ah good, lemmy hasn’t changed a bit since i left it 2 months ago
welp see you losers next year
Thankfully you left me this message so I can block you and never hear from you ever again.
Dem’s aren’t even putting in the minimum effort into pretending to be an opposition party.
They’re gladly letting it all burn because they lazily expect it to mean easy wins in 2026. Then they’ll manage to barely take the House and maaaaybe Senate, and literally do nothing with it.
cuz that worked so well this year. got booty clapped by a felon. utterly waffle stomped right back to the segregation days by this diaper clad casino salesman.
they’re fucking done. they ain’t participating in 2026 as anything but a joke write-in
Better than not voting and doing nothing.
The best would be voting and being an activist.
The US is not a democracy, it’s a capitalist dictatorship.
Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’
Okay, and? How does voting harm us? Not voting does a lot more harm.
If your democracy is staged like reality TV, then it does nothing.
Does voting in a capitalist dictatorship work? It got the US to where it is now. Doing the same strategy over and over again, when proven that historically things keep getting worse, should tell you that not only is it a pointless strategy, it’s actively harmful because it draws energy into an electoral contest that does nothing to improve people’s lives.
Bourgeois democracy is an elaborate theatre piece used to keep people distracted, and give them the illusion of choice.
I’m not going to say the same thing twice, take a look at https://gregtech.eu/comment/3527169
That doesn’t address anything. Saying vote over and over doesn’t make it a viable strategy, especially in bourgeois “democracy”'s staged elections, where the vote choices are stacked between various capitalist puppets.
Essentially you’re asking us to play a rigged game, and insisting both that it’s not rigged, and that it’s super important to play it. Also that anyone who refuses to play it deserves ridicule. This is the level of zealotry people have in their fake political system.
I never said it wasn’t rigged. Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder. Democrats are, of course, the party of the rich, but so are Republicans. Republicans, however, are way more against the redistribution of wealth.
Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder.
You can only make statements like this, by ignoring history. People in the US have voted for 150+ years. This is the result.
Again, if voting is working so well, why do things keep getting worse? Are they just not voting hard enough? No, it’s the system that’s broken, it’s theatre, a catch-22, a rigged game. Those of us who’ve studied US history and it’s class history learned this a long time ago. The liberals coming and telling us to vote to fix things, aren’t bringing any new arguments, and appear to us like fanatical zealots, who think that if they repeat mantras over and over, it cancels history.
Both voting and not voting have the same effect. Nothing. It is not a democracy and pretending you are in one does fuck all.
Throw bricks at fascists, punch nazis, but also vote, ffs
- votes Kamala
- at least 51% of others do the same
- Kamala wins
Explain again how voting and not voting does the same? I know the first past the post system is horrible, but saying that voting does nothing is disingenuous.
This is false, multiple presidents won more than 51% of the vote and lost. Your elections are decided by election riggers during redistricting. It is called gerrymandering. You live in a corrupt society that uses voting and a circus every few years to mollify you. Even if Kamala won, which was basically impossible based on how the districts were drawn, you’d still live in a capitalist dictatorship that would be every bit as bad as it is now. You would still be causing wars around the world, you would still have homeless people everywhere, and most people would still be living pay check to paycheck while she did absolutely nothing. Kamala Harris is a manager of capitalism, not leader in any sense. You have absolutely no vote or say in the people who run your country, the board members of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and the rest.
The sad thing is, trump won even the popular vote. And, even with gerrymandering, voting still makes a change, if even a small one.
Also, are you saying trump and kamala are the same lmfao
It’s clear that you are completely unaware of the history of the US democratic party as controlled opposition, and how thoroughly evil they are.
Here’s what the Biden administration did to Palestine:
Some more on your party:
Even if one accepts the argument that voting is not productive, that doesn’t inherently justify not participating. There’s plenty of things people do daily that are not productive or useful uses of their time.
Please demonstrate the harm caused by voting in the presidential elections.
Even if it’s not productive, it takes at absolute worst case living in a hellscape without properly staffed polling places, one day out of your time every four years. I was able to do it and get back to my shit in 30 minutes this time, from the time I left home to the time I got back.
So even if it’s useless, for me it was the same as sitting on my ass and watching a TV show. Explain why that is such a horrendous waste of my time that I should have instead not done it at all.
The harm is simple, people get the illusion they’re making a difference and that it’s enough, it also legitimizes voting as the way to change things despite ample evidence it doesn’t.
This leads to Dems hating protestors, or telling protestors to protest quietly and no in the road. This leads to liberals hating the working class when they go in strike, because why didn’t they just vote for better conditions. It leads to liberals hating anything useful, because they already did the only ‘useful’ thing and voted.
This leads to lesser evilism and accepting institutions as the foundation of society, instead of any ideology that will positively change things.
You are free to participate in any kind of meaningless gestures and genuflection to make yourself feel better, but the US is a controlled authoritarian oligarchy with democratic window dressing and not a democracy in any meaningful way.
Look, if you aren’t going to do anything else, you might as well vote. It’s the best you can do. And even if you are active, you should still vote.
Right, I said you are free to do any meaningless gestures you want
My guy, life is filled with meaningless gestures we all have to regularly do.
I frequently know the only viable solution for companywide issues at my workplace. Do I just run off on my own and shove it through because I know I’m right? No.
Even when the change is so buried in the back end that they’d never know, I participate in the meaningless gesture of informing the business folks, taking questions that they don’t have the knowledge base to understand my answers, etc. It’s a regular process established in my workplace, and despite it not changing anything, it must be followed.
For the price of a few hours every four years, I get to bite back at people who argue that you don’t have any say if you didn’t vote. And if by some miracle voting ends up effecting some change (companies drawing conclusions from the popular vote maybe?), I’m already doing the bare minimum.
Wow, a lot of words to say nothing. You don’t have to do anything meaningless, it is by definition meaningless.
Worse would be discouraging voting and activism. Instead try to tell people that nothing they do matters and just bend over and take it up the ass
Malcom X said,
“ I don’t think that if I was cornered by any fox or a wolf, that I would have to take a choice between either one. I don’t see any choice between a fox or a wolf. A fox is a fox and a wolf is a wolf—to me. Neither one is the lesser of two evils. Both of them are evil. And Negroes, when they become politically mature, I think will realize that you don’t have to throw the bullets out of your gun just because you have a gun. Likewise you should wait until you have a target and bring that target down. I think when Negroes become really mature, they won’t vote just because they can vote. Sometimes they’ll abstain. Ofttimes in a position of abstaining is as effective in its results as an actual vote, as is proved in the UN. You have those who say “yes,” those who say “no,” and those who abstain. And those who abstain have just as much weight. And probably the most intelligent thing Negroes could do at this juncture would be to abstain and withhold their vote completely and make both the fox and the wolf fight it out among themselves.”
This was true when he said and is true now. Malcom X knows far more about opposition to reactionary politics than you do and he what he said was in no outdated then nor now.
(https://www.icit-digital.org/articles/malcolm-x-at-columbia-university-november-20-1963)
I honestly don’t think these one off protests will force any change personally. They are a start to network and I think we should shift protests to be places to centralize people to a method of communication.
But the only thing that would force the hand of change is a general strike for weeks/months like Georgia is doing.
One decentralized protest organizer is starting a method of collecting sign ups to organize such a protest. Im not sure who the original organizer is but id rather give trust that something will come of it.
Personally, I think I will see if I can be more involved in my local state politics and volunteering. Might see if I can run for local office or if that is feasible.
It’s really the keyboard activists. You would be surprised.
They can’t do that. The simple rule of LAW IN THIS COUNTRY should be enough to stop them. All we have to do is remove them from power. Where is the Democrats gathering part of our military and law enforcement to oust these people from our government? This is all it takes. Our country has very clear, simple laws that prohibit exactly what is going on right the fuck now from happening, and it’s still happening. Why? Because they’re afraid they’ll be seen as the same as the people from 6 January? That it will give these asshats some sort of ammunition against actual justice? Fuck them. Fuck them, throw them out, lock them up, and re-educate the people that this shit isn’t going to be tolerated. We can remove them forcefully because they did something wrong, they couldn’t remove anyone because we didn’t.
It’s that goddamn simple. How is it not that goddamn simple? Fucking do something. Fucking throw these fuckers out. Now. Not next election cycle, not whenever a bunch of people want to finally get off their ass and violently rebel, fucking right now.
In your country your political parties operate as one and the politics are managed by the oligarchy. Everything is occurring exactly as your business dictatorship wants.
Which is why I want to drive the ones who still have a duty to this country’s ideals to act. There ARE those who are like that, you know. And have the rule of law of this country on their side. So let’s go.
As Lenin said in State and Revolution, “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!“
This is no different and only shows the media’s effective advertising that people think otherwise.
Lenin said, “Only simpletons put faith in words.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/jun/09.htm) This is the root of the discussion when it comes to “lawfulness”.
Your ideas of the violently rebelling “right now” doesn’t quite make sense. In the US, the white “proletariat” is still benefiting for the capital extraction occurring in the global south as Sakai has explained. This, as long as it is happening, will impair the development of class consciousness. A rebellion without class consciousness will not be substantive rebellion. It would either be pointless or adventurist.
Only morons listen to extremists about other extremists. - Me, now.
Tired of people putting faith in alt-left historical shitlords like Lenin.
Lenin was one of the most important figures in creating the first Socialist State, I think we should at minimum learn from his experiences and thoughts to see what we should copy and what we need to change.
I’ll maybe take your thoughts on Lenin seriously when you accomplish anything even comparable to what he did. Until then, you can sit around and feel superior over individuals who brought about earth-shattering change created through the correct analysis of the conditions that he saw.
Most of the country wants this. For every person who tries to overthrow the government, there are more people who will fight to keep it as it is.
Just try to tell them the parties are the same. I’ve been pilloried three times, they cut my balls off, and I’m set to be hung tomorrow at dusk.
See?! See?!
Yeah, there is a reason my instance doesn’t have downvotes or federates with the lemmy.world idiots
Glad I finally got off world and can see your comments again. Missed you. Not trying to be weird, I just like your style.
And what exactly are leftists doing that is so effective?
🙄
There are no leftists in America because of the Nazi consolidation of power in the red scare and this is what you get.
What a disingenuous question. Do the leftists have the resources, reach, recognition, institutional support and seer amount of fucking money that liberals do?
The average liberal voter, who this meme seems to be targeting, is just as powerless as you are. But yeah let’s make fun of them for voting, even though Kamala lost because of poor turnout.
Poor turnout? That election had some of the highest voting numbers in our history.
Why is it a problem for “leftists” to solve?
It’s a problem for everyone to solve
