I honestly have no idea why anyone here on a visa would still be here at this point. I get that it's not easy to uproot your life on a dime, but also, it's not that easy to go to a modern Gulag with no hope of release or due process, either.
Lesser evil when Kamala Harris: NO WAY JO SE, I will never cosign a genocide
Lesser evil when China: Well see the thing you have to remember is
Haha yeah I am super exotic traveler, clearly
Here's a dbzer0 admin being super condescending about how important it is not to vote, and saying that voting will "legitimize" a whole bunch of stuff they don't want, and anyway there's no particular difference between Kamala Harris and Trump, so why bother? After all, he's doing what really matters for societal change in the US: Making and running FOSS. You can expand out the whole conversation and read it, the dude is out of his goddamned mind on this topic and for some reason absolutely convinced that everyone needs to receive his wisdom. It honestly reminds me of talking to a teenager, or a MAGA person about vaccines, or something.
Here's a huge thread with a bunch of people weighing in, on the topic of whether or not "electoralism" should be permitted on a political post in an anarchism forum. Pretty much all the Lemmy mods and admins involved opined that it should not.
So yes, it's common on Lemmy to see people advocate for not voting and that being the extent of your involvement with the official political process. And, they sometimes go further into apparently claiming that that should be the extent of your entire political involvement, or that people should be banned for saying otherwise. We've been talking in this thread about "protest voters," so presumably the concept is also known within the real world, but I was mainly talking about people giving their opinions on Lemmy, and on Lemmy it is very common.
And look, the Democratic primary produced an actual wildly popular candidate.
Personally I think STAR is better than RCV, but I do think the correlation between RCV primary and great outcome is notable.
As to why people don’t tend to advocate so much about electoral form? (Personally I would love to see multi member districts with single transferable votes). Simply because the same establishment centrists politicians who are currently rallying against mamdani, would torpedo it and claim it was impossible
So voting for Cornel West for president was something we heard all the fucking time this past election because, unlike RCV which was on the ballot in half a dozen states, it was totally possible.
Got it.
Getting corporate backed moderate centrists out of party leadership is a prerequisite for electoral reform.
Absolutely agree.
And the only way to get the middlemen of the party to oust them is to make it clear that they will lose elections if they keep towing the moderate centrist line
There's quite a bit of history of this, from George McGovern to Al Gore to Kamala Harris. Has it worked yet? How much longer do you think we should give it?
Edit: Actually, maybe that last part is incomplete. I do think that unfucking the centrism of the Democrats in general is an urgent priority, and stuff like "uncommitted" does have a strong potential to knock some sense into them. The thing about that though is that it is visible and organized. Mostly what I am criticizing here is this whole strategy of just not voting, and hoping that that alone and nothing else will eventually motivate these corrupted people to suddenly abandon their campaign donors and embrace the actual left, all of a sudden, and it'll happen in time so that no horrifying damage happens in the meantime while Trump is in office. The whole political machine of American politics has been wildly out of step with the actual American people since at least 1992 or so, and I see no reason that people being less involved in politics will make that any better.
I think it takes a lot more than voting alone, or not voting alone. But mostly what people on Lemmy seem to advocate, as far as I can tell, is just staying home and doing nothing, to "teach the Democrats a lesson" or because they haven't gotten good enough on their own yet, or something, thinking that eventually a better politics will fall from the sky and we'll be able to vote for it. I don't think things work that way.
Ctrl-F "dead fish" if you want my response to this line of argument
That whoever the Democratic candidate, there is an obligation for supporters of left wing and progressive candidates to support, in turn, a centrists candidate who wins the primary.
You know what else has been a consistent backdrop? The pretense that "Trump is going to literally kill motherfuckers on a pretty massive scale, so we need to vote for a dead fish, if that is the alternative in the general election" is some kind of smarmy DNC plot or a trick or "obligation." No, it was the reality, and y'all (the voters) fucked it up, and here we are.
Better than that would be some kind of election reform so that progressive voters wouldn't have to support some centrist dickhead who won the primary or else get The Joker as mayor, or whatever, but I have noticed that the consistent drumbeat of "Don't vote for Democrats! It's a trick!" on Lemmy is far louder than any voice of reform along those lines. Wonder why.
So the question here is, if the left wing and progressives are obligated to support a centrist candidate when they win the primary, how come it’s okay for a centrist to loose the primary and not only not throw their support behind the winner, but to go out and run as an independent?
Pretty sure I'm in 100% agreement with you on this side of it, since I posted this article and all. I talked elsewhere in the comments about some of the reasons why I think it is so.
One of the best meals I have ever had in my life was some ceviche from a little hole in the wall place in Honolulu. Never had tiradito but I assume it is top tier.
Yeah. I think most of the issue is that when things get easy, people turn complacent, and the rot comes in. But having it connected in some theoretical sense to people's coworkers (and in particular having their politics-people fighting for their economic rights against a clear villain on a day-to-day basis, instead of just jetting around Washington doing God knows what) does seem like a baseline improvement.
Also, Things are about to get super fucking hard and probably stay that way for quite a while, so we definitely won't have that complacency problem going forward.
Yes, and then someone quizzed him for more details, and it turns out that that meant "setting up a mutual aid sublemmy, running an anarchist Lemmy instance, helping my fellow humans create AI art through a shared network." Nothing that was going to do a fucking thing to prevent the horror that's happening in Gaza, CECOT, nothing for working people, he just runs a fucking web site and claims credit for that as his political contribution.
(Edit: I really cannot overstate how disgusted I am with this point of view. You know what some of the politicians were doing while he was running his FOSS? They went down to El Salvador and met with Garcia, talked with lawyers, put themselves at some personal risk to fight for someone who needed it, and now everyone's out of CECOT because they took some fucking direct action. It's not an either or. You can like democracy and direct action both. Fuck man. FOSS is great. Running Lemmy instances is great. But don't fucking confuse that with what is going to get us out of this horror and into a better state.)
I run some web sites too, some are even oriented towards helping people get access to information because I do agree with him that that stuff is important. I would never dream of claiming credit for those things as super-superior things that are producing some kind of societal good, and talk down to someone who is claiming some other way of influencing the world and telling them not to do the things they're doing, because my way is better. That's why I say he sounds like a teenager. The whole thing is fucking insane.
Oh, pardon me, Corporal. I didn't realize he was doing all kinds of vital political activism and just couldn't talk about it, for reasons of mission security.
It would have been perfectly fine for him to say, "I don't really want to talk about my IRL activities, but yes, I do work hard at making a difference in ways that I think are a lot more important than periodically voting." If he'd said that, I wouldn't have needed to bring up this one as an example. It was specifically the fact that he was real aggressive about not voting being virtuous, while holding up his own more-or-less-nothing level of activism as what he needed to get credit for instead, that made me bring it up.
And a whole bunch of people including several anarchists went "what the fuck, yeah that's messed up, it is very un-anarchist to start to police what people can and can't say because a lot of people are issuing wrongthink and we need to correct that." I was far from the only person that got banned.
Also, the person who banned me was doing heavy electoral promotion of one side of the political election. I talk about it in one of those comments (maybe search for "profile" to find it). They were actually doing what you are claiming here that I was doing.
Anyway, the main point was, you asked me for examples. Here are my examples. If you don't like them, then okay.