Following USA politics as an outsider, this has baffled me greatly the past year and more. Is harm reduction really such a difficult concept? It’s like that damn bus scenario, just with only bad options.
Something like: There’s five people on the bus, and the brakes stop working, so they vote for what they should do. Two say they should drive off a cliff, and one says they should just swerve and crash into the nearby ditch. Two people don’t vote because they want neither. The bus drives off the cliff and everyone dies
Here’s another hypothetical for you. Two people are given $100 to split, one person makes the offer on how to split it, and the other chooses to accept or decline. If they decline, nobody gets anything.
Rationally, the way this plays out is that the first person offers a $99-$1 split, and the other person accepts, because $1>$0. But when researchers have actually run this experiment, they’ve found that people tend to reject offers below $30-$40, and people tend to make offers accounting for that. Somehow, the “irrational” behavior results in a more optimal outcome.
Once upon a time, in the New Deal era, Democrats offered something closer to $30-$40. But somewhere along the line, people started employing this “lesser evil” nonsense, and the offers got worse and worse. Now, we’re past the point where they even offer us $1. Now they offer us “We’ll still commit genocide, but slightly less.”
I’m completely baffled by how anyone can still be committed to this clearly failed and irrational strategy of “lesser evilism.” Even if you personally think it’s the right move, surely you must at least understand that this isn’t how other people are going to behave.
Well your system clearly is completely fucked up, no denying that, you know and can clearly word it out waaayy better than some random internet person like I do. But the bus is still headed off the cliff, so what is the counter plan?
The bus was headed off a cliff regardless of who got elected.
There is no easy fix and no strategy that’s actually likely to work. What we need is an actual left-wing party. We can either try to push the Democrats in that direction, which fundamentally requires holding them to some basic standard and disciplining them when they fail to live up to it, or we can form a new party from the ground up. Both of those strategies are furthered by voting third party. Of course, there are also strategies that don’t rely on electoralism, such as a general strike, but this is also furthered by supporting a third party like PSL which engages in and promotes direct action.
You’re fucking up your own metaphor now because the Dems would have been the ditch crash which is better than the total destruction of driving off the cliff. But it doesn’t matter what anyone says you’ll just both sides it.
Let me try again: Two people are running for the leadership position. The other one says they won’t punch you, but you know they probably will. The other one says he’ll shoot you and your whole family. You won’t vote against the shooter because the puncher is bad and unreliable as well, so now you and your family get shot.
That demented clown was pretty openly saying he’ll turn USA into fascist dictatorship if he’s elected, and now he’s doing it and apparently speedrunning towards ww3 because he didn’t get the nobel peace price or some insane shit. And I still see people online arguing that voting against him didn’t matter?
The other one says they won’t punch you, but you know they probably will. The other one says he’ll shoot you and your whole family.
That’s not the situation. One says that he’ll shoot me and my whole family, the other says she’ll shoot me and my whole family with a rainbow painted gun.
That demented clown was pretty openly saying he’ll turn USA into fascist dictatorship if he’s elected, and now he’s doing it and apparently speedrunning towards ww3 because he didn’t get the nobel peace price or some insane shit.
Frankly, I think every president since at least Bush has been a fascist dictator. Everything that Trump is able to do now is because of the massive expansion of executive power and the massive curtailing of civil rights that happened after 9/11 with full bipartisan support, and the democratic presidents since then have done nothing to rein in or revoke those powers.
Meanwhile, economic conditions have gotten worse and worse, leading to a rise in political extremism, which has no outlet except for the right. Maintaining the status quo is suicide, it guarantees that we will continue sliding into fascism.
The only option is to push for an alternative, no matter how desperate it is. Every political movement starts somewhere.
But you could have bought four more bad status quo years to build that political movement! Now you don’t have even that, people there are getting murdered and dragged into concentration camps more and more openly since even us randos overseas are hearing about it, and you might never get to vote again
You mean that we could’ve stalled efforts to build a political movement until the situation was even worse.
The choice to vote Democrat is also a choice not to vote PSL. If it cost nothing, then I would’ve done it, give me ranked choice voting and I will put the Democrats above the Republicans. But I consider it more important to support people who would actually fix the situation if they got power.
If what you’re seeing doesn’t make sense, maybe the problem is in your interpretation?
It sounds like you see R promising “bad thing” and D promising “less-bad thing, but we will move right next time” and so you want to just give up because both options are bad.
But I think this involves viewing the parties as monolithic entities that you have no control over (as seen in “the Democratic Part Elite kept out Bernie”) when they’re actually just composed of people. An important factor is that the American people on average are much more conservative/authoritarian/pro-corporation than typical Europeans. Somewhat by history, somewhat by US-sourced indoctrination, somewhat by foreign-sourced indoctrination.
When I see real-life progressives, they’re always taking the most-progressive available action of the moment. In the moment of a US presidential election in a swing state, that most-progressive action may be voting for the slightly-less-bad candidate. But voting for a candidate doesn’t tie them to that candidate’s policies and they can spend the majority of their time and effort focused on progress.
When I see online progressives(?), they’re primarily concerned with giving up: tearing down other progressives’ efforts because they’re not progressive enough but not offering an alternative. The result of this, intended or not, is a populous who doesn’t offer resistance to authoritarianism and probably welcomes it in the end.
There’s nothing “progressive” about supporting genocide.
From the moment I reached the age of reason, I was outraged at the pointless wars of aggression being waged in the Middle East, wars that were supported by the vast majority of the Democratic party. Even when we got a supposedly “progressive” president, Obama, he doubled down on the killing and bloodshed. For twenty years I have been told this lesser evilist nonsense, as the bodies piled higher and higher. Then, almost as soon as the bipartisan forever wars came to a close, they merely shifted focus to killing other Middle Easterners in Palestine through the proxy of Israel, at an even greater intensity than before. Twenty years of patiently waiting, twenty years of no progress being made whatsoever, twenty years of killing for no benefit to anyone but arms manufactures and oil companies, twenty years of Americans never getting a real chance to vote on whether it should continue because both parties supported it, and you have the audacity to call yourself a progressive, and to attack me as not a real progressive, when you’re the one that’s perfectly fine with that?
Maybe you should have been doing something other than waiting patiently for twenty years. I don’t know why people expect something to happen when they do nothing.
Oh, of course, something! If only I had thought to do something, the wars would’ve been stopped, the Patriot Act repealed, and Guantanamo Bay shut down. And the solution is so obvious, staring me right in the face: something.
Maybe the difficulty you’re having is that you want to judge all action as good (it results in a perfect world) or bad (it does not result in a perfect world) and so inaction becomes the only safe course.
The Patriot Act wasn’t created by a single individual. Not only did it require hundreds of powerful politicians working together, but many hundreds of administrative workers, tens of thousands of government employees to apply it, and millions of American voters who approved of it.
Some of the authoritarians behind the Patriot Act were, I’m sure, disappointed at how gentle it is and how few rights it strips away. But they still worked hard every day to enact it and I think you agree that it’s played a role in making America more authoritarian and more willing to accept greater loss of rights.
Do you think it’s possible to make change in the other direction in the same way? Through imperfect, compromised, incremental changes? If not, why do you suppose this only works in one direction?
No, of course not. You just explained exactly what I would have to do to make that happen: something. I don’t see how the course of action could possibly be clearer.
Is harm reduction really such a difficult concept?
As an American, let me be very clear here. Americans, as a whole, are very, very, very dumb. And dumb people operate almost entirely based off their feelings, not their intellect.
To a dumb person, yeah, harm reduction is actually a difficult concept to wrap their mind around.
I’ve been here my whole life, and honestly, there really are just a lot of dumb people here. Which is why I don’t really see any of this getting better after Trump is gone. We’ll just keep making dumb decisions because dumb people make dumb decisions.
The common sentiment seems to be “I’ll rather live in a fascist dictatorship than vote democrats” while still thinking that’s any different from supporting republicans, so I guess I have to admit you do have a point…
The thing that a lot of people seem to be having trouble grasping is that when voters tell you what they want, and you tell those voters to fuck off, some of those voters won’t vote for you. This is the simple reality of politics, it’s how it has always worked, it’s how it will always work. This is true everywhere, not just the US.
It is not the job of voters to elect democrats, it’s the job of the democrats to win votes. They fucked up and they are to blame more than anyone who sat out the election or voted for a 3rd party.
Right, and my point is that the bus is still headed off the cliff because of the failure of democrats.
Look, let’s rewind a little bit. Your analogy is about the 2024 election. You say the democrats are saying they want to crash it into a ditch, and if that the democrats don’t get charge of the bus, the bus is headed off the cliff. But, at the time of the 2024 election, who was currently in charge of the bus? Who had been in charge of the bus for the past 4 years?
Right, and my point is that the bus is still headed off the cliff because of the failure of democrats.
Look, let’s rewind a little bit. Your analogy is about the 2024 election. You say the democrats are saying they want to crash it into a ditch, and if that the democrats don’t get charge of the bus, the bus is headed off the cliff. But, at the time of the 2024 election, who was currently in charge of the bus? Who had been in charge of the bus for the past 4 years?
Following USA politics as an outsider, this has baffled me greatly the past year and more. Is harm reduction really such a difficult concept? It’s like that damn bus scenario, just with only bad options.
Something like: There’s five people on the bus, and the brakes stop working, so they vote for what they should do. Two say they should drive off a cliff, and one says they should just swerve and crash into the nearby ditch. Two people don’t vote because they want neither. The bus drives off the cliff and everyone dies
Here’s another hypothetical for you. Two people are given $100 to split, one person makes the offer on how to split it, and the other chooses to accept or decline. If they decline, nobody gets anything.
Rationally, the way this plays out is that the first person offers a $99-$1 split, and the other person accepts, because $1>$0. But when researchers have actually run this experiment, they’ve found that people tend to reject offers below $30-$40, and people tend to make offers accounting for that. Somehow, the “irrational” behavior results in a more optimal outcome.
Once upon a time, in the New Deal era, Democrats offered something closer to $30-$40. But somewhere along the line, people started employing this “lesser evil” nonsense, and the offers got worse and worse. Now, we’re past the point where they even offer us $1. Now they offer us “We’ll still commit genocide, but slightly less.”
I’m completely baffled by how anyone can still be committed to this clearly failed and irrational strategy of “lesser evilism.” Even if you personally think it’s the right move, surely you must at least understand that this isn’t how other people are going to behave.
Well your system clearly is completely fucked up, no denying that, you know and can clearly word it out waaayy better than some random internet person like I do. But the bus is still headed off the cliff, so what is the counter plan?
The bus was headed off a cliff regardless of who got elected.
There is no easy fix and no strategy that’s actually likely to work. What we need is an actual left-wing party. We can either try to push the Democrats in that direction, which fundamentally requires holding them to some basic standard and disciplining them when they fail to live up to it, or we can form a new party from the ground up. Both of those strategies are furthered by voting third party. Of course, there are also strategies that don’t rely on electoralism, such as a general strike, but this is also furthered by supporting a third party like PSL which engages in and promotes direct action.
You’re fucking up your own metaphor now because the Dems would have been the ditch crash which is better than the total destruction of driving off the cliff. But it doesn’t matter what anyone says you’ll just both sides it.
Let me try again: Two people are running for the leadership position. The other one says they won’t punch you, but you know they probably will. The other one says he’ll shoot you and your whole family. You won’t vote against the shooter because the puncher is bad and unreliable as well, so now you and your family get shot.
That demented clown was pretty openly saying he’ll turn USA into fascist dictatorship if he’s elected, and now he’s doing it and apparently speedrunning towards ww3 because he didn’t get the nobel peace price or some insane shit. And I still see people online arguing that voting against him didn’t matter?
That’s not the situation. One says that he’ll shoot me and my whole family, the other says she’ll shoot me and my whole family with a rainbow painted gun.
Frankly, I think every president since at least Bush has been a fascist dictator. Everything that Trump is able to do now is because of the massive expansion of executive power and the massive curtailing of civil rights that happened after 9/11 with full bipartisan support, and the democratic presidents since then have done nothing to rein in or revoke those powers.
Meanwhile, economic conditions have gotten worse and worse, leading to a rise in political extremism, which has no outlet except for the right. Maintaining the status quo is suicide, it guarantees that we will continue sliding into fascism.
The only option is to push for an alternative, no matter how desperate it is. Every political movement starts somewhere.
But you could have bought four more bad status quo years to build that political movement! Now you don’t have even that, people there are getting murdered and dragged into concentration camps more and more openly since even us randos overseas are hearing about it, and you might never get to vote again
You mean that we could’ve stalled efforts to build a political movement until the situation was even worse.
The choice to vote Democrat is also a choice not to vote PSL. If it cost nothing, then I would’ve done it, give me ranked choice voting and I will put the Democrats above the Republicans. But I consider it more important to support people who would actually fix the situation if they got power.
Who was George Floyd?
Who built the camps?
If what you’re seeing doesn’t make sense, maybe the problem is in your interpretation?
It sounds like you see R promising “bad thing” and D promising “less-bad thing, but we will move right next time” and so you want to just give up because both options are bad.
But I think this involves viewing the parties as monolithic entities that you have no control over (as seen in “the Democratic Part Elite kept out Bernie”) when they’re actually just composed of people. An important factor is that the American people on average are much more conservative/authoritarian/pro-corporation than typical Europeans. Somewhat by history, somewhat by US-sourced indoctrination, somewhat by foreign-sourced indoctrination.
When I see real-life progressives, they’re always taking the most-progressive available action of the moment. In the moment of a US presidential election in a swing state, that most-progressive action may be voting for the slightly-less-bad candidate. But voting for a candidate doesn’t tie them to that candidate’s policies and they can spend the majority of their time and effort focused on progress.
When I see online progressives(?), they’re primarily concerned with giving up: tearing down other progressives’ efforts because they’re not progressive enough but not offering an alternative. The result of this, intended or not, is a populous who doesn’t offer resistance to authoritarianism and probably welcomes it in the end.
There’s nothing “progressive” about supporting genocide.
From the moment I reached the age of reason, I was outraged at the pointless wars of aggression being waged in the Middle East, wars that were supported by the vast majority of the Democratic party. Even when we got a supposedly “progressive” president, Obama, he doubled down on the killing and bloodshed. For twenty years I have been told this lesser evilist nonsense, as the bodies piled higher and higher. Then, almost as soon as the bipartisan forever wars came to a close, they merely shifted focus to killing other Middle Easterners in Palestine through the proxy of Israel, at an even greater intensity than before. Twenty years of patiently waiting, twenty years of no progress being made whatsoever, twenty years of killing for no benefit to anyone but arms manufactures and oil companies, twenty years of Americans never getting a real chance to vote on whether it should continue because both parties supported it, and you have the audacity to call yourself a progressive, and to attack me as not a real progressive, when you’re the one that’s perfectly fine with that?
Maybe you should have been doing something other than waiting patiently for twenty years. I don’t know why people expect something to happen when they do nothing.
Oh, of course, something! If only I had thought to do something, the wars would’ve been stopped, the Patriot Act repealed, and Guantanamo Bay shut down. And the solution is so obvious, staring me right in the face: something.
Maybe the difficulty you’re having is that you want to judge all action as good (it results in a perfect world) or bad (it does not result in a perfect world) and so inaction becomes the only safe course.
The Patriot Act wasn’t created by a single individual. Not only did it require hundreds of powerful politicians working together, but many hundreds of administrative workers, tens of thousands of government employees to apply it, and millions of American voters who approved of it.
Some of the authoritarians behind the Patriot Act were, I’m sure, disappointed at how gentle it is and how few rights it strips away. But they still worked hard every day to enact it and I think you agree that it’s played a role in making America more authoritarian and more willing to accept greater loss of rights.
Do you think it’s possible to make change in the other direction in the same way? Through imperfect, compromised, incremental changes? If not, why do you suppose this only works in one direction?
No, of course not. You just explained exactly what I would have to do to make that happen: something. I don’t see how the course of action could possibly be clearer.
As an American, let me be very clear here. Americans, as a whole, are very, very, very dumb. And dumb people operate almost entirely based off their feelings, not their intellect.
To a dumb person, yeah, harm reduction is actually a difficult concept to wrap their mind around.
I’ve been here my whole life, and honestly, there really are just a lot of dumb people here. Which is why I don’t really see any of this getting better after Trump is gone. We’ll just keep making dumb decisions because dumb people make dumb decisions.
The common sentiment seems to be “I’ll rather live in a fascist dictatorship than vote democrats” while still thinking that’s any different from supporting republicans, so I guess I have to admit you do have a point…
The thing that a lot of people seem to be having trouble grasping is that when voters tell you what they want, and you tell those voters to fuck off, some of those voters won’t vote for you. This is the simple reality of politics, it’s how it has always worked, it’s how it will always work. This is true everywhere, not just the US.
It is not the job of voters to elect democrats, it’s the job of the democrats to win votes. They fucked up and they are to blame more than anyone who sat out the election or voted for a 3rd party.
But the bus is still headed off the cliff
Right, and my point is that the bus is still headed off the cliff because of the failure of democrats.
Look, let’s rewind a little bit. Your analogy is about the 2024 election. You say the democrats are saying they want to crash it into a ditch, and if that the democrats don’t get charge of the bus, the bus is headed off the cliff. But, at the time of the 2024 election, who was currently in charge of the bus? Who had been in charge of the bus for the past 4 years?
But the bus is still headed off the cliff
Right, and my point is that the bus is still headed off the cliff because of the failure of democrats.
Look, let’s rewind a little bit. Your analogy is about the 2024 election. You say the democrats are saying they want to crash it into a ditch, and if that the democrats don’t get charge of the bus, the bus is headed off the cliff. But, at the time of the 2024 election, who was currently in charge of the bus? Who had been in charge of the bus for the past 4 years?