I like to just take the opportunity to roast the fuck out of old me for my terrible code and then sit content knowing that I am now making much more stupid but better hidden mistakes 😌

I disagree on what you think my position is. Let me clarify. Doing nothing to me is letting progressives be suppressed and die so they can never organize and proliferate their ideas. Even in better political systems people sometimes have to vote strategically to ensure that.

I sincerely hope you are doing something more than just handing victory to republicans and hoping the dems find you important enough. The republicans will make sure you can never reorganize or even exist if you let them. Rather than it just being very hard under dems. I’ll leave it at that from my side.

I totally feel you on that. You’re right. The democrats are despicable for playing with their voters like that. They’ve pretty much always done that to lesser extents. It’s what the stalemate forces them to do. That doesnt make it right, but so long as they cant change the rules, its a constant they will work under.

Starving them of power would be the right choice if there was a viable alternative. But in this case the alternative will eventually starve progressives of power to simply exist. Your only options lie outside of politics and are often just straight up illegal, but you dont have a Trump to bail you out if you start a revolution, nor enough people willing to support it on the progressive side for obvious reasons.

At the end of the day, you do you, but doing nothing if the status quo is hostile to you is a losing strategy. Frustrating sacrifices are neccesary in the US political system, pretty much by design.

They should not be voted for in a functional voting system. But the US doesn’t have that. You have a system where your opinion doesn’t matter if they can get to 51% of the vote elsewhere. If you want progressives to matter, you need progressives to thrive and become unavoidable to win. One party wants to suppress and eliminate progressives if they could, and they are now in power. Progressives will lose even more foothold. The other party isn’t great either, but under them, at least progressives could grow to become that critical mass you need to make actual change in the party and prevent lawsuits like that from happening.

The democrats know the rules of the game, and so should you if you can vote. If you dont want to sacrifice any chance of progressive change, you cant pretend they don’t exist and that a party with disproportionate incentive to change for you has to do so in order for you to vote the survival of your ideals.

EDIT: Better phrasing

Parties change, even if slowly. The republicans changed to get to where they got now. 20 years ago they would have rejected the idea of a king as traitorous, but now they are embracing one. Why? Because it turns out that it wins them elections. They will reform voting when they can get the chance, but not to introduce ranked voting, but to eliminate voting and to permanently crown one of their own as your supreme leader. Which is where your chance for any voter reform ends.

For ranked voting to become something the democrats will change for, they need reliable democrat voters to care for it so much it wins them elections. We actually saw an example of this with the ousting of Joe Biden, as that was also unprecedented. Parties change if the pressure is too much. But that pressure simply isn’t there for ranked voting. And a good way to ensure it never will is to let the republicans create more brainwashed sheep that are told ranked voting is communist or some bullshit like that. At least the democrats cared a bit about education, free thought, love, and peace, which are factors you need for people to think for themselves and not be consumed in group think.

It’s indeed a shame that the Dems regressed on that issue, and that in the current system you have no alternative choice that can actually win, but sometimes holding a line is all you can do as a single person. The propaganda that the republicans are producing is exactly designed to make sure your position never holds a majority, as with the right stimulation, most people can be made to believe that being pro-war makes you a patriot and a ‘true’ American. And they’ve been winning for a long time on that front too.

You can’t vote that propaganda away completely with the current democrats, that’s true as well. But it’s incredibly hard to resist when that propaganda is entangled and mixed in with staying informed about the government and society. Things aren’t lost, but if they were hard to impossible before, it didn’t make it any easier like this, even progressive minds can be taught to reject progressiveness, so long as you get to them early and overwhelmingly enough.

Unlike the republicans who active embrace ranked choice voting? /s

If the republicans have no chance to get into office because the democrats reach a critical percent of the vote every time, it opens up the doors to a progressive party or reform within the democrats that would allow for ranked choice voting to become a debated issue. But as it currently sits the democrats are the ones in the hot seat to become the party that can’t be elected anymore, and then it opens the door for an even more right wing party to spoil the democrats vote, and since republicans benefit the most from the current system, and have a base that is far more easily controlled than democrats, the odds of being able to get ranked choice voting there are non-existent, compared to the alternative.

You can, so long as you acknowledge that them taking an anti Israel stance would most likely also lead to Trump due to other democrats feeling alienated, and thus, a Trump administration that will do even more genocide.

The sad truth just seems to be that not even among democrats that position is a majority. No matter what you voted for, it would most likely not have changed that. The US needs like 20-40 years of progressive change before the majority is ready to take on such positions, and the way to ensure that timeline becomes longer and longer, is by making choices that undercut even small steps there.

Don’t vote for the lesser evil, vote for the path towards that eventual US where your opinion is held by the majority.

No way it would happen right now if the democrats won. But so long as the constant tug of war between Democrats and Republicans happens rather than one side overwhelming the other, nobody has any reason to change other than just enough to win the next election. Political change can take a lifetime to manifest, especially in a broken two party system, but if anyone thinks it will come within a single election they’re fooling themselves. Handing power back to the party that sinks people deeper into propaganda and lies, ensures that not even baby steps can be taken forward, let alone leaps.