I want the right’s worst dreams of the left’s future: mandatory veggie burgers and 15 minute cities, gay sex on city plazas, an authoritarian green new deal and also a feral world with no borders, books full of blasphemy in every school, the end of gender. Let it be so
I want the paradox the right constantly imagines of our sci fi green party policies implemented by brute force but also frighteningly wild political anarchy everything everywhere all at once
Blaming the youngs for electing trump, eating too much avocado toast, being on your lawn, is called "scapegoating" -- a practice of eliminating critical thinking in favor of picking an easy target to burn at the stake.
More complex to think on how the Dems reacted to Reagan's racist win by taking up his dog whistle for white voters who don't want the safety net extended down to the pigmented classes (centrism). this agenda worked well for the corporations too (neoliberalism) and so here we are
If i'm running a restaurant, it's not going to help me to blame potential customers for not coming in, if they prefer food from a different restaurant. I can feel upset and resentful all I want to, but the way for me to get those customers into my place is to cook them up food that they want to eat.
Organizing political victory is a lot more effective when you have food on the table your base is hungry for.
- Candidates who appeal to the Dem base and leverage that appeal into popular organizing win. Obama campaigned on proactive change, people responded by signing up to organize and turning out to vote.
- Candidates who disavow their base and avoid empowering regular people to organize, lose. Hillary contracted a troll army to smear Sanders supporters, and avoided organizing key Midwest states despite organizers begging the campaign to show up.
The "young voters are the problem" theorists tend to focus on the Gore and HRC losses, but both of those candidates won the national popular vote.
Why would we spend decades demonizing young, low wage, and BIPOC Americans, rather than working together to advance the Interstate Compact for a National Popular Vote? Maybe we should ask the DNC...
There are candidates who do electrify unlikely voters with the urgency and messaging of their campaigns. They typically take up popular issues polls show large majorities of Americans support, such as climate or universal healthcare.
But whether it's Jesse Jackson, AOC, or Bernie Sanders, what these left populist candidates have in common is that the Democratic party establishment marshals truly extraordinary resources to defeat them, sometimes demonstrably more than they do for the GOP
"if #biden loses its the fault of young apathetic voters"
since you all keep trying to sell this car, let's check under the hood...
- unlikely voters skew young, low wage, BIPOC -- people who are often excluded from economic stability due to low wages, housing insecurity, student and medical debt, and the need to care for under resourced family and friends
- the hypothetical privileged young leftists this theory demonizes are statistically irrelevant, stop hating ghosts
the failure of mainstream medicine to name post-covid immune dysregulation as a serious public health crisis is causing not just unnecessary death and disease, but also feeds the democracy-destroying fires of disinformation. when doctors, as the public face of science for many, are untrustworthy, conspiracy theories are easily weaponized https://assemblag.es/@hugo/112625277951807994
Of all the people responsible for covid denial, doctors are the ones with the most potential for reframing and whose failure to do so causes the most harm. They have the latitude to speak freely, the training to interpret new covid science, the responsibility to do no harm to their patients, and often, they are the ones with the power to set the tone for entire hospitals, public health officials, politicians, and patients.
@hugo really astounding to be witnessing such a profound denial in real time. a community member was recently hospitalized with Covid and barely survived sepsis and stroke, and is now working to regain motor skills. I have not heard a single other friend acknowledge this as a common outcome of Covid. In our town it is spoken of as “freak occurrence” or “they were working too hard” or “who could have possibly predicted” or “they had the bad flu”
“Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the [US] military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.”
if the US was morally superior to China or Russia (as it claims to be) it would be dismantling and exposing internet propaganda, not protecting and creating more of it. But the US can’t do that, because it is controlled by elites whose wealth and power also require internet propaganda. like Russia, the US is a corrupt oligarchy (and in case that word is confusing it pretty much means high level organized crime, we’re a mafia state too)
imo the thing to look out for is what do democrats do with this info? are they able to hold congressional hearings? are they able to put conditions on the pentagon’s black box funding? do their appointees at DOJ open investigations? do they name names? or do they just run out the clock
obligate organizer, systems thinker, radical optimist, public good believer, artsy generalistliving in Lingít Aani, my ancestors were quebecois & ukrainian jewsposting ideas at #SocialTech; always boosting #alaska; ⚠️: I’m often wrong Avi is wild hair blowing in wind, cover is a watercolor I made of a volcano