Glad the city known for its phycists finally got a blue vote in!

It doesn't just take that in situations where deep red is the only real color. Perhaps in smaller elections, I don't know. What I do perceive is how divided we are as a Nation and as communities. I'm hoping we come together in agreement despite various valid arguments being made.

I'm just also expecting us to continue slap fighting as the Right gains a stronger hold due to our own inability to take cohesive action. This tends to be an unpopular opinion. Yet I've noticed the same trend for the last twelve years. So I try and talk about it whenever I can.

yay! that’s the cool thing about rhetoric is different styles represent the same ideas effectively to different audiences

it’s the people looking for more and more conservative candidates as they watch their ‘christian nation’ become secular and their white cis male dominated culture become more open.

Spot on.

plenty of little fascist dictators

While I'm not a Marxist, he had a brilliant term for these people: "Petty Bourgeoisie" They think they're in line with the upper-crust, but are just Proles that are kidding themselves.

Exactly this. No, people aren't voting for racists because they're upset with taxes or unemployment. They're voting for racists because they're racist.

What kills me about posts like this is that they paint leftist activism in a way that's indistinguishable from christian evangelicalism.

• Serves the poor by working at homeless shelters
• protests un-threateningly against opposition
• participates in book clubs and peer groups
• otherwise fully participates in a system that's hostile toward their existence

Libs like this forget that the civil rights leaders they model themselves after were intentionally inflammatory -sometimes violently so- so that the people who were refusing to negotiate with them would be forced to do so at risk of material harm to their interests. All these people downvoting you would rather protests be silent and non-invasive than be loud or -god forbid- threaten the power structure they comfortably benefit from.

MLK and Fred Hampton are looked at so favorably in hindsight because they forced the liberal structures at the time to concede some minimum amount of liberty to those who were actively under threat. They weren't targeting conservative fascists with their protests (they knew better than to think they would ever change their minds), they were targeting those centrists who thought themselves allys but stopped short of action because they themselves were not materially threatened by the systemic injustices being faced by the black community at the time, and they didn't want to risk harm to their own position in order to solve it. Protests were a way to hold hostage their interest in exchange for addressing the interests of black americans.

To quote MLK from his letter from birmingham:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

MLK might as well have been comparing Biden and Trump with regards to their shared zionism. Biden deserves no less pressure to negotiate just because he is a "more gentle" person.

Thank you for writing all of this out. It needs to be said more. We're not going to break the system constantly acquiescing to a rigged system.

That’s part of my problem. I’m a moral absolutist about a lot of things, which is a luxury. I don’t currently have that luxury, but that knowledge doesn’t change my morals.

The other part is the game theory aspect, in that the further right a candidate you accept, the further right the next democrat will be. The OP in this is trying to survive, not to change the system.

We know it’s bad. The point is that we unfortunately have to choose the lesser of the two evils, like it or not.

You sent my brain in circles here for a minute. Dude definitely means, “skip the vote and some jackass is gonna end up getting elected anyway and you will have had no say over who it was. When that person has folks seigin’ and heilin’ at the library you’ll wish it had been the other guy.”

What?? Frederick Douglas had a famously contentious relationship with Lincoln. He wrote scathing indictments about him in his paper "Douglass' Monthly" and traveled the country agitating for Lincoln to abolish slavery. He even endorsed the dump-lincoln movement during the re-election campaign over his reconstruction plan. It was exactly his raving against Lincoln during his re-election that brought them together, because Lincoln needed Douglas's support to win. It's fucking wild to see someone name drop Douglas in defense of an incumbent candidate facing scrutiny.

He didn't 'work hard for candidates who couldn't promise to abolish slavery', he worked hard to agitate them into action. This kind of revisionist history is fucking infuriating, especially when it's used to undercut voices trying to push for progress.

I just want to counter with, I actually reached out to a progressive election group that's supposed to help left leaning people get elected into local office positions after being confused by some of the requirements of getting on the ballot and was straight up told I was not wealthy enough to even consider running.
That unless I had a wealthy parent or a church group that I could collect more funds from, I shouldn't even bother but just donate to them to get someone better and wealthier elected in my place.

When your barrier to entry isn't even just knowledge of the system, and having networking to assist you but literally the amount of money in your bank account, the concept of running against the people who will not only crush you and your campaign but likely hurt your non political career and livelihood of earned capital, then doing so becomes less of an option.

I then supported a person I agreed with for a Legal position who was literally a public defender and he lost to a guy who played football in college with no history in law or civil service.

It might be easy to run a campaign and I might have a slightly more skewed representation as I am closer to a larger city but when even the left side is looking at how mucho ey they can make on running campaigns and not how likely they are to help shift policy then we are royally fucked on the concept of representation by the people.

This kind of take isn't "necessarily wrong", i.e. we have never seen fascism beaten by peaceful means and all, but talking about it openly on someone's platform is a bad move for several reasons. Put up and shut up, is my advice. Get with your local antifa group, or start one with guidance from one you trust. Keep your mouth shut, protect yourself and others for real.

are we allergic to doing both or something

the post clearly outlines voting as the last minute harm reduction option after all other avenues have been exhausted. do (violent perhaps) praxis and organizing, yea, but why tf would you throw away your option to vote when things haven’t changed yet and you have the opportunity to do 0.01% good for your neighbor?

You first.

Calm down Dollar store Robespierre

my opponents doing political violence

Cringe and bad.

Me doing political violence

Based ang good.

Absolutely not unhinged god complex thinking, I'm sure you're not equally as authoritarian as the people you despise.