For the sake of clarity, I meant actions in the sense of direct action; typically some sort of anarchism flavoured so prefiguration was often at least kept in mind. Nothing has ever snowballed of course, although some actions have spawned some lovely little related communities that are thriving too (and others that since ran out of steam, true); I’ll always choose small victories over chasing the best loss as electoralism endlessly expounds. But I don’t at all disagree with the sentiment!

I have been told this my whole life, how our silly little actions didn’t mean anything because they were too small or fringe or whatever.

The difference is I can look back across the decades and see a lot of people who I have helped, and who have helped me in turn, things have been directly made better as a result (well, at least some of the time). Meanwhile, their “more realistic” approach centred on voting has seen periods of glacial progress and rapid retreat, leaving them further back than ever before in my lifetime.

What agency or power do you have in government? You are picking from a pre-approved list of would-be rulers.

Edit: and to be clear, I am not telling you not to vote, but for fucks sake stop pretending you have actually done anything until you have actually done anything. Voting is beneath the minimum for that.

And precisely because so many people can’t imagine any ‘solution’ beyond impotently signing off on new rulers and calling it a day, we are doomed to keep on with this whole farce. We told you this would happen a decade ago.

I mean you don’t deserve it, regardless of how many people your country has instilled that exact sentiment in around the world, it’s a clear mistake to conflate the ruled with their rulers.

That said, the vast majority of USAmericans didn’t care until it started happening around them, and many still bury their heads and won’t step beyond the most passive possible resistance (voting for a new ruler or set thereof, leaving the fundamental issues unaddressed; largely because of how closely they relate to the concentrations of power that rulers both require and personally benefit from; and the cycle continues). This isn’t unique to the US, similar is well documented during worse circumstances in Germany for example (Meet the Germans is a good book on the topic), but I can understand why some people arrive at being frustrated with you en masse.

Why are you running defence for them? Their job is to manage your expectations into extinction, they are your rulers not your friends.

If money still meant anything even in this scenario, I would be deeply saddened for humanity.

That all hinges on them feeling too insecure in their institutional power (particularly military and police, where they have relative popularity) to manipulate the vote without consequence- likely by eroding it through continuing with the same kinds of action and harming yet more people in the meantime.

I am also pretty doubtful of the chances of whomever ends up in power next, upon being handed the machinery of state, actually makes the fundamental changes necessary to get away from the underlying causes that led us here, and honestly your wishlist doesn’t either (the results stem from the particular systems and power structures at work, if we don’t address them at their root then we haven’t done anything, and since this includes the very structures that state political power relies upon…), but those are really only secondary points.

I hope that I didn’t imply that you were advocating for that, I was trying to speak purely to the point being made without any assumptions beyond.

Voting can be a tool, but not really beyond cases like Hungary where it has been allowed to persist for long enough that the autocatabolic nature of fascism burns out the population at large (so pretty much allowing it to run its course, with some limits imposed by the EU in this case) and not having the ability to look for fuel beyond their borders.

Fine if the spread of the fires can be contained in such ways, not much use for more than ruling over the ashes otherwise.

Edit: To clarify, it requires these conditions (the former to be effective, the latter to actually matter) because otherwise the people who cannot be compelled to do anything beyond voting will just meekly sit by as the vote gets ignored anyway, so long as the fascists have enough of some form of power to maintain the momentum to do so.

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În that case, what you are describing there is a system with a strong inherent bias against working class interests. What purpose do the ‘change from within the system’ party actually serve then? Merely to find ways of keeping the masses mollified without stepping on the toes of power too much?

I mean, I have seen this argument applied in contexts up to and including Tommy Robinson, so it is used to do exactly the thing that it is arguing against too. Too frequently, that feels like the whole point.

Why are you all so eager to prop up the corpse of a dead system? I genuinely can’t make any sense of it.

Talking from experience, if you write cursively whilst having bad enough handwriting, it can become a reasonably effective form of encryption in general.

That really just depends on the scale they are personally used to though, for a fair few years I lived ~5 hours from my family (relatively far within the country), but it didn’t feel like very much because I/we visited my partner’s family on the other side of the continent at least once a year. Prior to that, I don’t think that I would have visited anywhere near as frequently.

The lack of Schengen and now EU membership may make British people more prone to being on the smaller side of this.

Well, that and due to them being investigated for how they handle children’s data and access, it had appeared that a fine was heading their way.

The US Revolution was justified as being in protest against taxes, but taxes raised to pay for the Seven Years War which (chronologically, if not causally) began with George Washington ambushing French troops and resulted in colonists gaining significant territory. One of the nowadays less romanticised causes of the revolution itself was the block on westward expansion of the colonies by the British government too, incidentally.

Your outline there also ignores the many wars and atrocities that describe the westward expansion of the USA (and beyond, the Philippines for example) as it actually did happen too, they very much did not begin their imperialism with the start of the cold war.

The Stanford Review is evidence enough that at least Thiel was already an utter piece of shit before this.

That’s fine, there are a great deal of more impactful and meaningful things that people can do instead of voting. My point is that if someone’s sole contribution is voting, they haven’t actually done anything.

The ratchet effect works because vast swathes of people can’t perceive of any way to affect change beyond voting, thus creating a single (recurring) major choke point for going through the ‘correct’ channels.

If all you do is vote, you can’t complain.