The 2020 Presidential General Election thread

Well sure, that's obviously the case. But do you think your ideal society (or even something close to it) will be achieved through armed revolution? Or will it be achieved through a democratic process? How do you see it happening?

I can't wait until you discover books and the internet.

I think you may have just won the Internets for today.

Pretty clear Amaris is pro-totalitarian armed revolution. Clearly we can't have people voting for these things, they are too important!

And with that, why would anyone care about any other point this individual cares to make?

Marxism is an abject failure. While capitalism has so brutal flaws the US as a nation is behind the curve on redressing, other nations have been more successful there.

And once the revolution starts, you never know who is going to end up against the wall.

That depends, and while that may seem like a non-answer answer, the truth is there are so many factors that lead up to a revolution, armed or otherwise, that trying to accurately predict which one would be the most effective, the most beneficial, requires far, far more data than we have available. That said, revolutions themselves are rarely orderly creatures, requiring an informed, educated population that I'm not sure exists in the US at the moment. The US has had many generations to convince its citizens it's the freest nation on earth, and that kind of propaganda does not disappear over night. Republicans and Democrats have no desire to remove it, either, because it serves each interest to maintain the idea of the city on a hill, a beacon of freedom. It's why Democrats AND Republicans share so many commonalities. When it comes down to it, both wings are attached to the same bird.

So the answer is that it depends upon a shitload of factors that can't really be reliably predicted this far out.

Because anarchocommunists are all about pro-totalitarianism.

That gave me a flashback to 1968. Guy I had a crush on at the time (not reciprocated, mercifully as it turns out) used "Up against the wall, muthafuckers!" all the damn time. I asked him why armed revolution was necessary; he just shook his head and said "You'll get it eventually." No idea what happened to him, but I'm guessing he wasn't on the front lines.

Yeah, I was 18. I thought all of Earth's troubles could be solved if we all just lived in communes and shared everything. Note: I was 18. Eventually, to quote @Amaris, you discover books (no Internet in 1968), you have experiences, you learn, you mature.

Some of us, anyway.

They are if they want a revolution to impose their order without elections.

That's absolutely totalitarianism.

lol no.

That's not a sign of maturity, it's a sign of indifference to evil when it becomes inconvenient to shine a light on it.

I know you're trying to play gotcha here, but, most the the scant few progressive victories and ideals that have gotten passed were the result of radicals from minority groups.

SNAP (a program for food distribution) was created by the Black Panthers, for instance.

MLK was an open socialist and was hated more for this than the racial equality stuff.

White folks from both sides of the aisle misappropriate their words but yes, a lot of us are decidedly anti-capitalism because what good has it benefitted us?

(And y'all clowns better not reply with some fool ass bullshit like "It's better than being in Africa!" )

So are you preparing for armed revolution, or just talking it up to send other people out there?

https://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3321172/

Just remember, if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

I feel like the French Revolution is the perfect example of an armed revolt against an entrenched elite going terribly, terribly wrong. The reason the American Revolution succeeded is because nothing really changed--the ruling elite remained the same, except they were no longer tied to Britain. In France, the elite were specifically targeted. Violence begat violence, and the Revolution turned on itself. A strongman appeared, wars were fought, and the elite reasserted itself. The toppling of elites through violence will only result in a new elite that will defend its status with more violence...or utter chaos. It's not a viable way of changing governments for the better.

Aww, you just stole @oldfella1962's best line!

I hear the rains in Africa are pretty nice, though.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Something must fill the space left by the previous occupant, and since humans are creatures of habit, they move in the direction by which they're most comfortable. It's why reactions to rocking the boat are seen as extreme rather than as necessary. Look at how the US, for example, approaches climate change. It's a real, tangible threat to humanity, something that could destroy most life on earth before it can adapt. Yet what do you read about in the (U.S.) news? How to offer economic incentives to corporations to assure compliance. How do we structure the economy for a changing environment? Articles about how expensive it will be to make necessary changes. Why? Because the framing of keeping normalcy as something wholly and truly cataclysmic bears down on us is paramount. People want to believe things will return to the "normal" they understand.

The economy is made up. It's not real. If every human died tomorrow, the economy would go with it as it never existed outside of a phantom illusion in their heads. The whole system is built on a single concept: "this exists, is stable, and has merit." Yet it gets more precedence than the very real changing climate that won't care how high or low the stock market goes before the end of the business day. So even though the economy isn't real, the illusion that it has value is what keeps things moving. It's what people are used to, what they believe in, because it signifies structure, normalcy, the status quo.

When there is a sudden vacuum of power, the status quo seeks to fill it with something as similar as the previous figurehead in order to maintain order and stability. People will kill to maintain that order and stability, even if the cost is millions of innocent lives in countries those people will never see. In short, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." The longer a system has to entrench itself, the more normal it becomes, the more it becomes "just the way things are." It's why most U.S. citizens see communism as an evil, as something that doesn't work, not because it doesn't, but because it's the opposite of what they've been told works. If you're raised to believe star bellied sneeches are inferior, you will continue to believe that narrative until a piece of data causes you to stop and rethink it. Most people are too focused on maintaining normalcy to look for that evidence. To quote yet another old saying, "it's better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don't."

None of this takes away from the issue that eventually people become desperate and they make decisions, good or bad, to change their circumstances. Unfortunately, most people are still chained to their old beliefs when this happens, and so a desire to repair the foundation of the house and build something better just results in another room being added, and the foundation continues to crumble. The United States has a crumbling foundation, one built on the enslavement of human beings as its primary economic motivator. It has never moved on from that exploitative system, only adapted it to other forms as human sensibilities caught up with the evil of each system. In some sense, that can be considered improvement, but in many other ways, it's important to remember that those systems never went away. We still have slavery. We still have exploitation. Hell, we still have debtors prisons in this country.

For the past, oh, handful of generations, the US moved from trying to fundamentally shift its foundation, to merely making the house itself look better. Black men are still likely to go to prison more than white men, but the police chief who signs off on their arrest is a black woman, and so on. I'd dive down more into it, but I have to get some work done at the moment.

Suffice to say, yes, revolutions can be bloody, violent, and still end up with the same old boss back at the top, but it doesn't have to be that way, nor is it a foregone conclusion.

US government ineptitude. Trump and his cronies dropped the ball so badly I don't even know where to begin

And blacks overwhelmingly voted for Biden over Sanders why again, exactly?

We understand the historic roots of black identity politics and socialism.

There's pretty explicit proof however that that is not where the community as a whole currently is. Indeed, there's quite a bit of evidence that blacks are more conservative than white liberals when it comes to this - and it's always been explained to me that is because they fear they have more to lose in an unstable environment. I tend to think that is true, white supremacy being what it is.

If the black community was largely socialist, we wouldn't have Biden as president. Period. The black community is how he got there.

The first story is mostly not true, but even to the extent that it is, I don't think anyone has any objections to the Black Panthers feeding children, and it still took electoral politics (which, according to the legislative record, were inspired almost entirely by the Committee on School Lunch Programs report) to turn it into a national program. Black Panthers fed 10,000 kids a day, optimistically. WIC and SNAP feed millions. That's what electoral politics get you.

The Black Panthers engaged in mutual aid to directly address the needs of the people who were constantly ignored by electoral politics because those people were black and their voices didn't matter. Electoral politics don't cause change, and they only work as long as people have a conscience. Stokely Carmichael made the very correct point that America has no conscience, which is why it takes violence, sometimes, to spur people into action. The state uses violence against people every day, and no amount of voting stops it when people are convinced the state is in the right.

*that's what people who care get you

Electoral politics, by giving power directly to the populace, increase the chances that someone who cares will use their power to get you WIC . . . but also allow the chance that an apathetic/other-interested majority will drown them out on that level as well