“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leader of the Democratic party at its most popular and most powerful
They should try to heed the wisdom of their predecessor, or they can instead demonstrate how far the party has fallen.
I think my desire for a small electric pickup truck might override my caution in this case, we’ll see if I get burned. At the very least I’m not going to preorder and will wait for real critical reviews after it’s released.
In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright.
In the United States, Social Democrats call themselves Democratic Socialists. Or are they just using social democracy to get their foot in the door so democratic socialism can follow? Only time will tell. I know what I’m hoping for, but I do worry a bit that there isn’t a follow-up plan. Even so, social democracy is much more fertile ground for a real socialist movement to thrive.
When people say democracy, they usually mean direct democracy.
This just isn’t true. The majority of democracies around the world today are representative democracies, and people colloquially refer to them simply as democracies.
And even at that, the party establishment control who we can even vote for. So we only get to choose from the representatives they give us for the most part.
That’s partly true to varying degrees depending on what country you’re referring to, but it also isn’t that simple. The methods the establishment uses to control who gets party nominations are mostly indirect (i.e. media manipulating the narrative, PACs and dark money to campaigns, etc.). I think you’re being overly cynical - which is fair - but we have more power than you think we do, we’re just not very good at using it. Cynicism itself is one of the ways that the establishment controls who gets elected.
In short: the establishment has a stranglehold on democracy not because our democracies are fake (flawed, maybe even rigged a bit, sure, but not fake), but because they have us out-organized.
The future doesn’t have to be set in stone. We can create the future we want by demanding it and taking action. I can see a future where a progressive is elected president in 2028 and a critical mass of people successfully petition that president to issue pardons.
What I wonder is how exactly are they going to enshittify it? It’s extremely barebones and modular in a way that anyone can design add-ons and accessories for it. I can see them doing subscriptions and the like for various add-ons but you can always just get the base model and get add-ons elsewhere.
They’ve been promoting it recently and have several working prototypes that they’ve been driving influencers around in. There was one video with Marques Brownlee and they even let him drive it himself.
A republic is a type of democracy. Specifically, it’s a representative democracy.
Mamdani’s kinda straddling the edge. He calls himself a Democratic Socialist and uses anti-capitalist rhetoric but his policy platform is just Social Democracy.
I didn’t reply to them, I replied to you.
Why the fuck do you think they’re endorsing candidates in DNC primaries, genius? They’re literally doing exactly what you suggest.
They’re already relevant. That party of a hundred thousand has become a household name among the Democratic voting base because of the insurgent campaigns they’ve been running and winning against the DNC establishment.
This chart is useless to roughly 5% of the population. Is there a version that doesn’t use red and green?
We gave the Iranian regime extremely powerful leverage on the global stage and galvanized support for the regime domestically, so not great. If there was a possibility of a popular revolt happening in Iran the war definitely killed it. The introduction of a common enemy made a lot of the domestic opposition fall in line to defend their sovereignty, and the ones who didn’t were successfully suppressed by the regime with fewer people willing to stand in solidarity with them.
I don’t think Rossman is a leftist. He’s pro-consumer and sticks up for the little guy against big corporations, but he’s not anti-capitalist.
I’m partial to GRSM (Gender, Romantic, and Sexual Minorities).
Supporting Israel is supporting terrorism.
The US was founded by displacing indigenous people. Are you saying that indigenous people should retake the US? All Israelis do not agree with Netanyahu.
Does peaceful coexistence and equal rights not even occur to you, or is it that you have no desire to peacefully coexist with those who are different from you, that you would frame the discussion as if the only possibilities are one ethnic group displacing the other?
Both indigenous Americans and Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and yes, I do support reparations and land reform in the US that restores stolen and privatized land to the commons, so long as no one is currently living on it. In the case of Israel much of the land has been stolen in living memory and all homes occupied by first-generation settlers should be immediately restored to the Palestinians they were taken from (or their nearest relatives if the IDF already killed the previous occupants in the genocide). Second-generation and so on can continue to live where they are, but it will be in a free Palestine where Palestinians must be able to return to these places and live freely alongside them. The apartheid state of Israel is not entitled to exist, people are, and the name of the country in which they live scarcely matters more than if they have equal rights.
Biden was not a centrist. He allowed illegal migrants to flood across the border despite polls showing that most Americans wanted tighter border security. Trump made border security a top issue.
First off, Biden did cave to you reactionaries and tighten border security in the second half of his presidency after he had reversed only some of Trump’s border controls in the first half. Second, immigration is not harmful (although the exploitation of immigrant labor is, both to the immigrants themselves and to the working class as a whole) and the only thing strict border security and mass deportations do is cause astronomical suffering and deprive millions of their basic human rights.
Democrats should be anti-Netanyahu, not anti-Israel
This is like saying you should oppose Hitler but support the German Reich. Israel is a settler-colonial apartheid state that was established by the violent displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in living memory and motivated by Zionism, an ethno-supremacist fascist ideology that works towards- and has succeeded in - establishing a Jewish ethnostate that upholds a regime of apartheid, occupation, and genocide.
Progressives might win in some areas because voters are frustrated with Trump but later, they might regret electing a progressive just as some voters now regret voting for Trump.
Voters elected the centrists who have been in control of the party for years and now regret it. Trump’s victory is the establishment dems’ failure, and their refusal to learn and change is rooted in their willful incompetence, lack of any real conviction aside from maintaining their comfortable positions, and their willingness to cater to the interests of their wealthy donors over the interests of their constituents.
Democrats simply wanted a candidate who could beat Trump. In Kamala Harris they chose the wrong person. She was so dumb that she said she wouldn’t do anything different than Biden despite knowing that the GOP strategy was to link her to Biden.
It’s odd that you criticize her for being like Biden while advocating for more of the same. How do you cope with the cognitive dissonance?
You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.