The only people who could stop ICE from masking (apart from the people they work for) are Congress or police. Congress won’t, and states are too afraid of being declared “in open insurrection” to try. Also, whether they’d even listen to Congress is up in the air at this point.

Luckily, them being masked hasn’t stopped people compiling lists of them and figuring out who’s who in videos of their abuses.

I’d rather see legislative and activist focus on the whereabouts of the people they take; making sure they’re safe is more important to me than knowing right now who disappeared them; that info can be gotten at any time, through many means (including ones they can’t erase, like bank transfers, healthcare benefit information, etc), when these Nazis are out of power.

Yeah, absolutely.

As far as ICE goes, absolutely. They are abusing the carve-out for arrests made during the commission of a crime in order to arrest people on the street who present no danger, by treating someone’s immigration status as being on par with e.g. finding a murder in progress, where immediate arrest is “reasonable” under 4A.

Unlike “vote for the single issue you care about” - that works real well right?

No, and I’m not trying to strategize how to win as a non-Democrat, I’m trying to strategize how to get Democrats to actually win…

And the answer is kick out the centrist assholes who keep enabling Republicans, and never ever telegraph to the DNC that if they can just get their preferred candidates far enough, you’ll just roll over and do what they want.

Like it or not democracy means compromise

Wrong. Democracy means voting to make decisions. Some people compromise, some don’t. It’s not required, and you just telling people that it is is deluding yourself.

the US flavor of democracy means compromise between just two candidates.

Wrong. There are in fact more candidates (and non-participation), and people are not persuaded by being told they’re being railroaded towards ones they dislike. If we want to win in 2028, we need a new strategy, that doesn’t solely revolve around winning the primaries. We need pressure campaigns and protests if we get some corporatist piece of shit like Newsom, for example.

Throwing away your vote on other candidates does not change this.

I never said it’s smart for people to do, I said people will do it, and you need to understand and accept that, otherwise you can’t strategize around it.

As much as I wish I could pretend it signals social preference to the people in charge, it doesn’t.

Agreed; people vote according to their own interests, and the actual way to get them to vote for you is to convince them that you best serve those interests. Not to tell them “no one serves it, but we’re not as bad as the other guys”. If their interest is a single-issue, and they as a bloc are large enough to tank your win, you have to shift, or you will lose. That’s just math, and the reality of democracy.

A vote for 3rd parties may have told Kamela to go fuck herself, but now we get trump as the consequence.

Which is why Democrats should have absolutely rioted when Biden first announced he was running again for 2024, rather than letting him wait until 3 months before the election to kick it to another candidate, who had no time to prepare, and who was never selected by the public in the first place. Biden fucked us and Harris.

And it’s “Kamala”.

And because the DNC puts its finger on the scale earlier on, they end up with bad candidates in the General, and then lose. The Democratic Party has been seeing a lot of good bottom-up shifts leftwards to meet voters, but it’s much slower at the national level, and unfortunately the President is the person who most needs to match voters.

Point is, “vote blue no matter who” as a tactic does not win elections. If you just accept that a bad candidate is locked in, you’re just accepting that you’re going to lose.

and everyone has to choose between those two no matter how imperfect they are

No, they don’t. That’s the point. You keep claiming this, and then losing, because in fact there are other choices, and people make them. If this were true, Harris and Hillary wouldn’t have lost.

It doesn’t matter whether you wish everyone had to choose one or the other, you need to deal with reality as it is, and in reality people can vote third party or sit out. If you pretend otherwise, you’re gonna keep losing.

This is great to say in theory, but merely telling people this in a Beehaw post doesn’t actually make anyone vote differently.

If you actually want to win and not just have someone to scapegoat, you have to actually entice people, and if your candidates aren’t enticing people, the only actual, actionable leverage you have is changing the candidates.

4% of Democratic voters want to increase military spending.

70% of House Democrats just voted to increase military spending.

Most important quote from the article, imo.

The Trump Administration IS a Nazi Problem

ftfy

Every time I see an argument in the comments about whether people not voting Blue (but also not voting Red, obviously) are “handing the election” to the opponents, I feel like the people arguing such haven’t re-assessed their understanding of our political landscape since 2016.

The reality is that you cannot cajole thousands or even millions of people into voting the way you want them to. There’s no social or technical framework to do it. It’s literally an impossibility. You have to entice them.

I understand that the DNC deluded themselves into thinking they could, despite Obama’s nomination over the DNC-preferred Hillary in 2008, but we’ve had 3 election cycles since Obama, and Democrats have lost 2, and severely underperformed in the other, all because of weak candidates who refused to shift their platform towards the votes they were missing. And their strategy was merely to cajole people with “better than Republicans/Trump”.

If it worked, I’d hate it but at least I’d respect the utility of it for harm prevention. But it literally doesn’t work.

The fact that every discussion of changing the DNC sees the VoteBlueNoMatterWho brigade arrive to deploy this rhetoric clearly shows that they know the DNC won’t change, but rather than blame the group whose explicit job is to attract voters with their platform for being intractable to voter demands, they instead rush to ensure this argument is stated and visible.

At this point it’s not actually voter engagement or strengthening of the Blue base, it’s just preemptively attempting to construct a scapegoat for when the strategy continues not to work.

“Don’t you remember all those times when we explicitly told people online they had to vote for us? And then they didn’t? So that’s their fault, see? Yes, even though we knew what would get their votes, but refused to do anything different.”

Unfortunately, abolition is one of those things that people poo-pah no matter what agency is involved, because we’ve allowed the Right to successfully frame its changes as “realistic” and “practical”, and Democrat changes as “idealism”. People will act as though it’s completely impossible to not have ICE or DHS… despite the fact they are both younger than most of us.

My Trumper family have stopped with pretenses at this point. They’ll usually just smile smugly and ignore any questions if confronted. Republicans want this unapologetically, they just don’t want to be on the record saying it, in case it doesn’t finish the way they want.

we’d better be careful to make sure that we aren’t simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything

You do realize that copyright is solely a function of the federal government, right? There is no state or municipal copyright, it’s already the federal government who decides whether your copyright as a creator is valid or enforceable, or whether to just hand it over to another company/ billionaire.

No no, they’ve now moved on to, “well fine, it’s real, but it’s too late and/or too expensive to do anything now”.

Never been to Weltenburger, but I used to go to Kloster Andechs with my dad and grandmother to get their pork knuckles. Something about going to a kloster (abbey) and seeing the monks living there like it’s still the 1500s is very cool. Kloster Andechs was founded in 1458 with an official writ for operating as a tavern, and has been brewing since then. Imagine living in a place that’s been around and doing the same thing for 560+ years.

That right there is what we call a “First Amendment lawsuit”, kids.

Mozrella, my favorite cheese

The real means to prevent this is unionizing, which is really the answer to most other techbro-hellscape problems too. Just like Hollywood is putting anti-ai clauses in their contracts, so too will tech workers need to. Unfortunately, given that the end goal is to remove the IT workers entirely, this is still only a delay if companies push ahead, since just like scabs, there will always be people willing to sell their fellow workers down the river for their own enrichment.

But we’re not even close to that point; most tech workers think unionizing is a 4-letter word. There’s always a private chat room where folks are lamenting the absolute class-ignorance of their coworkers who are all convinced they’re going to stumble into unicorn stock options soon, despite multiple rounds of layoffs each year now being standard in tech.

The real question is what has to happen to end this horrible capitalist nightmare in general.

Her story didn’t end when she was killed, and it is very relevant that her queerness is being weaponized to rationalize and justify her killing by conservatives.

I think your “everyone else” is excluding about 1/3 of the country. Go on a conservative news site, and see if you can find one article about her that doesn’t mention her being lesbian, and understand that they do so because those sites are ‘smearing’ her to their homophobic readers, so they won’t empathize with her.

Go into a conservative space on any social media, and tell me how many are lamenting her death at all, rather than calling her a ‘professional agitator’ or saying she brought it on herself.

Yeah, even as horrible as I know conservatives are, it was still shocking how many of them were making jokes about this, or treating it as somehow making her murder okay. Between this and how many conservatives have been making open ‘jokes’ about mass-murdering the GTA 6 pride parade attendees (the existence of which is not actually something R* has said, and is mostly just these same people pushing), people need to realize that the average conservative is starting to ideate about killing queer people.

Because Wall Street knows that Trump will let them ride along for the plundering if they bribe him, and (if we ignore that no Democrat president would do this in the first place) they know that a Democrat wouldn’t… At least not in the same way.