All Politicians Are Bastards

Things must be getting bad, seems like a big uptick in "both sides" memes lately

Just in time for mid term elections to sway the independent/on the fence voters away from voting Democrat.
While Democrats deserve their fair share of criticisms, it is nothing compared to how Republicans shifted their ideology to fascism/nazism. A vote for a republican is a vote for nazi's.
- As per this meme
  "I want to be on the side who murders children for fun"
  Or
  "I'm too.chickenshit to stop people murdering children for fun"
  If I have to be on one side I'm not picking the willfully murdering children side
- Are the Democrats going to start acting like their colleagues are Nazis? That would be cool. To be fair, I do like Newsom pushing for redistricting and the Democrats not backing down on the shutdown.
- You're "overthinking" it. There are only like 8 states that count votes anyway
- The shutdown prevented the last jobs report from coming out. The payroll company ADP released theirs and it's not good
Wouldn't call this a both sides meme necessarily, it criticizes Democrats for being ineffective and not doing their job right, while Republicans are clearly the root cause of the entire problem in the first place.

I would still rather have the coward cops in charge than the active shooter

I want more options. The coward cop is perfectly willing to compromise and work across the aisle with the shooter to kill fewer kids because the idea of zero murdered children is a radical idea to the cowardly cop. He's like "I'll get to the bottom of this situation find out how many kids he needs to kill. If he says five I'll get him down to three. Then we'll work together with the parents of these kids and find out whose kids will live, together as a nation."
People who want no kids killed in the situation are exremists, according to the cowardly cop, who want him to pass a purity test like "stop the shooter before he kills more kids"
So I want an option that says "I will actively stop school shooters frol shooting schools" but people who want the cop aren't willing to betray the cop's legacy and admit he needs to be fucking fired yesterday, so the next shooter, if there's a school left, will actually be stopped or the new cop can be actually held accountable for failing so horribly without an army of unthinking drones defending them.
- I totally agree.
Having the coward cop In Charge means that the shooter will eventually be in charge. Because the coward is a coward

Hint: They're both republicans.

Anybody who doesn't explicitly oppose FPTP actually supports the Republicans. They are playing dumb, and DINO voters are dumb to keep falling for it.
- We need to try to pass these ballot initiatives for alternative voting systems when it’s an off-election year.
  Too many people that aren’t checked into the voting process vote against any system changes during Presidential election years. Our best bet is to get a big movement going now so that we can vote for a different system during midterms.
  All we need in half the states is to get citizens ballot initiatives going, which just require getting enough signatures to put it up for vote.
- This sounds like more "Don't bother voting" propaganda.

Unfortunately unless we as citizens are dedicated (investing the time too coordinate and act) and educated (about the topics at hands, including the ones we do not care about) enough for anarchy we do need representatives.

If we are not ready for anarchism then we need a system with representatives. They do not have to be professionals and they could be temporary (e.g. max N years/mandate) or part time (e.g. max 10hrs/week) or whatever other rules we deem required.

If we are not ready for either then we leave a power vacuum that will be taken by whomever is more powerful, including those ready to use power in the most unethical ways, bribing, coercion, murder, etc.

So... even though 99.99% of politicians might be corrupt, maybe 99.999% even started uncorrupted (funnily enough not even a word in my browser dictionary) but the system itself in order to reach and hold power did corrupt them, the alternative is IMHO even worst.

That being said don't ask me to point out a .00% of uncorrupted politicians. I do have some ideas but even there I didn't do the background check necessary so I might be biased.

Finally why do I bother writing this? Well because I worry that the power vacuum can be created and then abused by political actors outside of democracies.

Anarchy doesn't mean chaos, a lack of social order, Mad Max, or a power vacuum. Depending on which flavor of anarchism we're talking about, political power is distributed among the population evenly.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
— Buckminster Fuller
- I'm not sure what you are clarifying for but I can at least make my point more explicit : I didn't use anarchism in a derogatory manner, on the contrary. I was trying to highlight that anarchism, like democracy, is demanding because it demands of its participants to actually take part.
- I think he addressed that though. Anarchy requires knowledgable participation in small sections of the responsible governance that would normally go to representatives.
  To put it in simple terms, people don’t need to know how to build bridges, but they need to understand they, as with every other person in the village, are each tasked with carrying one boulder to a piling in the river.
- I don’t see how that would happen/function in reality though.
  “Just want you to ask yourself: when you gain results the wrong way, what are you left with in the end? Only dark regret and a deep emptiness that have nowhere to go.” - Suzaku Kururugi
  You can work within a system to change it and peacefully push for change from the outside.
There could be intermediary steps. As just one example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism
democratic confederalism defends a "type of organization or administration which] can be called non-state political administration or stateless democracy",[1] which would provide the framework for the autonomous organization of "every community, confessional group, gender specific collective and/or minority ethnic group, among other".[4] It is a model of libertarian socialism[18][19][20] and participatory democracy [24] built on the self-government of local communities and the organization of open councils, town councils, local parliaments, and larger congresses,[4] where citizens are the agents of self-government, allowing individuals and communities to exercise a real influence over their common environment and activities.

Isn't the government shut down? I dont know what magical powers you think they have. Give them a majority, I guarantee things wont be as shit as they are today. Won't be sunshine and rainbows either but if you want to eat the turd sandwich over smelling a fart, thats on you.

Huh? The government shutdown like a day ago. But yes, a true unobstructed majority would certainly improve things.
- https://www.npr.org/2025/10/15/nx-s1-5575134/government-shutdown

Conservatives are the school shooter. Conservatives are the cops sitting outside for an hour. Progressives are trying to seize enough of a majority to stop the shooter and regulate gun ownership to prevent future shootings.

Lol, nice joke.

Where does that put everyone who didn't vote?

They’re the people that stay home and make whiny memes about how bad it is and then go on about their lives doing nothing at all to change it.
- while you... ?
Reading the news saying "how horrible. There is nothing we can do."
They're in the short bus parked outside.
- ableism

They all work for Israel anyway https://www.trackaipac.com/congress

Israel and the USA are two arms of the same entity. Both are entirely controlled by the capitalist hegemony.

We need more of them more often

Yup.

And the dbzer0 shits are the ones criticising on the internet while doing fuckall.

I vote, protest, do mutual aid, do anti capitalist shit like make free software, donate from my paycheck to organizations that help people, and still find time shit on libs on lemmy. If people further to the right than libs were here I'd be shitting on them too but they dont stick around on lemmy for long.
What do you do?
Pj? get yourself some glasses, I'm on mander.xyz.

Republicans are Jimmy from mouthwashing.

Democrats are Curly.

Leftists are Swansea.