The moderate wing of fascism as one very smart guy once said
Duterte was getting closer with China. Marcos represents a reversal, or maybe more accurately a return to complete submission to the United States.
Depending on what you mean by 'fighting the system' I think we're saying roughly the same thing. Electoral politics is upon us right now though, and in truth is always there to be dealt with, so needs to be engaged with constantly.
I'm saying the exact opposite. Electoral politics is something to spend something like 1% of your political thoughts on unless you are personally running or supporting an electoral anti-capitalist campaign. It is a distraction that gives you the false impression that your lone vote or nagging people to vote for capitalist politicians is doing anything good, let alone worth spending any real time on. If you're spending much of your political focus on this you're just a dancing monkey for the ruling class. This includes local campaigns. If you deviate from this line you'll actually be working against the oppressed and marginalized people around you and in other countries.
Make sure your representative knows your name and what you stand for.
A complete waste of time. You do not matter, politically, as an individual. The other people who have their ear have tens of thousands of dollars to drop on them. You think you're going to compete with that by having the super smartest arguments and "a relationship" with this stooge that knows exactly who butters their bread? At most they will use you as a prop for their own ends. And if they are a capitalist politician, which is nearly all of them, you will be speaking to a brick wall that will never do what is necessary for justice.
From what I can see they mostly don't get that much input from voters, so your voice is louder when you talk directly to them.
Bruh liberals are constantly organizing letter writing campaigns and calling offices and trying to get meetings with their reps. They are routinely ignored. Only organized actions with leverage ever do anything and again, it's only within very limited confines of capitalist discourse.
In contrast, donors get to go to special events at the mansions of party insiders where they get to tell the candidate all about their latest Brown Child Exploder 3000 and how important it is that they don't get in the way of its sales and hey here's $30,000 from all of our executives that just happen to be donating to you as individual private citizens.
You do not register on their radar. You're the goofball they make fun of to their sides later. At most they will use you as practice for how to handle people that want things they will never be provided with.
The electoral system can be changed, but as you say, it'll take fighting for that.
In your mind, what does it mean to change the electoral system and how does it compare to what is necessary to undo the intrinsic violence and disposession of the capitalist system?
Fighting the system directly won't gain much as it's just that, a system.
Why not?
It'll have to be a 'hearts and minds' job amongst the electorate to show people there is a better way and get them to vote for candidates who support that.
You do need to communicate with the public but feeding into the false notion that you're just going to vote out capitalism will lead to almost immediate distrust because you will fail right away.
It can work, that's ultimately how things have drifted to the right over time, people believe that's the 'better' way.
You think people have drifted to the right because they were offered a better future by politicians that had personal relationships with random right wing constituents?
You'll notice that this is a city council run by Democrats.
The dehumanization and abuse of the homeless is a bipartisan position. This is because it is a fundamental product of capitalism, where those most impoverished do not have any humane guaranteed place to live. Compounding this, business owners, through the process of becoming more interested in their own profits than in the well-being of their business' community, treat those who live on the streets near their businesses as merely a threat to their incomes.
Those business owners are who actually control your city councils and your presidencies and your frocked-up supreme court. They also fund the party and PACs and PR firms that are telling you this highly non-strategic advice of "just support this party it's the good guys and very smart". This is an example of why they are in power and you are not - they control your actual political brain.
In reality, you should join us in fighting against the system itself, as it will never deliver what is necessary, and it will actually fight against it instead. This does not mean never engaging in electoral politics, but it does mean actually understanding it and putting energy into that which actually builds our cause and helps our neighbors.
For additional context, the MK-84 is manufactured by General Dynamics and the JDAM systems they are usually retrofitted with are always manufactured by Boeing.
Both companies are weapons manufacturers for this genocide. Both are also unionized "good job" companies. It's very important to not be knee-jerk pro-union, but to understand how one's own participation in their country's economy impacts everyone else. Say no to bomb manufacturers. If you work for a weapons manufacturer, change jobs as soon as you can. If you work somewhere that does business with Israel or weapons contractors, consider organizing your workplace against that (you may get fired but Palestine is more important).
With Lemmy, entire instances can be more like a single subreddit or a small set of them. Comms often lack clear distinctions in topic or focus and this is particularly true for small instances. They look more like the old-school forums that Reddit replaced but with better tooling and interfaces and ways to discover them.
Some of the large instances, by contrast, have complete Le Reddit brain and constantly want to speak to the manager about you daring to contradict them. That's not the curated liberal echo chamber they signed up for! Nor what the admins nor their mods signed up for! They just wanted another Reddit with some vague nonsense about open APIs and they are, predictably, constantly shedding users back to Reddit.
Kurzweil is a "futurologist" crackpot that just makes shit up and is constantly wrong.
At this rate he really just might die in September.
Oh she definitely does
Echoes of the electoral logic of the Weimar Republic.
They could do it just by walking around corners without wearing their bell collars.
Bowman left the DSA and talked a little shit about it a while back lol. This was roughly around when DSA was infighting about Palestine, with its large liberal contingent clutching pearls over the DSA BDS group. Many folks wanted to kick out Bowman, including that group, because of his vote to fund the Iron Dome.
It's a pretty great encapsulation of overall DSA electoralism that their guy isn't even in their side, isn't even transactional with them, he literally just thinks they are a group that will give him last-minute free help even though he craps on them. He's also probably correct about that but also in proper DSA fashion didn't plan anything early enough and therefore flailed and fucked up wasting a bunch of resources and losing.
Hey that's not fair.
They also do a lot of drunk driving