Not voting is a choice. Not voting is saying you’re okay with either option. You’re OK with fascism because you can’t bear to have neoliberalism instead. Maybe you’d rather have genocide of both Arabs and Latin Americans? Maybe you’d rather have a president who has promised to make the genocide worse than one who might put some amount of pressure to make it less bad.

I imagine we can agree no American president has been ideal? Some of the presidents who have given us the most progress in important areas like welfare, civil rights, and environmental protections have also been war criminals. Roosevelt, Kennedy/LBJ, Obama, etc. Imagine where we’d be if no one voted for the lesser evil in those elections, held firm and didn’t vote for the president who would set up concentration camps, or keep us in wars in Asia and the middle east.

Throwing away your vote got us presidents like GWB and Trump. Stalled progress for decades. Evil supreme court justices. In fact, the most underrated job of the president is picking supreme court justices, since the court has made itself the single most powerful institution in the country.

How about you vote for the most potential for progress?

The not voting strategy has never worked before, why would it work this time? You want the let the future of this country determined by someone else?

What are we going to change our vote to? Only two parties can win this year (let’s change that) and the other option is worse on this issue.

Cut your nose to spite your face then. You’ll keep paying for genocide even if you won’t “vote for it.”

The things you can do are support groups and politicians that will push the country in the direction you want it to move. Really think about what action (or inaction) does for the things that matter to you. You have an opportunity to do something to help reduce overall suffering and make the country and world a slightly better place.

So you have three options, all having a bad outcome on the most important thing you care about.

One of the options maybe has better outcomes on some other things you care about.

Another option has bad outcomes in almost everything you care about, plus maybe even a worse outcome to your most important thing.

The third option is to leave it up everyone else to pick between the first two.

I know what I’d pick, what will you do?

Sounds like copium to me. The neolibs have really figured out how to placate the masses. Things aren’t bad enough and the media keeps the majority unaware.

The local version of this in southern California is the Banh Mi, a Vietnamese sandwich on a baguette. Less than 10 years ago you could get a good banh mi for 3 or 4 bucks, and these days even the cheapest I’ve seen are $6.50 and many places are charging over $10 for this perfect sandwich. At least double in under 10 years :(

Reading stuff like this is so crazy. They just go “hey 150k is a nice big number and should be plenty of heads, let’s just just take way the livelihoods of tens of thousands of actual people to make a number look nicer”

It reads like it’s from 98. The references to Blockbuster, Daimler-Chrysler, McDonnell Douglas, and Bill Clinton tipped me off this was an old one.

Sorry I’m too used to transit communities where everyone is in the know about big international projects.

In California they are building the first phase of the high speed rail project through the middle of the state where there is relatively little demand for rail. So we will end up with a high speed line that won’t get nearly as much use if they end up canceling the project. In California San Francisco and Los Angeles both are nearly equally as large and ridership will probably be dominated by trips to or between one of those cities.

I guess the difference in UK is the North has quite a few large cities that are each much smaller than London, so it doesn’t have that same “bi-pole” setup. Building starting in the north would improve connectivity between those cities. But I guess my question is, would there be much demand for travel between the northern cities as compared to demand between the north and London?

California HSR did this technique and honestly it isn’t going a whole ton better. Hopefully they connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with the central valley high speed line eventually, but it would have served a lot of people better to start in the cities and connect them through the valley later. Those lines in the cities could have been used for regional rail services while the valley line was completed. Specifically it would have been great to see a new SF to Sacramento line via San Jose and the LA to Lancaster line via Burbank.