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davidw parent
Who you work with certainly matters, but it does show that it's incredibly easy to get a foot in the door with a lot of political things.

People complain so much about politics as being this completely foreign and detached thing. But it's not if you put a bit of effort into it.

mothballed
Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece. OP was supporting a conservative party, so basically going with the flow of a bunch of what a bunch of influential and rich people wanted as their pawn. If you have something that is of little consequence to the rich, like mothers against drunk driving or something, sure you can probably get it done as it's a token gesture and the powerful just pull strings to get out of those prosecution anyways.

If you look at actually trying to move the meter away from the status quo of the rich and powerful, rather than just repainting the pieces on the chess board, you see politicians like Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul found the whole thing rigged against them. Bernie was railroaded by the upper echelons of his own party and Ron Paul found his name magically erased from practically all the talks on the high level debates in the press to the point they would just skip over his name in the primary poll rankings.

davidw OP
It's incredibly easy to get involved with people like Mamdani or Seattle's Katie Wilson or so many others, if that's your political angle. The same is true on the other side.

We should be encouraging people to be more involved. That helps shape outcomes.

mothballed
Katie Wilson's claim to fame is doing the bidding of rich and powerful King County Metro union gang / alias "ATU" for the purposes of using exploitive taxes to take from the population of Seattle (who have infamously been fleeced on massive gouged public transit construction costs) and reshuffle the money to cushy transit union lobby and their benefactors so their precious fiefdom would not be downsized. She then created a payroll tax to enrich rich contractors to create a tiny amount of "affordable housing" (buzz word used to enrich construction contractors at public cost) for a select few. She is basically a shining beacon of a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful as they are all too happy to be the benefactors of her tax policies that largely socialize costs and privatize the earnings albeit under a false flag of helping the poor.

Mamdani has been legally barred from the Presidency, the position we are discussing. He simply cannot. In fact, I suspect that is part of the reason why Trump has been so weirdly chum with him, he's simply not a threat for the presidency and never will be.

davidw OP
I wasn't discussing 'the presidency'. I'm saying it's easy to get involved - especially so for the local races that matter more to most people's lives in any case, where things like zoning and school curriculums are decided, or where money either gets invested to further fossil fuel infrastructure or for cleaner things like bikes, walking and transit.
mercanlIl
>Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece.

I fail to see how it’d be any more difficult to get involved in politics for candidates that don’t meet this criteria.

mothballed
You've quoted a single sentence then ignored the second paragraph where I explained things even Jon Stewart famously pointed out:

https://youtu.be/SqRt8Lbk5eY?t=387

It's easy to "fail to see" when you do not look.

mercanlIl
We appear to be talking about different topics entirely. Your points seem to be about the effectiveness of political involvement, but the comment you’re replying to and the quote I posted relates to political involvement.

It’s encouraging to hear stories about how people get involved. We can learn about the process, network, and have an impact, even if that impact is incremental.

Edit: Clarified, added second paragraph

BobaFloutist
> Bernie was railroaded by the upper echelons of his own party

Bernie Sanders is an Independent, he doesn't have a party.

mothballed
I see you've disregarded I used past tense in regard to his 'railroading' and then changed the tense, which I find underhanded. To bring it to a more plain level, he , at a prior time, under his more notable POTUS bids, ran on the Democratic ticket.

What's also worth pointing out is that the person Democratic upper echelon nominated, without even a primary, the last election was someone who did so abysmally in the popular primaries that she was at single digit percents yet magically got installed as the POTUS contendor without even a a vote. When you consider our voting system is set up that writing a candidate in is essentially throwing your vote away, a popular primary does not even happen (imperfect as it may be), in practice the two parties are operating as bureaucrats of in-party members who are giving you a choice of two people that represent the in-party elite albeit with some different kinds and volumes of scraps tossed to the general populace.

And for the most part, our founding fathers warned us of exactly this.

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