Yeah, priests can’t run for office. However, it’s weird with the Pope because there’s restrictions on the ways in which a reigning Pope can stop being Pope (this actually was a big deal when Benedict XVI resigned, some people thought he didn’t have the right to do that just because he was sick). So while a priest just stops being a priest if he wants to run for office, I’m not sure how it works with the Pope.

Yeah you’re exactly right, as I said we live in completely different and irreconcilable realities. The fact of the matter is, given the option between sitting down with people like myself (Hexbear user) who have extremely different views, or just hitting the button that makes us all go away, the vast majority of people will just hit the button. It’s not really even a liberal thing, people behave that way regardless of ideology (although I think there’s something particular about how atomized and depersonalizing the current state of social media is that makes that kind of behavior more common).

But you see my point — you’re perfectly within your rights to think that everyone who’s a socialist/Marxist/whatever has gone too far or whatever, and not wish to interact with them. Replicate similar preferences across a whole community, though, and it ends up isolating them and creating the situation that the root comment of this thread is lamenting. We’re just little echo chambers siloed off from each other because the cognitive dissonance of experiencing each other’s versions of reality is too much.

It’d also be nice to see a few more viewpoints.

Unfortunately, hasty defederation has made this impossible. It’s too easy for people in a community to ask for defederation instead of confronting other people’s viewpoints. Not to mention that when very contentious topics are brought up and there are whole communities full of people who dedicate a lot of time to reading about and thinking about those topics, it can create a poor situation where that community suddenly starts an outburst of too many disagreeing viewpoints. Compound that with the extremely fractured state of information and media where people live in completely different realities. It gets to be too much, and it’s exceedingly difficult to have a civil conversation when the gulf between 2 communities is so large.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/download/what-itd.pdf

https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf

tldr build parallel power structures under the purview of a revolutionary socialist organization outside of the current bourgeois democracy. Strengthen them and grow them out as long as the bourgeois state allows, then in a moment of crisis seize state power to oversee a transition from capitalism to socialism.

There’s also the anarchist strategy which is similar in essence but with the crucial difference of laying out the parallel power structures horizontally such that no central power nor state organs exist.

Bernie is a Zionist and not a socialist at all. He sucks and if he was in a general election in 2028 I probably would still vote for the PSL candidate because I don’t live in a swing state.

But he absolutely was screwed out of the 2020 nomination in a concerted effort from the Democratic Party establishment to get anyone but Bernie to win.

Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race until Super Tuesday to act as a spoiler while all the other moderate candidates dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. The media consistently downplayed Bernie’s early lead.

Pete Buttigieg had shady connections to the owners of the app used to conduct the Iowa Caucus. That same Iowa Caucus held “votes” that were based on how loud the audience’s cheers for each candidate were.

The media buried the Tara Reade story (CNN even took down an old episode of their radio show where Tara Reade’s mother called asking for help because her daughter had been assaulted by her boss who was a politician in DC).

Recognizing the reality of the situation, calling it out as a shit sandwich, and encouraging others to act in the way that reduces harm the most with an actual chance to succeed

Yeah I agree, more people gotta join Hamas

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-comes-to-power

There are some misconceptions about how Hitler came to power. It is important to understand that:

Hitler did not seize power in a coup; and Hitler was not directly elected to power.

Rather, Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power through Germany’s legal political processes. According to the 1919 German constitution, the position of chancellor was appointed by the president.

Guess Germans should’ve voted harder then. Oh wait, there was a Communist Party who attempted a revolution before Hitler came to power and they failed because the Freikorps killed them? Well I wonder who started the Freikorps…

Yes, that’s right, and Kamala promised she wouldn’t change anything about what Biden was doing too (i.e. exactly the same thing).

I don’t understand why the gaudy Trump Gaza real estate deal is supposed to be a point in favor of Biden or Kamala, either. Would it be any better if after exterminating the same number of Palestinians, Kamala did a land acknowledgement in Gaza instead of building a Trump Tower? The reality is that if Israel is capable of seizing land in Gaza to build a riviera they’d do it regardless of which party is in power in Washington DC. Their strategy hasn’t changed at all since Jan 2025 when Trump stepped in.

Oh I guess Dr German History decided to show up and teach us all a lesson about how voting against Hitler would have stopped Hitler. Because Hitler definitely got into power because he won a democratic election, right?

She promised nothing with regards to Palestine. She said she would not be fundamentally different from Joe Biden in any way. Joe Biden always granted Israel unconditional and full support. There is nothing Israel asked for during the Biden administration that they didn’t get; and I don’t think there’s any reason to think a Harris administration would change on that end.

So why shouldn’t we believe that Kamala would kill just as many people as Trump? Because she isn’t an old decrepit white dude like the other 2 guys?

Definitely the vibe OP was talking about,

What, as in being correct?

Then you will need to be aware that by not voting for the more left candidate, we will have a far right government for a couple of cycles at least. This will cost lives and further entrench them into power.

And yet when the moderate liberal candidate wins and nothing changes, the lesson most regular people learn is that liberals suck and the left gets lumped in with that because this strategy of always ceding ground to the liberals makes the left indistinguishable from libs. It also results in the genocide in Gaza and similar things in the future as climate collapse advances and the contradictions get sharper. So why is there a duty for the left to neuter itself, associate with liberals who actively oppose the socialist agenda, and be complicit in genocide with our tiny amount of power?

The reason what I’m saying is relevant is that for that strategy to work the left has to establish itself as a real political force first. Doing nothing but ceding ground in elections achieves the opposite. I’m saying that the Democrats currently have no reason to care about the left because there’s not enough leftists to swing an election, and for that to be the case the left has to do work on the ground first that can get people to agree to a radical leftist program distinct from liberalism.

The Dems didn’t lose because leftists didn’t vote for them, there’s not a lot of leftists in the US anyway. They lost because Biden’s presidency failed to improve people’s material conditions since COVID and Kamala offered nothing better.

Ideally leftists could actually be organized enough that we could make concrete demands and withholding our votes would kill a candidate’s chances, but that’s not the reality except in some specific local contexts. In general this is a big reason why I think leftists in the US shouldn’t really bother with national elections (except as a way to advertise their orgs like PSL does) since they aren’t really achieving anything by putting energy somewhere that their enemies can outdo them with money.

Why can’t you think further than electoral campaigns? Why not organize a trade or tenant’s union, reach out to a local community and get them organized, do volunteer work as part of a political organization (or even any random group or Church if necessary), do anything other than pitching all your hope into the Democratic Party when history and political theory show that you’ll just be coopted?

WTF kind of organizing are you doing that the end goal is an election?

Uh oh, getting too close to tankie logic!

they constantly scrutinize others’ supposed moral purity and looking for skeletons in the closet.

Yeah just several hundred thousand dead Palestinians in Gaza, you know, a little skeleton in the closet. A tiny blemish. But all the adults in the room ought to just get over it and focus on what’s important: making America’s armed forces the most lethal army in the world, and student loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients who operated a business in an underserved neighborhood for 3 or more years.

Ok tankie, in this house we only think in terms of the choices that our benevolent masters lay out for us. Criticism of the system itself is a bridge too far.

Okay just gonna sweep Gaza under the rug in no time at all then.