Have we as a society not yet learned our lesson to not let the internet name things?

Because if we haven’t, my submission for your consideration is Baby McBabyface.

We should come up with some kind of name for this new system. Perhaps we’ll use some Greek? That usually sounds cool.

That’s fair. Sarcasm can be misunderstood and places the work of interpretation on the reader.

I’m not really the most concise writer but complex issues can’t be easily discussed in the length of a tweet.

THIS IS NOT SARCASM :(

Tell you what, let’s meet in the middle. I’ll work on my writing skills and you work on your reading comprehension and attention span.

THIS IS SARCASM :D

I’m sorry if this got a little mean/heated. I just get really mad about certain issues. We’re on the same team and that’s what matters.

THIS IS NOT SARCASM : (

I’m sorry, I forgot we’re on the internet and Poe’s Law applies. Next time I’ll add a “THIS IS SARCASM :D” disclaimer to the end of my posts when relevant.

THIS IS SARCASM :D

I don’t know how you read a post going through all the structural problems with elections which culminates in a point about people not dealing with non-voting in an effective way and not get the point. Other people did.

THIS IS NOT SARCASM :(

This is a thread about asking why Americans don’t vote at a very high rate. I am pushing back against the sadly very common doomer narrative that people just don’t care, are lazy, or stupid. For starters it’s just wrong, but also it accepts a framing where every single individual is responsible for the current situation we’re in, and therefore they just need to change. This is an entirely unproductive way of looking at things. Individual responsibility blame games are just about making the people making them feel superior to others. It encourages you to sit back and basically just say “I guess democracy doesn’t work! I did my part!”

My comment is the opposite of advocating for apathy. I am pointing out that more needs to be done to fix this problem. If you’re in a position to be angry at people for not voting, you should go do something about that. What are your state’s electoral laws like? Could you change them? What about participation in civic organizations like unions that can organize people to vote? Are there any around you that are doing that work? Do anything other than just telling random internet strangers that they should go vote.

I have voted in most elections and my area is good about at least early voting and mail in voting. But not everyone lives in a state/city where this is the case and not everyone is in the same situation as me.

But more to the point: Go on shaming people. That has worked SO WELL in the past. Clearly there is absolutely no need to change our strategy.

EDIT: Also those policies like early voting, mail in voting, time off work, etc. are the kind of things that we need.

I’d ask you to consider how we got here. Trump didn’t just fall from the sky and started wrecking things on his own.

I could go into the whole history of the last quarter century and beyond, but to keep things simple, let’s go with a personal example:

I live in an area I would describe as blue MAGA. They regularly vote (corporate) Dem at the federal level, although local politics is very Rep dominated. My rep is a multiple term incumbent Democrat who we have tried and failed to primary multiple times, including one election where I was directly involved in the progressive opposition campaign.

As far as issues that enable fascism goes, they:

• Voted for more ICE funding and increased border security.

• Voted for increases to military spending.

• Voted to support Israel’s genocide.

• Participates in the war mongering around countries like Iran. To the extent that they had any issue with Trump’s recent war, it was a matter of poor execution rather than any principled stance against US imperialism. This matters beyond some lefty purity test. Stances like these and the policies they lead to help manufacture consent for these wars.

• Failed to press for congress to act on it’s constitutional responsibility to stop presidents from illegally starting wars.

• Voted on a Republican resolution to condemn the horrors of socialism at a time when right wing fascism is the dominant, pressing crisis in our country.

I could go on, but you get the gist. They’re exactly the kind of Democrat we’re talking about who enables the fascists to do what they do.

So… setting aside the fact that he’s probably in a safe seat anyway, what should I do come election day? Is voting for this person a vote against Trump and fascism? Is this harm reduction? Can I expect them to do ANYTHING to reign in this administration when they have not even tried to do so before? IF they’re not going to, what exactly is the benefit? And there are costs beyond what they will do in office. Incumbency comes with a pretty big electoral advantage. Continuing to support them makes it harder to unseat them later.

Yes.

As we all know, if you just keep telling people to vote, eventually they’ll just be like “Yeah! I’m gonna take off work from the job that doesn’t give me time off, go find a polling place, which isn’t close and crowded because the state doesn’t run enough polling places, then try to go there in a town without public transportation! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” Then they get there and find out that most of the local elections are uncontested and the federal ones have only a choice between no climate policy and climate policy which is insufficient but delays the necessary work until it’s too late. Then after begrudgingly voting, they realize that their districts are so gerrymandered their vote basically didn’t count anyway.

Nope, no need to change anything, we just need to keep telling people to go vote. It hasn’t worked yet, but… uh…

The way I see it, it’s more like they’re ok with it as long as the knife is pointed at someone else. Fascism is imperialism brought home. All that imperialism has been happening non-stop and even at home, marginalized groups have been subject to all sorts of terrible things.

They’ll call that less bad because it doesn’t affect them yet. And in the narrowest sense I guess they are technically correct exactly in the short term. But 1) It’s not better for those other people. 2) They don’t see how one inevitably leads to the other. The same tools they built to stop “our enemies abroad” can and are used to suppress dissent at home.

If a Dem ran that as a fucking bare minimum promised to reign in the military, police, and surveillance states and curb executive power, I’d be more sympathetic to the argument for harm reduction even if they didn’t agree with me on other things. But if they’re just going to keep enabling all of this, at best the only “harm reduction” happening is some people getting to ignore the suffering until next election.

From what I’ve been told it’s still a pretty persistent cultural problem, but I’m not Indian, so take that with a grain of salt.

I mean, of course it’s good if we get those things on a scale that will fix the problem. However, the critique socialists have of capitalism isn’t based on human nature or some moral judgement of individual capitalists. It’s based on an understanding of capitalism as a system and what forces drive it to produce the results we observe.

There is of course the labor issue, but let’s focus on the market aspect and how it relates to environmental issues for now. In a market economy, the pursuit of profit and growth combined with the laws of supply and demand create pressures that make some companies successful and others fail. This can be looked at like an evolutionary process. Survival of the fittest. Capitalists aren’t bad because they are bad people, it’s that only bad people become successful capitalists. Companies that are unwilling to engage in maximum profit seeking behavior over the long run get filtered out.

Then there is the financial aspect of this. Investors generally speaking don’t make money off of steady profits. They make money when the price of the stock increases above what they bought it for so that they can sell it for a profit. This dynamic demands continual growth. A company that is not growing is one that will be abandoned by investors or pressured to do so through ownership voting. This growth is necessary to outcompete other companies who can also seek to reinvest or acquire more capital to expand further.

These phenomena aren’t really in dispute. A pro-capitalist economist would say that this decentralized system of economic pressures creates incentives for growth and innovation. These incentives ultimately result in an optimized economy that has efficiently allocated it’s resources in the way that meets people’s needs. There is some degree of truth to this, but ultimately the claim that this form of economy produces desirable results for society demands evidence of these outcomes. It also depends on what you value. Was capitalist industrialization good for the workers who died in unsafe factories? Was it good for those in other countries which we violently exploited for profit? Was it good for managing our environment and natural resources in a sustainable way?

There is plenty of evidence that despite the progress made under capitalism, it has failed to produce desirable results in many respects as well. And once again, capitalist economists have analyses of these failures. For example, the damage to the environment is a problem referred to as “the tragedy of the commons.” While we all benefit from having a habitable environment, the pressures of the economy are such that no one person or corporation has enough of an incentive to take on the costs of pursuing that benefit on their own. And again, this isn’t merely a matter of preference for greed. Companies that choose to take on this additional cost for a relatively small return risk losing to companies that do not do so.

It is also evidently true that market competition is not always sufficient to keep companies in check. For all sorts of reasons, various industries have consolidated into monopolies or near monopolies. The basic assumptions of the market model are no longer satisfied. (Many buyers and sellers such that none have the ability to act as price setters.)

On top of the mainstream capitalist economic analysis of capitalism, there are of course additional critiques by Marxist economists, but this is already getting long enough.

Lastly, the typical liberal response is to say “ok, capitalism has these problems on it’s own, but we can just regulate it.” This sounds like a nice solution, but the problem is that these capitalists are able to convert their economic power into political power through campaign donations, media ownership, etc. We keep trying to regulate corporations, but these efforts ultimately fail or prove insufficient because the government which would pass and enforce these laws owes it’s political power to the very corporations it would be regulating. Fundamentally, the problem with capitalism is that it’s antidemocratic. A government can’t be of, by, and for the people if it depends on the wealth of a handful of capitalists more than it does the votes of the general public.

People often misunderstand what socialism is. It’s not just one thing. It’s not just “the government does stuff.” There are two core components of it: 1) You must observe and analyses the world and the relationships within it to understand how things change and then adapt to these conditions and changes accordingly. 2) That political power in society should be in the hands of the working class, aka the majority of the population.

The goal in this is to have the means by which we can collectively make decisions that we believe will benefit from society. That doesn’t mean we’ll get everything right, but at least we had that choice and we can learn from our mistakes and move on. Capitalism at it’s most theoretical is a system with nobody at the wheel. “The invisible hand” of the market guides priorities for society, not any particular conscious choice by people. More realistically, capitalism is a system in which wealthy capitalists make decisions for the rest of us. In either case, if the incentives aren’t aligned to be in favor of public good, then we don’t get public good.

Also, before you go “but China” again: I already said that I don’t agree with literally everything China, or any particular government, does. Doing so would be dogmatism. It would fail the first principle of socialist philosophy to analyze the world scientifically. I can look at their successes and failures and use that knowledge to make future decisions. Even for their successes, it isn’t automatically the case that we should copy their successes. Different times, places, and people create different conditions which need to factor into your analysis. What worked for them may not work for us, but it at least tells us something.

I know you are referring to China, and that’s true, but there’s more to it than that. We have this concept of developmental/climate justice when discussing our policies to save the environment. Western capitalists/imperialists have made use of fossil fuels for a long time now to develop their economies then use that economic might to subjugate the rest of the world and keep them underdeveloped. It is only fair that those who have benefited most from burning carbon take on more of the burden of transitioning away from it. Asking developing nations to shoulder that burden is telling them to deny themselves the benefits of the modern economy.

Ideally, the historically biggest polluters would use the wealth they’ve accumulated to help this transition. Even if it means some economic pain, they can relatively afford it compared to those other countries. In the mean time, those developing nations could make use of fossil fuels to catch up their economy to some reasonable standard before transitioning, potentially with the help of those developed nations, to renewables.

The trouble is, under capitalism, the people who hold power are the same people who have been made wealthy from exploiting fossil fuels and they have an entrenched interest in maintaining the market for those fuels so they can stay wealthy. Even if the social benefit of a green transition is evident, the threat to their profits is enough to have them fight against it. In this way, at a point in time when we ought to have already begun a transition away from fossil fuels, we have been routinely blocked by those entrenched interests.

China is a case for why socialism is better positioned to tackle this issue. When modern China was founded, it was an agrarian society previously under the thumb of both feudalism and western colonialism. Meanwhile Western countries had been industrializing off of coal and then later oil for a considerable time before this. So they made use of fossil fuels to develop their country into the modern industrialized country we see today. (Also remember that a lot of their industry was aimed at exporting to western consumers, so their development and the resulting carbon footprint can’t be entirely disentangled from western capital.) But what have they been doing with that development? China has been using it’s ability to set economic priorities and divert capital where needed to make great strides in things like solar panels, electric vehicles, and mass transit. Because at least some capital is controlled by interests who aren’t directly beholden to the profit incentive, they are able to do what needs to be done for the good of society and the world instead of allowing for markets to eternally doom them to short term priorities.

The US has an economy developed enough to take care of everyone and still develop new technology if they chose to do so for quite some time now and we’ve known about climate change for decades. We needed to start a massive project on the level of the New Deal, industrializing for WWII, or the space race decades ago, but we have failed to do that because of who controls the resources and political power in our society. The meager attempts at environmental regulation have done little to slow down climate change. It’s only gotten worse over time and at an accelerating rate that will only get worse as we experience more feedback loops.

Despite all of this, what is the capitalist class doing? They’re pushing to get rid of the few regulations we have. They’re building data centers to spend even more energy on a project that arguably won’t even benefit most people. They’re continuing to incite wars over resources. They’re building bunkers so they can hide away from the consequences of their actions. Capitalism is killing us. We might not agree with everything that China is doing, but they are showing what a government can do when it is motivated by interests other than capital.

You know, I think headlines like these might be getting to the point where they don’t even qualify as onion-like. The Onion headlines are at least clever jokes that make sense when you think about them. This is more like someone playing “yes and” with a bunch of crazy people.

This is how I feel when it comes to climate change especially. The other issues are important, but the difference between getting M4A now and later is the people it can’t help now. That’s still important, but with climate change we’re hurtling towards a disaster we won’t be able to pull back from if we keep waiting. Every time we get a Dem where the best they can do is maybe undo some of the damage the Reps caused I just feel such despair.

That and the fact that they can’t extract profits from services which have been made public. If we get free healthcare there are a bunch of leeches insurance execs that will be out of a job.

Whenever I want to sum up what capitalism is all about.