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Be suspicious of anyone who tells you that voting is going to solve this problem. They aren't going to let you vote them out of power.
By all means, vote if you can! But if the only thing you do is vote, you will lose.
Voting is the bare minimum.
If they let us vote again then we might as well do it, but at the rate things are going they might just rig the election if they don't cancel it.
Or use it to keep track of who isn’t supporting the new regime and come after you. I’ve always been very pro-voting but it doesn’t feel safe to be voting anymore and I’m not going to risk my safety for a rigged election
Voting caused the problem, it can solve it too. But here's the thing: for voting to solve the problem, you have to actually do it and play the game.
Every 20-25 years some rightwing psycho wins and inflicts some horror on us because new voters don't remember what happened the last time people said "both sides are the same". You kids know that whole Iraq war and torture thing was avoidable, right? So was Reagan's annihilation of the middle class.
this overly simplistic and completely ignores the impact of things like voter suppression or propaganda or narrative control
Well yeah, but part of the voter propaganda is telling people both sides are the same. I get that there's pro capitalist media bias which at its root is caused by extreme financial inequality. But fixing that financial inequality requires government action, and that requires voting. For the people who will do the inadequate version over the people who want to make it worse. Incremental change through pressure + time, just like everything else on earth.
Bush was forced onto us by the Supreme Court in a judicial coup that basically set us on our current trajectory. Trump has never won more than 50% of the vote, even this time around he only got 49.9%
In a democratic country this shit wouldn't happen. Elections have always been dubiously free and fair in this shithole.
I'm in my 30s, hardly a kid. I've watched this shithole country get worse and worse my whole life, and I am beyond convinced that we will only stop it with political actions that go far beyond the ballot box. You're going to have to get your hands dirty.
If we're allowed to vote for the next president you might as well, I know I will, but stop pretending it is nearly good enough.
There's definitely giant inadequacies in American democracy, but still I fail to see how voting isn't good enough. If people voted for Gore instead of Nader, American history would be very different. We'd have avoided a giant tax cut for the rich l, withdrawing from Kyoto, and a trillion dollar unnecessary war. Wealth inequality wouldn't be as bad, there would definitely be earlier progress against global warming, and we could probably afford real universal health care by now.
Ideally after voting in the right people, we'd fix all the democracy problems. But still I'd say voting alone would make a huge difference. Anything else meanwhile - protests (BLM, Gaza), violence (Matthew crooks, Luigi) has at best accomplished zero, and in reality seems to have done serious damage to the causes they were seeking. The one exception I'd give is boycotts - like the Tesla boycotts that have destroyed their sales numbers.
People did vote for Gore. Their votes were invalidated by the Supreme Court. The election was stolen.
Playing with historical counterfactuals is pointless anyway. Voting is over. They aren't going to let us vote them out of power anymore. The elections will either be canceled or rigged.
It's time to do something else.
We need organized labor actions. We run this country and we can shut it down. That's how we got the New Deal.
Don't forget the vandalism and arsons. There's more than one way to hurt a business.
My hope is that congress gets huge wins (despite the very expected interference from the GOP.) A Dem congress should absolutely clog the system and start the battles that this FUCKING inept GOP congress should be doing.
Trump is overreaching for power that belongs to congress and is ignoring the judicial branch. Someone has got to rein him in or we won’t make it to 2029.
Look at the Dem voting pattern in the past few months. They're part of the problem. They won't save you.
If that’s true, nothing will. We need not only Dems, but independents and GOP voters that realize they’ve been swindled.
Exactly. The public needs to be in support of this. Relying on Dems will not help. They are not on your side either.
Voting won't save you.
Voting also isn't the only option.
Recall that there are four boxes of liberty.
I know ballot box, soap box, and ammo box. Is the fourth one a coffin box?
You forgot the jury box i.e. jury nullification
"Eyy what murders? I didn't see no murder. Brian Thompson just fell on some bullets."
There's a saying about the western front of WW2, "The war was won with Soviet blood, British intelligence, and American steel" though over simplifying the whole affair and the contribution of the Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Danes, Belgian, etcetera the point is still broadly true. I say this to point out that the destruction of fascists is a multifaceted operation and that decrying the use of a tool no matter how small is foolish.
Ideally we will be able to vote them out and then get to lynching the sons of bitches, but only using two tools is unlikely. But well as Cincinnatus once said "Hope for peace, Prepare for war".
I think that saying is just the British patting themselves on the back. It was mostly just Soviet blood that liberated the camps.
It ain't British Intelligence was fucking nuts and after awhile just devolved into trolling the Axis because they were that far ahead. Same thing with American war materials it gave both the Soviets and British enough slack to focus on what was wanted rather than what was needed, without M3 Lees the British may not have had enough tanks for North Africa and without the M3 Trucks the Soviets would've wasted materials building trucks rather than tanks.
That won't be enough.
The point of a speed bump is to slow the car down and fuck up the underside if they don't. Same applies here