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I would rather have 50 states that agree on a plan of action than one guy fighting against the entirety of the federal government.
Good luck with that. I doubt there’s one single thing for which that is possible besides maybe “George Washington was the first president”.
Biden is president and emissions are even worse since he started
That’s pretty disingenuous given his term started in the middle of covid. US carbon emissions are still well below what they were in 2019.
You do understand things take time right?
Its like watching a train speeding towards a barrier, steadily accelerating faster and faster, full throttle, and saying well it takes time to come to a full stop. No brakes applied, no taking the foot off the gas. Im not even accusing him of doing nothing, he’s actively worsening climate change.
Except the foot is being taken off the gas, or in the analogy coal is beyond fed in slower, or some coal is beyond replaced with renewables, but you’re amazed the train is still going. Like Geez industrial and power momentum is freaking hard to change, we’re not going to turn off all the fossil power plants, ice cars, and change every industrial process in a measly 3 years.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-u-s-oil-production-reached-an-all-time-high-in-2023
You’re blinded by the D next to his name, never in the history of the world have we been worsening climate change faster.
Taking foot off the gas is emissions peaking, remaining steady, not being higher than the previous year. Hitting the brakes is reducing emissions to less than the previous year. We have to do that for a long time before we stop contributing to climate change, as it’s all cumulative.
I think you, like many, expect the entire freaking world to change in a couple of years. You have no idea how much there is to do and how much industry there is out there. You have to keep voting it in for decades. It’s not one and done. Sorry but you have no idea how the world works. But go ahead and don’t vote in stupid protest and we can start again from scratch in 8-16 years (remember it’s been 23 years since we could have started with Gore, but go ahead and don’t vote.)
And BTW I didn’t say hitting the brakes, I said less coal being put in. Momentum is a bitch. That’s what the world is. Buut you don’t seem to realize that and just want to complain. Chow.
PS you’re the one actually blinded by a D next to the name because you expect everything to change because of that D in 2 freaking years (when he had control of the house).
And this is the reason it’s a crisis. Climate change is a long process, as is changing the entire world economy to face it. It’s not a crisis because of disruptive weather this year, but because we’ve already set in motion changes to the atmosphere that will inexorably make much more serious changes for at least the next century. Even changing just one small sector of emissions, changing internal combustion to battery electric vehicles, will take a couple decades, and is facing constant resistance by conservatives. One small sector. We have to change the entire world economy. There is so much work ahead and we’re already out of time to prevent serious climat consequences. Starting a couple decades earlier would have made a huge difference (although EV technology wasn’t up to it, so we’d focus on other things).
People can’t seem to look at a graph and internalize what it means when the line keeps going steeply up into the future, but Al Gore clearly could. People can’t seem to conceptualize that some actions have long term results, but Al Gore clearly could
Agreed. On batteries this is where I go back to the 70s. When the oil embargo happened they should have been R&Ding hard for better batteries (and solar and nuclear and fusion). If they started some serious battery R&D back then we would be incredibly better off.
And we should have gone off coal in the 80s. AFAIK there was enough NG to replace it, at least in North America.
We’re also drilling more oil than ever before.
Almost like a war broke out that cut America’s allies off from their usual stocks of oil and raising prices globally including on non-oil-product goods or something!
Wanna gripe? Gripe in context.
I wasn’t griping and understand the context.
But that just underscores the idea that even if Al Gore had taken office there’s no telling what his climate legacy would have been.
You think Al Gore winning would have prompted Putin to invade Ukraine twenty years early?
That is not at all what they said and you should be fucking embarrassed. They were saying that electing gore in 2000 wouldn’t have (necessarily) prevented Putin from invading Ukraine. But I think you probably understand that. You’re just being a piece of shit.
My point is that even while pretending to acknowledge context they’re trying to throw it in the bin.
Not my fault that there’s only so nice a way to point out that what someone’s trying to base their argument on is horseshit.
You’re needlessly antagonistic.
Gore would have had to respond to events, including drilling more oil which would undermine his climate efforts.
What I’m saying is presidents live in the real world like the rest of us and make decisions they don’t want.
is there anyone at all concerned about climate change in 2024?
Horseshit
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they’ll be able to actually do anything about it. The US government, and all governments to a greater or lesser extent, fundamentally serve capital and are beholden to the interests of capitalists.
No president, no matter how far to the left, could possibly save us. They will always delay action as long as possible, when not actively accelerating climate change. We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Voting does help, because a hostile government will systematically murder people who resist climate change while a “friendly” one will only imprison some of them. Voting is helpful, but not sufficient. We don’t have any more time to waste begging for our lives.
Edit: also, he did win and then there was a coup. This was at least the third right wing coup in the last 60 years. So… Yeah…
And? Whet exactly is the point of this post? You might not get EVERYTHING you want, but you’ll get SOMETHING, VS voting for assholes who’ll actually be working AGAINST fixing the problem.
From civil rights, to healthcare, to climate, to pretty much any issue that matters Republicans will ONLY make it worse.
In my decades of living I have not seen Republicans offer a solution to a single issue. It’s always just fear mongering and hate.
That’s basically what I said. The important thing here, that most liberals fail to understand, is that there will be no government solution. Ever. No matter who you vote for.
You have to actually organize and take direct action, not just beg for some authority to do something. Liberals tend to miss this. They just invest energy in getting people to vote, then they go to brunch. If you only focus on voting, you’re not actively moving towards survival you’re just delaying death. That’s my point.
Tell us “something” we got. Everything continues to get worse under Biden. Just more slowly.
Until Trump the whole country had been getting steadily more progressive. We went from a Democrat signing an order to kick gays out of the military to legal gay marriage nationwide in just 20 years.
We were slowly getting better, and the GOP was fuming over it. When Obama won in 2008 despite the GOP putting up their most centrist, electable candidate in generations, they abandoned Democracy entirely and started burning everything down.
Since before Clinton housing, education and healthcare has gotten more expensive while wages have stagnated. The wealth gap has been expanding for years.
Occupy was under Obama. DAPL was under Obama. Prism was under Obama.
Obama did some good things, but he presided over the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in history. That was him. He facilitated the police crackdown on occupy. He facilitated the police attack on the Standing Rock tribe to push through the pipeline that ultimately poisoned their water. The NSA was caught actively spying on American citizens under Obama.
Republicans have been burning everything down since the 70’s. That’s not a new thing. Nixon carried out a coup and started the drug war specifically as a cover for political violence against his opponents, and people in his cabinet have literally admitted as much. Every fire Republicans have started, Democrats have tended.
Obama was probably the best president the US could elect, and the best he could do was pave the way for Trump. The problem is America. Republicans have been fascists for a long time, but Democrats have been paving their way and enabling them the whole time. The system is broken beyond repair. The best you can do with voting is delay the collapse. You have to organize outside of the system if you want to survive.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact the republicans are doing everything they fucking can to hurt democracy and Biden so they can say we told you so… THE problem is the republicans that refuse to do their fucking job and represent the people of this country. Cancun cruz? That fucking zombie from Kentucky??? The dipshit in florida??? Gym fucking Jordan??? It’s embarrassing.
Biden has no excuse for calling to block the rail strike and continuing to supply Israel with weapons.
Sounds like someone watches too much fox “news”…
Yeah all those Fox News watchers known for their lack of support for Israel. /s
Do you even know what you’re talking about?
We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Great! Lemme just let the trans folks in my life know that alls we gotta do is elect the fuck who threatens to erase their existence entirely!
Bc the untenable systems at play in Russia, S Arabia, DPRK, RSA, etc. have done wonders towards the citizenry in those countries rising up and rebelling… oh… wait… thats right… its damn near impossible to rise up the closer your state is to the fascist mark. Congrats, ur right that the liberal system blows. Replacing it with something worse will only make things worse.
How successful have you been at bringing ur fellow comrades together to organize for direct action? And thats going to go better after we go full fascist?! After our minority allies are straight up outlawed?
You have the same level of comprehension for nuance as maga cultists. We are on the brink of fascism because liberals are useless.
But me? Oh, I organized an antifascist groups that organized one of the largest antifascist protests in the US the day after the murder of Heather Heyer, helped organize an antifascist self defence training group, I organized a police oversight group that de-anonomized thousands of complaints about police allowing for the identification of highly problematic officers, one of whom was fired after our efforts. I helped get the data for SPD.watch. I organized several public records request trainings. I started a food security committee that helped a bunch of people get food when they didn’t have money, which expanded to canning food for houseless folks and supporting camps. oh, I also organized the protest where I was shot by a fascist. That and about a hundred other things, all of which I did with my trans comrades who were organizing for their own survival because they knew that liberals would not ultimately protect them.
What the fuck have you done?
Edit: your vote against murdering the trans folks is great, but you know what would help the people in your life when the voting eventually fails to stop fascism? Why don’t you talk to them about what hormones they need and work on figuring out a plan to smuggle it in. As a cis person, you’re the right person to risk yourself for them. Even today you could work with them to organize a safety group that they could call for support if they don’t feel safe walking home or end up in an unexpected sketchy situation. You could organize a hate watch group to track fascist activities. You could do a ton of shit RIGHT FUCKING NOW instead of waiting to vote and then just seeing what happens.
Oh boy, let me try and reply here without losing my cool. If youre actually putting in effort into direct action, u deserve a serious reply. I have infinite respect for that, please keep that in mind as you read this.
You accuse me of a lack of nuance, while implying that i am against direct action and only favor voting, all in the efforts of getting upset at someone because they encourage others to vote and still ignoring the crux of their point. But its easier to compare me to maga. That way, the onlookers now know to side with u, after all u just egoized about all these wonderful things that i never told u not to do! This is hardly fostering comraderie between the working class. Please check my (admittedly short) comment history. I am in favor of always more direct action, but i am always against disparaging ppl ffom voting.
You say things like smuggle hormones, great. I am in favor, but guess what? That very word implies u are taking something from somewhere where it is legal, to somewhere where it is not. You are still beholden to the laws of wherever it is you are smuggling from. I.e. you need hormones to not be outlawed everywhere.
Im not trying to tell you your actions are useless. Far from it. Clearly u do more than most, certainly more than me, and i concede that. Your actions would only be more meaningful if done by more people. What i keep trying to hammer thru to all you other leftists pn here isnt to stop, but to simply understand that these efforts are NOT more easily undertaken in a system that is “untenable.”
You didnt address that point for a reason. You complain about how awful libs are. Who? My shitty coworkers? The ones who believe in this system bc thats all they know and are exploited and taken advantage of and made to think their neighbors are the problem? 50+ yrs of very concerted propaganda have gotten them to this point. Hate em all you want, when u talk about the things that need to happen to topple the system, thats who you are depending on awakening. These same brainwashed folk who want nothing more than to end the day knowing their families are still provided for.
And again, look at the countries that do tend towards fascism harder than the States. Do you see more enlightened proles? More direct action? Because reality tends to disagree. Youre sitting here shitting on another leftist bc god forbid he votes, ur shitting on the liberals who perpetuate the shitty system we’re forced into, but youre espousing values that all predicate on working together. Do you not see the dissonance there? We are NOWHERE near revolution, further still from utopia. We can cry that the climate is killing us, or that the system is too slow. Great. But right now, that system is only out to exploit you, not make your existence unliveable. If we get to that point, which under trump, it is likely, no amount of direct action is going to help. Not in a time when all the powers that be need do is take a look at their preferred mass surveillance system to find the rabble rousers and send out a drone or two to quell whichever protest gets to crazy.
Tldr: Thanks for your efforts, please dont disparage voting.
I literally said “Voting helps,” and talked specifically about how it helps. At no point did I ever say not to vote. I even kind of said that I think people should vote. Why the do you think I’m telling people not to vote? Take a look at my post and ask yourself where this is coming from and maybe you’ll understand why I’m calling you out.
I’m not saying anywhere, at any point, that people shouldn’t vote. I’m not saying anyone is bad for voting. I’m not even hinting at the idea the voting is not at least a little helpful. I’m just fucking sick of everyone focusing on voting when it’s one of the lowest valuable type of action you can take after canvasing and posting shitty memes.
I organized, I got shot, I kept organizing. The whole time I watched liberals tell queer and trans folks, black and brown folks, and all kinds of other marginalized folks and every intersection of those to vote harder any time they’d call out liberals. Liberals got Biden, stabbed radicals in the back, and went back to brunch. They had fucking years to organize, and instead they just got disappointed again and again by the failure of the system they believe in to address existential threats against it. Whenever they get called out for this shitty behavior, or whenever anyone points out that voting isn’t enough, they hold up those same marginalized people they’ve been throwing under the bus between election years.
When I’m saying “make the system untenable” I’m meaning that you have to make oppression impossible by organizing. You have to make ecocide impossible by making it so expensive to extract petroleum that it stops being an option.
You think that you have to be close to revolution to make the system untenable? It took one person attacking an immigration facility to stop Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan. Slavery didn’t end because people voted against it. It ended because people formed a guerilla resistence that attacked plantations and smuggled people out, illegally. The civil war started because John Brown lead an armed assault on Harpers Ferry with the intent of creating an armed slave insurrection. They, and a lot of other people carrying out direct action, made the system untenable.
You know how they got to the point of making the system untenable? They organized. You should absolutely vote if your conscience lets you. I will shame you for not voting if you’re as privileged as I am, but I won’t if you’re not. But for fuck sake, organize. Organize small groups. Organize too many groups to infiltrate. Go fill jails like XR until they can’t afford to put people in jail anymore. Make this shit expensive. Organize locally to abolish free parking.Make perpetuating climate change so expensive that every oil company is forced to invest in renewables. That’s what making the system untenable means. The fact that you jumped immediately to assuming I could only have meant something like “don’t vote,” even though I explicitly said voting has value, says something. Please take a minute to reflect on why you’ve spent this much time and effort arguing against something I did not say.
Very fair points, theres been a lot of ppl on this site yelling at me in a short period of time. I got a little fixated on making the system untenable bc in this very same thread theres no shortage of shitheads arguing against voting, all while countless other russian shills all across the web eg them on in hopes of enabling russian imperial interests.
Im just very frustrated, as i can tell u are. Im looking for leftists to come together regardless of how far left they swing. Ur points on making the system on tenable sound more like the types of direct action i seem to most believe in. Its about making life untenable for the capitalist owner class, not the poors foghting for their lives down below.
On that point tho, i still would urge you to find room for some more sympathy/empathy for those, erm- lets say, highly misguided poors still simping for the neoliberal way. With the amount of propaganda they consume, its no wonder they are the way they are, but that doesnt mean that theyre entirely lost. Ppl are fickle and change their minds drastically all the time, especially when their ego is in play. Ive gotten far right wingers to agree with me on dismantling insurance agencies, enacting a maximum wage, shit even to abolish currency altogether and trans rights. Its about how its presented to them, and by whom. Im not going to tell u to waste ur time convincing them actively, that is a waste of time.
But a newly found culture based on sympathy and kindness isnt necessarily all that far away. Anarchist theory is largely based on assuming that humans are naturally inclined to cooperate with one another. Theyre just never going to if u call them out for being the hypocrites that almost all of us naturally are. My 2 cents, anyway.
Thanks for ur time, but more so for ur energy irl with what u do. Continue yelling at everyone else in here, ur energy is wholesome.
Thank you for this. People are using short term fear to try to trump the long term fear and it’s such a backwards perspective. It’s like someone who is afraid of the kitchen being a mess while you’re trying to stop the leak in the roof. And the moment we try to explain this to people they act as if we’re signing their death warrants not realizing they’re signing their own.
also, he did win and then there was a coup
Brett Kavanaugh helped with that coup and now sits on the supreme court.
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they’ll be able to actually do anything about it.
Having someone who doesn’t understand (or, more likely does but doesn’t give a shit) IS a guarantee that nothing is done about it.
Great, but I literally said voting helps. Pointing to where I start saying “voting is not sufficient” and repeating something I said later doesn’t add anything.
Can you explain to me why you felt this was necessary to say?
I was so disappointed as a Canadian to see Gore lose. That stolen election was stolen from all of us not just America.
Imagine how different the entire world would be now if Bush/Chaney had never happened.
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Nope it’s your job to vote for dems for no reason other than “not republican” and if you don’t vote for dems for no reason other than “not republican” you’re a bigger enemy to dems than republicans.
Whose to say that the Gore Timeline would have brought us to anything better than what we have now?
I’d like to think that in that timeline, we never got past the point of TFG sticking to his shitty ass TV shows.
Doubt.
Whose to say that the Gore Timeline would have brought us to anything better than what we have now?
I mean, this is just kinda dummy thiccc reasoning. Looks good from the outside, but vapid and lacking substance.
It absolutely, 100% no-doubt, are-you-even-joking would have been better. But my idiot friends all voted Nader to register their displeasure. Stupid fucks.
I disagree. There’s only so much one man would have been able to do. After 9/11, he would have lost all buy-in from the public as the War on Terror started. Who would care about saving the planet if they are worried about terrorist attacks?
We can do two things at the same time you know. And the way industry and electrical grid changes work is over a long period of time. You move the needle at the start and the path change is dramatic.
The Kyoto Protocol would have been ratified. Could you imagine if we had an international agreement with legally-binding emissions reductions in place in 2000? The Paris Agreement is the best we have, and it’s simply not as strong as Kyoto would have been
No Iraq War, “No Child Left Behind” never becomes a thing, Bin Laden gets caught in Afghanistan if the 9/11 plot even manages to happen since Bush is known to have ignored a report containing a warning about the attacks being planned.
You really wanna tell me that a world without the war on terror would be exactly as bad as the one we live in today? Especially one without the war on terror where the century kicks off with a president who takes the climate crisis seriously?
You’re taking quite a bit of a leap there about 9/11 being foiled because Gore was in office. I really don’t think that it would have been sunshine and lollipops like what has been suggested. He’s one man. I have a hard time believing one man would have made the difference in terms of 9/11.
I was 17 during that election, otherwise I would have voted for him. I think he could have done some great things, but I’m not so sure those great things would have made massive waves that would change today.
🤷🏻♀️
Edit: format more better next time.
Even if that terrorist attack wasn’t foiled, there were many possible ways to respond to it. It’s naive to think that would have unfolded the same way
Bush ignored an attack imminent report that basically spelled out the intent of Al Qaeda to launch an attack via the hijacking of airplanes. Gore likely would not have, as gore is not as dumb as Bush is well known to be.
One of the key findings was that poor transition because of the election mess led to lack of intelligence briefings, etc and thus lack of decisions.
Fuck, even just excluding the war in Iraq makes a huge fucking difference.
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In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women’s reproductive rights, and now in 24 they’re angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can’t see.
Every 4 years is really a choice between conquest or making the economy go brrr.
The dems are definitely consistently better for the economy though.
If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn’t really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.
If only being told that were enough to finally get the idjits to pull their heads out of their asses.
Honestly, at least on Lemmy, I think a lot of the ass-headers are just a mixture of shills and edgelords. In what proportion, I have no idea.
The ratio of beliefs on the issue is very different among the people who are genuinely engaged with it, than among the people who quick post a punchy message or two and then scuttle away. There’s just a lot of people coming in for a moment to do the second activity; that’s the only thing that makes it seem like the opinion poll is as mixed as it looks like at first.
(I’ve been spending way too much time paying attention to this today.)
Lemmy is such a small market compared to others like reddit, twitter, and facebook. Two of them have gone full fox news. Reddit wants to but can’t afford to lose any users. The battle for social media is over and the fact that disrupters even make their way to lemmy shows how far their reach is.
Russia and other bad actors are dragging the USA off its throne and their doing it from the inside. The GOP are like fully hopped up junkies at this point and if we tried to remove the mainline of the propaganda feeding their dilusion they’d just as well claw your eyes out.
Just sucks no one in our government is willing to do anything about it.
Edit: If I had one guess it would be that lemmy exists to push a red scare caricature version of a communism that’s why you see all these communists with awful takes all the time. Some of them radicalized but mostly just bad actors trying to portray lemmy, one of the last hide outs for lefties, as radical communists.
Al Gore was a new runner for president after serving vice president for the two immediately previous terms, and was 52 at time of running.
Biden is an incumbent who served two vice president terms which he finished 8 years ago, and he is currently 81.
Now tbf, the orange definitely made Bush look like a competent and coherent president in comparison. But comparing Al Gore to Biden is kinda dumb. I expect Biden’s huge train plan to go about as well as Obama’s huge train plan of which he was also a part of.
It’s not that both sides are the same, it’s that they’re both corporately backed which means nothing substantial will actually be achieved besides not shooting yourself in the foot like what Republicans like to do.
Also keep in mind the 2000 election was stolen by the supreme court because that power is totally valid against actual votes.
suck my balls
He did put effort into fighting it, Jeb blocked the recount after it was found Gore had negative votes and Bush had more votes than people in a county then when it got to the Supreme Court they ruled that it took too long to get to them for them to allow a recount
suck my balls
is so fucked up that the future of the world depends on one single country, and more exactly, one single person in that country
This is an extreme exaggeration. Supposing you could wave a magic wand and zero out all US emissions and waste beginning in the year 2000, we’d still be just as fucked due to China and India’s emissions. And guess what, neither of those nations give a fuck about sticking to climate treaties. China manipulates its stats on virtually every useful metric, and India has a position that they deserve to finish industrializing.
Also since Al Gore invented the internet (well not really, but it was something he did care about) so maybe there could’ve been some standards and requirements for inter-operation (which was the direction things were going before Bush) and maybe the internet wouldn’t have become the shithole it is now. Yeah it would still be a shithole, but we might’ve had a shithole that corporations actually had to do a little competition.
There would also not have been an invasion of Iraq, things like Isis would have probably remained an unkicked hornet’s nest.
License to torture at will would not have been granted to government goons.The threat of hijacking airplanes and smashing them into iconic buildings would have been taken seriously. Which opens up the possibility that 9/11 could have been averted. Then maybe the mouth-breathers at TSA would not have been given the power to profile and harass at airports.
The list goes on: Katrina and New Orleans; the neutralizing of the Consumer Protection Bureau; the typically republican financial free-for-all that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
Then there are Supreme Court appointments, which we get to keep for life, like goddamned herpes.
But since so many ignorant and smug lazy assholes stayed home on Election Day bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe, everybody got a succession of utterly preventable shit sandwiches.
I keep comparing Casablanca to New York City. One reason is that they’re both the biggest cities in their respective country without being the capital, and that they suck, but also because before 2001, they both had twin towers (the ones in Casablanca are still standing btw).
