Not spicy. Everyone knows nuclear power is lemon-lime flavored.

“I know, I know, but it was this or we’d have to stop bombing brown people and tell the poors we’d give them food. It was the politically responsible thing to do.”

There’s a philosophical and a practical side to this:

Philosophically, the core of a democratic system is the peaceful transition of power. The idea that you won’t just try to force your will over people with violence and will respect the will of the populace. This is a fine principle in a proper democracy with a fair process and political outcomes that fall within acceptable ranges. If you wanted more money for the trains and someone else wanted more money for the busses, that’s a disagreement you can live with. And if the voting system is set up so you had equal chances both to introduce topics/candidates and vote on them, then great. By accepting the election and not trying to go outside the system to get your way, you keep the peace and allow for that process to be a viable vehicle for change.

If this is a requirement for democracy, then the converse is that if a system isn’t fair and produces unacceptable results (eg, Nazis and genocide), participating in it merely legitimizes it. Obviously nothing physically stops you from organizing, but symbolically you’ve shown that you view the system as the sole legitimate way to exert political power and garner authority. And people will then turn around and say you should vote instead of doing xyz actions. “I don’t agree with your methods.”

On the practical side of this: people put a lot of time, energy, and political capital into supporting candidates in these elections. It eats up the public bandwidth, crowding out other forms of political participation. In addition, once someone works hard to get their candidate elected, there is an impulse, an incentive, to defend them. The people who said to suck it up, vote for Biden, then push him to the left turned around and chastised leftists for protesting over things like the continued anti-immigration policies or the support for Israel’s genocide. US electoral politics is a team sport. People get psychologically invested in their team. They don’t like it when you criticize their team. This makes them resistant to change even on policies they nominally support. I think encouraging people to maintain that emotional investment in elections is harmful. It hinders organizing efforts. It hurts attempts to build class consciousness because it gets people to think about their fellow workers as the enemy and capitalists as potential allies. And the corresponding obsession with 24 hour news cycles turns politics into a TV show. Trying to talk to libs about any history older than like a week ago or maybe at most a presidential term is impossible. If it wasn’t on their favorite TV show it doesn’t exist.

We need to be drawing people’s attention to actual types of political participation. Elections don’t just distract from that, they make people think they’re doing the right thing. It’s a release.

All that said, that’s not to say there’s never value in any part of the electoral system, it’s just very limited. Bernie’s attempts at running were part of what got me more engaged in politics and shifted me from being a progressive-ish lib to being more of a socialist. Important to that though was not just the policy platform, but the structure and messaging of the campaign promoted the importance of mass political participation. I ended up meeting some local socialist groups in the process of going to campaign volunteering. However, most of the time and energy still went into the election only for the system to block us at the end and Bernie to give in. Tons of hours of volunteer time went into doing little more than getting people to sign ballot petitions. We weren’t getting those people into a union or a mutual aid group or anything. We basically just tossed our energy into the void.

For me: Voting represents support for both the process and the government that results from that process. By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power. Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.

Some obvious problems with that: What if the process itself isn’t fair in the first place? We don’t really get to choose our leaders. We get presented with a set of options which are acceptable to capitalists and are asked our opinion on which we like more. You could write multiple books on the ways the US electoral process has been structured to disenfranchise people and reduce the impact they can have on their government, but fundamentally it comes down to the fact that the government doesn’t represent people and that’s a feature, not a bug.

So we end up with a pair of awful candidates who both have done and will do more awful shit. If the election randomly fell out of the sky without context, sure, you could argue about one being technically better than the other. But it didn’t. It’s this way for a reason. It’s this way because people are willing to cede their expression of political power to it despite the fact that it’s clearly unaccountable to them.

Voting is just supporting the system that’s deprived us of any real democracy while normalizing fascism to protect itself. Voting is a fairly low information form of political expression. You don’t get the choice to be like “Oh I’ll begrudgingly support this candidate, but this this and that are things I don’t like and want them to change.” You get two boxes. Each one represents EVERYTHING the candidate stands for plus the implicit choice of accepting the process in the first place.

If people want things to get better, they have to organize and take real, tangible actions rather than just begging capitalist politicians to do stuff for us every 2-4 years. People should be doing this regardless of who’s in office, but let’s put a fine point on it: People are worried that Trump is gonna be fascist, take away people’s rights, and end democracy. Are you just going to accept that because he won the election? Are the rules that bind the process more important to you than the results? If not, you should be willing to do what it takes to stop him instead of chastising that people didn’t show up to participate in a sham of an electoral system.

For what it’s worth, I actually did go to the polls to vote specifically on an equal rights ballot measure in NY. At least that has a semblance of direct democracy. There I’m explicitly saying “I support this policy specifically” instead of supporting a candidate who just says they support those things while also doing awful shit. It passed, so that’s nice. If anything I’m more pissed at Californians for voting against a measure to END SLAVERY than I am with people who didn’t want to vote for a person currently engaged in supporting a genocide.

Oh so the turnout last time was 100%? I guess someone should go fix the data then.

By “popular vote,” you mean the % of people who voted. I’m talking about the country overall. Which includes people who didn’t get off work, have a handful of understaffed polling places, no good public transportation to get them to polling places, imprisoned people, people screwed my voter registration laws, etc. and that’s not even counting people too young to vote.

Your view only makes sense if you ignore literally everything about the broken US electoral system and all the other systems that touch it.

If you completely ignore how the electoral system works, sure. Back in reality, we have elections which, largely due to voter disenfranchisement efforts, only at best only account for ~60% of the country, only about half of which go to the fascists. So less than a 1/3rd of the country, and even that comes with the caveat that their other option sucks too.

They only get power because the system is set up to favor them and the state needs to use violence to enforce the will of that minority on everyone else. We have the numbers to change things for the better, we just lack the organization to make that happen because of a century of efforts to violently repress those organizations and socially isolate people.

So you can keep being a misanthrope by pretending most of the people aren’t worth saving or you can recognize your fellow humans and work with them to do something about it.

Even if someone wins an election by a lot, the nature of voter turnout in the US means they at best represent like a third of the people. The fascists don’t outnumber us in reality, just in a political system that will allow them into power before even a social democrat.

It’s just what you do when your side doesn’t have a justifiable platform on it’s own merit: See: All the people who keep telling us to ignore all the bad stuff corporate dems do because Trump would be worse.

IF you could actually run on things people liked, you’d talk about that and perhaps only call out your opponent’s opposition to the things you support or show how they might be lying about claims that they want similar things.

But when your core platform is “let rich people keep doing what they want,” you have to find ways to deflect from that.

The trains were just keeping with the metaphor of the OP. (Although we do need much better trains too.)

Acting like the only thing wrong is train schedules is really reductive. People who insist on voting as THE prime form of political participation will often say that not voting for a lesser evil is a privileged position because you’re not going to be impacted by the stuff the other party will do. But I’d argue there is an inherent privilege to being someone who won’t be materially impacted by US imperialism.

We’ve all been conditioned to view the violence the government inflicts on the rest of the world as normal. Maybe you don’t agree with it, but only as much as you don’t agree with, say, tax policy. It’s an abstract thing. We’re removed from the constant horror it represents. We’d like it if it wasn’t happening, but we don’t have to think about it most of the time and will clearly not do anything about it any time soon if everyone left of Hitler’s position is “vote for the Hitler that’s only going to do the bad stuff to other people.”

In general I take issue with people framing this as protecting democracy from fascism. The US is not a democracy.

• For starters, a constitutional democracy shouldn’t be able to end through a simple vote that doesn’t even include most of the country. If voting in fascists is an acceptable outcome of the system, it’s not a good system.

• From the ground up, the US was built to be as anti-democratic as possible while still technically having voting. Obviously it started with only land owning white men being allowed to vote. It’s expanded slowly over the years, but it STILL explicitly disenfranchises people such as prisoners. The electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the longer, staggered term limits in the senate, and the lifetime term limit for supreme court justices are all mechanisms which were explicitly designed to filter out the will of the masses from influencing government. To bring in a personal example: I live in NY. My vote doesn’t matter. I don’t say that as an excuse for not voting because I know I won’t have an effect of the election. I say that because I don’t even get a vote! Even if there was a candidate I cared about, just because of where I was born I can have zero influence on their election into government.

• Finally, I’d argue that an imperialist country is definitionally not a democracy. The core principle of democracy is that the government rules over only those who have consented to it. An imperialist state such as the US takes actions all around the world in other sovereign countries that have major influences on people who never consented to be subjects of US power. An Iraqi who’s house got bombed didn’t get a chance to vote against Bush. A person in Latin America didn’t get a vote on the US invalidating the vote in their country with a coup. Cubans, Vietnamese, etc. didn’t get to vote on the US making sure they couldn’t trade with the rest of the world.

As a related point to the last point: This is why I think it’s philosophically wrong to vote for candidates who don’t represent you in the US elections. In a democracy you are still considered to have “consented” to being governed even by an opposition party you didn’t vote for because you consented to the process. By voting you are saying that you agree that this is the way we will choose our government and that you will abide by the results even if you don’t get the outcome you want. That’s fine if the process was truly democratic and you can live with any of the outcomes even if you’d prefer something different. But if all outcomes are systematically unacceptable to you and the process itself is flawed, then still casting your vote within that framework is consent to the government and the process that produced it. When you go vote, there’s no box for “I’m only voting for this person because they’re technically better than the other one. I’m not actually ok with them.” You simply vote for Harris and the implicit choice of “I will not try to enact change in any other way.”

If you think Trump represents the rise of fascism and the end of democracy, then you shouldn’t be willing to abide by the results of the election anyway. But could you imagine any of the people telling you to vote against fascism taking up arms to storm the capital to protect that democracy and it’s people? Could you even imagine those people symbolically supporting leftists if they did this? I can’t. Because they didn’t do shit last time. Because they spent years talking about the right wing coup attempt in terms of it being treason rather than it being a problem because they’re fascists. Because civility and rules are more important than anything else to these people. If Trump won, the day after the election the same people who said it’d be the end of democracy will be saying “We’ll get em’ in 2-4 years.”

No. Clearly the solution is to continue to abandon anyone outside the US because they don’t matter. /s

But more directly: HOW are you going to work on it? Who is gonna do that? The capitalist/imperialist who you’ve pledged your vote to unconditionally?

…and you’ll be doing so with someone who is slightly more likely to be concerned with their image, and hence slightly more likely to listen.

Why would they be concerned with their image if people are going to vote for them anyway? We have a candidate who supports literal genocide and that’s not bad enough for people to do something. What exactly, precisely, practically, is the mechanism for holding a politician accountable when you will always vote for them and won’t take any actions outside the electoral system?

We’re here because people keep supporting a broken system. We keep getting elections with gerrymandering and candidates that don’t represent people because people are unwilling to take action outside of them or even exercise that power in its most basic form. Even if you maintain that things are genuinely good when Democrats win (we’ll circle back on that one), it’s such a brittle system. Any progress that has been made can be wiped out every few years due to elections which have been gerrymandered to create the 50/50 coin-flip when the actual population doesn’t support the right at nearly that rate. Plus, because of the messed up process of supreme court appointments, we sometimes lose rights even when Democrats are in office because of a fundamentally undemocratic institution. You could argue that’s all the more reason to have voted against Republicans in the past and why we should vote against them now, but once again: In a system that is supposedly based on constitutional protections, why are our rights contingent on the random time an old judge kicks the bucket? Or the supposedly illegal actions of a president?

Because there’s nothing to actually stop any of it. Rights are hard to establish and enforce and really easy to be taken away or ignored. Republicans will “break the rules” and then Democrats will decide to be bound by not only the rules their “opponents” won’t follow, but by the new rules that come out of their actions. If you truly believe your opponents are fascists, and you’re genuinely opposed to that, then nothing should be off the table for resisting them. At the tamest end of things the least they could have tried to do would be to break the power of the court or anti-majoritarian rules in the legislature. But again, if rules don’t matter to fascists, you should be willing to go way further than that to stop them. Instead, the “#resistance” under Trump largely consisted of tweets, protest signs, and a call to vote differently in 2-4 years while simultaneously questioning if we’d even have an election to vote in. If Trump wins are liberals going to get out there and do something about it? Are they going to storm the capital to boot out the fascists? Fight cops and feds from taking away minorities? No. That’s way too “uncivil” for them. We’re just gonna have to vote harder next time!

And if only all we had to talk about were the trains being on time!

Circling back to how things are under Democrats: Sure, maybe they’re a bit nicer to minorities publicly, but we still get:

• An ever expanding military, police, and surveillance state. Bush might have started the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and enacted the Patriot act, but Obama continued the wars, including the torture and indefinite detention he said he’d end. We also learned about the NSA’s mass surveillance program under Obama and when confronted with the public outcry about an assault on our fundamental rights or the war crimes being committed by the military, he chose to go after whistleblowers instead of doing anything about it. Since then has ANY president or major presidential candidate even talked about the NSA or given any indication that they’d cut back on surveillance or imperialism? In my lifetime over 3 Democratic and 2 Republican administrations, the military budget has tripped. And of course support for Israel’s genocide has continued with little more than hand wringing and empty promises.

• Anti-immigration policies continued under Obama and Biden. Biden in particular continued the detention centers and even allowed for the wall to keep being built.

• Climate legislation that isn’t good enough to meet the existential threat posed by the problem. Far from being “something is better than nothing,” these compromise positions obstruct efforts to implement the necessary changes. Plus whatever “advancements” are put in place tend to be fairly temporary in nature. A regulation can be easily overturned by a future administration or court. It’s a lot harder to go around destroying public transportation and clean energy infrastructure after it’s already been built. We are facing a global crisis and the system is going to get us all killed eventually, and poorer countries even sooner.

There are a lot of people who are hurt by US capitalism and imperialism even under Democratic administrations. It’s a decision to not value those people. And it’s not even like they’re always different people. The surveillance state hurts everyone, but in particular it makes it easier for the government to target undesirable groups like immigrants, LGBT people, or say, women who want to get an abortion. There are certainly LGBT people, disable people, women, PoCs, etc amongst those the US has bombed, sanctioned, or caused to live in chaos after a coup. Lack of adequate healthcare means that accessing abortions or gender affirming care harder even if they are completely legal.

But don’t worry, just vote for the Democrat then push them to the left! By… uh… holding up signs? Making tweets? You definitely need to unconditionally vote for them again next time, so you can’t pressure them that way.

It’s ok, next election we’ll talk about ~the trains~ the military, surveillance state, healthcare, the environment, etc.

4 years later: “THIS election is super important. We’ll talk about the trains in another 4 years.”

Because President’s Day is for buying stuff. Clearly what we need is to allow stores to set up in polling places to get it to be a holiday. /s

Little known fact that dogs have a very unhealthy work culture. He didn’t even think it would be an option to go out before the work was done.

OOTL: I’m confused. What is this? I’ve been using Firefox for years and I have no idea what this button is/was or why people would be annoyed by it.

The links didn’t work either. But thanks for the suggestions. I’ll look into other app options.

It depends. Usually I’m just looking for some game or show I like. The few of those I’ve looked into that have a community have like a handful of users, infrequent posts, or auto-posted threads with no comments beyond the bot post.

EDIT: Also, do you know how to get to your link on Memmy? For me it just brought me back to the main feed.

The only real issue I have is that there aren’t that many active communities for more niche topics. I hope it’ll get there someday, but for now we have Linux or Star Trek, take your pick. :P