Should have mentioned, I’m in SoCal right next to the San Fernando Valley.

This looks like Sonic the Hedgehog

That’s my offering

No, it’s not suspicious to make a new account and then use it. Especially when there are many new accounts being made on the website. Attack the merits of the conversation, don’t default to this lame routine of “you are doing something which I have decided resembles the actions of a widely disliked group despite you having very clearly different values from that group”.

Your exact quote was “I vote for democrats because they’re not actively working to take my rights away”. You have rights besides the right to express your gender identity as you please. Those other rights, as I have very clearly expressed, have been and still are being taken away by Democrats. I don’t need to know what you’ve been through to talk to you about the reality of police brutality in the world and the way which Democrats enable it.

Yes, the progress towards a third party would not be instantaneous. So we shouldn’t bother starting anywhere, and should just concede defeat to the oligarchs who demonstrably own both parties?

What I’m doing is deciding that I’m not willing to endorse, by vote, continued murder both overseas and at home in the name of possibly preempting further persecution of a marginalized group. I believe the greatest “net good” for humanity should be the priority (second only to the preservation of nature), not a localized “net good” for communities I identify with or for my nation.

It’s not performative lol, you don’t even know who I am, what could I possibly have to prove here? Don’t assume to be able to ascribe motives to me, and don’t tell me I don’t care about helping people just because I’ve decided bullets and bombs and for-profit murder are the more urgent evil than laws and vitriol and bigotry.

People aren’t allowed to have opinions on new accounts? On a website seeing a massive influx of new accounts? Am I going to be a Russian bot next? My other account is @[email protected] , but that’s an account for a video game group I run, so I don’t feel using it for my personal politics is appropriate.

I’ve already very clearly articulated the many ways in which they are the same, friendo. If you’re comfortable voting for tangible murder overseas and by US police in the name of preempting persecution of a specific population, that’s your prerogative. But similarly, don’t expect me to tolerate your “Democrats aren’t taking away our rights” nonsense when I’ve provided multiple verifiable examples of them doing exactly that. Just not the rights you’re currently worried about.

Edit: I guess this conversation is over, so I’ll end it with a picture of Biden holding hands with an actual Italian fascist PM

Voting for them for who they are not, while ignoring the fact that they don’t fight back in any meaningful way, is doing your part to enable the ratchet effect.

I don’t care what the right wing does. I care what’s right. I’m not voting for anyone whose campaign donors profit from overseas murder, just because they’re not vitriolic about trans people at home.

Then why would did the Democrats not use their brief supermajority to codify protections for abortion, for trans people, etc? Could it be that they don’t actually care about you at all and just need a narrative in order to hold up a sign that says “If you don’t vote for me, look what will happen!”

They’re playing their role in the Ratchet Effect, and Republicans are playing theirs. All to benefit the same people.

Also worth mentioning that more people died of COVID during Biden’s administration and police killed more people in 2022 than any other year. While Biden insists we need to “fund the police” and Democrats champion Cop City - are those not just components of a decentralized, country-wide “death camp”?

It’s not “both sides-ing”, it’s insisting that they are the same side. One actor playing two roles in the same movie.

It was Democrat DA Sherry Boston in Georgia who charged 22? environmental protestors with domestic terrorism for being present at protests in vague proximity to where a police car was burned.

It was Democrat Mayor Andre Dickens, and Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff & Raphael Warnock, who remained silent when the Atlanta City Council passed funding for Cop City after 90%+ of public testimony urged them to vote against it. Although the Senators had no problem implicitly supporting the state’s narrative that the protestors are violent terrorists, while waxing poetic about “sacred constitutional rites”. They’ve also all been silent, as far as I’m aware, about the police firing 57 rounds into Tortuguita / Manuel Paez, an environmental activist who had his hands up at the time of death according to an independent autopsy. The first environmental activist killed on US soil - which, as an act of politically motivated violence, would actually fit the definition of terrorism - with the full complacency of the Democratic Party.

It was Obama who passed the Trespass Bill allowing federal authorities to designate certain areas as, essentially, “1st Amendment does not apply here” zones. He also signed the NDAA, which, as the ACLU explains: “…[codified] indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield.”

It was all presidents, Democratic and Republican, who decided not to exercise the unilateral authority granted to the executive branch to end the wildly unpopular Drug War which especially targets poor and/or marginalized people, particularly black people. (Based on rates of arrest vs rates of self admitted use.) All presidents have the ability to reschedule any substance at any time without any approval from any other branch of government. The Drug War, or just cannabis prohibition even, could end tomorrow if Biden wanted it to.

Not to mention they may not be taking away your rights, as an American, but the Democrats might be taking away the lives of your parents, siblings, or neighbors as acceptable collateral with the wars they champion overseas. (Speaking less about Ukraine as the whole nuclear disarmament in the 90s is a special case, and more about, for example, our unjust occupation of oil fields in Syria or Obama’s illegal strikes in Libya).

Vote 3rd party, because you’re doing something worse than throwing your vote away when you vote Republican or Democrat. Both teams have largely the same corporate ownership.