[Mega thread] - Biden ends bid for presidency
[Mega thread] - Biden ends bid for presidency
Biden announced he's ending his bid for the presidency via X (formerly twitter).
Sources:
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In 2016 it was a "Vote Against Trump Regardless Of Who It Is". It's shaping up to be that again, but this gives me hope that maybe we'll have someone we can vote for that we like... Even if just a little. Harris is no Obama in charm, but it's a step in the right direction.
The general election will continue to be a strategic vote against the party you don't want to win until voters come out en masse in the primaries. And those better candidates will have to actually be running in the primaries.
Not just the primaries; it's going to take a tea party style insurgency into the DNC in order to exact the actual changes that we are looking for. The long play is getting involved in your state level Democratic party apparatus and pushing for better representation of progressive policies in the party platform, and pushing people of progressive persuasions into the DNC. <--- Much inadvertent alliteration.
You mean not until the entire voting system is overhauled and the first pass the fence post system is abandoned.
Yes. I mean the thing that won't happen until we overwhelmingly vote in the major parties primaries to put in representatives who will legislate those changes at the state level. Because 3rd party candidates aren't winning with the current system, so we have to change the two major parties from within, through their primaries.
I don't see that happening unless we were voting with rifles and guillotines.
No 3rd party has won a single electoral vote since Wallace in '68. He won 46. You have to go to Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 to top that with 88 (the most ever). It's either taking over the parties from the local level up through their primaries or it will take the full collapse of our government with a new constitutional convention, and that probably won't go well.
Like I said, rifles or guillotines. I don't see it reasonably happening through voting in our current system.
Well it can't if we don't try. For the 2024 primaries in Texas we had 17.9M registered voters, 3.2M primary ballots cast, and only 900k of them were Democratic. So I get why people think it isn't going to work. But I think anyone expecting a "don't vote and let it burn down" situation to result in an immediate improvement rather than things getting insanely worse are deluding themselves to everyone's detriment.
I'm definitely not in the don't vote camp. I just think I have reasonable expectations of what my vote can accomplish, and it's not much.
Definitely a lot of well earned cynicism about the process.
We actually saw this happen in 2020 in the Democratic Party. And establishment Democrats played the game to force Bernie out. We’re hearing from people that Biden wasn’t the best person to beat Trump, he was the best person to beat Bernie. That’s why they rallied around him and pulled the bullshit with Warren before Super Tuesday.
Yes, that was at the top. The president can't unilaterally change state-owned voting laws. Bernie did succeed in getting more progressive candidates into the Democratic party primaries down ballot in 2018 and beyond. That pressure needs to be maintained all the way down to the state legislatures and city/county offices. We have to flip the states locally to get election reform at the state level in order to make 3rd party options viable at the national level. Focusing on the presidential race to shame Democrats into electoral reform is just an exercise in self-owning loss to the Republicans.
I could care less about charm. I wish more people would. Personally, I want a fucking autistic that defines real goals, outlines a plan to achieve them, and measures their success on how efficiently the goals are met. I'm exaggerating a bit, but I miss the days where politicians had platforms and were willing to be something more than just a feeling.
Couldn't* care less.
Bad bot. I like to leave a little wiggle room. I've often suprised myself and found that when I care very little about something, I can sometimes find a little more apathy later on.
If you can care less, why mention it? It is an empty statement, supporting nothing. It has no rhetorical impact at all, except that reinforces the idea in your audience that you haven't even a good grasp of the language you are using.
Perhaps you are an English speaker from outside the US? It is an often used and well known colloquialism in the states. It's not any more empty than other accepted forms of speech that lack traditional grammar or syntax.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/could-couldnt-care-less
To a non US English speaker it would understandably sound strange. But to correct someone using this phrase in the states would only make one look like a prick.
It is an often used and well known colloquialism
It is a bastardization of a well known colloquialism
To a non US English speaker it would understandably sound strange
To English speakers who've heard it and have given it any thought, it just sounds careless, or stupid
If someone were to point out something like this to me, I'd just say "oops", learn from it, and move on. I wouldn't double down on it. It's like defending 'would of', or 'supposably' - obvious mishearings of other words. People know what you mean; it is just that you are also telling them something you probably don't mean to.
That's just how language evolves. You can pick lots of hills to die on with so called bastardization of the English language, it's full of these. If you understand this is part of modern English and just pick fights on the internet, congrats - you have a full time hobby. No one is doubling down, I could care less how you choose to speak, I just thought perhaps you were unaware that in parts of the world this is accepted evolution of the language.
Eye sea. Ewe our sew wright. Make language mistake non possible. Easy awl understand every won know matter what. Y try harder
At this point, it's all just about delaying the repression and concentration of power under a Trump presidency, as well as trying to slow down the climate catastrophe as much as possible on top of that. Things won't get better any time soon, it's simply not the historical situation and dynamic at the moment, but every year to organise people for radical alternatives for when the global collapse progresses further is valuable.