knightly the Sneptaur

Roughly half of the population has absolutely no clue what’s going on. Kids, old people, non-news-readers/viewers, etc.

A third of the population is vaguely aware that some shit is going down based on vibes but can’t identify the problem.

Half the remaining sixth can identify the problem as political but misattribute the cause. Leaving just a 12th of the population actually aware of our situation.

And once they do it, he’ll very quickly learn where real power comes from.

They don’t need the White House to achieve their agenda, they got Obama to sign Romney’s healthcare plan without even holding majorities in both houses of congress.

The fact that Democrats are willing to bend over backwards to accommodate their friends across the aisle is sufficient to prove that we can’t rely on them to consistently advocate for the best interests of their constituents.

I’m not giving up in the slightest. My opinion is that we should put our effort where it can be most effective, and given the mass media environment, peaceful protest can be rendered inert by simply not covering the story.

The first 50501 protest drew a purported 72,000 people at 67 events across the country, but hardly anybody seems to know that even occurred.

Provocateurs injected into BLM burned down a police station to discredit it as a peaceful movement and streisanded it so hard that people still think that police departments in California actually got defunded over it.

When peaceful protest have been criminalized, activists have nothing to gain by keeping their protests peaceful.

I’m not insulted or offended in any way, this is me trying to gently correct your misconception about how common relationships like mine are.

There’s no need to get emotionally charged about it, some people are serial monogamists and some aren’t and that’s OK. Some highschool relationships last and some don’t and that’s OK too.

Again, WHAT ARE YOU ACTUALLY ARGUING HERE? Seems like you’re arguing for the sake of arguing. What even is your point?

I very explicitly stated my point in the previous comment. There’s no need to get emotionally charged about a quibble over statistics

Rare is rare. You’re just splitting hairs here between what’s exceptionally rare and what is more common but still rare

Exceptional events are those that are extraordinary. A blue lobster is exceptional at one in two million, but the odds that any random person is in or has been in a polyamorous relationship are estimated at one in nine and a highschool relationship ends in marriage for one in fifty cases. Combining both gives a rate of one in 450, meaning that we can statistically estimate the number of poly households in the USA that started in highschool at around 286,000, or slightly more than one Alaska. Something so common is hardly exceptional.

There are more folks with poly experience than military experience, so if you want to say that my relationship is exceptional then I question your sense of proportion.

I don’t know what you think “status quo” means, but the Democrats have been capitulating to intransigent Republicans for longer than I’ve been alive.

You accuse me of hating them when I’m merely disappointed. You accuse me of partisanship when I merely express a justifiable lack of confidence in their leadership. That’s all fine, but what could possibly have posessed you to call me clueless when you imagine that flouridated drinking water is the hill Democrats would choose to die on?

My point is that it really isn’t rare enough for an example to be exceptional.

The lottery’s odds might be hundreds of thousands or even millions to one, but someone is still going to win it. What would be exceptional would be a year where nobody wins the lottery.

1-2% odds are a lot higher than lottery odds. If someone offered me anything close to 50-1 on that bet then I’d absolutely take it.

There is no argument here if you can’t accept and agree on the basic facts of the situation.

The “basic facts of the situation” are that the Democrats would never have been willing to risk political capital over niche red state issues and would rather give up than spend the effort needed to protect our teeth.

As someone who has lived through more than a few presidential administrations myself, I can tell you for a fact that this is the how the status quo would have been preserved.

Politics should never be boring, because politics are always a matter of life and death. These issues are important and the fact that Democrats care more about working with Republicans than getting into fistfights with them on the congressional floor is dangerously boring.

Precisely. She’d immediately wash her hands of the issue and give red states carte blanche to fuck themselves up however they wanted. A carefully triangulated middle ground where she gives up the pretense of even addressing a particular public health issue in exchange for gaining exactly nothing.

Yes you people. Fuck off with the faux outrage.

I’m not outraged, I’m confused. Who is “you people” supposed to be referring to?

She’s a politician that did a stupid politician thing. It’s so fucking stupid to give a single shit about it.

And yet, here you are getting mad because people didn’t give enough of a shit about it.

Clearly it failed. But it’s a really fucking stupid reason to not vote for her. Just completely ignorant of the political reality we were in.

Says the guy trying to blame the voters in a country that science says is not and has never been a democracy.

That’s the thing, it might be rare but it’s still common enough that it’s existence isn’t really exceptional.

Trans people aren’t the norm, but any “normal” group of 200 people has 3 trans folks in it.

Likewise, most people aren’t polyamorous and few polyamorous relationships are stable on the timescale of decades, but there are enough people that the statistical likelihood of a 50-year-old polycule existing approaches 100%.

You should be doing more than merely protesting.

Our enemies get to set the context of any actions we take, so protests can be safely ignored.

Anything that has a chance of succeessfully shifting public opinion can be defused by talking heads calling peaceful protests “lawless” and associating them with national enemies.

Political power is measured by the capacity for violence, the number of people who would kill or die to achieve any given goal. Luigi accomplished more with three bullets than protests have achieved in this country for the last 30 years.

It doesn’t, voting is a statistical process.

Changing one vote changes almost nothing.

Mass media allows our oligarchs to change thousands of votes at a time.

“Making change for a better tomorrow” is illegal. Protesting is only tolerated when it doesn’t hurt our owners. If you’re going to get disappeared for your political activities anyway, then there’s no reason to be peacefull about it.

Remind me how well that worked for BLM, Occupy, the anti-war protests after 9/11, the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, etc, etc.

Protesting is a waste of time. Direct Action gets the goods.

Protesting is illegal in this country.

Edit: To the downvoters, remember Mahmoud Khalil? That was 3 weeks ago.

I don’t feel very exceptional, folks with polyamorous attachment styles are a lot less uncommon than most people think.

Do you think she’d oppose it, or try to find some “middle ground” that gives up too much and satisfies nobody?

I am. America has never been a democracy. It was always a thinly-veiled oligarchy, six corporations in a trench coat pretending to be a government.

Blaming the voters doesn’t make any sense because American voters are the most heavily-propagandized population on the planet. Most of them still think Democrats are actually opposed to Republicans even though they share campaign donors.

Man you people are a bunch of fucking snowflakes after all aren’t you?

“You people”?

Throw a hissy fit because the only viable candidate that wasn’t going to quite literally destroy our democracy didn’t turn out perfect.

Who are you talking about? Harris destroyed her own campaign by squandering all the momentum gained from dropping Biden off the ticket.

She was never a viable candidate because she chose to fight right-wing populism with mealy-mouthed bipartisanship.

If you haven’t grasped it yet, I’m not sure you’re capable of understanding. You even said yourself that she, “tried to appeal to” those people, which implies that you understand that it was 100% a political move to try to get votes.

I genuinely do not understand what your point is. It sounds like you’ve got your understanding of electoral politics backwards, the onus is on political parties to earn our votes and parties that can’t convince people to vote for them lose elections. Individual choice doesn’t matter, what matters is who has the best propaganda.