Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you'll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.
Ugh. I agree with this. But I don't, at the same time. I'm of the opinion that people need to expire. There was a time where we could make the world a better place by working with people, but some just shouldn't exist. Some people just can't be reasoned with.
Both are correct we need a multilateral approach to win this. A peaceful movement is good but it’s a lot stronger if it’s backed by an adjacent movement that has some threat of force. A user above mentioned the civil rights movement with MLK being backed up by the Panthers. This was a great example because if you look at any successful revolution the approach was multilateral. The abolition movement was also multilateral
You are fundamentally confused such that you think there's any agency in voting in the first place. The only real impact it has is to completely short circuit and subsume all political activity away from any outside organizing that is, historically, literally the only thing that has ever worked to accomplish anything.
My goal is this is a forum. Someone says something wrong and then you say the correct thing under them. That's what you do on forums.
You literally voted to escalate a genocide because the system you're playing apologist for presented you no other choice. What misinformation am I spreading? You're the one acting as an enemy of liberation. You literally voted for a genocide. You are literally an ally to our oppressors.
It's honestly fucking frightening how you're capable of that kind of doublethink.
And you're not just an ally of our oppressors in that sense. You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
BlueMAGA continues to insist that, because they denied the extent of the genocide when it was their team doing it, the genocide actually wasn't that bad when it was their team doing it.
No, we’re calling for the overthrow of our oppressors. We’re calling for seizing the means of production. We’re calling for real and permanent liberation from the bourgeoisie.
I don’t care whether you vote, and I’m not telling anyone whether or not to vote. But I am pointing out how little power it gives us for the amount of time, money, and energy people are putting into it. The juice ain’t worth that much squeeze. We’re never going to vote ourselves out of wage slavery.
Last election the choice was between Palestinian genocide and Palestinian genocide. You are smoking crack if you think the oligarchy is ever going to provide you with a meaningful choice to loosen their hold on you through the civic ritual of voting.
So you knowingly voted to throw Palestinians under the extermination bus, is that it? And you consider yourself to be on the right side of history? And you never considered that perhaps your slavish ideological devotion to following the rules of a fascist political system was slow-boiling you into a fascist?
Ukranian genocide
You're talking about the ten years of ethnic cleansing the Ukranian nazi government was doing to ethnic Russians within its borders, right? You wouldn't possibly consider yourself to be against genocide while supporting these guys, right? Because nobody could possibly be that deluded, right? Tell me you're not that programmed.
Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.
You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is "none of those things," actually, and you don't get that by voting harder because as you've just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never "less genocide," it is "no genocide."
Yeah man, the Neo-liberal turn? The war on terror? The GFC? All irrelevant, "people not voting" is the reason we have a goddam Cheeto in the white house.
Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn't work. Just because it isn't capable of causing any meaningful change doesn't mean it's useless.
Just because it isn't capable of causing any meaningful change doesn't mean it's useless.
I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It's like all change must be meaningful, and if it's not then it's not worth our time.
Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful
Lenin's position on integrating with the masses meant running working class parties in opposition to establishment parties, ie voting PSL over DNC. The vanguard's task is to become a party that the working class puts their full support behind, so that when revolution does happen, the vanguard can serve as the spearpoint to direct the masses in one unified direction and crush the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one.
You're right, I dont know that they are a psyop. I do, however, know that the position of 'voting is not worthwhile if you are a leftist' that they are taking above is the same position that many psyops would like to have in the minds of leftists. Put more simply, what might they have said differently if they were a psyop? Nothing, I presume.
It is better to root out psyop talking points that diminish our ability to form a collective voice, than it is to allow foolish notions like 'dont vote' to continue in our spaces.
Voting doesn't do much, though. I support voting for working class orgs like PSL, but not for the DNC or GOP, and I know it's very unlikley that PSL will win electorally. Leftists understand that the path to change is via organizing, not by supporting orgs that work against our interests, and we know we can't magically turn a capitalist org into a proletarian one by wishcasting.
If you want to argue against that, then do so, don't badjacket.
Fascists don't care if we vote, what they care about is if we organize. Now that the spoils of imperialism are drying up, fascism is rising, and the super-exploitation we inflict on the global south is turning more inward. What fascists are scared of is working class organizing and building actual power.
I think the point of the words inclusion is that you might have a very different perspective of the implications and effectiveness of voting when the state doesn't explicitly cater to your identity as the default.
Damn, I didn't realize I - a non-eligible voter not living in a swing state - was that powerful. That makes it even more egregious that the Democrats didn't try to win my vote. I personally chose who would win and they wouldn't even not do genocide to convince me
And yet, we're seeing GOP reps resigning in critical and contested seats that have been demonstrated to lean far more towards the Dems, especially when Dem-Socs are on the ticket.
We shouldn't just vote, but not voting will ensure we never get out of this mess.
The MAGAts wouldn't be trying every voter suppression trick in the book if voting wasn't currently still a colossal threat to their power
The right have gerrymandered and bet million bucks rigged the voting machines too. Always projection with them. Look at Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham voting districts. I read years ago that they have it rigged that they could never lose even if people voted.
The total lack of show-up from the majority of the left to primaries and the general election is precisely why fascists are in power today.
You speak just like a privileged white psuedo-leftist who lives in relative peace while minorities have the largest crackdown on them since the start of the War on Drugs.
No, Bolsonaro was not a dictator; if he had been, we wouldn't have been able to remove him. He had far less power than he thought; that's why voting worked.
I would argue the same is true of Trump. It certainly was in his first term. This term has all the aesthetics of authoritarianism, but he is failing to consolidate power, which is kind of pathetic considering how much power in the US was ready to surrender on day one.
except for all the white conservatives that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th, 2021; commit acts of violence against Democrat politicians; make reports and call "wellness checks" on others; commit or support police brutality; defend ICE abductions and trafficking...
There’s over 200,000,000 white citizens. A few hundred doing dumb shit isn’t the entire group. Would you apply this way of thinking to other groups of people?
Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
I still lurk on Twitter. Calling it a "white supremacist site" is just... Silly. The whole point of social media is that it's the users who create content.
I'm seeing a lot of right-wing fundamentalists being clapped by sane people. The only time I see any nazi/fascist/supremacist content is when it's getting ratio'd or just ridiculed.
I'm not saying this content isn't there, but I'm saying there's still a lot of people fighting the good fight. Packing up your toys and going home is not really a method for anything other than getting completely marginalised, IMO.
Revolutions stand or fall with public support. Voting is the most visible way to establish public sentiment. People like to quote that only a third of the US actually elected Trump, but do we have a clear idea of just how many oppose him, if so many voters apparently never expressed their opinion in any measurable way?
Doing nothing and complaining on the internet is useless. Doing something is scary. If you knew you had your community at your back, wouldn't you feel more confident to step up?
You're right that people need to know that voting won't be enough, but it's still important in order to communicate the public opinion that separates a revolution from a coup.
Depending on the stakes, yes. It is categorically better than not voting at all.
There is still the spoiler effect to consider, which may make voting third party a worse strategy in the complex, blind game that elections are. In elections where that isn't as big of a risk, it's a good way to indicate dissatisfaction with the status quo and the parties on offer. If there is a particularly convincing third party that many agree on, it also communicates what people do want.
In presidential elections, in a country where the president already had so much power even before this whole shitshow, when one candidate is a much greater threat to the basic feasability of resistance, it's a dangerous gamble, risking much for a fairly slim chance at an all-or-nothing victory.
FPTP is one of the many things that are fucked up, but not every election has that kind of impact, and particularly if you're in states where one party is so dominant that the spoiler effect is negligible anyways, it may be the more valuable choice.
Even along with public support, revolutions need their violent wing. MLK wouldn't have been as nearly successful without the Black Panthers visibly totin' guns on the 5 O'Clock news. It made MLK look very reasonable to deal with.
Gandhi, the modern Icon of peaceful protest winning the day, had armed rebellions popping up behind him. The Indian's had nearly a 100 year history of violence against the British. And an exhausted Great Britain just wanting to get out of the colonial business didn't hurt either.
When facing despots and fascists, there needs to be people willing to kill and die for the cause of freedom. We have not reached that point yet.
Agreed on all points. It's kinda like a robbery – you probably won't arbitrarily hand a random stranger your wallet, but if they point a knife, things look different.
Though in this case, it's the robber barons getting mugged by their victims.
The success of diplomacy and peaceful protest hinges on the existence of a credible threat that the alternative (war and riots, respectively) will be worse. Even if a (mostly) peaceful solution should be found, I suspect there will have to be some measure of violence to get that point across.
As others point out, the elites won't go down quietly, and as long as there are bootlicks willing to fight on their behalf, they'll rather let their bootlicks die than make concessions.
So while I don't think violent revolutions are good for their own sake, they may be a necessary evil for good ends.
If, for whatever reason, the police collectively decides to no longer enforce the commands of those in power and no other group steps up to violently defend the status quo, a peaceful revolution in the form of civil disobedience would be conceivable.
Getting to that point without some measure of violence is what I believe to be unlikely – not impossible, mind you, and I very much hope for it, but it's quite likely that an attempt to create such a consensus would (at least initially) be violently suppressed just as violent resistance would.
Even if it is achieved, the new society will need to guard itself against opportunistic egoists seeking to exploit the new power vacuum. Here too there may be at least an initial period of violence until that new dynamic is clear.
As long as there are people willing to hurt others for their own benefit, they will have to be fought.
I know of no revolutions that didnt use force or the credible threat of force, because the ruling class would always rather escalate than voluntarily give up their power.
People like to quote that only a third of the US actually elected Trump, but do we have a clear idea of just how many oppose him, if so many voters apparently never expressed their opinion in any measurable way?
Don't forget that we don't really understand how many of those get blocked from voting one way or another. So that's actually part of how the dictator suppresses opposition and then pretend that they're not losing.
Why is this type of privileged exclusionary 1 dimension opinion even upvoted?
There are multiple problems that matter at any given time.
Saying that racism is a distraction ignores the very real people who are being harmed right now because they aren't you, and thus you don't care about them. "I got mine" but about other issues.
Then thats what you should have complained about (the context being ill fitting in your mind) rather than implying that racial issues are a distraction.
Every dictator came to power through elections. Every dictator then manipulates or abolishes the next election so as not to lose power. No dictator has ever lost an election. There are "honest" exceptions but they were soft dictators. Fascism is just a special kind of dictatorship.
I didn't believe for a second that a Kamala victory would have crushed fascism forever.
In fact, I'm positive the GOP would place Trump's cold corpse as their nominee in all future elections if they had to.
The problem is simple:
Fascists are in power right now.
They wouldn't be in nearly as much power if Kamala had won
Because the fascists are in power, its exceedingly unlikely we'll ever have a fair election again with this government
That wouldn't be nearly as likely to be the case if Kamala had won.
Furthermore, I'm tired of white leftists screaming for revolution while they themselves know damn good and well they'd never fight in one themselves, and they wouldn't suffer even close to as much as racial, sexual and gender minorities will in resisting fascism.
The white leftists who refused to vote for Kamala suffer nowhere near as much as any minority living under Trump, and they knew that and still relax with their arms behind their heads today.
The white leftists who refused to vote for Kamala suffer nowhere near as much as any minority loving under Trump, and they knew that and still relax with their arms behind their heads today
The smug liberals who refused to have a backbone or humanity in the face of their party's genocide suffer nowhere near as much as Palestinans suffered under Biden and Harris, and they knew that and still relax with their fingers in their ears today
So you're not at all refuting that minorities are suffering g far more than white people under Trump?
And here's the issue with using the genocide of the Palestinians as an excuse to abandon all other minorities:
Resistance against the genocide in Palestine exists almost entirely within the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
Democracy would still almost certainly continue to exist in some capacity if Kamala had won.
But now that Trump won, Israel is not only entirely free, with zero guard rails whatsoever, to complete their genocide and attack all of their neighbors, but now the US is further involved than ever, outright bombing Iran in the process.
And genocide is your concern, huh?
What about the 4k (minimum) missing minorities that were kidnapped by ICE?
The mass building of concentration camps on US soil?
The massacre of Venezuelan civilians as prelude to an outright war and enslavement of Venezuela?
The campaign of the GOP's to destroy the 14th amendment and Voting Rights Act? You know, eliminating birthright citizenship and voter rights, the same shit the Nazis did to Jews leading to the start of the Holocaust.
Oh, and the total betrayal of Ukraine in Russia's genocidal war on them?
Refusal to vote for Kamala produced more genocide. Kamala was objectively the less genocidal option than Trump.
Words have meaning, and war is not genocide. You people support the Ukrainian coup government, who were doing actual ethnic cleansing before the Russian Federation finally stopped them. Anyone in the Donbas region would throw you in a hole for this equivocation, and you would deserve it. It makes me sick when liberals just mindlessly project the crimes of America's vassals and allies on America's enemies. Israel and Ukraine are allies. Israel trains both the Ukranian military and ICE. You are supporting, either tacitly or overtly, two different sets of nazis. You are a nazi supporter.
Refusal to vote for Kamala produced more genocide. Kamala was objectively the less genocidal option than Trump.
This is genocide-justifying horseshit to soothe your guilty conscience. Gaza was levelled under the Democrats. I'm not reading the rest of your fascist apologia because frankly, you people all spew the same delusional arguments. Anyone in Palestine would throw you into the sea for this inhumanity, and you would deserve it. Your cowardice and servility in the face of unimaginable cruelty has doomed you to live the rest of your life as a Good German. I would say good luck, but I don't wish good luck for you. I wish you a sudden moment of terrible clarity.
I'll take it that you have absolutely no reasonable counter argument and are just shitposting images of minorities being attacked with no real goal in mind.
You understand the US has a binary party system, right? You have 2 choices.
Since the GOP primaries for Trump, and Biden totally fucked over the Dem party by dropping too late for anyone other than Kamala to take the ticket, that was the choice.
Time and time again we see terminally online leftists scream for revolution, and absolutely no indication one will ever happen, let alone that they'll participate.
This is you coping by reflexively projecting your cowardice and complacency onto others to justify your uselessness, with an (un)healthy dose of "it can't happen here" american exceptionalism. Keep wallowing, your overlords love it.
Totally valid. You're right. Under those conditions, voting will definitely work. But only if you shame people on the Internet to vote the correct way.
Liberals have tried and failed to meaningfully improve their situations via voting for centuries. Without analyzing which class is in control of the state, voting will always be extremely weak.
You mean Biden who believes we would have to create Israel if it didn't exist, who continued the war drive, who delivered weapons and training to genocidaires, who put infants in solitary confinement at the border, who was instrumental in ensuring that the prisons were full of black people who could be used as slave labor, who pardoned the judge who took bribes in exchange for sentencing 8 year old to juvenile detention for jaywalking, who failed to do anything meaningful to stop Trump, who failed to do anything meaningful to limit the power of the executive so it couldn't be abused, who failed to do anything to stop fascism at all?
Those 4 years where voting a different guy in didn't do literally anything to stop fascism in the least?
Sure. Do it again. I am sure continuing to not stop fascism is exactly how we stop fascism
I think the leftist point being made isn't that any particular election has no effect. Of course elections have effects. At the very least they provide legitimacy. I think the point is that even though it worked to unseat Trump in 2020, the election did not halt the long term processes leading us towards fascism. It slowed them down a bit but didn't reverse trend. Reason being that the owner class kept expanding their wealth and therefore control over the entire system. I think leftist memes about elections are often poorly communicated or understood, which isn't ideal, but then it's ..memes.
I take this meme to also point out that a fascist could just not follow elections, or call them off entirely. Adolf Hitler, the man in the image, called of elections under guise of security. Yeah, you vote against 'em, but then they refuse to leave.
"BannedVoice" pointed out that this didn't happen in 2020, but I'd point out that then Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, as well as a fair number of Republican politicians, were what you'd call "Tea Party" or neoconservative. Kevin McCarthy, as well as just about every one of these "moderate" Republicans, have been chased out of the party, largely because of their refusal to bow to MAGA orders. The Republican Party of 2020 is not the Republican Party we have now. It's loyalists all the way through. Remember what happened with the Epstein files?
That's important context for what happened in 2020.
Broadly, if one believes that elections are a tool that should be leveraged, it's crucial to understand that elections are not enough, Never have been. Elections are but a small part of the democratic system. All the other cogs - campaigns, fundraising, at all levels of government, for this or that office, within parties, all of that matters immensely. The people you mention who acted as a bulwark against the fascists were a product of that system. Who the choices are come election time is the product of that. Whether it's a Turd Sandwich v. Giant Douche. Or whether it's Mamdani v. Cuomo.
Because they're already drawing weapons and we've been "trying" so hard we elected him twice. You think this will change? You think the Dems will wave a wand and institute voting reform and healthcare or increase wages or improve the living conditions?
after germany lost in ww2 only 300 people stood in front of nuremberg.
every fascist that survived just used their position of power and recognition and continued staying in politics. they didn't change their minds, only the approach.
fascism wasn't suddenly eradicated. the generations they put into this world were taught and raised by these fascists in hiding.
MAGA fucks won't change their minds. They'll just change the approach.
and honestly: as a non-american it doesn't matter if trump or a dem are in power. they'll continue murdering people in their interest.
Lemmy is full of leftists, the vast majority of which understand that electoralism and reformism are losing strategies and that revolution is generally necessary.
Yeah man i guess they just suddenly found the fountain of youth. Nothing is causation actually, cause and effect is a myth sold to us by Big Causality so we buy more notebooks
Yes, the causation was the dramatic expansion of safety nets, improved agriculture, land reform, poverty reduction, and more. The proof of effectiveness is in the graph.
IQ is pretty much a bullshit measure that largely correllates to education and economic standing than anything else. There isn't some grand variance in intelligence, actually, what's at play is competing class interests and socioeconomic factors determining diet and access to education.
IQ is generally bullshit. It tests how well people can take specific tests, it doesn't correspond to actual intelligence, and people are far closer in that regard than they like to imagine.
Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you'll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.
Ugh. I agree with this. But I don't, at the same time. I'm of the opinion that people need to expire. There was a time where we could make the world a better place by working with people, but some just shouldn't exist. Some people just can't be reasoned with.
Both are correct we need a multilateral approach to win this. A peaceful movement is good but it’s a lot stronger if it’s backed by an adjacent movement that has some threat of force. A user above mentioned the civil rights movement with MLK being backed up by the Panthers. This was a great example because if you look at any successful revolution the approach was multilateral. The abolition movement was also multilateral
You don't have to be violent to encourage alcoholism or smoking.
You're right that voting is a tool; you're wrong about whose tool it is and what it's used for.
You are fundamentally confused such that you think there's any agency in voting in the first place. The only real impact it has is to completely short circuit and subsume all political activity away from any outside organizing that is, historically, literally the only thing that has ever worked to accomplish anything.
My goal is this is a forum. Someone says something wrong and then you say the correct thing under them. That's what you do on forums.
You literally voted to escalate a genocide because the system you're playing apologist for presented you no other choice. What misinformation am I spreading? You're the one acting as an enemy of liberation. You literally voted for a genocide. You are literally an ally to our oppressors.
It's honestly fucking frightening how you're capable of that kind of doublethink.
And you're not just an ally of our oppressors in that sense. You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
BlueMAGA continues to insist that, because they denied the extent of the genocide when it was their team doing it, the genocide actually wasn't that bad when it was their team doing it.
Bruh
No, we’re calling for the overthrow of our oppressors. We’re calling for seizing the means of production. We’re calling for real and permanent liberation from the bourgeoisie.
I don’t care whether you vote, and I’m not telling anyone whether or not to vote. But I am pointing out how little power it gives us for the amount of time, money, and energy people are putting into it. The juice ain’t worth that much squeeze. We’re never going to vote ourselves out of wage slavery.
Last election the choice was between Palestinian genocide and Palestinian genocide. You are smoking crack if you think the oligarchy is ever going to provide you with a meaningful choice to loosen their hold on you through the civic ritual of voting.
This line is smoking gun proof that everyone in this thread trying to engage with you is talking exclusively over your head.
So you knowingly voted to throw Palestinians under the extermination bus, is that it? And you consider yourself to be on the right side of history? And you never considered that perhaps your slavish ideological devotion to following the rules of a fascist political system was slow-boiling you into a fascist?
You're talking about the ten years of ethnic cleansing the Ukranian nazi government was doing to ethnic Russians within its borders, right? You wouldn't possibly consider yourself to be against genocide while supporting these guys, right? Because nobody could possibly be that deluded, right? Tell me you're not that programmed.
You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is "none of those things," actually, and you don't get that by voting harder because as you've just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never "less genocide," it is "no genocide."
You people really are hell bent on reducing the word "genocide" to meaninglessness
There it is. If you're not a liberal you're personally getting checks written by Putin or whomever's the villain of the month.
Nice try FBI
Widespread violence and voting? That's the answer.
People not voting is why we're in the situation we are in right now
Yeah man, the Neo-liberal turn? The war on terror? The GFC? All irrelevant, "people not voting" is the reason we have a goddam Cheeto in the white house.
Yes but they don't want to admit that, since it makes their feelings hurt, so they pretend voting is useless.
Even as much as I love the Fediverse and tend to lean pretty far left, sometimes this place honestly feels like a Marxist circlejerk.
You should definitely vote but it shouldn't be the only thing you do.
No
Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn't work. Just because it isn't capable of causing any meaningful change doesn't mean it's useless.
I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It's like all change must be meaningful, and if it's not then it's not worth our time.
Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful
Lenin's position on integrating with the masses meant running working class parties in opposition to establishment parties, ie voting PSL over DNC. The vanguard's task is to become a party that the working class puts their full support behind, so that when revolution does happen, the vanguard can serve as the spearpoint to direct the masses in one unified direction and crush the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one.
Badjacketing is bad. Don't do that.
You're right, I dont know that they are a psyop. I do, however, know that the position of 'voting is not worthwhile if you are a leftist' that they are taking above is the same position that many psyops would like to have in the minds of leftists. Put more simply, what might they have said differently if they were a psyop? Nothing, I presume.
It is better to root out psyop talking points that diminish our ability to form a collective voice, than it is to allow foolish notions like 'dont vote' to continue in our spaces.
Voting doesn't do much, though. I support voting for working class orgs like PSL, but not for the DNC or GOP, and I know it's very unlikley that PSL will win electorally. Leftists understand that the path to change is via organizing, not by supporting orgs that work against our interests, and we know we can't magically turn a capitalist org into a proletarian one by wishcasting.
If you want to argue against that, then do so, don't badjacket.
Im literally just telling folks to not engage in the same behavior that the fascists hope we engage in.
Fascists don't care if we vote, what they care about is if we organize. Now that the spoils of imperialism are drying up, fascism is rising, and the super-exploitation we inflict on the global south is turning more inward. What fascists are scared of is working class organizing and building actual power.
I don’t know why you think you own the place when this is their Lemmy instance, while you're a guest here.
Just you wait another few more years and I'm gonna vote so hard it'll make your head spin
Is this not also true for liberals who aren't white?
yes. i did not create this image
I think the point of the words inclusion is that you might have a very different perspective of the implications and effectiveness of voting when the state doesn't explicitly cater to your identity as the default.
Or bearded. You can be a clean shaven, tan, even a woman and the meme still works.
Weird how voting always seems to work for the right wing
Maybe voting would actually work if…you know…you actually voted
My mom said that you gotta vote if you want to complain and I do like to complain.
He was appointed by the elected government
We forgetting when Americans voted out Trump now?
I get it but do you actually think we won’t have elections in 2028 and that a democrat can’t win the presidency again?
We just had some elections and democrats absolutely destroyed in almost all of them
I know it’s mostly doom out there but this is absolutely not a full fascist takeover
Ah yes, the "definitely not mad" emoji
My bet is that this is all a propaganda campaign.
We forgetting that the person who replaced him was also a fascist and then Trump got reelected anyway now?
Because people like you stayed home.
You're the reason for Trump, it's your fault.
Damn, I didn't realize I - a non-eligible voter not living in a swing state - was that powerful. That makes it even more egregious that the Democrats didn't try to win my vote. I personally chose who would win and they wouldn't even not do genocide to convince me
Not once ever? Not even when Trump lost the 2020 election despite the jan6 raid on the capitol?
So you're saying "No TRUE fascist", huh?
Which just resulted in a different fascist being elected, and then Trump got reelected anyway?
And yet, we're seeing GOP reps resigning in critical and contested seats that have been demonstrated to lean far more towards the Dems, especially when Dem-Socs are on the ticket.
We shouldn't just vote, but not voting will ensure we never get out of this mess.
The MAGAts wouldn't be trying every voter suppression trick in the book if voting wasn't currently still a colossal threat to their power
Americans: "Our FPTP two-party electoral college system doesn't work. Clearly democracy doesn't work."
Meanwhile in Canada we just voted for dental care. Europeans just voted to take on big tech corporations.
I think the problem is years of "it's not my job to educate you, sweetie". Turns out it is our job to educate them. Because they vote.
Remember when Canada voted to replace First-past-the-post voting?
Don't you have SS veterans to be giving standing ovations too right now?
Maybe people would vote more if the counter offer wasn't also fascism
The right have gerrymandered and bet million bucks rigged the voting machines too. Always projection with them. Look at Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham voting districts. I read years ago that they have it rigged that they could never lose even if people voted.
Those guys are senators. There are no voting districts for Senate elections. They are state-wide popular votes.
Voting districts are relevant at the federal level for presidential and House of Representatives races.
bro just one more vote bro, bro I swear just one more vote and it'll fix democracy bro
The total lack of show-up from the majority of the left to primaries and the general election is precisely why fascists are in power today.
You speak just like a privileged white psuedo-leftist who lives in relative peace while minorities have the largest crackdown on them since the start of the War on Drugs.
Chile actually voted out their dictator.
then what happened
So did Brazil, and they actually threw theirs in prison.
No, Bolsonaro was not a dictator; if he had been, we wouldn't have been able to remove him. He had far less power than he thought; that's why voting worked.
I would argue the same is true of Trump. It certainly was in his first term. This term has all the aesthetics of authoritarianism, but he is failing to consolidate power, which is kind of pathetic considering how much power in the US was ready to surrender on day one.
Same as most Eastern Block countries. Except Romania, they chose other ways.
I mean this isn’t a “white lib” thing. Most people don’t want political violence or related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
Congratulations
except for all the white conservatives that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th, 2021; commit acts of violence against Democrat politicians; make reports and call "wellness checks" on others; commit or support police brutality; defend ICE abductions and trafficking...
There’s over 200,000,000 white citizens. A few hundred doing dumb shit isn’t the entire group. Would you apply this way of thinking to other groups of people?
Nope and I'm not applying it to "white citizens"; just "conservatives". I'm saying to the "white lib"s and others that the violence is already here.
It's only white lib thing, if you're a racist
I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%. (Christopher Armitage)
Hey what do you think stops them from winning that first election?
🤫
The upside-down corpse of Mussolini might disagree with that
Surely, having the largest military in human history is going to help us, right?
Funny, posting said article on a nazi platform.
Write more non-Nazi stuff and it will stop being a Nazi platform.
The owner of the site is a fucking nazi so there no making it un nazi. Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
I still lurk on Twitter. Calling it a "white supremacist site" is just... Silly. The whole point of social media is that it's the users who create content.
I'm seeing a lot of right-wing fundamentalists being clapped by sane people. The only time I see any nazi/fascist/supremacist content is when it's getting ratio'd or just ridiculed.
I'm not saying this content isn't there, but I'm saying there's still a lot of people fighting the good fight. Packing up your toys and going home is not really a method for anything other than getting completely marginalised, IMO.
Revolutions stand or fall with public support. Voting is the most visible way to establish public sentiment. People like to quote that only a third of the US actually elected Trump, but do we have a clear idea of just how many oppose him, if so many voters apparently never expressed their opinion in any measurable way?
Doing nothing and complaining on the internet is useless. Doing something is scary. If you knew you had your community at your back, wouldn't you feel more confident to step up?
You're right that people need to know that voting won't be enough, but it's still important in order to communicate the public opinion that separates a revolution from a coup.
That is indeed a good argument for voting, but voting third party
Depending on the stakes, yes. It is categorically better than not voting at all.
There is still the spoiler effect to consider, which may make voting third party a worse strategy in the complex, blind game that elections are. In elections where that isn't as big of a risk, it's a good way to indicate dissatisfaction with the status quo and the parties on offer. If there is a particularly convincing third party that many agree on, it also communicates what people do want.
In presidential elections, in a country where the president already had so much power even before this whole shitshow, when one candidate is a much greater threat to the basic feasability of resistance, it's a dangerous gamble, risking much for a fairly slim chance at an all-or-nothing victory.
FPTP is one of the many things that are fucked up, but not every election has that kind of impact, and particularly if you're in states where one party is so dominant that the spoiler effect is negligible anyways, it may be the more valuable choice.
Even along with public support, revolutions need their violent wing. MLK wouldn't have been as nearly successful without the Black Panthers visibly totin' guns on the 5 O'Clock news. It made MLK look very reasonable to deal with.
Gandhi, the modern Icon of peaceful protest winning the day, had armed rebellions popping up behind him. The Indian's had nearly a 100 year history of violence against the British. And an exhausted Great Britain just wanting to get out of the colonial business didn't hurt either.
When facing despots and fascists, there needs to be people willing to kill and die for the cause of freedom. We have not reached that point yet.
This is absolutely the correct answer. Successful revolutions are always multilateral in their approach.
Agreed on all points. It's kinda like a robbery – you probably won't arbitrarily hand a random stranger your wallet, but if they point a knife, things look different.
Though in this case, it's the robber barons getting mugged by their victims.
so voting AND revolution are both good
The success of diplomacy and peaceful protest hinges on the existence of a credible threat that the alternative (war and riots, respectively) will be worse. Even if a (mostly) peaceful solution should be found, I suspect there will have to be some measure of violence to get that point across.
As others point out, the elites won't go down quietly, and as long as there are bootlicks willing to fight on their behalf, they'll rather let their bootlicks die than make concessions.
So while I don't think violent revolutions are good for their own sake, they may be a necessary evil for good ends.
what about peaceful revolutions (as long as they DON'T even escalate)?
If, for whatever reason, the police collectively decides to no longer enforce the commands of those in power and no other group steps up to violently defend the status quo, a peaceful revolution in the form of civil disobedience would be conceivable.
Getting to that point without some measure of violence is what I believe to be unlikely – not impossible, mind you, and I very much hope for it, but it's quite likely that an attempt to create such a consensus would (at least initially) be violently suppressed just as violent resistance would.
Even if it is achieved, the new society will need to guard itself against opportunistic egoists seeking to exploit the new power vacuum. Here too there may be at least an initial period of violence until that new dynamic is clear.
As long as there are people willing to hurt others for their own benefit, they will have to be fought.
But we should try to fight as little as possible.
I know of no revolutions that didnt use force or the credible threat of force, because the ruling class would always rather escalate than voluntarily give up their power.
thejre's the people power revolution in the phillippines back in 1986
Don't forget that we don't really understand how many of those get blocked from voting one way or another. So that's actually part of how the dictator suppresses opposition and then pretend that they're not losing.
Race baiting to distract from the class war?
what about classbaiting?
Why is this type of privileged exclusionary 1 dimension opinion even upvoted?
There are multiple problems that matter at any given time.
Saying that racism is a distraction ignores the very real people who are being harmed right now because they aren't you, and thus you don't care about them. "I got mine" but about other issues.
Some take for a socialist to have really...
I wouldn’t assume they are one.
I mean their post history seems to match, as does their presence here and comment.
I just think some people only believe in ideas insofar as they are in the groups that benefit from said policies.
Adding white into this meme doesn’t acknowledge or address any problems, it just serves to divide people.
Then thats what you should have complained about (the context being ill fitting in your mind) rather than implying that racial issues are a distraction.
Moron
Some of the dumber white libs I've talked to honestly believe 51% of American voters voted for Trump 🤣
They don't know what voting does or how it works but they're sure it's the only reasonable solution!
Yall know the reps and dems just place bids to decide who will run the country. Kind of like deciding who will host the Olympics or Super Bowl.
TIL voting is only for "white liberals" apparently.
No you gotta do it harder.
-idk blue maga probably
Every dictator came to power through elections. Every dictator then manipulates or abolishes the next election so as not to lose power. No dictator has ever lost an election. There are "honest" exceptions but they were soft dictators. Fascism is just a special kind of dictatorship.
Yea, posting memes is a much better solution. Thanks for your service.
i missed 3 elections while posting this
Working class organizing is the solution, voting isn't one.
Anyone on .ml is Bourgeois though...
How?
Lol what
Here's the thing:
I didn't believe for a second that a Kamala victory would have crushed fascism forever.
In fact, I'm positive the GOP would place Trump's cold corpse as their nominee in all future elections if they had to.
The problem is simple:
Fascists are in power right now.
They wouldn't be in nearly as much power if Kamala had won
Because the fascists are in power, its exceedingly unlikely we'll ever have a fair election again with this government
That wouldn't be nearly as likely to be the case if Kamala had won.
Furthermore, I'm tired of white leftists screaming for revolution while they themselves know damn good and well they'd never fight in one themselves, and they wouldn't suffer even close to as much as racial, sexual and gender minorities will in resisting fascism.
The white leftists who refused to vote for Kamala suffer nowhere near as much as any minority living under Trump, and they knew that and still relax with their arms behind their heads today.
The smug liberals who refused to have a backbone or humanity in the face of their party's genocide suffer nowhere near as much as Palestinans suffered under Biden and Harris, and they knew that and still relax with their fingers in their ears today
So you're not at all refuting that minorities are suffering g far more than white people under Trump?
And here's the issue with using the genocide of the Palestinians as an excuse to abandon all other minorities:
Resistance against the genocide in Palestine exists almost entirely within the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
Democracy would still almost certainly continue to exist in some capacity if Kamala had won.
But now that Trump won, Israel is not only entirely free, with zero guard rails whatsoever, to complete their genocide and attack all of their neighbors, but now the US is further involved than ever, outright bombing Iran in the process.
And genocide is your concern, huh?
What about the 4k (minimum) missing minorities that were kidnapped by ICE?
The mass building of concentration camps on US soil?
The massacre of Venezuelan civilians as prelude to an outright war and enslavement of Venezuela?
The campaign of the GOP's to destroy the 14th amendment and Voting Rights Act? You know, eliminating birthright citizenship and voter rights, the same shit the Nazis did to Jews leading to the start of the Holocaust.
Oh, and the total betrayal of Ukraine in Russia's genocidal war on them?
Refusal to vote for Kamala produced more genocide. Kamala was objectively the less genocidal option than Trump.
Words have meaning, and war is not genocide. You people support the Ukrainian coup government, who were doing actual ethnic cleansing before the Russian Federation finally stopped them. Anyone in the Donbas region would throw you in a hole for this equivocation, and you would deserve it. It makes me sick when liberals just mindlessly project the crimes of America's vassals and allies on America's enemies. Israel and Ukraine are allies. Israel trains both the Ukranian military and ICE. You are supporting, either tacitly or overtly, two different sets of nazis. You are a nazi supporter.
This is genocide-justifying horseshit to soothe your guilty conscience. Gaza was levelled under the Democrats. I'm not reading the rest of your fascist apologia because frankly, you people all spew the same delusional arguments. Anyone in Palestine would throw you into the sea for this inhumanity, and you would deserve it. Your cowardice and servility in the face of unimaginable cruelty has doomed you to live the rest of your life as a Good German. I would say good luck, but I don't wish good luck for you. I wish you a sudden moment of terrible clarity.
I ain't reading all that nazi shit, free Palestine
these liberal mfs unironically
Do tell me what the roadmap for establishing progressive policies is like under Trump vs Kamala
Seems we're objectively further away from a progressive government than ever. Am I wrong?
Damn thats true, seems like all your voting shit doesn't fuckin work at all🤷♂️
Not a rebuttle to my point at all.
I'll take it that you have absolutely no reasonable counter argument and are just shitposting images of minorities being attacked with no real goal in mind.
How typical
In my mind palace.
y'all go to a ballot box and think "i'm gonna vote less genocide today" ?????
As opposed to...?
You understand the US has a binary party system, right? You have 2 choices.
Since the GOP primaries for Trump, and Biden totally fucked over the Dem party by dropping too late for anyone other than Kamala to take the ticket, that was the choice.
This is not an argument for cowardice and "lesser evil" fascism, this is an argument for revolution.
A revolution that you mfers will never fight in.
Time and time again we see terminally online leftists scream for revolution, and absolutely no indication one will ever happen, let alone that they'll participate.
This is you coping by reflexively projecting your cowardice and complacency onto others to justify your uselessness, with an (un)healthy dose of "it can't happen here" american exceptionalism. Keep wallowing, your overlords love it.
Were the “Uncommitted” Palestinians also white leftists?
voting is actually the way to go, and would probably help get fascism out of the government. vote or don't.
Fascism litteraly wins through democracy so...well we can stop it prematurely, but once it's In power it won't let itself to be voted out
maybe a revolution can work if NOT voting
You're on .ml, you absolute loser
Hey sorry, what did they say?
Usual substanceless "heh, you are from this instance, need i say more?"
Ah
So block .ml and stop whining already.
Democracy is when your corporate lords graciously allow you to choose between genocide and genocide
Not sure if you have noticed, but your government has already started the armed combat against the people
Totally valid. You're right. Under those conditions, voting will definitely work. But only if you shame people on the Internet to vote the correct way.
Poe's law has got me good this time. Not sure if youre sarcastic or not lol.
Full on sarcastic
Read up on the Viet Cong or Taliban and stop making excuses
Well, then when we're all under the control of a fascist government, everyone is going to blame you.
Sure thing, would another hundred years suffice or would that still be too early to tell?
Liberals have tried and failed to meaningfully improve their situations via voting for centuries. Without analyzing which class is in control of the state, voting will always be extremely weak.
Nobody in the United States has ever tried to vote against a fascist dictator?
Who do you think is actually organized an armed uprising against Trump? How do you think they're doing it "instantly"?
And then we got another genocidal imperialist, worker protections continued to erode, and imperialism persisted.
You mean Biden who believes we would have to create Israel if it didn't exist, who continued the war drive, who delivered weapons and training to genocidaires, who put infants in solitary confinement at the border, who was instrumental in ensuring that the prisons were full of black people who could be used as slave labor, who pardoned the judge who took bribes in exchange for sentencing 8 year old to juvenile detention for jaywalking, who failed to do anything meaningful to stop Trump, who failed to do anything meaningful to limit the power of the executive so it couldn't be abused, who failed to do anything to stop fascism at all?
Those 4 years where voting a different guy in didn't do literally anything to stop fascism in the least?
Sure. Do it again. I am sure continuing to not stop fascism is exactly how we stop fascism
"How about we try voting"
"This doesn't count, I voted but then other people voted the opposite way"
Maybe the problem is that people on Lemmy don't understand what an election is.
Oh yeah. Famously, all the fascism in America stopped existing on January 6th, 2021.
That's why everyone was at the US Capital celebrating.
I think the leftist point being made isn't that any particular election has no effect. Of course elections have effects. At the very least they provide legitimacy. I think the point is that even though it worked to unseat Trump in 2020, the election did not halt the long term processes leading us towards fascism. It slowed them down a bit but didn't reverse trend. Reason being that the owner class kept expanding their wealth and therefore control over the entire system. I think leftist memes about elections are often poorly communicated or understood, which isn't ideal, but then it's ..memes.
I take this meme to also point out that a fascist could just not follow elections, or call them off entirely. Adolf Hitler, the man in the image, called of elections under guise of security. Yeah, you vote against 'em, but then they refuse to leave.
"BannedVoice" pointed out that this didn't happen in 2020, but I'd point out that then Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, as well as a fair number of Republican politicians, were what you'd call "Tea Party" or neoconservative. Kevin McCarthy, as well as just about every one of these "moderate" Republicans, have been chased out of the party, largely because of their refusal to bow to MAGA orders. The Republican Party of 2020 is not the Republican Party we have now. It's loyalists all the way through. Remember what happened with the Epstein files?
That's important context for what happened in 2020.
Broadly, if one believes that elections are a tool that should be leveraged, it's crucial to understand that elections are not enough, Never have been. Elections are but a small part of the democratic system. All the other cogs - campaigns, fundraising, at all levels of government, for this or that office, within parties, all of that matters immensely. The people you mention who acted as a bulwark against the fascists were a product of that system. Who the choices are come election time is the product of that. Whether it's a Turd Sandwich v. Giant Douche. Or whether it's Mamdani v. Cuomo.
Dont forget the rigged machines in swing states thanks to Elon.
you're right. one more election and we fix climate change, ranpant exploitation and discrimination! We just have to vote properly.
Because they're already drawing weapons and we've been "trying" so hard we elected him twice. You think this will change? You think the Dems will wave a wand and institute voting reform and healthcare or increase wages or improve the living conditions?
Trump isn't the problem, he's a symptom of the problem. The US Empire has never served the working classes, no president has.
after germany lost in ww2 only 300 people stood in front of nuremberg.
every fascist that survived just used their position of power and recognition and continued staying in politics. they didn't change their minds, only the approach.
fascism wasn't suddenly eradicated. the generations they put into this world were taught and raised by these fascists in hiding.
MAGA fucks won't change their minds. They'll just change the approach.
and honestly: as a non-american it doesn't matter if trump or a dem are in power. they'll continue murdering people in their interest.
As an American who's lived in various countries and can't stand his home country, I agree with you 100%.
"The fever will break!"
(also the 'clean energy' he's talking about is fracking 🥰 )
If we just keep changing the bandages and apply no antibiotics, surely the infection will just give up
Instant? My guy where do you draw the line?
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963: https://letterfromjail.com/
We've been trying for a long time? How long should we wait? Do they need to officially declare fascism?
sorry.
::: spoiler your commitment to the bit is truly laudable 🤣
😭
:::
Lemmy is full of leftists, the vast majority of which understand that electoralism and reformism are losing strategies and that revolution is generally necessary.
What's idiotic about Marxism?
The implementation
?
What fools
Correlation isn’t causation
Yeah man i guess they just suddenly found the fountain of youth. Nothing is causation actually, cause and effect is a myth sold to us by Big Causality so we buy more notebooks
Snide vagueposting to cover for having been schooled with data. Sad!
But when people die under communism beaucouse there was a world war and the land was totally destroyed, it's certainly that ugly communism in it?
Yes, the causation was the dramatic expansion of safety nets, improved agriculture, land reform, poverty reduction, and more. The proof of effectiveness is in the graph.
It has to be when it's supporting my argument! Let's disregard all the years of war, it must be the Marxism!
Hi again, what did they say? Some lib bs?
as always :3
:3
Classic
You're on .ml, dipshit
You actually said this comment to a mirror
Therefore, you're the idiot
IQ is pretty much a bullshit measure that largely correllates to education and economic standing than anything else. There isn't some grand variance in intelligence, actually, what's at play is competing class interests and socioeconomic factors determining diet and access to education.
IQ is not a statistic.
IQ is generally bullshit. It tests how well people can take specific tests, it doesn't correspond to actual intelligence, and people are far closer in that regard than they like to imagine.
IQ isn't a statistic.
Sure, it's a tested metric, I misspoke. That doesn't change that IQ is bullshit.
Never argued it isn't bullshit...
Don't see what the problem is, then.
the iq test is indeed BS, and was built on hatefulness and eugenics - is there an alternative to the iq test? i was thinking of the sat.
So if everybody is well-fed and educated, we could use it to let only the most intelligent people vote?
"Most intelligent" is a moving target, but by feeding and educating everyone people will in general have better skills for making good decisions, yes.
In the current style of democracy elections can be bought by playing ads to people and by making empty promises until there is a majority.
If we need intelligence to make good decisions, but the majority is neither fed well nor educated well, people are trapped.
Do you have an idea how things can be changed?
Organizing in working class parties directly, filling in the gaps in food and education, and directly opposing the system. Marxism-Leninism.
That’s the least of bourgeois democracy’s problems, and such suffrage gatekeeping was banned for very good reasons.
Previously.