Lol, I guess I should have led with "extremely, profoundly ignorant in a way that almost has to be a choice at this point” for all of the reading comprehension in this post.

Aside from the fact that I am far more left than the democratic party and your base assumption about me and the point of my post is woefully far off, I would really love some answer to a very basic question:

What has the effect been for left/progressive policy from sitting out elections or voting for third party/independents?

While left/progressives sit over here and go “oh I don’t like this candidate because they voted for this policy in '92 that was bad for beluga whales” the right will line up and dutifully vote for a rapist that tried to overthrow democracy as long as they have an R next to their name.

But yeah, vote your principles! Go out there and vote for the green candidate! After all, look at how well that went towards advancing green principles - The party promotes green politics, specifically environmentalism; nonviolence; social justice; participatory democracy; grassroots democracy; anti-war; anti-racism; libertarian socialism and eco-socialism. All that got so much better thanks to the idealists who thought Hillary was a little too corporate or had a little too much resting bitch face.

I don’t think they are under-estimating, or even close. It’s like taking a solid b student and grading them next to the kid eating paint chips and torturing small animals and pretending it’s the same. Even in modern times, look at economic accomplishments of this admin, legislative accomplishments, etc. Fighting for things like a higher min wage (though it failed.)

Stop blaming people for not voting for them.

Fuck no. Every time in my life we’ve voted in Republicans it’s led to one catastrophe or another. Sure you can make an argument that Dems need to be pushed to the left, but the choices are between:

a) the party who isn’t improving your life fast enough
b) the party these days that are literal fascists responsible for multiple financial collapses at this point, millions dead from wars they start, failure to manage a pandemic, extreme wealth concentration, that is looking at our planet on fire and still doesn’t meaningfully acknowledge that our policy is causing it. Book bans, loss of bodily autonomy for half of the country, destroying education, ensuring discrimination in law, bringing back child labor.

If you’re voting republican in 2023 or not voting democrat, you’re a sociopath, billionaire (whoops said the same thing twice), or a fucking moron*. There is no path to a more progressive country that comes through allowing fascists to burn it all down.

* I suppose I could more charitably say “extremely, profoundly ignorant in a way that almost has to be a choice at this point.”

He’s not even really facing all that much backlash. Should we all be outraged? Obviously. As it is, I doubt this is even getting to the masses, and if it does, you just wait a week for some other moron to do something stupid…

I mean, given all of the other laws and such that he broke blatantly while in office, fuck no lol. Emoluments, Hatch act violations, the very obvious fact that either impeachment would have succeeded if republicans even pretended for a second to be principled and supported the constitution, etc.

Just toss it on the pile.

you are either stupid, evil or both

Republican leadership is mostly both, and it is done with the idea of keeping their voting base stupid. Smart, moral people don’t vote republican at least since Reagan. The only thing Republican leadership believes in is money and power, and you have to keep people pretty dumb in order to keep believing the lies that Republican policies are good for anyone but the rich. So you get a DeSantis, for example, who’s stripping libraries and destroying education in his state because it’s the only hope that he has in keeping power. It’s why Republican talking points are all about “woke” because they don’t have to define it and they can’t actually point to like a single fucking thing they’re doing that’s bettering anyone’s lives.

So, so sorry about that.

On it!

Try something with crayons. But be careful, trust me those crayons don’t taste as good as they look.

This grants you intelligence +1, use it wisely.

Wait. Sorry, I’m trying to understand, are you saying you actually don’t think patriarchy exists in the West?

Yep, extremely dumb point they were trying to make.

same way if you’re a Leftist and critique Democrats or Hillary Clinton then they think you’re really a fascist mysogynist

Two questions:

1. which critiques?
2. If you don’t want this country to be fascist or misogynist, how are your critiques helping?

Could have really saved a lot of time if you started with “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

I bet you were the the type that said that we didn’t need to worry about Roe when Trump was campaigning the first time around.

You know, if you skip that first sentence in my comment, what country would you think I was talking about?

Fascism happens slowly, and then all at once. Please, I beg of you, read a book.

If Trump wins re-election, I think it’s entirely non-hyperbolic to say that democracy in this country is over. Think of the things he tried to do with some, obviously-too-small, guard rails. He attempted a literal coup. Literally throw away votes. Literally has one of his chief advisors saying that if people protested said coup, they would use the insurrection act, or more directly, use the military to put down to put down those protesting the coup. There is a very small number of things that prevented this from happening, not the least of which is just a tiny handful of people being like “uh, we can’t actually do this, right?”

I remember when my kids were small and I would make them come inside when it would get dark and a fit would be thrown as if I controlled the sun and this was an injustice I was creating. IDK why that popped into my head.

I think there are about three things in play here:

1. Quite a lot of the republican base lives in a completely different reality thanks to campaigns of propaganda and destroying education. Charitably, the best way to describe these people is extremely ignorant. For them, these indictments are dem led witch-hunts that they mostly don’t believe, even when you can literally see the opposite. EG: Should presidents take classified documents? No. What are these pictures? those are classified documents at maralago. Did Trump do something wrong? Now let me tell you about Hunter Biden and the Biden crime family…
2. Quite a lot of republicans are bordering on sociopathy if not pure evil. The party in particularly, and not the voters, know they’re peddling bullshit but they don’t care because it’s going to get them more money/power, which is the only real goal/ideology. Then you have the white supremacists and fascists that are just evil and are doing this for ideological reasons.
3. Systems are designed in this country to perpetuate this. Literal minority rule is a founding principal of this country.

I mean, I wouldn’t encourage any one to relax when it comes to Trump, but based on what’s up today, there is extremely low likelihood that Trump wins. People should realize just how unlikely it is for an incumbent to not get re-elected. Trump would have skated to re-election had he just not so catastrophically fucked up COVID and thus the economy. Again, not even be competent at it, just be less incompetent.

Biden probably has this in the bag barring some act of god. He’s going into '24 as one of the most legislatively accomplished presidents, great economic numbers including avoiding recession, etc. Then there is the whole “Trump might be in jail by the election” thing, and even if not in jail, he’s going to be so mired in legal proceedings it is unlikely he’ll be able to effectively campaign. DeSantis is a distant 2nd, and seems to be only widening that gap every time him or his campaign opens his mouth. The rest in this primary are auditioning for roles on Fox or lobbyist positions.

Again, I would not relax because if somehow Trump is elected we probably just sealed the countries fate into a full fascist dictatorship, but it’s just not likely.

Which is why we don’t need to debate. It’s like being invited to a debate on whether water is wet.

Oh for sure. This is probably an occasion where the venn diagram of groups I cross over with is a little sketch, but still lol

His best case scenario is he gets elected in '24 and courts are mired in the unprecedented nature of what to do with a commander in chief that is a criminal. You’d think it’s simple, but it’s really not.

His second best case scenario is that another Republican wins in '24. Even in that case, I have a hard time envisioning how he goes from today where he’s like 15 pts ahead but his party acquiesces because of that even though they hate his fucking guts, and he also somehow loses the primary and someone who has enough tolerance for him and the political fallout from a pardon actually goes through with it.

And then there’s the problem that even if he’s pardoned from the federal crimes, it doesn’t extend to the state crimes.

Right now, the likely and not optimal scenario is that he’s a very obese nearly 80 year old incontinent man who hasn’t seen exercise or vegetable in decades has been mainlining diet coke and mcdonalds the entire time. There is a likelihood that he doesn’t see consequence because he doesn’t make it that far. This is also why I wouldn’t be very worried about '28.

Outside of that, there are public recordings with him virtually confessing to every one of these crimes. Hell, half of them were on TV. So, although I won’t be surprised if he somehow rides off into the sunset, it seems unlikely. But anyway, his actual chance at multiple pardons are basically 0.