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.
winterayars
joined 2 years ago
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.
What do you mean "prevented"? It's not as if pulling the lever invokes some magic spell that makes these things impossible but nothing does that and that's not the claim people are making. There are significant, real, material, factual, likely, stated, and historical differences in outcomes.
I'm not sure how that can be reasonably applied. I'm also not sure why that should be the standard. I also see some potential critiques, for example "increasing the lives" is remarkably ambiguous and could support (for example) a Matrix situation where people have long and relatively peaceful lives but are not free.
Some of those things in the post above i'll grant you. Some of them absolutely are on the ballot though, undisputably: One of the candidates in this election has promised new concentration camps and forced deportation for millions, which counts as genocide. The other candidate has not.
One of the candidates is definitely going to side with Putin against Ukraine. The other (major) candidate is going to continue the "we'll help Ukraine survive but not win" policy of the current administration.
One of the candidates has promised to shut down NOAA and was hugely detrimental to climate science (and science of all types) the last time he was in office. One has not and was not.
One of the candidates has spoken out in opposition to universities in general, the other one just wants to arrest anyone who complains about genocide too loudly. I'll add: the wapo decided not to endorse this year because of Trump's retribution against Bezos the last time he was in office and maybe there were some new threats made this time. (And that's just the one that's in the news lately. Trump got a lot of revenge on people he thought were not sufficiently loyal to him personally last time.)
The whole COVID thing... just in its entirety. Do you think if Hillary Clinton were President things would have gotten to where they are now? We could have beat this thing. We literally accidently wiped out a couple strains of the flu. We just... chose not to. I'm not saying COVID would have been beaten if Clinton were President but i will say there would be a real difference if the president weren't up there encouraging people to drink bleach.
I really don't get this logical framework where voting is doing some kind of favor for the politician class.
Generally speaking, politicians (and one of the two US parties in particular, additional video from the second most recent Republican president because they are two in a row on this now) consider elections and voters to be a problem for them.
What do you mean by "doesn't work"? Doesn't get us to an anarchist society? Well yeah, if you had enough votes to get there you wouldn't even need to vote. People would just forget about all these made up ideas because who needs them? We can make up better ideas whenever we want.
If you mean "the outcome of the election will have no material impact on the world in which we live" then... i'm gonna have to disagree.
TBH i could leave this reply here but i'm going to elaborate anyway.
Yeah, both parties are strongly pro-genocide, against the wishes of the American people i might add. Genocide is not up for a vote. There are things that are, however. Such as how Arabic looking people will be treated in the US or how trans people will be treated--whether they'll be allowed to exist at all.
I also don't think it's inevitable that a society that's moving in a fascist direction will become full on fascist. I'm not gonna bet on it in the US's case, the US has been kinda crypto-fascist since at least W and before. Really, the US's problems predate and kind of inspired the modern concept of "fascism". Voting won't fix that, though. Not in the US or elsewhere.
Anti-fascist politics are not up for a vote, either. That doesn't mean there's nothing that can be done. Quite the opposite, there's a ton that can be done. Build a local anti-fascist, pro-community coalition and power base. Hell, you can build local political (electoral) power, too.
The Republicans didn't get to where they are now because all the old fossils from the 1950s suddenly went insane. It took decades of pushing crazy politics on a local level to get to where we are. They got up early and worked real fucking hard to make sure fascism was accepted, that it would be on the ballot, and that it would win. We could do the same, if we wanted. It'd be even easier for us, in some senses. Our goal is much more reasonable and does not require total power over everyone's lives. We just don't have anywhere near the same resources.
I think it's extremely clear what's happening and why and tone policing them about it is not helpful.
I, too, do not want to be deleted out of existence by the US government/military and so i, too, comply with sanctions.
We have reason to believe Linus and the kernel team are not filling the kernel with government back doors (for the thing, there's a high chance someone notices and makes it public that such code was put into the kernel by one of them). Linus has talked about refusing to do this in the past. However, it's no surprise they're not willing to risk the whole project for a handful of people working for Russian weapons manufacturers.
That's basically open to the same critique, it's just more veiled. One could also say the voting improves people's lives in a material sense. You're in here arguing about the optics or whatever, which helps no one, improves no lives. Just telling people "don't do this, it's bad" gets you nowhere, You have to present the thing you can do instead that's better. Just saying "well do direct action" is not compelling because you can very easily do both.