There are discrete opportunities to firebomb walmarts and I support each instance
That’s lemmy as well. Tons of talk. Absolutely zero action.
The whole “everyone is 12” extends to things like this btw, if voting meant nothing, why is there a constant concerted effort of making voting particularly difficult? Are the politicians bored? Or is there something to a vote we’re not seeing that they do? Of course you don’t think those things you’re 12.
The revolution is just leftist rapture. It’ll have fire and punish the ones who deserve it and it’ll happen any day now and when it’s done it’ll be a utopia and even though people have said it’ll happen for hundreds of years it’ll happen this lifetime for sure and we can do some things to push for it but just wait it’ll happen any day now
Honestly for all my bloodthist, ya ain’t wrong. Fact of the matter is most leftists are either too chickenshit or too insular to do jack for shit. Or they get into petty and stupid squabbles effectively preventing any attempts at outreach, seriously id happily join a group of leftists who can stop fighting about theory for five fucking seconds and do something.
I’m a Redneck who follows the old ways of being an anti corporate asshole, I really don’t care about your Soviet larp let’s just set up a communal food pantry you fuckwits. I’ve never felt more rage than when some yuppie ass twig tried fucking purity testing me via quize.
Oh boy these comments are gonna be full of wimpy whatabouts here we go 🙏 🪑
If you think voting is useless, I gotta ask then why do so many politicians try to surpress it?
Teaching the population learned helplessness.
walmarts have insurance, firebomb the CEOs instead
Firebombing a single building does nothing. You need coordinated violence with a massive group of people. Things that many tend to write off as “riots” like the 2020 BLM protests. My problem is never with voting, but it’s with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other? Both are completely necessary to achieve the end goal desired. We should be seeing more Luigis and Tyler Robinsons at the very least every month instead of telling everyone that peaceful protests and a bit of community outreach is the only things worth doing outside of election time.
Did BLM actually change things?
And yet, you aren’t out there assassinating CEOs.
Curious.
/s
It’s easy as fuck to tell everyone else to be a martyr. I think that’s the dilemma we might be in here
My problem is never with voting, but it’s with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other?
Devil’s advocate-- Trump is provoking the public so he could invoke the Insurrection Act and legitimise the use of violence to purge any opposition.
There has already been numerous instances of violations of constitution and civil rights, but where does the public draw the line? I don’t know, but I think the test will be the midterms on whether or not Trump will rig it. Or, if not the midterms, wait in two years if he doesn’t want to step down.
You can use the logic of “they’re just waiting for us to get violent so they can oppress us harder” all the way to the camps.
Not saying you’re necessarily wrong about the insurrection act but if he was really trying to do it he would whether someone really did it or not. I mean he’s already been shot at. Hes got the false grounds to go for it.
Unfortunately you’re batting for the other side. All they want to do is throw out any reason they can to keep the status quo of non violence so they can continue to steamroll forward. Because the secret is that they’re fragile. It’s not a majority of the population that’s doing this, it’s a very small minority with a slightly larger minority supporting it and a vast majority saying “well don’t get too rowdy yet, that’s what they want.”
Trump wasn’t even elected on the second term when he was shot at so he doesn’t have the grounds to invoke the Insurrection Act. But now as the president, he can’t use that prior incident. He’s waiting for any excuses to invoke the act as incumbent president.
It’s not a majority of the population that’s doing this, it’s a very small minority with a slightly larger minority supporting it and a vast majority saying “well don’t get too rowdy yet, that’s what they want.”
Everyone seem to have forgotten about last year when people talked about raising arms in response to the brutal ICE abuse, and the government floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. The government did tone down the raids and scapegoated Gregory Bovino, but in any case, are people really willing to be martyrs and raise arms next time around if it’s brought up again?
i regularly get flamed by asking my fellow so-called (internet) leftists one piercing question: “how?” i’ve been called a nazi, maga, etc. because i want people to actually consider how they would go about implementing their big ideas.
it’s great to have big endgame ideas, it’s important to have a direction. but if all you have are the big endgame ideas and nothing else, you are simply not a serious person and you have a lot of political literacy you need to work on. being terminally online and jockeying with nothing but ideas is not praxis, it’s not even theory. it’s just attention whoring for updoots and likes.
Reading this reminded me of a quote. I unfortunately can’t remember for the life of me who said this, but it was something to the effect of: “I appreciate many leftist ideas. But, in my experience, if your only acceptable outcome is ‘utopia’, and your only acceptable timeline is ‘immediately’, then things aren’t likely to go your way.”
We need to democratize our workplaces
People like that are on the same political level as that one Nickelback song.
It’s important to remember the famous song “everyone I don’t like is literally hitler” by rusty cage and that it applies to a shocking number of people online
Had a very long argument on here with some “leftist” several months back where they were trying to argue voting does nothing and makes you complicit with the genocide in Gaza, but during the argument they conceded that republicans had a much more extreme on Gaza as well as were doing worse things to citizens than any democrat, and that voting doesn’t stop you from doing any other kind of activists, but they still just doubled down on “voting bad”
Genuinely insane
They boil down to:
- Paid trolls
- Genuinely mentally ill people whose decision making centers are broken
Either way the solution is not to engage with them in anyway. You will not convince them to be reasonable and your energy is better spent elsewhere.
I knew a guy who daily stared into the sun for a few seconds.
He claimed to vote and tried to get me not to. I think he was either a secret Nazi or a secret superalcoholic or both.
Or ai bots that have lost the plot in the argument
Damn AI bots taking away jobs from paid trolls
That person probably voted, if they could.
That’s been my experience, except for any concessions.
I was banned from a certain “leftist” sub for arguing it’s stupid to dismiss voting or dislike voting instead of whatever-else because election outcomes have very practical consequences for a lot of people in the here and now and you might need to start looking at Plan B’s in the event your systemic revolution that gets rid of the US government and allows you to rebuild– a messy process that you’ve not elaborated on– doesn’t happen.
Far as I’m concerned, it’s proof some leftists are just as dumb and easily mislead as ultra conservatives; your rhetoric is indistinguishable from anti-voting memes that came right out of a Russian bot farm.
Agreed. Voters holding out for the perfect candidate infuriate me. The only “perfect” candidate is staring at you in the mirror. Outside of that, compromises are necessary.
It’s also funny how they pretend that the two actions are mutually exclusive, as if the rules of the universe won’t allow you to firebomb Walmarts the minute you cast a vote. It’s almost like discouraging people from voting is the actual purpose.
This is it. You can do harm reduction in voting for the least-worst feasible candidate, while organising/protesting on issues you disagree with them on.
E.g. In the UK, Labour is often poor on queer rights issues, but comparatively massively better than the tories/reform would be, not to mention economic and welfare policies. So I vote Labour, and attend pro-trans rights protests and criticise Labour and their stance on this issue.
You can do harm reduction in voting for the least-worst feasible candidate
The research does not support this thesis. Policy is largely independent of popularity.
Yeah, things like the Democratic party supporting gay marriage after it gained critical mass in popularity are a total coincidence. The policies are just random. Same thing with the the Republican party morphing overnight into a white nationalist cult who doesn’t care about deficit spending anymore. You never know where the parties are headed, and it has nothing to do with the desires of the base and who they vote for.
the Republican party morphing overnight into a white nationalist cult who doesn’t care about deficit spending anymore.
I’m confused by the sarcasm. Do you think these are recent?
No, politics is not random, politics is what economic elites want. That’s why Marxist would say it’s a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.
Here a direct quote from the famous 2014 study by Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Disclaimer: There are sources that say this study has some oversimplifications and claim that at least “limited leverage” is possible.
But we shouldn’t settle for just limited leverage as people. Unfortunately, neither voting nor individual arson attacks will change that.
Instead we should see voting and (the limited effect it has on politics) as our tool to make more and more people realize that big business ruling everything isn’t an error in the system, but its core function. It always existed to protect the interest of the economic elites. We need to understand that the system has to be replaced not fixed.
Okay, but that quote doesn’t support the conclusion that engaging in harm-reduction via voting is instead a bad thing. In fact, it doesn’t even argue that your vote doesn’t matter. The only thing it suggests - and I can’t even say “proves” here, as your own disclaimer brings the validity of this study’s conclusions into question - is that mass voting doesn’t result in policy change from the major parties.
Voting for the party that is going to bomb brown people, rather than the one that is going to bomb brown people, round up locals who look too brown, and de-legitimize LGBTQ+ peoples of all demographics, is harm reduction worth engaging in.
I eagerly await the total failure of capitalism as much as the next socialist, but I am not condemning local minorities just to win some form of imagined moral high ground.
I just don’t think the Ds actually do harm reduction. Biden and his DOJ had the Epstein files and they did literally nothing with them. And that’s just the clearest example of the enabling they do. Obama and Biden expanded ICE into what it is today and created the policy framework that Trump is using, but Biden did nothing to address it when he was president. He just opted not to use it, knowing full well what the Republicans would do because they were literally publishing treatises on what they would do. The Democrats are harm reduction like the Good Cop has your best interests at heart.
I have had a read through that study, and I would consider the following points striking:
- it is entirely US-centric. Extrapolation to the entire world from this study would be pretty fruitless — in the extreme example, Switzerland is a democracy that uses referenda more than most (any?) other country, and so any policy decided by one of these by necessity follows the will of the voters (though not necessarily their interests, of course).
- it is focussed on a very specific period of time — between 1981 and 2002. What’s striking about that period is Reagan - Bush - Clinton - Bush – in general a rightward swing (3/4 republican, and Clinton was a ‘third way’ Democrat). Is it particularly surprising that these governments aligned with elite interests?
To give a counter example to this study: consider the exit to the gilded age. We have a period comparable to now, where political power was bought and sold; corruption reigned. However, the government of Teddy Roosevelt made a number of moves counter to corporate interests, breaking up monopolies, reserving vast swathes of national parks, legislation protecting food and drug adulteration (note: not an unequivocal fan of TR — I am not in favour of his gunboat diplomacy).
A more recent example: under the Biden administration, there was a significant uplift in antitrust efforts. Lina Khan was appointed to the FTC, and who knows what she could have accomplished given more time. In a UK-based example, we are (finally, thank fucking god) renationalising our public services. It is absurd to think this would have happened under the opposition.
TLDR: democratic socialism is possible; your study is a snapshot of conservative administrations in America and — no shit — they aligned with corporate interests.
TLDR: democratic socialism is possible
That is not at all the TLDR. Your entire argument is that outside the US voting can influence policy. No one is arguing against that, but that in no way supports the thesis that democratic socialism is possible. All of history shows that democratic socialism has never happened. There is no known path to democratic socialism at all.
You hate democratic socialism because it doesn’t kill enough people like Stalin’s National Socialism
Average .ml user
I mean that’s ridiculous — Brexit for one is an example of a massive change to the British political landscape that doesn’t happen without the public voting for it.
Shut the fuck up. If you don’t want to vote, then don’t vote. But you have no reason to try and stop others from voting.
His reason is that he thinks anything that hurts the west is good. Because his simply brain can only understand black and white binary arguments one time when he was 14 he discovered the USA are the bad guys.
Do you not think the 250 year old country founded on genocide and slavery that has only not been at war for 20 years of its history is the good guy?
Hey man I see you joined a week ago and literally all you do is argue with people.
This isnt a healthy way to spend your time. I recommend taking up a hobby like reading or knitting
Lmao, please Adress the contents of my comment.
Yuuup. Recently called out a post for discouraging voting, but the author was a mod so they removed my comment. Called them out on that and they removed that comment and banned me from the sub.
gonna take a wild guess and say latestagecapitalism or progressivepolitics
But everyone is so corrupt anyway right?
/s
“Both sides are the same, you shouldn’t bother voting”
The bad guys win, things get worse
“See? I was right!”
Bill to Criminalise Being Poor narrowly passes with a 51/49 vote.
The issue is that even if you voted for the democrat every time, due to them not improving the living situation considerably you’ll always end up having the worse guy win at some point.
The only thing that would really help would be to finally start improving the living reality of the people.
Last time the democrats had control of all three branches of government, americans got slightly better healthcare, and now insurance companies can’t just refuse to cover conditions they claim you had before you got insurance. Also no more lifetime maximums.
That’s why we need people to vote in the primaries.
The primaries that they can decide not to have? Or that the winner didn’t really win?
at least one state had open primaries, I’d need to check if others do but we got ours from a ballot measure.
Wow, how generous of them to give one state a primary, maybe.
according to balotopedia it’s 14 with open primaries
Truly the land of democracy, lol.
Wilding v. DNC is the court case where the DNC admitted that they don’t have to abide by the primaries because they are a private entity and can nominate whomever they want.
They admitted this in open court because so many people voted in the primaries for Bernie, and yet they nominated Hillary, that they could no longer hide this fact from the majority of the Democrat voting public.
The truth was short lived though, as that case is almost completely memory holed, and everyone pretends like none of that happened a decade ago.
I was there. I remember. Sure, vote in the primaries and vote for the “lesser evil”, but we won’t win anything without infiltrating the Democrat bureaucracy and forming unions and serious protests.
Nah, if people cared about politics before Election Day we could be pushing for better candates in the primaries.
We absolutely will continue to get the choice between a shit sandwich and a shit burrito every time if we keep refusing to take part in the ingredient selection.
I’m gonna need to stop you right there.
Pushing for better candidates means defining a coherent set of qualities one wants in a candidate and then actually doing legwork for them instead of flinging shit everywhere from the lazy safety of your bedroom in your parents’ house.
You’re supposed to “improve living reality” before and after voting, not instead of… Voting doesn’t preclude protesting or working to that end.
You don’t think the bad guys were the guys doing a genocide?
You can do both. It’s not like voting voids some firebombing permit you never had anyway. Just mind the timing, because firebombing might end up barring you from voting.
Also, please don’t firebomb Walmart. You’d just hurt other victims of the systemic evil. The people who are to blame don’t shop there.
Unrelatedly, I hear there’s a killer recipe for flame-grilled parasite…
Felons should be able to vote!
No state’s permanently bar all felons from voting anymore. The key difference now is when they’re allowed to vote again.
For some, prisoners can vote, for some it’s after you get out of jail, and for some, it’s when your parole is up.
There are still certain crimes that do require the governor to grant permission, though.
Sorry, no can do, but how about we make one president?
/s
I don’t believe that voting will save the world but neither will this comment, still I wrote it and still I vote.
