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In the UK you can spoil your ballot if you're unhappy with the options and is a recorded vote. Perhaps there's something like that.
I don't understand the motivation to spoil your vote. First past the post is the shittiest voting system but the rational response is to vote tactically instead, perhaps reduce the majority of your disliked incumbent. Even if you can't overturn a majority, MPs on smaller majorities may be less arrogant, and less likely to vote for unpopular policies. But sometimes you do overturn a majority. It will happen lots in this/next year's election.
I don't think any politician gives a shit about the numbers of spoiled ballots, they literally don't look even once at those numbers.
I live in maryland so my ballot doesn't matter much regardless for the presidential election. If Biden loses maryland he loses. And I won't be voting for him. The worst thing missing my vote will do for him is reducing his popular vote. Since that's mostly a talking point, good.
its funny(?) how i only see posts criticising ppl for not voting/voting third options but i dont currently see anyone actually advocating for doing that
I stand with Israeli and Palestinian civilians, all of whom are victims of Hamas and the Netanyahu regime.
if voting changed shit it would have been made illegal. don't legitimize slavery by acts of expressing gratitude for being able to pick your masters.
...slavery????
stagnant wages, no real influence on the politics because the Overton's window is so narrow and all major parties filled with out of touch millionaires and also just because the political system does not really benefit a common person in a meaningful way, the cost of living and debt crisis, needing to join the military for basic public services, creeping corporate censorship and oligopolization creating a generation of dependent, depressed people with growing self-censorship instinct?
Ok but none of this is slavery. I wouldn't even call it indentured servitude. There's a million miles between things sucking and being literally enslaved
Yeah I mean police brutality exists and although a peaceful revolution would be preferable to adventurist bloodshed, we must reckon with the high odds of the powers that be not giving up their power to "the mob" peacefully, this bears no comparison to the rampant abuse of the rural south before the Second American Revolution. But still for real emancipation I believe a third revolution is needed, first the colonial rule, then chattel slavery and now the oligarchic, imperialist capitalism need to go. The continued existence of the previous two was an impendance to the proper development of the United States (the latter two also a humanitarian tragedy, first directly, the latter indirectly*) while nowadays it is also and probably even more importantly, not just anymore due to the climate crisis but also due to hawkish foreign policies being on the rise – a threat to the continued existence of humanity.
* I think I get your point. We used to have that buffer called the middle class that for decades ensured some relative social peace and fostered some faith in the American dream because some people were able to advance socioeconomically. But we are the first generation to actually have a worse standard of living than our parents, so all of that is crumbling. I used to be a software developer but the absolute shitshow that has been the 4-month long failed job hunt in the current state of the market forced me to become a food delivery driver. It all feels so disempowering when you feel your efforts amount to nothing. And I believe it's not just me. Lots of young people have been scammed into wasting their time and money pursuing degrees that produced no ROI for them. I now really think I should've trained to become an electrician or other deficient, decently paying blue-collar vocation but now if I don't find at least a support/admin job in IT soon it will be another couple years of debt and uncertainty and feeling easily replaceable, cheated out of future after being promised an irrationally exaggerated market value.
But I feel like again, I'm not alone in this sentiment and soon we'll see another wave of people training for highly demanded blue collar jobs, the market will saturate and some people will again end up feeling duped into another Ponzi scheme with their livelihoods. Because capitalism is a permanent crisis of overproduction, chaos and speculation, a dog eat dog world
inb4 Ayn Rand's "Anthem"
I don't really care about getting rich. I actually care about my craft and believe everyone should be able to do what they are passionate about without the fear of hunger, not receiving healthcare or homelessness. Most commercial software development is just as wasteful as marketing anyway.
Russian spies. Nice try.
Incredible how the majority of their comments come at hrs when most Americans are in bed..
but election rigging in post-Soviet Russia was actually started by the CIA to not let the communists get back to power in 1996 elections. Which is actually yet another proof that what is needed in any country really is a revolution and actual thorough democratization of every aspect of social and economic life possible, instead of neo-aristocratic electoralism. And that to that goal, a party able to lead a way towards it is needed (instead of trying to work within those that actually just prop up the system and will actively fight back when that is challenged (look up SJ Voralberg case in Austria as the most recent example, or even more glaringly, CPRF purging anti-war faction or the Blairite hostile takeover in Labour a couple years ago)), which was sadly lacking in Russia in the 90s as well as today.
If you are against both dominants in a two-party system, vote for the party more likely to win, so that the margin would become bigger, the winning party would split and the losing party would have unpredictable change.
I'm in the second world, just thinking.
In the US this seems to have already happened once, in the 50s.
“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.
With either of those parties in power one thing is always certain and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle.
Under the administration of both these parties the means of production are private property, production is carried forward for capitalist profit purely, markets are glutted and industry paralyzed, workingmen become tramps and criminals while injunctions, soldiers and riot guns are brought into action to preserve ‘law and order’ in the chaotic carnival of capitalistic anarchy.
Deny it as may the cunning capitalists who are clear-sighted enough to perceive it, or ignore it as may the torpid workers who are too blind and unthinking to see it, the struggle in which we are engaged today is a class struggle, and as the toiling millions come to see and understand it and rally to the political standard of their class, they will drive all capitalist parties
of whatever name into the same party, and the class struggle will then be so clearly revealed that the hosts of labor will find their true place in the conflict and strike the united and decisive blow that will destroy slavery and achieve their full and final emancipation.” - Eugene V. Debs