It seems more like keeping people voting is one of the many ways the status quo pretends to have some legitimacy.
It seems more like keeping people voting is one of the many ways the status quo pretends to have some legitimacy.
It is hilarious that liberals have actually appropriated the rhetoric that saying "actually, both sides are wrong" ends up favouring the "evil" side, but they continue to apply this maxim to the USSR and Nazi Germany. An inability to realize that what makes this maxim ridiculous, in the latter case, is that, in fact, it was the Soviet Union that ended fascist barbarism, while the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are two cogs in the same bellicose, anti-democratic, imperialist machine. As long as the choice is reduced to "blue vs. red" (a fake contradiction), the freedom of the human race will remain, at best, a distant dream.
But perhaps what irritates me the most is the overly pedantic use of Jim and Pam memes.
It has always been a con game, the elite cannot have their power voted away.
When it seems that's about to happen they make a 11/09 (the Allende one)
They love memes where a character just points to a sign with their opinion on it, how low effort. Little ableism for flavor too.
what bothers me a lot about libs is that they get weirdly fixated with a single technical or wonk method of "fixing the system" as if ranked choice voting is this grand innovation that will save democracy
And how the fuck do they even think it's going to happen? As if the entrenched political duopoly is going to allow any meaningful reform of itself. The reason we don't have politicians getting assassinated all the time is because nobody's even allowed to become a serious enough threat to the status quo.
I was this kind of liberal back in like 2015, and my reasoning was, in retrospect, essentially entirely predicated on the assumption that Western countries were logical and meritocratic, and so reforms to the FPTP system would be accepted so long as we could demonstrate its superiority. As if the problem was just that politicians needed to be convinced to introduce a better voting system because ranked choice was wrongfully seen as too complicated or something. Luckily I never became a Ranked Choice Guy™, I was still largely apolitical at that point, but the idea of it sounded good and reasonable and common sense so why not believe it.
It later sunk in that no, actually, the system is specifically designed to work this way and the uninspiring candidates and endless broken promises were a feature, not a bug. Also, Australia having mandatory voting and it not meaningfully producing better results was a pretty big point against that whole theory, leading me down the "okay, so we also have to change everybody's mind and convince them to vote for good candidates, surely the powers that be would not oppose better political education so people don't vote for conservative parties that don't benefit them" ideological cul-de-sac until I realized that that's liberal nonsense and transitioned to a socialist and then communist outlook.
I love your username
Oh, I definitely have a problem.
And, yeah, I feel like I'm really sick of Office memes and the show generally. I think I was just oversaturated with it. I watched it too many times and, unlike other shows, it's such a particularly sickening setting (toxic workplace) that I literally get a little nauseous listening to the opening.
The best use of this format.
There are so many layers too. Once you realize that voting will never change the status quo, you can vote on primary elections that will never change the status quo, campaign for better politicians that will never change the status quo, join peaceful protests that will never change the status quo, canvas for activist causes that will never change the status quo, or check out and stop participating in the political system, also never changing the status quo.
A dedicated person can sink a lifetime of effort into all of the socially recommended options for causing change, and never do anything that can cause change.
I'll join in with the real criticism but first I want to say that the Lemmy meme itself is just garbage. It wouldn't even have been funny or appealing back when the Jim template was new.
Okay so Western liberals, who are largely incoherent and confused people, are manipulated into following this line. It's not some organic realization of the liberal ideology that voting is inherently good. There have been many liberal projects that gladly attacked voting and voting access, such as the United States liberals for most of their existence. They restricted it to white landowners at first and wrote about it like it as a duty, like a burden that must be taken on by good, self-sacrificing landlord men.
The idea of just voting as an inherent good that means the Bad Guys lose is a product of data-driven political campaigning that follows the exact line of thought as this meme. Democrats figured out that they did better if they could get people on the fence about voting to turn out, that that particular demographic was favorable to them. So they started including it in their campaign strategies, pushing "neutral" campaigns to just vote, not even for any particular thing or person. They pushed it through their usual channels in the media and various PR groups until it caught on as a way to be positive about allegedly important political issues without actually taking an explicit position on them. Republicans figured out the same thing and acted in the opposite direction, always pushing to implement voting hurdles for the demographics that are less helpful for their own campaigns.
The real problem here is the flattening of politics that you mention. These are liberals being led around by PR campaigns and deeply cynical campaign strategists that tell them politics is only how you personally cast a ballot for Red vs. Blue and that your way of wielding power is to do as you're told for Blue. The idea that they should organize to make demands themselves is against the PR and campaign strategists' interests of getting these propagandized people to tick the box for the candidates they are pushing and so they offer many rationalizations for why you should not organize to demand more, not withhold your vote, think beyond one election at a time, or, oh deary me, operate outside of the confines of bourgeois electoralism to flex political muscle. They have no theory of power or achieving goals beyond this lazy goading from on high.
On the plus side, this stuff is so stupid that we can easily provide correct framings and provide off-ramps for these incoherent liberals. Go ahead and let them vote, it literally doesn't matter if they do something as an individual. But teach them the limits of bourgeois democracy, the distance that always exists between what is necessary for liberation and what is actually on offer by capitalist parties, teach them socialist theory. Get them to come to a meeting with your org. This is our actual burden as socialists: to become sufficiently educated to cut through false liberal talking points and redirect discussion to correct thinking and collective action.
Precisely been my take. The way people so passionately argue about voting is infuriating; Yes, it might matter on a tiny scale, but the plane's going down and we're arguing about which drinks steward has the more polite rhetoric - There are infinitely more important things to passionately argue about.
Give people a vote to pretend they have a tiny bit of power and it's wielded as an excuse to never attempt to change or do anything ever.
My go-to site to see what the libs are up has shifted from Reddit to Bluesky. I think a lot of the people consider themselves progressive but they have a mortgage which makes the situation different from my time at with Redditors. The Bluesky people I follow and I think most progressives on the site were all very disturbed, disgusted, and angered by this: Hundreds of police have sexually abused kids. How do they avoid prison time? - Washington Post
I think we'd define the average Bluesky progressive as a centrist. None of the posts I saw even mentioned in passing what could be done about the police. No mention of defunding the police. No mention of police reform. No mention of BLM or the BLM protests. No mention of voting for candidates that might actually do something about it. No mention of anything.
An already huge number of people is blocking me: ~160. That's crazy considering I've only been on the site 4 months and I only have ~90 followers. I assume it's very easy to get defined as a leftist reply guy just for being critical of the dems. Mostly all I've done is mention my democratic bugbear which is the verb "do". Okay, I admit it. I want the dems to do something.
I decided to stop commenting about such things to them. That includes me talking about Kathy Hochul. I don't want to hear 1,001 excuses and rationalizations about how nothing can be done about shitty dem pols like her because the dems have a lock on their voting base.
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Edit
They are having a lot of fun dunking on her. But I wonder how many them would even dream of voting for a leftist candidate.
https://subium.com/profile/jimmyjazz1968.bsky.social/post/3kutnshqe3c2a
i started being skeptical with libs when i studied revolutionary politics and suddenly became a propagandist russian bot or whatever. "everything i disagree with is propaganda" is such a bad take
i guess those people must be really comfortable with the current status quo.