It’s like banging your head against a brick wall inevitably causes you to see the truth, but at that point your brain is so addled that you are hallucinating the truth, despite your best tries at avoidance.
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Cake day: February 18th, 2025
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Buuut it’s your guy’s fault, if only you’d have voted for the less evil of the two evil guys we’d have a waaaay less evil guy doing less evil guy shit and being waaaay less evil-y obvious about their evil shit. Don’t you see? You made it obvious that the evil guy is an evil guy, instead of the less evil of the evil guys, damnit!!!
In this post: making a case against electoralism without realizing they’re making a case against electoralism…
And Batman doesn’t exist, so the quote still checks out. But, if he did, he shouldn’t either. Absolute Batman has a great take on Batman as a poor, working-class person. I think Batman works better as that. Batman inherently is problematic, as a billionaire playboy beating up mentally-ill people. (This coming from a Batman fan myself).
I can see that. I think there was one progressive blip in US politics, and funnily enough Roosevelt was pushed left-ward by the communist and socialists of the era to get the New Deal passed. And we’ve not seen such a progressive slant in US politics since. That’s what happens when you get a major purge of progressive parties from the McCarthy era forward. Communist and Socialist parties used to be much more prominent in the early 20th century until they we’re practically eliminated, now they’re a shadow of what they once were.
A fantastic book covering the American political system, is “Democracy Inc” by Sheldon S. Wolin, which wrote about how the system is constructed to give the semblance of democratic participation but, is in fact, what he terms a “managed democracy”, in which the levers of the democratic processes are manipulated to a minute degree. He wrote this book in ~2006, I believe, which just goes to show how long this horse and pony show has been going on for (probably FAR longer).
Yes, I appreciate that Bernie moved me further left than I was already. Although, if I had more political consciousness before Bernie arrived on the scene, that shift would have happened irregardless. I dropped out of politics for about a good decade (after being disillusioned with Obama’s first term) and he got me back thinking that a real progressive had a shot.
But after the last ten years, it’s quite evident that the progressive wing of the Dems are merely a pressure release valve, same that the Dems are for the Republicans. It just keeps people endlessly mired within the constraints of a system that will not move leftward no matter the consequences of not doing so.
After reading enough Marxist literature, it’s clear Marx was right, and that only a revolution ending in the dismantling of the current system and installation of a worker’s controlled one, will create any meaningful and lasting change for the working classes.
“If we the voters can kick this football, then the Dems will move left”
That guy looks like a real life Mac from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, giving off mad Mac vibes too.
It’s amazing to me that you could read that quote, and your take, unironically, is exactly the sentiment that Arendt was warning about.
Ugh, so true. The insidious nature of Steam is the fact that they’re basically a PC gaming business monopoly, but they’re benign compared to other corporations, so gamers tend to turn a blind eye to that fact, or find various grasping ways to convince themselves otherwise (there’s still Epic and GOG! etc). The fact that 80%+ of PC game sales are through Steam doesn’t seem to faze or disturb them, when it most definitely should. What happens when Steam drops the facade? I imagine it won’t be long before Steam turns into the badguy.
51·1 year agoThat’s exactly it, I almost used the good cop/bad cop analogy for my original comment. It’s been glaringly obvious that the dems are just a pressure-release valve for people’s anger for some time now. They never live up to any of the expectations that people have for them. At this point it is a cruel Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown facade. And democrat voters eat it up every time.
Now the biggest sentiment from liberals is “this is your fault, if only you’d voted for the dems”, when it is largely irrelevant if voters do. The dems are just a friendlier looking version of a corporate controlled imperialistic government. The sooner the people realize this, the sooner we can actually mobilize people against the real enemies of the people, which is corporate control of both political parties. Until class-consciousness manifests itself on a much larger scale, we’ll continue to play these stupid corporate controlled dem vs repub games and win more stupid prizes.
It’s this rhetoric that plays perfectly into the class divide that the corporate asshats want everyone to fall for. “It’s your fault for not voting for the other corporate shill party!” Disregarding the fact that the main difference is one party is just mask off, and the other is mask on fascist. As many people rightly point out, the dems are controlled opposition. If they weren’t there would literally have been much more fight and pushback from them for the four years before Trump 2.0 (especially since they knew it was coming faaar in advance) rather then the milquetoast response we got from them, this was made quite obvious by the dems moving right in many policies and stumping with Cheney of all people. If these people really gave a shit about appealing to their constituents, they would’ve listened to the damn voters. This is all beside the point as modern American voting IS NOT determined by the voting public, but much more powerful interests. If you really believed your vote was effecting something in this, or any other election in the past 20+ years, I have a bridge to sell you in the Sahara.
Yes, yes! Embrace the power of the dark side!
After the past twenty years, coming of age during the Bush W years, I’ve tried hard to resist becoming a misanthrope. But good, goddamn is it harder than ever before. I thought it was bad (and it was) when W. was the president growing up, but the amount of insane and woefully misinformed and hateful people in this country has reached a fever pitch I never could have imagined back then. It’s truly awesome in the most negative sense of that word.
Sheldon S. Wolin talked about the fact that the US system was a “managed democracy” and a form of “inverted totalitarianism” in his book Democracy Inc about twenty years ago. In a managed democracy the pretense of democratic voting is maintained, but the system is so heavily managed as to render voting ineffective and largely irrelevant. The US voting system is so heavily gamed that to expect the average US citizen to have any power through the ballot box is laughable.
50% of the time I pass everytime