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[–] 64 points 11 months ago (12 children)

You should definitely vote but it shouldn't be the only thing you do.

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  • [+] -13 points 11 months ago (11 children)
  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn't work. Just because it isn't capable of causing any meaningful change doesn't mean it's useless.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Just because it isn't capable of causing any meaningful change doesn't mean it's useless.

    I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It's like all change must be meaningful, and if it's not then it's not worth our time.

    Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful

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  • [+] 5 points 11 months ago (9 children)
  • [+] 9 points 11 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    You're right, I dont know that they are a psyop. I do, however, know that the position of 'voting is not worthwhile if you are a leftist' that they are taking above is the same position that many psyops would like to have in the minds of leftists. Put more simply, what might they have said differently if they were a psyop? Nothing, I presume.

    It is better to root out psyop talking points that diminish our ability to form a collective voice, than it is to allow foolish notions like 'dont vote' to continue in our spaces.

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  • [+] 7 points 11 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Im literally just telling folks to not engage in the same behavior that the fascists hope we engage in.

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  • [+] 8 points 11 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Fascists spend hundreds of millions on each election cycle. Clearly they care

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  • [+] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    If you categorically discount the people in politics, our most visible rhetorical speakers, as being part of a consent manfactury, how do you suppose we will ever aquire the broad appeal necessary to build a large coalition of workers? Unions are not up to the task in 2025 (in part due to political decisions that have weakened them)

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  • [+] 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    Okay, I think we are going to continue to disagree. I understand that your position is to support thr PSL in leu of either the DNC and GOP. I dont expect you to engage further. My final pushback is that PSL does not hold seats or win elections to my knowledge, and if they aren't holding seats, they are not serving an electoral function for us.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago
    1. I don’t care what fascists hope.
    2. If fascists say the sky is blue, does that make it a “fascist talking point,” and therefore isn’t blue? That’s just not how it works.
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  • [–] 43 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Is this not also true for liberals who aren't white?

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  • [–] 63 points 11 months ago

    Just you wait another few more years and I'm gonna vote so hard it'll make your head spin

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  • [+] 95 points 11 months ago (43 children)
  • [–] 35 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you'll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.

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  • [+] 32 points 11 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Ugh. I agree with this. But I don't, at the same time. I'm of the opinion that people need to expire. There was a time where we could make the world a better place by working with people, but some just shouldn't exist. Some people just can't be reasoned with.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago*

    Both are correct we need a multilateral approach to win this. A peaceful movement is good but it’s a lot stronger if it’s backed by an adjacent movement that has some threat of force. A user above mentioned the civil rights movement with MLK being backed up by the Panthers. This was a great example because if you look at any successful revolution the approach was multilateral. The abolition movement was also multilateral

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (32 children)

    You're right that voting is a tool; you're wrong about whose tool it is and what it's used for.

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  • [+] 16 points 11 months ago (31 children)
  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (30 children)

    You are fundamentally confused such that you think there's any agency in voting in the first place. The only real impact it has is to completely short circuit and subsume all political activity away from any outside organizing that is, historically, literally the only thing that has ever worked to accomplish anything.

    My goal is this is a forum. Someone says something wrong and then you say the correct thing under them. That's what you do on forums.

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  • [+] -7 points 11 months ago (29 children)
  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    No, we’re calling for the overthrow of our oppressors. We’re calling for seizing the means of production. We’re calling for real and permanent liberation from the bourgeoisie.

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  • [+] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    I don’t care whether you vote, and I’m not telling anyone whether or not to vote. But I am pointing out how little power it gives us for the amount of time, money, and energy people are putting into it. The juice ain’t worth that much squeeze. We’re never going to vote ourselves out of wage slavery.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    You literally voted to escalate a genocide because the system you're playing apologist for presented you no other choice. What misinformation am I spreading? You're the one acting as an enemy of liberation. You literally voted for a genocide. You are literally an ally to our oppressors.

    It's honestly fucking frightening how you're capable of that kind of doublethink.

    And you're not just an ally of our oppressors in that sense. You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (18 children)

    Last election the choice was between Palestinian genocide and Palestinian genocide. You are smoking crack if you think the oligarchy is ever going to provide you with a meaningful choice to loosen their hold on you through the civic ritual of voting.

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  • [+] 2 points 11 months ago (18 children)
  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (12 children)

    but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at Trump and conclude that he’s infinitely worse

    This line is smoking gun proof that everyone in this thread trying to engage with you is talking exclusively over your head.

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  • [+] -6 points 11 months ago (11 children)
  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    Bro you've been reduced to yelling "This is what you wanted!!!" at the people telling you none of this was necessary, it's pathetic. Every day liberals prove there is no bottom to how low they will go to drown out their conscience and prject their guilt

    Well, you got your "pragmatic" genocide and then some. You got your guy in to stop Trump, and he immediately shit the bed. Hindenburg preceeds Hitler. Here we are again. You've learned nothing.

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  • [+] -5 points 11 months ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    Please let the previous election go. It’s over. Nobody here is advocating for or against what’s already in the rear view mirror. And anyway, what we said on Lemmy last year had fuck-all effect on the election. Let’s “optimistically” say we affected 1,000 votes. Trump didn’t win by a hair’s breadth. What we said didn’t materially matter w/r/t/ the election. And that’s not even what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to agitate & educate people to think beyond/outside of the election cycle, and to break people out of myopic electoralism.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (7 children)

    He’s not our man. Previously:

    It’s not wrong to say regulatory capture is a problem, it just doesn’t go far enough. The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

    The game is rigged. The election cycle’s pomp and circumstance is to divert your energy and attention from the fact that it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.

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  • [+] -4 points 11 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    No, he’s not. Despite that, there sure are a lot of folks here who were eager to hand him the keys of the country, and continue to to defend their choice.

    Trump already has the keys. That ship has sailed. If he has a third term it will be through extralegal measures, not the ballot box.

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  • [+] -3 points 11 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    Take genocide for example, which seems to be the theme of the thread: we didn’t get the choice of no genocide, our only options were more vs less. Those are shitty options, but if we have that wiggle room, it’s worth voting for less in order to prevent more. Damage mitigation. Still genocide, still shitty options, but tangibly distinct options.

    Whether it would have been a “lesser” genocide is unfalsifiable. We’ll never really know. But I don’t have the faith in it that you have. I’m not sure what a more competent genocidal administration would have done.

    Consider what many US Palestinians did: threaten to withhold their votes if Harris didn’t say there was at least some daylight between herself and Biden regarding Gazans. And she wouldn’t even do that much.

    But that’s how you use the vote, if you use it at all. You use it as leverage. If the Democrats know you’ll “vote Blue no matter who” or “vote Blue no matter what,” then they’ll ignore you altogether, because you’re already in their pocket. You’ve made yourself irrelevant.

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  • [+] -5 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago

    Half correct. Withholding votes won’t get their attention - we’ve seen that play out again and again. Democrats would rather lose than change. If you want their attention and real change, you’ll need to do things other than vote.

    If neither withholding nor not withholding will get their attention, then you’re making an even stronger case against voting’s worth than I am.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    Guy got totally lost in their argument.

    Democrats would rather lose than change. If you want their attention and real change, you’ll need to do things other than vote.

    I don't know but I think at least 90% of the thread is exactly that, vote alone can't solve shit

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    So you knowingly voted to throw Palestinians under the extermination bus, is that it? And you consider yourself to be on the right side of history? And you never considered that perhaps your slavish ideological devotion to following the rules of a fascist political system was slow-boiling you into a fascist?

    Ukranian genocide

    You're talking about the ten years of ethnic cleansing the Ukranian nazi government was doing to ethnic Russians within its borders, right? You wouldn't possibly consider yourself to be against genocide while supporting these guys, right? Because nobody could possibly be that deluded, right? Tell me you're not that programmed.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.

    You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is "none of those things," actually, and you don't get that by voting harder because as you've just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never "less genocide," it is "no genocide."

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    People not voting is why we're in the situation we are in right now

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    Yall know the reps and dems just place bids to decide who will run the country. Kind of like deciding who will host the Olympics or Super Bowl.

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  • [–] 35 points 11 months ago (18 children)

    Weird how voting always seems to work for the right wing

    Maybe voting would actually work if…you know…you actually voted

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  • [+] 10 points 11 months ago (11 children)
  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    We forgetting when Americans voted out Trump now?

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  • [+] 4 points 11 months ago* (5 children)
  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    I get it but do you actually think we won’t have elections in 2028 and that a democrat can’t win the presidency again?

    We just had some elections and democrats absolutely destroyed in almost all of them

    I know it’s mostly doom out there but this is absolutely not a full fascist takeover

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  • [+] 4 points 11 months ago* (3 children)
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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago

    And yet, we're seeing GOP reps resigning in critical and contested seats that have been demonstrated to lean far more towards the Dems, especially when Dem-Socs are on the ticket.

    We shouldn't just vote, but not voting will ensure we never get out of this mess.

    The MAGAts wouldn't be trying every voter suppression trick in the book if voting wasn't currently still a colossal threat to their power

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    The right have gerrymandered and bet million bucks rigged the voting machines too. Always projection with them. Look at Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham voting districts. I read years ago that they have it rigged that they could never lose even if people voted.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Those guys are senators. There are no voting districts for Senate elections. They are state-wide popular votes.

    Voting districts are relevant at the federal level for presidential and House of Representatives races.

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago (6 children)
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