• ksynwa_from_lemmygrad [he/him, des/pair]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Preogressive feels like such a shit word now I would never touch any person with a twenty feet pole who describes themselves as progressive or support some figure who does. The totality of my expection from progressives is that they won’t say slurs in public.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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      11 months ago

      I would never touch…

      Anybody who is plugged into politics and uses that word is somebody to be avoided. But not everybody is politically sophisticated and American political language broken.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        “Progressive” only really became a thing during the Late Clinton / Early Bush Era, when talk radio heads were trying to turn “liberal” into a slur. Which, in hindsight, very funny. The folks that adhere to the word tend to be ones who grew up in that time period and were hunting for leadership that was farther to the left than Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

        As they pivoted, lots of conservative media shifted in turn. And so you got a bunch of talking heads tying “progressive” back to the eugenics movements of the early 20th century and the Girl Boss Capitalism of the 1980s. So the term soured among younger millennials and zoomers, while the post-Soviet world denuded terms like Socialism and Communism of their nationalist energy.

        In another ten or twenty years? Idk. Alphas will all call themselves something new, maybe? Or maybe we’ll all go back to calling one another Radical Centrists while winking and nudging? Who can say. But its all just verbage, one way or another. What’s really the difference between a Liz Warren Liberal, a Bernie Sanders DemSucc, and an Infrared Patriotic Communist, anyway?

  • Anne_Teefa@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Fuck in the Senate chamber(or house of representatives) and get shizz all over each “progressive” seat as they admit they lied until eventually the smell of shum is everywhere from copious amounts of vigorous ass stretching (feel free to smear shijaculate all over republican chairs too). This is just a modicum of what should happen too.

  • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Actually, to pivot off my previous post here:

    Honestly, more than the local or municipal politicians, you get interesting candidates for the positions that are even more radical than the elected counterparts (though the elected ones are still pretty good compared to the national ones).

    I would never rule out local or municipal politics, tbh.

    • AnarchoAnarchist [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Local and municipal politics are super duper important.

      I will happily vote shame the hell out of someone too lazy to go vote in local elections. State Constitutional amendments, and local ordinances, have a direct impact on your life.

      For president, if you’re one of the lucky citizens in a district where your vote matters maybe you could take it seriously, but let’s be real, it doesn’t matter.

  • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    To be honest:

    The local and municipal Democrats are mostly good, depending on the state (Virginia elected some good ones recently).

    It’s honestly the federal/national Democrats that are usually the problem.

    And I guess Dark Brandon, but that’s to be expected (I’m going to use that nickname unironically; he’s Sauron at this point).

    • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Local and municipal Democrats are capitalist scum that lie to fund cops, tear down COVID protections to protect their property tax base and chamber of commerce donors, oppose and hem and haw about even simple things like raising the minimum wage. They are usually literally bourgeois and bring that bias with them front-and-center.

      Try running against one, see how good they are.

      • HamManBad [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        It depends where you are. I think all the big city Dem parties suck, but where I am there are a few elected “Dems” that post Communist memes all the time. When you’re in an inconsequential region you can get away with doing stuff like that, it’s not like the state party ever gives us a second thought anyway

        • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          The town I live in has a long standing Dem mayor who is notoriously (as much as a local politician can be when many don’t care about their comings and goings) anti-homeless. I know of at least one soup kitchen that he relentlessly attempted to have shut down because of a homeless encampment in a nearby wooded area that he wanted to force out of town. He’s also had long standing plans to demolish a bunch of public housing units and replace them with a smaller number and offer “vouchers” to the victims, which are worthless due to a lack of overall affordable housing availability and lack of permanence. Mind you there’s a wait-list at all time for the existing, insufficient, public housing, so this would massively increase homelessness.

          I hate that motherfucker so much. I don’t doubt that some local politicians are good but you can’t say they are in general, broad strokes.

          EDIT: I’ve also heard that he’s got corruption issues with local property developers but can’t confirm; in the “Yeah he’s corrupt” column he was floating a very dubious property tax scheme to “encourage development” a while back that I won’t name to avoid doxxing myself.

          • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            Yep. My experiences have been pretty similar. And I live in a Democrat-saturated “very liberal/progressive” area of Northern California. Maybe 1-2 of the 7 or so city council members in the largest city near me would actually call themselves Republicans or independent, with the rest insisting they are Democrats or even “progressives”. These politicians are 100% fascist. The ones who call themselves “progressive” just use some nicer sounding rhetoric (e.g. having a debate over whether to call themselves a “sanctuary city” and then ultimately deciding not to because at least they were being honest that they wouldn’t do anything at all to keep their own police, the local sheriff, or any federal agencies from having free rein to haul away undocumented folks; in other words they were considering adopting the label even though they knew it wouldn’t mean anything at all).

            And yeah: they adopt every anti-homeless ordinance they can think up, and openly sic their fascist pigs on tent-cities and individual unhoused people alike on almost a daily basis. Their hands have been tied on a very temporary basis a couple of times by injunctions filed in federal court, but all those courts have done is told them they need to file the proper paperwork, dot their Is and cross their Ts, before continuing with the violence. And still the local city and county governments have brainstormed every way possible to bypass and ignore these temporary injunctions and shit and continue to be as vicious and destructive as possible. And they get away with it 99% of the time.

            Oh, small anecdote if anyone doubts they are outright fascist. The local cops warned unhoused activists that if they were seen meeting together or talking to housed activists who have been organizing with them, that they’d arrest them. Straight up violation of their supposed first-amendment “right to assemble”. And all the local politicians literally just stared stony-faced and shrugged their shoulders when confronted with questions and demands about this policy.

      • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        They pass, for example, accomodations for the neurodivergent (people like me) and much needed welfare benefits, to give some examples.

        But it depends on where you are in the country. Many state Democrats in the country are pretty useless or even actively bad.

          • ProfessorAdonisCnut [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            Some of them want the homeless to be in meat grinders but also want to evade the guilt associated with the throwing, so they build systems that keep them on the precipice until they fall in

          • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            I agree.

            I’m talking about in places like where I live and I’m referring to certain reforms or legislation that gets passed along with the bad.

          • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            For example, in your neck of the woods, that’s the case, but depending on the area, state, or locality across the country, it may not be.