Watched the Vaush and Zoe discussion. It was really good (I knew of her already and knew she was pog), and I agreed on a lot with Vaush, but I think Zoe did bring up some points that changed my mind ever-so-slightly. A small thread:

A point Vaush brings up often is that people like Bernie and AOC radicalized a LOT of people into socialism, or at the VERY least social democracy, which is far better than neoliberalism or fascism. And I think this is correct and good. The problem I'm starting to realize

is that I feel that people are being radicalized by the failures of neoliberalism, not the successes of socdems. I think social democracy is a really good idea to make things better for a lot of people. But Zoe made the point that it's okay to let the socdems

push for social democracy and we vote for them, while us socialists work on direct action. And that brought up a concern I hadn't thought about before. Like Zoe said, socialism in electoral politics is diluted, watered down, and ultimately just social democracy.

But while I'm fine with getting social democracy while pointing people farther left, I think having socialist politicans, ultimately diluted to social democracy, can lead to some issues. People got radicalized by Bernie, imo, because he LOST.

The failures of neoliberalism, and even some socdems, does radicalize people, but I'm concerned the failures of """socialism""" will make people think that that's all there is to socialism. I'm worried that we'll say, "No, this isn't real socialism, here's some more radical

stuff," and people will reply, "You keep saying that. You're lying just as much as liberals do. Socialism was tried and it didn't work." And of course we know that it's diluted to the point of being just liberalism, but most people don't think that way.

I do think we should vote, and I do think socdems help the country in at least some way, but even if I'm not fully convinced, I'm at the very least worried that "socialist" politicians will ultimately hurt socialism more than help it. I feel that by letting

socdems make things easier for people, lives better, and strengthen conditions for us, while we in the background do our thing, that might lead to much better conditions for us, because the blame won't be on us when things inevitably go wrong.

We should ally with socdems in the meantime (while still criticizing them heavily and getting into twitter fights and whatnot; they're still ultimately capitalists), but I'm not sure it's a good idea to *become* the socdem.
But I dunno. I could be completely off the mark here.

anyway shout out to @anarchopac who is amazing

also read this cause she corrected herself from the debate on a point she made and i didn't know about this, so even moreso electoralism is not a particularly amazing strategy - again, not saying not to vote here, just that im not gonna pog for it https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1339325414259515393