Eh. I've spoken to a lot of women that don't feel safe here in Texas. They don't have the money to leave, and with the governor pardoning rapists and racist murderers, they are afraid of the future here. They are afraid of being raped and being forced to carry, which is absolutely what rightists want.
They have also asked me who I'm voting for. And if saying I'm voting for Dems makes those in my life and around me feel safer, then I will do that, and I won't lie to women and fem people. Telling them about socialism, revolutionary politics, imperialism will not help them feel safer or better. It's so shitty here in Texas, that basic survival instincts are what people worry about. Me and so many of my friends have been catcalled or threatened with sexual violence here.
Voting is the liberal bandaid, they think it will fix everything. It won't, voting will not stop imperialism, it won't stop genocide it won't even stop homelessness or inflation lol. But will it slow the progression of fascist policies and maybe give people the chance to learn about actual leftism? It might. And that's all a lot of people can hope for.
Vote against gross rightist policies, and in the meantime get organized, form a union, talk to your coworkers about how you need to be earning more, form community with people outside of the corpo entertainment sphere. There is so much work to do in the US for there to be an actual leftist movement, frankly we are so far behind and need to start doing shit now.
I might get shit for this, but in Wisconsin having a Dem governor has absolutely slowed down the deluge of fascist bullshit we've been putting up with for the past decade and a half. I can't imagine how much worse things would be if Walker was still in power.
You can't legally be fired for discussing wages. And if you don't think you can form a union/join an existing one, there are plenty of leftist organizations that you are probably local to, that you can join. Something, anything is better than nothing. We have to foster true community, and organize before we can even hope and dream for something getting better.
Does anyone actually say "rightist"? Sounds like some "oh yeah, if we're leftists, then YOU'RE RIGHTISTS!! HAHA THE PEN IS MIGHTER THAN THE SWORD MLADY!!"
As a 40 year old voter I can say things have changed. Gay people can get married. They couldn’t when I was younger. I was about to lose my healthcare at work during Bush but it hasn’t been a concern since.
Also activists spent decades making huge sacrifices fighting for LGBTQ rights only for homophobic Democrat politicians like Hilldawg to come along and take all of the credit.
I have to guess they had a pre-existing condition or were self employed or something under bush, and don't consider "you could get fired or go into huge medical debt at any moment" a concern (they should)
Gay people getting married was pushed through by an unelected body that is appointed, and if the civility libs are to be believed, apolitical (lmao)
The majority of people in the US don’t have healthcare or are undercovered or are spending a huge portion of their income on it. The US has the worst healthcare system in the developed world, brought to you by the wonders of voooooting.
Voting he also brought us such wonderful things as endless wars and constant genocide. Very cool! Glad you can turn your brain off and ignore your elected representatives doing those things in your name but I cannot
I was about to lose my healthcare at work during Bush but it hasn’t been a concern since.
so what, you think things are good now?
If I want health insurance it's going to be like 1/5th of my fucking pay. I would qualify for subsidies under the ACA, but guess what? my workplace offering insurance means I don't qualify. Even though I have to fucking pay for that insurance
No. I’m doing decent. I’m pretty good at saving money so I have a pretty decent sized emergency fund. Plus the company I subcontract to would hire me if the OG company gets taken out somehow. Which it’s not.
Gay people can get married because queer people agitated for that right for decades, and they finally got influential enough that they could not be ignored. It had nothing to do with who was in power. It wasn't because they voooted. The people who were in power were against gay marriage until the conditions demanded that they weren't.
Had the people in power not pivoted then agitation would have escalated until someone else got into power and pivoted.
no one voted on approving gay marriage; it became legal because of decision from the the supreme court that invalidated doma.
the closes thing that makes your statement true is the respect for marriage act; which came 8 years after doma was invalidated and whose only real power is to give anti-gay bigots legal protections, since the supreme court already decided against anti-gay marriage laws.
The blue guy won and we still got genocide. Now we get to pick between the red guy who will continue to genocide Palestinians or the blue chick who will continue to genocide Palestinians. Really great system we've got here
The whole point is most people don't do both, they likely do neither and maybe vote (which doesn't matter because it's largely just spectacle anyway).
The bourgeois electoral process is a mechanism for dissipating political momentum. It's the buffer between the masses and the elites. Picture a monarchist system on the verge of revolt, and the bankers funding the king come out and give a concession allowing the peasants to choose one of two new kings (both of whom have to go through an arbitrarily complicated selection process to ensure they aren't going to lessen the bankers' power and wealth). Some of the peasants might see through the ruse, but it only has to trick just enough of them to shift the balance of power back to the state apparatus.
The goal of leftists here isn't to get people not to vote, it's to help people see through the illusion, hoping to reach a critical mass that can affect material change. Historically, these critical masses are what forced puppet kings to give concessions. But history is rewritten to switch the causality, erasing activists and bestowing all credit on supposed great men.
I care more about your hair color or what you ate for breakfast than whether you vote and for whom. We need to see beyond the symbols and images and interact with the mechanisms they obscure.
Here's the thing. Anyone who thinks voting matters is also a civility fetishizing liberal who abhors violence to the 100000th power. Here in the real world, actual change that has benefited working people has onlyever come through either explicit violence wrought on their behalf, or by the threat of it. People didn't get the 8 hour workday because they VOTED for it, they got it because enough pissed off, armed workers scared enough of the owning class that they felt compelled to pass it. 1850-1940s America was nearly a hundred fucking years of low-scale civil warfare and tbh if American workers didn't get so fat off post-war prosperity it'd still be going. But they did and because this shit isn't taught in our schools our country is filled with ignorant chuds who want to take us back to the stone ages and ignorant shit-libs who would gladly let them if the alternative meant violence.
So if you’re not going to vote then you’re going to go do violence? How much actual change have you produced from not voting? You see much benefit to working people from complaining online?
If you never withhold your vote than you have lost all leverage. Even in the logic of the stupid voting game always voting blue is a big fat L. If you are a reliable voting bloc, you will never get jack shit
A no-vote is a vote of no confidence in the system. I'll continue to vote in every presidential election, and it would be better if non-voters would instead vote for a third party like Green, PSL, or even whatever Cornell West is doing now. But i no longer blame anyone for not voting.
In peripheral nations outside the core is the only time where voting actually could lead to improvements, since there are segments of the national bourgeois who stand to gain from de-colonizing, so it's possible to form a short-term coalition with them. In the core nations is where voting is pointless. The only nations to ever vote in socialism via the ballot box have been "third world" countries.
I don't get the point. So instead of voting, we should hope for some lovely dictator that takes power and hope everyone in country loves that person? What′s the alternative? Just because change of government doesn't magically fix all the problems does not mean you should not vote.
you're going to be voting in "the most important election of our lives, we have to stop fascism" between a Democrat and a Republican whose actual policies and outcomes from governance are essentially identical right up until you're dead
Also every election for the rest of our lives is going to be "the most important election of our lives" because the Democrats only have like two tricks
The way hexbear kink shames voting is really fucked up. I know enlightened people like us just absolutely get to go hogwild during voting season. I mean, I'm an absolute menace in that voting booth, just crankin' my hog like there is no tomorrow. I think I make all the poll workers uncomfortable as I'm desperately screaming "ohh fUuucCk! I think I'm gonna VOOOOT!"