this is a bullshit argument
one side in US politics is pretty ANTI death camp while the other is very much PRO death camp. lesser evil voting in this case is ANTI death camp
you putz
no side in us politics is anti death camps
Except if you consider that one side committed a genocide and then the other side committed even more genocide.
And refusing to side with the better options actively works the worse option in the hand.
No these “better options” choosing to do genocide lead to a worse option. You can’t fault someone for not voting for genocide. When the option is a turd sandwich or a shit stew don’t be surprised when people choose neither.
And now the whole fucking restaurant is literally made out of shit. Great job not voting there.
lol I did vote, I just understand that when people don’t vote for someone its the politician’s fault for not running better policies and being more likeable and not someone who didn’t like them so they didn’t vote for them. If you would hold your leaders more accountable for being shitty then we wouldn’t be in this mess but yeah yell at me a stranger on the internet with zero power.
Literally all Kamala had to do was say she was against the genocide, she made that choice not me.
More “both sides” bullshit. Dumbasses like you are part of the reason Trump got into to power.
Oh yeah its my fault the democrats decided to support a genocide and cost themselves the election. You would rather blame me someone with zero power than the leaders who have failed you, pathetic.
Yes, actually. A politicians first job is to get elected. It doesn’t matter how good their policies are if they just never get elected.
So if the anti-genocidenvoting block was actually a thing that voted reliably, then politicians could cater to those people instead of the pro Israel crowd.
And even ignoring that, when the choices are the guy that was somewhat pushing back on Netanyahu and making some effort to help Palestine, Vs the guy who is enthusiastic to go all in with Netanyahu, and cleanse the entire region so he build property their and make money and gave Israel the go ahead to start several all new wars. And we get one of those two options no matter what, then not voting is implicit support for the second, much worse option.
Bro you don’t even know who was running why are you talking? it was Kamala vs Trump not two men. Biden also did not push back against Israel most of the death and destruction of Gaza happened under Biden. He let them do a genocide what push back could there have been? He had all the power to stop it and did nothing.
All I am saying is when the options are two shitty candidates don’t be surprised when people stay home instead. You need someone who can inspire people to come out in vote and if they can’t do that they will lose. You keep talking about people that didn’t vote when you should ask yourself why was Kamala so fucking terrible that she lost to a child rapist? That is on her and no one else. You don’t blame the fucking fans when a sports team loses, they aren’t the ones playing the game. It was her job to win not anyone else’s and she failed miserably.
Listen, the time for doing something about the problem about two shitty options is NOT at the literal last second, when you have no other options BUT those two shitty ones. At that point, and ONLY at that point, it becomes about choosing the lesser of two evils. If you don’t, you get the worse of two evils, it’s as simple as that. You want things to change, or maybe more than just two evils? Make the effort to change shit BEFORE things get locked to two shitty choices. Every year more people are riled up about this, so how about organizing to do shit BEFORE the only play left is to fumble and give the ball to the fascists? Because this moral grandstanding literally fucks everyone, and I’m speaking as a non-American, being fucked by stupid American choices such as not voting for Kamala because she was “pro-genocide” (while Trump is watering at the mouth thinking about building hotels atop the ashes of Palestinian lands).
We’ve been saying the same thing since at least before 2020. And somehow it wasn’t the right time ever since then.
There wasn’t a chance to have something different, the democrats didn’t have a primary… They selected who they wanted to move forward without a single vote cast.
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I did vote dumbass, its not my fault Kamala wasn’t popular that is on her for her stupid positions.
an abstention from voting COUNTS AS A VOTE FOR TRUMP
no, it doesn’t. only votes for trump count as votes for trump.
Except here, in the real world world, one side built the death camps while the other side is filling them up.
How many death camps did Biden build?
And don’t start about some other country where they don’t have control over.
I can start with Gaza because it was US money and weapons that enabled it. In addition to an enormous ICE and immigrant detention center expansion. There are 69 cops cities around the US with cops being trained by IDF because of Biden.
And what good did not voting do for you? Do you think the people in Gaza or Iran are greatful you didn’t vote for Biden?
When people are getting slaughtered when their entire civilization is getting leveled, they’re not concerned about the political party of the person doing it. They’re not over there chanting death to Biden or death to Trump. They’re chanting death to America.
And the only abstention of my vote was for a Democrat or Republican that does not imply that I did not vote
And you do you feel good about yourself now that thousands of people are dead that would otherwise be alive if Trump didn’t win the election?
Because few dozen thousand dead poor brown people is just the piece to pay for you to feel morally superior about how you didn’t vote for Biden/Harris.
You talking the same ones that would still be dead if Biden got reelected? Are you living in this fantasy land that Biden would have stopped bombing and paying for their genocide, which he refused to acknowledge was happening, if he got elected?
You vote for the lesser evil because that’s the limit of what you can achieve in the voting booth. But voting isn’t the only thing you can do to change society, obviously. I think these kinds of posts are missing the bigger picture
I agree. The long game is to form a grassroots party that reflects your values and gains enough traction to be relevant. But the short game remains the lesser of two evils, lest you never have the chance to play the long game
By supporting the people that are gonna kill your grassroots movement using their constituents as the weapon?
Is the greater of two evils going to do any more to support your movement? One of the two is getting elected, whether anyone likes it or not
Only getting elected because liberals have no preverbial balls to do what’s right and refuse to support fascism. We don’t need or want the support of evil, the goal is to eliminate the evil
If you honestly think absetention is more useful than engagement then by all mean abstain. The rest of us will make the decisions.
Your vote has zero impact on politicians or policy. You’ve trained them they don’t have to listen to you and you will keep coming back.
Voters get what they want, rarely, but it does happen sometimes.
Non voters have to take much riskier and more costly actions to be acknowledged.
Funny thing is most Americans can do both. Direct action rarely leads to losing voting rights, and voting certainly doesn’t prevent organizing or direct action.
Your lesser evil has gone from no death camps to 50 in this scenario.
Then we’ll have to bully them into abolishing one less death camp
This is a false premise. Instead of choosing which evil we want to accept, we can choose which evil we prefer to resist.
The electoral system also gives that lesser evil legitimacy, insert robot voice:
"they were voted for democratically, these protesters all just hate democracy and {country.capitalized()}!".In all seriousness, what you are putting forward requires actual resistance, not just marching in the streets like is too common nowadays, but actual efforts to make it hell for people in power, and it actually makes it harder if the people in power can make you look unreasonable because you voted for them.
But even if you don’t vote, someone else will, and they will still get to play that “democracy” card.
No one is saying don’t vote. They are saying that your vote is impotent.
Your vote is very important, its just most people either don’t use it, or only vote at the highest level. Votes for low level local positions can be very impactful and can be decided by dozens of votes. And if more people did that it would have knock on effects down the line all the way up to national government.
That’s a god of the gaps argument.
If only people would vote they would have more power
No. People don’t vote because their vote doesn’t matter. Public opinion doesn’t matter. Public support doesn’t matter. Gay rights came after violent riots. Civil rights came after violent riots. Labor rights came after violent riots. Because the voting wasn’t working.
You have it all backwards. People aren’t powerless because they don’t vote. People don’t vote because they’re powerless.
That’s a completely reductive and simplistic view on politics.
It’s a combination of the 2. Yes civil rights came after violent riots, but only because Kennedy/Johnson were in power at the time. If the republicans were in power in 63, then civil rights wouldn’t have been passed.
Gay rights only went through, firstly in states with Dem governments, then nationally because of dem appointed supreme court judges.
This isn’t a case of you can only do one or the other, you can and should do both. Because that’s the only way you actually get change.
You’re describing an actual strategic framing which is voting for the person you would like to be your opponent in the actual conflict that is needed. Vote for Ds not because they’ll fix things but because when you decide to finally riot you’d rather have a D in office than an R. That’s a valid strategy, but voting doesn’t change things. Voting just makes it easier for you to change things.
I do want to point out that corporate profits are higher under D administrations, that it was the D President Truman that oversaw Operation Paperclip to save 10k Nazis from standing trial and that committed genocidal aggression against Korea, that it was the D President Obama that destroyed Libya while it was the most successful and prosperous country in all of Africa, and that it was D President Clinton who saw nothing wrong with having black house slaves in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion when he and Hillary lived there.
You’re right that the D’s public relations strategy doesn’t afford them the operating room to crack down hard on protestors and riots. However, it should also be noted that after Atwater articulated the Southern Strategy and essentially beat the Ds for a decade, the Ds decided that they needed to be more like the Rs and adopt their own version of the Southern strategy, hence Biden’s Crime Bill and Clinton’s war against welfare. Because the Ds weren’t up for the fight, they triangulated in order to win, and by triangulated we mean that they literally took up far-right positions on purpose in order to win. And look what happened? Everything got worse and now the Ds won’t even entertain addressing it.
You are wrong.
Good to know
True, and I agree, but we do actually have to resist for that to be the case. Not just with the signs and angry letters we’ve been using to try to convince the corrupt to simply not be corrupt anymore, but with actions that actually prevent them from making things worse, up to and including their death, if necessary. Until then we really are just voting for the lesser evil and letting them do whatever they want.
Resist by giving them legitimacy
That’s a very silly take that isnt true at all. How can you say that by not voting you’re taking away their legitimacy? This is the kinda shit that makes people think you’re anti leftist voting psy op to keep the conservatives in power.
The US does it all the fucking time when they claim such and such a leader is illegitimate because they didn’t get enough votes. Not having people vote for you delegitimizes you. How do you not see that?
Because you’re making a false equivalence. They absolutely have NOT done that for an actual US/presidential election. Keep trying to get people to throw their vote away, im sure keeping the republicans in power will help leftist causes. Get real.
Resist all of them
…but you don’t live in a world where one party is building 50 and the other 51. That’s just a strawman to avoid taking responsibility for having to choose between the actual options, not the options you wish you had.
The Dems have gleefully supported deportation policies that also put families in cages just like under Trump, they have supported Israel’s genocide before Trump and during Trump. The lesser evil is still evil.
The lesser evil is still evil.
Yeah no shit otherwise we wouldn’t call it “lesser evil”
This made me laugh for some reason, happy Saturday to both of y’all.
“The Dems” don’t share opinions on any of those issues, so how the fuck are you going to pretend to slander an entire political party over your ignorance of that reality?
The Democrats range from the far left to the moderate right. You couldn’t get five of them to agree on a restaurant, but you’re gonna pretend we’re all down with genocide and ICE camps? GTFO here and don’t come back til you’re sober and serious. This is a serious topic and it deserves better than sophomoric, Fox-News-Worthy takes on the Democratic Party.
Obama deported 3 million people when he was in office. Trump hasn’t even come close to that. Obama also repatriated 2m at the border. Obama ALSO created the legal, bureaucratic, and operational structure that allowed ICE and BORTAC to be deployed inside US cities. The Republicans are just using what the Democrats handed them and they’re not even as prolific as the Democrats were. You are voting for a delusion that doesn’t exist. Re-engage with reality.
‘Slander’ lmfao.
Yeah the DNC, who else lol wtf are you talking about
It’s not my fault you can’t fucking read.
Lmfao
bOtH sIdEs
I fucking hate that we keep getting this “both sides bad” ideology, now “both sides deathcamp” ffs, right during Trump’s reign where we are seeing concentration camps and illegal wars right after a boring Biden presidency.
It’s coming up to election season, so all the sabateuor bots are spinning up again to try and convince people like you not to vote.
That’s why it’s the same 10 accounts in every fucking group. Same dudes, over and over, making the same illogical bad-faith arguments.
@terranoid @Triumph ITs a good cop/ bad cop situation. In the US the DNC “failed” to punish Trump for an attempt to overthrow the Goverment.
Additionally the border camps got correctly called concentration camps in 2019 and Biden started to fill them.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/are-ice-detention-centers-concentration-camps/
How long do you think it takes to run a trial? Like, gather evidence, interrogate witnesses, investigate, etc. In fact, what do you think happens to bring about a trial?
And why would the DNC be involved with that?
Also, was Biden President in 2019?
@webadict And here is it how it actually done when the “Opposition” isn’t on your team:
Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years in jail - what you need to know
@IngridAusOL @webadict Schön wenn Demokratie funktioniert wie sie sollte, oder?
Wünschte wir würden das selbe bei uns mit dem AFD Verbotsverfahren anstoßen.
@tompearce49 @webadict One can only hope. I for my part couldn’t wipe the grin off my face for a week at least.
Okay, so which question does that answer? Unfortunately, Trump lives in the US where the President somehow has complete immunity to everything, which seems more like an indictment on the Supreme Court than on Biden or other Democrats. It might even be an indictment of the voters, for electing Trump and giving him immunity to his crimes.
@webadict You didnt ask questions you implied that they couldnt Persecute Trump “Because there wasnt enough time”. Biden could have jailed him due to the same immunity from the Supreme court.
Also you know blaming the voters for not persecuting Trump is a new low.
Additionally I almost forgot about Yoon Suk Yeol who got arrested for a similar coup attempt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest/_of/_Yoon/_Suk/_Yeol
weird that other countries seem to be able to punish coup attempts. Almost as long there is political will…
A new low? Okay, pal. I’m not entirely sure where you think my old low was, but sure? I asked some pretty basic questions because I legitimately don’t think you know how the US legal system works. And it’s fair not to. Pointing to other countries on how corruption is dealt with, insofar as what could’ve or should’ve been done, doesn’t override the way that the US system works. Why don’t you point to other corruption cases for lower offices in the US? Those also take years to investigate and prosecute. Some of the lower office corruption cases can be wrapped up in a little as a few months, but then tend not to.
Does that help point out the issue?
How long did it take Müller to break silence, Garland to charge?
Mueller (that’s his name, btws, he’s not German) is probably a bad person to use, mostly because he was a Republican, but also because I’m not sure which silence you mean: The Clinton emails or like, the rampant corruption from Trump? Because those are both unrelated to charges being brought forth, since the email thing was still being investigated for more than a year afterward, and the Mueller Report took a couple years? Garland (who was also a Republican) also took years. These are all multi-year long investigations, you need to bring up something faster, buddy.
As I said elsewhere, it’s extremely relevant as policy needs to be viewed as a continuum.
And you didn’t use a continuum. You used two examples. Where are the other examples in America that show this? Can we look at how long Watergate took? That seems a pretty resounding example because it took years for that one too.
@webadict ‘Fatal Mistake’: Democrats Blame DOJ As Trump Escapes Accountability For Jan. 6
“Merrick Garland wasted a year,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler said ahead of the fourth anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot.https://www.huffpost.com/entry/january-6-doj-trump/_n/_67783f7ce4b0f0fdb7b19d36
The boring Biden presidency where kids we still being put in cages, where children were put in solitary confinement, where racialized mass incarceration in the US is still the worst in the world and including parole and supervision is triple the volume of any other country on the planet and with some of the worst recidivism and the only country charging prisoners hundreds of dollars a day? Boring like protecting Trump and the rest from DOJ prosecution over the Epstein situation? Boring like 1100 killed by police? Boring like bombing the Nord Stream 2 and bombing Yemen, Syria, and Iraq?
This is what we mean. You are so far into harm reduction that you are literally incapable of understanding that Biden’s term was not boring but mass murderously tragic.
Boring? There was and still is literally a genocide going on.
But thanks for proving the meme right.
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How many were active during biden’s campaign, how many did he not shut down?
Why was nothing done about abortion rights?
Why did he support (and not just “not being vocal” about) the israeli state during an active genocide?
Your “blue team” is just as complicit.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to is defending Biden. It isn’t a defense of Biden’s failure to act to say that Trump is, quite obviously, worse in every aspect. It is insane to think otherwise because the genocide got WORSE under Trump.
The point is that dipshits/losers/morons/accelerationists sit here and say both sides are bad, when one side is actively worse and they do not care that the one obviously worse side is killing multiple-folds more people while they pretend to smugly assert how good it must be to choose no evil while everyone else struggles to work with the hand they’ve been forcibly dealt.
You let me know when you step up and assassinate a billionaire, alright, bud? I’ll respect your stance then.
Want to hear something interesting though? Trump is actually not worse than Obama in every way.
Trump has deported 1.5 million people across all of his years in office so far. Want to guess how many Obama deported?
3 million.
So actually Trump is the lesser evil when it comes to deportations if you take this approach.
The reality is that they’re both horrible but for different reasons.
I think that is a really gross thing to say from someone who didn’t pay attention to the ongoing rapes of children in ICE concentration camps. I think that’s a gross thing to say to the militarized presence of ICE kidnapping people as they left their court hearings to be here. I think that’s a gross thing to say to the people attacked by ICE for protecting their neighbors. I think that’s a gross thing to say to the people who got married and had to pick up their partner’s green card because they were arresting them and shipping them all over the country.
To say that it’s a smaller number is insane because it treats immigrants not as people that are still suffering right now (I have neighbors that still can’t fucking go to work because ICE is still here), but as numbers and this one is smaller. That is such a dumb and pathetic argument that it shows you as hopelessly heartless or desperately dumb, and I don’t thing it matters which is worse.
We don’t care about your respect, we don’t respect anything liberals do while defending empire and their shade of fascism
“Everyone is a liberal that disagrees with me” is a great lie to tell yourself at night.
My friend, read a bit of history, your whole society is based on genocide and exploitation.
I am not defending trump nor biden because the whole country should be treated as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
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Since you asked, Biden increased police, ICE, and detention center funding to their highest levels. Because of Biden’s 69 cop cities across the country local police and ICE are being trained by IDF, the same people that trained Derek Chauvin when he murdered James Floyd. Before he left office he requested an additional 42k detention center beds be created.
Biden was enabling, paying for, and funding that genocide then denying there was one. Harris wanted the world most lethal military while reiterating Israel has a right to exist and rh is will protect their interests.
Idk, if given the choice between 50 death camps or 51 death camps, it would be pretty fucked up to choose 51.
Precisely. That’s why you need to think more broadly. So you don’t become evil and pretend it’s OK.
Nobody is pretending it is okay.
But pretending like refusing to vote is morally superior than actively preventing the extra death camp is not.
No one is advocating refusing to vote. The post is explicitly stating that voting isn’t helping. It’s time to try something new
There are absolutely lots of people advocating refusing to vote. You can argue that OP isn’t one of those people, but there are entire instances filled with people saying exactly that.
There are, but they have a very specific reason. And that reason is to discipline the party. That theory of action is pretty solid, but it’s not what is being said here what’s being said is that voting is impotent. You can vote all you want. You’re pissing in the wind.
Nah, that theory of action is dogshit. A smattering of indignant leftists isn’t going to discipline the party. Especially when the mechanism of action is… not doing something. That course of action is, in a disciplinary sense, indistinguishable from just being lazy or apathetic. It’s not praxis, and it doesn’t encourage praxis. 0/5 stars, terrible political action.
Voting isn’t impotent. It’s very weak, but it isn’t impotent. It nudges things slightly, which isn’t nothing.
It clearly doesn’t, as the Overton window has been sliding right for decades.
As for disciplining the party, you clearly think that if the Republicans lost they would be moved. Why do you think that if the Democrats win on a right-wing platform they’ll be nudged to the left instead of learning the lesson that they win more if they slide to the right?
You could not be more wrong. Factually, morally, tactically, strategically, you are wrong along every axis in every dimension of existence.
We can work together by standing together and voting our common interests or we can lose the country.
We should be supporting primary challengers for every Republican. Those moderate, DNC types? We should fund one in every goddamn red district in America.
There are more of us than there are of them. Instead of bitching about voting not mattering, make it fucking matter. Take over the Republican Party. Your local party has a couple thousand voters behind them. That’s it. You can’t find a couple thousand neighbors who think corruption is bad and kid-fucking is deplorable?
TRY HARDER FOR FUCK’S SAKE. STOP WHINING AND START WINNING.
Oh man if only we got organized and raised a ton of money and got a whole bunch of people connected via a whole communication and logistics and education capability suite. We could even celebrate together when we did it. We could throw a party. Hey. That’s what we’ll call it, we’ll call it a party.
And since it’s about voting, and saving democracy, we can call it, The Democratic Party!
This is great. It obviously won’t happen overnight, but if we organize our new party, The Democratic Party, we could take that strategy you have and start winning. The leaders of the party will need to be people who understand this, but I mean, of course they would understand it, who wouldn’t understand that we have to save democracy or lose it, and that it’s not hard we just need to get a few thousand people in each district to overwhelm our opponents with votes.
No, this is great. I love this idea. Let’s build…
Wait, there’s already something called The Democratic Party? They already oppose the fascist Republicans? They already have a huge operation that’s been around for a century? And they have a shit ton of money flowing into them constantly?
So then What the fuck is going on? Why are we in this situation? Are they just that bad at their jobs? Well then we should stop putting our effort behind them and start a new party! Wait, what? That just means the fascists will win? But you just said the Democrats have been around this whole time and the fascists are winning… Oh it’s our fault for not voting correctly?
There are people in this very thread, and other parts of the fediverse, who are only here to attack those that point out it’s not okay while they actively pretend it’s okay.
If you’re stuck in a system that only gives you the options of 50 death camps or 51 and you don’t work towards building an alternative system. Then you’re just evil lite.
This is how you know someone only cares about their own moral superiority complex and is the type of person that loves handing out arbitrary purity tests.
People like you are actually just at harmful to left wing goals as any fascist or neoliberal. You are the rot from within.
Ah the irony. A post telling voters to think about more than a single election day, in plain English, and you still can’t imagine doing so.
It’s a strange world we live in… And I get it, you’re too busy to care about politics. You want that one vote to absolve you of responsibility for everything before and after it. Meh.
Nope, I’m active in bringing about change in other ways, through supporting my community, going to protests, organising actual resistance networks, community lobbying, boycotting, direct action and
violencewhere needed.But it’s just none of that stops me from all voting in every possible election I can, as it’s still one of the most impactful things you can do as an individual to enact change.
This post doesn’t say not to vote. It says not to vote for genocidaires.
In the flawed system of the US democracy not voting for one of the two main candidates is functionally the same as not voting.
It does literally nothing help the Palestinian people at all.
The US is not a flawed system of democracy. It’s a genocidal empire designed by the founders to prevent the masses from having any influence over the power of the landed elite. Voting doesn’t do anything for the Palestinians. If you want to help the Palestinians, you have to do something other than voting.
It is both a flawed democracy and a genocidal empire, those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
Yes it does. Like you must know the trolley problem right? If voting for the other side stops even 1 death, stops 1 single bomb, then it’s better than not voting.
The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment to illuminate moral reasoning. It is not a model of the world. In fact, it is the exact opposite of a model of the world. It is a deliberately forced break from reality in order to isolate the moral reasoning.
We don’t have a trolley problem here in the US. We have a single genocidal empire with a veneer of democracy for the masses that was never intended, and never has, represented the will of the masses. It was design, from the beginning, to be a conflict resolution mechanism for the elite merchant class and establish legitimacy for their rule. For each mechanism that would have allowed the masses a say in politics, the founders designed a system to prevent it from having an effect. That’s not a flawed democracy. That’s a shell game.
In The Trolley Problem, you have perfect information about the future, so you can say definitively that making a choice has a specific outcome. You don’t have that in politics. Your claim is that things are better under Ds than Rs. My claim is that Ds and Rs are a continuity of harm that reinforce each other.
Case in point - the deployment of ICE into major cities. People like to claim that Trump did this and Harris would not have. But no one seems to want to engage with the fact that it would have been impossible for either of them to do so without Obama. Obama created the mechanisms that allowed ICE and BORTAC to be deployed to major US cities. He expanded them immensely. And he literally appointed Tom Homan, the same person Trump has relied on for this stuff. Without voting in Obama, we wouldn’t have had Trump deploying these units to the cities.
But even more evidence that there aren’t 2 tracks, only one - We all watched Trump deploy ICE and BORTAC to major US cities during his first term. The mechanisms he used to do that were created by Obama. Biden took office and in four years never did anything to reverse or structurally limit the features Trump used. We all watched Trump do it in Term 1. Biden campaigned on reclaiming the country’s soul. Then, instead of doing anything, he simply chose to change the priorities of ICE and BORTAC, knowing full well that any future president could just go right back to doing what Trump had done. And that’s exactly what happened.
So think about this, right. You and your partner are raising a kid. You and your partner agree that the kid shouldn’t be allowed to mess up the house. Then your partner decides to get into finger painting as an art form. OK… Weird, but fine. And then the kid gets into the finger paints and ruins the house. And you tell your partner that they better stop this, so they clean the walls, but they leave the finger paints in the same place. And the kid gets them again. Are you blaming the kid this time? No. Clearly negligence is a thing. Now, in this family drama, we can pretend your partner is just absent minded after the first time, but if it happens for a decade and every time you try to get rid of the finger paints they stop you and demand you help them clean up the walls and that if you don’t you’re just helping the child destroy the house further, at what point do you stop and realize that your partner is actively obstructing you?
There aren’t two tracks. There’s one. Bush 2 planned 7 wars after Afghanistan: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. Obama attacked 4 of them. Biden/Harris attacked 3 of them. It’s one track. It’s just genocidal global domination with a blue tie on or a red tie on. The two “tracks” are just PR firms. They know you have a particularly psychology so they pander to you. They say “we’re the only ones worthy of your vote” and then they collaborate to go and kill the same people with the same guns from the same money. They say “we’re the only ones with the potential for a better future, those other people are going to ruin the country and then nothing can be salvaged” and then collaborate to maintain the largest prison and parole system in the history of the world, complete with prison slavery, racialized murder and torture, and the worst outcomes in the world.
You’re literally watching a sport, with two teams on the field, and telling me “we have to root for one of them” when the sport is literally two teams of white people competing to see who can lynch more dark skinned children.
I love how you think concentration camps and genocide are “arbitrary purity tests” instead of fully disqualifying positions to hold.
People who do lesser evil voting are, on the whole, far more invested in the morality and virtue signaling and far less invested in the material analysis of what’s actually happening and how to change it.
The problem is, not voting doesn’t push the Overton window in your direction. When you choose to simply abstain, rather than voting against the greatest evil, you give up ground to your opponents without getting anything in return.
Voting is a critical part of making lasting change. It might be useless on its own, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary.
You’re mistaken. No one is saying not to vote. They are saying that your vote actually doesn’t matter. It is not true that voting pushes the Overton window. Look at the Maine Senate race. We just had a huge campaign between an entrenched war mongering Democrat and literal US military mercenary with a Tottenkopf tattoo (removed recently) who is a petite bourgeois luxury food farmer who organized his neighbors to fight for his private property economic interests against a large capitalist enterprise. The overton window is so far right it’s not even funny.
If voting made critical lasting change, it would be outlawed. The founders made sure that the masses could not change the system by voting. That’s why 70% percent of the Senate represents only 30% of the population. You can’t fix that with voting. The wars planned under Bush 2, which absolutely were influenced by the Bush 1 circle, were carried out by Bush 2, and then by Obama, and then by Trump. The Senate doesn’t respond to votes. The president doesn’t respond to votes. And the House has over 100 Democrats supporting ICE.
What is it going to take for you to realize this? Go. Vote. But pretending it does anything is delusion. Every single improvement of rights came through violence, from labor rights to civil rights to gay rights. It took riots, it took bloodshed. The system is designed to force this to be true.
Reading comprehension.
I’m not saying concentration camps are the purity test. I’m saying people like you are the kind of people that do arbitrary purity tests.
What’s the purity test then? Are we not calling out dems for supporting genocide?
Biden admitted he didn’t want the DOJ to go after Trump for sedition in a hope for bipartsianship. He could have released the Epstein files then unredacted but didn’t. He has a history of voting for federal increases to police budgets, he was the sponsor on the bill making it nearly impossible to discharge federal student loans in bankruptcy. And that’s just Biden.
What to know what’s most damning about the Democrats? In the build up to this situation, through it all, when they had enough power to do something they didn’t do it. Obama could of put in changes to federal student loans but didn’t, they were a problem way before then. They had decades to codify Roe vs Wade into law instead of a supreme court ruling.
At best they’re inactive and inattentive.
At best! And that’s extremely generous.
Vote local, vote to end FPTP.
Problem solved! We’ll all just go…not vote?
Hmmm…that doesn’t seem right. Doesn’t that let all the people who really want to vote for the 51 death camps decide who’s in charge then?
Either way you get death camps, get off the trolley and discover there’s a no death camp option
What is the no death camp option in the United States? I would genuinely like to know.
The only option I’m aware of is voting more, not less. Vote in every primary and every local election. Make yourself part of the process.
By electing the same people that got us into this mess?
You didn’t answer the question. What’s the no death camp option?
What’s the no death camp option?
You have to create it, it wont be handed to you on a silver platter. You can start by not kissing the dems arses and yelling at them to do better or fold up shop. While showing the republicans the back of your hand too, obviously. They are playing you and using your vote like its a foregone conclusion, and you are letting them. Why not stand up for yourself? Or do you have any morals at all? American selfishness is another issue and it disguises itself as learned helplessness.
And how does not voting help that?
What is it with liberals when someone says you don’t have to support the oligarchy they translate that to don’t vote
That’s one of the major problems, Democrats claim to support the no death camp issue, but they want someone else to do all the work so they can come in afterwards, jump on our bandwagon as if they supported it the whole time
It would be the option for expressing power outside of voting…
And how has that gone for you? How many concentration camps has it stopped?
I mean it’s not going well, but I having trouble thinking of a time where a country voted its way out of having concentration camps either.
You know what stops pipelines? Physical altercations. You know what stops cop cities? Physical altercations. Voting has only ever increased the military, increased the police, and increased the prisons. Voting one way or the other literally has no impact. The only way to stop this stuff is to fight.
It isn’t there. Vote for whoever you want, but acknowledging that you were not given choices at all is important.
But you are. The thing is systems of governance for hundreds of millions of people, all with different wants, morals and desires across very different circumstances and locales is going to be extremely complex. Mix into that the shitty power dynamics of capitalism and you system with a lot of political inertia that eventually boils down to 2 pretty similar positions at the highest level. And trying to move that political lever at the very furthers end is difficult.
If you want your position given more weight, then you have to act at every level of governance, not just the very top with the presidential election.
That’s certainly a theory. But it doesn’t really hold up. The reason we have 2 similar positions at the highest level is because they are one position, it’s the position the dominant ruling class and it always has been. You think that somehow the desire of native Americans to be free mixed with the desire for black Americans for reparations mixed with poor immigrants to be safe mixed with poor white people to be healthy leads to Palestinian genocide?
Naw. Come on! You can’t think that’s how this works, can you?
You didn’t answer the question.
don’t be petulant.
Keep going please…Tell me how that would work in the US system of First Past The Post elections.
Or if First Past The Post elections is the problem, tell me how you would get rid of that system.
It would require not using elections to express power
Keep going please…Tell me how that would work in the US system …
Well first I want you to imagine having a sense of decency, an ability to feel shame, and identify what morality you have, if any. Let me know when you get to that point and we’ll talk next steps. Whats worth you acting on? Not someone else, you.
edit: no reply, and theres your answer. You will only act when you are literally lit on fire, and until then you’ll sit there and do nothing while flapping your mouth uselessly, same as you centrist lot always do. You are a walking liability to whatever political party will have you.
Sigh…
So you don’t actually have a real solution for getting rid of the conservatives and neoliberals in office.
You just want everyone to know that you’re too cool to be a Republican or a Democrat. 👍
You don’t need to get rid of that system. All you do is need to vote for candidates that do not support the oligarchy. But liberals are not concerned about long-term success, their concern about the short-term win
I mean…yes. Exactly. That’s what the primaries are for. Primary out the neoliberals.
The Republicans primary out anyone who isn’t hard right enough for them. They vote, then they vote again, then they vote some more.
And now all branches of government are controlled by the hard right. Because they voted. A lot.
Incorrect.
In the 21st century alone, Democratic presidential candidates have accumulated tens of millions more raw votes than their Republican counterparts, heavily bolstered by high-population states like California and New York. For instance, in 2008 and 2020, Democratic candidates won the popular vote by margins of roughly 9.5 million and 7 million votes respectively.
Democratic primaries routinely draw higher raw voter turnout than Republican primaries.
When evaluating the “national house vote” (the cumulative number of votes cast nationwide for all members of the U.S. House of Representatives) the Democratic Party frequently captures a higher raw vote total. High-turnout midterm wave elections, such as the 2006 and 2018 midterms, saw immense raw vote advantages for Democrats.
Local election turnouts are heavily dominated by major metropolitan areas. America’s most populous cities (such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago) feature massive electorates that vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in local municipal races.
So your theory of is not supported by the evidence. Please try to explain why things are the way they are again, but this time include the fact that Democrats have consistently voted more at every single level than Republics for almost 30 years.
It’s not like you can’t do both. Vote the lesser evil, get off the trolley.
So the solution is get off the trolley but keep supporting the people that are creating the trolley situation?
They don’t require your support to hold elections. What would “not supporting” elections by not voting do, exactly?
Who said anything about not voting? Liberals have locked themselves into a binary system of oppression that they claim to oppose
Ok, are you proposing to vote? For whom?
Literally whomever isn’t a genocidaire
I said ‘vote the lesser evil’ you opposed. So I’d say you said that.
Basically, don’t expect significant change from Democrats until we can get rid of the neo-liberals. Until then, you’re just voting harm that’s getting steadily worse.
For the love of Christ. If it comes down to 50 death camps vs 51 death camps and you couldn’t muster up enough loud vocal grass roots support for ‘no death camps’ to make it feel like there is even an outside chance of winning enough that people don’t feel that they have to vote for the lesser 50, then maybe you should examine why that is. I’m tired of this stupid fucking argument.
Godless commie isn’t interested in improving America.
They come up with these tired ass cliche posts that only encourage voter apathy, which results in fascist victories.
They have no concept of pragmatic and realistic steps towards improvement and they think the magic third party fairy will swoop down and sprinkle magic dust that will allow a third party candidate to win, and they don’t give a shit if America gets worse while they believe in this fantasy.
Liberals create these fascist victories by allowing the 50 death camps to exist. ‘We are morally Superior because we allow less death camps than the other guys’ And then Republicans build the 52nd death camp Democrats will allow 51 to be built because it’s less
What is your suggestion to improve things that actually has a chance of happening? What you’re saying isn’t completely wrong, it’s just not very helpful without an objective.
Lol, imagine saying “godless commie” like it’s an insult. Couldn’t be me.
We are currently looking at the results of decades of your supposed “pragmatic and realistic steps”. Fat lot of good it has done other than to enable the owning class to achieve fascism with minimal and negligible resistance.
Incrementalism doesn’t work when the rest of the system is actively undermining what little progress you make faster than you achieve it.
That’s literally his username, genius. I’m an atheist who doesn’t hate communism; I hate the dictatorship/totalitarianism/imperialism that always seems to be packaged with it. I’m also a realist who actually wants to see a better tomorrow for everyone (except fascists).
Would you like my take on what to do? Swallow that bitter pill of milquetoast democrats, get more progressive supreme court justices nominated, push towards ranked voting to make >2 party victories possible, get rid of citizens united, push out APAIC. NONE of that is going to happen with republicans, which is exactly what you’ll get by pushing your fantasy of voting for people who will never win.
It’s not us that are saying 50 death camps is lesser evil or lesser harm. We advocate for no death camps. You either support it or you don’t. What’s tiresome is liberal arrogance that theirs is the only correct path forward when history has shown time and time again that they are enabling fascism that led to the creation of those 50 death camps
First of all the 50 vs 51 death camps is a laughable exaggeration and inflation of the relative evils and you all fucking know it.
Second, you can advocate for no evil at all all you want. I, obviously, support that too. But A) evils are relative, sometimes, aren’t they. We won’t always agree about what is right and wrong. Pretending your perspective is objective and everyone else is an idiot for not agreeing with you isn’t working out very well for you, is it? B) Even if we agree completely that one system of goverment, economics, international relations, etc. are all correct, unless we can somehow form a sovereign state of two, we’re going to have to coordinate, compromise and agree with others. A lot of others. Come election day under first past the post voting, even if there is a party or candidate that represents every single one of my deeply held ideals, if they don’t have competitive levels of support to even have a chance of winning I would probably not vote for them. Because I’m not a moron who cares more about virtue signaling or keeping my perfect principles untarnished than actual outcomes.
Third, again, you need to examine why your alternatives aren’t viable. The answer cannot be external. Blaming everyone else for being stupid, brainwashed, etc. is defeatism. You can’t control others perspectives, only your own. If the choice is between fascism, fascist enablement and anti-fascism, you gotta figure out why anti-fascism isn’t the obvious choice for most people. Then you can start to figure out how to make it the better AND SAFER choice to make.
We know why anti-fascism isn’t the default choice - propaganda. So we have these fights with liberals specifically because it creates the opportunities to counter the propaganda. The number of people in this comment section that don’t realize that Obama deported far more people than Trump has, and probably ever will, is staggering. The number of people who think that women got the right to vote by voting is staggering.
We know what the problem is, and it’s super obvious what the problem is when we say we won’t vote for a genocidaire and the liberals all pull out the daggers and screaming that lesser evil voting is literally the only path forward. The problem is fundamentally what people believe about the world and the gap between those beliefs and reality. The process of challenging those beliefs looks a lot like this.
We need a revolution 🇦🇱✊🏼nothing will improve until the pedophile class lives in fear
Tell me, what’s the alternative?
I don’t see one. You’re just fucking grandstanding.
So, I’m what, supposed to not vote at all?
Then the actual evil will win
Americans seem to think they are due some sort of fair and equitable civil society without having to fight for it. Actual evil will win anyway unless you fight the evil people and take a stand, constantly-- not occasionally when its only relevant to you. The problem is that americans are too spoiled and are lazy with their politics and morals. They just lay there like baby birds waiting to be fed, so the evils take advantage of that lethargy and here we are.
I’m a Euro and I am constantly pissed at American politics. And it’s blearing in our ears all day.
I couldn’t tell you who is the mayor of London, but everyone knows who the mayor of NYC is.
both are actual evil.
A: we have to get rid of vaccines, get rid of healthcare and go to war
B: we have to keep vaccines, keep healthcare and go to war
You: woah! They’re exactly the same!
Yes, both of those are, and I quote, “actual evil”.
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That both of your examples are, in fact, evil. They may not be the same, or equal, but both are, obviously, evil. Which was the argument.
As the kids say, you are doing the thing in the meme.
deleted by creator
What alternative? You chose the options. I’m just pointing out that, as the user above said, they’re both evil.
It’s up to you and your community to create the alternative. No one is going to give it to you on a silver platter.
that’s not what I said but that’s not going to stop the bad faith takes
It’s exactly what you said
if that were true could link me saying that instead of typing something that I didn’t type.
both are actual evil.
There’s no other way to interpret this mate
there is but not if you refuse to operate in good faith
The only solution liberals are capable of seeing are ones that involve their failed party and their failed ideology
And the solutions you offer are?
My point is you’re just saying things and doing nothing.
Watch the idiot walk, watch the idiot talk, watch the idiot write up their name on the blackboard. Watch the robot walk, watch the robot talk, watch the robot write up their vote on the ballot.
It’s a lose-lose situation, there is no win condition, there’s just be heard, or be not heard
You only say that because you want the 51 death camps party to win.
Lesser evil voting is simply the limited options given to us under a broken system.
Until the system can be broken, I’d still rather attempt to cause less harm and impede the organization to break the system as little as possible.
I’ll vote for the least establishment option amongst our de-facto options presented when it’s time to vote. In the meantime I’ll help with organizing, with advocacy, with 3rd party groups, with building alternatives to our capitalist system to support the revolution when it’s time.
Would you rather me not vote and allow one more to not be countered towards the more establishment option that would work towards pulling back our rights even faster?
There shouldn’t be any death camps, fucking obviously, but that would be 1 less we have to destroy in the coming days. Work to break the system so we don’t have death camps, but also work to slow it down as much as possible so we have less to fight to break the system.
Personally, I’d rather you not talk about voting at all because if you know you’re voting for genocidaires as a harm mitigation strategy that is fundamentally unsustainable then spend your time talking about those things and stop talking about voting and sheep dogging for the fascist Ds.
The image is rhetorically effective and philosophically wrong.
It assumes lesser evil voting has no terminal conditions. That’s a strawman. The argument isn’t “accept any amount of evil indefinitely.” It’s “while building the capacity to break the system, slow the accumulation of harm so there are more people alive and organized to do the breaking.” Those are different positions and collapsing them is how the image works as rhetoric. It’s also ideologically similar to how conservatives collapse Democrats, liberals, and leftists together. I’d hope you’re more intelligent than that.
The death camp math also proves too much. By that logic, if one candidate builds 50 death camps and the other builds 51, destroying one death camp is also pointless because you’ve implicitly accepted the existence of 49 others. The logic rules out every incremental action including the organizing you’re telling us to do instead. If no action that reduces harm without eliminating it is acceptable, there is no acceptable action short of immediate revolution. Which, I would ask, what was Lenin’s view on immediate revolution and the monopoly on violence?
I already said there shouldn’t be any death camps. Obviously. The question is whether 50 is the same as 51 to the people in them. I’d ask the people in them. I suspect they have a view.
I’m also not voting for genocidaires. I’m voting for the candidates both establishment Democrats and Republicans are spending money to stop, who are explicitly calling out both parties, and who have policy that directly counters what’s producing the conditions you’re describing. Collapsing that into “sheepherding for fascist Ds” requires ignoring everything specific about the races in favor of a general theory that conveniently rules out every available action.
Organize. Advocate. Build alternatives. Vote strategically where it matters. These aren’t contradictions. You’ve decided they are because it’s cleaner that way and you don’t have to face an uncomfortability that way. That’s exactly how MAGA operates ideologically.
That’s a false equivalency. Destroying a concentration camp doesn’t put anyone into a position of power. It’s incremental, yes, but it’s fundamentally anti-fascist. Voting in Democrats, when literally 100 off them voted for more ICE, when Obama and Clinton turned Libya into an open-air slave market, when Obama hired Tom Homan and created the conditions for ICE BORTAC to be used in major cities, when Obama and Homan deported 3m people, double what Trump has managed do in both terms so far… That’s not incremental harm reduction. That’s literally voting for harm. It would be the equivalent of making sure there were social workers at the concentration camps, or demanding we send the prisoners art supplies. It’s not actually incrementalization of anything. It’s just a feel-good veneer on atrocity.
Honestly, there’s so few examples of presidents that didn’t preside over total fucking atrocities that maybe we’re coming at this from different places. I am coming at it from the USA is a fundamental violent, white supremacist, misogynistic, genocidal, enslaving, and mass murdering entity and it has been since day 1. There’s no harm reduction through voting here. People like to point at Obama’s blocking of Keystone XL as an example of harm reduction but ignore the fact that he expanded domestic fossil fuel production more than any other president. Was blocking the Keystone XL harm reduction? No. It was appeasement. There’s a huge difference.
Similarly, people like to say that civil rights wouldn’t have gone anywhere if Ds weren’t in charge, but Nixon was forced by the civil rights movement to make policy concessions, just the Ds were. This is the only thing that works. Forcing them to appease. You want harm reduction, you’re going to have to create interest convergence, and voting doesn’t do that.
I have no reason to defend Obama’s record nor am I trying to, because it’s correct. 3 million deportations. Tom Homan hired by Democrats. ICE BORTAC infrastructure built under Democratic governance. Fossil fuel expansion while blocking one pipeline as political cover. Gotta love those “bridge fuels,” friggin idiots. These are real and they’re damning. You’re right that this isn’t harm reduction but an architecture of the harm being built with a friendlier face on it.
The Nixon point is also correct. The Civil Rights Movement didn’t win by electing the right people. It won by making inaction more politically costly than concession regardless of who held office. Interest convergence is the mechanism. Voting isn’t.
But here’s where your argument collapses into the same categorical error the image made.
You’re treating “Democrat” as a fixed ideological category that determines outcomes regardless of the individual, the race, or the conditions. It’s a vast generalization The Democratic Party is a ballot apparatus, not a coherent political entity. It contains Obama. It also contains the Squad. It contained the New Deal coalition and it contained the DLC that dismantled it. The Tea Party used the Republican apparatus to primary and replace establishment Republicans with candidates who were genuinely further right. That’s not a hypothetical, it happened, and it reshaped the party against the establishment’s will.
The candidates I’m talking about are being spent against by both establishment Democrats and Republicans simultaneously. Their own party’s apparatus is trying to stop them. Calling that “voting for Democrats” in the sense you mean requires ignoring everything specific about the race in favor of the label on the ballot line.
You’ve correctly identified that the Democratic establishment produces harm. We have 0 argument there. Both establiahments are fascist. You haven’t demonstrated that everyone who uses the Democratic ballot line to run against that establishment is equivalent to Obama. That’s the gap in your argument. And until you close it, the interest convergence point, which is correct, doesn’t rule out supporting candidates who are themselves creating the political pressure you’re describing as the only thing that works. And until we’ve reached a point, as you mentioned it would have to be incremental under our existing system, to educate voters and provide them with more options to better represent them, what more can we do? We’re attempting to do the work that we can while we can, but that still exists under the same system. If voting is advocating for genocide, then what is participation in our capitalist society? Our taxes fund the actions of the government and our labor helps corporations to gain their capital and influence, but we still work as we need our own capital to survive, protect each other, and organize.
I’m not saying don’t advocate for better, don’t build alternatives to capitalism, don’t prepare for the revolution. I’m saying do that in addition to making sure the fascist don’t have the easiest time at the voting booth as well. Make them have to rig it, the thing we can nearly bet on is their incompetence, and that will add more fuel to the fire in people’s eyes to overthrow this system. Unfortunately, our system exists such that most voters remain ignorant, lack education, and are propagandized to be selfish. I’m just saying to be strategic about it to make it easier for us in the long run. Play the longer game so we can actually fix this shit instead of putting a bandaid on it.
You’re treating “Democrat” as a fixed ideological category that determines outcomes regardless of the individual, the race, or the conditions
I’m not. I’m treating it a dynamic component of a larger structural system organized to maintain an equilibrium.
The Democratic Party is a ballot apparatus, not a coherent political entity
This is incorrect. The Democratic Party is a public relations arm of the ruling class, just like the Republicans are. Both parties have clear ideological overlap - liberalism. That there are two liberal parties competing on the ballot is where the incoherence comes from, if we expect them to differ ideologically. Once you stop expecting that, the coherence comes into focus. The two liberal parties are organized to capture the greatest number of votes each by having huge tents, they are organized to create a divide-and-conquer strategy (like sexism, like racism) and they do this through virtue signalling. They both spend millions of dollars researching the population and they find the fault lines that divide people and they take up positions on either side of those fault lines. This consumes all electoral energy while maintaining a singular ideological foundation - liberalism.
The Tea Party used the Republican apparatus to primary and replace establishment Republicans with candidates who were genuinely further right. That’s not a hypothetical, it happened, and it reshaped the party against the establishment’s will.
The Tea Party was bankrolled by the elites, a corporate project, not a grassroots one. Yes it had grassroots elements, built into the design to create legitimacy. But the same donors who ten years prior were supporting what you call “the establishment” republicans were now supporting the Tea Party. It happens all the time. Donors that used to support the Ds switch to support the Rs, and vice versa. It’s all a game of PR effectiveness, not of ideology. The rise of fascism is not a psychological choice originating in individual, it is a collective psychosis originating is class conflict and economic crisis. The timing of The Tea Party’s rise has as much to do with the rise of Obama as it did with the global financial crisis caused by the US finance industry as it did with the IMF naming China as the single most important contributor to world economic growth in 2007. The Tea Party was not a proactive effort it was a reaction to the signs impending collapse of the US empire.
You haven’t demonstrated that everyone who uses the Democratic ballot line to run against that establishment is equivalent to Obama. That’s the gap in your argument.
No. You think I’m saying don’t vote for any Democrat ever. I’m saying don’t vote for genocidaires. If the Ds ran someone who wasn’t a genocidaire, I’d probably vote for them.
the interest convergence point, which is correct, doesn’t rule out supporting candidates who are themselves creating the political pressure you’re describing
Correct
as the only thing that works
Incorrect. American history has shown us time and time again that voting barely works at all and that it is conflict in the streets that precipitates the changes we want, regardless of which party is in power at the time.
And until we’ve reached a point, as you mentioned it would have to be incremental under our existing system, to educate voters and provide them with more options to better represent them, what more can we do?
We can stop carrying water for fascists you yourself have pointed out. The number of people on Lemmy who think arguing against Platner is a cardinal sin is a prime example of my point. The man was literally a mercenary soldier and then became a petite bourgeois farmer and then organized people to fight against a big corporate farm to protect his financial interests and suddenly everyone thinks he’s a good candidate to not only vote for but to put all their energy and voice behind. Then it turns out he had a Tottenkopf tattoo for 20 years and he proudly showed it off in public and he was someone who studied WW2 history and considered himself an expert in it and now what happens? They double down on why voting against Platner or even CRITIQUING Platner is not merely unacceptable but equivalent to actively supporting fascism because Collins is a Republican collaborator.
What we can do is stop playing Blue No Matter Who and stop entertaining Blue MAGA and be serious and open about the fundamental fascist nature of the Democratic party, the failings of their heroes, and undermine the case for lesser evil voting. Because lesser evil voting is not educating voters and it doesn’t provide them more options.
What we can do is demonstrate that since the founding of the country voting has done almost nothing while getting in the street and shutting down the economy or making the elite scared is the only thing that’s ever really worked.
We’re attempting to do the work that we can while we can, but that still exists under the same system
Limiting your imagination of the work to only the things they approve is not doing even half of what you can.
If voting is advocating for genocide, then what is participation in our capitalist society?
Voting is a proactive action. Working for a wage is a reactive action, driven by starvation and exposure. The only way you can get access to resources is through our resource distribution system. And even THEN it’s important to make some distinctions - one should not consciously join the military, one should not consciously join the police force or the prison force, one should not consciously work for a weapons manufacturer, etc. They have captured all of us, they are starving us to death, and they are allowing us to live if and only if we work for them. This is not at all equivalent to voting for someone who says they have no intention of stopping Israel from committing genocide with the billions in weapons we provide them.
Our taxes fund the actions of the government and our labor helps corporations to gain their capital and influence, but we still work as we need our own capital to survive, protect each other, and organize.
Which is fundamentally different from why we vote.
Maybe our taxes fund the actions of the government. MMT is still being debated. Our labor doesn’t help corporations gain their capital and influence, it helps them maintain what they already had. The bourgeoisie is somewhat permeable, but it’s not so permeable that you choosing to work created new forms of capital and influence.
I’m saying do that in addition to making sure the fascist don’t have the easiest time at the voting booth as well.
That’s literally impossible in the US. Both parties are structurally part of the liberal capitalist system. Fascism emerges from liberal capitalism, not from one party or another. If the voting booth isn’t fighting liberal capitalism, it is completely orthogonal to the question of the rise of fascism. The rise of fascism is happening through the actions and inactions of both parties, and getting one more “nice liberal capitalist who doesn’t want to harm me” into power has literally no effect on the rise of fascism. As I said, it’s not a phenomenon of individual psychology, it’s a collective phenomenon and the only solution to it is to physically defeat them. Fascism has never lost in the voting booth.
Play the longer game so we can actually fix this shit instead of putting a bandaid on it.
The agitprop I do here is specifically the long game. It’s an attempt to break down the compatabilist position, because such a position allows people to psychologically avoid the inner work that needs to be done. People need to go through a process of grieving for their false beliefs in order to change, and they need that change to be willing to lend their power to the cause. If people hold on to the belief that voting matters, then 2 things happen: 1) they vote and engage in bystander effect assuming other people will do the other work and 2) as it becomes more and more obvious that voting is not working they protect their belief by lashing out at everyone who isn’t voting like them. They have to do both of these things to maintain their self-image of a good person living in a good place with good people doing good things. They have to believe this to avoid realizing that their parents and their grandparents and their kids and their friends are participating in a system, and possibly taking direct actions, that violates their core values. We HAVE to break down these false beliefs if we’re ever going to raise consciousness to the point of fighting fascism.
We cannot keep giving people easy ways out of the difficult reality: the USA is and always has been a white supremacist genocidal rapacious destructive violent misogynistic duplicitous mass murdering elite entity, born of European empire and heir to European empire, maintainer of European empire, and fundamentally the biggest worst and most evil problem the world has ever seen. That’s a lot for people to process. But if we keep saying “it’s good to fight for Platner and everyone else is morally failing” then they’re never going to get to the point where they’ll organize with the anti-fascists. The best thing possible for the fight against fascism is for Platner to disappoint everyone, because it will force people through the grief cycle, just like Bernie failing did. Bernie failing and then subsequently demonstrating his complicity was one of the best things for the cause. By contrast, Obama and Hillary are STILL nearly untouchable hero figures and people still cannot learn the lessons of Libya, of Homan, of ICE and BORTAC, of the Pivot to Asia, because they’re emotionally attached to those people being good because it means that not only were they good because they voted for them but that the society they live in is good because these heroes are living proof of the goodness of this country.
Phew, that’s a whole dissertation. Let’s break it down.
Alright, fair on the Tea Party. Koch money, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity. Same donor class reshuffling to manufacture grassroots legitimacy. The analogy doesn’t hold and I’ll own that.
The voting/labor distinction is real too. You can’t eat if you don’t work. You can choose not to vote. Not the same thing. Point taken.
On limiting imagination to only what they approve: I’d push back there. I’m door knocking, building mutual aid, working with DSA and WFP, advocating for RCV, trying to build local alternatives to capitalism. That work exists alongside the electoral calculation, not instead of it. If your argument is that doing both dilutes organizing energy, make that case specifically. But “you’re only doing what they approve” doesn’t track against what I’m actually doing.
On Obama and Hillary still being untouchable: yeah, that’s real and it’s infuriating. People still can’t reckon with Libya, with Homan, with ICE BORTAC, with the Pivot to Asia, because they’re emotionally attached to those figures as proof the system works. I’ve watched that attachment short circuit every honest conversation about what the Democratic establishment actually does. That’s the grief cycle failing in real time and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
On Platner: I’m not treating criticism of him as a cardinal sin. The tattoo, the Reddit posts, the kill comment, the mercenary history, those are documented and worth scrutinizing. What I’ve said is that both establishment Democrats and Republicans are spending money to stop him, that the scandals being amplified are the salacious ones rather than the substantive ones, and that Collins is a 30-year documented donor capture story whose voting record actively harms the people we’re supposedly organizing to protect. That’s not Blue No Matter Who. That’s reading the specific conditions of a specific race. If those conditions don’t justify the calculation then make that case. But collapsing it into general lesser evil sheepherding requires ignoring everything specific about it.
The grief cycle argument is the most interesting thing you’ve written and I’m not dismissing it. And yeah, the USA has been a white supremacist genocidal violent entity since day one. That’s not fringe, that’s history. People need to reckon with that fully instead of finding emotional exit ramps through hero figures.
On Bernie specifically: I don’t think he demonstrated complicity in the sense you mean. He operates within the constraints of the system he exists in, he makes compromises that are sometimes genuinely wrong, and yeah, taking forever to call a genocide a genocide isn’t defensible as playing politics. That one lands. But collapsing Bernie endorsing Biden into the same category as Obama building ICE BORTAC or Clinton turning Libya into a slave market is the same categorical error I’ve been calling out in your argument all along. Operating within a broken system under constraint isn’t the same as actively building the infrastructure of harm. That distinction matters, because it’s the same distinction I’m making about Platner, and about voting itself.
But the grief cycle theory is still making a bet. It’s betting radicalization outpaces harm accumulation. And that bet has a historical test case that did not go well.
Weimar Germany. Massive radicalization. Demonstrated failure of liberal institutions. Widespread grief about the old system. Fascism still consolidated first because it had more organizational infrastructure ready when the window opened. The grief cycle doesn’t just produce revolutionaries, it also produces fascists simultaneously from the same conditions. Whoever is more organized when the crisis peaks wins. And fascism is actively closing the space to organize right now. NSPM-7. Surveillance expansion. (I’m starting my own activist group here to push back locally against the age verification, flock cameras, etc.) Criminalization of dissent. Every month consolidation runs it gets harder to do the work you’re saying is the only thing that matters. So I understand the urgency.
However, the people who get deported, lose healthcare, disappear into detention, or die while we wait for sufficient radicalization aren’t theoretical. A movement that has fewer people because the conditions it was waiting to create killed them first isn’t stronger. It’s smaller and facing something more consolidated.
You haven’t shown the grief cycle produces capacity faster than fascism closes the space for it. And the people paying the cost of being wrong about that timeline aren’t the ones theorizing about it. (See: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder - Vladimir Lenin)
On limiting imagination to only what they approve: I’d push back there. I’m door knocking, building mutual aid, working with DSA and WFP, advocating for RCV, trying to build local alternatives to capitalism
None of that is disapproved. I too have done all of those things. I have found them to be cul-de-sacs. In both DSA and WFP the racism is virulent. At least in DSA some chapters have labor organizing groups. But the electoral groups in DSA are toxic, in my experience. As for local alternatives to capitalism, I love me some co-ops, some soup kitchens, and some community gardens, but they’re never going to save us.
What I’ve said is that both establishment Democrats and Republicans are spending money to stop him
Which would be relevant if it weren’t for the fact that meta-gaming is a thing in politics and they totally understand the idea of amplifying the impression of being resistant. I don’t trust it for a second based on what I know of Platner… to wit…
collapsing it into general lesser evil sheepherding requires ignoring everything specific about it.
So here’s what I see that’s specific about it. Platner was a US soldier who killed brown people under some of the worst conditions in recent memory. He saw the atrocities, and he volunteered for more duty. Then he volunteered for mercenary duty. And you know what he says made him quit? That the mercenary companies were ripping off the US government. Then he became a luxury food farmer. This is the definition of being part of the petite bourgeois. The petite bourgeois are well known internationally and historically to be reactionary fascists because of the economic position. But some of them have historically been class traitors, so we’ll have to dig deeper. Why did Platner get into politics? Well, because he didn’t like what the politics was doing to his oyster farm. OK, so self-interested, check. Why did Platner get on the radar of Democrats? Well, because he organized his local community. Oh?! That’s good right? Well, he organized them to fight a big corporate aquaculture company from ruining his farming business. So…, no. Squarely petite bourgeois. OK. So, at this point we have a murderer who volunteered to murder more and then decided to suck up into his own little world selling luxury food to the bourgeoisie and then got into politics specifically to protect his economic interests. Taken through a historical lens, that’s essentially the profile of most Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe. Then you couple that with the Tottenkopf, the late game removal of said Tottenkopf, and the attempt at downplaying it literally to a question only of whether or not he knew what it was instead of actually addressing its meaning, history, and the impact it could have on others? His entire anti-war stance is limited to America First economic resentment. To me, that’s the specifics of the case. And the specific things absent are also telling. Platner is not working with vets, or disgruntled men, or young boys. He’s not helping people to deconstruct the patriarchy inside them, the white supremacy inside them, the violence inside them. He’s not using ANY of his traumatic experiences to help others. He’s on a path from storm trooper to mercenary to petite bourgeois to petite bourgeois politician with the very real potential of unexamined white supremacy, misogyny, and potentially even war crimes.
As for being a sheep-dog? I think it’s pretty clear he’s attracted a TON of energy that otherwise could have been used to build anti-imperialist movements.
On Bernie: […] Operating within a broken system under constraint isn’t the same as actively building the infrastructure of harm
When he votes to approve the constant expansion of the military, how is Bernie not actively building the infrastructure of harm? He had no obligation to endorse who he endorsed. You’re correct that it’s not at the same level as Presidents, but Sanders isn’t a President, he’s a Senator. And while he’s done good, he’s made substantial compromises and he’s backed away from fights when he had the necessary support from people. He could have sacrificed his career. That’s honestly not too much to ask. Many politicians have sacrificed their career to fight for what they believed in. Bernie didn’t. He told his supporters that they should all compromise the way he’s compromising.
But the grief cycle theory is still making a bet. It’s betting radicalization outpaces harm accumulation.
That’s not actually true. The grief cycle theory is a hypothesis for how to fundamentally solve a particular problem, specifically the tendency of euro-centric liberalism to produce fascism.
And that bet has a historical test case that did not go well. Weimar Germany. Massive radicalization. Demonstrated failure of liberal institutions. Widespread grief about the old system. Fascism still consolidated first because it had more organizational infrastructure ready when the window opened. The grief cycle doesn’t just produce revolutionaries, it also produces fascists simultaneously from the same conditions. Whoever is more organized when the crisis peaks wins.
Yeah, see I think the German example shows the opposite. People did NOT go through grief. They wanted to believe. That’s why the National Socialists won them over with tales of tradition and white supremacy. They interrupted the grief cycle. But more importantly, Hitler never won a majority electorally and the Nazis still took power. So I agree with you. We need to organize and organize fast. But organizing to vote for liberalism does two things: 1) it interrupts the grief cycle by reinforcing the delusion that there is some aspect of good that can be protected and nurtured in the political system of a genocidal liberal democracy and 2) it steals energy from organizing in ways that are effective against fascism. Organizing to vote has never been effective against fascism historically. If we all abandoned the ballot box and sat each other down and went through the group processing of grief that not only is America gone but that America was never good, never worth saving, and never worth preserving, we would actually have a chance against fascism. The Bolsheviks literally won the day because they said “Russia ought to lose the war”. That sort of revolutionary defeatism is what won, not hoping they could steer the military to be 1% less imperialist.
The Vietnamese won the day not because they thought that they could collaborate with the French occupiers to reduce the harm they were doing but because they knew the current form of their country needed to be destroyed. The Chinese won the day not because they thought they could make the Japanese and Europeans slightly more gentle but because they knew they had to go beyond the current form of government and current relationships and destroy them to produce a just society.
Voting for Platner, organizing the vote for Platner, and organizing the fight against Platner critics is not organizing that will fight fascism. It is the definition of sheep-dogging.
However, the people who get deported, lose healthcare, disappear into detention, or die while we wait for sufficient radicalization aren’t theoretical. A movement that has fewer people because the conditions it was waiting to create killed them first isn’t stronger. It’s smaller and facing something more consolidated.
What you don’t understand is that this is bi-partisan. Obama deported 100% more than Trump has. Obama appointed Homan to do it. Trump used the same guy. The prison-industrial complex enjoys total bi-partisan support. Mass racialized incarceration enjoys bi-partisan support. Mass surveillance enjoys bi-partisan support. Mass surveillance by the US military on US citizens enjoys bi-partisan support. And here’s where I’m going with this:
[Comic]
This comic assumes that the strategy is accelerationism to force people to radicalize by preventing meaningful change through lesser evilism. It’s not.
The strategy is consciousness raising to induce people to radicalize by revealing the truth that we are trapped in a Good Cop / Bad Cop situation. No amount of working with the Good Cop will improve our chances of success. The Republicans and the Democrats are 2 PR firms for the ruling class. They play Good Cop / Bad Cop with the citizens. This is why Pelosi said we need a strong Republican party. Because the Republicans and the Democrats across the country golf together, party together, go to school together, work together, eat together, drink together, laugh and cry and celebrate together. They’re colleagues. On the election trail, they play up their differences and make moral overtures about how “if you believe this, then you must vote for me”, but the outcomes are primarily the same. As PR firms, they each have their own kayfabe. When what is needed is a carrot, like expanding entitlements, the Democrats take up that charge. When what is needed is a stick, like austerity or domestic police violence, the Republicans take up that charge.
I’m not advocating for accelerationism of the decline of social conditions. That’s going to happen faster than anyone can imagine. It’s accelerating because the US has been outmaneuvered on the world stage and the elite are desperately trying to save their position, so desperate that the financial faction and the cybernetic faction actually had a pretty serious schism for awhile there, though it seems like they may have patched it up and have a tenuous alliance while they make money together manipulating the markets. Social conditions are going to decline no matter what we do. Voting can’t change geopolitical conditions. I’m advocating for people to give up the delusion that things like the WFP or a local food co-cop are going to save us, if only we could get people to vote for the candidates that won’t smash our delicate sandcastle. That’s delusional thinking.
making sure there were social workers at the concentration camps, or demanding we send the prisoners art supplies.
this is what harm reduction actually looks like.
