not deadly for you, just deadly for others. Masks aren’t to protect yourself, they’re to protect other people. Something that seems to be extremely difficult to grasp for Americans that have had decades of being told that they’re the center of the universe

Yes, if you’re actually organizing so much that spending an hour filling out a ballot based on some local union’s voter guide is gonna detract from that then you have a point. Also if you live in a state where voter suppression is much stronger, sure.

But I feel like that’s not a very common situation. I think when you factor in the impact that local elections have—Republicans are very successfully banning books about critical race theory currently by electing school board officials; sheriffs have an incredible amount of power with very little oversight and very few people vote on those races; local government officials can just sell your green space to bougie developers to further gentrification—if you factor in all that, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an activist too busy to copy a voter guide.

One interesting to note is that whenever a party ends up in overwhelming majorities, there’s always factionalism that splits it up. If Democrats won an overwhelming majority we’d likely also have a lot more critiques of establishment elites coming from the left. It weakens their ability to justify neoliberalism under the guise of appealing to “moderates”

That being said shit’s complicated. They tried to deport my family just months after Trump got elected and he overturned the entire immigration apparatus within a few weeks. At the same time, Biden has been much more imperialist than Trump could’ve ever dreamed of and nobody is as effective at giving away money to “defense” contractors as Democrats. Bernie was genuinely actually on track to win the nomination in 2020 and betting markets, historically the single most accurate predictor, had him winning right up until the Clyburn endorsement of Biden.

All of these are simultaneously true and they should all be considered.

I’ve studied alternative voting systems a lot (even made a website that lets you compare about 2 dozen of them at once). I’d love for us to switch to an Approval system. But if there’s one thing I’ve concluded from studying them it’s that you can’t fix a system of exploitation through “reform” without directly addressing the underlying power structures. I do believe these systems can help us break the duopoly, but, if anything, smaller parties can be even more susceptible to corporate takeover

For which part? The bit about Lenin’s warning is from Lenin’s Testament[0] in the post-script:

Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

Also in the testament he said of Stalin

I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious “nationalist-socialism” [Stalin critised the minority nations for not being “internationalist” because they did want to unite with Russia], played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.

Also there was 21 members and 10 candidate members of the Central Committee at the time of the Revolution in 1917. You can look up the history of each of the members and see that, for the ones who made it through till Lenin’s death, Stalin had them executed in order to consolidate all power. These members include Zinoviev and Kamenev who represented the “left wing” of the party. Trotsky was the only original member that survived but he was banished and never returned to Russia. Stalin would use him as a scapegoat for many years afterwards; using alleged involvement in “Trotskyist groups” as an excuse to imprison or kill other members of the party.

[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/index.htm

Wild to see a community that’s supposed to be a fan of Lenin making excuses for Stalin… Lenin’s last dying wish was that the party find a way to get rid of Stalin. Stalin literally had all of the original members of the Bolsheviks – everyone that was there during the October Revolution – killed. He pretty much stood against everything Lenin (and obviously his arch-rival Trotsky) stood for