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[Zangi]

The only reason I can think of people in the US gov't ignoring election security so hard is that they(or the parties) also exploit that shit for themselves and don't want to close the loophole off, despite all the warnings.

Looking at you Georgia.

[SalmonGod]

For the record, Warren has now persuaded me to Bernie or Bust.

Last chance, America.

Agreed.  Posted this on my Facebook a few days ago.  Also donated to Bernie's campaign.  First time I've donated to a political campaign ever.  Thinking about volunteering too. 

My honest belief is that if Bernie doesn't win 2020, then there's no more use for politics.  We won't have any time left to wait for further election cycles, and the likelihood of another candidate coming along in only a few years with demonstrated integrity and proposals adequate to address the scale of the problems we face is almost nil, anyway.

This is a little long, but I have a point here. I appreciate anyone who sticks through it. I promise the purpose of this is not just to be alarmist and depressing.

I've been speaking up about inequality/class warfare, police corruption, surveillance, war profiteering, rising fascism, environmental collapse, and the near-equal complicity of both political parties in all these problems since the early 2000's. It's been an exercise in frustration for most of that time. Screaming into the void.

In the last few years, things have begun to turn around. I don't feel like the only one paying attention to these things anymore. And while that's nice... unfortunately, the urgency to address them has also amplified 100x over the last 20 years.

Class warfare is at such extremes that people literally die on the floor of warehouses and their co-workers are ordered to step around them and continue working, while police continue to ramp up their violent criminalization of homelessness (including 1.4 million children) and suppression of dissent. Employers will pro-actively release public statements thanking the police for their service after the police kill their own employee in pursuit of some unrelated petty thieves. The Indiana state government ordered the obstruction of the investigation of a wrongful death in an Amazon warehouse to strengthen their bid for HQ2 - "Hey set up shop here and we'll literally let you kill our people".

Australia - the continent - is on fire. That is not hyperbole. The fires are so overwhelming that residents are being advised by their government to just flee into the ocean, because there's no where else to go. The president of Brazil is ideologically opposed to the existence of the Amazon rainforest, and has drastically accelerated its destruction since taking office, much of it not even for industrial purpose. It's just being burned for the sake of burning, and indigenous people and activists who stand in the way get murdered. Insect populations have dropped by over half over the last 30 years. Everyone's just hoping that hope will prevent bees from going extinct, because doing anything about pesticides isn't politically viable. Environmental collapse is already driving immigration crisis all over the world enough to de-stabilize politics in developed nations as people flee areas that are becoming less livable. The USA used its domestic police forces (including officers from Indiana) as an invading military on native american land to build a pipeline under the passive watch of a Democrat president, mauling peaceful women and children with attack dogs and locking them up naked in dog cages outdoors in the dead of winter.

Day 2 of 2020 saw everyone tensing up for WW3. Democrats will largely denounce the decisions that put everyone on edge. But then they'll quietly support a defense authorization act that increases military funding by hundreds of billions of dollars. While the financial media is abuzz with positive spin about defense industry stocks, and everyone constantly asks how we can afford to pay for anything that actually helps people. People hitting adulthood in 2020 will have never lived in a world where the USA wasn't at war. Wars where it's been revealed by the Afghanistan Papers that high ranking generals didn't even know what the point was, because they weren't provided a clear objective.

We literally have concentration camps operating within our country, which arrest doctors for approaching them with the offer of free medical care for dying, locked up children while they wait to represent themselves in court after being separated from their parents.

You can be charged $500 for a bag of sterile saltwater at the hospital. Or $50 for the right to hold your child after giving birth. People are dying en masse to illnesses that are easily, cheaply treatable for which medicine is abundant, because prices of, for example, insulin have gone up more than 1000% in the last 20 years. Meanwhile you can cross the border into Canada and buy those same medicines for 1/10 of the price.

Above all, scientific consensus is we have failed so hard for so long to do anything about global warming that we now have merely 10 years to enact revolutionary change, or else it's guaranteed to reach apocalyptic extremes. The collapse of modern civilization, at least. If you think I'm being dramatic, tell that to an Australian. Where the sky has literally been blood red for days. Where the smoke is visible from New Zealand. Ask them if they think the word apocalypse is too dramatic.

The despair of it all has grown so great that suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth and the leading cause of death among young men.

I've been paying attention to these issues for 20 years. Watching them all get worse and worse and worse. Watched electoral politics fail to address anything over and over and over. I've been telling everyone I know since 2008 that we should all be rioting *right fucking now* for the environment (that was the year I learned about the clathrate gun). The last few years has seen so many people waking up and beginning to talk and take things seriously, and I'm thankful for that. But I've been doing this for a while.

And what I want to say is this election is different. Bernie Sanders and AOC are the first nationally recognized politicians I've seen in my entire adult life who I wholeheartedly believe in the integrity of. At age 36, the first to ever make me feel like there's anyone in federal politics representing me.

And given the deadline on global warming, the 2020 election, especially the Democratic primary, will be the most important, concentrated historical inflection point since 9/11. This is IT. The stakes are do or die. Seriously. Do or die. Many believe Sanders is too extreme. Unpragmatic. Besides half of the claims about him being lies by a media establishment owned by the rich who actually feel threatened by him... his boldness in the face of political status quo is exactly why I love him. Milquetoast neoliberal reformist bullshit has been failing for how long now? It's time to give it up.

There is no other candidate, and has never been another candidate in my adult life, with the integrity and gusto to have any hope of addressing all those problems above with the tenacity and urgency they deserve. And the environment demands this. There is no other choice.

If Bernie doesn't win 2020, we have no more use for politics. We will be out of time. Out of time. Out of time. I want that to sink in. This is it. We won't have time left to wait for the next election cycle. The only hope left for saving modern civilization from environmental collapse will be mass violence. I don't mean riots. I mean guillotines. And I don't mean that figuratively.

Anyone who knows me knows my cynicism towards politics. I have denounced every politician that everyone else believed in and I have been right every time. I'd like to think it probably means something when I actually believe in one. I have never promoted someone for an election like this before. I can only hope that this allows my words to carry weight for someone.

Bernie or Bust - 2020

Anyone so inclined can feel free to share this around.

[Frumple]

If your last hope is a septuagenarian that's been ossifying in congress for decades, you're definitely pretty fucked, I'll give that much. Especially when everyone still looks to be likely to be beaten handily by bloody biden

[Telgin]

I couldn't agree more with SalmonGod.  The crushingly sad thing is that even if Bernie were to win, he'll be hamstrung by Congress and won't get anything accomplished.  Sometimes it feels like the best we can do is shrug and tell people we told them so when everything falls apart, and that's zero comfort.

[TamerVirus]

[sluissa]

Step 1: Get Trump out of office.

Everything else follows that.

[Teneb]

I couldn't agree more with SalmonGod.  The crushingly sad thing is that even if Bernie were to win, he'll be hamstrung by Congress and won't get anything accomplished.  Sometimes it feels like the best we can do is shrug and tell people we told them so when everything falls apart, and that's zero comfort.

I dunno about you, but I am readying myself to become the shaman of a Mad Max-esque tribe after the collapse of contemporary civilization.

[nenjin]

I'll take a President trying to do something good and fair being cockblocked by Congress over a President being a self-serving prick who Congress won't stand up to.

[Telgin]

Oh, absolutely.  I just don't see any way out of the current situation.  Not enough people in power see or care about the consequences to do anything until it is much too late, and with the way we've set up our government even that can't be changed [in time].

[Iduno]

Not enough people in power see or care about the consequences to do anything

Oh, I assume a good number of them do care. They've just set up a system that destroys anyone who isn't them, and benefits the people who are.

[Naturegirl1999]

I think there may be a revolution at some point. If there isn’t, then there will never be

[Kagus]

I think there may be a revolution at some point. If there isn’t, then there will never be

That... I mean... That's entirely true. Either something happens, or it doesn't. There aren't a lot of states a binary value can be in!

[PTTG??]

The revolution is in a state of quantum superposition.

[Max™]

Good lord, apocalyptic mindsets are absurd, how old are you all? How many times have you heard the imminent doom predictions? Anybody remember when we used to have polar bears and summertime ice at the north pole? What a tragic loss that was. How about all the people lost from the barrage of constant category 6 hurricanes and EF6 tornadoes?

You're getting scared over imaginary issues and ignoring why shit is fucked: trickle down nonsense, obstructionist congresses murdering bipartisanship, crumbling infrastructure, open and proud white supremacists walking down the street and winning elections, gerrymandering, people who pronounce that g and the one in gif the same because they're not the same but one is like in giraffe, wealthy cunts throwing money at elections and winning, that hillbilly cunt mcconnell sneaking hordes of hard right judges onto the benches when he isn't outright stealing their seats.

I get that you feel worked up over what sounds like a righteous cause, I mean, without the environment, where will we keep all our stuff? We can't just move it beyond the environment like that boat the front fell off of, right?

It's not going to be a pressing issue in the next 50 years, or 100 years, even assuming the theoretical framework it's built on isn't flawed.

There are bigger more pressing issues right now, fuck your climate crusade, we have little kids in cages, hordes of backward ass cultists assaulting numerous liberties via the courts, and literal nazis roaming around freely.

[PTTG??]

The climate crisis 1: is actually having pressing effects right now, as you may have noted in minor, remote places like California and Australia, and 2: inseparable from economic and political injustice.

We can't solve global warming by forcing all the poor people to live without electricity, and we can't solve inequality without addressing the ways that rich people steal environmental services from the poor.

The best-case solution for both problems is the same: A world where people are part of an intelligently-run society that considers the long-term consequences of its actions on the world and the people in it, including preserving people's liberties in that system.