Conservatives do well because their ideology is compatible with the interests of capital. No party that is a serious challenge to those interests can win any notable power through elections in the US.

As far as the idea of focusing on local races: If your main concern is immediate and substantial action on climate, what good would winning a local race do for you? Yeah maybe it would be easier to get a left wing candidate on a school board or whatever, but that’s because it holds no meaningful power.

Not that I think they have any particular chance of success at the national level. I’ve just found that “local races” argument… most charitably put, confusing, less charitably: bad faith or willfully missing the point.

It’s just what you do when your side doesn’t have a justifiable platform on it’s own merit: See: All the people who keep telling us to ignore all the bad stuff corporate dems do because Trump would be worse.

IF you could actually run on things people liked, you’d talk about that and perhaps only call out your opponent’s opposition to the things you support or show how they might be lying about claims that they want similar things.

But when your core platform is “let rich people keep doing what they want,” you have to find ways to deflect from that.

One of us always tells lies. One of us only tells the truth.

The trains were just keeping with the metaphor of the OP. (Although we do need much better trains too.)

Acting like the only thing wrong is train schedules is really reductive. People who insist on voting as THE prime form of political participation will often say that not voting for a lesser evil is a privileged position because you’re not going to be impacted by the stuff the other party will do. But I’d argue there is an inherent privilege to being someone who won’t be materially impacted by US imperialism.

We’ve all been conditioned to view the violence the government inflicts on the rest of the world as normal. Maybe you don’t agree with it, but only as much as you don’t agree with, say, tax policy. It’s an abstract thing. We’re removed from the constant horror it represents. We’d like it if it wasn’t happening, but we don’t have to think about it most of the time and will clearly not do anything about it any time soon if everyone left of Hitler’s position is “vote for the Hitler that’s only going to do the bad stuff to other people.”

In general I take issue with people framing this as protecting democracy from fascism. The US is not a democracy.

• For starters, a constitutional democracy shouldn’t be able to end through a simple vote that doesn’t even include most of the country. If voting in fascists is an acceptable outcome of the system, it’s not a good system.

• From the ground up, the US was built to be as anti-democratic as possible while still technically having voting. Obviously it started with only land owning white men being allowed to vote. It’s expanded slowly over the years, but it STILL explicitly disenfranchises people such as prisoners. The electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the longer, staggered term limits in the senate, and the lifetime term limit for supreme court justices are all mechanisms which were explicitly designed to filter out the will of the masses from influencing government. To bring in a personal example: I live in NY. My vote doesn’t matter. I don’t say that as an excuse for not voting because I know I won’t have an effect of the election. I say that because I don’t even get a vote! Even if there was a candidate I cared about, just because of where I was born I can have zero influence on their election into government.

• Finally, I’d argue that an imperialist country is definitionally not a democracy. The core principle of democracy is that the government rules over only those who have consented to it. An imperialist state such as the US takes actions all around the world in other sovereign countries that have major influences on people who never consented to be subjects of US power. An Iraqi who’s house got bombed didn’t get a chance to vote against Bush. A person in Latin America didn’t get a vote on the US invalidating the vote in their country with a coup. Cubans, Vietnamese, etc. didn’t get to vote on the US making sure they couldn’t trade with the rest of the world.

As a related point to the last point: This is why I think it’s philosophically wrong to vote for candidates who don’t represent you in the US elections. In a democracy you are still considered to have “consented” to being governed even by an opposition party you didn’t vote for because you consented to the process. By voting you are saying that you agree that this is the way we will choose our government and that you will abide by the results even if you don’t get the outcome you want. That’s fine if the process was truly democratic and you can live with any of the outcomes even if you’d prefer something different. But if all outcomes are systematically unacceptable to you and the process itself is flawed, then still casting your vote within that framework is consent to the government and the process that produced it. When you go vote, there’s no box for “I’m only voting for this person because they’re technically better than the other one. I’m not actually ok with them.” You simply vote for Harris and the implicit choice of “I will not try to enact change in any other way.”

If you think Trump represents the rise of fascism and the end of democracy, then you shouldn’t be willing to abide by the results of the election anyway. But could you imagine any of the people telling you to vote against fascism taking up arms to storm the capital to protect that democracy and it’s people? Could you even imagine those people symbolically supporting leftists if they did this? I can’t. Because they didn’t do shit last time. Because they spent years talking about the right wing coup attempt in terms of it being treason rather than it being a problem because they’re fascists. Because civility and rules are more important than anything else to these people. If Trump won, the day after the election the same people who said it’d be the end of democracy will be saying “We’ll get em’ in 2-4 years.”

No. Clearly the solution is to continue to abandon anyone outside the US because they don’t matter. /s

But more directly: HOW are you going to work on it? Who is gonna do that? The capitalist/imperialist who you’ve pledged your vote to unconditionally?

…and you’ll be doing so with someone who is slightly more likely to be concerned with their image, and hence slightly more likely to listen.

Why would they be concerned with their image if people are going to vote for them anyway? We have a candidate who supports literal genocide and that’s not bad enough for people to do something. What exactly, precisely, practically, is the mechanism for holding a politician accountable when you will always vote for them and won’t take any actions outside the electoral system?

We’re here because people keep supporting a broken system. We keep getting elections with gerrymandering and candidates that don’t represent people because people are unwilling to take action outside of them or even exercise that power in its most basic form. Even if you maintain that things are genuinely good when Democrats win (we’ll circle back on that one), it’s such a brittle system. Any progress that has been made can be wiped out every few years due to elections which have been gerrymandered to create the 50/50 coin-flip when the actual population doesn’t support the right at nearly that rate. Plus, because of the messed up process of supreme court appointments, we sometimes lose rights even when Democrats are in office because of a fundamentally undemocratic institution. You could argue that’s all the more reason to have voted against Republicans in the past and why we should vote against them now, but once again: In a system that is supposedly based on constitutional protections, why are our rights contingent on the random time an old judge kicks the bucket? Or the supposedly illegal actions of a president?

Because there’s nothing to actually stop any of it. Rights are hard to establish and enforce and really easy to be taken away or ignored. Republicans will “break the rules” and then Democrats will decide to be bound by not only the rules their “opponents” won’t follow, but by the new rules that come out of their actions. If you truly believe your opponents are fascists, and you’re genuinely opposed to that, then nothing should be off the table for resisting them. At the tamest end of things the least they could have tried to do would be to break the power of the court or anti-majoritarian rules in the legislature. But again, if rules don’t matter to fascists, you should be willing to go way further than that to stop them. Instead, the “#resistance” under Trump largely consisted of tweets, protest signs, and a call to vote differently in 2-4 years while simultaneously questioning if we’d even have an election to vote in. If Trump wins are liberals going to get out there and do something about it? Are they going to storm the capital to boot out the fascists? Fight cops and feds from taking away minorities? No. That’s way too “uncivil” for them. We’re just gonna have to vote harder next time!

And if only all we had to talk about were the trains being on time!

Circling back to how things are under Democrats: Sure, maybe they’re a bit nicer to minorities publicly, but we still get:

• An ever expanding military, police, and surveillance state. Bush might have started the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and enacted the Patriot act, but Obama continued the wars, including the torture and indefinite detention he said he’d end. We also learned about the NSA’s mass surveillance program under Obama and when confronted with the public outcry about an assault on our fundamental rights or the war crimes being committed by the military, he chose to go after whistleblowers instead of doing anything about it. Since then has ANY president or major presidential candidate even talked about the NSA or given any indication that they’d cut back on surveillance or imperialism? In my lifetime over 3 Democratic and 2 Republican administrations, the military budget has tripped. And of course support for Israel’s genocide has continued with little more than hand wringing and empty promises.

• Anti-immigration policies continued under Obama and Biden. Biden in particular continued the detention centers and even allowed for the wall to keep being built.

• Climate legislation that isn’t good enough to meet the existential threat posed by the problem. Far from being “something is better than nothing,” these compromise positions obstruct efforts to implement the necessary changes. Plus whatever “advancements” are put in place tend to be fairly temporary in nature. A regulation can be easily overturned by a future administration or court. It’s a lot harder to go around destroying public transportation and clean energy infrastructure after it’s already been built. We are facing a global crisis and the system is going to get us all killed eventually, and poorer countries even sooner.

There are a lot of people who are hurt by US capitalism and imperialism even under Democratic administrations. It’s a decision to not value those people. And it’s not even like they’re always different people. The surveillance state hurts everyone, but in particular it makes it easier for the government to target undesirable groups like immigrants, LGBT people, or say, women who want to get an abortion. There are certainly LGBT people, disable people, women, PoCs, etc amongst those the US has bombed, sanctioned, or caused to live in chaos after a coup. Lack of adequate healthcare means that accessing abortions or gender affirming care harder even if they are completely legal.

But don’t worry, just vote for the Democrat then push them to the left! By… uh… holding up signs? Making tweets? You definitely need to unconditionally vote for them again next time, so you can’t pressure them that way.

It’s ok, next election we’ll talk about ~the trains~ the military, surveillance state, healthcare, the environment, etc.

4 years later: “THIS election is super important. We’ll talk about the trains in another 4 years.”

Because President’s Day is for buying stuff. Clearly what we need is to allow stores to set up in polling places to get it to be a holiday. /s

I played through the game long after it had been patched up. I enjoyed it enough. When Phantom Liberty released I went back to start a new save to play it and after playing through the different character background introductory bit I realized it just wasn’t going to be that different of an experience the second time around. So I just loaded up my endgame save for the DLC. I had fun with that, but going around with a maxed out character blowing everything up with a shotgun definitely trivialized things.

Little known fact that dogs have a very unhealthy work culture. He didn’t even think it would be an option to go out before the work was done.

But aren’t people carbon based? We should just compost them instead.

Mine is that in Star Trek, at least all the computers advanced enough to be used on a starship are actually sentient. At some point you have enough self aware hologram programs and rogue AIs that you should start to wonder if they’re actually anomalous.

The problem is not seeing a problem with any of that before the bit about talking to spooky foreigners.

The rich and powerful having this much control over our government, communications, and our economic lives in general is THE problem. Full stop. What they decide to do with that power is beside the point. There’s no such thing as a good king.

Accidentally deleted comment, here it is again:

Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.

I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.

The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.

Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.

I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.

The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.

Does Star Trek count? I would be remiss for not bringing up Star Trek given the opportunity to insert it into a conversation. I bet the aliens will love that.

OOTL: I’m confused. What is this? I’ve been using Firefox for years and I have no idea what this button is/was or why people would be annoyed by it.

The links didn’t work either. But thanks for the suggestions. I’ll look into other app options.

It depends. Usually I’m just looking for some game or show I like. The few of those I’ve looked into that have a community have like a handful of users, infrequent posts, or auto-posted threads with no comments beyond the bot post.

EDIT: Also, do you know how to get to your link on Memmy? For me it just brought me back to the main feed.