• 262 Posts
  • 290 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • This is not up to Harris or politicians to fix, they are not capable of getting people out of this. They will just let you down in new and innovative ways. You talk about the changes they are doing now but I was talking the changes that they’ll need to get reelected in the future - it will be grim and similar to what’s happening all over Europe. Centrist liberal parties are becoming indistinguishable from parties they lost power to (Labour in UK, Renaissance in France, Civic Platform in Poland). It will discourage even more people from participating in politics.

    People need to get out in front before it happens to minimise the damage. This means more respect towards people we don’t agree with and that unfortunately includes less poo slinging at bigots. This also means less involvement in treating symptoms because it depletes our capacity for change („orphan-crushing machine”).


  • Yeah, that’s what I’m warning you about. This approach has been tried. Whatever happens, it was already decided because you’re not going to course correct at eleventh hour and root cause of general discontent is much deeper than you want to admit.

    If you lose you’ll go into democratic resistance, fight every single thing Trump does. By second or third year regular people notice that not much is changing in their lives and then you lose all of your steam. When actual bad stuff happens nobody cares.

    Then in a couple of terms people will get tired of the right, vote for the libs and then you realise that those Dems have adopted lots of stuff Republicans did because that was the only way to get back into power. And that it was always about power. I’ll be there to say „told you so”.





  • It’s good that you recognise tribalism as a core issue although you need to acknowledge that you can be victim of that too. You’re trying to start from the top because that looks like it’s have biggest impact but the actual change needs to start at the bottom. This is something we can do but it’ll be much more work than waiting for someone to do that for us. I realise that all of us are so used to slacktivism by now that it sounds like an insurmountable task but there’s no other way. First step is to stop contributing to the problem so here I am trying to explain why current approach won’t work.


  • So, not much is changing then but you assumed history can only move forward. We’ve reached a point where this belief is pretty much a modern secular religion - nobody guaranteed it would be so. This religion even has prophets like Francis Fukuyama who I blame for popularising it.

    It’s likely we will be set back again many times and there’s no guarantee that the end result will be satisfying. The best thing we can do for now is to figure out why those things happen in the first place without attributing blame. The future needs to include everyone, even the bigots. My guess most of the bigots wouldn’t be bigots if they had higher participation in profits that our societies generate. This is because politicians funnel those into the pockets of various oligarchs. Neither Republicans or Dems will fix that unfortunately.







  • I understand what you feel, I was there too accusing others of „symmetrism”. You don’t want to see critique of your side or pointing out that others might not be entirely wrong because you feel like everything you do contributes in some small way to which side will win. But this only leads to dishonesty and overt hyperboles. You’ll be frustrated, anxious and sad when you lose so don’t do that to yourself.

    Maybe people voting for Trump don’t care about public healthcare because they don’t trust doctors in general. Maybe they feel that the entire healthcare industry is there to scam them and putting public money would be a waste. They’re probably wrong but you need to consider what led people to vote for someone that promises to dismantle the whole system. Maybe the root cause is something different and that’s what needs addressing first?






  • It’s not a Reddit thing, it’s happening everywhere in the US media sphere aligned with Dems. I have a horrible deja vu to how our local equivalent political party and media did exact same things and lost badly and couldn’t get back into power for nearly 10 years. Not that I’m a big fan of them either but if we had two party system I’d begrudgingly vote for those guys so I can sympathise somewhat. I’m trying to convince at least some people that this is not the way to go.