But that’s the thing, I’d rather do that be the guy that pressed the big red button on a bunch of kids. And it would set an example, which hopefully others could follow, but even if it doesn’t that’s fine with me.

An example that is oddly close is Montréal’s rent increase refusal process. We have a system where we can refuse the rent increase and then the landlord has to justify it. The power dynamics are totally fucked, though, and a lot of people are scared to do it, especially if they don’t know anyone else who has. Even still, many people have done it and overloading the system has brought real change. Like the military example, there are huge consequences(in this case it’s related to having shelter) but you still gotta do it. There are tired poor people at serious risk of losing their homes who are braver than these soldiers.

But that’s just it, the US had this strong pro-labour stance, so much momentum, and then they threw it all away and now it’s about what your boss “lets” you do.

But they won’t even have those discussions outside of work. I have a theory that it’s because if they’re progressive outside of an exploitative power dynamic then it’s much harder to handle if when it’s happening. It’s like their lives are in constant justification of why being taken advantage of is “actually normal” and why they say shit like “that’s life” or “in an ideal world…”. Easier to submit than fight*.

*Clarification: “fight” here could literally even just be voting progressive since that’s a completely secret thing. I’m not saying we gotta be raging at our bosses or trying to imply that everyone is in a place they can even speak honestly, safely.

To put it more directly, anyone with a political ideology based on having a position relative to two or more other positions seems constantly so desperate to appear like an enlightened, balanced thinker while also having a political that’s nearly entirely worthless. They’re great at voting against stuff but their spines are jelly and it’s so fucking hard to get them to commit to fuckin’ anything.

And it carries over in their lives! Trying to get a hard opinion out of them on anything is so hard! They’re so scared of being “wrong” that they constantly half-ass everything they do and I’m so tired of it. Just commit to something, please!

(Maybe we need to start running actual super far left parties in the world to centralize regular leftist parties to get these people to finally behave lol)

Yea, Bezos pretended he had an emptional enlightening and then kept doing terrible things. Dude’s so broken that seeing the whole planet from space wasn’t enough to set him straight.

Is the alternative then to bomb children?

“Sorry kids, I was worried I’d lose my pension so you have to lose your lives” isn’t much of an excuse.

Well, they don’t need to. If someone says “hey, go commit a warcrime for me” it’s really your duty to say “no, fuck off.”

To be honest I always had the imagery of horses doing the work, so the “quarters” would be three limbs and a remaining limb still attached to the rest of your body.

If you want a balanced society, first you have to fully grasp what that means. Political ideologies are not unchangeable like race or sexual orientation, you can literally just go “oh, this position isn’t serving me anymore” or “this party has changed and moved away from representing my principles” and you can do it whenever.

Being a “moderate”, especially if you’re in a place where true support of the working class has evaporated and the right has gone full fascist is such a silly thing. All it does is scream that the only thing you care about is being between two things, not that you’ve actually thought about if either of those two things have become invalid as a point of reference. In the US and Canada the overtly right-wing parties have shifted so far to the right as to not be even remotely valid and the center has, because it has no values to keep it in place, moved to fill the conservative gap.

“Balanced”. Sure thing, champ.

Centrism is not “balanced”, though, it is just a political ideology that can’t commit. The left says people need to have equal rights, the right says society needs to be segregated in one form or another, and the centre comes along and says “what if we just took away some rights?”

This, of course, generally leads to them spending all the momey the left would but on terrible investments. In most places on the planet “the left” isn’t that extreme if you look at them from an objective point of view, they just get treated as extreme because the right goes off the deep end and the center is there saying “our position is reasonable and therefore anything else must be extreme!” while completely ignoring the fact that almost all centrism is simply right-wing economic policy without as much of the overt homophobia and racism. I have to say overtly, ecause of course actually helping minority groups would constitute an extreme action so im most cases they just don’t do anything and call it a win.

There’s a reason MLK said that the greatest enemy to black people is the white moderate. There’s a reason Canada is struggling under the Liberal party. There’s a reason so many places are just slowly descending into fascism as their governments do very little to stop it because of a naive sense of decorum and a strong unwillingness to ever admit that maybe holding the line isn’t working anymore.

You haven’t explained it your position, you’ve just called the guy who votes strictly progressive a fascist which is, frankly, absurd.

But sure, keep telling everyone that the solution is to keep enabling the ratchet effect, that’s totally not going to help the far-right. You got this, champ.

Do you understand where conservatism came from? Are you familiar with what it’s trying to conserve? It’s cultural stagnation in favour of the privileged class with an economic approach to match.

In what way? “Just give in to the endless cycle of the right getting worse and the center-right doing nothing to fix it” is your plan for a better tomorrow? Sure thing bud, that’ll definitely work this time!

The US is a fascist country with the only opposition being “centrism”. Centrism is a relativistic political ideology which really only exists to provide an incredibly weak alternative to conservatism that doesn’t immediately scare voters with things like actually doing anything different and of value.

Sure, I don’t disagree with that and I probably would have voted if I were in the US. At some point, though, it’s not the fault of people who refuse to vote for the controlled opposition. They’re sick of the cycle, sick of this “strategic” voting crap, and sick of lending their voices to the validation of major human rights violations. I really cannot blame them for their decision.

The US clinging to false, centrist comfort instead of doing the uncomfortable thing to get shit done is a big reason why they’re in this mess.

Why didn’t those people vote? It wasn’t because Harris was a progressive and they thought she wasn’t progressive enough, it was because she was already just a corpo centrist and refusing to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza was the nail in the coffin. All she had to do was say the truth and she refused.

And then she fucked off immediately, leaving everyone else to the GOP because actually caring isn’t her style.

In a place where elections don’t happen, or are obviously rigged? Sure, mostly agree. In the US, though, tens upon tens of millions of people gleefully, zealousy voted for Trump. When Biden was in the primaries with Bernie lots of the supposed “left” voted for Biden even before the DNC really got fucky with it.

US citizens really need to understand that it’s not enough to be acting like stupid, scared little babies who can’t be held accountable because they had a surprising amount of control over the situation for decades and yet still let this happen mostly voluntarily. As a Canadian who has always voted progressive, it’s the same situation here, arguably worse in some ways because we’ve even had a viable third party option the whole time. Our two countries are embarrassing, and acting like a dude saying “not all men” whenever someone expresses anger over our collective actions doesn’t help anyone.

I’m sure all those Palestinian/Iranian/Lebanese people killed by US/Israeli strikes, with unconditional help from Canadian resources, would really love to hear how it wasn’t your fault, specifically.

You have to actually listen and pay attention to more than the most absolute surface level stuff. He wants people who are worse.

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend if they’re just looking for a power grab. In fact, they could very likely be a lot worse.

MAGA is the cult name, so yes that makes sense. Once you leave the cult the whole thing kinda falls apart. You can still be a piece of shit, but will at least not support Trump(the lowest bar and not deserving of much, if any, respect).

I think it’s to show the fact that those people have got nothing that they asked for, the lying is not at all well-hidden, and yet they still support him with a fervor that is often not considered worth very much in polls and the like since 100% can be an indicator that the surveyed person didn’t really pit much thought into their response.

Eh, up here in Canada we’re not too far behind. Still better, but the bar is super low and we’re kinda cowards when it comes to standing up for ourselves. Hopefully the most recent utter failure of strategic voting helps, but who knows.