I understand and support the sentiment: something needs to change. I just don't think that re-framing electoral politics will work unless it's backed by a mass movement of organised workers. If that happens, the question becomes, why bother with the middlemen? They can legislate for themselves without having to beg the ruling class for mild compromises.
Destroying the world more slowly by slightly impacting one election at a time brought us here.
That's kinda what I was driving it. How many elections would it take to abolish FPTP? We'd have to wait for that and only then could we think about voting in politicians who might do something and the system would still be dominated by capital. That makes a three-step process out of a two-step process.
Seems like a request to wait for an indefinite number of election cycles—the same request of those who say to vote for this or that faction of the capitalist party and one day, just maybe, conditions will be just right for one of those parties to effect any change. Too many African, Latin American, and Asian homes and lives would be destroyed while they wait patiently for the US to get its act together.
It would take too long to work unless you know of a massive campaign across the western world to implement FPTP. If it doesn't exist already, it must be built within the next year or so or the west will be locked into another four-ish years of no progress. And that's just for a shot at electing politicians who might vote to abolish FPTP. Before they even come within hearing distance of, never mind face-to-face with, the contradictions of imperialism.
Currently, almost all I see in the west is how to do business as usual but in green. That means denying progress to the subjugated masses so that USians can maintain their standard of living. Oppressed people shouldn't have to wait for the US to figure out how to tactically solve the world's ills through an electoral technicality. Round and round we'd go with electoralism.
At this point, there is one, single option: revolution. Anything else will take too long. Luckily for humanity, whatever the US thinks or wants is largely irrelevant. The world is revolving anyway. The only question for the world is what form the revolution takes. And the additional question for USians is whether they want to be part of the change or to ruin everything out of spite and self-interest.
While I agree with revolution, I don't think pursuing that is at odds with voting a certain way once a year. There's already a movement to eliminate FPTP in the USA and it has been making real progress. This additional step is necessary (within the framework of voting) for the other two steps to work - the second step keeps getting undone.
Personally I've been pushing for this since the 2000 presidential election. It has indeed been painfully slow... But it does seem to be getting somewhere. Not to imply we shouldn't be organizing outside of elections, too.
I have to admit, I did not expect this response. I'm struggling to see how an anti-capitalist argument in favour of socialist revolution is right wing.
A possibility? It's happening as we speak. Time will tell.
It's a spoiler, a red herring. "Don't bother doing the thing that could actually threaten our power. Instead, focus on this other thing that has no shot of happening."
And in your view, the thing that threatens their power is voting Dem? Please let me know if I've misunderstood. If not: (i) how does this 'solution' help people who aren't in the US and (ii) the Dems are in power and have been in power recently before this, and recently before that, and they achieved… what? They brought as much horror to the world as the GOP.
They brought as much horror to the world as the GOP.
This is such a ridiculously wrong statement that if I hadn't already been talking with you and could see you're not an idiot, I'd assume you're too stupid to reason with and just start calling you names. How could you possibly come to that conclusion?
how does this ‘solution’ help people who aren’t in the US
Depends on the country, but it's generally applicable to most places. A revolution is not happening. Change within the system. And for some places, having Dems in charge in the US allows the US to pressure those countries to change in better ways.
Unfortunately they don't care. They know what they're doing,
This discussion (and name calling) isn’t for you. It’s for the audience.
And yet they keep doing it, and defending it.
And it's not just this thread: read their comment history, and it's littered with name calling and personal attacks. I report their really egregious stuff but it's tedious reporting every single comment that has personal attacks.
I think you might be right. I let it slide in other comments as I put it down to the ordinary liberal world-outlook. But there's only so long I'll put up with schoolyard name-calling. I've got better things to do.
I think Lemmy needs a little bit of work on how blocking a user works. It gets confusing seeing new comments come through and not being able to see what they're replying to. You also have no option to report a comment if you can't see it. Even if you click the "show context" button, knowing that you're about to force a blocked user's comment to show, it just refuses. You have to open in an incognito tab and click show context. Basically, I want the ability to not see their comments in general, and not see them on the "new comments" feed, but if I explicitly ask to see their comments, let me do that.
I have blocked a large number of users who have consistently added nothing to conversation, or who routinely resort to personal attacks.
I am truly frustrated and disappointed that so many people:
feel it acceptable to personally attack another commenter
accuse everyone who disagrees with them of being a paid shill, or a troll
use "shut down" words, with the intent to either entirely discredit the person they're responding to, or end the conversation where it is
literally copy-and-paste the same reply all over a thread or targeting a person[^1]
make bold claims with no sources, and when you reply correcting them and provide sources of your own, they downvote and don't reply
engage in conspiracy thinking and go on imaginative expeditions, where connection to reality is secondary to consistency with their beliefs
I know it's naive to think people will be able to always get along. And I guess it is naive to assume that people actually want to learn, and try to help others learn. But that's what I want. I'd much rather converse with someone who shares none of my values or beliefs as long as they're level-headed, not resorting to trickery or fallacious reasoning, are willing to source their statements, and respect me in dialogue.
[^1]: I saw one yesterday where the person copy-and-pasted something like "Russia started the war" about 10 times across a thread, several times replying to the same person, sometimes other people. Every time, it wasn't actually directly relevant to the comment they replied to. It's just an attempt to brute-force shut someone down.
Yeah I had them blocked for a bit over a day, but they're so prolific that I keep seeing other comments responding to theirs (without the ability to see theirs) which confuses me even more while reading my feed.
I read the page that 133arc585 linked. I can't actually see the lemmy.ml homepage unless I log out of my fediverse account, I believe.
I understand the intent of the rule, but I've seen communities who require "only respectful discourse" get swamped by sealions and bad-faith "just asking questions" types with dogwhistles and veiled references. In my opinion, sometimes namecalling and insulting is a necessary counter to someone spreading a poisonous bad-faith idea, especially when it's outright propaganda. But, I'm not a server admin, so I'll try to be more respectful of that rule in the future.
You called me an idiot after a few hours of us talking in what was apparently good faith. This isn't tone policing because it's not the way that you're formulating your argument that I'm objecting to, rather, it's the fact that you're mixing arguments with name-calling. There's very little point in us continuing to engage as everything I say that doesn't confirm your worldview is more evidence that I'm a shill. Where do we go from there? You're clearly not interested in a discussion.
Ah. I'm from kbin, so I can't view the lemmy.ml homepage (to my knowledge) unless I navigate outside my fediverse account. The linked post seems to be down right now, but I'll view it when I get a chance.
I’m from kbin, so I can’t view the lemmy.ml homepage (to my knowledge) unless I navigate outside my fediverse account.
You can view it, by pointing your browser to https://lemmy.ml. This community is hosted on lemmy.ml, and as such, the instance rules apply in addition to the community rules. Just like on the rest of the fediverse.
The post is not "down", whatever that means; it pulls up fine for me. Either way, here is an archived version.