bloodfart
@bloodfart@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Stay Mad 13 hours ago:
lets say youre right, and the president can’t do anything to stop arms shipments. simply forcing the (it wouldn’t be swift, the supreme court works on a set schedule) case would be better than rubberstamping the appropriations of our genocidal congress.
simply forcing the supreme court to rule would be powerful!
make them put their names on their genocide! even if the executive fails wouldn’t it be better to actually try everything to stop the genocide than to simply say “nothing i could do!”?
of course, if the executive branch were so weak there’d be no reason to fear project 2025, but i’ll leave that alone.
but there are tons of ways to hamstring aid, usually it’s not explicitly listed what aid will be sent in a bill, that’s left up to the executive. in that case de la cruz could send nonlethal military supplies like food, medical and replacement parts.
in the case that aid is specified, it can be slow walked as part of a peace deal, it can be deactivated or simply sent during adverse conditions that will ensure it never arrives.
psl has been running in state, local and congressional elections since 2008.
its astounding to me how many people reply to posts like this saying “you can’t win, so dont try!” or “its going to be hard and people will oppose you, so give up!”.
- Comment on Stay Mad 14 hours ago:
it’s already like that.
- Comment on Stay Mad 1 day ago:
Oh well, if you clearly communicate your needs during the primary and fall in line for the general then why wouldn’t the democrats reward your loyalty by adopting your positions!
How clear and transparent would the upcoming trump presidency have to be for you to jump ship from the democrats and take up a position that they have to aim for in 2028?
- Comment on Stay Mad 1 day ago:
Voting for what you actually want to happen is literally the only way to communicate your needs to political parties that they actually listen to.
There are people whose whole education and job is just to know how many people in a given district that the party can pick up by adopting aspects of a particular platform.
Tell them! Tell them that you won’t vote for them unless they take up the antiwar, Medicare for all torch! Tell them that they can’t get your district without a housing guarantee and free school lunch! Tell them to stop the genocide in the only way they listen to!
It’s not a protest to use your vote.
- Comment on Stay Mad 1 day ago:
I’m voting party for socialism and liberation and you can too. They’re running Claudia de la Cruz on a platform of Palestinian statehood and an end to arms shipments to Israel.
For me there’s no better time to start building a new American political formation. If the democrats wise up and snap left when they see the third party/lack of turnout then that’s fine too.
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 3 days ago:
It looks from my reading that you do have a communist party and they ran a retired teacher in 2021.
They seem nice. Why not check em out?
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 4 days ago:
i’m not as familiar with canadian politics as i could be, who’s PP?
IIRC you have a communist party and a ml party. idk if they have a decent stance on the issues that motivate you but they’re probably not a fall in line behind the liberals party like americas DSA is…
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 4 days ago:
Biden isn’t slow walking aid. The aid that is sent to Israel from the us with the approval and assistance of the Biden regime is literally being used to commit a genocide that Biden himself is on the record as denying.
There is no middle ground to this. He’s not doing more than the neoliberal norm. I can say that because the neoliberal norm was Clinton, bush 2 and Obama, under whose regimes nothing on this scale happened!
Biden is less willing to oppose Israel than Regan was.
Now a person could take the position that it’s acceptable (either because they can’t affect it or because they approve of it) for the guns of the fascist state to be pointed outside its own borders as opposed to inside. That person would be somewhere in the geometry that encompasses fascists, liberals and cowards.
I’m not saying that to place you there, only to point out the company someone keeps with such a position.
That’s not you.
A vote, a record of what you desire for your nation, state, county and town, is never symbolic. Even votes cast for parties that lose have substantial effects regarding funding, ballot presence, event appearances, media coverage and public awareness. I am in this thread telling people to vote their politics and values because that tactical garbage is what got us into this mess.
We’re stuck in the present but we can struggle for the future. The easiest way to be a part of that struggle is to vote for it!
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
We do know if Perot functioned as a spoiler. We know because after hw bush lost a bunch of people threw around the spoiler accusation and that prompted several groups to analyze the results in depth as you said would be necessary over the next decade.
It turns out that Perot did have more pull amongst conservative voters but the electoral college effect was only to reduce Clinton’s margin of victory.
Which sounds crazy unless you grew up in an area that was filled with conservative voters who had no desire to get behind hw bush after he lied about taxes.
Clinton’s success came from being conservative enough to rob pissed republican voters from their party, not from Perot siphoning off hw bush’s base.
Anyway, I’ll leave aside the question of how anyone can suggest that a regime actively supplying and denying a genocide while suppressing protests against it doesn’t count as fascist already and ask: if you really believe that project 2025 represents a move towards one party autocracy, and you remember January 6, what makes you think that Biden being declared the winner is going to stop the fascist state you fear?
If you truly believe that the republicans are as big a threat as you say then it doesn’t matter how people vote, they’ll just attempt a coup better this time. You’d make more sense if you were telling people to arm themselves instead of vote.
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
It’s wild that you chose Perot as your example when he’s generally accepted as having not been a spoiler and his anti-nafta platform drug it kicking and screaming into daylight for everyone to see.
If anything, Perot ‘92 was a great example of a non spoiler third party forcing both major parties to actually be held accountable for their policies.
When both parties don’t represent you, vote for one that does!
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
they keep doing that because people keep voting for them. stop voting for them.
if all the people begging the democrats to move “left” always vote for them anyway, why would the party ever meet their demands when it could pick up more support by moving “right” and courting the opposition’s base?
stop supporting parties that don’t align with your values and politics!
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
me neither anymore tbh, especially when meetings are scheduled around someone elses time and i gotta take off work or whatever to make em.
if you really feel left out, just don’t vote for people that don’t align with you no matter who else is on the ticket and help out the people around you when you can.
sometimes the best activism we can do is just taking care of each other!
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
what politics do you have? what motivates you?
I like the party for socialism and liberation and it’s a great time to like them because they’re running a presidential candidate on a platform of palestinian statehood and an end to arms shipments to israel, but you might have different values.
what do you wish you could vote for?
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
every ballot is tallied. if one of the parties wants to pick up votes in your district they look at what people voted for in the past and try to either adopt that platform or clearly tell people they already have that platform.
if, as the OP states, our elected representatives don’t actually represent us, the first step is to say in a way that cannot be denied or covered up what positions they would need to take up in order to represent us.
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
if you see an option with a write in part, write in someone instead of casting a vote for a candidate you don’t like.
if there’s not an option to write in your choice, don’t fill that part out.
someone else commented and talked about being in a place where everything is pretty much dominated by the republican political machine. in those cases it might be better to focus on mutual aid and working in local county and town meetings instead of attaching yourself to a party.
if you’ve got the time, putting the screws to someone in a county board of commissioners meeting over spending a bunch of money on the local cops riot gear that they never use instead of straightening up peoples screwy culverts is a sure win.
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
sometimes i see ballots like that too. if you don’t have an option, but there’s a write in line, write in something, anything. if there’s no write in line and you don’t see a candidate you like, leave that field blank.
some places are already dominated by a party machine. in those cases it might be best to do mutual aid like helping the people around you instead of volunteering for a political party that is unpopular and going to face insane opposition anyway.
I don’t have all the answers for everyone in every case and place.
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
I like party for socialism and liberation. If they don’t have a candidate listed on your states ballot but they’re running one you can write em in.
What kind of politics do you have? I suggested psl because they’re running on a platform of Palestinian statehood and an end to weapons shipments to Israel and those issues seem to be what’s disgusting people with the democrats and republicans this go around, but what else motivates you?
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
Wow, where do you live that there aren’t any third parties that align with your values or politics?
- Comment on Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. 5 days ago:
~stop voting for politicians who don’t align with your values and politics~
- Comment on Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day? 1 week ago:
The ops question is about America. I explicitly made a top level comment about America.
When someone asked for a tldr I did not specify Irish Americans, but that should be clear from the thread, my post and the op.
You’re replying to a comment where I explicitly specified America.
America is not the world but we’re talking about America here.
- Comment on Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day? 1 week ago:
i’m not.
if you want to understand why the history of racism against irish americans after the wave of immigration in response to the manmade famine doesn’t factor into racism irish americans experience today (none, zero, irish americans do not experience racism today), read my top level comment.
the defining factors are that irish americans were integrated into white supremacist power structures and black americans weren’t, that st. patricks day isn’t treated with any reverence in the united states and is instead one of the big four drinking holidays and the negative stereotypes of irish americans from the 1800s don’t survive today in word or in deed.
i chose not to touch on the lingering economic impact of racism against irish americans as opposed to racism against black americans because they’re in two different universes. one was largely dismantled before any of us were born and the other is still systemic and pervasive to this day.
- Comment on Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day? 1 week ago:
No.
Serving a dish which is part of the post slavery white supremacist negative stereotype of black Americans used to reify the Jim Crow and segregationist regimes on the day set aside to mark the freeing of the last slaves would not be more or less racist weather black Americans enjoyed eating it or not.
Are people getting upset over nothing? I don’t know. Are some people not allowed to get upset? I don’t know.
- Comment on Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day? 1 week ago:
Thanks for catching that. I kept trying to figure out how to frame greenwood and Parrish street as similar early attempts to bring black Americans into the fold of capital, one of which saw a violent attack by the white hegemon that was opposed to expansion of capital to black Americans but it just kept not fitting.
I guess my brain just subbed it in cause I was turning it over in my head. Edited.
- Comment on Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day? 1 week ago:
Irish people are white and therefore cannot experience racism.
- Comment on Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day? 1 week ago:
Irish people are white.
They didn’t start out that way in America, because race is a social construct used by the state to achieve its ends and when a shit ton of Irish people were coming over to the United States to escape the manmade potato famine the terms of their acceptance into American society was that they’d be doing the shittiest work.
American society dealt with this contradiction by adopting the racial pseudoscience that put Irish people below “real whites”.
Whiteness isn’t something innate that can be measured objectively (although pseudoscientific methods claim to be able to do so!), it’s a basic subjective measure of where one stands in the white supremacist power structure.
The white supremacist power structure informs all sorts of stuff like can you get a loan, can you get insurance, do you need to be more afraid of dying to the cops than usual, how loud can you play your music, pretty much every aspect of life in America.
After Catholicism became more widely accepted in the us, and a shit ton of Irish people became cops (so that the white supremacist state could surveil their communities) Irish people were eventually considered white.
Black people in America aren’t white. That might seem like an obvious thing to say, but it’s important to be clear that the process of integration that the Irish immigrant wave went through was never really offered to black Americans.
A person could argue that we are living through that process right now and I think there is a process of integration going on but it’s not making black Americans part of the broader white American group but instead giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital. That’s a significantly different deal.
Anyway, there’s this thing called racism, which is where a society uses the completely made up category of race to discriminate against groups of people to achieve its ends.
Some examples of American racism are slavery, segregation, redlining, the treatment of agricultural workers, the treatment of rail workers, etc.
What’s important is that racism is when a society (or its members) discriminate against some group. There is power in the discrimination and it’s being used against a group.
If a bank decides not to lend to white people it doesn’t hurt white people because there’s literally all the other banks that they can go to and get loans. There is discrimination being used against a group in that example, but it has no power over them because they’ll just go to all the banks that (and I’m quoting directly from a Bank of America sign here) don’t “serve coloreds”.
Okay, so why am I saying this? We’re talking about food!
There’s an old stereotype that black people eat watermelon and fried chicken. There’s a long and storied history to the food stereotypes of black Americans but I’ll spare you the tangent and just say it’s visible in all sorts of Jim crow and segregation era media and arts and crafts stuff.
If you got one of those “antique mall” type places you can probably see some of it there.
During and before Jim Crow and segregation, those stereotypes were deployed to depict black Americans as at best ignorant country bumpkins and at worst subhuman apes.
So to serve the stereotypical food of a racist caricature on a day that is intended to remember the destruction of a neighborhood of black Americans is at best thoughtless reproduction of a racist stereotype and at worst malicious intentional reification of a racist stereotype!
But why isn’t it racist to serve corned beef on saint patricks day? Well for one thing, saint Patrick’s day isn’t seriously celebrated as a remembrance of Irish American culture or the experience of immigrants almost anywhere in the us. It’s one of the big four, a drinking holiday with a dress code.
It’s also not perpetuating harmful stereotype to run a homemade Reuben special on saint Patrick’s day. No one bites into a Rachel and thinks “lol, those dumb micks are only good for driving spikes, drinking and swearing allegiance to Rome” or “if only they could multiply the way they multiply, maybe they wouldn’t be so poor, sad!”
Now that’s not to say it’s racist to prepare or eat fried chicken or watermelon. As a southerner I got strong feelings about both.
But pretty much it boils down to Irish people are white.
- Comment on After 7-Year Hiatus, Western Digital Unveils 6TB 2.5-Inch Hard Drives 1 month ago:
I solder new usb connectors and all manner of other connectors on to stuff all the time.
I’m at a 100% success rate getting data off stuff that just needs new connectors.
If you need data recovered, the literal best case scenario is that it’s just got a bad connector.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 1 month ago:
i meant the claim that teslas are the top made in america cars. i looked and found cars.com’s list of the most made in america cars and their dubious Made in America Index and that’s about it.
i also want to just throw an electronics manufacturing industry scoff at the CBOs methodology. i used to work for an electronics manufacturer that did mostly pcb assembly. a bunch of the work was government contracts or prestige stuff that had to say “made in USA” on it as opposed to the more clear symbol of a hollowed out manufacturing sector, “assembled in USA”. every day truckloads of parts from china would get soldered to PCBs from iirc taiwan and that was enough to earn made versus assembled.
- Comment on Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption 1 month ago:
how was that figured out? most evs have a less complex manufacturing process and rely on a shitload of electronic components that aren’t manufactured domestically. i’d be interested to see the methodology!
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 month ago:
I cook and eat vegan sometimes. I have a bunch of vegan friends.
Vegans on the internet are really annoying.
- Comment on What's a good budget home server? 1 month ago:
What are you actually gonna be doing? Not 10 virtual machines or whatever you said, what actual services are you gonna be running?