I’m on a mailing list for Claudia and got this today. Kind of funny since last week the Democrats tried kicking de la Cruz off of the Georgia ballot.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
    29·
    3 months ago

    If you’re not going to “vote for any of these”, what is your plan?

    How are you proposing to run society, get food, healthcare, education, have roads, clean water, internet connectivity, power, law, and all the other things that make it possible for you to express yourself here today?

    • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      45·
      3 months ago

      Different people here will have different methods, this is a Left-Unity instance, though most are Marxists or Anarchists.

      How familiar are you with Leftist Theory?

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
        17·
        3 months ago

        I live in a country where, unlike the US two party system, political parties span the entire range. So much so that it appears that at the extremes there is little to differentiate between them.

        I’m familiar with their “solutions” to complex issues.

        I think H.L. Mencken captures it best:

        “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

        In other words, being a society is complicated, it’s messy and ultimately a reflection on human nature.

        So, pick your path as best as you can. This is what I try to carry with me:

        Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

        Source: https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html

        • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          44·
          3 months ago

          I live in a country where, unlike the US two party system, political parties span the entire range. So much so that it appears that at the extremes there is little to differentiate between them.

          There exists no such country where Communists, Liberals, Anarchists, and fascists all compete in some grand electoral game.

          I’m familiar with their “solutions” to complex issues.

          These are?

          In other words, being a society is complicated, it’s messy and ultimately a reflection on human nature.

          Don’t see the point of this comment, you’re implying we have simple worldviews and yet you think Human Nature matters at all, as though it isn’t shaped by Material Conditions and changes with Mode of Production throughout history. You just say “it’s complicated,” shrug, and offer nothing, no suggestion nor critique of Leftism.

          I ask again, how familiar are you with Leftist Theory?

          • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
            18·
            3 months ago

            There exists no such country where Communists, Liberals, Anarchists, and fascists all compete in some grand electoral game.

            Australia does, as far as I’m aware, have political representation for all of those alternatives and provided me the opportunity to vote for any of them, although we tend to dislike the fasists since they have a tendency to want to end society.

                  • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                    28·
                    2 months ago

                    CPA doesn’t really do electoral entryism (and is probably the most hexbear approved Australian communist party). Socialist Alliance (ex-trots) do earnestly run for government sometimes, but are part of a gaggle of minor parties whose preferential votes disappear often, though they’ve gotten to city council.

                    This is just based on my local experience of being around them and volunteering, I haven’t gotten into a discussion about their paths to power. There’s a tacit acknowledgement that a dozen part time nerds is probably not changing much so while they occasionally scoff at each other, there’s also a lot of cross-pollination and protests etc organised between them (and a few others).

                    Electorally, both of their voters generally wind up preferencing the greens, which are a big tent left party with the occasional embarrassing Malthusian, or Labor which is a blairite shit pit with the occasional left radical member.

                    Recently, the Australian electoral rules changed which increased the requirements for a party to be on the ballot, but I actually don’t see that changing much in terms of actual electoral results.

                    I think realistically Australia is going to be one of the last countries with a population over 10 million to go red, despite the efforts of my comrades. Wealthy, high minimum wages, white settler nationalism very strong, most rabid antiCPC reflex etc.

                    I did meet a Cuban delegation through the CPA and Socialist Alliance, which was nice.

                • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  21·
                  2 months ago

                  Yeah, so the Australian communists hypothetically get elected and then exercise state power to liquidate the capitalist class? Is that how you really think the world works?

          • heggs_bayer [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            30·
            2 months ago

            I looked up the guy that quote was from, and umm…

            As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of… representative democracy… which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors

            He seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism but never in its American form. “War is a good thing,” he wrote, “because it is honest; it admits the central fact of human nature… A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid.”

            Mencken recommended for publication philosopher and author Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living and called it “a really excellent piece of work”. Shortly afterward, Rand addressed him in correspondence as “the greatest representative of a philosophy” to which she wanted to dedicate her life, “individualism” and later listed him as her favorite columnist.

            In addition to his identification of races with castes, Mencken had views about the superior individual within communities. He believed that every community produced a few people of clear superiority. He considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural elitism and natural aristocracy. “Superior” individuals, in Mencken’s view, were those wrongly oppressed and disdained by their own communities but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement, not by race or birth.

            Bufe [wrote] that some of Mencken’s statements were “odious”, such as his claim in his 1918 introduction to Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ that “The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world”.

            how-compellingsmuglordwall-flipped

              • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                8·
                2 months ago

                This has to be the funniest case of a liberal smuglord stumbling in here thinking they are the smartest person in the room about to educate us simple minded commies and getting absolutely shredded in recent memory, very old school r/cth vibes. I love you all

                rat-salute-2

                • roux [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
                  4·
                  2 months ago

                  I always wanted to start a dunk session. I just never imagined I would do it with a post in the_dunk_tank lol. The post was mostly meant to poke fun at the sign co-opting too. Didn’t expect an Australian trying to lib-plain US politics to those of us who are actively getting crushed by the US machine…

                  I think this is probably my best post on hexbear now, but also the amount of info that other hexbears just bring with fire in dunk sessions has always impressed me.

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          31·
          3 months ago

          I live in a country where, unlike the US two party system, political parties span the entire range

          No you don’t

          I’m familiar with their “solutions” to complex issues.

          So you’re familiar with Marx? What a coincidence, so am I CommiePOGGERS

          Ok, let’s confirm your “familiarity” with the most basic question imaginable…

          According to Marx how many sources of profit are there?

          In other words, being a society is complicated, it’s messy and ultimately a reflection on human nature

          Define human nature, use as many words as you need

          • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
            9·
            2 months ago

            Hey! Their country is completely different! Unlike the US, which just has a far right and right wing party, they have both of those and a centre party, and a vaguely centrist party that claims to be left that never gets elected! It’s completely different!

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          17·
          2 months ago

          I live in a country where, unlike the US two party system, political parties span the entire range.

          Entire range of neoliberalism maybe.

    • Preston Maness ☭@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      41·
      3 months ago

      How are you proposing to run society, get food, healthcare, education, have roads, clean water, internet connectivity, power, law, and all the other things that make it possible for you to express yourself here today?

      The party in question (PSL) actually has taken a stab at what their vision of the first ten years of a socialist United States would look like:

      https://1804books.com/products/socialist-reconstruction-a-better-future

    • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      34·
      3 months ago

      What does any of that have to do with the specific neoliberal system we live under? Do you think if we didn’t have a gerrymandered, bourgeois, “democratic” republic exactly like this one society would immediately collapse?

      Your comment seems to imply you think the range of stability stretches from Kamala to Trump.

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
        15·
        3 months ago

        Your comment seems to imply you think the range of stability stretches from Kamala to Trump.

        I don’t live in a country where those are voting options, so no.

        I was attempting to ask the OP what they were planning if they didn’t like either of those choices, but it seems that question has gone unanswered.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          26·
          2 months ago

          I don’t know what you want @Nakoichi@hexbear.net to specifically say, but they’re a left wing anarchist, so thats the alternative being proposed. There are centuries of books on what leftists want, it’s not a mystery or something we avoid talking about.

          We’re not liberals who are advocating for making tweaks or legislation. We don’t want to operate the current situation. We want to overthrow the current social arrangement and elevate the working class to the status of dominant political and economic authority. The particulars of how the working class will exert this dominance has to get figured out on the way because of things like geography, culture, historical conflict, etc.

          So we don’t have the answer on how exactly a socialist America would look, because we don’t even have a united front yet to realistically take power. Why worry about what color the drapes are gonna be if we don’t even have a foundation yet?

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      3 months ago

      How are you proposing to run society, get food, healthcare, education, have roads, clean water, internet connectivity, power, law, and all the other things that make it possible for you to express yourself here today?

      Well first you should stop voting for people who are responsible for degrading the government’s ability to sustain all of those things that make it possible for you to express yourself here today, that includes Republicans and Democrats

      Before advancing any prescription, the principle of DO NO HARM must first be applied, that holds true in medicine as well as politics

      Also helps to have a basic education in concepts that seem to be out of your depth like; Socialism, leftism…or general anti-fascism