Just vote to change things.

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Voting is one of many tools at our disposal - and right now we need all the tools we can get.
So, don't shit on voting - do vote!
Do the other things too, but don't skip the vote.
- Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you'll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.
  
  Even if you're stuck in the cousin-fuckingly-deep south like me, where your vote will almost certainly be washed out by a horde of Nazis: still do it. Especially in smaller elections - school boards, city level stuff, whatever you can get in on. Those are the ones where you can really start to turn the tide. All it takes is for the usual rednecks to start feeling apathetic, and a handful of us bleeding-heart-commie-socialist-hippie-libruls to step up, and BAM, we've got a progressive oasis elected in our desert of red. Which still isn't much, but it's a foothold.
  But it does require us to do the bare-assed minimum amount of effort in support of change, which is to vote.
  
  Ugh. I agree with this. But I don't, at the same time. I'm of the opinion that people need to expire. There was a time where we could make the world a better place by working with people, but some just shouldn't exist. Some people just can't be reasoned with.
  
  Both are correct we need a multilateral approach to win this. A peaceful movement is good but it’s a lot stronger if it’s backed by an adjacent movement that has some threat of force. A user above mentioned the civil rights movement with MLK being backed up by the Panthers. This was a great example because if you look at any successful revolution the approach was multilateral. The abolition movement was also multilateral
  
  No I'm with you there - but it's hard to discuss that stuff without getting banned; and you can do that stuff while still casting a vote every now and then. I've stirred up a lot of drama here by encouraging the use of that tool - this thread is stuffed with mouth-foaming Trump progandists, so proceed with caution. And grab some popcorn - it's a shitshow, but it's a show!
  
  You don't have to be violent to encourage alcoholism or smoking.
- You're right that voting is a tool; you're wrong about whose tool it is and what it's used for.
  
  It can be used for either liberation or oppression. Ceding it to the oppressors does not help you. Promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation helps the oppressors.
  What is your goal here?
  
  You are fundamentally confused such that you think there's any agency in voting in the first place. The only real impact it has is to completely short circuit and subsume all political activity away from any outside organizing that is, historically, literally the only thing that has ever worked to accomplish anything.
  My goal is this is a forum. Someone says something wrong and then you say the correct thing under them. That's what you do on forums.
  
  You are spreading misinformation and promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation. You are an ally to our oppressors.
  
  You literally voted to escalate a genocide because the system you're playing apologist for presented you no other choice. What misinformation am I spreading? You're the one acting as an enemy of liberation. You literally voted for a genocide. You are literally an ally to our oppressors.
  It's honestly fucking frightening how you're capable of that kind of doublethink.
  And you're not just an ally of our oppressors in that sense. You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
  
  You voted not just for genocide, but to crank the genocide up to the max. "No genocide" wasn't an option, because our system is shit, so why not at least try for damage control instead of taking the absolute most evil path you could?
  You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
  Which of those actions are mutually exclusive to voting?
  
  BlueMAGA continues to insist that, because they denied the extent of the genocide when it was their team doing it, the genocide actually wasn't that bad when it was their team doing it.
  
  Last election the choice was between Palestinian genocide and Palestinian genocide. You are smoking crack if you think the oligarchy is ever going to provide you with a meaningful choice to loosen their hold on you through the civic ritual of voting.
  
  No, we’re calling for the overthrow of our oppressors. We’re calling for seizing the means of production. We’re calling for real and permanent liberation from the bourgeoisie.
  
  Which of those are mutually exclusive to voting?
  
  I don’t care whether you vote, and I’m not telling anyone whether or not to vote. But I am pointing out how little power it gives us for the amount of time, money, and energy people are putting into it. The juice ain’t worth that much squeeze. We’re never going to vote ourselves out of wage slavery.
  
  There it is. If you're not a liberal you're personally getting checks written by Putin or whomever's the villain of the month.
  
  You're projecting.
  
  Bruh
  
  Nice try FBI
- Widespread violence and voting? That's the answer.
- People not voting is why we're in the situation we are in right now
  
  Yeah man, the Neo-liberal turn? The war on terror? The GFC? All irrelevant, "people not voting" is the reason we have a goddam Cheeto in the white house.
  
  Yes but they don't want to admit that, since it makes their feelings hurt, so they pretend voting is useless.
  
  Even as much as I love the Fediverse and tend to lean pretty far left, sometimes this place honestly feels like a Marxist circlejerk.

322 comments