this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Lemmitors: You don't understand! I'm not voting for Slightly More Rotting Corpse, I'm voting for the Slightly More Rotting Corpse administration. Yes it's true that both of them support nuclear warfare along the Mexican border, but Rotting Corpse would be dropping more nukes with higher frequency on the climate refugees so we have to vote for the lesser evil.
What would be the alternative
As I've said elsewhere, to fix it from within the system itself you would need a bloc of people willing to punish one of the parties for moving right by withholding their votes and their donations. To fix it from without the system is also possible, but would require some "authoritarianism" in the form of people with guns. Anything else is just people flailing around ineffectually and getting mad at others who aren't flailing in the ineffectual way that they prefer.
Either way you've got the same problem: getting a large enough group of people together who are willing to do the thing. Socialists of all stripes have been trying to crack that egg for over a hundred years and the only ones who had any success were the ones that managed to get the peasants on their side because peasants have a certain amount of class consciousness that proles don't.
so suppose you let trump win to spite the dnc. then what? what are you going to tell all the people whose rights are being taken away?
If you had enough people to do the thing, then you would be able to protect members of the group at a local level while national orgs realign and/or get replaced.
But nobody has a large enough group of people to do the thing. In the absence of a large enough group of people to do the thing, voting is a purely personal decision that will not effect the outcome.
"If there were enough people who cared about trans lives to actually change the outcome of the election, you wouldn't need the law to protect them -- you could just make them do it."
Please God tell me I'm misreading this. People in Texas can just get fucked I guess?
Sorry; what would be the alternative NOW?!?
I don't see all that happening before it's time to vote, so isn't what you're saying now a bit of a distraction from the very real risk to the stability of the country?
Shoot them
We're allowed to kill Abe Lincoln and JFK, why aren't we allowed to kill these guys? Why does Reagan get plot armor out of all the presidents? Who wrote this shit?
To be fair JFK getting shot was pretty epic though. He almost caused nuclear holocaust (although a more rabidly anti-communist president may have definitely caused nuclear holocaust), war crimed the South Vietnamese a ton, and stabilized Israel. RFK getting assassinated was less epic because that gave us Nixon
You have a very twisted view of the world. No one was "allowed" to shoot Abe Lincoln or JFK. It was very much not allowed, but murderers don't usually care about what's allowed and do it anyway.
When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.
So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.
If choosing red or blue doesn't work, and choosing another option also doesn't work, then what good does feeling self righteous about your decision to pick one over the other do? Unless you're suggesting that the shitty reality of our situation is that we're fucked and nothing will work at all no matter what - which is a level of defeatism that I don't think is very helpful either.
Voting for the slightly less shit option makes it easier for the things we do in parallel to have a positive impact: direct action doesn't get slowed down much by voting once a year or so.
I won't deny that people can do multiple things at once, I just don't agree with the premise that voting matters in the current paradigm.
I don't think it does much, but any tiny contribution to the fight against climate change is a good for the world, as is any slowing of the erosion of civil rights domestically, gutting of what remains of medicare/medicaid, etc.
I also know a GOP administration will be worse in terms of fighting against leftist movements in the streets, if only slightly. They're definitely worse re: labor movements overall, again: even if only marginally.
So I'm not going to claim it's a panacea, or even someone that will have notable effects, but I do think it matters at the margins, so the effort required is usually worth it, IMHO
Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.
Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of "better" pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.
I'm not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I'm asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you're doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.