While Education and Organizing is building the parts for a new engine the rest of the year.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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look, I can understand the argument that you must vote for the most effective way to contain an evil. It's a good solid argument.
However it starts taking damage almost immediately when:
The plan to fight the evil is using the most disliked president in recent history to win a popularity contest.
They pre-emptively destroy any and all opportunities to find a better candidate to win the popularity contest against the evil.
They refuse to debate anybody just like the evil they want to defeat. Making it impossible to verify they're the one for the job.
They forcibly re-schedule the primary schedule to delay any signs that this plan might be a terrible idea.
Their age is seriously in question, their mental acuity is in question, and they also decide to dodge being in a completely unscripted environment for two hours while standing.
Certainly with all this you can at least understand why someone would rather vote third party, because this Biden option is not making me feel any safer.
At what point can we stop pointing the finger at the voters and start pointing at the guy they're "supposed to vote for"? Is there a point we can ever point that finger at Biden? Or is it like Trump,where we need to vote for him "even if he were to shoot someone in the street"?
It works better when you have an idea of what the President actually does and what direct action would mean.
Almost everything we would want to do is at the local or regional level. Want higher density housing? Your mayor and city council control that with no say from the President. Better public transportation? Same, though the President can try convincing Congress to pass grant funding for it. More and better bike lanes? Same thing. Get rid of anti-homeless architecture? All city level stuff.
School lunch programs? State government can stop it if the wrong people are there. Expand Medicare? Same. Better rail networks? Same. Ban gay conversion therapy? All state government.
Foreign policy is the one thing where the President does have a lot of control. That's actually the exception. I like Biden's approach on Ukraine--getting most of Europe to go along with sanctions at all, especially after Trump destroyed our soft diplomatic power, was amazing. His approach on the Gaza conflict is far less amazing, to put it mildly. Other than foreign policy, the position is mostly advocacy and horse trading around funding priorities with Congress. Soft power for the most part.
A bad President, especially combined with a bad Congress, sure as hell can stop the local agenda items, though. Pull the grants for cities to implement public transit. Pull Medicare expansion entirely. Don't provide school lunch program funding at all. Put judges in power who rule arbitrarily in favor of conservatives with no care for precedent.
What voting for Biden is for is to make sure the federal government doesn't overrule things built locally and regionally. That's it. The rest needs direct action on the part of all of us at different levels of government.
finally somebody gets it dude hoo lee I feel like I've been wearing the nightmare vision goggles and taking the crazy pills or something
Point fingers all you want as long as you vote to keep the rapist, insurrectionist, self-admitted wannabe dictator out of power.
Yeah Biden is only the first one so 1-3 = 2 so he's good candidate