It's also funny how they pretend that the two actions are mutually exclusive, as if the rules of the universe won't allow you to firebomb Walmarts the minute you cast a vote. It's almost like discouraging people from voting is the actual purpose.
This is it. You can do harm reduction in voting for the least-worst feasible candidate, while organising/protesting on issues you disagree with them on.
E.g. In the UK, Labour is often poor on queer rights issues, but comparatively massively better than the tories/reform would be, not to mention economic and welfare policies. So I vote Labour, and attend pro-trans rights protests and criticise Labour and their stance on this issue.
Yuuup. Recently called out a post for discouraging voting, but the author was a mod so they removed my comment. Called them out on that and they removed that comment and banned me from the sub.
Right. That's why the whole democracy process isn't supposed to begin and end with election day... But I have a suspicion, and it is just a suspicion, that a lot of the public don't actually have as much of a problem with genocide as we assume they would.
I'm not entirely certain my own neighbours could locate Palestine or Israel on a map.
Very depressing and completely real, unfortunately.
The state of public education and historical knowledge honestly makes me second guess the idea of re-education camps, lol. Seems preferable to decades of bloodshed fighting unlimited waved of ignorant propagandized fascists.
Maybe a clockwork orange style eye opening device with the Gaza genocide playing in one eye and both sides of the American political elite saying there's no evidence of humanitarian violations in the other.
So in other words even if voting did work you're going to end up with someone as shitty as the average American and they're still going to commit genocide
I do think it odd that the Palestine protests seemed to dry up recently... It got visibility and there were protests before the election, and then nothing. It really just reads almost like the movement cared more about making a point about complicit Democrats than genuine care for the issue, and once Biden and his ilk were "held to account", they gave up.
Yes, there might be a case of the media colluding to not cover it as much anymore because they were no longer useful in swinging the election, but I think it might be a little of Column A and a little of Column B...
The issue is that even if you voted for the democrat every time, due to them not improving the living situation considerably you'll always end up having the worse guy win at some point.
The only thing that would really help would be to finally start improving the living reality of the people.
Wilding v. DNC is the court case where the DNC admitted that they don't have to abide by the primaries because they are a private entity and can nominate whomever they want.
They admitted this in open court because so many people voted in the primaries for Bernie, and yet they nominated Hillary, that they could no longer hide this fact from the majority of the Democrat voting public.
The truth was short lived though, as that case is almost completely memory holed, and everyone pretends like none of that happened a decade ago.
I was there. I remember. Sure, vote in the primaries and vote for the "lesser evil", but we won't win anything without infiltrating the Democrat bureaucracy and forming unions and serious protests.
Nah, if people cared about politics before Election Day we could be pushing for better candates in the primaries.
We absolutely will continue to get the choice between a shit sandwich and a shit burrito every time if we keep refusing to take part in the ingredient selection.
Pushing for better candidates means defining a coherent set of qualities one wants in a candidate and then actually doing legwork for them instead of flinging shit everywhere from the lazy safety of your bedroom in your parents' house.
Last time the democrats had control of all three branches of government, americans got slightly better healthcare, and now insurance companies can't just refuse to cover conditions they claim you had before you got insurance. Also no more lifetime maximums.
Also Republicans have had complete control of government more than Democrats over the last few decades, so you'd expect Republican policy to be moved further.
Yeah, called out a suspicious account posting that type of content and got banned lol. Account was made a year ago, but had zero activity, not even 1 upvote or downvote, until 3 months ago when it suddenly started posting “voting doesn’t work” type content just as the midterms are coming up. Hmmm 🤔.
Then there’s accounts named shit like ConcernedCitizen or AngryAmerican posting tankie shit. I could take a guess what country they’re probably posting from and it def ain’t US.
I was banned from a certain "leftist" sub for arguing it's stupid to dismiss voting or dislike voting instead of whatever-else because election outcomes have very practical consequences for a lot of people in the here and now and you might need to start looking at Plan B's in the event your systemic revolution that gets rid of the US government and allows you to rebuild– a messy process that you've not elaborated on– doesn't happen.
Far as I'm concerned, it's proof some leftists are just as dumb and easily mislead as ultra conservatives; your rhetoric is indistinguishable from anti-voting memes that came right out of a Russian bot farm.
Agreed. Voters holding out for the perfect candidate infuriate me. The only “perfect” candidate is staring at you in the mirror. Outside of that, compromises are necessary.
There's a certain leftist opposition to structure in general.
I had a comrade who was actively trying to get out of jury duty because he has fair objections to the legal system. Others in our organization were encouraging him to wear communist pins and whatnot so he doesn't get selected.
But like... what if some reactionary takes your place on the jury? Is that preferable to you being selected and needing to briefly take part in a deeply flawed system that you believe should be overhauled? Shouldn't people who have dedicated their life to fixing these systems make it a point to operate within them in some capacity?
It's as if they are worried participating in the system in any way will somehow taint you.
You must vote out every Republican, then drag every Democrat kicking and screaming to the Left.
We cannot make progress if we're (barely at that) fighting the Republicans everytime they wanna hunt the homeless for sport or force transpeople to strip naked for perverts.
The revolution is just leftist rapture. It'll have fire and punish the ones who deserve it and it'll happen any day now and when it's done it'll be a utopia and even though people have said it'll happen for hundreds of years it'll happen this lifetime for sure and we can do some things to push for it but just wait it'll happen any day now
Honestly for all my bloodthist, ya ain't wrong. Fact of the matter is most leftists are either too chickenshit or too insular to do jack for shit. Or they get into petty and stupid squabbles effectively preventing any attempts at outreach, seriously id happily join a group of leftists who can stop fighting about theory for five fucking seconds and do something.
I'm a Redneck who follows the old ways of being an anti corporate asshole, I really don't care about your Soviet larp let's just set up a communal food pantry you fuckwits. I've never felt more rage than when some yuppie ass twig tried fucking purity testing me via quize.
Okay but this analogy falls apart because there have been many actual revolutions and never even a single rapture.
The contemporary USA, China, France, and many other countries’ governments were created by revolutions, it’s not even like they’re particularly rare in human history.
I'm just saying that's how people are treating it. Why bother working for it when it's inevitable? "It'll come save us all" while ignoring the hard work and problems. Ignoring that long term permanent change is more of a result of boring, slow work.
Voting doesn't change anything, though, it contributes to the nothing changing if you think voting does anything. The gradual change you're talking about is organizing and building alternative systems of power so that in the future there can exist the basis of a revolution.
Cool, so you're doing that? Do think most leftists online talking about not voting are doing that? Most importantly, how exactly does voting once every 4 years for the least bad option materially hinder those efforts you're SURELY working on?
The imperial core will be the last to revolt properly. Its inhabitants are too comfortable and chauvinistic to want the actual change that global equality would need. As long as the new system doesn't radically change their view on exploitation the western left will at best achieve national socialism. The western hegemonial structures need to be crushed first if the capital R Revolution is to come. Western leftists at large have neither the power nor the intention to tear down these systems as that would mean that their own living standards would deteriorate in the short term.
... but the means of production are mostly just shops, superstores, malls, shopping centers, restaurants, gyms, car dealerships, movie theatres, film equipment, data centers, offices, warehouses, vans, semi trucks, trains, planes, and airports.
Do you not understand that incremental change is possible without revolution? There's a middle ground between "maintain the status quo" and "overthrow the government."
If you were born in this century, you haven't ever seen evidence that Congress can actually pass legislation that makes our lives better. It used to happen, and I believe it can happen again if we can elect people who aren't corporate shills.
There was a time when people like Mamdani weren't the exception and political figures actively tried to make life better for all of their constituents. That should be our expectation, and anyone who doesn't deliver should lose re-election.
Although I'm sure we can vote better politicians, I'm also highly doubtful that we will vote better politicians. People are uncultured, uneducated, propagandized to their eyeballs and wholly unwilling to learn.
This is a real problem. US politics has turned into a team sport where "our side" and "their side" are supposed to be enemies fighting for dominance instead of working together for the common good. Voter loyalty to the political team is prized regardless of the real-life result that the team achieves. Critical thinking is actively discouraged and propaganda dictates the perception of reality.
The challenge is how we break that propaganda bubble and get people to hold their politicians to a minimum standard of actually improving the lives of their constituents.
A lot of people say they have deprogrammed their family members through a long process of good-faith discussions and targeted debunking of conspiracy theories or false reporting. Some have used chatbots to educate their loved ones or even manipulated algorithms to show fewer partisan conspiracies and more factual information.
Cults famously fall apart when their leaders die, and the leader of America's most dangerous political cult is no spring chicken. It's possible that the blinders will fall away pretty quickly after he's gone. But that doesn't mean we can't -- or shouldn't -- attempt to make progress where we can in the meantime.
This is impossible with the current leadership and they don't change.
People aren't going for the stupid "blue no matter who". Mamdani and Al-Sayad have even shown that "blue no matter who" isn't even a thing that the DNC believes in. Why do you think that is? When the DNC had a leader who wanted change and younger reps, they canned him IMMEDIATELY
AIPAC funds %60 of the Dems and the Dems will ALWAYS fund Republicans to defeat progressives in elections so they can win by you blue magas
You cannot vote out of fascism it has NEVER happened and we have been couped
I am not against voting. I am against voting for Democrats (the status quo) they cannot be removed until the DNC gets rid of support for Israel and neoliberals are kicked out of the party and sent to the right where they belong.
You cannot compromise with pedophiles. You do not incrementally reduce concentration camps. You don't incrementally make progress with fascists that are killing DNC reps in MN (when have they brought that up), threatening and intimidating ilhan Omar (of which SCHUMER HAS SADI NOTHING) .
Politicians in AIPAC's pocket count as "corporate shills" in my book.
Many of the top Democrats are bought and paid for, they don't make people's lives better, and people should stop voting for them.
But the place for your protest vote is in the primaries, where you actually have a better choice. In a general election where your choices are Corporate Democrat or Fascist Republican, the two are simply not interchangeable.
People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because "both sides are the same" have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years.
"People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because “both sides are the same” have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years."
That's the biggest lie of all. You centrists have been shitting on the left and APPEASING the monsters that got us here now. THAT is why political discourse and policy has shifted farther and farther right.
As opposed to what? Like, the entire point of the tweet in the picture is that you guys never actually DO stuff.
More importantly, can you explain exactly how you're materially hindered from preparing the revolution by voting for the least bad option once every 4 years?
It seems insane to me to believe you can overthrow a large ass government, but spending 4 hours once every 4 years puts it in jeopardy. That's 0.0114% of time, 0.017% of awake time and 0.053% of the median americans free time.
Because your complacency and appeasing only made us drift to the right. Do you see where we are at?
Here is a better option for this.
You tell me:
When have they Democrats ever restored a benefit/entitlement that was cut by Republicans? When have they repealed any troublesome laws? (Not counting the WWE senator flip flop game) They had the majority in 1996 and CHOSE not to do anything for us.
Even in CA, Newsome, the frontrunner for standard Dems, had all the votes for universal healthcare in his state and what did he CHOSE to not do it.
Last question, if I am so wrong, why on earth would this party struggle so hard to defeat a mentally ill, cyberpedophile that is openly committing treason?
Had a very long argument on here with some "leftist" several months back where they were trying to argue voting does nothing and makes you complicit with the genocide in Gaza, but during the argument they conceded that republicans had a much more extreme on Gaza as well as were doing worse things to citizens than any democrat, and that voting doesn't stop you from doing any other kind of activists, but they still just doubled down on "voting bad"
Haha, the paid trolls are much more convincing and I've noticed a lot more sophisticated propaganda on the fediverse. Regular Bots are probably in higher abundance on meta and Reddit and other big tech social media platforms.
i regularly get flamed by asking my fellow so-called (internet) leftists one piercing question: "how?" i've been called a nazi, maga, etc. because i want people to actually consider how they would go about implementing their big ideas.
it's great to have big endgame ideas, it's important to have a direction. but if all you have are the big endgame ideas and nothing else, you are simply not a serious person and you have a lot of political literacy you need to work on. being terminally online and jockeying with nothing but ideas is not praxis, it's not even theory. it's just attention whoring for updoots and likes.
Reading this reminded me of a quote. I unfortunately can't remember for the life of me who said this, but it was something to the effect of: "I appreciate many leftist ideas. But, in my experience, if your only acceptable outcome is 'utopia', and your only acceptable timeline is 'immediately', then things aren't likely to go your way."
And a bunch of dead people. Something tells me the terminally online leftists won't actually be in the frontlines risking their lifes. Exactly like they aren't risking their lifes, but the minoritized peoples every time they get off on accelerationist fantasies.
It's important to remember the famous song "everyone I don't like is literally hitler" by rusty cage and that it applies to a shocking number of people online
You can do both. It's not like voting voids some firebombing permit you never had anyway. Just mind the timing, because firebombing might end up barring you from voting.
Also, please don't firebomb Walmart. You'd just hurt other victims of the systemic evil. The people who are to blame don't shop there.
Unrelatedly, I hear there's a killer recipe for flame-grilled parasite...
As a black person, if voting is useless, then why did Jim Crow era South come up with millions of ways to stop Black people from voting? Why do d still have systems set in place to make voting for minorities harder, like laws about former felons not being able to vote?
If you're a minority (race and gender, fuck even poor white men) your ancestors didn't fight and die for voting rights just for you to sit here and go "oh it doesn't really do anything"
The whole "everyone is 12" extends to things like this btw, if voting meant nothing, why is there a constant concerted effort of making voting particularly difficult? Are the politicians bored? Or is there something to a vote we're not seeing that they do? Of course you don't think those things you're 12.
They have delivered NOTHING since the neoliberals infected the party. They are leadership and no one will replace them. I won't keep listing all the ways that the leadership has stated and shown how they aren't going to fix any of this. They will just make the "Jack Smith" rematch and "that will get trump this time"!
We will watch trump (if he is still alive) either never show up or pleas the fifth. We will watch the clips and get excited for a year and a half and then, election time!
It will be narrow margins, we CAN'T have another maga in there, better keep voting blue and NOT progressives because they are "unelectable". Better keep appealing to the right, THAT WILL DELIVER FOR THE WORKING CLASS SOMEDAY
Experts already agree that we are in fascism. Please look into how many people vote out of fascism
When in the 40 years of this will be enough for people to see?
Cool, how much of that have you done? And can you at least comprehend that some people with lifes worth living DON'T want to lose their life as the very first option?
Revolution of course. How that is accomplished is debatable and would be best if it was something like a massive general strike.
We are in a horrible place. DOGE compromised every aspect of our federal government's information security and data infrastructure. They invaded it, infected it with their AIs, and copied it onto servers. There is no getting that back.
State governments are still effective and people can still have a voice there. Wherever we go from here, it can't be the status quo. We are in Thomas Paine and pre-revolution times right now.
There are concentration camps right now, treason, and we are dismantling the ICC.
Incremental voting while shifting right has been as effective as believing in trickle down economics.
We need a party that shares the same basic principle as the New Deal Democrats. Neoliberals CANT be that because they abandoned the whole idea of pre distribution policies (shaping the labor market itself through minimum wages, union rights, public works, protective tariffs, and financial regulation. The neoliberal turn replaced that with "redistribution" — letting the market run its course and then compensating the losers via tax-and-transfer tools like the Earned Income Tax Credit)
That's the principle that can get us stuff incrementally
Cool, so what have you done? And most importantly, how would voting once every 4 years for the least horrible option have hindered you substantially in all these things you're surely doing?
Or have you done nothing? Exactly like every single big talking, privileged, selfish leftist online?
"how can voting once every four years...."
Look where it led? The business owners are in charge - 2 Groups of business owners. Workers are not represented anymore and we are more right wing than every country but Israel.
Privileged and selfish? For advocating and donating to left wing causes? Educating youth in civic duties and principles? I'm a nobody but can contribute locally, but your blind loyalty to a party that has given you nothing is weird.
It's the exact same argument as trickle down economics. Look back at the last half century, it ain't happening
This seems true on the face of it, and it is definitely worth trying to get further left democrat candidates, but it seems to me that they have to believe that trying to capture said 5% won't cause them to lose more in the process, especially if they can never "earn my vote" for much of said 5% no matter what they do.
First and foremost, we need to spread the implementation of ranked voting in more cities. Once enough cities have ranked voting and it's proven successful and popular, then more cities will adopt, then states, and once enough states have adopted ranked voting, we'll have a real chance for anyone to be elected despite what party they're aligned with. Two states use it for federal elections, and many other states have cities that use it for local elections. All states that have it banned need to have it bills constantly in circulation to get it unbanned until it finally is, then bills to constantly have it implemented.
There are a lot of issues that need fixing, but I think starting here will open the floodgates for fixing a lot of the other issues.
There was a law a few years back that prevented giving water to people standing in line to vote. Lines in places where your vote matters can take hours. You also do not get time off work so you have to use a personal day or just get paid less that week.
The water law was specifically in Texas, not a federal law.
It's stupid how difficult some places make it to vote. Also, in a surprise turn off events, the military was specifically ordered to make sure everyone gets a "down day" to vote.
Probably because of the amount of stupid people in the military that will vote red. I hope it flips this year though.
Just so people know because this is important, many states have laws requiring employers to allow time off to vote. Check your local laws. Some states even require that time to be paid.
A problem is that, actually, some are. It's the carrot on a stick problem allowing the problem to get much, much worse, at a rapid rate.
Like, the big stone door at the end of the tunnel is open, but closing, and there are only 10 people-spaces available. So, 1000 people fight each other to survive, rather than rushing through the door and ripping the spine out of the person closing the door.
"Oh, you have an issue with the door closing person? Maybe if you ran faster and beat more other people you wouldn't have an issue with it."
I'm not USian, but here are some assorted reasons why one might choose not to vote. I do not necessarily agree (or disagree) with any of them, and this is my attempt at a reasonably balanced analysis as a person who is not an expert in politics, but has read a lot of arguments in the comments.
Voting makes you complicit.
(Let's say for the sake of argument that it is a given that Democrats will continue aiding Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing just as much as the Republicans, but will improve things for marginalised communities domestically.)
The argument here is that voting for a politician that will perpetuate a genocide makes you complicit in a genocide in a way that inaction does not. The counter-argument is that refusing to exercise what influence you have in the choice between make a choice between Palestinian genocide or Palestinian genocide and trans genocide makes you complicit in trans genocide. This is literally the kind of thing that the trolley problem thought experiment was made to explore.
Voting for the lesser evil increases harm in the long run.
The argument here is that demonstrating a willingness to vote for the lesser evil - with no red lines whatsoever - incentivises Democrats to only ever be slightly less bad than the Republicans, whereas having red lines and allowing Democrats who cross them to lose will incentivise the Democratic party to change their policies. The counter-argument is that Dems haven't exactly demonstrated that they willing to adopt certain policies even when it would be demonstrably beneficial to their election prospects, and so the pragmatic thing to do is to delay harm for as long as possible to give a better chance that non-electoral politics will shift in the interim. The counter-counter-argument is that such a shift will not occur while that harm is being delayed, which leads us on to...
Accelerationism.
(Yes, I'm aware that what I'm about to write isn't the original meaning of accelerationism. Don't @ me.)
The argument here is electoral politics either can never progress toward socialism/anarchism/your-flavour-of-leftism (if you're a leftist), or even that it is no longer even capable of halting a descent into fascism (if you're a pessimistic liberal), and so we should simply allow shit to get fucked so that a critical mass of people have it bad enough to do some revolution and/or non-voting-based direct action about it. The counter-arguments here include, but are not limited to: a) well, that's just like, you're opinion, man; b) that's an awfully big gamble to take when there's no guarantee that what will come after will be better; and c) you should prioritise the lives of people that currently exist, now, rather than those of hypothetical future people, and immediate harm reduction is of more benefit to those people specifically.
In case any one cares, I'm English. My position on voting is that I may vote in an election where the Greens or possibly the Lib Dems stand a chance of winning, but otherwise I spoil my ballot. Yes, I'm aware that the Lib Dems are shitlibs. Still better than Labour. I will never vote Labour for as long as it remains transphobic or as long as the likes of Luke Akehurst remain in the party.
The counter-counter-argument is that such a shift will not occur while that harm is being delayed, which leads us on to…
Accelerationism.
I agree with what you said, up until this point. Non-electoral strategies are not harmed by voting because of accelerationist reasons, but because the messaging becomes muddled.
We have these two horrible, awful parties no one really likes, politics is increasingly driven by "negative partisanship," just a question of which party you hate more, and then everyone on the other side is assumed to be fully on board with the worst aspects of their side, when in reality almost everyone is following this same "lesser evil" logic, and it's really just a question of which party's faults they're more aware and conscious of. One of the biggest advantages to non-electoral strategies is that you have the opportunity to distance yourself from that and define what you actually stand for and don't stand for yourself. Someone who (correctly) sees someone like Joe Biden as a slimeball, could be more receptive to leftist ideas if they're decoupled from him.
Now, you take a protest, a union, whatever, and it takes an official stance endorsing a politician, now you're gonna be defined by that politicians words and actions, and unless it's someone you can really trust and stand by, you're right back to square one.
Point is, accelerationism is stupid and doesn't work, and I can't say that no one believes it, but I certainly don't (although people often assume that it's what I believe despite everything I say to the contrary). We can look at history and see very long periods of time when things were horrible for a lot of people and they weren't able to change things just by really really wanting them to, because they lacked power and organization. It can also just lead to the left straight up getting exterminated, as has happened many times in history, like Nazi Germany, or Iran under the Shah, or the mass killings in Indonesia under Suharto. Sometimes, the bad guys just win.
Imo, anyone who actually believes in accelerationism is a fool who doesn't read theory or study history, but it mostly just exists as an insult or accusation, rather than being something people actually believe.
This is literally the kind of thing that the trolley problem thought experiment was made to explore
no, it's not. the trolley problem is a series of questions that help you to explore your own morality and understand your tendency (consequentialism or deontology or divine command theory, etc) and how far you're willing to stick to your beliefs.
there are no correct answers to the trolley problem.
A runaway trolley is on course to kill five people, but if you pull a lever it will be diverted to a track where it will kill only one person. Should you pull the lever? Does that make you a murderer?
You: There is no correct answer to this.
A politician who will commit multiple genocides is fighting an election against a politician who will commit one genocide. Should you vote for latter politician? Does that make you complicit in genocide?
You: This is obviously completely different from a trolley problem, and consequentialist and deontological ethics are not relevant in this situation.
there is no correct answer. it depends on which ethical system you prefer. and in fact, the same reasoning someone would use to make their choice in the trolley problem is, hopefully, the same method they'd use in politics. and, to that end, deontologists never pull the lever.
there is no correct answer. it depends on which ethical system you prefer. and in fact, the same reasoning someone would use to make their choice in the trolley problem is, hopefully, the same method they’d use in politics.
Literally the point that I was making in my original comment.
voting for genocide is wrong
If you're a deontologist. Whereas a consequentialist would argue that allowing more genocide to occur when you could have voted for less genocide is wrong. And, as we've established, neither position is objectively the correct one. It depends on you as a person. And let's not even get into virtue ethics.
great. it seems like you understand that the trolley analogy doesn't have a single answer
and if you are attacking deontology, you are going to need to overcome all the justifications that deontologists (who make up a plurality of professional philosophers) would proffer.
so you can decide if the right thing for yourself to do is to vote for small genocide or to vote "against big genocide" (ifthe option offered is voting for small genocide) but you can't decide for others.
I'm not attacking deontology. Or consequentialism.
I'm a bit confused as to why we're arguing when you haven't actually said anything I disagree with since your first response, so I am going to guess that what has happened here is that because I formatted my original comment as "here is the argument for why voting is bad", "here is the counter-argument for why it isn't", it comes across as me thinking that the counter-argument is a refutation. That's not my position. I was not trying to state a position. I was merely trying to put forward my analysis of why there is debate by offering the arguments I commonly see both for and against, and I put the "against voting" arguments first because that most directly answers the question I was responding to.
I think we both agree that there is no correct answer to the trolley problem beyond what is correct to you personally, and I think we both agree that there is no correct answer as to whether you should vote beyond what is correct to you personally. That is why I think the trolley problem is relevant.
FWIW I think that my "I will not vote for Labour" stance demonstrates that I at least lean more toward the deontological position (in this case, at least), but in truth I couldn't honestly tell you that I've come to a firm moral decision. If the Tories and Reform have some fresh new lunatics in charge come the next election I may well be scared enough to change my mind.
Several reasons -
People are lazy AF, maybe a bit "soft disenfranchised" in terms of not preceiving that they have credible information, and also there are active demoralization campaigns going on.
All those are reasons but none are valid excuses. Get off your ass and vote. Many places allow you to vote early. Federal law requires your employer to give you time off to vote.
Vote-suppression micro-targeting is more effective and harder to differentiate than traditional negative or positive messaging around candidates. They particularly target minorities who they know are unlikely to be swayed to one side, so the most effective strategy is to convince them not to vote. They often rely on the idea that not voting will "send a message" to those in power. In reality, it just makes the targeted demographics appear unreachable.
A team led by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recruited more than 10,000 people across the United States — a group representative of the country’s voting population — to install an app that captured every ad they viewed for the six weeks leading up to the November election in 2016.
The study participants who saw the ads with vote-suppressing messages on Facebook were 1.9 percent less likely to actually vote in the election than people who did not see the ads...
“In fact, those minority users got the vote-suppression messages nearly 10 times more often than white people in white-majority counties in non-battleground states,” says Young Mie Kim, UW–Madison professor of journalism and mass communication and the lead author of the study...
While a 1.9 percent shift in the behavior of some voters is small, the researchers say, so were the margins of victory in many states in 2016. And, compared to white voters in white-majority counties in non-battleground states, nonwhites in nonwhite-majority counties in states with tight presidential races were about 14 percent less likely to vote. Extrapolated across the country for the 2016 election, the effect of the ads may have kept about 4.7 million people from voting.
Even a good politician whose goal is to help people can't help people if they don't have any power. That means winning elections. If one group votes at 2x the rate of another group, then enacting policy that pleases that group is 2x as effective at retaining the power needed to help all of the people when you can. That's why the groups with the highest voting rates are held as sacred across parties. You can never enact policy changes that will negatively impact them because you will lose power.
Then add in what we learned from Cambridge Analytica, and you realize just how targeted these political advertisements are. They're running the numbers and targeting not just groups, but specific people they know are more likely to be brainwashed. It's sick. And it's working.
These people are the modern versions of flat earthers. Except, in voter suppression, even if you show them a spycamera full of bigwigs doing the ray liotta laugh and literally talking about this technique, they aren't gonna believe you. It's actually a smart strategy that works really well on mildly to very dumb people with a lot of pride that care in a cynical world.
I take it back, this isn't flat earthers, it's the people that believe their messiah is coming back (soon!). The time passes, you've fucked your dad and bought a thousand dollars of saltine crackers. Yet, no results other that something you can pretend you affected, exactly like superstitious people.
It's a passive take on agency.
Damn whoever convinced people to do this is pretty scary.
Also kinda feels like calling your shot. It's mindgames: "don't move, I'm going to stab you" stabs you "I told you I was going to stab you, good slave."
I forgot the term for when people get off on totally giving up. Is it fatalism?
Whatever. Either way, these people are dumb as hell. They can do what they want, but they aren't gonna do anything, exactly as they're told.
Know what not voting accomplishes? Not voting; it accomplishes you not voting Lmaoo
Firebombing a single building does nothing. You need coordinated violence with a massive group of people. Things that many tend to write off as "riots" like the 2020 BLM protests. My problem is never with voting, but it's with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other? Both are completely necessary to achieve the end goal desired. We should be seeing more Luigis and Tyler Robinsons at the very least every month instead of telling everyone that peaceful protests and a bit of community outreach is the only things worth doing outside of election time.
And some people draw the line at supporting candidates that don't support human rights or support Israel, yet that one gets you yelled at and told "we have to use every tool available".
The partisan purity tests on the left are a big part of the reason why Republicans keep winning general elections.
Republican policies are bad for anyone who isn't rich. Their party is literally promoting fascism at this point. But somehow the fact that a Democrat isn't 100% what you want them to be means you should stay at home and not vote?
Be advised that the thing Republican voters are best at is falling in line. They will vote for a candidate they actively hate ... as long as that candidate has an R next to their name on the ballot.
The time for purity tests is the primary. Vote for non-AIPAC, pro-trans candidates then. Cast your ballot for the person who best represents your interests. Actively campaign for them and convince everyone you meet to vote for them.
But in a general election, if you refuse to vote because you don't like the Democrat (with whom you agree on 80% of issues), you're ceding the choice of representative for your state or district to the people who will vote Republican no matter what. And I doubt you will agree with even half of that person's votes.
You might feel like you've done something valuable and righteous, but all you've really done on a practical level is make it easier for the right-wing candidate to win a majority.
Even if you're not enthusiastic about voting for the Democrat, you can feel good about voting against the Republican.
I haven't been excited about voting for a lot of people in my life, but I am still quite proud of the fact that my vote helped a dead man beat John Ashcroft for a seat in the Senate.
Also, even for those who only care about 1 issue (whether Gaza or Trans rights or something else), it’s important to have some sense of nuance on that issue and not frame it in completely black-and-white terms. Chances are that a given AIPAC Democrat candidate is less hostile to Palestinians than their Republican opponent, or that an anti-trans Democrat on the wrong side of trans sports and bathroom issues is running against a Republican that wants trans folk jailed or killed. The Democrats are far, far from perfect, but they are still better than the Republicans on every single issue.
But that's never how it fucking works out! You refuse to use the one tool that most people can use with very little effort, time, cost and risk. Then, you DON'T USE ANYTHING FUCKING ELSE!!!!!
I'm absolutely fine with firebombing walmarts or whatever else violence is needed. I'm not naive enough to believe voting alone will get us all the way. But I'm also not stupid enough to believe any of you fucks actually do shit. You fucking never do!
My problem is never with voting, but it's with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other?
Devil's advocate-- Trump is provoking the public so he could invoke the Insurrection Act and legitimise the use of violence to purge any opposition.
There has already been numerous instances of violations of constitution and civil rights, but where does the public draw the line? I don't know, but I think the test will be the midterms on whether or not Trump will rig it. Or, if not the midterms, wait in two years if he doesn't want to step down.
You can use the logic of "they're just waiting for us to get violent so they can oppress us harder" all the way to the camps.
Not saying you're necessarily wrong about the insurrection act but if he was really trying to do it he would whether someone really did it or not. I mean he's already been shot at. Hes got the false grounds to go for it.
Unfortunately you're batting for the other side. All they want to do is throw out any reason they can to keep the status quo of non violence so they can continue to steamroll forward. Because the secret is that they're fragile. It's not a majority of the population that's doing this, it's a very small minority with a slightly larger minority supporting it and a vast majority saying "well don't get too rowdy yet, that's what they want."
Trump wasn't even elected on the second term when he was shot at so he doesn't have the grounds to invoke the Insurrection Act. But now as the president, he can't use that prior incident. He's waiting for any excuses to invoke the act as incumbent president.
It's not a majority of the population that's doing this, it's a very small minority with a slightly larger minority supporting it and a vast majority saying "well don't get too rowdy yet, that's what they want."
Everyone seem to have forgotten about last year when people talked about raising arms in response to the brutal ICE abuse, and the government floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. The government did tone down the raids and scapegoated Gregory Bovino, but in any case, are people really willing to be martyrs and raise arms next time around if it's brought up again?
Now you're bending my brain. Was Carlin's stance something like, "They keep encouraging everyone to vote, but voting doesn't matter because everything's rigged!" ?
I am quite willing to believe in activist and advocacy. However when they explicitly call to not vote as happens suspiciously often, then I have to reconsider their objective, since refusing to vote does absolutely nothing to advance their stance.
I get downvoted for calling out comments that cause apathy in pretty much any political community. I get downvoted for just posting facts in those same communities. It's always those same people doing it too.
The smart people are organizing in their local communities, not taking cellphones or other electronics to meetings. Meeting in basements or places with few to no windows. They're aiding each other financially, emotionally, and morally. They're arming up and practicing on the down low. If someone talks about their efforts online looking for more, it's probably a honey pot.
I don’t think voting works based on decades of experience voting and not seeing it work but I still vote because at this point I don’t want to invalidate my experiment.
At this point we're fucked anyway but I want the opium that is slightly better governance with the democrats as the world sinks into a trash fire so I voted for them.
The big issue with electoralism is the tendency to reduce people down to believing in fairy tales about just needing the right rulers and everything will be fixed. Expecting a group of people, who keep threatening you with an increasingly right wing opposition rather than listening to their electorate, to actually serve your interests seems mindblowingly naive, especially given all the evidence to the contrary we have to hand by now.
It is possible to responsibly advocate for voting (obviously alongside taking more effective measures to put power back in people's hands directly where possible), but this is incredibly rarely seen. Instead the voting becomes the be all and end all, and things keep sliding further and further.
I believe in organizing. Unionizing. Then voting. When we're united we can all agree who to vote for first. Until then the voting thing doesn't seem to be helping in FPTP countries.
Wood be good to be informed and organized, but do not declare that to be a prerequisite to bother to vote. "We all must agree on who to vote for before we bother to vote" isn't a good concept.
I don't believe firebombing walmart will do us any good. I believe forcibly removing the current administration by physical means or otherwise is necessary to achieving some long term progress towards recovery. Might not be peace at the end of that tunnel, but it will be better than letting than ruin things even more like they continue to be as I type this out.
Idealism is great, but you need to have some roots in what you can realistically effect. There are very left-wing people that can do both. I'm a liberal though.
The people too scared to vote because there might be a guy saying mean things about them. Are the same ones claiming they'll be the face of the revolution.
Liberals need to make up criticisms of Marxists in order to feel like they're part of the conversation. Nobody wants to firebomb a Walmart. That's adventurism and pointless. You made that up and assigned it to Marxists because you're anticommunist.
Marxists believe in organizing the working class to defeat the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we all live under and are being oppressed by, not randomly attacking buildings. Reducing all of leftist theory to "lol they want to firebomb Walmart" is exactly the type of behavior we point to when we call liberal debate idealistic and not rooted in material reality.
Tl;dr youre a bunch of moronic liberals lashing out in incoherent ways. If you people actually studied Marxism, you could form much more pithy memes that actually offend leftists properly.
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In France we know how to protest and some buildings got firebombed yesterday
It's also funny how they pretend that the two actions are mutually exclusive, as if the rules of the universe won't allow you to firebomb Walmarts the minute you cast a vote. It's almost like discouraging people from voting is the actual purpose.
This is it. You can do harm reduction in voting for the least-worst feasible candidate, while organising/protesting on issues you disagree with them on.
E.g. In the UK, Labour is often poor on queer rights issues, but comparatively massively better than the tories/reform would be, not to mention economic and welfare policies. So I vote Labour, and attend pro-trans rights protests and criticise Labour and their stance on this issue.
Yuuup. Recently called out a post for discouraging voting, but the author was a mod so they removed my comment. Called them out on that and they removed that comment and banned me from the sub.
gonna take a wild guess and say latestagecapitalism or progressivepolitics
But everyone is so corrupt anyway right?
/s
I don't believe that voting will save the world but neither will this comment, still I wrote it and still I vote.
"Both sides are the same, you shouldn't bother voting"
People don't bother voting, the bad guys win, things get worse
"See? I was right!"
Bill to Criminalise Being Poor narrowly passes with a 51/49 vote.
Bill to provide Israel with 12,000 brand new "child-melter 4000s" passes with unanimous bipartisan support.
Right. That's why the whole democracy process isn't supposed to begin and end with election day... But I have a suspicion, and it is just a suspicion, that a lot of the public don't actually have as much of a problem with genocide as we assume they would.
I'm not entirely certain my own neighbours could locate Palestine or Israel on a map.
Very depressing and completely real, unfortunately.
The state of public education and historical knowledge honestly makes me second guess the idea of re-education camps, lol. Seems preferable to decades of bloodshed fighting unlimited waved of ignorant propagandized fascists.
Maybe a clockwork orange style eye opening device with the Gaza genocide playing in one eye and both sides of the American political elite saying there's no evidence of humanitarian violations in the other.
So in other words even if voting did work you're going to end up with someone as shitty as the average American and they're still going to commit genocide
That’s not what happens when voting works.
It’s what happens when you vote and then do nothing else.
Yes it is
I do agree with that
I do think it odd that the Palestine protests seemed to dry up recently... It got visibility and there were protests before the election, and then nothing. It really just reads almost like the movement cared more about making a point about complicit Democrats than genuine care for the issue, and once Biden and his ilk were "held to account", they gave up.
Yes, there might be a case of the media colluding to not cover it as much anymore because they were no longer useful in swinging the election, but I think it might be a little of Column A and a little of Column B...
The issue is that even if you voted for the democrat every time, due to them not improving the living situation considerably you'll always end up having the worse guy win at some point.
The only thing that would really help would be to finally start improving the living reality of the people.
That's why we need people to vote in the primaries.
Wilding v. DNC is the court case where the DNC admitted that they don't have to abide by the primaries because they are a private entity and can nominate whomever they want.
They admitted this in open court because so many people voted in the primaries for Bernie, and yet they nominated Hillary, that they could no longer hide this fact from the majority of the Democrat voting public.
The truth was short lived though, as that case is almost completely memory holed, and everyone pretends like none of that happened a decade ago.
I was there. I remember. Sure, vote in the primaries and vote for the "lesser evil", but we won't win anything without infiltrating the Democrat bureaucracy and forming unions and serious protests.
Crickets
The primaries that they can decide not to have? Or that the winner didn't really win?
at least one state had open primaries, I'd need to check if others do but we got ours from a ballot measure.
Wow, how generous of them to give one state a primary, maybe.
according to balotopedia it's 14 with open primaries
Truly the land of democracy, lol.
Nah, if people cared about politics before Election Day we could be pushing for better candates in the primaries.
We absolutely will continue to get the choice between a shit sandwich and a shit burrito every time if we keep refusing to take part in the ingredient selection.
I'm gonna need to stop you right there.
Pushing for better candidates means defining a coherent set of qualities one wants in a candidate and then actually doing legwork for them instead of flinging shit everywhere from the lazy safety of your bedroom in your parents' house.
You're supposed to "improve living reality" before and after voting, not instead of... Voting doesn't preclude protesting or working to that end.
Last time the democrats had control of all three branches of government, americans got slightly better healthcare, and now insurance companies can't just refuse to cover conditions they claim you had before you got insurance. Also no more lifetime maximums.
True, but do democrats improve more than the previous republican made it worse? It doesn't feel like it.
Also I wouldn't use Healthcare as an example of something that works in the US
No, because it's easier to destroy than to build.
Also Republicans have had complete control of government more than Democrats over the last few decades, so you'd expect Republican policy to be moved further.
Also thousands of innocent civilians were murdered on the other side of the planet by those democrats, but they were brown so they didn't count?
Don't dismiss my comment. Those lives are worth your comfort?
You think someone arguing on behalf of the victims of American imperialism is arguing in bad faith automatically?
That's a fucked up level of dehumanization, brother, lol.
You don't think the bad guys were the guys doing a genocide?
People on Lemmy too. Just hop on over to ![email protected] and there’s the same sentiment.
Come to lemmy where /c/Conservative is for anarchists, and /c/LateStageCapitalism is for conservatives pretending to be centrists.
And people say the Fediverse is confusing, pft.
Or literally any political thread (including this one just wait)
That community is full of tankies whose literal job it is to mind fuck you into not voting. They ban anyone that calls them out.
Yeah, called out a suspicious account posting that type of content and got banned lol. Account was made a year ago, but had zero activity, not even 1 upvote or downvote, until 3 months ago when it suddenly started posting “voting doesn’t work” type content just as the midterms are coming up. Hmmm 🤔.
Then there’s accounts named shit like ConcernedCitizen or AngryAmerican posting tankie shit. I could take a guess what country they’re probably posting from and it def ain’t US.
I'm proudly banned from that. I can't stand authoritarians.
It's because most of the people there are from countries that do not declare themselves a democracy.
"Late stage capitalism" is a red flag for bullshit - tankie Nostradamuses with fake intellectualism and phony "stages".
I was banned from a certain "leftist" sub for arguing it's stupid to dismiss voting or dislike voting instead of whatever-else because election outcomes have very practical consequences for a lot of people in the here and now and you might need to start looking at Plan B's in the event your systemic revolution that gets rid of the US government and allows you to rebuild– a messy process that you've not elaborated on– doesn't happen.
Far as I'm concerned, it's proof some leftists are just as dumb and easily mislead as ultra conservatives; your rhetoric is indistinguishable from anti-voting memes that came right out of a Russian bot farm.
Agreed. Voters holding out for the perfect candidate infuriate me. The only “perfect” candidate is staring at you in the mirror. Outside of that, compromises are necessary.
There's a certain leftist opposition to structure in general.
I had a comrade who was actively trying to get out of jury duty because he has fair objections to the legal system. Others in our organization were encouraging him to wear communist pins and whatnot so he doesn't get selected.
But like... what if some reactionary takes your place on the jury? Is that preferable to you being selected and needing to briefly take part in a deeply flawed system that you believe should be overhauled? Shouldn't people who have dedicated their life to fixing these systems make it a point to operate within them in some capacity?
It's as if they are worried participating in the system in any way will somehow taint you.
Those subs are just propaganda tools for russian and chinese bots and propagandists - and the useful idiots. You cannot really tell any of them apart.
You must vote out every Republican, then drag every Democrat kicking and screaming to the Left.
We cannot make progress if we're (barely at that) fighting the Republicans everytime they wanna hunt the homeless for sport or force transpeople to strip naked for perverts.
if Democrats ever pass ranked choice voting, then third parties can finally have a chance
Shhhh the Democrats will hear you!
The revolution is just leftist rapture. It'll have fire and punish the ones who deserve it and it'll happen any day now and when it's done it'll be a utopia and even though people have said it'll happen for hundreds of years it'll happen this lifetime for sure and we can do some things to push for it but just wait it'll happen any day now
Honestly for all my bloodthist, ya ain't wrong. Fact of the matter is most leftists are either too chickenshit or too insular to do jack for shit. Or they get into petty and stupid squabbles effectively preventing any attempts at outreach, seriously id happily join a group of leftists who can stop fighting about theory for five fucking seconds and do something.
I'm a Redneck who follows the old ways of being an anti corporate asshole, I really don't care about your Soviet larp let's just set up a communal food pantry you fuckwits. I've never felt more rage than when some yuppie ass twig tried fucking purity testing me via quize.
For being so focused on inclusion, we have an issue with purity testing for sure. Maybe people need to accept less perfect allies.
Okay but this analogy falls apart because there have been many actual revolutions and never even a single rapture.
The contemporary USA, China, France, and many other countries’ governments were created by revolutions, it’s not even like they’re particularly rare in human history.
Ok fair, at least there's been revolutions.
I'm just saying that's how people are treating it. Why bother working for it when it's inevitable? "It'll come save us all" while ignoring the hard work and problems. Ignoring that long term permanent change is more of a result of boring, slow work.
Voting doesn't change anything, though, it contributes to the nothing changing if you think voting does anything. The gradual change you're talking about is organizing and building alternative systems of power so that in the future there can exist the basis of a revolution.
Cool, so you're doing that? Do think most leftists online talking about not voting are doing that? Most importantly, how exactly does voting once every 4 years for the least bad option materially hinder those efforts you're SURELY working on?
Voting does nothing and thinking it does something prevents people from moving beyond just voting.
The imperial core will be the last to revolt properly. Its inhabitants are too comfortable and chauvinistic to want the actual change that global equality would need. As long as the new system doesn't radically change their view on exploitation the western left will at best achieve national socialism. The western hegemonial structures need to be crushed first if the capital R Revolution is to come. Western leftists at large have neither the power nor the intention to tear down these systems as that would mean that their own living standards would deteriorate in the short term.
"Seize the means of production!"
... but the means of production are mostly just shops, superstores, malls, shopping centers, restaurants, gyms, car dealerships, movie theatres, film equipment, data centers, offices, warehouses, vans, semi trucks, trains, planes, and airports.
So to you, maintain the status quo and keep the masters happy so they don't release their "retribution" on us again.
Be quiet slaves?
Do you not understand that incremental change is possible without revolution? There's a middle ground between "maintain the status quo" and "overthrow the government."
If you were born in this century, you haven't ever seen evidence that Congress can actually pass legislation that makes our lives better. It used to happen, and I believe it can happen again if we can elect people who aren't corporate shills.
There was a time when people like Mamdani weren't the exception and political figures actively tried to make life better for all of their constituents. That should be our expectation, and anyone who doesn't deliver should lose re-election.
Although I'm sure we can vote better politicians, I'm also highly doubtful that we will vote better politicians. People are uncultured, uneducated, propagandized to their eyeballs and wholly unwilling to learn.
This is a real problem. US politics has turned into a team sport where "our side" and "their side" are supposed to be enemies fighting for dominance instead of working together for the common good. Voter loyalty to the political team is prized regardless of the real-life result that the team achieves. Critical thinking is actively discouraged and propaganda dictates the perception of reality.
The challenge is how we break that propaganda bubble and get people to hold their politicians to a minimum standard of actually improving the lives of their constituents.
A lot of people say they have deprogrammed their family members through a long process of good-faith discussions and targeted debunking of conspiracy theories or false reporting. Some have used chatbots to educate their loved ones or even manipulated algorithms to show fewer partisan conspiracies and more factual information.
Cults famously fall apart when their leaders die, and the leader of America's most dangerous political cult is no spring chicken. It's possible that the blinders will fall away pretty quickly after he's gone. But that doesn't mean we can't -- or shouldn't -- attempt to make progress where we can in the meantime.
INCREMENTAL CHANGE!!!
This is impossible with the current leadership and they don't change.
People aren't going for the stupid "blue no matter who". Mamdani and Al-Sayad have even shown that "blue no matter who" isn't even a thing that the DNC believes in. Why do you think that is? When the DNC had a leader who wanted change and younger reps, they canned him IMMEDIATELY AIPAC funds %60 of the Dems and the Dems will ALWAYS fund Republicans to defeat progressives in elections so they can win by you blue magas
You cannot vote out of fascism it has NEVER happened and we have been couped
I am not against voting. I am against voting for Democrats (the status quo) they cannot be removed until the DNC gets rid of support for Israel and neoliberals are kicked out of the party and sent to the right where they belong.
You cannot compromise with pedophiles. You do not incrementally reduce concentration camps. You don't incrementally make progress with fascists that are killing DNC reps in MN (when have they brought that up), threatening and intimidating ilhan Omar (of which SCHUMER HAS SADI NOTHING) .
THEY ARE NOT ON OUR SIDE
Politicians in AIPAC's pocket count as "corporate shills" in my book.
Many of the top Democrats are bought and paid for, they don't make people's lives better, and people should stop voting for them.
But the place for your protest vote is in the primaries, where you actually have a better choice. In a general election where your choices are Corporate Democrat or Fascist Republican, the two are simply not interchangeable.
People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because "both sides are the same" have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years.
"People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because “both sides are the same” have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years."
That's the biggest lie of all. You centrists have been shitting on the left and APPEASING the monsters that got us here now. THAT is why political discourse and policy has shifted farther and farther right.
No? Why would you assume that's what I'm about? What a weird leap.
As opposed to what? Like, the entire point of the tweet in the picture is that you guys never actually DO stuff. More importantly, can you explain exactly how you're materially hindered from preparing the revolution by voting for the least bad option once every 4 years?
It seems insane to me to believe you can overthrow a large ass government, but spending 4 hours once every 4 years puts it in jeopardy. That's 0.0114% of time, 0.017% of awake time and 0.053% of the median americans free time.
Because your complacency and appeasing only made us drift to the right. Do you see where we are at?
Here is a better option for this.
You tell me: When have they Democrats ever restored a benefit/entitlement that was cut by Republicans? When have they repealed any troublesome laws? (Not counting the WWE senator flip flop game) They had the majority in 1996 and CHOSE not to do anything for us.
Even in CA, Newsome, the frontrunner for standard Dems, had all the votes for universal healthcare in his state and what did he CHOSE to not do it.
Last question, if I am so wrong, why on earth would this party struggle so hard to defeat a mentally ill, cyberpedophile that is openly committing treason?
FORTY YEARS OF YOUR WAY GOT US HERE
Had a very long argument on here with some "leftist" several months back where they were trying to argue voting does nothing and makes you complicit with the genocide in Gaza, but during the argument they conceded that republicans had a much more extreme on Gaza as well as were doing worse things to citizens than any democrat, and that voting doesn't stop you from doing any other kind of activists, but they still just doubled down on "voting bad"
Genuinely insane
They boil down to:
Either way the solution is not to engage with them in anyway. You will not convince them to be reasonable and your energy is better spent elsewhere.
Or ai bots that have lost the plot in the argument
Damn AI bots taking away jobs from paid trolls
Haha, the paid trolls are much more convincing and I've noticed a lot more sophisticated propaganda on the fediverse. Regular Bots are probably in higher abundance on meta and Reddit and other big tech social media platforms.
I knew a guy who daily stared into the sun for a few seconds.
He claimed to vote and tried to get me not to. I think he was either a secret Nazi or a secret superalcoholic or both.
That's been my experience, except for any concessions.
That person probably voted, if they could.
i regularly get flamed by asking my fellow so-called (internet) leftists one piercing question: "how?" i've been called a nazi, maga, etc. because i want people to actually consider how they would go about implementing their big ideas.
it's great to have big endgame ideas, it's important to have a direction. but if all you have are the big endgame ideas and nothing else, you are simply not a serious person and you have a lot of political literacy you need to work on. being terminally online and jockeying with nothing but ideas is not praxis, it's not even theory. it's just attention whoring for updoots and likes.
Reading this reminded me of a quote. I unfortunately can't remember for the life of me who said this, but it was something to the effect of: "I appreciate many leftist ideas. But, in my experience, if your only acceptable outcome is 'utopia', and your only acceptable timeline is 'immediately', then things aren't likely to go your way."
We need to democratize our workplaces
People like that are on the same political level as that one Nickelback song.
They love to go on about the French Revolution, yet never acknowledge that it immediately led to dictatorship.
Kinda seems like leftists spend a LOT of time thinking about how to avoid counter-revolutions but whatever
This part comes across very clearly... seems there's no time for anything that would follow though.
And a bunch of dead people. Something tells me the terminally online leftists won't actually be in the frontlines risking their lifes. Exactly like they aren't risking their lifes, but the minoritized peoples every time they get off on accelerationist fantasies.
It's important to remember the famous song "everyone I don't like is literally hitler" by rusty cage and that it applies to a shocking number of people online
You can do both. It's not like voting voids some firebombing permit you never had anyway. Just mind the timing, because firebombing might end up barring you from voting.
Also, please don't firebomb Walmart. You'd just hurt other victims of the systemic evil. The people who are to blame don't shop there.
Unrelatedly, I hear there's a killer recipe for flame-grilled parasite...
Felons should be able to vote!
No state's permanently bar all felons from voting anymore. The key difference now is when they're allowed to vote again.
For some, prisoners can vote, for some it's after you get out of jail, and for some, it's when your parole is up.
There are still certain crimes that do require the governor to grant permission, though.
Sorry, no can do, but how about we make one president?
/s
If you think voting is useless, I gotta ask then why do so many politicians try to surpress it?
As a black person, if voting is useless, then why did Jim Crow era South come up with millions of ways to stop Black people from voting? Why do d still have systems set in place to make voting for minorities harder, like laws about former felons not being able to vote?
If you're a minority (race and gender, fuck even poor white men) your ancestors didn't fight and die for voting rights just for you to sit here and go "oh it doesn't really do anything"
Politicians and Russian bots.
That's what makes it useless
Teaching the population learned helplessness.
The whole "everyone is 12" extends to things like this btw, if voting meant nothing, why is there a constant concerted effort of making voting particularly difficult? Are the politicians bored? Or is there something to a vote we're not seeing that they do? Of course you don't think those things you're 12.
Illusion of choice and controlled opposition.
They have delivered NOTHING since the neoliberals infected the party. They are leadership and no one will replace them. I won't keep listing all the ways that the leadership has stated and shown how they aren't going to fix any of this. They will just make the "Jack Smith" rematch and "that will get trump this time"!
We will watch trump (if he is still alive) either never show up or pleas the fifth. We will watch the clips and get excited for a year and a half and then, election time!
It will be narrow margins, we CAN'T have another maga in there, better keep voting blue and NOT progressives because they are "unelectable". Better keep appealing to the right, THAT WILL DELIVER FOR THE WORKING CLASS SOMEDAY
Experts already agree that we are in fascism. Please look into how many people vote out of fascism
When in the 40 years of this will be enough for people to see?
And your solution is…?
I'm not sure what their opinion is, but:
Warfare against the private property owning class that rapes children and funds genocidal imperialist wars.
Cool, how much of that have you done? And can you at least comprehend that some people with lifes worth living DON'T want to lose their life as the very first option?
I have been part of an org a while ago that was opposing military and finance support of Israel. Nothing illegal, though.
Things will change when a critical mass of people reach the point where they have nothing left to lose.
Whole bunch of people I know are literally dying. I don't care about the comfort of the people who want uninterrupted brunch while that goes on.
Revolution of course. How that is accomplished is debatable and would be best if it was something like a massive general strike.
We are in a horrible place. DOGE compromised every aspect of our federal government's information security and data infrastructure. They invaded it, infected it with their AIs, and copied it onto servers. There is no getting that back.
State governments are still effective and people can still have a voice there. Wherever we go from here, it can't be the status quo. We are in Thomas Paine and pre-revolution times right now.
There are concentration camps right now, treason, and we are dismantling the ICC.
Incremental voting while shifting right has been as effective as believing in trickle down economics.
We need a party that shares the same basic principle as the New Deal Democrats. Neoliberals CANT be that because they abandoned the whole idea of pre distribution policies (shaping the labor market itself through minimum wages, union rights, public works, protective tariffs, and financial regulation. The neoliberal turn replaced that with "redistribution" — letting the market run its course and then compensating the losers via tax-and-transfer tools like the Earned Income Tax Credit)
That's the principle that can get us stuff incrementally
Cool, so what have you done? And most importantly, how would voting once every 4 years for the least horrible option have hindered you substantially in all these things you're surely doing?
Or have you done nothing? Exactly like every single big talking, privileged, selfish leftist online?
"how can voting once every four years...." Look where it led? The business owners are in charge - 2 Groups of business owners. Workers are not represented anymore and we are more right wing than every country but Israel.
Privileged and selfish? For advocating and donating to left wing causes? Educating youth in civic duties and principles? I'm a nobody but can contribute locally, but your blind loyalty to a party that has given you nothing is weird.
It's the exact same argument as trickle down economics. Look back at the last half century, it ain't happening
That’s lemmy as well. Tons of talk. Absolutely zero action.
But if they talk really hard maybe the green party gets 5% which would do checks notes absolutely nothing in a first-past-the-post system
Wrong! 5% of votes in green party means checks notes Democrats get 5% less votes, which secures a victory for Republicans!
It also pressures dems to lean more left. A thing we should be doing in blue states.
This seems true on the face of it, and it is definitely worth trying to get further left democrat candidates, but it seems to me that they have to believe that trying to capture said 5% won't cause them to lose more in the process, especially if they can never "earn my vote" for much of said 5% no matter what they do.
First and foremost, we need to spread the implementation of ranked voting in more cities. Once enough cities have ranked voting and it's proven successful and popular, then more cities will adopt, then states, and once enough states have adopted ranked voting, we'll have a real chance for anyone to be elected despite what party they're aligned with. Two states use it for federal elections, and many other states have cities that use it for local elections. All states that have it banned need to have it bills constantly in circulation to get it unbanned until it finally is, then bills to constantly have it implemented.
There are a lot of issues that need fixing, but I think starting here will open the floodgates for fixing a lot of the other issues.
Right. I must be tired.
I advocate both.
The fuck do you know?
Ever heard of OpSec?
If there was opsec there wouldn’t be talking about it
It's not about keeping the action secret, it's just about preventing the powers that be from finding out who took the actions.
If you can fire bomb a Walmart and have them not find out about it, that's actually pretty impressive, or it was a really small fire.
https://www.shawlocal.com/the-herald-news/2026/07/10/fire-led-to-estimated-6-million-in-damages-to-joliet-area-walmart-prosecutors-say/
Well
at least none that could be directly related to action. which is exactly what OP was complaining about..
LMAO!!
As Eminem once put it, "Talk is cheap, motherfucker, if you're feeling frogish, leap."
Does voting cause Americans some obscure form of pain or anguish?
I can see no other reason why not to vote.
There was a law a few years back that prevented giving water to people standing in line to vote. Lines in places where your vote matters can take hours. You also do not get time off work so you have to use a personal day or just get paid less that week.
The water law was specifically in Texas, not a federal law.
It's stupid how difficult some places make it to vote. Also, in a surprise turn off events, the military was specifically ordered to make sure everyone gets a "down day" to vote.
Probably because of the amount of stupid people in the military that will vote red. I hope it flips this year though.
Americans aren't really allowed to take off work.
Just so people know because this is important, many states have laws requiring employers to allow time off to vote. Check your local laws. Some states even require that time to be paid.
Does anybody require the employee to prove they actually voted?
A problem is that, actually, some are. It's the carrot on a stick problem allowing the problem to get much, much worse, at a rapid rate.
Like, the big stone door at the end of the tunnel is open, but closing, and there are only 10 people-spaces available. So, 1000 people fight each other to survive, rather than rushing through the door and ripping the spine out of the person closing the door.
"Oh, you have an issue with the door closing person? Maybe if you ran faster and beat more other people you wouldn't have an issue with it."
A lot of us have been disenfranchised yet the rest of the world keeps parroting the oligarch shit about pulling ourselves up by the boot straps.
I'm not USian, but here are some assorted reasons why one might choose not to vote. I do not necessarily agree (or disagree) with any of them, and this is my attempt at a reasonably balanced analysis as a person who is not an expert in politics, but has read a lot of arguments in the comments.
Voting makes you complicit.
(Let's say for the sake of argument that it is a given that Democrats will continue aiding Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing just as much as the Republicans, but will improve things for marginalised communities domestically.)
The argument here is that voting for a politician that will perpetuate a genocide makes you complicit in a genocide in a way that inaction does not. The counter-argument is that refusing to exercise what influence you have in the choice between make a choice between Palestinian genocide or Palestinian genocide and trans genocide makes you complicit in trans genocide. This is literally the kind of thing that the trolley problem thought experiment was made to explore.
Voting for the lesser evil increases harm in the long run.
The argument here is that demonstrating a willingness to vote for the lesser evil - with no red lines whatsoever - incentivises Democrats to only ever be slightly less bad than the Republicans, whereas having red lines and allowing Democrats who cross them to lose will incentivise the Democratic party to change their policies. The counter-argument is that Dems haven't exactly demonstrated that they willing to adopt certain policies even when it would be demonstrably beneficial to their election prospects, and so the pragmatic thing to do is to delay harm for as long as possible to give a better chance that non-electoral politics will shift in the interim. The counter-counter-argument is that such a shift will not occur while that harm is being delayed, which leads us on to...
Accelerationism.
(Yes, I'm aware that what I'm about to write isn't the original meaning of accelerationism. Don't @ me.)
The argument here is electoral politics either can never progress toward socialism/anarchism/your-flavour-of-leftism (if you're a leftist), or even that it is no longer even capable of halting a descent into fascism (if you're a pessimistic liberal), and so we should simply allow shit to get fucked so that a critical mass of people have it bad enough to do some revolution and/or non-voting-based direct action about it. The counter-arguments here include, but are not limited to: a) well, that's just like, you're opinion, man; b) that's an awfully big gamble to take when there's no guarantee that what will come after will be better; and c) you should prioritise the lives of people that currently exist, now, rather than those of hypothetical future people, and immediate harm reduction is of more benefit to those people specifically.
In case any one cares, I'm English. My position on voting is that I may vote in an election where the Greens or possibly the Lib Dems stand a chance of winning, but otherwise I spoil my ballot. Yes, I'm aware that the Lib Dems are shitlibs. Still better than Labour. I will never vote Labour for as long as it remains transphobic or as long as the likes of Luke Akehurst remain in the party.
I agree with what you said, up until this point. Non-electoral strategies are not harmed by voting because of accelerationist reasons, but because the messaging becomes muddled.
We have these two horrible, awful parties no one really likes, politics is increasingly driven by "negative partisanship," just a question of which party you hate more, and then everyone on the other side is assumed to be fully on board with the worst aspects of their side, when in reality almost everyone is following this same "lesser evil" logic, and it's really just a question of which party's faults they're more aware and conscious of. One of the biggest advantages to non-electoral strategies is that you have the opportunity to distance yourself from that and define what you actually stand for and don't stand for yourself. Someone who (correctly) sees someone like Joe Biden as a slimeball, could be more receptive to leftist ideas if they're decoupled from him.
Now, you take a protest, a union, whatever, and it takes an official stance endorsing a politician, now you're gonna be defined by that politicians words and actions, and unless it's someone you can really trust and stand by, you're right back to square one.
Point is, accelerationism is stupid and doesn't work, and I can't say that no one believes it, but I certainly don't (although people often assume that it's what I believe despite everything I say to the contrary). We can look at history and see very long periods of time when things were horrible for a lot of people and they weren't able to change things just by really really wanting them to, because they lacked power and organization. It can also just lead to the left straight up getting exterminated, as has happened many times in history, like Nazi Germany, or Iran under the Shah, or the mass killings in Indonesia under Suharto. Sometimes, the bad guys just win.
Imo, anyone who actually believes in accelerationism is a fool who doesn't read theory or study history, but it mostly just exists as an insult or accusation, rather than being something people actually believe.
This is a spot-on analysis, especially for someone not in the US.
no, it's not. the trolley problem is a series of questions that help you to explore your own morality and understand your tendency (consequentialism or deontology or divine command theory, etc) and how far you're willing to stick to your beliefs.
there are no correct answers to the trolley problem.
A runaway trolley is on course to kill five people, but if you pull a lever it will be diverted to a track where it will kill only one person. Should you pull the lever? Does that make you a murderer?
You: There is no correct answer to this.
A politician who will commit multiple genocides is fighting an election against a politician who will commit one genocide. Should you vote for latter politician? Does that make you complicit in genocide?
You: This is obviously completely different from a trolley problem, and consequentialist and deontological ethics are not relevant in this situation.
there is no correct answer. it depends on which ethical system you prefer. and in fact, the same reasoning someone would use to make their choice in the trolley problem is, hopefully, the same method they'd use in politics. and, to that end, deontologists never pull the lever.
voting for genocide is wrong
Literally the point that I was making in my original comment.
If you're a deontologist. Whereas a consequentialist would argue that allowing more genocide to occur when you could have voted for less genocide is wrong. And, as we've established, neither position is objectively the correct one. It depends on you as a person. And let's not even get into virtue ethics.
great. it seems like you understand that the trolley analogy doesn't have a single answer
and if you are attacking deontology, you are going to need to overcome all the justifications that deontologists (who make up a plurality of professional philosophers) would proffer.
so you can decide if the right thing for yourself to do is to vote for small genocide or to vote "against big genocide" (ifthe option offered is voting for small genocide) but you can't decide for others.
I'm not attacking deontology. Or consequentialism.
I'm a bit confused as to why we're arguing when you haven't actually said anything I disagree with since your first response, so I am going to guess that what has happened here is that because I formatted my original comment as "here is the argument for why voting is bad", "here is the counter-argument for why it isn't", it comes across as me thinking that the counter-argument is a refutation. That's not my position. I was not trying to state a position. I was merely trying to put forward my analysis of why there is debate by offering the arguments I commonly see both for and against, and I put the "against voting" arguments first because that most directly answers the question I was responding to.
I think we both agree that there is no correct answer to the trolley problem beyond what is correct to you personally, and I think we both agree that there is no correct answer as to whether you should vote beyond what is correct to you personally. That is why I think the trolley problem is relevant.
FWIW I think that my "I will not vote for Labour" stance demonstrates that I at least lean more toward the deontological position (in this case, at least), but in truth I couldn't honestly tell you that I've come to a firm moral decision. If the Tories and Reform have some fresh new lunatics in charge come the next election I may well be scared enough to change my mind.
Several reasons - People are lazy AF, maybe a bit "soft disenfranchised" in terms of not preceiving that they have credible information, and also there are active demoralization campaigns going on.
All those are reasons but none are valid excuses. Get off your ass and vote. Many places allow you to vote early. Federal law requires your employer to give you time off to vote.
No excuses... inform yourself and vote.
Vote-suppression micro-targeting is more effective and harder to differentiate than traditional negative or positive messaging around candidates. They particularly target minorities who they know are unlikely to be swayed to one side, so the most effective strategy is to convince them not to vote. They often rely on the idea that not voting will "send a message" to those in power. In reality, it just makes the targeted demographics appear unreachable.
Even a good politician whose goal is to help people can't help people if they don't have any power. That means winning elections. If one group votes at 2x the rate of another group, then enacting policy that pleases that group is 2x as effective at retaining the power needed to help all of the people when you can. That's why the groups with the highest voting rates are held as sacred across parties. You can never enact policy changes that will negatively impact them because you will lose power.
Then add in what we learned from Cambridge Analytica, and you realize just how targeted these political advertisements are. They're running the numbers and targeting not just groups, but specific people they know are more likely to be brainwashed. It's sick. And it's working.
These people are the modern versions of flat earthers. Except, in voter suppression, even if you show them a spycamera full of bigwigs doing the ray liotta laugh and literally talking about this technique, they aren't gonna believe you. It's actually a smart strategy that works really well on mildly to very dumb people with a lot of pride that care in a cynical world.
I take it back, this isn't flat earthers, it's the people that believe their messiah is coming back (soon!). The time passes, you've fucked your dad and bought a thousand dollars of saltine crackers. Yet, no results other that something you can pretend you affected, exactly like superstitious people.
It's a passive take on agency.
Damn whoever convinced people to do this is pretty scary.
Also kinda feels like calling your shot. It's mindgames: "don't move, I'm going to stab you" stabs you "I told you I was going to stab you, good slave."
I forgot the term for when people get off on totally giving up. Is it fatalism?
Whatever. Either way, these people are dumb as hell. They can do what they want, but they aren't gonna do anything, exactly as they're told.
Know what not voting accomplishes? Not voting; it accomplishes you not voting Lmaoo
Its okay, they didn't vote either.
Well, being a bot from another country, voting can be a bit of a challenge.
Firebombing a single building does nothing. You need coordinated violence with a massive group of people. Things that many tend to write off as "riots" like the 2020 BLM protests. My problem is never with voting, but it's with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other? Both are completely necessary to achieve the end goal desired. We should be seeing more Luigis and Tyler Robinsons at the very least every month instead of telling everyone that peaceful protests and a bit of community outreach is the only things worth doing outside of election time.
And yet, you aren’t out there assassinating CEOs.
Curious.
/s
It's easy as fuck to tell everyone else to be a martyr. I think that's the dilemma we might be in here
I think it's okay that some of us want to exercise our rights but draw the line at breaking the law.
If you want to blow up (or even give up) your own life for the cause, that's your choice. It's not mine.
And some people draw the line at supporting candidates that don't support human rights or support Israel, yet that one gets you yelled at and told "we have to use every tool available".
The partisan purity tests on the left are a big part of the reason why Republicans keep winning general elections.
Republican policies are bad for anyone who isn't rich. Their party is literally promoting fascism at this point. But somehow the fact that a Democrat isn't 100% what you want them to be means you should stay at home and not vote?
Be advised that the thing Republican voters are best at is falling in line. They will vote for a candidate they actively hate ... as long as that candidate has an R next to their name on the ballot.
The time for purity tests is the primary. Vote for non-AIPAC, pro-trans candidates then. Cast your ballot for the person who best represents your interests. Actively campaign for them and convince everyone you meet to vote for them.
But in a general election, if you refuse to vote because you don't like the Democrat (with whom you agree on 80% of issues), you're ceding the choice of representative for your state or district to the people who will vote Republican no matter what. And I doubt you will agree with even half of that person's votes.
You might feel like you've done something valuable and righteous, but all you've really done on a practical level is make it easier for the right-wing candidate to win a majority.
Even if you're not enthusiastic about voting for the Democrat, you can feel good about voting against the Republican.
I haven't been excited about voting for a lot of people in my life, but I am still quite proud of the fact that my vote helped a dead man beat John Ashcroft for a seat in the Senate.
Also, even for those who only care about 1 issue (whether Gaza or Trans rights or something else), it’s important to have some sense of nuance on that issue and not frame it in completely black-and-white terms. Chances are that a given AIPAC Democrat candidate is less hostile to Palestinians than their Republican opponent, or that an anti-trans Democrat on the wrong side of trans sports and bathroom issues is running against a Republican that wants trans folk jailed or killed. The Democrats are far, far from perfect, but they are still better than the Republicans on every single issue.
But that's never how it fucking works out! You refuse to use the one tool that most people can use with very little effort, time, cost and risk. Then, you DON'T USE ANYTHING FUCKING ELSE!!!!!
I'm absolutely fine with firebombing walmarts or whatever else violence is needed. I'm not naive enough to believe voting alone will get us all the way. But I'm also not stupid enough to believe any of you fucks actually do shit. You fucking never do!
Did BLM actually change things?
Locally it did. Seattle still has less than half the cops we did before 2020, it’s awesome.
Devil's advocate-- Trump is provoking the public so he could invoke the Insurrection Act and legitimise the use of violence to purge any opposition.
There has already been numerous instances of violations of constitution and civil rights, but where does the public draw the line? I don't know, but I think the test will be the midterms on whether or not Trump will rig it. Or, if not the midterms, wait in two years if he doesn't want to step down.
You can use the logic of "they're just waiting for us to get violent so they can oppress us harder" all the way to the camps.
Not saying you're necessarily wrong about the insurrection act but if he was really trying to do it he would whether someone really did it or not. I mean he's already been shot at. Hes got the false grounds to go for it.
Unfortunately you're batting for the other side. All they want to do is throw out any reason they can to keep the status quo of non violence so they can continue to steamroll forward. Because the secret is that they're fragile. It's not a majority of the population that's doing this, it's a very small minority with a slightly larger minority supporting it and a vast majority saying "well don't get too rowdy yet, that's what they want."
Trump wasn't even elected on the second term when he was shot at so he doesn't have the grounds to invoke the Insurrection Act. But now as the president, he can't use that prior incident. He's waiting for any excuses to invoke the act as incumbent president.
Everyone seem to have forgotten about last year when people talked about raising arms in response to the brutal ICE abuse, and the government floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. The government did tone down the raids and scapegoated Gregory Bovino, but in any case, are people really willing to be martyrs and raise arms next time around if it's brought up again?
He’s been shot at since he was president again… there are a lot of assassination attempts, it’s hard to keep up
In their defense, it's the Walmart they shop at, and they don't want to miss out on those great deals for highly processed food like substances.
Hey, I quite enjoy some of those highly processed food like substances.
Are you talking about Great Value Cheese Wow! Spray on Cheddar Cheese!!!!!!!
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Cheese-Wow-Spray-Cheese-Cheddar-8-oz-Can/10315764?classType=VARIANT
walmarts have insurance, firebomb the CEOs instead
To anti-quote Carlin, if voting didn't do anything, they wouldn't be trying so hard to stop us from doing it.
Now you're bending my brain. Was Carlin's stance something like, "They keep encouraging everyone to vote, but voting doesn't matter because everything's rigged!" ?
Bots are out spamming whatever sticks to get you to not vote.
Sometimes it's that, sometimes it's the other person refusing to believe that actual activists exist
I am quite willing to believe in activist and advocacy. However when they explicitly call to not vote as happens suspiciously often, then I have to reconsider their objective, since refusing to vote does absolutely nothing to advance their stance.
Someone actually did firebomb the local Walmart last night...
Sick!!
There are discrete opportunities to firebomb walmarts and I support each instance
Oh boy these comments are gonna be full of wimpy whatabouts here we go 🙏 🪑
The people talking about doing illegal shit won't brag about doing said illegal shit, unless they're stupid.
Firebombed Walmarts tend to make the news, though, and I haven't been hearing about any
Because that's a terrible waste of a protest. If you're going to do something illegal it's gotta be smarter than just that.
I get downvoted for calling out comments that cause apathy in pretty much any political community. I get downvoted for just posting facts in those same communities. It's always those same people doing it too.
Love a good selfaware meme.
The smart people are organizing in their local communities, not taking cellphones or other electronics to meetings. Meeting in basements or places with few to no windows. They're aiding each other financially, emotionally, and morally. They're arming up and practicing on the down low. If someone talks about their efforts online looking for more, it's probably a honey pot.
I don’t think voting works based on decades of experience voting and not seeing it work but I still vote because at this point I don’t want to invalidate my experiment.
I have to keep voting to show it doesn’t work.
I vote because maybe the horse will learn to sing.
You never know if you don’t try.
The do nothing moralists dunking on any righteous rhetoric again.
Hard to stand up without getting made an example of when everyone around you is bent over.
As an intellectual, I encourage people to do both.
Oh, so you guys believe people on Twitter now?
At this point we're fucked anyway but I want the opium that is slightly better governance with the democrats as the world sinks into a trash fire so I voted for them.
The big issue with electoralism is the tendency to reduce people down to believing in fairy tales about just needing the right rulers and everything will be fixed. Expecting a group of people, who keep threatening you with an increasingly right wing opposition rather than listening to their electorate, to actually serve your interests seems mindblowingly naive, especially given all the evidence to the contrary we have to hand by now.
It is possible to responsibly advocate for voting (obviously alongside taking more effective measures to put power back in people's hands directly where possible), but this is incredibly rarely seen. Instead the voting becomes the be all and end all, and things keep sliding further and further.
No one cares much about a firebombed walmart.
I believe in organizing. Unionizing. Then voting. When we're united we can all agree who to vote for first. Until then the voting thing doesn't seem to be helping in FPTP countries.
Wood be good to be informed and organized, but do not declare that to be a prerequisite to bother to vote. "We all must agree on who to vote for before we bother to vote" isn't a good concept.
It depends on what you're trying to achieve.
I feel seen
I don't believe firebombing walmart will do us any good. I believe forcibly removing the current administration by physical means or otherwise is necessary to achieving some long term progress towards recovery. Might not be peace at the end of that tunnel, but it will be better than letting than ruin things even more like they continue to be as I type this out.
Idealism is great, but you need to have some roots in what you can realistically effect. There are very left-wing people that can do both. I'm a liberal though.
Idealism isn't great, don't ever say that.
The people too scared to vote because there might be a guy saying mean things about them. Are the same ones claiming they'll be the face of the revolution.
🤣
I guess the Tankies didn't get the memo that Twitter is only for fascists and hookers now.
Lmfaoooo it's so truuuuueeee hahaha
Liberals need to make up criticisms of Marxists in order to feel like they're part of the conversation. Nobody wants to firebomb a Walmart. That's adventurism and pointless. You made that up and assigned it to Marxists because you're anticommunist.
Marxists believe in organizing the working class to defeat the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we all live under and are being oppressed by, not randomly attacking buildings. Reducing all of leftist theory to "lol they want to firebomb Walmart" is exactly the type of behavior we point to when we call liberal debate idealistic and not rooted in material reality.
Tl;dr youre a bunch of moronic liberals lashing out in incoherent ways. If you people actually studied Marxism, you could form much more pithy memes that actually offend leftists properly.
Are there a lot of Marxists on Twitter? This didn't seem directed at Marxists.
tell me one political ideology that's not left or right
If only this county's politicians can follow this advice
Spoken like a true centrist, lmao.
Where is the nuance between being murdered in a gas chamber and getting free housing and healthcare?