claim 1: “voting doesn’t change anything”
Never forget the recent case of Kris Mayes, who refuses to uphold the Arizona supreme court’s sweeping ban of abortion.
Kris Mayes only won her 2022 election by 280 votes. Voting changes things.
claim 2: “but genocide joe”
Yep. Hold that fucker’s feet to the fire. He has blood on his hands
But trump has promised to be indisputably worse.
I won’t tell you how to vote. I just encourage you to vote. You’re not radical for ditching the only miniscule right the state has granted you to do some small aid for your neighbors.
According to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN, the Obama administration absolutely committed war crimes. Voting matters, and no matter what you think of Biden he is infinitely better than Trump, but don’t roll your eyes and pretend that the people complaining about extrajudicial murder-robots are crazy. Credible institutions believe Obama violated international law with his drone program, you don’t get to pretend that’s fake because you don’t like it.
fully agree! but your qualms about eye rolling absolutely do not apply to me, perhaps you misread some of my tone? :) see some of the body text where i note that he has blood on his hands.
my use of the “but genocide joe” phrase was a (perhaps lackluster) dig against concern-trolling; the disturbing mincing of absolutely valid criticism of Biden into a “skip-the-vote cuz it doesn’t matter” platform that is essentially thinly veiled maga propaganda.
i do see your concern with how i phrased this, as again im totally with you in condemning Genocide Joe. if you have ideas of how to better phrase this meme i’m totally down to modify the text of it. :)
PS i fully believe that obama committed war crimes. the title of this post was not ironic, i believe that statement genuinely. bro committed attrocities that are not fake. again, not sure if you were misreading the tone there.
OK, yeah, I read this as claiming people who say, “voting doesn’t matter,” “genocide joe,” and, “Obama is a war criminal,” are all just stupid leftists. It sounds like we agree and I would have gotten more context from the post body of the post, not just the image and title. My bad. :/
no hard feelings :) your response was totally valid to a different kind of post, fortunately i’m not that !
Lemmy is so kind and rational, I have trouble adapting to the reasonable conversations here.
it’s really like three or four other people who are consistently kind and good faith. there is still a wealth of toxicity here too. :(
Yes voting matters!! Biden and Trump aren’t the only ones running!
If your vote doesn’t matter so much, why are so many people telling us not to vote?
^^because ^^it ^^does ^^matter
Vote!
AMEN 💯💯💯
all this dialogue is also such a huge spit in the face to the women and POC who FOUGHT for the right to vote. yes, it’s a right with limited scope and fraught with corruption. but to discount it altogether on the public stage is so fucking disingenuous.
“Voting doesn’t change anything, it’s pointless and things won’t get better”
Woman’s suffragists, civil rights protestors, and gay rights protestors: “Are we a fucking joke to you?”
One person is a politician, and one is a rapist con artist. I’ll take the politician please.
In Quebec, we have a saying that I would like to share with you. It comes from our love for complaining. We are completely addicted to complaining about everything. It’s our third national sport after Hockey and curling.
“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain”
If you vote for a person and they don’t do the promised thing, you can complain. You have an
excusereason.If you vote for a person and someone else gets elected, you can complain that the person you voted for would have done a better job.
If you do NOT vote, you didn’t do shit. You didn’t do the strict minimum. You have no excuse to complain about any of it, because you did not participate in the decision.
but what if i want to have my cake and eat it too! i want to avoid doing the strict minimum and complain i feel like you are ignoring my emotional needs in all of this /s :)
It is rather convenient that 2024 is the year everyone is choosing to be upset about dead Palestinians, but double tap drone strikes are definitely a war crime.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/Publications/Rome-Statute.pdf
i mean the title genuinely. obama did war crimes. that is a true unironic statement.
let me see about editing the title it seems to be causing confusion.
edit: okay fixed. i do want to push back on your statement tho. everyone is NOT suddenly getting mad about dead palestinians. people have been pissed about the apartheid regime in israel for decades. be careful with your assertions here.
I’m happy to accept that there’s people who have been concerned for a long time about Israel. I’ve seen protests about 15 years ago in my own city in the UK, for about an afternoon. Never saw it again. Never saw any protests about any other genocides happening around the world, like Darfur, only this one.
But what’s new is linking it to a sitting US president, in an election year. Israel’s genocide has been supported by everyone since Truman recognised it a day after it was set up. The USA is a genocidal country literally built on genocide.
When I was in college ten years ago, there were Palestine protesters out every year. At one point they made an artificial wall of cardboard informational posters around a main throughway, with a narrow passageway, to make a point about the checkpoints.
Maybe leftists are tired of being told to vote for the lesser evil as the genocide continues to escalate? Maybe we have realized that it’s not doing much good?
Fuck the USA. Throughout its entire history. Hopefully in the future things can get better but I seriously doubt it.
Happy? I know I’m not.
It is rather convenient that 2024 is the year everyone is choosing to be upset about dead Palestinians
Talk about your daring takes.
It is rather convenient that 2024 is the year everyone is choosing to be upset about dead Palestinians,
Not everyone. You obviously aren’t.
I’ve seen elections tied that had to go to a coin toss. This flipped the government of a nearby town. Every vote matters.
The shoe that was thrown at Bush matters more than all the voting youre gonna do in your life. Dont fool yourself
Okay, buddy.
I’m sure you are more politically relevant than we are.
It certainly mattered to Canadian politics. One of our politicians participated in a shoe throwing event at -24 in Montreal where ppl threw their shoes at a picture of Bush to protest US involvement in that incident and Harper 's willingness to engage Canada in a meaningless war. One of the protesters was a provincial left-leaning party co-leader and MNA (Amir Khadir).
However, voting matters more than one successful protest on one issue. You would need to throw thousands of shoes to get shit done if that’s how you want to go about it.
I can only hope for people in there to go from shoes to bricks really fast
What exactly did that shoe accomplish?
it was pretty funny, I liked it
It got an MNA in hot water for his involvement in a protest in Montreal where people went out at -24C and threw their shoes at a picture of Bush.
Showing disgust for the genocidal ghouls that rule the USA.
deleted by creator
votes 3rd party
and now we let the copium roll in
Can we try out Ranked Choice voting (or something similar) first? We don’t have to pass federal reform, it can be passed on a per state basis. In fact, there is little stopping democrats from passing it in states they control.
Whats the hold up blue states?
who’s saying voting doesnt change anything?
The people who don’t want you to vote.
I feel like you and OP are talking about people like me who aren’t voting for your candidate
lol, false. don’t brigade or stir up shit but check out my comment history for examples of individuals who advocate for voter abstention.
do like, the bare minimum of research before implying im a liar. 👍
edit: since u pedants refuse to actually read, here is a recent user openly campaigning for voter abstention. not third party, full poll skipping, and stating voting does nothing. do not brigade this user im not trying to be an ass here, just proving that i am not lying. and another popular article that calls for not voting.
I don’t see where they’re calling you a liar.
I see you commenting on a post criticizing specifically voting for Biden.
see the edit to my comment for proof
A bunch of assholes, not limited to Lemmy. You’ll see them pop up soon.
People living in a very biased state.
Russian state trolls
The fish in the meme
Yeah, voting in the right person will solve deindustrialization, homelessness, decadent academia, drugs, inflation etc etc
People who say that usually don’t vote.
I vote, even though I know it changes nothing.
I won’t tell you how to vote. I just encourage you to vote.
I genuinely hate this shit, because its so nakedly dishonest.
We played the game back in 2000 with Ralph Nader and “I don’t care who you vote for, so long as you vote” collapsed into “Ralph Nader helped George Bush Jr steal the election” minutes after the polls closed in Florida. Then we played it again in 2016, when Jill Stein was accused of being a Putin shill. The Republicans played it in 1992 when (not entirely unfairly, Perot reviled Bush Sr for taking a foreign policy position of reconciliation towards Vietnam) Ross was blamed for George’s abysmal poll numbers following Desert Storm.
Anyone who says this, while expressing any serious degree of interest in the outcome of the election, is simply lying.
this post is specifically me confronting the position that elections are useless and should be avoided.
check through my comments in this post and you will find no instance of me telling someone who to vote for.
and yet you are the one coming into my comment section and calling me a liar. kindly stop it with the attacks, this is asshole behavior you are exhibiting.
the making fun of the “voting makes you complicit” fish is you confronting third parties. Most of the leftists not voting for Biden are going to choose third parties. You’re being disingenuous, and getting weirdly defensive when called out.
potentially nsfw meme (nothing crazy promise)
This commenter is pointing out that people will say “just vote!” but then if someone brings up third party, people will say “omg just vote for Biden aren’t you afraid of a Trump presidency?, voting for Biden doesn’t make you complicit”.
You can’t see that your meme is pushing that same argument by disassociating your vote from your values?
I guess the way I model it in my head has layers.
The base layer 1 is just that voting is to be taken seriously. Women and people of color have lived and died for this right and it shouldn’t be flaunted as extraneous in the face of that effort. Human rights have been preserved by recent voting, and that reality should not be scorned. This is a core belief and principle I have when it comes to voting.
On an altogether different layer 2, yeah sure I guess personally I fear the damage that vote splitting can have? But I recognize that this is a layer that has a lot more nuance than the first. For example, it highly depends on if it’s general vs primary, local vs state vs federal, whether you are in a swing state or not, whether your state has RCV, etc. While I have concerns, being anti-third-party is not a deeply held belief I have in comparison to the first layer, for these reasons.
This post is exclusively about layer 1 because voter apathy is the far more fearful element (to me) at this point. (Now, that’s not to say other people won’t butt in with their third-party concerns, but welcome to the internet lol). Hope this helps.
Not voting is a valid choice in an election though. In part the US has Trump as a political figure because the Tea Party movement wasn’t afraid to tank the 2012 midterms and hand Obama’s administration the legislature. If your representatives have to choose between loosing and meeting your demands, eventually they get the message and meet your demands.
If your representatives have to choose between loosing and meeting your demands
If you’re not voting you’re indistinguishable from someone who doesn’t care about the outcome. The representatives are going to chase after the people who vote, not the people who don’t care enough to vote.
If you’re not voting you’re indistinguishable from someone who doesn’t care about the outcome.
Only if you aren’t messaging. A write in campaign for “nobody” would be a clear indicator that there are people willing and able to go to the polls, fill out the form, just not for the candidates given. Then, in future, you have hard numbers to point to; “look at this block of voters that wrote in nobody, maybe we should target them”.
If you’re not voting you’re indistinguishable from someone who doesn’t care about the outcome
But that’s a real possibility, especially in an election in which both candidates are intolerable
So: if people on the left refuse to vote because both candidates are terrible, and people on the right are going to come out in droves for God King Trump, where do you think the Democrats are going to go chasing votes? Are they going to try to chase the non voters who wouldn’t vote for Trump anyway? Or are they going to try to steal votes from Republicans by shifting further to the right?
Convincing someone who isn’t going to vote to vote for you is 1 vote, convincing someone who would have voted for your opponent to vote for you is 2 votes. Not voting just means both parties ignore you.
if people on the left refuse to vote because both candidates are terrible, and people on the right are going to come out in droves for God King Trump
You don’t even need that much. With the proper electoral split, Trump could win with an little as 42% of the popular vote.
But that’s a structural problem. And it’s a proven perpetuated by those centrist voters happy to see elections break whichever way they lean.
Convincing someone who isn’t going to vote to vote for you is 1 vote, convincing someone who would have voted for your opponent to vote for you is 2 votes.
Not by the math of the electoral college.
None of that changes the fact that convincing someone voting for your opponent to vote for you instead is more valuable than convincing someone who isn’t voting to vote for you.
Do you really think there are republicans left to be convinced? Especially with the rising costs of everyday goods? (Remember, it doesn’t matter if the president isn’t directly responsible, it’s happening under Biden’s watch, so the administration gets the blame - either out of ignorance, or out of a frustration that the problems have not been sufficiently addressed)
If shifting right convinces 50 “centrist” voters to vote for them instead, and shifting left convinces 99 people who wouldn’t have voted to vote for them, they’re going to shift right.
Politicians are all too happy to have people not vote, so they have fewer people to try to convince.
others have taken a valid attack against this argument, but also worth noting that the Tea Party was backed by ultra wealthy and corporate interests. that sheer mass of capital has insane messaging power that the left either doesn’t have or is refusing to wield.
Yeah, it was a Koch brother’s project backed by big bank accounts – but that doesn’t mean the tactics aren’t valid. Left wing policies poll especially well with Americans, especially when they’re described clearly and without buzzwords. What we lack in funds, we potentially make up for in sheer numbers of people.
Obviously that requires a hell of a lot of coordination, but I think it’s achievable.
the key flaw to your position:
Obviously that requires a hell of a lot of coordination, but I think it’s achievable.
yes. coordination. coordination, which, like it or not, cannot be done without cash. the tea party was able to gain its astroturfed support by coordnation, messaging, which took think tanks, writers and publishers. not free.
you are getting it absolutely correct with the caveat “when they’re described clearly and without buzzwords.” and what does it take to generate that clear communication? research, analysis, understanding, writing, marketing, canvassing, publishing, broadcasting. all of those are job descriptions that can be done remarkably well, for the cost of hiring people to do it. you are counting on a supermassive bulk of labor to reach millions of Americans that can’t and won’t appear for free, as much as i wish it would.
the problem, of course, is the Democratic party. if it would just be better and stop being a neoliberal protoconservative capitalist genocide supporting clownshow, and put a bit of cash toward doing some actual leftist groundwork, we would be fine, but of course we cannot hope for things to magically be better, only to work with things as they actually are.
How is it supposed to Become Better without pressure? Organizations are like organisms; they minimize energy expenditure - whether in the form of cash, calories, or labor. As long as being the lesser of two evils is a successful strategy, the DNC will not change. There’s no pressure to change.
As it stands, it’s in the organization’s best interest to maintain the threat of Republican domestic policies. It’s why there was no legislative attempt to codify abortion rights in the national legislature - the party benefits from the continued uncertainty. If they had pushed a vote, then individual members would have to answer to the public for how they voted – worse still, it might have passed; then they’d have to find something new to campaign on.
I don’t disagree; you just bypass my main point.
How is it supposed to Become Better without pressure?
There is no pressure without money. That’s literally all I am saying.
Right now, millions of Americans could skip the vote out of protest and go utterly unnoticed because there is no messaging backing them. They are indistinguishable from the majority of Americans that don’t vote anyway, and can be treated by Democrats as such.
Thus hilighting the key distinction between a leftist ditch-the-vote movement versus what the Tea Party was.
As soon as there is significant capital backing pro-Palestine views, my point will be moot. This has not happened yet though I pray it does.
Sounds like you’re suffering a serious case of “First Past The Post voting”.
I’m surprised you’ve let this condition go untreated for so long.
It even says on the documentation that if your condition lasts more than a generation, consultant a revolutionary.
Um, his comment is about how other people reacted to their choice of a third party.
yeah this user has a habit of typing out the same (valid) talking points, even copy pasting sometimes, in response to comments without actually engaging with the other user. like i agree with their takes but they have a bad tendency to shove them where they don’t belong and take no questions after.
i would block them but it’s kind of entertaining to see lol
Hm nice to have some context I guess lol
Vote, or don’t.
The important thing is that electoralism won’t solve our problems and is a waste of time for the working class.
Edit: Downvote me all you like. But I’d be interested if any of you have a plan of voting capitalism away. I’m all ears.
huge news you’ll be happy to hear: you can do both voting and direct action. those aren’t somehow mutually exclusive. i do both. 👍 hope this helps
Never claimed otherwise. I critizised the whole practice of trusting in electoralism.
All that discourse surrounding electoralism distracts from proper political action. How many people vote every soandso years and think that this was the vital act of a democratic society?
3rd parties can be made viable by passing electoral reform at the state level.
We aren’t Russia (yet), we can still change things if we change how we vote! Look up a video on First Past the Post voting for more information on how and why the spoiler effect exists.
I live in Europe, so I know about other votino systems (and I know the game theory behind fptp voting, thanks).
Even in Europe, where you have a more broad spectrum of parties in parliament, you can’t vote away capitalism.
