I came here to argue against this increasingly-transparent “please don’t vote” propaganda being posted here coincidentally in this leftist community, and here’s this unanimous comment section already on the case 😃
Nobody is saying don’t vote, I’ll be voting as I have in every election, including in the 2024 primary and general.
Nothing will fundamentally change
F Biden
I could see a lot of Dem voters just staying home instead
Many Arab-Americans in Michigan (and across the country) are running an “Abandon Biden” message
Nobody is saying don’t vote
(Edit: That’s all from the last 1 day)
And you took all of those out of context. Put the full sentences
Sure
Which Democrats are actually Leftist and not just centrist or Republican-lite? Bernie? AOC? We tried and the Dem party/oligarchy shut that down real quick.
Trump and the GOP is the enemy. Biden and the Democrats, to me, are also the enemy to the people because they want the status quo to continue. “Nothing will fundamentally change.” I feel we’re going to get fascism either way. One is accelerated and the other is a slow death march.
F Trump and F Biden. Both don’t care about the people.
I don’t think many will go from voting Dem to Trump but I could see a lot of Dem voters just staying home instead.
Many Arab-Americans in Michigan (and across the country) are running an “Abandon Biden” message over Biden’s handling of the Gaza genocide.
Thanks.
due to how formatting works in fedilab, I was very confused until I figured out these are quotes and they think the quotes somehow support their position.
Nobody is saying don’t vote
i’ve had options on my ballot besides democrats or republicans every year
Working to oust the establishment Democrats and push the remainder to the left sounds great. Increasing fairness in the voting system sounds great. Protest outside the voting system sounds great. Lots of things aside from just pulling the lever for the least-bad guy are actually extremely impactful.
None of that changes the fact that voting for a third party in this election is functionally equivalent to sitting at home waiting for it all to get better on its own which is functionally equivalent to handing Trump the keys to the FBI and the nuclear codes and hoping it all goes okay. For that reason I feel just as comfortable criticizing a vote for a third party (in the general election) as I do a non-vote, both in terms of whether it’s a good idea to spread propaganda about it online, and whether it’s a good idea to do it when the time comes.
The right to vote is a hard fought privilege that we should be excited to exercise every chance we get. This post is a poor perspective of voting as it implies some huge cost to go out and vote for the person you feel is right for the job. There’s something to be said about making it easier to vote and giving people time, but we can’t get there if people don’t vote.
The most important vote of your lifetime… So far.
Unfortunately, evil keeps trying to get power.
Unfortunately, evil keeps trying to get power.
That’s because evil already is in power, and we are merely given the illusion of choice between two of its agents. They designed it that way.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
Voting at the grassroots level will enact change. School boards and county positions can enact just as much change as state and federal elections. Won’t matter if the president is blue if the entirety of local governments are red.
I mean, isn’t that the whole point? You should vote every time, and if you vote right things will be more good or at least less bad, and then you do it again. It’s only very few years, and you don’t have anything more important to do.
Yes, the point is for it to be a distraction mechanism to make people feel like they have a voice and some power without actually giving them any. All we get is the illusion of choice and a different puppet at the top of the pyramid scheme.
And the idea that things don’t change is so fucking dumb. Don’t tell me Obama to Trump wasn’t a change. Christ.
What people are really whining about is that they want a quick fix, and they’re not getting it because that’s just not possible even if half the politicians weren’t rotten to the core. But let’s not pretend there won’t be “real change” in America if Trump is elected again.
Just dumb.
Yeah! Instead of voting we should do nothing at all and complain online! That’s how all the greats do it
Welcome to r/teenagers!
Tbf most of the truly great people tend to end up in a psych ward, prison, or shot by cops while engaging in direct action
Reminds me of that Office Space scene. If every single day has been worse than the day before, then every day is literally the worst day of your life.
Likewise, fascism is getting closer and closer to a reality in the US. Every election for the last 15 years at least has been more important than the last.
So, if anyone out there is influenced by the nihilism of the meme - no, nobody expects everything to get better all at once, or that this election is the one that makes “real change.” But things can get a lot worse, and if you don’t have the imagination to know why that makes voting the most important thing you do this year, then that’s a very sad thing for all of us.
I think the main problem is the pro-voting folks go all nuts saying that voting is SUPER IMPORTANT and you HAVE TO DO IT or EVIL THINGS WILL HAPPEN.
I’ve been voting nonstop for 24 years. There hasn’t been any really huge change because of it. Even when the bad guy wins.
Voting should feel less like an epic struggle for the soul of a nation, and more like paying your taxes. You have to do it, but you don’t have people screaming at you for the preceding 18 months about how meaningful and important it is only for nothing to really change. No matter who wins on election day I still have to go to work the next day, then sun is still going to rise, and America will kill brown people.
the pro-voting folks
I beg of you to go live in a society which doesn’t have voting in its government. Just for like a short time. It’s incredibly instructive, and will give a reality-check to this idea that you seem to have that things are so bad right now that there’s not even any point in choosing a better future or a worse one. Things may or may not be better with Biden, but they will absolutely be much, much worse with Trump.
I shouldn’t have said “pro-voting.” I’m pro-voting. I think we should be voting for our bosses. I just think that this system makes voting pretty ineffective.
But it’s an election year, and nobody’s allowed to dissent in an election season or they’re Russian plants so I’ll just shut up and feel completely alienated from the people who live around me, and now everyone on the Internet.
Just like every other election year.
Sometimes people are going to disagree with you, when you post opinions on the internet. It is ok; it doesn’t mean we’re against you.
Voting is a cumulative effort. It really only works if more than just you vote. One vote is a pebble on a beach. A hundred million is a landslide. Getting discouraged because your one vote didn’t enact real lasting change is insanely prideful.
And just because nothings changed for you doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed for others. Theres hundreds of millions of people in the country, all with their own struggles and challenges. Just because you didn’t get yours doesn’t mean their hasn’t been positive (or negative) change.
Which is exactly the opposite message of all the GOTV efforts I’ve ever seen. I’m not saying don’t vote. I’m saying don’t make it such a huge fucking deal, and lower your expectations of what it’s actually going to get done.
I’m far, far less discouraged with this attitude than the one where I really, honestly believed something will happen because I filled in a box on a piece of paper.
There hasn’t been any really huge change because of it. Even when the bad guy wins.
That perfectly encapsulates the idea privilege.
The lives of people who lack those privileges have changed
If that’s the case, why are so many people, regardless of privilege, still miserable? If voting fixed things, shouldn’t things be getting fixed? Because it doesn’t seem that way to me.
I know multiple people the entire arc of whose lives were changed by the Obama-era immigration policies. Want me to ask them to tell you how wrong you are?
the deporter in chief? si, se puede? Obama is a border-hawking, bomb-dropping torture supervisor who extra judicially murdered people on his kill list.
do you know any of those people?
Whataboutism says what
I know one guy who got to stay in the US under DACA, and I know one guy who was fighting a legal battle to stay in the country when Obama came into office, and he said fighting his case got easier under Obama. He’s still here now (he stayed in limbo for a pretty extended length of time, and eventually got married which resolved the issue).
I am not an expert. I don’t know which column of this table the second guy would fit into, or whether the huge reductions in the second column mean that the “deporter in chief” nickname is an unfair characterization based on the relatively-smaller increases in the first column. I just know he said his case got easier.
What do you know about it? What are your sources of information?
it’s not whataboutism to say Obama deported, killed, and tortured people. it’s a fact, and it’s relevant when discussing his legacy.
What are your sources of information, specifically about his deportations and his immigration policy? Are you basing this on “everyone knows” type of knowledge, and finding it superior to someone relaying to you firsthand knowledge and a cited source with an argument?
I didn’t say voting fixes anything. It doesn’t, especially in first past the post two party systems.
I’m saying that the idea that nothing changes is only something you could say if you aren’t a member of any of the many demographics that are actively getting their rights stripped away.
Voting may not do much to make things better, but it can absolutely make it magnitudes worse for vulnerable folk.
Absolutely. We don’t get to vote for “better” in America. We get “less worse” and “more worse.” Voting for less worse just makes sense.
But if you convince people they’re voting for “better” and they don’t get it, I don’t blame them for not voting again.
Seriously?
That’s kind of the whole fucking point of democracy, you keep voting. Forever. There is no “one last vote.” If you don’t like voting, don’t vote. But don’t complain about the winners and losers then, as you did absolutely fuck all
That’s kind of the whole fucking point of democracy, you keep voting. Forever.
That’s not the positive point you think you’re making…
Spot on! Well said!
>don’t complain
stop me
The best part about that is I don’t have to. I just get to ask how you helped prevent things from getting worse
But… I didn’t get the result I wanted last time. It kind of seems like the whole system is made of corporate crooks. If I threaten to not vote at all until they stop being crooked, surely they’ll be impacted by that, and all of a sudden there’ll be candidates worth voting for. By magic.
Just you wait. You’ll see. Any day now.
Look up The Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell.
Falwell’s people took over the GOP with a simple grass roots strategy. If the local GOP club got an average twenty people at their monthly meetings, the MMs would show up with fifty. They made sure they nominated every dog catcher, county clerk, and school board member they could. After a few cycles the party elders began to see that they didn’t run things anymore.
You vote, you keep voting, and you make usre your neighbors are voting, too.
It sounds to me like they did a lot more than just vote. They showed up at party meetings first, and they got their people nominated. And they didn’t wait for a primary to do it.
Did the Russian propaganda mill spin up again?
The kids have always been spouting this bullshit. It’s just that sometimes it leaks from the tankie instances. I is usually just block the poster and move on. It makes lemmy ever so slightly tolerable.
It never stopped, it just found Lemmy I guess.
My understanding was that it was slowed if not stopped because of lack of funding due to the war…
Damn, you’re probably right. I wish my tax dollars were spent more on aid for Ukraine and less on helping Israel commit war crimes. Then we could find out for sure whether you’re right. Also because that’s just the more moral thing to do, but ethnic cleansing is more of an American pastime than baseball, so that’s probably not changing soon.
Yea, look at this guys post history
It may be that voting for flavors of capitalism makes you feel like a loser, but not voting is exactly what everyone you hate wants. That’s one less vote for their opposition!
If you don’t think there have been massive changes even in the past two decades, for better and worse, then you’re beyond reasoning with.
I mean record homelessness has happened so I guess that’s changed.
What if I don’t think those changes have very much at all to do with how I individually voted in those intervening years?
Then congratulations, you’re experiencing what it means to be one small part of a very large society regardless of the decision-making mechanisms it uses?
It’s not fun, I’ll tell you that much.
ITT people interpret weariness of fear-based politics as propaganda, for some reason. i can’t witchall no more, can’t criticize shit, only fearmonger, or you must be working for the other team.
Exactly this.
Maybe if we all apathy hard enough, the fascists will just give up and go home! Brilliant!
