• The Snark UrgeEnglish
    76•5 months ago

    Getting real sick of the “don’t vote” anarchists. They remind me of insufferable debate-me atheists; you want to agree, but they make it hurt the whole time.

    • FlashMobOfOne
      16•5 months ago

      It’s hard to convince tens of millions of people that it matters when electing one party over another doesn’t make a material difference in their lives that isn’t negative.

      • @Soulg@lemmy.world
        7•5 months ago

        Only one of the two parties actively campaigns on hurting people. It’s not a difficult choice.

        • FlashMobOfOne
          1•5 months ago

          It doesn’t matter what they campaign on when the end result is exactly the same regardless.

      • @erin
        6•5 months ago

        I don’t like the Democrats one bit. It frustrates me to have to vote for them. BUT, they aren’t the ones demonizing me and removing my healthcare because of an innate part of myself. I’m trans, and Republicans are doing their damnedest to kill us. Democrats aren’t helping, but they aren’t calling to put us on lists and remove all of our healthcare, or make it illegal for us to change our names. Being a casualty of the apathy of those that think it doesn’t matter makes me want to cry, every day. And we aren’t the only ones! There are so many other targets conservatives are hunting and actively trying to hurt (people that can give birth, immigrants, veterans, etc), and no vote is just letting them get away with it. The Democrats are complicit and aren’t doing nearly enough, I’d vote for a leftist even after the primaries if one had any chance of election, but right now I have no choice for my own self preservation than to vote blue.

        Please, I beg you, think of those that are vulnerable and hurting if conservatives have power. It’s not a good choice to vote blue, but it’s the least bad one.

    • @xor@infosec.pub
      5•5 months ago

      the one good argument for that i’ve seen is: complacency
      if anarchists (or x leftists) participate in a rigged democracy, they may start to feel like they’re doing something, and doing enough by voting and promoting whomever… while that whom is guaranteed to fail even if they play the game and win the votes (see also: bernie sanders should’ve had the dnc nomination… the first time he won and the dnc directly intervened and gave it to hillary… and the second time there was collusion to manipulate the votes (buttiegeg dropped, all of his supporters went to biden, warren stayed on, and sanders would’ve won had she not)
      but the left is always going to lose american democracy because democrats and republicans are entrenched…
      so the argument goes, if they don’t participate in the election, they’ll demand other forms of change that will actually accomplish something…

      • @pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
        12•5 months ago

        In theory, not voting is a protest strategy where you tie up a wealth of votes behind some set of issues, and thus incentivize politicians to platform those issues to court those votes.

        In reality, next to none of the suits in power want anything to do with your issues, and they are tickled pink that they’ve managed to convince you to voluntarily self-select out of the process.

      • The Snark UrgeEnglish
        1•5 months ago

        If we’re going to talk about complacency, it has to be mentioned that the rightward lurch of the GOP is owed in large part to the tea party fringe going mainstream. If leftists were to organise and get involved in the party, and keep on doing it at every level, the democrats would have little choice but to give up ground to those ideas. The problem is that with politics the way it is, you have to be something of a cretin, or rich, to see much point in it, and so a lot of good people we’d love to see on the ballot aren’t running because they have better things to do with their lives. Campaign finance and media coverage is so fucked up right now that a grassroots local governance campaign based on leftist thought is for most a pretty dire prospect. That’s where I want to see us spending our energy, rather than giving up on democracy at all.

        • @xor@infosec.pub
          2•5 months ago

          preface: you should vote in every election! not just presidential but there’s an election every year that still matters… even judges are elected!

          anyways, it’s kinda like, if you have a shitty broken… say bicycle, where every bit and really the design is broken…
          but you need to ride it to do stuff, so you keep spending a lot of resources fixing and maintaining it… jury rigging different bits and pieces to make it sorta rideable…
          but if you just walked and recycled it and got/built a new bike with that same energy you spent on the old bike, you’d have a much better bicycling system…

          i think there’s a better alternative to throwing the whole bike away… but i do think a lot of good people get lost trying to fix their bike bike while ignoring fundamental flaws…