Kamala won’t do shit about Project 2025 either

from Dessalines’ master list of awful things Kamala Harris did in California:

To protest the mass Hannibal directive?

MC in the Fable trailers is “ugly”

She looks like a regular person

From the list:

Tried to deny a transgender inmate healthcare and endangered trans women by forcing them into mens prisons, leading to the rape and torture of at least one trans inmate.

The Democrats are, at best, passively complicit in Project 2025, at worse active participants.

But there’s a deeper issue: as long as your vote is guaranteed, they have no reason to ever listen to you, or do anything for you, ever.

You cannot tell them to protect queer people, or stop a genocide, or do anything else you want, in return. You have no leverage. The Democrats have free reign to write policy for their wealthy donors while feigning helplessness to you. In California, Kamala Harris was not only cartoonishly evil, she was corrupt. She neglected to prosecute Steve Mnuchin for ruining thousands of people’s lives; instead, she accepted his money. These people do not mean well. They are not working class. They serve their own — big business owners and landlords, investors, political elites, themselves — at your expense.

I’m not saying conditional voting will bring any radical change — for that we need to get off our asses and strike and organize — but it’s at least more sane than unconditional voting.

Here you go, the clip by itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqRNnIMDkUY

deleted by creator

…I pulled an all nighter

I don’t know why

deleted by creator

You have a few days to read his before I get embarrassed about writing a wall of text.

most human beings are just animals — scared, stupid, and impulsive

Most of us think and act as our circumstances demand. We believe what those around us believe, because we lack the energy, time, resources, and education to build a worldview from the ground up. Even here on hexbear, we absorb consensus views from our peers rather than each of us individually verifying every detail. We trust the collective intelligence, media literacy, skepticism, and good will of our community, and we trust our process of consensus.

The way propaganda works is by hijacking the consensus. Capitalists control the major mouthpieces of our society - the media and the politicians, and increasingly, the social media. They run astroturf campaigns. They launder false stories through legitimate media outlets. They tell you Saddam has WMDs and Gaddafi is conducting a genocide, and they drum it up into a consensus. Soon all your friends, family, and coworkers believe it too. When they’re not lying, or lying by omission, they propagandize by emphasis, by choice of words, by slant. They shape what is permissible to think and say. Propaganda works, and it works on everyone, including you and I. Cultural attitudes about gas-guzzling vehicles were largely manufactured by the oil industry and its media cronies. Those attitudes did not arise organically. Propaganda experts hijacked the consensus and changed the culture.

nothing disenfranchised about those shitbags driving $70k pickup trucks eating meat at every meal

As individual consumers, we can only do so much. We can’t vote with our wallets to change the power grid, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing, or commercial supply lines. There are some individual choices we can make, but they would need to be coordinated on a mass scale, and even then the impact would be limited. Sooner or later, change must come from government, and as the 2014 statistical analysis I cited showed, we do not control our government. The public has “little or no independent influence” on public policy. Whenever we disagree with capitalists on an issue, we lose. Sometimes capitalists use their stranglehold on the media to gin up public consensus, other times, as with healthcare in the US, they don’t even bother, because they don’t have to. Policy is written by money and power and leverage, not by votes. It doesn’t even align that well with public sentiment.

The other issue is coordination. Putting the onus of change on the individual is like expecting wildebeests to cross the river one at a time. Individuals don’t make change, coordinated movements make change. The issue there is that capitalist states are experts at crushing or co-opting movements. Huge volumes of propaganda, astroturfing, even jailing or assassinating movement leaders, like the six BLM leaders who died in Ferguson under suspicious circumstances in the years after the George Floyd protests. The situation is infinitely worse outside the imperial core, where entire governments can be toppled, nations invaded, and populations starved by sanctions. Capitalists have violently killed millions of people who tried to bring about collective change, including worker’s rights, rights for women and minorities, education, healthcare, and environmentalism.

Even modest gains, like the 8 hour work week, and the ostensible right to unionize, have required significant struggle and risk, and since then decades of Cold War propaganda have eroded the class consciousness and solidarity that made that organizing possible.

“Would you be willing to stop eating cows to save the rainforest?” 2% might answer yes.

If you controlled the media and the government the way capitalists do now, I bet in ten years you could persuade the public to reduce red meat consumption at least by half.

Maybe not you, literally, but say a democratic socialist government. Do things for people, meaningfully improve their lives, and they’ll start to listen.

maybe, but I haven’t found anything about notching the trees prior to Dien Bien Phu

(especially china, they can easily accept 3-4 million a year without noticing it, if they appropriately allocate workplaces)

I should learn Chinese

i just wish i knew the backstory, i was away for a little while and then there was beanis

Tell me I’m not making this up

During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong once prepared for a battle by notching all the trees along the route they expected to transport their artillery over, so when the time came they could fell the trees quickly and transport the artillery by surprise, without the Americans seeing a big path slowly forming in the jungle.

I know I read this somewhere, long ago. Does anyone know what battle this was?

A generalized and perhaps novel form of misogyny will likely be the result, with childless women shunned and shamed, not just by their communities, but directly by the state; under such conditions, violence against women, deemed narcissistic and against life, would be normalized.

Social media is already there

Frankly, if anyone wants violence, it should be you. If you truly believe we are headed toward a one-party dictatorship under Trump, and you oppose violence to stop that, I don’t know what to tell you. On the Fourth of July of all days. If you’re so certain that you’re willing to vote for a genocide, the worst thing you can possibly vote for, but violence against Trump is too far, I don’t know what to say.

Strikes?

I’m saying it’s not that important who runs the government, because the rich, the MIC, and the oil industry are in charge regardless. The only way positive change happens is if a bunch of us band together and physically force it to happen. They already have the elections gamed out, we’ve been voting for the lesser evil since Nixon, since before Nixon, and look where that has brought us.

It doesn’t matter how you vote, but there are other things you can do. Organize your workplace and community. Most of our rights were gained through strikes and other direct action. We didn’t vote in the 8 hour work week.

Voting is literally not going to do anything.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

They don’t control the media either. They are brainwashed, disenfranchised, and overworked. The establishment has decades of experience manufacturing consent, and when that doesn’t work, they ignore the people outright. 70% of Americans want public healthcare and it’s not even in the realm of political possibility.