this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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Idk, if given the choice between 50 death camps or 51 death camps, it would be pretty fucked up to choose 51.
If you're stuck in a system that only gives you the options of 50 death camps or 51 and you don't work towards building an alternative system. Then you're just evil lite.
Precisely. That's why you need to think more broadly. So you don't become evil and pretend it's OK.
Nobody is pretending it is okay.
But pretending like refusing to vote is morally superior than actively preventing the extra death camp is not.
No one is advocating refusing to vote. The post is explicitly stating that voting isn't helping. It's time to try something new
There are absolutely lots of people advocating refusing to vote. You can argue that OP isn't one of those people, but there are entire instances filled with people saying exactly that.
There are, but they have a very specific reason. And that reason is to discipline the party. That theory of action is pretty solid, but it's not what is being said here what's being said is that voting is impotent. You can vote all you want. You're pissing in the wind.
Nah, that theory of action is dogshit. A smattering of indignant leftists isn't going to discipline the party. Especially when the mechanism of action is... not doing something. That course of action is, in a disciplinary sense, indistinguishable from just being lazy or apathetic. It's not praxis, and it doesn't encourage praxis. 0/5 stars, terrible political action.
Voting isn't impotent. It's very weak, but it isn't impotent. It nudges things slightly, which isn't nothing.
It clearly doesn't, as the Overton window has been sliding right for decades.
As for disciplining the party, you clearly think that if the Republicans lost they would be moved. Why do you think that if the Democrats win on a right-wing platform they'll be nudged to the left instead of learning the lesson that they win more if they slide to the right?
Yes, sliding, as opposed to speeding. That is something.
Where did you get that idea? I'm just saying your strategy doesn't work.
This is the meme. You're doing the meme. You are convincing yourself that sliding into fascism at our current rate is better than sliding into fascism at a hypothetical faster rate. That's the meme.
My strategy clearly works - civil rights happened because of riots, women's sufferage happened because of radical disobedience, labor rights happened because of literal paramilitary skirmishes, the 7 working class revolutions around the world unseated the ruling class through violence. It works. Hell, the American revolution happened this way.
So what if it's the meme? It's true.
And no, not voting and political demonstration are not the same thing. You can vote for lesser evil to slow fascism in the government while also using other means to facilitate change. They are not mutually exclusive strategies, they are complementary. Refusing to vote has never made a difference, it's a bad strategy.
Again, no on is talking about refusing to vote. We're talking about not spending all of our energy carrying water for fascist collaborators and calling it harm reduction.
You falling for the Good Cop / Bad Cop routine is not harm reduction.
We discussed this already. Yes, they are, and you claimed they had a good reason. It is in fact a terrible reason.
No one is talking about "spending all of our energy carrying water for fascist collaborators". If you don't have the energy to do more than one thing at a time, that's a you problem.
We as a society don't have the time to go door knocking for fascist collaborators who have not only done nothing to stop fascism but have actively created and supported the systems for it. You do not, in fact, need to go campaigning for Democrats with Tottenkopfs on their chest or who were attorneys general and had no problem enforcing the racist police system of the largest prison-industrial complex in the world. You can, in fact, just ignore those people and focus on things that actually get results
Terrible strategy. Do both. There is nothing to gain by not using every tool at our disposal.
Every fascist collaborator you spend labor on only brings us closer to fascism.
And every overt fascist you don't vote against brings us closer to fascism and faster. I don't know why this concept is so difficult to understand.
Because it's just not true.
You keep saying that without any reasoning or evidence. You're just bringing up other unrelated actions. You're wrong, learn from it and adapt as a person. Repeating a lie over and over doesn't change the reality.
You're hilarious. agamemnon, you are making the claim for which there is no evidence. You are the one saying that voting and particularly voting for genocidal war criminal administrators of empire somehow slows fascism down.
Obama shows us that is fundamentally not the case. Trump's entire operational and bureaucratic basis for deploying ICE into cities was created by Obama and Biden. Tom Homan, Trump's main deportation guy, was appointed by Obama and was Obama's main deportation guy. Trump is able to do what he's doing literally because we voted in Obama and Biden.
And after Trump showed us what he and his team would do in Term 1, we voted in Biden and what happened? The Supreme Court gave the president total immunity to anything while in office. Biden decided to do literally nothing to stop Trump coming back to power. He had the Epstein files. He had the same witnesses. He had the immunity. He did nothing. He did worse than nothing, he refused to give Harris the time she needed to run an actual campaign, deliberately driving a nail into the coffin of that absolute shitshow of a campaign. And Biden was a KNOWN fascist. From th Crime Bill to his full-throated support for Israel and their genocide of the Palestinians. He was a fascist, and he oversaw a genocide. It never slowed down.
You're relying on some counterfactual that if we hadn't have had that Biden term it would have been worse, or if we hadn't had those Obama terms, it would have been worse, but there's no way to validate those claims, and all th evidence is that they actively support the trajectory and they completely abandon any responsibility to slow it down or stop it.
Trump: did a bunch of terrible shit
Biden: did nothing
Trump: doing a bunch of terrible ahit
If you can't see how "doing nothing" is preferable to "doing a bunch of terrible shit" then we're at an impasse here.
I'd rather have a donkey trying to pull against me than an elephant. If you can't understand that, you're lost.
Stop viewing the world in imaginary binaries. You can do more than one thing.
Two things can be true at the same time. Biden can "do nothing" and also Biden can support Trump. That's what doing nothing was. You have problem saying that if I don't vote for Harris than it's equivalent to voting for Trump. But you're not willing to say that Biden doing nothing to stop Trump is equivalent to supporting Trump.
Stop believing fairy tales created by white slave owning European colonists who wanted to make sure the masses wouldn't revolt and also that their vote would never really have an impact on their power.
You could not be more wrong. Factually, morally, tactically, strategically, you are wrong along every axis in every dimension of existence.
We can work together by standing together and voting our common interests or we can lose the country.
We should be supporting primary challengers for every Republican. Those moderate, DNC types? We should fund one in every goddamn red district in America.
There are more of us than there are of them. Instead of bitching about voting not mattering, make it fucking matter. Take over the Republican Party. Your local party has a couple thousand voters behind them. That's it. You can't find a couple thousand neighbors who think corruption is bad and kid-fucking is deplorable?
TRY HARDER FOR FUCK'S SAKE. STOP WHINING AND START WINNING.
Oh man if only we got organized and raised a ton of money and got a whole bunch of people connected via a whole communication and logistics and education capability suite. We could even celebrate together when we did it. We could throw a party. Hey. That's what we'll call it, we'll call it a party.
And since it's about voting, and saving democracy, we can call it, The Democratic Party!
This is great. It obviously won't happen overnight, but if we organize our new party, The Democratic Party, we could take that strategy you have and start winning. The leaders of the party will need to be people who understand this, but I mean, of course they would understand it, who wouldn't understand that we have to save democracy or lose it, and that it's not hard we just need to get a few thousand people in each district to overwhelm our opponents with votes.
No, this is great. I love this idea. Let's build...
Wait, there's already something called The Democratic Party? They already oppose the fascist Republicans? They already have a huge operation that's been around for a century? And they have a shit ton of money flowing into them constantly?
So then What the fuck is going on? Why are we in this situation? Are they just that bad at their jobs? Well then we should stop putting our effort behind them and start a new party! Wait, what? That just means the fascists will win? But you just said the Democrats have been around this whole time and the fascists are winning... Oh it's our fault for not voting correctly?
PROPAGANDA is what happened, you dumb fuck.
Republicans bought the airwaves. First they bought AM radio. Then local FM radio. Then local TV news. Then Fox News. Then they bought CNN, CBS etc. They bought all the social media companies. The Fascist Party literally controls all the information for more than half of the country.
That's how they "win."
Has fuckall to do with what the Democratic Party does or does not do.
And you'd already know that if you weren't just an asshole supporting the far-right while pretending to be a leftist rebel.
And voting helps this how?
There are people in this very thread, and other parts of the fediverse, who are only here to attack those that point out it's not okay while they actively pretend it's okay.