- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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Dated but still true. “But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich removed who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you. They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it. George Carlin
If both sides aren’t the same, how do you explain the 1952 Texas gubernatorial election?
Reptilians
Go out and VOTE. That’s the least fucking thing you must do as a citizen.
But spare us the theatrics, US is patently evil. You can try to lower the evil, however history will still remember your complacency.
Now go ahead with ad-hominems.
Trump supporters will not know what an ad hominems attack is. The average American Trump supporter is a gun toting, neoliberal, bear shooting, death penalty supporting, misogynist, who believe that LGBT people should be stoned to death Old Testament style, a white supremacist, anti-vaccine, climate change denying, anti-evolution, anti- science, flat earth believing, pro-life, anti- intellectual, sanctimonious evangelical Christian, Islamophobic bigot. Chem trail obsessive, xenophobic and a racist. Also ignorant, stupid, perverted and possibly demented.
Okay Sephiroth
Everyone should vote.
Both sides arent the same.
People should be free to transfer their vote if their first pick doesn’t win. 3rd parties should be free to compete in the electoral system without a spoiler effect.
Did I miss anything?
In 1776 some guys “invented” the concept of voating and haven’t changed it since. First past the post is easy to admin and understand but it doesn’t properly represent the people. The party system doesn’t help eather.
Ranked choice voting!
I just have to ask, when both candidates have espoused transphobic rhetoric, who do trans people vote for then? The end goal for both individuals is more dead trans kids.
You vote for the lesser of two evils because one of the two will win no matter what you do, there’s no third option that you can take -to VERY clear- on election day.
If they both want the exact same anti-trans policies (unlikely, I’m not even sure what race that might be) you can find some of the other important policies that differentiate them.
Then you fight like hell to have better options next time in the other 364 days of the year (usually 2 or more years in between). Or if you don’t think democracy works do whatever it is you want to do to get your way and, unironically, godspeed.
I think the most sickening line people pull is that voting like this for a candidate is some sort of moral reflection of you. It is literally taking elections more seriously than the voters they pretend to be above. It’s just 20 minutes of a random day to try and get fewer bad results than the alternative.
Is trans equality the only thing you care about? If that goal were achieved, would you be able to rest for the next half decade with no worries in the world?
Go to the 2nd bullet point on your political dance card and vote for that.
For a person who clearly cares about gender issues, you are remarkably binary in your priorities.
Blue maga have told me the formula is simple.
Harm caused by Republicans - Harm caused by democrats = democrats are better.
You dont get to ask for representation in government, you simply make this calculation and vote accordingly. No other options or reforms will be considered. Asking for more then these two options makes you a evil communist republican nazi commie socialist. This is what they call democracy.
So glad I didn’t have kids. Forever grateful to have gotten a vasectomy for those free souls that would have been imprisoned on earth. My kids will not have to suffer these people who are unfortunately my fellow US citizens. They won’t have to go to work for the worst people, they wont have to pay rent to the worst people. My unborn children are safe forever from life here.
If only more democratic socialists would run.
I would, but being a fired cop is ballot poison.
Since you’re already perfectly aware that the answer is to vote for the people who openly include pro-trans candidates in their ranks, and not the people openly saying you should be either forcibly detransed or killed, I’m unsure what kind of answer you expect. I suppose you could write in Pontius Pilate since you’re nearly on the cross already.
ITT: A lot of peple bringing their best “I don’t care about those other people, I’ve got mine” rhetoric
In other words, a lot of Americans in this thread.
I’ve got mine, I don’t care about the others
Ah, the traditional American rhetoric.
Most compelling argument I’ve seen for voting mattering is that rich people are spending a ton on advertising / campaign funds / etc. Follow the money, and if Musk is dropping half a billion to get more shitty republicans elected, then clearly it matters and both sides are not the same.
Who mints money anyways?
If voting didn’t matter, they wouldn’t try so hard to stop folks from doing it. There are different forms of corruption. Traditionally in the US for example, the actual counting of votes (prior to e-voting) is very accurate and voter fraud is very low but alot of effort is spent on preventing people from voting: laws that bar felons from voting coupled with law enforcement efforts that disproportionately target black people for felony arrests and prosecution is a good example. Other tactics are to limit the options people actually have when voting for and to sideline politicians who slip past gatekeepers either by sabotaging their campaigns in the news cycle or minimizing their effectiveness in congress if actually elected: committee appointments have incredible outsized power within the US congress.
rich people spend a lot on Dems as well though. If your issue is corporate interests, then you likely don’t have any candidate to vote for.
Think for a second. Do you want Trump and Steven Miller, the little Nazi fuck face to hold all the power or not.
Don’t pout. Don’t whine. Think!
Yes, that’s exactly what he wants, that’s what he’s being paid for.
At the end of the day, it’s monied interests that are pulling their strings too. Do you just dislike how crass these particular puppets are, or do you hate all puppets? If we’re talking about the groups holding power, none of them are in the US govt.
I do dislike how crass how these puppets are. I have a few other other words to describe them.
I mean, sure, but those monied interests are in favor of secret police and mass surveillance. The other monied interests seem at least moderately sane. Like, I’m not gonna dome Mark Cuban or anything, but he’s a significantly less shitty person than Musk or Zuck. Andrew Carnegie built a shit-ton of libraries. I’d rather have us all involved in making those decisions, but I’ll take a barely-benevolent billionaire over the a sadistic dystopian nightmare one any day.
Andrew Carnegie was a massive asshole who paid for union busters to kill people. Cuban will also gladly lead you to a sadistic dystopian nightmare.
Jfc honestly I sometimes think this country deserves everything that’s happening to it. You’re seriously sitting here trying to tell me “Oh but it’s okay because it’s the good billionaires that are buying my politicians!” There are no good billionaires. It is fundamentally impossible to be a good person and obtain a billion dollars.
But Republicans are way blatant on their road to fascism. Every Republican winning term will achieve like 4 terms worth of Democrat wins of policies that benefits them.
okay, but is your issue the path to fascism, or how blatant certain parties are with their embrace of it? because in reality, many of the Democrats who will win today will still fall in line with their Republican colleagues when it comes to issues like healthcare access for trans people, as well as funding for ICE and wars in the middle east. They’ll just be less rude than their colleagues while they do it.
So what do you want people to do?
for one, people shouldn’t be assuming that any critique of their oligarchy is the result of foreign agents. treating a problem first requires recognition. Part of that recognition is realizing that the US fell to fascism a long time ago, and that both major parties maintain an illusion of democracy.
for two, people should keep working to support political outsiders who are genuinely interested in doing good. I’m watching El-Sayed’s Michigan race very closely, for example, and would certainly recommend anyone living in Michigan to vote in that race.
and for three, people should still work to demonstrate when a candidate is unacceptable. Josh Turek is currently running for senate in Iowa, and he fucking sucks. If he is elected, it will show the Democratic party at large that throwing trans lives under the bus is an effective electoral strategy, and the party will shift further right. You absolutely should not “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” because electing someone like him is honestly even worse than electing a Republican. Having him lose sends the opposite message to the Dems, that selling out trans people will not win elections. Same with anyone accepting AIPAC money, don’t vote for them. If you want to see change within a party, part of that is hammering home that they will not get to win elections unless they start meeting your demands.
I don’t have a horse in this race but this
Having him lose sends the opposite message to the Dems
seems to have stopped working at large. The idea is correct, but the result would most likely not be an expected one
Pay attention in the lead-up to the primaries as well, perhaps?
I don’t trust a single word out of anyone’s mouth. Most of my pre-vote research is done by finding previous actions of the people on the list and choosing the one that pisses me off less.
I ended up voting for a non-aligned county exec over my incumbent aligned exec because the incumbent has done nothing but fondle the corporate interests, and the crusty white guy has been all over zoning, fighting to keep industrial interests out of residential areas.
I hope you’re not a troll depicted in the post. The difference this time is there is now a lot more progressives running and gaining support and popularity to usurp corporate Democrats. Besides, the Republicans did themselves a nice job shooting their own foot with how blatantly corrupt and incompetent they have been.
“A lot more” is pure copium lmao. There are a handful, and their races have been fun to watch! I’m personally very excited for the results of El-Sayed’s Michigan race. There are still plenty of corporate Dems running this year though, hoping that because the Republicans have been so blatant in their corruption, people will vote for anyone else. Iowa’s Turek, for example, is a corporatist piece of shit who will gladly work with Republicans to kill trans people. If you live in Michigan, you absolutely should vote for El-Sayed. If you live in Iowa, you absolutely should not vote for Turek.
Anyway you’ve already called me a foreign actor so w/e, don’t listen to sane and rational talking points because they deconstruct the simple view of American “democracy” you have.
Mate, it’s easy to look up how much the parties received by donations from billionaires in this election. Honestly, I thought Lemmy of all people would know this. It’s even all over social media how much Elon Musk alone spent in this election than George Soros did in his lifetime.
You weren’t initially clear about what you’re comment is about. The cynicism of your first post did not distinguish this time that there is now more progressive Dems that ran and won than corporate Dems that remain. That should be a cause for optimism than scepticism.
a lot… 100k is a lot.
the question is: how much goes here and how much goes there.
Edit: according to this it’s 2:1 for Republicans. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-50-biggest-donors-to-the-2026-u-s-midterm-elections/
well for a group like AIPAC, most of their millions actually end up going to pro-Israel Democrats during the primary season. Apparently crypto and AI are also surprisingly big supporters of Dems this season, although this is likely just monied interests trying to build new puppets. Those groups are also spending in the millions.
It is likely that more money will end up spent on Republican campaigns than Democrat ones; having the world’s wealthiest man-baby putting his thumb on the scale will just kinda do that. but it’s predicted that this midterm election will end up having a total price tag over ten billion dollars. Those billions are coming with strings attached, for both parties.
Not true in a lot of primaries. At other times you will have to organize a candidate which is part of doing more than just voting.
A lot but not a lot when compared how much is going towards Republicans.
billions are going to both parties. if you’re able to meaningfully differentiate between five billion and six billion dollars, I’m certain you live in a different tax bracket than I do.
Statistically, the Republican party receive way more donations from billionaires. You’re just a troll at this stage. I’m sure the handler of your handler is among those donors.
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
It’s easy to Google how much donations both parties received from billionaires in this election.
Jesus, sometimes Lemmy is brain dead. It is though there is incentive to malign the Democrats…
Musk is a gigantic Nazi POS. I can’t say this about the CEO of Target or whatever.
you can’t? did you just miss the part where Target tried to sell multiple different racist costumes this Halloween?
If you think any of the multibillionaire CEOs who are bribing your elected officials aren’t the scum of the fucking earth, I have a bridge to sell you. Musk is the loudest. That doesn’t mean he’s the biggest piece of shit.
Target was probably a bad example, I stopped paying any attention to Target when they caved instantly on DEI back in like Jan 2025.
And I used to buy from there like 2-3 times a week, easy.
I mean, it doesn’t really matter what example was picked. There are no good billionaires.
You may disagree with all the positions offered but assuming they’re bots is incredibly naive.
It’s not naive, it’s their excuse to switch their brains off.
If uncomfortable thoughts only come from faraway malicious others trying to undermine your “democracy”, you can dismiss them guilt-free.
Now you can simply drop a piece of paper in a box and call it good. Nothing scary needs to be done or considered to arrest the decade long freefall into overt fascism that you wait no stop you’re thinking again.
Yeah good point, Russia has famously never astroturfed online. Also, humans aren’t bots. The word literally means robot.
FBI would like a few astros to sell you.
“But what about–”
There is no greater humiliation than saying this
I never denied that Russia trolls online; it’s a huge part of their intelligence doctrine. Also, humans direct networks of bots.
what is context? Hmm, I dunno, but I’m gonna deliberately misinterpret everything just in case
What leads to this behavior? Did you hang out behind a lot of idling buses for 20 years?
Are you a shitbag IRL or just online?
Baby’s first leading question aside, no, I don’t suffer fools in any context.
The person i was gonna vote for dropped out last minute.
i was staring at my ballot just eyes glazed over looking at two crusty old white dudes who both vocally support israel n shit. One was red and racist, the other was blue lawyer who I know actively scammed the state for millions of dollars in a shady ass class action lawsuit that ended with no money being given to the plantiffs.
This shit sucks. Do I write in the guy I was gonna vote for anyway? I sure as shit don’t want to vote for the only two fucks on the ballot, they’ll rot my community from the inside.
You vote for the least vile, and maybe next time you at least vote in the primaries to make sure “your guy” stays around, maybe even donate to their campaign or volunteer.
To be fair, one side wants more money, trans people, to not exist and women to go to prison for terminating a non-viable pregnancy before it kills them. The other side at least pretends to care about human rights. So the decision is easy. Vote against dehumanization.
voting for someone third party is actually voting against dehumanization but christ alive everybody shits on me if I ever mention voting for someone not supporting an active genocide
I don’t support genocide. I voted blue because to do anything else is to waste your vote; whether or not you like it, we’re still stuck in a two party system. Until that changes, vote blue.
Pretends to care about human rights while not caring about human rights is worse because people won’t oppose them.
I howled when this happened. Admittedly, I was day drunk and high but…
The sides aren’t the same. Voting alone won’t fix things. Multiple things can be true at once and the folks who point out the truths that complicate your narrative aren’t all foreign provocateurs.
Re: voting, I think it’s helpful for radicals to look at voting not as a means of fixing the system, but as an opportunity to have a say in choosing the enemy they will face in the courts and in the streets.
The real issue is, Voting DOES fix things.
But not “everything instantly.”
But not voting, or voting for fascists, absolutely will never fix anything.
Like Democrats are a shit ass garbage party, but there is ZERO path to any actual change and progression through the GOP. And it will probably take decades of actual effort, but people are stupid and lazy and want instant gratification. So when Dems do garbage they roll back to not voting or supporting fascists who do nothing but lie.
Maybe we just care about different things, but I’ve been voting for progressives for decades and can’t point to much of anything I’ve seen fixed. If anything, I’ve watched the world at large and our politics get worse.
I still think there’s some value in voting (see the above re: choosing the enemy we will face), but I think it’s a mistake to expect or wait for politicians to save us. We have to build a better world for ourselves and take care of each other in the places and ways that we can without waiting for an invitation or asking permission.
There’s a reason voting is generally recognised as the least effective method of civic engagement. If you’re not doing more to promote and support the candidates who stand for the values you have, you’re probably not going to get the results you would prefer.
Just remember that the least effective method is still an effective method. Not voting is what “they” want you to do.
Representative democracy suffers the problem of only representing monied interests.
Edit: I continue to vote. I continue to play the lottery.
It’s almost like every other rounds we go back to Fascism who break everything and act like government is “broken”.
And I have voted for decades as well, in High School I called myself a Communist, but overtime I have moved right so now I am merely somewhere between Socialist and Democratic Socialist.
Well said. Voting is your BARE MINIMUM civic duty, you can’t act like ur gonna tear the system down and all this shit if u can’t even go speak ur mind in the booths.
Brit here, can confirm voting also breaks things. A lot of people voted for Brexit as a “stick it to the establishment” and thinking they won’t do it anyway because voting doesn’t actually do change anything.
Please Americans reading this vote!
In all my years I have never seen a candidate that matches of with my ideals, but that didn’t mean I didn’t vote. You try to find the closest match and then nudge the needle a little closer to what you want even if it is compromised.
There may be some fundamentals underneath that are difficult to change but it does not mean that both sides are the same.
On my way to vote for segregation, because my side assures me I’m “one of the good ones.”
Lotta people seem to have missed what happened with Labour in the UK. Both sides are absolutely not the same, but let’s not pretend that a vote for self-preservation is a noble act.
And just to nip this in the bud, I did vote straight Democrat down the ticket. Just not thrilled to find out how many of those candidates will implement Facism: Now in Blue!
let’s not pretend that a vote for self-preservation is a noble act
It kind of is when half the passengers in the car are hellbent on steering everyone into a car shredder.
In your analogy, both parties want to steer the bus into the shredder, but one will do it in a way that kills fewer people, which includes sparing you. Forgive me if “Some of you will die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” isn’t a compelling political message.
I demand better than a party that asks me to allow the state to slaughter my most vulnerable brothers and sisters in order to secure my own safety. None of us are free until we all are.
I have had almost 0 noticeable change in my life from trump being elected, it’s more like I see a bus going into the shredder filled with immigrants Ukrainians Palestinians black people lgbtq+ people Iranians Cubans people who need cancer research people who are vulnerable to climate change, and I instead send the bus of Palestinians. Some of you will die no matter how i vote, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make to prevent 5x more from dying.
Every single cis person and political party is responsible for how trans people are treated.
Stop using us as a cudgel for your ideas.
“I have zero noticable change in my life from Trump”
That is super obvious.
Liberal cis folk saw what was happening and decided we were too political and that we ruined the vibe. Then you deliberately excluded us from the conversation. That wasn’t to help us.
How noble of you to sacrifice others and expect them to also sacrifice themselves.
When you just look at the numbers, that seems logical. Pick the option that minimizes suffering, right? However, it starts to become gross when you notice that it’s always the same demographics on one side of the equation.
If you’re willing to take any action to secure the interests of the majority, then minorities fundamentally do not have rights.
I’d also like to add, I’ve yet to see any indication that Democrats will take strong action to protect Palestinians. Much of the current genocide happened under the Biden administration, which assured us they were very cross with Netanyahu’s government, and then kept sending them weapons anyways. It’s not even a choice of sacrificing one group to protect another—It’s a choice of sacrificing one group so we can maybe think about initiating the process of arranging a meeting to set an action item to strategize possibly helping some people. Or at least stop hurting them… If we feel like it.
If you don’t vote in the primaries to choose which dems are on the ballot then the blame really lies on those who, like were already talking about, decided not to vote in the primaries.
Maybe try harder in ALL elections because the only reason Republicans are in power now is because of low voter turnout by democrats in 2024
I’ve been an activist for decades and during that time I’ve grown incredibly cynical. A lesson that gets repeatedly taught is the vast majority of the loud voices in a movement are smug cowards.
They don’t actually care all that much about their cause: you never see them putting in anything resembling work. Sure, they’ll throw a few bucks at a cause, maybe they’ll attend rallies or protests. But they disapear as soon as anything that requires actual effort, risk, or serious time commitment comes up.
And they sure as hell won’t make hard choices that might impinge on their idealism. They don’t know how to and are unwilling to get their hands dirty and actually fight – moral purity is more important than ugly, imperfect, but net positive change.
They’ll scream about how they’re waiting for a perfect solution … but they can’t be bothered to bust their ass to make it happen. They’re dead weight.
I fail to see how arguing that both sides are the same is going to do anything except discourage voters, which has been rampant from bots & propaganda farms even compared to previous elections.
I voted in the primaries, but this isn’t true. The winner is decided beforehand and the election is just a formality.
The last time I voted for a non-establishment candidate who won the popular vote, the DNC ignored the election results and gave the nomination to their preferred candidate instead. That’s why we got Hillary instead of Bernie in 2016.
Is that why establishment Dem candidates like Cuomo and the Michigan traitoress lost their primaries?
Didn’t Cuomo run as a independent candidate after losing the democratic primary? So I guess the whole phrase is actually “Vote blue no matter who unless we lose”.
That traitoress Fetterwoman received 49% of the primary vote, with AIPAC spending $30-$35 million on her.
We are so lucky to have El Sayed instead of her.
But don’t fool yourself into thinking this battle is won. Today we are electing multiple Fettermen and Fetterwomen from “centrist” and “swing” states. I hope they all win, they are the lesser of two evils, but they are still evil.
Or you know principled anti-capitalists don’t want to give away there power. Oh i forget everyone who disagrees with you are scary foreigners.
Trying this hard to look unbothered is a ghoulish sight.
Wtf are you talking about
I can get paid for being an asshole online? I’ve been giving away my talents for free all this time.
Recruiting useful idiots to do the grunt work for them is part of the program.
You cannot beat the capitalist system via the capitalist system. It’s faux democracy. Just a bunch of right wingers. Know your enemy.
Thats not the point of this meme
the idea is to use the flawed democratic system to slow down a fascist take over of the liberal democracy as much as possible, you may argue it will fail and thats true, that’s why it is to slowdown, it is better to something at this front than nothing at all, to there be a revolution people must believe a revolution will be popular enough to win, Lenin himself was in favor of using the flawed democratic system to help rally the support of the masses
