Me waiting for someone to point at any time withholding your vote actually brought about measurable change in a positive direction.
Witholding your vote just means you give more chances to the person you least want to see in power.
Does unintentionally bringing positive change count?
If the intention of withholding your vote like a boycott is to get a political operative to make a change, the change must be on purpose.
I already stay home on vote day.
(I do mail-in)
Mail-in ballots are great
I’m so happy my state does it for everyone
My roommate and I sit down talk about what we’re voting for and do research together on who’s for what or what bill does what, then once we’re done we go out for dinner
10/10 way nicer than standing in line for God knows how long in shitty weather waiting for the chance to vote
Last time my mail in ballot got rained on and sealed itself shut before I even marked my votes, and I had to go drop my vote off in person anyway 😡
I’ll vote for Biden again, just as I did for Clinton and Obama before.
It’s water pumps on the Titanic though. I do it knowing all it is doing is temporarily staving off some people’s social policy torment as we sink, so it’s worth doing to sleep at night, but it’s solving nothing as both the Neoliberals and fascists take their orders on economic policy from the same owners. We are encouraged to fight over social issues either created by or exacerbated by economic policy we aren’t permitted a vote on. Example, you know what would drastically reduce the numbers of abortions en masse without any kind of ban? Income equity, because abortion is often an ECONOMIC decision for good reason. But we’re left to argue over the symptoms of of our mass economic servitude, not the servitude itself. We don’t get a vote on that short of suicide.
It’s not worth celebrating that we the people have no choice or vote on the economy we need. Climate change is worsening for private profit, dangerous AI tech is worsening for private profit, income, housing, food inequity is worsening for private profit, and neither the neoliberal, the fascist, or their Congressional tribes refuse to do shit to change that systemic problem.
Remember, grow grow grow! ☠️
Vote the person you want into power, and then make their life miserable until they fold. Protest, halt the economy, get out there and ask for what you want while those people are in power. Beats asking for what you want while they are not, and election week is not the only week that matters.
You rarely ever see a protest in the U.S, and if there is one it’s always wayy too late.
Protest has become a bad joke here. Get a permit by the state officals that the profiteers own and order around, at a designated protest time, in a designated protest place so as not to disturb the eyelines or profits of those being protested.
That isn’t protest, that’s unmitigated acquiescence. When the oppressors make the laws, and they do here, mass revolt is necessary. The owners let us protest in the above way precisely to completely devalue and depower protest here.
So you’re saying it’s harder to protest in America than say, Hong Kong, Iran?
Harder? No, I’m saying getting a permit from those your protesting to protest them makes protest here as effective as masturbation.
Protest all you like, just make sure you protest where, when and how the owners who literally use their power/capital hire organizations to write their preferred laws and legally bribe officials to enact them demand you do under threat of the state violence they own. But that isn’t really protest, as protest in the true sense involves disruption. American protest has become permission to stand in a designated corner together and be angry while not disrupting a damned thing.
Protest by the dictates of permit, and especially permit issued by a proxy of the protestee, is the opposite of that, defanged protest.
I was being facetious. You’re supposed to “protest”, not get a permit. These people in these other countries also aren’t allowed to protest, often with much harsher penalties for doing so.
Permits! Go stand for your country whatever they say. The only reason you need a permit now is you didn’t do that last time. The longer America waits the worse it will get. Once Trump gets voted in you won’t even have the right to vote.
See that’s the thing, we crow about how “free” we are, but our police are militarized. You don’t get a permit for an ineffectual fake protest that won’t disrupt commerce, and suddenly we are no different than Iran or Hong Kong, and our police WILL kill us for “lawless” actual disruptive protest.
When you cut through the intentional bullshit layers they point to to convince us we’re “free” our capitalist owners are just as willing to kill us to maintain power as Xi or any other totalitarian regime, our totalitarian regime is just a consortium of private shareholders who realized it’s easier to convince their slaves they volunteered through propaganda.
That’s what these other countries face to. Death. Hell they don’t bother militarizing the police, they just send the military.
All im saying is it only gets tougher the longer americans wait
Also, work to get more seats filled with democratic butts in other states so we don’t have to prevent all defections. Florida democrats and others seem incompetent right now, seems like it’s prime for a takeover by talented organizers. Do what Harry Reed did with Nevada.
Well as long as you acknowledge that we’re in a sinking ship, you shouldn’t need to do anything about it, right?
Maybe focus less on your actions that aren’t fixing things and more on your actions that are.
Unless you think going on the internet and complaining actually accomplishes anything.
I think it’s important to point out that while voting will stave off some cultural suffering and that’s reason enough, it will do all but nothing to address any of the many greedy profiteer made crises threatening humanity.
So, so many people think their vote IS addressing said crises, while our system is configured to prevent that and it won’t at all. So we can vote and then ALSO revolt, burn the profiteers and stop their quest for reckless, terminal growth/metastasis on a finite world before they burn the planet, our only COMMUNal habitat we all rely on from one breath to the next.
It was pathetic to watch Trump’s idiots attack the profiteer’s paid middle managers in DC in his honor btw, hilariously wrong target Wall Street is a few hundred miles north if you want to affect positive change.
So it is important for people to know that if they do want humanity to have a future that isn’t fighting to survive on a planet we’re turning against ourselves and cant turn back amongst other capitalist stoked dooms of our own species’ making, that yes, go vote, save persecuted groups from being scapegoated by the state by voting Biden, but if you actually want a future for the species, we need to do A LOT more than that small gesture.
But don’t worry, we in all likelyhood won’t, and we’ll all burn with pretty I voted stickers on our chest, is what it is. 🔥
I think it’s important to point out that while voting will stave off some cultural suffering and that’s reason enough, it will do all but nothing to address any of the many greedy profiteer made crises threatening humanity.
Sure. But you and every other doom and gloom poster on the internet are already doing that. It’s news to literally no one, and the only people saying that it will be a magical fix that will turn the world into a paradise aren’t going to listen to you anyway.
It’s also important to focus on things that will change things instead of just always focusing on the negative. Unless of course you want the world to burn because you get some kind of perverse glee in watching everything turn to shit around you.
I’m voting for Biden. I don’t want the world to burn.
But I also don’t want to hear a single god damned “if only we knew! If only we’d done something! This is such a random act of God!” when a CAT 6 kills millions of people on the Eastern seaboard in the coming decades.
I taunt because people should be more than ready to fight and destroy the market and central bank servers where the people doing for ego score points store their records of power. If it was just me, I’d die and people would laugh and that would be it.
But I say what I say to try to be part of that one in a trillion chance of helping to make enough of us angry enough to do it together. There’s approx 3k billionaires on Earth, and approx 28,000 100 million-plus-inaires on earth obsessed with and powerful enough to burn the world for their ego scores. We need to burn the god damned ego scores and their backups. Full reset.
Until then, they leverage those ego scores to keep us at bay while destroying our habitat. We can stop them, we in all likelyhood won’t, but again, enough angry people have beheaded tyrants. It’s possible… with enough people. Or humanity will just burn 🤷
I was confused about how a network cable was going to kill people for a hot second there.
In what world are Hexbear users MAGA hat wearers
I mean, refusing to vote for Biden while knowing full well it means Trump will get elected makes someone a Trump supporter.
I’m sure some internet tankies are just idiots following the crowd but most are former T_D trolls trying to disrupt the formation of an anti-MAGA coalition.
I live in Florida, where Biden has zero chance. Tell me how voting for Biden is better than pissing in the wind. I’ll vote for the socialist candidate to at least help show that movement getting larger.
I appreciate the motive behind it, but I don’t think your strategy is effective until we have national ranked-choice voting.
Say you are given the choice of Starbucks drip coffee (black), or Jonestown Kool-aid. You are going to be force-fed one of them no matter what. You have a vote to choose which one you prefer. In your scenario, you say “milkshake” in the hopes that maybe next time a milkshake will be an option, and in hopes that the rest of the voters are smart enough to avoid cyanide.
NARRATOR: They’re not.
Cool but the state’s choosing Jonestown Kool aid anyways so what makes asking for Starbucks coffee better than asking for a milkshake
I don’t think Trump has as much of a lead as you think in Florida. It’s unlikely, especially if potential Biden voters vote third party, but it’s far from impossible. Making people believe it’s impossible is part of the strategy though. Why participate if you’re going to lose anyway, right? It’s not likely Biden wins, but it’s possible and you could actually effect it, unlike the places where Biden is guaranteed a win.
At least consider watching the polls, and if it gets closer consider changing your decision.
Now that we have a six week abortion ban, with abortion on the ballot as a state constitutional amendment, and one for legalized recreational marijuana, there is a very significant chance for Florida to be in play.
Many people here are very upset with the state of insurance, especially homeowners. The Biden campaign just came out and said they will be targeting Florida to flip it.
Every vote will count, remember a few thousand votes gave us Rick Scott, we have a chance to remove him as well. There’s a lot at stake this year.
I’m definitely voting on the ballot measures. But unless something drastically changes it’s not gonna even be close here on the president
So we can bring up the popular vote again as argument to get rid of gerrymandering.
Also, if everyone thinks like that then it you would never notice how many actually voted a certain way.
You are playing into the Republicans playbook.
Your take is as stupid as those tankies.
We’re speaking facts, not ideology. It’s effectively what you’re doing.
It doesn’t make you a Trump supporter. For many it just makes them principled. There’s no need to gaslight people because you don’t agree with them.
It makes you a Trump supporter because your actions make it easier for Trump to win.
Blame the 2 party system, but them’s the brakes.
This is such a bankrupt and soulless view of both ethics and humanity.
If you really oppose “BiDeN’s gENoCiDe” why play political games?
Why not take direct action, it seems to be the virtue signaled by all the tankies supporting trump?
I personally think Biden is a better choice. Even genocidal vegetable Biden.
If I was one of them I’d like to think I would. I certainly think it’s a failing on their part if they don’t all own an AK.
All I’m saying is that people can take a principled stance not to vote or to vote like a moron, and there’s no reason to be toxic or abusive about it.
I vote third party and against incumbents. Third parties need ballot access and the largest issue facing us is first past the post right now. We’re in a cycle of abuse with our current political parties, and it needs to end.
No, as said: I’m not talking about ideology.
Ideologically they might be principled. But practically they make it easier for Trump to win than if they’d recognize the real implications of the fucked up US voting system and vote for the lesser evil. And making it easier for a candidate to win is effectively support.
That it the most misguided logic. What about if George Carlin didn’t vote in this election, like he didn’t when whe was alive? Would that make him a Trump supporter?
What about if George Carlin didn’t vote in this election…
I’m pretty confident he won’t be. And to make an assumption about his hypothetical practice in a situation he never encountered is simply ascribing your views to his with a false veneer of authority.
Lol, your message is “don’t vote for Biden” not “don’t vote because voting is bullshit”.
Stop being obtuse, your political games are tired.
No, I’m saying that not voting for “the right” candidate isn’t equivalent to supporting “the wrong” candidate in any situation - It’s using your vote. You suggest that the two parties have the right to hold our vote hostage because “the other guy is worse”, and I say that’s wrong and no one should stand for it. If I’m not allowed to vote for who I want because my vote is “wasted” or because you tell me I might as well be voting for the other guy, then what is a vote for?
Quit being obtuse. The time for “the right” candidate is in the primaries. The general is for forming coalitions.
They are a bunch of MAGA trolls LARPing as “leftists”.
This one.
That’s how we be y’know. Communist party card in one pocket and MAGA hat on our head
Like what are you talking about
I’m just glad that I was born far, far away from the USA.
I will never miss a chance to dunk on those pathetic fucks.
Hexbear users usually advocate for voting for PSL, not abstaining or voting for Trump. Not sure what the point of this meme is tbh
I think people coming from Reddit just haven’t really interacted with many Revolutionary leftists or Marxists in general, so they don’t know what to make of hexbear, but they are pretty predictible in my opinion. Lemmy.ml is federated with hexbear so I usually see them frequently.
The very concept of hexbear existing breaks some brains.
Many aren’t used to being exposed to places where there aren’t centralized rules or unified rules of moderation, so its understandable.
Though some users see that as a call to action to take it upon themselves to manifest conflict.
I like that you capitalized the R in revolutionary. Also, no they do not advocate for PSL. Electronic intifada morons all over.
Just make an account and ask them. The most common thing I have seen is suggesting to vote PSL, because if it gets over 5% it gets funding.
There are no laws against visiting hexbear and seeing for yourself, lol. You aren’t going to get “corrupted.”
but it’s not the hexbears making these memes…?
We communist definitely support donald trump whole heartedly lmao 💀
thats literally not what they are trying to convince people of.
Biden’s unconditional support for Israel is a vote for Trump.
Usually kids start to understand that problems aren’t necessarily binary around pre-pubescence. Not so the average Lemmy user evidently.
Or as a great man put it: you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists!
Don’t support the genocide, don’t vote for Biden or trump. Vote psl instead.
Google America search for psl 2004:
2024 Pakistan Super League
Good job, Google. No you fuckwit! I wanted to know who the psl is running in 2024.
psl party 2024: finally got me what I wanted.
Edited my shit. You should vote for the Pakistani super league tho…. I bet soccer players would stone cold do a better job than the average member of congress.
Sortition 2024!
Donald Trump is Genocide at home and abroad.
Joe Biden is “only” Genocide abroad, and probably less of it.
Therefore, a vote for Joe Biden is a Vote against genocide.
No, it doesn’t matter that he’s an active participant in the apparatus that’s creating the genocide, because if he’s in office there’s less genocide. Which is the important part, and pretending otherwise is sophistry. If you abstain from voting, you are increasing the likelihood of more genocide and if you discourage others from voting, you are an active participant in the overall social apparatus that is probabilistically increasing the amount of genocide.
The utility calculation is dead simple: more votes for Biden in key states makes more genocide less likely, and discouraging people from voting for Biden makes more genocide more likely. Therefore, discouraging people from voting for Biden is a pro-genocide strategy and voting for Biden in battleground states is an anti-genocide strategy. You should vote for Biden unless you live in a solid blue state, and even then it’s not a bad idea.
TLDR: if you encourage people to not vote for Biden, that’s supporting genocide. Accelerationism never works for us.
No.
I’m going to not support the genocide and I’m going to accomplish this by not voting for the parties and candidates supporting it directly.
I’m not going to make a utility calculation. I’m not going to try to participate less in the probabilistic social apparatus.
I’m going to vote for a party and candidate that didn’t do a genocide and isn’t going to do a genocide.
I’m not going to make a utility calculation.
Refusing to do the right thing isn’t noble.
I’m afraid you’re confused. Not voting for the candidate literally doing genocide is the right thing.
You know, because it’s right to not support genocide.
Biden isn’t doing a genocide. He’s indirectly making it easier by supplying weapons to the people who are, but is also threatening to withhold them if they continue. It’d be best if you think about the situation instead of blindly criticizing the admittedly bad president.
There’s a lot to criticize Biden for. Part of that is him not doing enough to prevent genocide, but if that’s the same as literally doing genocide, then by telling people it’s wrong to vote for him you are also committing genocide, because you are actively fighting against people trying to mitigate 3 genocides, including the one you’re upset about.
I thought hexbear was far left?
Yes, generally. However, they’ve been hijacked (legitimately or otherwise) by a group telling people not to vote for Biden. They push a message that it somehow does moral good to not participate. It doesn’t. Also, they’re pro-China and Russia before they’re leftist. These are authoritarian nations, and that seems to be priority 1 before anything else. They aren’t leftist if it goes against these nations, and they care about power far more than they care about people. They care about people as a means to power.
I personally believe this “don’t vote for Biden” message was started by either right-wing or state actors from another nation. It’s spread so much past that though. I think I was recently banned from Hexbear for commenting that sometimes we have to do things we don’t like because it provides the best outcome. Biden isn’t a great choice, but he’s the only reasonable choice. People should perform other actions, but they should vote for Biden to protect minorities and others temporarily. They’d rather people do nothing.
Tankies are far-right with Soviet aesthetics.
How is hexbear “far-right?” You don’t have to agree with them, or like them, but they unabashedly hate colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, and are generally uncompromising in this to the point that they also hate liberals.
Calling them far-left is accurate, you don’t have to like or agree with every leftist to be a leftist.
Hexbear are pro-imperialism when Russia or China are doing it, and they openly despise democracy. They are definitely not leftists.
They are, but they are also generally extremely hostile towards liberals, so .world, a very liberal-dominated instance, tends to not know what to make of them.
In the eyes of .world, the DNC may not be perfect, but stands for incremental, positive change.
In the eyes of hexbear, the DNC is continued Capitalism, without hope of reforming, thus the best way out is to pool behind legitimate Socialist parties like PSL and work within local elections.
That’s why there’s such a conflict between .world and hexbear, in my eyes.
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Sure. They’re so “far left” (Marxist-Leninist, allegedly) they’re all the way up an unrepentant, fascistic, oligarchic, autocratic, right wing dictator’s asshole. Presumably the “logic” is that at least Russia used to be communist, and isn’t “amerikkka” (staggeringly witty stuff, huh?), but it’s pretty clear they’re just trolls - or nearly undistinguishable from trolls. That is not effort I’d recommend wasting on their dumb asses.
Staying home is a goofy waste of your only real voice as a citizen. Voting third party is fine, and the people acting like they’re forcing you at gun point to vote for Biden “or else” are little better than the fascists they say they’re against
