Ti'ana

So long as we stick with this system that rewards and gives power to the most unethical people, it is a cycle we are doomed to repeat.

Its a slow decaying rot on society as worker & consumer protections are eroded by the wealthy sociopaths. Eventually the regular people rise up, and new regulations are written in blood. And then like fools, we maintain the same perverse system that made bloodshed necessary and it all starts again.

Those who cheat, exploit, and abuse will always make more money in a system that only rewards the accumulation of wealth. If these sociopaths encounter a barrier to increasing their wealth, they work to destroy it, slowly chipping away bit by bit over years if they must.

Not just 50 years ago, that was simply the start of another cycle of capitalist rot. We're in the 2nd US Robber Baron Age enacting the same play that keeps happening because of capitalism's perverted incentive structure.

"Cumulative 2.2 million% inflation in 5 years." Holy shit 😨

"We're working on making you even more of a debt slave, be happy peons!" - translated from demonic oligarchian (as if theres any other kind of oligarch 😜).

In short, to use a phrase i saw from someone else: Before you can have a big tent, first you gotta make sure the tent poles holding it up are strong and secure. You gotta have the base to win.

But a good candidate that can truly bring out the vote needs to not just stand up to Trump, but also shows they want to work to change the very system that gave rise to him. Trump is simply a symptom of the societal rot of rich bigoted oligarchs holding power, not the illness.

Newsome's attacks on trans people and the homeless are not going to endear him to the base. He's popular currently almost solely on his standing up to Trump (which is a unequivocally a good thing don't get me wrong).

I just think Newsome is just too alienating to the base just like Kamala (and Biden and H.Clinton). History has shown that dems trying to appeal to the center/center-right doesn't actually pick up any people while simultaneously alienating those in the base itself.

To be fair almost nobody heard of Mamdani just months before absolutely crushing the primaries and catapulting himself to being one of the most known and popular politicians in the country. Its too early to accept Newsome as the automatic candidate 3 years out.

The strategy of being the party that reaches across the aisle and work with the other side is a failure. It hurt Obamacare's potential. It hurts the efforts to fight the regime today. No more half-steps that get inevitably undone by the republicans every 4 or 8 years.

Wanting dems to actually fight for good things is not proposing helping the tea party. Helping the tea party is compromising your legislation in a vain attempt to reach out an olive branch to fascists who have already broke all prior branches into tiny pieces and threw them in wood chipper.

You can also use sway over the voter base to pressure inter-party dissent if its an issue particularly popular with voters like working toward nationalized healthcare. Urge voters to write in to and phone call obstinate dems. There are plenty of methods to put pressure without being evil about it.

Don't need blackmail, but you can threaten supporting primary candidates for dems that step too far out of line where they're actively detrimental to the party's goals. You can bribe with specific things they want for their state/district or threaten with not supporting specific things they want.

I know, but treating republicans as good faith actors they can work with on equal footing and not insane sex perverts is what causes the dems problems. Obamacare was an improvement, but it could've been so much more if dems dealt with repubs like the insane bad faith fascists they were/are.

Just stop fucking giving up before the first hurdle and deciding nothing can be done. This fucking defeatist attitude drives me fucking nuts. It is the root of the dems decline since Raegan and the growth of the neo lib faction of the dems.

This stuff is only impossible because you've already decided it is. You've given up without a fight. And thats why dems lose. No will to actually stand tall and fight for whats good. Things can be better, but it needs to be fought for. It wont happen on its own.

Because we dont use it. Party leaders have a lot of methods to pressure members of the party to fall in line on important things. Republicans do it plenty, but the dens refuse to put pressure on the right wing of the party like Manchin or Sinema to push them in line.

The strategies that worked with Raegan republicans during Clinton's presidency stopped working once the Tea Party took over the repubs. One's strategy needs to keep up with the times.

You cannot work with bad faith actors. But you can do things to mitigate them if you're willing to treat them as the bad faith actors they are.

If both sides genuinely worked toward mutual compromise, starting at a public option as a show of good will has merit. But that was the wrong strategy because the repubs would fight on principal. In an adversarial negotiation, compromising in advance is shooting yourself in the foot

The dems arent perfect omnipotent beings. They're fallible. They can have completely misguided strategies or simple mistakes. The dem strategy is civility and trying to reach across the aisle which is incompatible with the republican strat of "fuck you, pound sand".

I was not expecting to be so attacked today 😰

Simple psychology to start above your desired goal in negotiations. Never any reason to not do so to some extent.

Its basically negotiations 101. Ask your friend if they can give you $30 and you'll probably be rejected. Ask for $500 and when they refuse, back down to $30 and it actually increases how likely they are to do it because it sounds much more reasonable in comparison than just on its own.

If you start with the ideal, you have wiggle room on what you can give up in negotiations. If you've already given up those bits of wiggle room, now you have to cut actually important stuff for negotiations when it inevitably isn't accepted by repubs by default.

Obama attempted to ease negotiations by proposing the republican plan. If they were genuine actors and not virulent racist fascists, they would agree with it. But they weren't genuine actors. They opposed on principal because it came from a black dem president. So it had to be watered down anyway.

If you start at the ideal: fully nationalized healthcare, when you compromise you back down to a public option

If you start compromised: public option, when you compromise, you go to the much inferior public marketplace.

Compromising before negotiations even started weakened it.

Why? Since when does compromising before ever going into any negotiations work out on anything? Your just starting out from a weaker position. Romneycare *was* the compromise, but since it was Obama making the proposal, repubs decided to fight it tooth and nail anyway and ultimately made it weaker.