If every moral abstainer/third party voter had voted for Kamala in 2024, Trump would still be President. There simply weren’t enough of them to matter.

The beacons are lit! The working class calls for aid!

That’s basically what I meant. I support the Iranian people, their war of defense, and their general stance against Western Imperialism.

That doesn’t mean I think the Iranian state are the good guys though. Some elements are doing good in the world, but it’s also a horribly repressive theocratic regime. Of course, on the list of oppressive regimes, Iran ranks far below the likes of Israel and the USA…

Honestly, comrade, I agree with you. I’m just trying to create some space for the large amount of people who would be turned away by a Stalin quote to join the left in supporting Iran’s side in this. They don’t care about the broader fight against US imperialism, but they hate how bad this war looks for America (and how expensive it is).

Or maybe you don’t choose the sides that are running the war (eg USA vs. Iran), but instead choose the side that is fighting it (the working class) against the side that instigated it (the global billionaires who benefit from imperialism and capitalism).

What language is that?

Or maybe, instead of creating privacy-infringing laws or blaming parents, we actually dismantle the tech companies who created them and imprison their leaders. We all know corporate social media is cancer, that’s why we’re on Lemmy. So let’s fucking do something about the cancer instead targeting the victims or worse, exploiting the situation to expand the surveillance state.

Honestly I doubt that Democrats would move for prosecution. This is the party of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. There’s no way they want consequences for a member of their own class.

Now, if Trump were a leftist and breaking norms to the benefit of the working class, he’d already be executed.

Pahlanuik has a certain way of planting images in your brain that stay there for decades. Such a weird, brilliant, fascinating and slightly off-putting author. He really captures the ennui, alienation, despair, and absurdity of late-stage capitalism.

It’s not just foreign. Internal capitalists also wish to destabilize nation states. There’s a popular fad among the global bourgeois to believe that humanity should be sliced into corporate fiefdoms with zero state control. There’s another popular bourgeois fad which is to believe that humanity’s population must be brought radically lower to reduce the risk to themselves from large numbers of people angry at being dispossessed by climate change and AI.

These two fads combined are personified in people like Trump, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc, and they are extremely dangerous to our species.

There’s a difference between lone individuals tearing out stop signs and a neighborhood collectively deciding to install one near a park.

• The sample size is stupid small, so it’s a bit dicey to draw definitive conclusions.

This is the part that always gets me when leftists do infighting. Like, guys, we’ve only been doing this socialism thing for like 125 years and there’s only been a handful of projects that even successfully overthrew the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie themselves took 200-300 years to overthrow feudalism and had many failures and committed awful atrocities along the way.

Let’s learn from our mistakes and stop being so puritanical with our ideologies. None of us have any idea what socialism will look like when it is finally successful, the most we can do is just keep working to put power in the hands of the people, whatever form that takes.

Sounds a lot like a bunch of small states to me.

A guy drove by my local protest with a thumbs down and I got to call him a pedophile protector, which was very cathartic for me. I probably don’t need to do any more political action until the election now. /s

To be more optimistic, and entirely anecdotal, it was the largest protest in my town by far and there were many more young people present. The resistance is growing, and becoming more diverse.

Americans, even the ones who engage with the election cycle, have been politically sedentary since the civil rights movement in the 60s/70s. It takes some time and effort to wake people up to the fact that human rights are bought and continually paid for with blood, sweat, and tears. These protests are doing that. Single protests don’t solve problems on their own, but they are a necessary step to finding the solution. Take comfort that they continue to grow.

Agreed, and also agreed that Mamdani wouldn’t even be called a socialist in most of the world. But in the American context, everything I said is true. I’m sorry that we’re so distorted from reality that we have to have conversations like these.

Yeah it’s really sad.

Sure, but there a shit ton of people who say that because he’s a socialist, everything will go to hell. It’s important to counter that argument with facts that show otherwise.

At the very least it is evidence that socialists can govern at least as well as capitalists.

So it was a PR stunt that fixed more potholes than the DOT usually does in a week, and it further established credibility that socialists can perform at least as well as the best capitalists.

I’ll be interested to see how Mamdani’s longer term infrastructure plans work out.

Israel is not committing genocide because they are Jewish, they are doing it because they are an arm of the western capitalist oligarchy and maintaining imperialist power in the Middle East is essential for controlling the global trade in oil.

So now the fascist GOP knows how 600k Californians voted? I guess we better hope that the guy in charge isn’t vindictive about people not supporting him.