oh i’m sure the comments on this post will be real civil
From now on, whenever I encounter someone who says they’re not voting/voting 3rd party, I’m gunna ask if they’ve tried to reach out to their representatives trying to get them to raise some support for what they believe in. Or if they’ve tried nothing and are now just giving up. These people are literally supposed to work for us.
People refusing to vote for Harris becuase of a foreign conflict they understand nothing about is peak stupidty.
OF COURSE Trump supporters are selfish and dumb. That’s what makes them great dupes for evil forces. Trump himself knew this, as he’s famously said.
Someone else summed it up almost a century ago: “It works the same in every country.”
Yeah, because that worked out so well when in 2016 when Trump got elected, the GOP got multiple Supreme Court picks, multiple federal judges were given life terms, and Roe vs Wade got struck down. Let’s see how that plays out when Ukraine falls, war breaks out in Europe, America becomes a theocratic dictatorship, and what little progress we may have seen with the environment completely falls apart and the world goes full tilt towards becoming an uninhabitable hellscape. Whatever the protest was about will be utterly meaningless.
If you want to protest, you protest AFTER you get sympathetic ears into office, not after you get the opposition elected. Trump gets in, then suddenly he’ll give you plenty to protest about, vs protesting when Harris is in office and she actually has a willingness to listen to protests and meet their demands.
Usually they live in blue states that will partially insulate them from the consequences. Or they’re young and don’t understand knock on effects yet.
Dem centrists are too lazy to try to influence their politicians to do the right thing. And they pretend the politician is powerless to change their stand. They can change their stand. You can apply pressure during an election. if you’d just try. But you all pretend you are powerless, and then call everyone trying to pressure harris shitty names.
Everyone who doesn’t support a corporatist duopoly is lazy, dumb, and/or working for the geopolitical rival to my dominant hegemonic country!
One can only wonder why you have not convinced more people with your message and Harris is now losing.
Pretty sure people are gonna die regardless of which genocidal wacko is elected.
I would say they feel there is no personal/social benefit from electing one over the other. The reality is the tarriffs and mass deportations are the stupidest fucking I’ve ever heard and likely will piss away more money and people than COVID did.
They are either Russian trolls or children who have a Disney level perspective on politics, I think. They don’t want to recognize that they have very limited options or the harsh realities surrounding them.
To keep voting blue/red no matter is how you create the very situation we are in. Punishing politicians is how you get them to work for you and not for themselves and pacs.
It really depends on which state you live in whether or not you have the luxury of a protest vote. If you live in NY state that has a 20% lead for Harris, sure, some people can vote Jill Stein or something. But if you live in a state that actually might be close or not an obvious blowout, you can’t vote that way. You actually have to be tactical with your vote, not idealistic or symbolic.
Even if you’re in a solidly blue state, don’t fuck around with your vote.
You fuck around, and we all find out.
Back in 2000 I traded my vote for Nader in a swing state with someone in a solidly blue state. We should do that now.
Whenever I hear people pushing the, you’re either with us or against us, kind of rhetoric it makes me shake my head. It should go without saying, but obviously it doesn’t, that you don’t get to tell other people how to vote, and if you try to, they’re going to think you’re a raving lunatic. If you actually want to convince them to vote, you might want to consider making a plan for how to reasonably sway their views.
Or don’t, do whatever you want, it’s your life.
you don’t get to tell other people how to vote, and if you try to, they’re going to think you’re a raving lunatic
Umm…that’s the entire way we select leaders. The entire campaign for any office, high or low, is telling people how to vote. That’s literally democracy in action.
And it is not wrong to tell people that if they want third party candidates, the path to do so is to start with voting reform. I’m in Oregon, and we’re actually making progress on this instead of just bitching about it or running spoiler third party candidates. We have ranked-choice voting on the ballot this year. If it passes, all our state and federal elections will be decided by ranked-choice voting. We’ll actually make it viable for progressive third party candidates to run for our US House and Senate seats without just serving as a spoiler for Republicans. We’re actually doing something about the two party duopoly.
But you never hear these anti-Kamala trolls suggesting doing something that would actually make a difference. They show up every election, and their platform is ALWAYS “don’t vote for the democrat.” Doesn’t matter what election. Doesn’t matter what year. They always find some reason that you shouldn’t vote for the Democratic candidate. Their criticisms always attack the Democratic candidate and ignore the Republican.
They’re clowns and trolls. Nothing more. They bitch about the two-party duopoly, but they don’t actually want to do anything. The truth is they’re actually just Republican trolls.
LOL, what rhetoric? I’m generally of the opinion that voting is an end in itself in democracies, and wish we had mandatory/compulsory voting laws. If you live in a democracy there should be obligation to vote, and the citizens should feel confident that we are accounting for the will of the people. But with the electoral college and first past the post system, there are realities of outcomes. There are really only 2 possible outcomes of a presidential race. And if you live in a swing state your vote does a lot more to tip realize one of those 2 outcomes. So the motivation to vote should be to help achieve one of those 2 outcomes that you find more preferable. If you live in a state that is not even close, that is when you don’t have to worry much about your vote impacting the outcome and therefore have more latitude. I’ve voted 3rd party in multiple elections, but I did so in good conscious knowing I wasn’t impacting the outcome of actual leadership due to the area I vote in. In pure rational choice model, sure, your individual vote likely won’t matter (how often is a race decided by 1 vote?), but if the level of effort to vote is low, might as well do it just in case and for a sense of moral civic duty to a democracy.
Kinda like a tactical wee?
Sure, more Palestinians will die
Sure, Ukrainians will die
Sure, US minorities will die
Sure, the entire world will suffer from a fascist demagogue at the head of the most powerful country in the world
But have you considered that, for a few brief moments of time,
we created a lot of value for the shareholderswe got to feel smug over the SHITLIBS who wanted to prevent fascism?It’s honestly such a shockingly privileged position it almost defies belief that anyone could actually be so dense unless they are operating in bad faith. Yes, there are several serious problems in the world, and absolutely none of them are solved by helping the US slip into fascism. Leftists in particular are supposed to hate fascists, so I can’t imagine how anyone with leftist sympathies could possibly want to see what the world looks like with an unrestrained Trunp at the helm. Again, unless they are so privileged they don’t think the consequences would affect them personally, in which case I would call any other profession of external empathy which they might bleet ad nauseum, as questionably sincere.
it almost defies belief that anyone could actually be so dense
There is no end to the depths of human stupidity.
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They don’t think the consequences will touch them. They’re the leftist equivalent of “shitlibs”
Ahh, but you see, you disagreed with Stalin that one time, and therefore you were the fascist all along
As I believe in the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a popular base of support for such a measure, instead of a narrow oligarchy oppressing the proletariat and enforcing its will on society, I am a shitlib. It’s a terrible burden to bear. 😔
Correct, my harm reduction framework is much more violent than your harm reduction framework, and is therefore more interesting, which makes you wrong.
Communism sucks! We should have a classless, moneyless, stateless society where goods are distributed from each according to ability to each according to need instead! And according to Hexbear users, such a model is called liberal capitalism.
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And hardly takes that. All you have to do is have a subtle difference of opinion, and BAM! You’re a fascist.
My favorite, however, is that when you point out that their arguments are 100% logical fallacies, you get banned from multiple communities at once.
Did you know if you support Harris, you’re also a transphobe?
Just admit it!
Something something chronically online lmfao touch grass bougie.
But what else am I gonna do with my feelings of impotent rage? Try to actually change something?
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This was a great comment until you implied only conservatives are deciding not to vote for Harris due to our support of Israel.
I was making fun of that short-sighted self-serving nature by making a comparison to capitalist conservatives, not asserting that champagne socialists are, themselves, capitalist conservatives (though, functionally, their actions serve the same goals).
Short-sighted self-serving is what happens when people promote a lesser evil out for fear of a greater one.
They are not willing to risk their lives in the pursuit of an end to our complicity in genocide. More concerned with their current sense of safety in the heart of the Empire than the violence employed to maintain it. Prefferring the surety of another four years where they don’t have to think about politics over the chance for fundamental changes in how our political system functions when a large majority of the country aligns against a second Trump administration.
But hey, at least we can all look forward to doing this again when Trump runs in 2028, right? Democrats surely won’t triangulate even further to the right in pursuit of the mythical moderate Republican voter, right?
Prefferring the surety of another four years where they don’t have to think about politics over the chance for fundamental changes in how our political system functions when a large majority of the country aligns against a second Trump administration.
God, accelerationism is so fucking dumb.
If we just let the fascists win then we’ll be able to usher in a socialist paradise! What’s unclear about that to you? Read a book! /s
I hate and love how this is pretty much exactly accelerationism explained without the childlike naiveté.
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A literal pandemic killed millions of Americans and the status quo between the Democrats and the Ivermectin party barely even twitched.
If you think there is a realistic electoral path out of our bipartisan death spiral, I would love to hear it. I’m just cynical enough not to be surprised that neither complicity in genocide abroad or the mass murders of schoolchildren at home will convince the Democrats to start treating Republicans like a threat.
What exactly does “treating Republicans like a threat” look like to you?
The way out of a death spiral is not directly into oblivion. It fucking sucks that genocide is in the category of really important things that need addressing but it is not in the category of things that can be addressed in this particular election.
The electoral path is not at the ballot box every four years at the presidential level. It’s down the ballot and on the other the years. It’s building political capital for the cause you believe in by showing usefulness to the people seeking or holding power and talking to them about the issues you care about. Volunteer for your local house candidate and talk to people in their campaign about how important it is to you that they don’t support genocide, urge them to vote against arms shipments and denounce settlements. Tell your representative how you want them to vote and get other people to do the same.
Working to get people elected gets them to listen to you, that’s why there’s so much money involved in elections.
You’re a fucking idiot.
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As opposed to what, doing the same thing every election in the hopes that it will somehow turn out differently this time?
Every time the Dems look left they lose. They go to the center because they lose control (they need all 3 houses to do anything), so they go to the center to find voters. They’ve had control of all 3 houses for, drumroll please, 4 of the last 24 years. Want them to stop going to the center? Them give them victories.
I wish more people could understand this. Or even made an effort to.
As opposed to trying to make things better and avoid more suffering for everyone.
Accelerationists have never lived through what they claim to want because if they did, and lived, they would no longer be accelerationists.
Accelerationists won’t have to live with the consequences because they don’t originate in the US.
Doing the same thing you’ve always done isn’t “trying to make things better”, it’s “trying to make things stay the same”.
If you want to avoid suffering, you have to be against genocide.
Check your privilege
You’re kidding, right?
If you weren’t paying attention, I’m a transgender furry. I’ve been personally targeted by Nazis long before Trump declared people like me to be enemies of America.
Do you think I am not painfully aware of what is at stake here?
I mean, that or all the angry young/middle age voters could, gasp show up to the primaries and move the party to the direction they’d like to see. Instead, the elderly voters, despite being a much smaller share of the population, outvote the heck out of them.
If folks like you paid attention to politics when it matters, not just when it was trendy, things would be a lot different.
Then again, reading what you’ve written, maybe it’s for the best y’all don’t.
I love the idealism, I lost mine decades ago.
Realistically, this is America we’re talking about. A literal pandemic that killed millions was only worth a 16% bump in the total vote count. The sooner you come to terms with the fact that this country is not and has never been a real democracy, the sooner you’ll be able to stop relying on the electoral system to save the world.
Also, I resent the assertion that I don’t pay attention to politics. I pay too much attention to politics. To the point that I predicted this exact scenario for the 2024 election back in 2015 when the DNC first started openly conspiring against Bernie, months before they ratfucked him out of the primary. I was the only person among my family and friends not to be surprised when Hillary lost in 2016. I knew the incumbent for 2024 would have to drop out to give the VP a chance at winning against Trump literally years before we learned that Biden was going to be that incumbent. I feel like Cassandra, cursed with foreknowledge that none will heed.
Anyways, the problem isn’t “trends” or a lack of interest from the youth, the fundamental issue is that electoral politics is a trap. Do vote in local and national elections, of course, but if voting is all you’re putting your energy into then you’re doing it wrong. And our political media ecosystem is designed to ensure that most people do it wrong by investing literal billions into election campaign coverage.
The real forefront of American politics is the union movement. Now that they’re starting to throw off their old business-friendly management and implementing democratic processes for replacing them, they’re taking position to become the driving force behind the new left. Watch for that over the next few years as the Republican party falls apart from the blowback against Trump’s attempts to steal the election while the Democrats continue triangulating to the right to pick up the “moderate” leftovers and alienating their own left wing.
Why not both OP?
