
the biggest mistake I see leftists making is overestimating their own popularity. "well but everyone would be leftist if they just-" no, stop, 1) you can't possibly know that 2) everyone will not just
but we need to get more people on board, which means advocating for violence in public places. a tiny fraction of people in a super secret space is a recipe for getting charged as conspirators and co-conspirators. we need people across the entire fucking planet rattling their chains in unison. we need a movement that's too big to be jailed.
We're staring down the barrel of over a century of sly upward wealth transfer and increasing state power at the cusp of a fully automated boring dystopia and a general collapse of biodiversity. If the whole world was going to mobilise as an insurgency like you're describing, it would have happened by now.
It's not "too late", but it's not early. Shit has to start happening.
yeah, i honestly don't have much faith in people. i'm 50 and i've been pretty radical left since i was in my early 20's. each new generation comes in thinking they're on the cusp of some great enlightenment that will change the world. they get complacent with that mindset until propaganda slowly erodes their morals and they accept the ever-approaching dystopia.
if you all had the perspective i have, you'd be planting bombs at every trump rally.
there is no dark cabal of illuminati engineering our dystopia. it's just shitty, greedy, unenlightened masses that love their shitty, greedy, unenlightened overlords, and until we cull those people nothing will ever change. they're not dying out. they're making new ones every day. we could have been living in a utopia by now. every problem in our society has a solution. we're just stuck in a left-right tug of war where no significant change happens except for more government/corporate overreach and degradation of the environment.
Same page on all that. History being what it is, I've yet to meet an upbeat historian. It's unintended consequences all the way down.
and no one seems to think it could ever happen to them until it's too late. we are not special. we could become a page in history at any given moment.