this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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That's the beauty of conservative hierarchies: everyone is conditioned to be exploited and eager to be so.
The same conditioned submission to authority is what keeps people voting blue no matter who despite rampant insider trading by DNC leadership. Those rich assholes are just as disgusted by their equally gullible supporters.
Edit:
I used to think American politics was Republicans shitting the bed and complaining it takes Democrats too long to wash the sheets. However, I've grown old enough to see it's just been Democrats normalizing shitting the bed so you'll accept ever dirtier sheets
If you think I'm wrong you should watch Obama sprint right while executing American citizens without due process and saying we weren't ready for gay equality.
Then further take note how an independent third party rated Hillary -right- of Trump just less authoritarian.
https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2008 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2012 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2016 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020
What keeps people voting blue is a basic understanding of how our first past the post voting system works. You're ALWAYS picking the lesser of two evils. It has nothing to do with authority.
In short, a basic understanding is really the problem all around.
Most people rely on specious reasoning without understanding how things actually work.
Everyone knows and accepts shit is corrupt, but it's always someone else's fault or an accident.
I was told all my life there were checks and balances. In reality, extremist evangelical groups have been stacking the ranks with people that actually want to accelerate the end of times.
Reality is reality complex. Most people lack the ability even given the information to understand all the moving pieces.
Civilization requires putting blind trust in others which is a dangerous gamble when you understand psychopaths are massively over represented in positions of power vs general society.
The goal of the machine isn't improving society or the world. It's extracting every ounce of value from you it can to hand to the rich that already have everything.
We have nothing left but violence.
Okay, then why are you here? If the only answer is violence, why aren't you out there? Is it because that's not the only answer, or because you don't want to fix the problem?
Until you violent overthrow everything people actually do something, the rest of us in reality are going to vote for the least worst candidate.
What do you think Luigi was doing?
Why do you think they cracked down on him in such a spectacle? There was a fella that shot up a church and the prep walk was a single gangly ginger but every badge in the county was there to walk Luigi. The trial is still on going and yet Netflix has a "documentary" espousing his guilt with information his defense learned about ONLY FROM WATCHING SAID DOCUMENTARY.
One person lashing out isn't enough. And believe me, as much as I'd love to, indiscriminate violence isn't the objective and even if I had access to a target my daughter and disabled partner actively need me. Believe me, I'd rather be dead than watch y'all mash on the buttons like you think the controller is plugged in but people need me.
So I try to at least get you to ask why none of your buttons work hoping you'll eventually notice the game is playing you.
I've been an engineer for decades and the first step in fixing something -properly- is to identify the root cause of the issue. Painting the crack in the sheet rock doesn't address the shifting foundation.
Everything "left" in the United States is still right of center politically. AOC and Sanders are centrists in a global sense at best.
Killing a billionaire is cool and all, but the assets just go to next of kin and the system chugs on.
Liberalism is the slow road to fascism because it will always defer to capitalism over democracy but definition. Liberalism comes laissez-faire thinking which funny enough includes conservatives.
The underlying root assumption has become everything should be about profit, period. Liberals aren't raising taxes because their campaign contributions come from corporations- the only people that matter thanks to Scotus.
Democrats couldn't secure roe v Wade in 50 years regardless of how large their advantage. Inversely, regardless of how small the Republican advantage or minority, they always get their way.
Either voting works and this is the system it got us or it never mattered and we were led here.
If you think what Trump is saying about just taking Greenland is ridiculous you need to look into how it's exactly how the US acquired Hawaii.
The US has been at war the entirety of its existence save like 10 sporadic years. We are an imperialist war machine and the reason you don't believe that is a lifetime of exposure to textbooks and news programming owned by an ever concentrated collective of VERY conservative hands.
You can't be liberal for capitalism but against fascism and colonial imperialism because they're the same thing with new paint. Both require extracting profit and resources for the benefit of private shareholders. The largest difference between the two is how far you are from the exploitation.
But also not sure where I advocated against voting before you chimed in assuming as much.
This is right on.
Can I get a tldr? Some of us have things going on..
Americans are dumb and have no attention span.
That's a pretty concise tldr.
That doesn't really refute my point then.
Damage mitigation voting is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for progress.
Ranting about violence online is masturbatory.
If you need a tldr on a 5 minute read you opinion doesn't fucking matter.
Counterpoint: if you can't choose where to spend your time, you'll end up spending all of it arguing online.
One person can only do so much violence against such a huge and powerful system, it would take organized violence with lots of participants to accomplish anything. And if that person was doing such a thing they certainly wouldn't tell you about it.
Nah, not me. I'm a mighty slow learner, but decades of voting for the least worst candidate have given us 2025 and fascist America. I'm skeptical that elections will even be allowed, but if they are, I'll vote for a candidate worth voting for, or I won't vote.
So you don't think the current results could be worse?
Things will be worse tomorrow, worse still the day after.
If you think the situation could have been worse today if history had gone differently, than you do understand damage mitigation voting.
And how's that working out?
Better than it could've been
I will buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk about it! Just let me know when you're in Seattle.
This should be the national motto of Earth.
It has everything to do with authority. You're electing the lesser evil to have authority over you.
You're proving my point because even defending them you still call them evil. 🫠
I'm not sure I understand. They have authority because that's their job. But we don't respect our admire them for it. So what's your point exactly?
People are down voting you because your point isn't clear, not because they disagree.
It's like you can't consider not being subjugated.
And by not voting, we remove the subjugation? No. Thr subjugation can only be removed through violence. Unless you're willing to be violent, then choosing the less bad subjugator is the best we get.
Christ. If you really want to understand the problem you have to realize both our political and economic systems are inherently violent and to what end.
I get it. You want the system to work. I do to.
https://dailyboulder.com/trump-says-blue-states-will-totally-disappear-off-the-map-next-year-promises-big-big-surprise/
Before the election, both Dump and Husk were saying they'd be in jail if they lost, talking about rigged elections, and election day surprises.
If you think voting will matter going forward you're delusional because this election was already stolen.
https://www.kkoh.com/2025/01/21/nv-sos-launches-investigations-into-election-fraud/
https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv
This was the first election in decades that there wasn't a Democrat lawsuit anywhere. Everyone signed off on everything despite years of known issues with voting machine security issues, foreign interference, Trump being an ineligible felon, scotus giving him basic immunity.
The executive controls the cops that arrest people. Even pretending a judge would issue a warrant for his arrest... Who's going to execute it?
The system has been caging you in with full support of the insider trading DNC backed by the same billionaires that back the GOP and own the media telling you how to feel about what they let you know is happening.
You won't understand, but liberals are fascists with a cleaner image.
Look into Fair Phone. They tried to make a phone free of child slavery and human exploitation and found it couldn't be done.
Every bleeding heart compassionate liberal has at least one phone/iPad/laptop/etc. All of them -all of us- benefitting from the exploitation of people we'll never have to look in the eye as they die from heavy metal poisoning.
It's easy to say it's not your fault because whatever, but it's all our fault and our collective denial oppresses us all.
The US was built off colonial imperialism and the bodies of a million slaves. A small group of rich benefitting while a large group of poor work to death.
It was the same in antiquity. It is the same in capitalism.
Capitalism has an intrinsic need to undermine democracy to the point the two are basically mutually exclusive.
Democracy is a system wherein everyone should have equal ownership of society. Capitalism is a system wherein the rich have largely exclusive control of the means of production.
Society cannot function without a means of production and thus democracy is subjugated in favor of lower wages and greater profits.
Educated workers want wages and protections. So the schools are sabotaged in favor of teaching standardized testing in favor of critical thinking. Pass the dummies because they don't want smart workers. Private schools only the rich can afford will make the thinkers.
Liberals will make a thousand sensible, small sacrifices to appease capitalists until there's nothing left to sacrifice and corporations own the country.
Voting will do little and violence will become the only option.
They suppress wages. They inflate the cost of goods. They drive small competitors out of business and buy them up, crush unions, pocket every nickel they can cut until people can't make ends meet and righteously lash out.
Ever the self victimizing dramatists, fascists will back you into a corner and when you push past them, cry foul and crack down with the full might of every law they can make up.
I agree with your overall comment but this reeks of “you participate in capitalism therefore you have no right to criticize” nonsense
Capitalism is coercive by design. It’s almost impossible to function without a smart phone let alone a cellphone these days.
You legally have to wear clothes when you’re outside (except VT). Nearly all clothes are produced in sweatshops with slave labor like conditions.
You have to eat. Nearly all food is harvested by exploited or worse workers.
That farm equipment and fertilizer? Crude oil says hello. Oh what’s that? We need cheap oil? Time for another forever war in the Middle East to “spread democracy” aka steal national wealth and assets.
I fully agree, but it's basically my point. The main differences are first realizing it and then not hand waving it away as someone else's problem.
It's the whole point of the "at first they came for" poem.
People are conditioned to think "Capitalism must be good because I have infinite selection of infinite consumption!" While justifying the exploitation of the third world workers.
Colonialism was about exploiting the external realms for resources and concentrating the wealth into one spot. For a while, the American peasantry benefitted and got comfy. Now that fascism is here, all that wealth will be further concentrated and they/we become the exploited ones.
Even now, they want to donate to Democrats that have done nothing but incrementally sell them out for decades like a boiling frog.
What’s funny is even that is a ruse and not true. Go to any chain supermarket and your options will be derived from a tiny handful of massive conglomerates. Even the produce and deli section! It’s not infinite selection, it’s infinite marketing.
Capitalism ran out of foreign resources to exploit and is now going after the imperial core. The 2008 crash and especially the aftermath is the start of that IMO. And that aftermath was entirely bipartisan with Obama stuffing his cabinet with Goldman Sachs people.
Democrats can’t seem to draw the line between that action and trumps election and reelection.
To the point of 2008 specifically-
Firstly, it never ended. They just hooked the money printer up and left rates near 0 for a decade. None of the underlying issues were actually fixed. They didn't stop over leveraging MBS, they just expanded to commercial real estate and auto loans.
Further, that's just the scapegoat. The MBS shit was just used as collateral. The problem was they were shorting VW massively and Porsche bought controlling interest causing a massive short squeeze and the computers that listen to rules liquidated their asses to cover.
Oops.
2021 was basically the same thing with GameStop. Massive illegal short positions causing short squeezes when the banks cheat and lose.
When you look into cellar boxing and the Sec's absolute refusal to do anything about obvious crime certified by statical analysis under both flavors of administration over decades there really is no other conclusion to come to beyond the uniparty leading us all to a fate of their donor's choosing.
They're either oblivious and incompetent or wholly complicit...
Then on the other front of Occupy Wall Street in response... The protests (undermined by billionaire ownership) were full of plain clothes cops inciting violence to get SWAT in. The ridiculous attention seeking X slams Y headlines increased something like 1600% post OWS as a direct effort to schism society over every line it could make up and why millennials started being blamed for killing everything ridiculous and wanting raises became entitled quiet quitting.
But we get heart warming stories about elementary school kids paying their parents cancer bills with bracelets made out of their lost hair.
Can we make out? 😂
Obama said we weren't ready for gay equality and handled the insurance lobby the Heritage Foundation's ACA promising customers while redefining enemy combatants to execute American citizens without due process.
Bush2 revenge for Daddy where Cheney's Haliburton mercs made half a million while troops had to write home for rations and body armor.
Clinton balanced the budget but unleashed the third way neo liberal rainbow Republicans.
Bush 1 tax cuts and bullshit oil wars.
Reagan. Fuck Reagan with a rusty pike. Between repealing the fairness doctrine and education sabotage, a lot of this falls on that cunt's shoulders...
But Nixon gave away healthcare to Permanente.
Johnson warned of the very racists he courted but luckily he loved black votes more than he hated black voters.
Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex he empowered much like Biden warned of the oligarchs he spent 40 years working for and not taxing.
Goldwater warned of the religious fanatics taking over the Republican party.
But you go back to Smedly Butler and the Business Plot and you'll see the last 100 years have been a slow walk back of all of the things FDR accomplished.
They really gloss over the fact FDR was a socialist elected into office for 4 consecutive terms. The 2 term limit stemmed from business interests upset that people were being protected and didn't want any more of this socialism nonsense where society works for society and not just the rich.
In fact, every study on term limits shows they're bad because you don't get rid of paid for shills but you do lose the Sanders types that do the job well because they've done it properly.
I've always found it funny how the people that fall for this shit also have very firm stances against estate taxes despite having negative net worth.
Most people's opinions are spoon fed to them and they just never really question why they believe anything or notice how most of it is conflicting nonsense.
Lol. Where are you located (vaguely is fine)? Are you female and between the ages of 25-45? If so and not on the other side of the world, maybe! 🤣
Yes to all the rest although I’d argue FDR was a social democrat and not a socialist.
Fair, but right now everything left of the children long for the mines is socialism...
A lifetime of neoliberalism and anti left propaganda will do that
It's so ironic too. You'd think if socialism was so incompetent the US wouldn't need to rant and scream and throw embargos everywhere.
It should just kinda putter out on its own, right?
But we can't talk about that because we're busy sane washing Saudis wood chippering journalists and liberating RedWhiteAndBlueLand from its Danish oppressors.
Socialism has been the only thing to give the US a run for its money.
Anarchy is wholly inadequate for the scale of the human population. Furthermore, we can't just transition to a classless, stateless society overnight. That shit has to take root across multiple generations of buy-in.
Agreed, but people not justifying the subjugation when they finally notice it would be nice though.
It’s a shame you’re being downvoted for this. The democrats are controlled opposition clowns and their supporters are essentially being swindled by Nigerian princes in an e-mail scam aimed at seniors who wouldn’t know better. It’s fucking painful to watch.
But if you send Hakeem Jeffries $20 right now, he'll eagerly reach across the aisle to do whatever the Heritage Foundation wants while belaboring all the noisy leftists that want him to do a goddamned thing beyond talk about how ketchup makes the boot taste better.
I still don’t understand why they beg me for money when they have their good billionaires dicks to suck instead.
I’ll never forgive Bernie for selling out my info to the democrat party.