Regex is a write only language.

Anecdotal, but our chapter of the DSA (not radical enough for me, but it’s what I’ve got around me) is growing rapidly. New member orientation has been standing-room-only since the election.

The Democratic party has just officially morphed into the Republican party of 30 years ago. They trotted out the Cheney’s ffs.

Not like it matters. We’re not voting our way out of this situation, the fascists won’t let anyone take power back now that they have it. It’s revolution or a technofeudal hellscape.

Ding. Both major parties have abandoned the working class, and a whole lot of people have given up on the system as a whole. Give a real choice that has a chance and people will turn up. But that means the politics-as-sports folks need to hang up their team colors, and that’s only going to happen by spreading class consciousness. No war but class war.

Liberals are pro-capitalism, which is the ultimate mechanism for inequality.

“Neoliberalism” isn’t a pejorative, it’s a political philosophy that has dominated the Western world for about 50 years, though it has roots much further back. It is a philosophy embraced by both Republicans and Democrats. It’s about privatization of services, lowering taxes, and deregulating corporations. It’s why we have for profit healthcare in the US, for example.

Good, good. Let the hate flow through you. Come to the left side where we want to rid ourselves of the capitalist class entirely and stop trying to negotiate with them through their puppet political parties. You are so close, I feel it in the force.

I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?

I didn’t abstain. I voted for a candidate that didn’t support genocide while living in a solidly oligarch controlled state. What you would probably call “throwing my vote away.”

But no voter had a say in this past election. It was a struggle between the corporatist and oligarch branches of the capitalist class, and the oligarchs threw more money at buying the election.

That’s it. No need to vote shame, regardless of if someone did or did not vote. It should be blatantly obvious by now that the Office of the President is (well, was) a rental. Now the oligarchs bought it from the corporatist landlords and plan to remodel and reside in it forever.

There is no war but class war. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. Organize. Let’s make voting useful again.

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Just so I understand, you’d rather wait around until the complete collapse of society rather than take five minutes to go vote, is that right?

Given this response, I’m guessing you read less than a paragraph in to my original response and decided you needed to wield your superior intellect and values and produce a “gotcha” response while not actually understanding what you were reading.

You don’t actually own anything of value, like a house or a car, I take it.

I own a relatively large house and multiple cars. I have a wife and a dog and a daughter and a granddaughter. I have lots of completely unnecessary consumer goods. Likely I’m more well off than you. Just because I can play and succeed in the capitalist game doesn’t mean I don’t recognize it for the oppressive system that it is and sympathize with the people that didn’t get as lucky as me.

You so badly want to pounce you have to build a straw man to dislike instead of trying to understand a perspective different from your own. You are a petty person.

What do you think a revolution is if not a collapse of the previous system?

Edit: also, it has already collapsed. That should have been evident in the 2016 primaries.

There has never, ever been anything approaching a protest that starts with the words “sitting out”.

In a sense you’re right, but it seems like a lot of people participating in this discussion may have a misunderstanding of the history of disagreements about electoralism on the revolutionary left.

Historically, some members of the left don’t want to waste time and resources participating in electoralism that could be spent doing other things that contribute to the revolution that will happen when the Bourgeois electoral system inevitably collapses.

Others want to participate to signal the point when that collapse has inevitably occurred because the corruption will have become blatantly obvious.

Personally, I don’t think just going in and voting counts as the kind of participation that theory is describing (that is, running in elections, participating in campaigns, etc.)

On the other hand, it has also become blatantly obvious to me, personally, at this point that on a national level my vote just doesn’t count. My vote is dictated by the capitalist class owned and controlled media telling everyone which states will vote which way. The puppet politicians aren’t vying for popular support, they’re vying for oligarch support and the media they control to sway that population. It’s voter manipulation on an unbelievable scale that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I can’t ignore that it has become blatantly obvious to me that the system is rigged by the capitalist class, and participation in it (at higher levels) is pointless.

They already overthrew their government and embraced socialism. You act like they want to overthrow their current government. They live decent lives. Better than ours. Our media lies to you about them. They are largely happy. I know it’s impossible to imagine that, what with living in this nightmare, but it’s possible when your government treats you as more than consumables to be exploited for profits.

How many times must I write the difference between corporate controlled platforms and governmentally controlled internet?

Oh, the burden you must bear dealing with us know nothings.

The same corporations that own the media own the government. There is no difference between the two in the United States. This “democracy” is a sham. This is an oligarchy. How many times do you need to be told this before you get it?

Just putting a fine point on it.

US users make up about 17% of TikToc’s global user base. Selling their addictive algorithm to keep a small number of users was never going to happen.

And what hand waving? It was banned because the US government could not control the flow of information to its own people like it can with all the other US corporate/state owned media. The data collection nonsense is just that. If they cared they could have regulated data collection across the board. Foreign countries abide by host countries laws all the time, see GDPR and similar. But that would have cut into the profits of other corporate/state controlled media outlets like Meta and Google.

Thanks, comrade!

The US government literally just effectively banned a social network through government mandate.

US corporations are the US government. They outright own it. US media is state media with extra steps.