I don’t acknowledge that the US has “democratic institutions.”

Well, I’m not sure why I’d even be running for a nomination to your “Racism Party™”, but I would be pretty unsurprised when I didn’t win.

You’re the one advocating to run for genocidal far-right jingoist party.

I don’t understand why you’d have me running in that party in the first place so I don’t know what answer you’re fishing for here.

You’re intentionally avoiding the point because you know I am right at this point.

Now you’re just straight up strawmanning.

You: “vote blue no matter who.”

Me: “You’re saying we should vote blue no matter.”

You: “STRAW MAN STRAW MAN”

When I read your first post here, I saw your line of thought was pretty thin, but there might be something of substance there. I can see what I thought was substance in your post was a mirage. It was a mistake to waste my time engaging with you.

This is just copium. You have conceded my entire argument. You cannot uphold the position that we should mindlessly “vote blue no matter who,” so you intentionally avoid the point because you know mindlessly voting for genocidal fascists is not a tenable position.

There is no point of discussing further as you have already conceded my argument but have too big of an ego to admit it.

Waking up to what? He can talk all he wants about corporate profits but can’t say the words “capitalism” or “socialism.” This article alone is evidence Americans are not waking up. Even the people who are forced to recon with the fact that a society that puts profits before people is bad cannot even articulate the possibility of an alternative to it.

Expecting Democrats to pass Medicare for All is a bit of a pipe dream.

Much of the voting population still thinks the Democrats are the “good guys” who will save us. Even here on Lemmy, speaking ill of the Democrats often gets me downvoted. The portion of Americans who are actually anti-capitalist is pretty small. Even most the supposed “far leftists” just want to tax billionaires. There anti-capitalist movement in the USA is far too small to be influential, the only real organization being the DSA, but even then the DSA is composed of a mixture of socialists and liberals and so it is not a purely socialist organization.

Even if Americans resisted, it wouldn’t matter, because “resisting” doesn’t do anything if it’s not well-organized by some organization or party that can channel the resistance into positive change. A lot of countries in the past have had “uprisings” that are largely disorganized, and the result is that the protestors don’t actually have any clear goals or anything to even potentially replace the sitting government, and so the sitting government just uses the protests as an excuse to oust another faction.

This is the chance to vote for, among many, that closest resembles your own choices.

If you run for the Racism Party™ as a person who has an anti-racist position, do you think you will be nominated? Maybe in an incredibly fringe case, but most of the time you will not be. And then what do you do when you’re not nominated?

The “vote blue no matter who” isn’t dogma, its usually pragmatic advice.

It’s literally a dogma by definition. Saying that you would do something as a matter of principle under all possible conditions without ever considering a different strategy is a dogma.

Your “advice” is based on extremely fringe. Sure, in a country of hundreds of millions, it may happen a couple times. But what about all the rest of the times it does not? You pretend it is a “victory” that one leftist gets into a position of power where they can hardly do anything at all because they are surrounded by extreme right-wingers, then you try to sheepherd everyone in to backing the extreme right wingers that are the very same people blocking them from getting anything done.

If your position was just “you should vote for leftists if they are in the primaries, then vote for them as Democrats if they win their primaries,” I wouldn’t have an issue with that. But that’s not your position. It’s “you should vote for Democrats no matter what.” Even if they’re a genocidal fascist far-right freak who is going to do everything in their power to block an edge case like Mamdani from every making any positive change, we should apparently still support that.

After the primary however, nearly any Democratic candidate would be preferable to a GOP one to most Democratic voters.

Most should be strung upside down like Mussolini.

Third parties in the USA have historically fielded pretty weak candidates.

Okay then field strong candidates.

If third party candidates want to be seriously considered, then I would recommend they start with smaller office positions to actually build a party that demonstrates is can govern.

Would you actually vote for them if they did or just shame people for not voting blue no matter who?

I’m losing faith in your arguments because you’re painting a picture that all members of a party share the same beliefs.

Because y’all demand people support the entire party. “Vote blue no matter who.” Canada does not have ranked-choice voting. They don’t even do that proportional voting thing where they hand out seats based on proportion of who votes for what party. There is a third party because people just vote for that third party.

The US doesn’t have a system that prevents this, it’s just a myth used to prop up the Democrats. If you do like a very specific Democrat, that doesn’t negate voting for a third party in places where the Democrat is awful. There is nothing built-in the USA’s system that would prevent it from getting seats to a third-party, and Canada is proof of that. It’s just a myth perpetuated to rally people into “voting blue no matter who” even when the Democrat clearly does not represent your values.

You are literally upset that I pointed out a giant contradiction in your worldview.

• Position A: “I want a left-wing government.”
• Position B: “I should vote for politicians who want a left-wing government.”

Yes, I hold both positions in my head simultaneously and you do not.

Pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction. Your comment is a long-winded way of saying that the two-party system should be abolished.

No, I am saying that “pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction” makes zero sense. It is like voting for the Racism Party™ and expecting them to run anti-racism candidates, or that you will “push” the Racism Party™ to be anti-racist. That isn’t gong to happen. The Racism Party™ would exist to push racism, it would exist to convince you to support its platform and vote for it.

The internet exists these days. We can all pull up videos going back decades to back when they were black-and-white of people talking about the needs of “pushing Democrats to the left” and yet generations later they are still a right-wing jingoist genocidal party. There is an old saying, “the definition of insanity is dong the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The same strategy is used for decades with everyone insisting that it’s the only strategy that can ever work yet it never works.

How much longer do we have to wait before this strategy works? Will Democrats become a left-wing party election, the election after, the one after that? I guarantee you that everyone will listen to you as they do every election cycle and your strategy will continue to be the one used again, again, and again. So I am just curious in how long you think it will take for your strategy to bear fruits.

What’s the relevance? The point of my post is that you are voting for a clearly right-wing party and the expectation that they will become left-wing is irrational. The existence of a spoiler effect does not negate this reality. It is incredibly incoherent to say, “we should vote in the right-wingers because we’re afraid of the spoiler effect,” then turn around and say that the right-wingers are "stupid’ for not running left-wing candidates as a right-wing party. It makes no sense. If you think you should never vote for a left-wing party out of fear of the spoiler effect, then you are really conceding that a left-wing government is impossible in the USA under its current form, and only maybe hypothetically in the far future if we ever have a different form, maybe with RCV, would it be possible.

US mentality is weird. Most countries we understand that a “party” stands for certain principles, and so if you don’t like the party, you vote for a different one. It makes no sense to demand that the party change to accommodate the voter, that’s not the role of a party. The role of a party is to try and change the minds of the population to support the principles of the party. A party exists to convince the masses to accommodate them, not for the masses to accommodate the party.

But Americans always vote for the same parties and always insist that the parties should violate their principles that they are very explicit about and openly declare all the time in order to accommodate the people. When the party inevitably does not do this but instead tries to explore new strategies to win over the population while adhering to their principles, Americans act surprised that the party isn’t bending to their will, but then vote for the same party again anyways.

I see this all throughout bizarre American commentary, where American leftists like Hasan will constantly call the Democrat party “stupid” for not abandoning their principles and running on an entirely different platform. But this, again, misses the whole point of a party. They are not “stupid.” They have a set of principles and want those principles to win, and it defeats the whole purpose of the party of they entirely abandoned their principles.

I mean, let’s say you live in a very racist country but have an anti-racist party, and then the anti-racist party decides to become racist to win the election. Did you really “win”? At the end of the day, the racist party still won, because you would have abandoned your principles to win, so it defeats the whole point of “winning.”

Democrats have a set of principles and want those principles to win, so naturally, as rational actors, they will not run candidates who oppose those principles while also try to push out people who infiltrate the party with ideas that oppose their principles. In any normal country, this is no problem because people understand that it just means you need to vote for a different party with different principles.

What’s even weirder is the Americans who delude themselves into believing the Democrats hold principles they literally do not. They are very open about being a neoliberal nationalist party, but I have encountered weird Americans who tell me things like Democrats all support universal healthcare / “Medicare for All” and they will argue until the cow’s come home that this is true and all evidence to the contrary is Russian propaganda.

Even here on Lemmy, criticizing Democrats by pointing out how they are right-wing can get you downvotes from weirdo Americans who are convinced they are a truly left-wing party. There is a huge delusion among Americans that Democrats are all secret far-left socialists who are just so incompetent that they constantly fumble the ball and mess up getting their policies across and so that’s why they never achieve the working class utopia. If you point out that there is no evidence that the overwhelming majority of Democrats even want these left-wing policies in the first place and they openly say they want the opposite, they will get very defensive and upset with you.

Trying to think of classical models to explain the EPR paradox kinda misses the point of the EPR paradox, because the point of the EPR paradox is to assume that there is indeed nothing linking the two particles until you look to then show you that this leads to a contradiction with Einstein’s definition of locality.† You can indeed trivially think of classical explanations to explain the EPR paradox and how the +1 and -1 particles might be linked and predetermined, but that’s not the point of the EPR paper which is to explore what happens if we don’t make this assumption.

The paper that instead explores what happens if we do assume they are predetermined is Bell’s theorem, and Bell’s theorem is more complicated than just assuming that the particles are entangled and opposites such that one will be measured to be +1 and the other to be -1. Bell’s theorem shows that the behavior of the individual particle can be dependent upon the configuration of a collection of measurement devices, even if the particle only ever interacts with one measurement device in the collection. That not only violates Einstein’s definition of locality, but if you try to make it deterministic, it ends up violating special relativity as well.

The simplest demonstration of this is with three particles in the GHZ experiment. The point is, again, not merely that the particles have correlated values but that (1) those values are statistically dependent upon the configuration of the measurement device and (2) the values for an individual particle can be statistically dependent upon the configuration of a collection of measurement devices even if it never interacts with most of the devices in the collection.

† “Locality” is used in two different senses in the literature. One is relativistic locality which means nothing can travel faster than light. The other is what I like to call coordinate locality which is what Einstein had in mind with the EPR paper, which is the idea that things have to locally interact to become dependent upon one another. The EPR paper is a proof by contradiction that quantum mechanics without hidden variables violates coordinate locality specifically.

In Copenhagen, “observing” really does just mean “observing” in the colloquial sense, there isn’t a fancy scientific meaning for it as the “collapse” is treated as a subjective update of knowledge and not a physical event.

faction A will just say faction B isn’t “really leftist” so therefore their attacks don’t count as “leftist infighting”

Not necessarily because if “all” is taken to be a universal “all” then this implies that they would still be bad under a different structure. It’s not clear from the statement alone what “all” refers to: “all” under this system or “all” under all possible systems. I have definitely seen a lot of people say it should be interpreted in the latter way.

I don’t like this argument because it concedes the premise that communists want to make everything free, which we do not.

The system makes no sense if you try to optimize it to get the highest score possible, you will find the differences in a single point have no logic behind it. But banks also typically do not care if your score is one point lower or higher. The number is just a quick reference point to make sure you aren’t someone in financial ruin, and if the score is at least mid then they will factor in things like your current income to debt ratio more than the score. If you are a normal person taking out a single loan for a house and probably a car and you know you have stable income to afford it, then you probably don’t need to worry about your credit score.

I tend to agree with people like Wittgenstein, Bohm, Engels, and Benoist, that identities are ultimately socially constructed. Aristotle believed identifies are physically real, so that a tree or a ship physically has an identity of “tree” or a “ship.” But then naturally you run into the Ship of Theseus paradox, but many other kinds of paradoxes of the same sort like Water-H2O paradox or the teletransportation paradox, where it becomes ambiguous as to when this physical identity would actually come into existence and when it goes away.

The authors that I cited basically argue that identities are all socially constructed. “Things” don’t actually have physical existence. They are human creations.

One analogy I like to make is that they’re kind of like a trend line on a graph. Technically, the trend line doesn’t add any new information, it just provides a simplified visual representation of the overall data trend of the data, but all that information is already held within the original dataset.

Human brains have limited processing capacity. We cannot hold all of nature in our head at once, so we simplify it down to simplified representations of overall patterns that are relevant and important to us. We might call that rough collection of stuff over there a “tree” or a “ship.” The label “tree” or “ship” represents an overly simplified concept of some relevant properties of interest about that stuff over there, but if you go analyze that stuff very closely, you may find that the label actually is rather ambiguous and doesn’t capture the fully complexities of that stuff.

Indeed, if we could somehow hold all of nature in our heads simultaneously, we would not need to divide the world into “things” at all. We would just fully comprehend how it all interacts as a single woven unified whole, and the introduction of any “thing,” any identity, would just be redundant information.

Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

— David Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”

You’re wrong. I’m a great ape and I can understand abstract language.