• 2 Posts
  • 236 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • advocating for voting in genocidal right wingers

    I am advocating for using your vote to reduce human cost as much as possible. What that means depends on the context.

    If you’re in America, the decision right now is between one genocide, two genocides, or refusing to have an impact on that decision with how impossible the system is for third parties. One less genocide is the least bad option, unless you have a better one.

    If you’re in New Zealand (where I live, so I’m more familiar with the politics here than anywhere else), there are multiple options because of MMP voting. That means I won’t be advocating for voting in genocidal right wingers.

    citation needed

    Labour coalitions have historically been the governments that have had the best impact on workers rights. At least far more than national coalitions.

    Also, don’t think I’m saying you should vote for labour next year. Labour is shit, vote for someone better




  • OK maybe I read that wrong. The way I interpreted it, I read “electoralism” as using voting as a primary tool. Using that definition, I agree with that paragraph. Voting alone is nowhere near enough to produce real change.

    But if the definition of “electoralism” is using voting in addition to direct action, I don’t think that paragraph gives much reasoning behind itself. It’s a good statement, but it needs more backing it up


  • Mate, I read the whole thing. The only claim I saw as to why voting is counter productive is that “voting convinces people that they’ve done all they need to” idea, which I think is flawed. All the other arguments are talking about voting having low impact and it can’t fundamentally change things.

    Please, if there is another part that I missed, tell me what it is, whether that’s something backing up the complacency claim or another claim entirely. I’d love to be proven wrong here.


  • Nowhere in that does it really explain why voting is counter productive. Voting is a tool, and a very cheap one. It only costs at most an hour once every 3 years and requiring knowledge of current events and politics, which is stuff you will know about anyway if you’re involved in any kind of direct action.

    The only potential argument there is the psychological one, where people are lead to think voting is enough to do their part, but I don’t think that’s a strong enough argument to pass up choosing your opposition. As shit as Labour is, National and Act are worse, and by any logic other than accellerationism (which is a terrible idea of you care about the human cost), Labour will make fighting capitalism that little bit easier.

    I understand not running for office. That article gives good reasons that actually joining politics is a wasted effort. It takes a lot of time and money, and almost always ends up making people slide towards the “reasonable politician”, not the radical that they promised to be.






  • It’s also in large part Trump’s fault that any attention is on the files. He was the one pushing the conspiracy theory, and running on the promise of releasing them. So anyone who’s name is in the files can blame Trump for them not getting away with it.

    I don’t like that line of logic, but it works out