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What is your voting red line? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This goes to all the peeps who support parliamentary voting as a valid political action.

If your society has been steadily progressing towards fascism for decades regardless of your voting (like the USA has been), is there any point, any action which will convince you that voting ultimately doesn't work?

Is so, what is it? What would your government have to do for you to acknowledge that voting doesn't matter? For many people, it was of course, supporting genocide (which is why so many states desperately try to deny a genocide is ongoing). But if genocide isn't, what is yours?

Eventually a society which has been slowly progressing towards fascism regardless of voting, will become fascist. And we all know what comes after that. There's always one thing where I think even the most hardcore parliamentarian will agree that voting ultimately didn't work: When they're personally being force-marched to the mass grave-sites.

Would that be your point? Or does it come earlier? If so, when?

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (25 children)

That's not the discussion we're having. I want to know your red line.

So it's not gas chambers, then it's somewhere earlier. So where is it?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (24 children)

I've answered your question very directly. I did it in my first sentence, and then spent a while explaining further what I meant.

Since you've attempted to prevent me saying things that don't fit your favorite way of looking at it, let me take a moment to explicitly reject that way of conversing, and expand a little but more on some of the things that aren't your favorite way of looking at it ("the discussion we're having"):

What's your red line? Climate destruction? Mass deportations? The collapse of even the fragile oligarch-friendly US "democracy" and the adoption of full-throated "enemies go into the camps, there is only one party" fascism, where hostile media gets shut down, protests get suppressed with deadly violence with no repercussions? Accelerated genocide in Gaza, new genocide in Ukraine? War in Europe? Shutting down NOAA and destroying climate science in the US? Destruction of universities that aren't friendly to the allowed politics? Nuking hurricanes? A million people dying of a preventable disease? Are any of those red lines?

Because you could spend half a day trying to prevent those things from coming about, but you're explicitly rejecting the idea of doing so. So if those kinds of things aren't red lines for you, what in the loving fuck is? Or is this massive concern about bad things happening in the world limited to only one place and one issue, and something like billions of people dying because of climate change in the not-too-distant future excluded from the idea of being present within this invented concept of "red lines?"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (23 children)

None of these things are prevented by voting. I am doing the only thing that works: Direct action

I’ve answered your question very directly. I did it in my first sentence, and then spent a while explaining further what I meant.

You said you'd never reject voting so long as there's a difference in the outcomes, no matter how small. I then presented you with one such example and you rejected voting. So what is it?

[–] winterayars 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This isn't an either-or choice, you know. You can do direct action and take an hour off every 1-4 years to go vote.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

By saying that this vote matters, you are justifying the incredible amount of effort and money wasted in electioneering. If it was just everyone taking a couple of hours every 4 years it would be simple, buy it's taking over whole societies for years on end.

[–] winterayars 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I ain't justifying shit, I'm spending an hour out of about every 8000 or so on this one activity. I/you have now spent more time arguing about this collectively, than it would take to just do it. That's time that could have been used to do something else.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Since you're here arguing for the importance of voting, you're defacto justifying the effort other people put to get their chosen party elected.

[–] winterayars 1 points 2 months ago

I don't understand why that is or why i even care.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

From what I've observed, only a minority of people actively engage with the political system heavily. I think most of society (at least in the US) does only engage with it at the elections, and otherwise are more concerned with their job, family, or favored sports activity.

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