In France we know how to protest and some buildings got firebombed yesterday
The smart people are organizing in their local communities, not taking cellphones or other electronics to meetings. Meeting in basements or places with few to no windows. They’re aiding each other financially, emotionally, and morally. They’re arming up and practicing on the down low. If someone talks about their efforts online looking for more, it’s probably a honey pot.
To anti-quote Carlin, if voting didn’t do anything, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop us from doing it.
Now you’re bending my brain. Was Carlin’s stance something like, “They keep encouraging everyone to vote, but voting doesn’t matter because everything’s rigged!” ?
The big issue with electoralism is the tendency to reduce people down to believing in fairy tales about just needing the right rulers and everything will be fixed. Expecting a group of people, who keep threatening you with an increasingly right wing opposition rather than listening to their electorate, to actually serve your interests seems mindblowingly naive, especially given all the evidence to the contrary we have to hand by now.
It is possible to responsibly advocate for voting (obviously alongside taking more effective measures to put power back in people’s hands directly where possible), but this is incredibly rarely seen. Instead the voting becomes the be all and end all, and things keep sliding further and further.
Someone actually did firebomb the local Walmart last night…
Sick!!
The people talking about doing illegal shit won’t brag about doing said illegal shit, unless they’re stupid.
Firebombed Walmarts tend to make the news, though, and I haven’t been hearing about any
Because that’s a terrible waste of a protest. If you’re going to do something illegal it’s gotta be smarter than just that.
No one cares much about a firebombed walmart.
That’s lemmy as well. Tons of talk. Absolutely zero action.
But if they talk really hard maybe the green party gets 5% which would do checks notes absolutely nothing in a first-past-the-post system
Wrong! 5% of votes in green party means checks notes Democrats get 5% less votes, which secures a victory for Republicans!
It also pressures dems to lean more left. A thing we should be doing in blue states.
First and foremost, we need to spread the implementation of ranked voting in more cities. Once enough cities have ranked voting and it’s proven successful and popular, then more cities will adopt, then states, and once enough states have adopted ranked voting, we’ll have a real chance for anyone to be elected despite what party they’re aligned with. Two states use it for federal elections, and many other states have cities that use it for local elections. All states that have it banned need to have it bills constantly in circulation to get it unbanned until it finally is, then bills to constantly have it implemented.
There are a lot of issues that need fixing, but I think starting here will open the floodgates for fixing a lot of the other issues.
This seems true on the face of it, and it is definitely worth trying to get further left democrat candidates, but it seems to me that they have to believe that trying to capture said 5% won’t cause them to lose more in the process, especially if they can never “earn my vote” for much of said 5% no matter what they do.
Right. I must be tired.
I advocate both.
The fuck do you know?
Ever heard of OpSec?
If there was opsec there wouldn’t be talking about it
It’s not about keeping the action secret, it’s just about preventing the powers that be from finding out who took the actions.
If you can fire bomb a Walmart and have them not find out about it, that’s actually pretty impressive, or it was a really small fire.
at least none that could be directly related to action. which is exactly what OP was complaining about…
LMAO!!
There are discrete opportunities to firebomb walmarts and I support each instance
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.
Illusion of choice and controlled opposition.
They have delivered NOTHING since the neoliberals infected the party. They are leadership and no one will replace them. I won’t keep listing all the ways that the leadership has stated and shown how they aren’t going to fix any of this. They will just make the “Jack Smith” rematch and “that will get trump this time”!
We will watch trump (if he is still alive) either never show up or pleas the fifth. We will watch the clips and get excited for a year and a half and then, election time!
It will be narrow margins, we CAN’T have another maga in there, better keep voting blue and NOT progressives because they are “unelectable”. Better keep appealing to the right, THAT WILL DELIVER FOR THE WORKING CLASS SOMEDAY
Experts already agree that we are in fascism. Please look into how many people vote out of fascism
When in the 40 years of this will be enough for people to see?
And your solution is…?
Revolution of course. How that is accomplished is debatable and would be best if it was something like a massive general strike.
We are in a horrible place. DOGE compromised every aspect of our federal government’s information security and data infrastructure. They invaded it, infected it with their AIs, and copied it onto servers. There is no getting that back.
State governments are still effective and people can still have a voice there. Wherever we go from here, it can’t be the status quo. We are in Thomas Paine and pre-revolution times right now.
There are concentration camps right now, treason, and we are dismantling the ICC.
Incremental voting while shifting right has been as effective as believing in trickle down economics.
We need a party that shares the same basic principle as the New Deal Democrats. Neoliberals CANT be that because they abandoned the whole idea of pre distribution policies (shaping the labor market itself through minimum wages, union rights, public works, protective tariffs, and financial regulation. The neoliberal turn replaced that with “redistribution” — letting the market run its course and then compensating the losers via tax-and-transfer tools like the Earned Income Tax Credit)
That’s the principle that can get us stuff incrementally
Cool, so what have you done? And most importantly, how would voting once every 4 years for the least horrible option have hindered you substantially in all these things you’re surely doing?
Or have you done nothing? Exactly like every single big talking, privileged, selfish leftist online?
“how can voting once every four years…” Look where it led? The business owners are in charge - 2 Groups of business owners. Workers are not represented anymore and we are more right wing than every country but Israel.
Privileged and selfish? For advocating and donating to left wing causes? Educating youth in civic duties and principles? I’m a nobody but can contribute locally, but your blind loyalty to a party that has given you nothing is weird.
It’s the exact same argument as trickle down economics. Look back at the last half century, it ain’t happening
I’m not sure what their opinion is, but:
Warfare against the private property owning class that rapes children and funds genocidal imperialist wars.
Cool, how much of that have you done? And can you at least comprehend that some people with lifes worth living DON’T want to lose their life as the very first option?
I have been part of an org a while ago that was opposing military and finance support of Israel. Nothing illegal, though.
Things will change when a critical mass of people reach the point where they have nothing left to lose.
Whole bunch of people I know are literally dying. I don’t care about the comfort of the people who want uninterrupted brunch while that goes on.
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
Okay but this analogy falls apart because there have been many actual revolutions and never even a single rapture.
The contemporary USA, China, France, and many other countries’ governments were created by revolutions, it’s not even like they’re particularly rare in human history.
Ok fair, at least there’s been revolutions.
I’m just saying that’s how people are treating it. Why bother working for it when it’s inevitable? “It’ll come save us all” while ignoring the hard work and problems. Ignoring that long term permanent change is more of a result of boring, slow work.
Voting doesn’t change anything, though, it contributes to the nothing changing if you think voting does anything. The gradual change you’re talking about is organizing and building alternative systems of power so that in the future there can exist the basis of a revolution.
Cool, so you’re doing that? Do think most leftists online talking about not voting are doing that? Most importantly, how exactly does voting once every 4 years for the least bad option materially hinder those efforts you’re SURELY working on?
Voting does nothing and thinking it does something prevents people from moving beyond just voting.
The imperial core will be the last to revolt properly. Its inhabitants are too comfortable and chauvinistic to want the actual change that global equality would need. As long as the new system doesn’t radically change their view on exploitation the western left will at best achieve national socialism. The western hegemonial structures need to be crushed first if the capital R Revolution is to come. Western leftists at large have neither the power nor the intention to tear down these systems as that would mean that their own living standards would deteriorate in the short term.
“Seize the means of production!”
… but the means of production are mostly just shops, superstores, malls, shopping centers, restaurants, gyms, car dealerships, movie theatres, film equipment, data centers, offices, warehouses, vans, semi trucks, trains, planes, and airports.
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.
For being so focused on inclusion, we have an issue with purity testing for sure. Maybe people need to accept less perfect allies.
So to you, maintain the status quo and keep the masters happy so they don’t release their “retribution” on us again.
Be quiet slaves?
As opposed to what? Like, the entire point of the tweet in the picture is that you guys never actually DO stuff. More importantly, can you explain exactly how you’re materially hindered from preparing the revolution by voting for the least bad option once every 4 years?
It seems insane to me to believe you can overthrow a large ass government, but spending 4 hours once every 4 years puts it in jeopardy. That’s 0.0114% of time, 0.017% of awake time and 0.053% of the median americans free time.
Because your complacency and appeasing only made us drift to the right. Do you see where we are at?
Here is a better option for this.
You tell me: When have they Democrats ever restored a benefit/entitlement that was cut by Republicans? When have they repealed any troublesome laws? (Not counting the WWE senator flip flop game) They had the majority in 1996 and CHOSE not to do anything for us.
Even in CA, Newsome, the frontrunner for standard Dems, had all the votes for universal healthcare in his state and what did he CHOSE to not do it.
Last question, if I am so wrong, why on earth would this party struggle so hard to defeat a mentally ill, cyberpedophile that is openly committing treason?
FORTY YEARS OF YOUR WAY GOT US HERE
Do you not understand that incremental change is possible without revolution? There’s a middle ground between “maintain the status quo” and “overthrow the government.”
If you were born in this century, you haven’t ever seen evidence that Congress can actually pass legislation that makes our lives better. It used to happen, and I believe it can happen again if we can elect people who aren’t corporate shills.
There was a time when people like Mamdani weren’t the exception and political figures actively tried to make life better for all of their constituents. That should be our expectation, and anyone who doesn’t deliver should lose re-election.
INCREMENTAL CHANGE!!!
Although I’m sure we can vote better politicians, I’m also highly doubtful that we will vote better politicians. People are uncultured, uneducated, propagandized to their eyeballs and wholly unwilling to learn.
This is a real problem. US politics has turned into a team sport where “our side” and “their side” are supposed to be enemies fighting for dominance instead of working together for the common good. Voter loyalty to the political team is prized regardless of the real-life result that the team achieves. Critical thinking is actively discouraged and propaganda dictates the perception of reality.
The challenge is how we break that propaganda bubble and get people to hold their politicians to a minimum standard of actually improving the lives of their constituents.
A lot of people say they have deprogrammed their family members through a long process of good-faith discussions and targeted debunking of conspiracy theories or false reporting. Some have used chatbots to educate their loved ones or even manipulated algorithms to show fewer partisan conspiracies and more factual information.
Cults famously fall apart when their leaders die, and the leader of America’s most dangerous political cult is no spring chicken. It’s possible that the blinders will fall away pretty quickly after he’s gone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t – or shouldn’t – attempt to make progress where we can in the meantime.
This is impossible with the current leadership and they don’t change.
People aren’t going for the stupid “blue no matter who”. Mamdani and Al-Sayad have even shown that “blue no matter who” isn’t even a thing that the DNC believes in. Why do you think that is? When the DNC had a leader who wanted change and younger reps, they canned him IMMEDIATELY AIPAC funds %60 of the Dems and the Dems will ALWAYS fund Republicans to defeat progressives in elections so they can win by you blue magas
You cannot vote out of fascism it has NEVER happened and we have been couped
I am not against voting. I am against voting for Democrats (the status quo) they cannot be removed until the DNC gets rid of support for Israel and neoliberals are kicked out of the party and sent to the right where they belong.
You cannot compromise with pedophiles. You do not incrementally reduce concentration camps. You don’t incrementally make progress with fascists that are killing DNC reps in MN (when have they brought that up), threatening and intimidating ilhan Omar (of which SCHUMER HAS SADI NOTHING) .
THEY ARE NOT ON OUR SIDE
Politicians in AIPAC’s pocket count as “corporate shills” in my book.
Many of the top Democrats are bought and paid for, they don’t make people’s lives better, and people should stop voting for them.
But the place for your protest vote is in the primaries, where you actually have a better choice. In a general election where your choices are Corporate Democrat or Fascist Republican, the two are simply not interchangeable.
People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because “both sides are the same” have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years.
“People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because “both sides are the same” have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years.”
That’s the biggest lie of all. You centrists have been shitting on the left and APPEASING the monsters that got us here now. THAT is why political discourse and policy has shifted farther and farther right.
No? Why would you assume that’s what I’m about? What a weird leap.
If you think voting is useless, I gotta ask then why do so many politicians try to surpress it?
That’s what makes it useless
As a black person, if voting is useless, then why did Jim Crow era South come up with millions of ways to stop Black people from voting? Why do d still have systems set in place to make voting for minorities harder, like laws about former felons not being able to vote?
If you’re a minority (race and gender, fuck even poor white men) your ancestors didn’t fight and die for voting rights just for you to sit here and go “oh it doesn’t really do anything”
Politicians and Russian bots.
Teaching the population learned helplessness.
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.
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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?
Edit: I’ll assume by the response that it’s “yes, I can forgive 2016 they didn’t know” types. Look up the deficit by administration, or incarceration rates.
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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.
Electing the ones who opt not to use ICE the way Trump uses ICE is an example of harm reduction. It doesn’t mean Democrats solve all problems; that’s literally the reason the term “harm reduction” is used - to distinguish it from optimal solutions, while still acknowledging its superiority over the alternative.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
They love to go on about the French Revolution, yet never acknowledge that it immediately led to dictatorship.
And a bunch of dead people. Something tells me the terminally online leftists won’t actually be in the frontlines risking their lifes. Exactly like they aren’t risking their lifes, but the minoritized peoples every time they get off on accelerationist fantasies.
Kinda seems like leftists spend a LOT of time thinking about how to avoid counter-revolutions but whatever
Kinda seems like leftists spend a LOT of time thinking
This part comes across very clearly… seems there’s no time for anything that would follow though.
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
Haha, the paid trolls are much more convincing and I’ve noticed a lot more sophisticated propaganda on the fediverse. Regular Bots are probably in higher abundance on meta and Reddit and other big tech social media platforms.
That person probably voted, if they could.
That’s been my experience, except for any concessions.
