devtesla

devtesla wrote (edited )

Reply to Please vote in November, even if Biden gets the election by twovests

I'm in a state where my vote for president doesn't matter, and I think withholding my vote sends a more powerful message because Biden is unacceptable. I will be voting for candidates I believe in downballot. I do hope he wins, but this is for an extremely narrow band of issues that only matter to me as a relatively well off white gay man. I think you are wildly naive if you believe that he'll be an even acceptable president, and that he won't be followed up by someone worse.

A few things to keep in mind:

The courts in this country are already fucked up beyond repair. It'll suck to lose RBG but she cannot do anything other than write a good dissenting opinion. The Supreme Court is fucked, the lower courts are fucked, it's all complete garbage. The only solution is to dramatically restructure the courts.

A large part of this is because of decisions made during the Obama presidency. He was so unwilling to make any fight against the Republicans that he left a ton of vacancies, and every one of them was filled by Trump without a peep from the Dems. And this is with young appointees, who will be fucking people over for decades. And speaking of RBG, her decision to not step down during a Democratic president should taint her memory, because there's no reason she shouldn't have been replaced a decade ago.

As for the executive branch, many of Trump's worst policies are just continuing things begun under Obama: the militarization of police, the ratcheting up of ICE, the weakening of labor laws. This is partly because Obama is a conservative, and partly because he capitulated reflexively to Republicans. I have no doubt that Biden will do the same, and worse.

The Democratic Party is a waste. It provides no one any safety from the Republicans, enables their worst aspects, and is complicit with horrendous crimes. I cannot actually encourage anyone to vote for them.

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devtesla wrote

Reply to Sources: Despite Huge Sales, Borderlands 3 Developers Are Getting Stiffed On Bonuses by hollyhoppet

Companies fuck over their employees very often but it's rarely so clear as signing deals that get you a $12 million bonus and means that your employees won't get promised six figure bonuses. Then, at the point where you'd usually be doing big layoffs, you dare them to quit so you don't have to pay severance. Absolute scum and they'll get away with it.

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devtesla wrote (edited )

Reply to i actually don't know why socialism is a good idea by twovests

"Socialist" in America right now basically means "liberal but angry" in the sense that our government has been taken over by extremest conservatives who do not believe that the law applies to them, but will happily kill and oppress millions of vulnerable people. What's socialist about Bernie is less his policies and more that he talks about class consciousness with people, which is necessary to stop a slide into fascism because god we are so far gone.

I am a democratic socialist because I believe in the democratic control of the means of production, that what our society produces and should not be controlled by a handful of psychopaths but a broad working class coalition. I feel that if we don't come together in this way our world is headed towards disaster. I believe in the Bernie campaign because I think the only way to achieve this is to give the working class a gradual taste of their own power, which I believe will stack on top of one another until we can make the steps we need to in order make a world habitable by all. This is all stuff that Marx talks about.

Democratic socialists generally distance themselves is from historical communist countries, though generally we acknowledge that the west has done some incredibly horrible things in the name of fighting communism. It's something to think RE: "it's never worked anywhere", it was never allowed to work because the most powerful nation in the world always stepped in to violently oppose it. A clear example of this is what happened in Chile in the 1970s, when a US backed coup overthrew a peaceful democratic socialist government in the name of free trade.

I hope this helps. I'm not a big reader into this kind of thing but I can answer any questions you have.

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