When people are getting slaughtered when their entire civilization is getting leveled, they're not concerned about the political party of the person doing it. They're not over there chanting death to Biden or death to Trump. They're chanting death to America.

And the only abstention of my vote was for a Democrat or Republican that does not imply that I did not vote

lol I did vote, I just understand that when people don't vote for someone its the politician's fault for not running better policies and being more likeable and not someone who didn't like them so they didn't vote for them. If you would hold your leaders more accountable for being shitty then we wouldn't be in this mess but yeah yell at me a stranger on the internet with zero power.

Literally all Kamala had to do was say she was against the genocide, she made that choice not me.

Oh yeah its my fault the democrats decided to support a genocide and cost themselves the election. You would rather blame me someone with zero power than the leaders who have failed you, pathetic.

We've been saying the same thing since at least before 2020. And somehow it wasn't the right time ever since then.

There wasn't a chance to have something different, the democrats didn't have a primary... They selected who they wanted to move forward without a single vote cast.

I did vote dumbass, its not my fault Kamala wasn't popular that is on her for her stupid positions.

an abstention from voting COUNTS AS A VOTE FOR TRUMP

no, it doesn't. only votes for trump count as votes for trump.

Voters get what they want, rarely, but it does happen sometimes.

Non voters have to take much riskier and more costly actions to be acknowledged.

Funny thing is most Americans can do both. Direct action rarely leads to losing voting rights, and voting certainly doesn't prevent organizing or direct action.

That's a god of the gaps argument.

If only people would vote they would have more power

No. People don't vote because their vote doesn't matter. Public opinion doesn't matter. Public support doesn't matter. Gay rights came after violent riots. Civil rights came after violent riots. Labor rights came after violent riots. Because the voting wasn't working.

You have it all backwards. People aren't powerless because they don't vote. People don't vote because they're powerless.

Lmfao

@Benaresh @webadict

RICHTIG GUT.😍😍😍

@Benaresh @webadict Javier Milei next? And then there's the current US administration...!

Okay, so which question does that answer? Unfortunately, Trump lives in the US where the President somehow has complete immunity to everything, which seems more like an indictment on the Supreme Court than on Biden or other Democrats. It might even be an indictment of the voters, for electing Trump and giving him immunity to his crimes.

Mueller (that's his name, btws, he's not German) is probably a bad person to use, mostly because he was a Republican, but also because I'm not sure which silence you mean: The Clinton emails or like, the rampant corruption from Trump? Because those are both unrelated to charges being brought forth, since the email thing was still being investigated for more than a year afterward, and the Mueller Report took a couple years? Garland (who was also a Republican) also took years. These are all multi-year long investigations, you need to bring up something faster, buddy.

I don't think the person you're replying to is defending Biden. It isn't a defense of Biden's failure to act to say that Trump is, quite obviously, worse in every aspect. It is insane to think otherwise because the genocide got WORSE under Trump.

The point is that dipshits/losers/morons/accelerationists sit here and say both sides are bad, when one side is actively worse and they do not care that the one obviously worse side is killing multiple-folds more people while they pretend to smugly assert how good it must be to choose no evil while everyone else struggles to work with the hand they've been forcibly dealt.

You let me know when you step up and assassinate a billionaire, alright, bud? I'll respect your stance then.

There are, but they have a very specific reason. And that reason is to discipline the party. That theory of action is pretty solid, but it's not what is being said here what's being said is that voting is impotent. You can vote all you want. You're pissing in the wind.

The US is not a flawed system of democracy. It's a genocidal empire designed by the founders to prevent the masses from having any influence over the power of the landed elite. Voting doesn't do anything for the Palestinians. If you want to help the Palestinians, you have to do something other than voting.

What’s the no death camp option?

You have to create it, it wont be handed to you on a silver platter. You can start by not kissing the dems arses and yelling at them to do better or fold up shop. While showing the republicans the back of your hand too, obviously. They are playing you and using your vote like its a foregone conclusion, and you are letting them. Why not stand up for yourself? Or do you have any morals at all? American selfishness is another issue and it disguises itself as learned helplessness.

It would be the option for expressing power outside of voting....

It isn't there. Vote for whoever you want, but acknowledging that you were not given choices at all is important.

You didn’t answer the question.

don't be petulant.

It would require not using elections to express power

Keep going please…Tell me how that would work in the US system ....

Well first I want you to imagine having a sense of decency, an ability to feel shame, and identify what morality you have, if any. Let me know when you get to that point and we'll talk next steps. Whats worth you acting on? Not someone else, you.

edit: no reply, and theres your answer. You will only act when you are literally lit on fire, and until then you'll sit there and do nothing while flapping your mouth uselessly, same as you centrist lot always do. You are a walking liability to whatever political party will have you.

You don't need to get rid of that system. All you do is need to vote for candidates that do not support the oligarchy. But liberals are not concerned about long-term success, their concern about the short-term win

Who said anything about not voting? Liberals have locked themselves into a binary system of oppression that they claim to oppose

That both of your examples are, in fact, evil. They may not be the same, or equal, but both are, obviously, evil. Which was the argument.

As the kids say, you are doing the thing in the meme.

if that were true could link me saying that instead of typing something that I didn't type.

You’re treating “Democrat” as a fixed ideological category that determines outcomes regardless of the individual, the race, or the conditions

I'm not. I'm treating it a dynamic component of a larger structural system organized to maintain an equilibrium.

The Democratic Party is a ballot apparatus, not a coherent political entity

This is incorrect. The Democratic Party is a public relations arm of the ruling class, just like the Republicans are. Both parties have clear ideological overlap - liberalism. That there are two liberal parties competing on the ballot is where the incoherence comes from, if we expect them to differ ideologically. Once you stop expecting that, the coherence comes into focus. The two liberal parties are organized to capture the greatest number of votes each by having huge tents, they are organized to create a divide-and-conquer strategy (like sexism, like racism) and they do this through virtue signalling. They both spend millions of dollars researching the population and they find the fault lines that divide people and they take up positions on either side of those fault lines. This consumes all electoral energy while maintaining a singular ideological foundation - liberalism.

The Tea Party used the Republican apparatus to primary and replace establishment Republicans with candidates who were genuinely further right. That’s not a hypothetical, it happened, and it reshaped the party against the establishment’s will.

The Tea Party was bankrolled by the elites, a corporate project, not a grassroots one. Yes it had grassroots elements, built into the design to create legitimacy. But the same donors who ten years prior were supporting what you call "the establishment" republicans were now supporting the Tea Party. It happens all the time. Donors that used to support the Ds switch to support the Rs, and vice versa. It's all a game of PR effectiveness, not of ideology. The rise of fascism is not a psychological choice originating in individual, it is a collective psychosis originating is class conflict and economic crisis. The timing of The Tea Party's rise has as much to do with the rise of Obama as it did with the global financial crisis caused by the US finance industry as it did with the IMF naming China as the single most important contributor to world economic growth in 2007. The Tea Party was not a proactive effort it was a reaction to the signs impending collapse of the US empire.

You haven’t demonstrated that everyone who uses the Democratic ballot line to run against that establishment is equivalent to Obama. That’s the gap in your argument.

No. You think I'm saying don't vote for any Democrat ever. I'm saying don't vote for genocidaires. If the Ds ran someone who wasn't a genocidaire, I'd probably vote for them.

the interest convergence point, which is correct, doesn’t rule out supporting candidates who are themselves creating the political pressure you’re describing

Correct

as the only thing that works

Incorrect. American history has shown us time and time again that voting barely works at all and that it is conflict in the streets that precipitates the changes we want, regardless of which party is in power at the time.

And until we’ve reached a point, as you mentioned it would have to be incremental under our existing system, to educate voters and provide them with more options to better represent them, what more can we do?

We can stop carrying water for fascists you yourself have pointed out. The number of people on Lemmy who think arguing against Platner is a cardinal sin is a prime example of my point. The man was literally a mercenary soldier and then became a petite bourgeois farmer and then organized people to fight against a big corporate farm to protect his financial interests and suddenly everyone thinks he's a good candidate to not only vote for but to put all their energy and voice behind. Then it turns out he had a Tottenkopf tattoo for 20 years and he proudly showed it off in public and he was someone who studied WW2 history and considered himself an expert in it and now what happens? They double down on why voting against Platner or even CRITIQUING Platner is not merely unacceptable but equivalent to actively supporting fascism because Collins is a Republican collaborator.

What we can do is stop playing Blue No Matter Who and stop entertaining Blue MAGA and be serious and open about the fundamental fascist nature of the Democratic party, the failings of their heroes, and undermine the case for lesser evil voting. Because lesser evil voting is not educating voters and it doesn't provide them more options.

What we can do is demonstrate that since the founding of the country voting has done almost nothing while getting in the street and shutting down the economy or making the elite scared is the only thing that's ever really worked.

We’re attempting to do the work that we can while we can, but that still exists under the same system

Limiting your imagination of the work to only the things they approve is not doing even half of what you can.

If voting is advocating for genocide, then what is participation in our capitalist society?

Voting is a proactive action. Working for a wage is a reactive action, driven by starvation and exposure. The only way you can get access to resources is through our resource distribution system. And even THEN it's important to make some distinctions - one should not consciously join the military, one should not consciously join the police force or the prison force, one should not consciously work for a weapons manufacturer, etc. They have captured all of us, they are starving us to death, and they are allowing us to live if and only if we work for them. This is not at all equivalent to voting for someone who says they have no intention of stopping Israel from committing genocide with the billions in weapons we provide them.

Our taxes fund the actions of the government and our labor helps corporations to gain their capital and influence, but we still work as we need our own capital to survive, protect each other, and organize.

Which is fundamentally different from why we vote.

Maybe our taxes fund the actions of the government. MMT is still being debated. Our labor doesn't help corporations gain their capital and influence, it helps them maintain what they already had. The bourgeoisie is somewhat permeable, but it's not so permeable that you choosing to work created new forms of capital and influence.

I’m saying do that in addition to making sure the fascist don’t have the easiest time at the voting booth as well.

That's literally impossible in the US. Both parties are structurally part of the liberal capitalist system. Fascism emerges from liberal capitalism, not from one party or another. If the voting booth isn't fighting liberal capitalism, it is completely orthogonal to the question of the rise of fascism. The rise of fascism is happening through the actions and inactions of both parties, and getting one more "nice liberal capitalist who doesn't want to harm me" into power has literally no effect on the rise of fascism. As I said, it's not a phenomenon of individual psychology, it's a collective phenomenon and the only solution to it is to physically defeat them. Fascism has never lost in the voting booth.

Play the longer game so we can actually fix this shit instead of putting a bandaid on it.

The agitprop I do here is specifically the long game. It's an attempt to break down the compatabilist position, because such a position allows people to psychologically avoid the inner work that needs to be done. People need to go through a process of grieving for their false beliefs in order to change, and they need that change to be willing to lend their power to the cause. If people hold on to the belief that voting matters, then 2 things happen: 1) they vote and engage in bystander effect assuming other people will do the other work and 2) as it becomes more and more obvious that voting is not working they protect their belief by lashing out at everyone who isn't voting like them. They have to do both of these things to maintain their self-image of a good person living in a good place with good people doing good things. They have to believe this to avoid realizing that their parents and their grandparents and their kids and their friends are participating in a system, and possibly taking direct actions, that violates their core values. We HAVE to break down these false beliefs if we're ever going to raise consciousness to the point of fighting fascism.

We cannot keep giving people easy ways out of the difficult reality: the USA is and always has been a white supremacist genocidal rapacious destructive violent misogynistic duplicitous mass murdering elite entity, born of European empire and heir to European empire, maintainer of European empire, and fundamentally the biggest worst and most evil problem the world has ever seen. That's a lot for people to process. But if we keep saying "it's good to fight for Platner and everyone else is morally failing" then they're never going to get to the point where they'll organize with the anti-fascists. The best thing possible for the fight against fascism is for Platner to disappoint everyone, because it will force people through the grief cycle, just like Bernie failing did. Bernie failing and then subsequently demonstrating his complicity was one of the best things for the cause. By contrast, Obama and Hillary are STILL nearly untouchable hero figures and people still cannot learn the lessons of Libya, of Homan, of ICE and BORTAC, of the Pivot to Asia, because they're emotionally attached to those people being good because it means that not only were they good because they voted for them but that the society they live in is good because these heroes are living proof of the goodness of this country.

Expressing power outside the voting booth

Right now your behavior makes me think you’re not discussing this in good faith and your intent is malicious not collegial.

That's because the only outcome you will ever accept is lesser evil voting. You imagine that anyone who is against lesser evil voting is either misinformed or malicious.

Just because you don't want to face the possibility that your voting strategy doesn't work doesn't mean that people who point it out are bad faith actors.

You’ve replied with an uncharitable and inaccurate summarization of my comment

That wasn't my intent. My intent was to take your words and show you a very common situation in which your words did not accurately reflect reality. Gerrymandering is a thing specifically because it is not true that every time you vote you move things towards a better outcome. I didn't take your words uncharitably, I took them as your wrote them and then applied them to the realities of voting in the US.

I was just surprised that your comment in general is just a word cloud and doesn’t actually elevate your claim into a “point” by supporting it or expanding on the thought. Your contributions to this thread continue to be an incoherent gish gallop mess.

I disagree, but I'll see what I can do.

Voting, in general, is powerless to change the power structure in the United States of America. It was designed this way by the founders for the explicit purpose of preventing the masses from having influence over the power structure of the country. This is why the founders debated so much. They needed the support of the masses, so they had to create a system that gave them legitimacy, but they refused to allow the masses to actually determine the direction of the country. Madison, 5th president, is most famous for writing and speeches on this position. The Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and many other structures were designed explicitly to remove the risk of voting changing anything that really mattered. This is the legacy of our country.

Today, that legacy has only been enhanced. Because the masses have never been in charge, and never gotten power, they have never been able to undo the deliberate disempowerment from the founding. Instead, the power elite have been in charge the entire time, and every time the masses have approached more power, it has been the power elite in position to either appease or dominate and then immediately act to remove whatever mechanism the masses were able to use to gain power.

We see this with the Civil Rights movement, where the expansion of Civil Rights was won by black people and white people getting together and rioting in the streets. The response was the War on Drugs, targeting both the drugs used by white people most likely to collaborate with black people, and targeting the drugs use by black people. Both D and R have participated in the drug war, maintained the disenfranchisement, maintained the mass incarceration from it, and maintained the justification of police violence and constant police expansion.

Voting hasn't done a single thing about it. Civil rights was won by violence in the streets and voting hasn't stopped any of the elite processes used to erode what was won.

We see the same thing with labor rights. It was unionization and Marxism that won us weekends, 8-hour work days, unemployment insurance, social security, and so many other things. Is it any wonder that immediately after these things we see Red Scares, purges, and union busting? Is it any wonder that both parties did these things collaboratively and continued them across many administrations? Labor didn't win by voting, they won by fighting. And then all of the mechanisms they used to win were stripped away by both parties.

Do you understand what I'm saying? The point is that voting is designed to aesthetically give the appearance of being an avenue for change for the governed, but it is designed mechanically to explicitly not be an avenue of change for the governed. The point is that the administration of the country is shared between the two parties who have shared interests against the masses, and the elite have always had this unbroken shared interest since the founding of the country. They have always collaborated to stop the masses from expressing their power. The evidence for this is that every single expression of power done by the masses historically resulted in appeasement followed immediately by bipartisan collaboration to dismantle every mechanism used by the masses during that expression of power.

Still bad faith and malice?

engage the rest of us on the subject.

you're not owed engagement on any topic. their claim stands on its own merits on its face.

Oh, I'm not a defeatist. I think we can absolutely change the world for the better. I just don't think any of the methods you listed are valid methods to do it. Because they are all structurally captured to ensure that they do not produce the change you're talking about.

In America, your assessment is divorced from reality. 80% of people live in a major city. There is no way they're growing their own food or buying their food from local farmers.

As for running for office, looking at the Senate, 70% of the population is represented by only 34% of the Senators. That means 30% of the population controls 66% of the Senators. Sure, you can run for office, but you're not changing the structural reality of the way decisions get made.

You cannot source the things you need for life 100% illegally. Even if you could, just because they're illegal doesn't mean they're captured. Large amount of heroin and cocaine are produced by the US government through their black operations in places like Afghanistan, Colombia, and Southeast Asia. Illegal doesn't mean subversive.

But let's take farming. In the US, small family farms produce less than 20% of the agricultural outputs in America. There's actually no way to live off farmers markets and small farmers. Sure, you can spend some of your money there. It won't change anything though. Besides, those farmers also need to buy equipment, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and seeds. Most of your money goes to the mega corporations that supply them. Family farms operate on something like 10% margins. Labor costs between 10% and 40% depending on the type of farming. So the vast majority of the money you spend with small family farms goes to the massive corporations like Monsanto, John Deere, Bayer, Cargill, and the 3 or 4 major fertilizer producers.

If you’re in a wealthier country or are a wealthier individual [...] you can change your nationality and thus who you vote for

This is also ridiculous. It's the equivalent of moving to Japan so you can get green tea kitkats. No expats in history have ever formed a voting power strong enough to change politics in the place they moved to. So yes, you can actually change your nationality so that you can cast a different ballot. It doesn't actually DO anything. It's like moving to a different cost so your tears fall into a different ocean.

Your mindset isn't optimistic, it's delusional. So of course my mindset looks defeatist to you, because I can take every single example of "power" that you think you have and demonstrate how it's not power at all. But I am an optimist because I recognize that there's far and away more of us than there are of them, and that we are capable of overcoming the psychological abuse and training they have put us through so that we fight each other and by overcoming these things we can form strong bonds between all of us and together we have the actual power to shut down their systems and build new ones that serve us.