vvilld

Nah, they can have it. It's always been a symbol of white supremacy and subjugation. I don't want it.

Nobody is ever claiming that any were ever amazing. I was on facebook when it was still called theFacebook and you needed a college email to sign up and I was on Reddit before Gamergate.

Opening up facebook to allowing anyone to join isn't what made it shitty. Not by a long stretch. It barely even existed when that happened. It was 2 years after the site launched. Back then there wasn't even a feed. The landing page was your profile with your Wall, and that eventually evolved into the feed. Peak facebook was from ~2006-2012. The thing that drove it to shit was the IPO and the drive for constant increase in quarterly profits that comes with a company being publicly traded.

GamerGate wasn't massive all over Reddit. It was largely on 8chan and 4chan and a few isolated subreddits, but it didn't even make the front page of Reddit until after mainstream media started reporting on it. Reddit has always had problems, but the thing that's made it really shitty, again, was the IPO.

Get over your superiority complex. Nobody cares.

I found it on Voyager, but had to search for it with the exact correct spelling "50501.chat" and I only knew about it because I found it referenced in another instance and signed up on my browser on my laptop. I don't think I would have found it on Voyager if I hadn't already known about it.

"The dummies" didn't ruin either Facebook or Reddit. The companies changing policies and algorithms in an effort to drive profit did.

I think trying to both primary Vichy Democrats and run a 3rd party bid at the same time would be enormously counter-productive.

If people start campaigning and supporting a third-party right now, there’s actually a shot to win some house seats and local elections next year.

No, there isn't. We're heading into a midterm where a lot of the typically disengaged public will be afraid and in strong opposition to the incumbent party. That's going to draw a lot of people towards the Democrats, and there will be a strong "Blue no matter who" push to convince people to vote strategically. The Democratic establishment will be fighting even harder against any third parties they might see as spoilers than they will be against the GOP.

You're right that the upcoming midterms present a great opportunity, but it's not in a third party. It's in a primary push. Rather than talking about a 3rd party that has almost no chance at materializing and even less chance at winning, all our effort should be put towards convincing people they need to show up in the primaries and vote for the most anti-establishment, most left-wing Democratic primary candidates they can.

That's where the real opportunity lies. Primaries get such an incredibly small voter turnout that a relative handful of voters can swing primaries. Then, once a real leftist progressive wins the primary, the whole force of anti-fascist electoral politics will be behind them in the general. It'll be easy to paint any Republican as a fascist, which will make it easy to frame any Democrat as a rational choice, regardless how far left they may be. When that progressive is the ONLY alternative to GOP fascists on the ballot, they'll have a much easier time of winning.

Get people who don't normally vote and who hate Democratic leadership/establishment to vote in the primaries. Run progressives in the primaries. Take over the party. That's the only way this could work.

I don't think systems are immutable. That's exactly my point. They are, but you have to have a strategy that can actually accomplish it. Systems aren't changed by people just dreaming of a better one. They're changed by motivated people executing a successful strategy.

Imma press 'x' to doubt....

Again, you're missing the point. I'm not debating the overall end goal. I'm talking about the strategy to achieve it.

Just saying "the Electoral College is bad, so let's get rid of it" is fine, but it's not a strategy to make it happen. That's a goal. What is the strategy to make it happen?

Likewise, just listing off a set of popular policies and saying "let's make a new party" isn't a strategy to actually achieving those goals. I'm not saying that voting for a 3rd party is bad because it "steals" votes from a major party. I'm saying it's bad because it's an effectual strategy to achieving the goal of enacting the policies in OP's post.

You're absolutely right that the 2 party system sucks and that the Democrats are awful. But, again, that's not a strategy to achieve your goals. Like it or not, but none of us will ever break the 2-party system by forming a new party or complaining about how bad it is.

If you compare, say, the Democratic Party of the 1920s to the Democratic Party of the 1960s, they're drastically different, almost diametrically opposed to each other on nearly every policy. Likewise if you compare the GOP of the 1950s to the GOP of the 1980s. Or the Democratic Party of the 1970s to the Democratic Party of the 200s. Or the GOP of the 2000s to the GOP today. How did those changes happen?

In every single instance it happened not by a new 3rd party forming or outside agitators pushing the parties. It happened because a fringe element of the party enacted an organized push in the primaries to co-opt the party, won a convincing general election victory, then strongarmed the rest of the party into ideological compliance. That's how parties change in the US, not by being supplanted by a new party. You want a real, left-wing progressive party? Get behind a massive push to primary key Democratic leadership (I call them the Vichy caucus), win a general election, then strongarm the party into compliance.

The data in the poll is correct, but people don't vote on policy. The problem is that OP is framing voters as hyper rational people who sit down to form a long list of their policy preferences, then examine each candidate and select the one that best aligns with themself.

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, votes like that, and they never have. They look at the candidates and pick the one that's more entertaining/has better vibes, then justify their support by either changing or disregarding their personal policy preferences, or (more often) convincing themself that the candidate supports whatever they support, regardless of the candidate's stated positions.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying play the game to win. Don't start with a losing strategy.

Because people don't vote on policy, they vote on personality and vibes. It's how it's always been. This list of policies is (mostly) just a copypasta of the Democratic platform. But people have never voted that way. The Democrats put forth the crypt keeper, then replaced him with one of the most boring public speakers to come out of the Democratic Party in a generation. And they were running against someone who is a horrific fascist, yes, but also has stage presences and charisma and knows how to play to an audience. As much as he's one of the worst people on the planet, Trump knows how to make himself entertaining to watch.

That's what drives votes for politically disengaged people who don't pay attention to politics until the middle of October every 4 years. They listen to who is more entertaining and pretend like that candidate is telling them what they want to hear, regardless of whether or not he is.