• Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • fishy@lemmy.today
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      24 hours ago

      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.

      • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        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.

    • AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml
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      22 hours ago

      You’re right that voting is a tool; you’re wrong about whose tool it is and what it’s used for.

      • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        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?

        • AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml
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          21 hours ago

          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.

          • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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            19 hours ago

            You are spreading misinformation and promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation. You are an ally to our oppressors.

            • Grapho@lemmy.ml
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              7 hours ago

              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.

            • AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml
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              19 hours ago

              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.

            • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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              19 hours ago

              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.

              • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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                17 hours ago

                False equivalence. Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.

                You chose significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + probable Venezuelan genocide + an untold number of atrocities to come.

                Harris was and is shit, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at Trump and conclude that he’s infinitely worse. You really going to pretend that opposition to genocide was a motivating factor in allowing Trump to win? Cuz you’ve enabled, and are in some part responsible for, a shit ton more genocide.

                You’re also hyperfocusing on the presidential election: voting impacts a lot more than just who gets to be god-emperor of the US for 4 years.

                • AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml
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                  6 hours ago

                  but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at Trump and conclude that he’s infinitely worse

                  This line is smoking gun proof that everyone in this thread trying to engage with you is talking exclusively over your head. You

                • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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                  13 hours ago

                  So you knowingly voted to throw Palestinians under the extermination bus, is that it? And you consider yourself to be on the right side of history? And you never considered that perhaps your slavish ideological devotion to following the rules of a fascist political system was slow-boiling you into a fascist?

                  Ukranian genocide

                  You’re talking about the ten years of ethnic cleansing the Ukranian nazi government was doing to ethnic Russians within its borders, right? You wouldn’t possibly consider yourself to be against genocide while supporting these guys, right? Because nobody could possibly be that deluded, right? Tell me you’re not that programmed.

                • mononoke@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  16 hours ago

                  Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.

                  You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is “none of those things,” actually, and you don’t get that by voting harder because as you’ve just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never “less genocide,” it is “no genocide.”

          • Dippy@beehaw.org
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            6 hours ago

            You’re right, I dont know that they are a psyop. I do, however, know that the position of ‘voting is not worthwhile if you are a leftist’ that they are taking above is the same position that many psyops would like to have in the minds of leftists. Put more simply, what might they have said differently if they were a psyop? Nothing, I presume.

            It is better to root out psyop talking points that diminish our ability to form a collective voice, than it is to allow foolish notions like ‘dont vote’ to continue in our spaces.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              6 hours ago

              Voting doesn’t do much, though. I support voting for working class orgs like PSL, but not for the DNC or GOP, and I know it’s very unlikley that PSL will win electorally. Leftists understand that the path to change is via organizing, not by supporting orgs that work against our interests, and we know we can’t magically turn a capitalist org into a proletarian one by wishcasting.

              If you want to argue against that, then do so, don’t badjacket.

              • Dippy@beehaw.org
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                5 hours ago

                Im literally just telling folks to not engage in the same behavior that the fascists hope we engage in.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  5 hours ago

                  Fascists don’t care if we vote, what they care about is if we organize. Now that the spoils of imperialism are drying up, fascism is rising, and the super-exploitation we inflict on the global south is turning more inward. What fascists are scared of is working class organizing and building actual power.

      • Oppopity@lemmy.ml
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        15 hours ago

        Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn’t work. Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.

        • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          12 hours ago

          Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.

          I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It’s like all change must be meaningful, and if it’s not then it’s not worth our time.

          Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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            11 hours ago

            Lenin’s position on integrating with the masses meant running working class parties in opposition to establishment parties, ie voting PSL over DNC. The vanguard’s task is to become a party that the working class puts their full support behind, so that when revolution does happen, the vanguard can serve as the spearpoint to direct the masses in one unified direction and crush the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one.

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    bro just one more vote bro, bro I swear just one more vote and it’ll fix democracy bro

    • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      Now’s not the time for that we can’t afford four years of Vance. We need to hold our noses and vote for Skeletor so we can stop the spread, then focus on progressive issues

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    how white liberals think fascism works

    Chad voting in a UN resolution condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza

    you’re finished

    Official portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu

    no, pls

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Just you wait another few more years and I’m gonna vote so hard it’ll make your head spin

  • godlessworm [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    you know what hitler? i tried to reason with you but you have left me no choice. i will be voting for somebody else. good luck earning my vote back fuckstick, you’re gonna need it.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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      8 hours ago

      They’re only allowed to be voted out after they establish the rules of the game lmao. Military dictators are just puppets of capital used to organize society with force and when capital is happy with it they just move on from them. It’s absurd to think they were voted out lmao. Every single liberal democracy that evolved from a military dictatorship still uses the constitution written by the dictators, i.e. Spain.

      • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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        11 hours ago

        No, Bolsonaro was not a dictator; if he had been, we wouldn’t have been able to remove him. He had far less power than he thought; that’s why voting worked.

        • Tinidril@midwest.social
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          8 hours ago

          I would argue the same is true of Trump. It certainly was in his first term. This term has all the aesthetics of authoritarianism, but he is failing to consolidate power, which is kind of pathetic considering how much power in the US was ready to surrender on day one.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    11 hours ago

    The problem in democracy is, that instead of a minimum IQ, there is a minimum age for voting rights.

  • Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 day ago

    Mamdani just started manufacturing consent for the regime changes in Cuba and Venezuela. 😂

  • fort_burp@feddit.nl
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    1 day ago

    Some of the dumber white libs I’ve talked to honestly believe 51% of American voters voted for Trump 🤣

    They don’t know what voting does or how it works but they’re sure it’s the only reasonable solution!

    • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      It’s funny how almost 20 million people less than in 2020 voted this time around (most of the missing voters being on the dem side too); people are beginning to realize we don’t really have a say

      • fort_burp@feddit.nl
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        1 day ago

        And it seems like a lot of Americans don’t understand FPTP or the Electoral College, or even the amount of voter suppression there is. Your vote only counts (and only maybe) if you live in a swing state. The votes in rural areas count for way more than in urban ones but those are already captured by R. Let’s not even get into the other branches of government:

        Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

        • James Madison