EXCHANGE INTERFACE

A moment to rant about politics and inertia.

So, with the fed election coming up, there's a lot of whining about how Labor is as bad as the Libs and there's no party to vote for...

Man, I hate it when two year olds (the id) throw tantrums in the supermarket and their parents (the ego) don't actually do anything about it - not even tell them "well, you can shout and scream but you're still not getting the damn thing".

So. No, Labor isn't perfect. They're centrist rather than progressive, they're beholden to much of the same big business and partisan groups that the Libs are, and they're definitely not people I want to see holding the reins forever and ever.

But.

Opting out of the Lib/Labor two party preferred system only helps the Libs. Who are already bad and heading for worse. Put Labor into the House now ("government"), then vote progressive in the senate - the Greens, Independents who are doing good things, other parties who believe in accountability for politicians (not One Nation, though. Or any of the right wings/racists. We want to move away from people who think that their skin colour/history/gender gives them the right to do as they please). Teeny tiny parties that have barely any say but which can grab things by the balls when the lawmakers are more or less evenly balanced.

And no, it's not going to be perfect immediately. But dear heavens the number of people who want a perfect Hero Of Democracy RIGHT NOW is frustrating. (y helo thar BernieBros, I see you are making Run 2.0 for the Democratic candidate and the Presidency, complete with whining)

It's like, we've been doing almost nothing politically progressive for the last 30 years - letting the 'right wing freedomists' erode our sense of community and unity in the name of big business and money money money money, and suddenly we're wondering why all our choices are bad?

Change will be slow. Start by kicking out the 'freedomists' who think that they should be allowed to rape bigot bias define truth etc (y helo thar if-i-didn't-see-it-happen-then-obvs-it's-not-true), then work on the 'well, we're sort of the lite version of that' and chaining them to the interests of the progressive groups.

Of course, now we have the 'instant' generation' (yes, even me) who are all "I DON'T CARE HOW, I WANT IT NOW!!" (I gotta make a Veruca Salt gif with that.)

It's ironic how many people are all "I just want the Perfect Party to run in and Sweep Me Off My Democratic Feet and take me to a place of Accountability and Democratic Socialism without having to do any of the work!"

Sorry, nope. That's not how this works. Murdoch paid metric fucktonnes of money to sway stupid-minded people; we're going to have to take it back a handful of people at a time. It's going to be nasty. It's going to be hard. And a lot of people are going to give up because it's [whinyvoice] too hard and all my choices are bad [/whinyvoice] - well, make LESS BAD CHOICES, asshole. They are there, it's just easier for you to thrash around complaining that you have no perfect choices.

tl;dr: Politics is fucked but we can unfuck it, however it will be slow. Unfortunately, people are lazy and they'd rather throw tantrums about how there is no Mr Perfect Party for them to take them away and give them Democratic Orgasms all day long, and they simply can't settle for anything less, darling, it's not true to themselves!