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Ubuntu vs Mint is one example
At this point I’d be happy to have one evil and one good
I’ve been an Unaffiliated Independent since I first registered to vote in 1977, and I have NEVER voted for a candidate that I really like, at least not for President. Every single election has been the better of two evils, and often there wasn’t even two, and often there wasn’t even one. I haven’t been even mildly interested in any of the candidates we’ve had in the 21st Century, except maybe Bernie, and he’s never really had a chance anyway.
I like AOC, and a couple of others. I’ve swing hard into the Progressive side these days. Time to balance the scale away from Conservatives for at least a half century. I’ll be dead by then.
Half of Americans actively vote for the more evil candidate. That’s the problem you need to fix first.
I really wish I was exaggerating but it’s hard to describe it any other way.
Half of Americans don’t vote.
Yep. I enjoy hypothetical discussions about how to fix our shit to benefit humans as much as anybody else.
But that’s the wall I mentally run into every time: dozens of millions of people voted for the obvious greater evil THREE consecutive times.
And these weren’t some kind of bland Romney v Obama elections that were very much two sides of the same coin. They were random politician v dementia predator Hitler and roughly half of voters were smashing that pedoHitler button.
Maybe if you’re running against pedohitler, don’t do shit that’s unpopular with your base just because you really want to.
Oh yeah, the DNC is crappy controlled opposition that normally exists to make conservative ideas seem liberal/leftist to americans.
… But that still means tens of millions of people actively choose the nightmare over the boring uninspiring candidate. Both things are true and both are bad. :/
Democrats knew they couldn’t win with a pro-genocide candidate and refused to change anyway. They preferred trump to telling netanyahu no. All centrists got the only thing they wanted in 2024. They just blame the left they have always hated for the negative domestic consequences of their unwillingness to change.
What about the “neutral of two mehs”?
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
Outside of the realm of politics, but one choice I’ve made somewhat recently that was “better of two goods” was picking a Linux distro
Fedora v OpenSUSE.
Mint and OpenSUSE, actually (I don’t like the Gnome DE)
Ended up going with OpenSUSE, I’ve found I really like KDE and Plasma
Woah, Fedora has a KDE Plasma edition, TIL
Might try that out at some point
Purely based on vibes, I think Mint takes security less seriously than Fedora and OpenSUSE.
Yes.
Anybody who says otherwise is likely (on some level) attempting to convince others to crush their hopes of a better world being possible.
No, it’s not possible with unlimited corporate “donations”.
Rs are left hand, Ds are right hand, AmazonEnronMega is the puppeteer.
They’ve made bribery legal, it’s blatant and right out in the open. They all shared the stage, everyone clapped, thunderous applause
Voters can’t out bribe them, they’re too busy trying to make a living on half the pay their parents had
How will you get them to outlaw bribery again? Not legally.
(see Super PACs and Citizens United)
That would imply nice things are possible. Surely you must choose between being against mexican rapist trans pet eaters or pro mexican rapist trans pet eaters as your 2 binary options.
It’s time to give up on this idea, given the outrage culture, the death of journalism.
We could have a race of Fred Roger’s vs fred rogers and someone would find or make up a scandal and half the internet will follow. For the foreseeable future all candidates appear to be evil, whether they are different from before or not, so our choice is who appears less evil.
Then there’s the death of the platform. Candidates compete to see how little they can say, to not give their opponents anything to go on, so all future candidates will not appear to have a good platform and our choice is who is less evil
We could have Fred Rogers vs Bob Ross…
But we don’t. We have genocidaires vs genocidaires. We have kids-in-cages champions vs kids-in-cages apologists. We have mass incarceration with racial undertones vs mass incarceration with racial overtones.
There is absolutely no manufacturing of the perception of evil needed. Every single American leader at that level going back as far as the eye can see is basically competing to see how many people they can kill and torture.
Bs, the distinction is clear. With this administration especially it’s never been more clear
Stop lying
Stop fighting on behalf of a white supremacist genocidal juggernaut. Let’s go with your heroes.
Thomas Jefferson - not just a slave owner, a slave breeder and for profit serial rapist. Raped people that he owned as property, took their babies from them, and sold the babies. Kept a very young slave girl in a cave in his bedroom with no windows and only the one door so he could rape her whenever he wanted. He tried to use his political power to end the transatlantic slave trade specifically to increase the price he could charge for slaves that were born on his plantations.
George Washington - order the genocide of indigenous people all over the colonies. Order Sullivan not only to kill every single Indian he saw but also to destroy every single source of food, every orchard, every farm plot, every single way the Indians could eat. Literally called “village destroyer” by the indigenous peoples because he ordered them all killed and burned to the ground.
Abraham Lincoln - famously abolished slavery? Nope. The Emancipation Proclamation only offered freedom to those enslaved peoples of the 11 rebelling states and only if they took up arms against the rebels. Slavery was left intact in the union and up to the states to decide by vote. Lincoln himself is on record stating that he didn’t care much whether slavery was legal or not. He just cared about stopping the rebellion. He is also on record saying that blacks and white probably couldn’t ever live together and that he thought the slaves should all go back to Africa.
Harry Truman - worked closely with the Vatican in Operation Paperclip to save almost 10k Nazis from suffering the consequences of losing the war. Gave them fake identities, money, safe passage, new lives, jobs, and integrated some of them into the workings of the US empire. He also oversaw the Korean War where the USA bombed the north until there were literally no buildings left and dropped so much napalm that Koreans in the North needed to live in caves because there was nowhere else to protect themselves from a chemical fire that bonded to human flesh and caused one of the most gruesome torturous deaths we know of. Oh. He also is the only human being to ever order the dropping of an atomic bomb. He did it twice, against densely populated cities, and while Japan was literally in the diplomatic process of negotiating a surrender with the US.
FDR - Concentration camps for anyone looking vaguely Japanese, including the state seizure of their property
Also, the US was a literal apartheid state until the 1960s.
I could go on. Every president since Reagan is super easy to expose as drenched in blood.
I think a lot of people relate to that feeling. Most people don’t just want the “least bad” option — they’d rather feel like they’re choosing something genuinely good.
Thats basically communism and socialism for me. I believe socialism would be better but its two goods either way.
So you believe that a dictatorship of capital, wielding the power of state violence to suppress its enemies and plan the economy, is better than a stateless, classless, moneyless society? Basically what you’re saying is that USSR was the absolute peak of societal development, and while I do like many faucets of USSR I will disagree here.
No meaningful difference
I dont think humanity has advanced enough to not conspire against each other, no matter the org chart.
That’s true, but socialism is more democratic.
Then vote in all elections including local, special, midterms and especially primaries not just general. Choose progressives.
We are where we are, because voter apathy. When you don’t vote, other pick the candidates for you.
from what I hear, depending on the state, it’s not easy to vote in the US.
- In some places you have to reregister beforehand and you don’t get a reminder
- sometimes the next place to vote is far away
- you have to bring a lot of papers
- the election is during workhours on like a tuesday
- there is a huge line and it’s sometimes really hot out
- even then sometimes they delete you from the list without notifying you
especially in southern states, primarily black neighborhoods districts have extra shitty conditions to prevent black people from voting
You are confusing cause and effect. We have voter apathy because we are where we are. The vote-harder contingent has never once shown that it works. Every single president has presided over mass murder of innocent civilians. Every single party has approved or failed to stop mass murder. There has not been a single victory over racialized mass incarceration in 70 years. The US imprisons more of its people than almost any other country, and has a parole system twice as big as its prison system, meaning it manages the lives 3x more people with its police force than any other country on earth. It’s unfathomably larger than anything the world has ever seen. It absolutely dwarfs the height of the GULAG system.
The system creates the apathy. The apathy doesn’t create the system.
And I saw your other comment that not-voting won’t make things better and that’s true, but voting also won’t make things better. So it’s time to start thinking about what will make things better and time to stop funneling energy into a known ineffective solution.
Exactly. Vote Green.
Wait is that Kang or Kronos
Maybe but not enough. Given gerrymandering and swing states. Do I wish my states politicians were progressive? Of course and I’ll keep voting for them. But when it comes to national politics, my states politicians are blue and that won’t change either way, and it will not be paid attention to because we’re not a swing state
As long as my state is balanced by another I can’t affect, nothing is changing. No matter how progressive we may be, there’s always a West Virginia voting against healthcare, education, technology, jobs, the environment, livable wages, more protective safety nets, etc
Problem is in a lot of places those with the D next to their name aren’t progressive with the only ones that actually are being third party. So not only do you have to convince a non-voter to vote, but you have to convince them to support someone that’s not part of the 2 major parties.
That’s why he called out primaries
Would be nice if we could count on primaries to be honest, when they deign to have them at all.
Even in primaries there’s just not an option. In my area everyone just tries to get right wing votes, including the Dems with many straight up just calling themselves conservatives that don’t agree with the direction that party took. I’ve yet to see anyone every running to represent the party even on a small scale advocating for leftist values.
We have that voter apathy because our voting system is awful, and doesn’t allow most votes to even matter. People should still vote, but that alone isn’t enough to fix anything. As things are now it’s damage control at best.
It’s bad, especially in the US and Canada, but not voting isn’t going to fix anything. Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one, even if the systems are set up to look that way. Voting is always worth it.
Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one
There might not be rules explicitly for this purpose, but the Electoral College and Senate are hard-coded institutions in the US government that effectively guarantee this. The antagonism there is more framed as a rural vs urban one, but it effectively amounts to the same thing in practice. Going by Wikipedia numbers, every elector for NY represents the votes of up to 714,372 residents of New York, while in Wyoming, that ration is considerably lower, at 1 elector for every 196,251 residents. This ignores things like residents counted in the population who are ineligible to vote and people who just don’t, but you get the point. Ditto for the Senate, where some 10 million New Yorkers get the same representation as just under 300,000 people in Wyoming.
Yes, rural states could eventually swing left again and make this no longer the case, but it certainly seems unlikely at any time in the near future.
Right, so you removed the reat of the sentence in that quote which agreed with that.
Specifically what I’m saying is that if people smarten up the system will change. The US is super close to being a dictatorship but the world saw Mamdani get elected all the same. There was a lot of power trying to get him to lose and he still won because he got the votes.
If people can vote and don’t because “it doesn’t matter” then they are a huge part of the problem and should be ashamed of themselves. Even if they lose for a few cycles, that support is crucially important to see on paper.
Everyone is talking about ranked choice and other options, I don’t have problems with that, but I’d like to say this:
I think if 80-90% of people voted for that lesser evil, then the greater evil would know that they have no chance, and shift themselves to get more votes. Either the candidate will change policies, or the party will dump those candidates and get someone new.
Problem is, both evils have equal chances of winning, so they have no reason to change significantly.
That’s what surprises me. Why’s the split 50/50 (±2% max)
Why’s the split 50/50 (±2% max)
Same corporations bankrolling them.
I mean why are people supporting the parties in 50/50 manner.
Because the parties are part of a long standing and every effective divide and conquer strategy.
The goal of the ruling class is to create a cross-class coalition so that the ruled-class supports the ruling class. This is impossible to do as a whole, so you have to divide the ruled-class against itself and then get one side of the ruled-class to side with the ruling-class on the basis of that division.
The 50/50 split is actively cultivated. It’s a sign that the parties are doing exactly what their job is and doing it very well.
