Not voting (in your election)

Yeah, I don't think we should be upset they didn't break the rule of law to get what they want.

Could they have fought harder and pushed back more? Certainly, but that isn't the same as doing what Trump is doing.

There are other ways. FDR knew how to be a bully when he had to without going full tyrant.

Also the difference is it's mostly executive action and literally every single GOP member falls in line unless they are retiring so they never reign him in. Had Obama or Biden had that blind support it could have possibly been different.

Yeah it would have been sooo hard to stop putting children in cages or close Guantanomo or to cut funding for genocide or to reduce police funding. Truly it takes a genius statesman to change any of that.

The greatest failure of the 46th presidency was a total unwillingness to prosecute the planners, organizers, and executors of the January 6th insurrectionist coup attempt. But then it's overall the same set of mechanisms that couldn't be brought to bear against confederate politicians, generals, and soldiers. A few people were barred from power here and there but there was no overall systemic introspection of the failure of the 1860s. We are living in the aftermath of that failure today, and are placing ourselves at major risk to repeat all of the worst mistakes from that period

Biden being an absentee President didn't help widen those Democratic margins or to keep Democratic Senators in line. Maybe Biden could have done those things 20 years prior, but he provided no party or national leadership to force things through.

It would have been nice to have some rulings stacked up against executive overreach before Trump though.

Yeah, let me remind you why SCOTUS has a Republican majority: because Mitch McConnell played the Senate like a fiddle and the complicit, cowardly Senate Democrats let him.

The fish may rot from the head down, but at this point the whole damn thing is rotten.

Also: you know the thing about programs that actually make people's lives better? They're popular.

Biden could have made policy via executive order in the first two years of his term; stumped aggressively to win Congressional majorities in the midterms based on the successes of his executive orders; and used his new Congressional majorities to turn his executive orders into law.

In other words, what Trump's doing, only with good policies.

But that would require Biden to actually have good policies and be physically and mentally healthy enough to stump for them. And we know neither of those were true.

Ah yes, solarpunk, where criticizing someone who put children in cages is bad because he didn't put as many in cages as others would have.

What the fuck do you think "punk" means? "Drawn in the style of studio ghibli"? Jesus fucking Christ, now I get how Miyazaki feels.

And you seriously think there are going to be fair elections in the US? Wake the fuck up.

Go out and vote if they let you. Maybe prepare for the scenario that ICE starts picking people out of the line. But don't be surprised when the media reports a surprising silent majority still eked out a Republican win and MAGA-filled review boards say it's all legit. (and likewise, if the Dems do win, I'll be very surprised).

I knew /r/solarpunk had become liberal slop. But it's sad that it happens here too.

Look, dude, I'm sure you mean well. But read the fucking room. Do you really think the gestapo is going to politely let themselves get tried for all the illegal shit they did?

Please, even if you take nothing else away from this, even if you think it's stupid or unlikely; prepare. Prepare for civil war, fascist subjugation, and/or the collapse of supply lines for your groceries and everything else you need. Maybe talk with friends about it and see if you can make plans together for if shit goes down.

Solarpunk was always a picture of the world as it should have been. Proof of life beyond capitalism. An aesthetic as easily commodified and robbed of its politics as cyberpunk and steampunk before it.

I suppose I'm glad to be on the Miyazaki side more often now. If you sat through it until now, thanks, I'm trusting the natural flow of my emotions to be more of a human connection than something more curated.

I get it, slop feels nice and simple and hoping the adults will fix it if you keep your head down is a very human response. But darkness doesn't stain the light. Solarpunk is so much lesser if we don't contrast it with the reality of our situation.

"We" won the 2020 election. And Biden spent four years doing nothing, sitting on his ass, driving the US economy into the dirt and presiding over the biggest wealth transfer from ordinary people to the ultrarich in world history. And Harris promised more of the same.

Though that's no surprise. Every Democratic administration I remember in the last sixty years has either been conservative ineffectual, or both. And both the Democrats and Republicans have been marching right for those same sixty years. The Civil Rights Act and the Great Society of LBJ was the high water mark for the left in America, and both major parties have been moving right ever since. Hell, fucking Nixon would be too liberal for the modern Democratic Party, never mind the Republicans.

But yeah, tell me again how winning or losing elections makes a difference.

Because anarchists often embrace explicitly revolutionary rhetoric and reject reformism

Personally I think it's silly to give up tools but the general argument is that electing lesser evils just gives them a veneer of legitimacy, consent of the governed and such