#do not split. the fucking vote

[goldkirk]

also, I UNDERSTAND. I understand how ineffectual and morally and ideologically sold out the democrats are. I don’t want them either.

but I LIVED THROUGH a mayoral election during a race where the vote split. The forces of moral uprightness vs the corrupt selfish evil. Whatever you want to call it. It was like that.

there were three main players:

the industry plant: a long time (32 years) city council member, the endorsed (and spiritual) successor of the man who’d been our mayor for years and years and years—that mayor was very ethically and financially corrupt, and also groomed and molested me between the ages of 4 and 7.

just some guy: a man who was not corrupt like industry plant but wasn’t super anti-corruption and such. more chill go with the flow, somewhat able to be bought, not corrupt like our local government officials currently were though.

a woman with backbone: Track record as a former city council member who actively fought and called out corruption and under the table dealing and refused to be bribed, which obviously won no coworker favors but did endear her to a lot of citizens who found her championing city funding transparency or things like adding sidewalks

The endorsed man had the full weight of the local political machinery behind him. The other two had the majority of the common citizens.

The man didn’t drop out because he believed the woman wasn’t capable of winning and he’d do it best. The woman didn’t drop out because she didn’t believe the man was resistant enough to corruption. (These are heinous oversimplifications. I understand. I’m trying to make a specific point, so allow me this for now.)

On election night, guess what happened?

The man who ran with the machine behind him got the votes he expected. Not quite the majority, but a lot.

The rest of the populace had split.

Some voted for the other guy. Some voted for the woman. (Many, as usual, didn't vote at all, unlike the local corrupt labor union bloc that turns out in force every cycle for their chosen machinery candidate.)

The majority vote did NOT go to a candidate most citizens wanted.

the vote was split almost in thirds. and you know what?

I watched the sliiiiiiightly largest third win, and saw a man celebrate who was chosen for the King of The Whole City position by a man who sexually abused me and used his local-kingly-powers for personal gain and under the table dealings before I was tall enough to go down a water slide.

37% of the vote was enough to elect the nominated successor of my childhood sexual abuser into office without term limits. He then proceeded to reign as mayor for multiple terms, and the city stayed as corrupt as ever instead of having ANY alternate instead.

No, it’s not exactly the same in this election. But it should be enough to make us ask questions, plan, and organize from the ground up without moral infighting when the stakes are so high.

We’re all tired. But not all of us are in the same amounts of danger from different outcomes. It MATTERS.

Who’s the up-next four year old you might be able to save from abuse by voting, you know?

better financial and societal policies come AFTER immediate scene-is-on-fire safety is secured. in the middle of a crisis, and this is by far a crisis, you choose the next thing that keeps you ALIVE and you plan bullet points and strategies for what comes NEXT after you’re not about to die every other block going down the street, metaphorically.

[fallling-in-winter]

If you voted third party, you voted for Trump

[englandsgirl18181234]

I'd say sorry for the sudden political spam but I'm really not. We finally have a good option and we need to grab it with both hands and run with it as far as we fucking can. So here's some facts that people seem to be ignoring when they say you shouldn't vote for Harris.

Harris was not a fucking cop, she was a district attorney and attorney general. Stop fucking saying otherwise, it's misinformation and you need to understand that.

Harris is documentedly pro LGBTQ+. When she was elected Attorney General, she co-sponsored legislation to ban the gay and trans panic defense which passed. She also officiated the first same-sex wedding in California after Section 8 was overturned 20 years ago.

In her entire time as District Attorney she never sought the death penalty. She also created the San Francisco Reentry Division, with the first of its kind reentry program Back On Track for first-time nonviolent offenders. 200 people graduated from it with less than 10 percent going on to commit another crime, compared to the 53 percent of California drug offenders that would do so in less than 2 years after release.

When she was elected to Attorney General of California, she introduced the Homeowner Bill of Rights, considered one of the strongest protections nationwide against aggressive foreclosure tactics.

In 2015, Harris's California Department of Justice became the first statewide agency in the US to require all of its police officers to wear body cameras.

So to reiterate:

Fucking vote for Harris.

Voting third party right now is not the fucking way. All it's gonna do is split the fucking votes that we need to keep Trump out of office. None of the third party candidates have the numbers to actually beat Trump. It's not going to fucking happen, stop saying it will because you're lying to yourself and others.

Not voting at all is even fucking worse than voting third party and you're an idiot if you think otherwise. Not voting isn't a fucking protest like some idiots are spouting. It's not making a fucking point. It is giving the fuck up and being a coward about it. It is actively choosing to not make things better when you have the fucking chance and I am disgusted that people actually think it's a good idea when we are on the verge of a second term for a literal traitor and convicted felon that actively thinks disabled and LGBTQ people should die.

Someone is still going to be President. Full stop, that is how elections fucking work. THERE IS STILL GOING TO BE A PRESIDENT. There is still going to be a president whether you vote or not. And our only real options right now are Harris or Trump. So use your fucking vote to make things better in the only way we can right now.

Yeah, there are things Harris needs to change and things she isn't on the right side on. But Trump is worse in every possible fucking way. So we need to lock this down and push for improvement, not decide shit is hopeless and fucking give the bad guy the win now that we finally have a fucking shot!

You didn't want to vote for Biden? Great, you're not! Now take the fucking miracle that just dropped into our fucking laps and run with it!

[sieglinde-freud]

one time eva told me that inigo was basically just a total drama character and i cant like that kinda hit me like a slap in the face but like in a good way because like. she was right. and that was several months ago but the concept was so good i sometimes just come back to it and now i have a question for the class

no i dont think inigo (or anyone else i excluded) would win but if you have a case for him im open

[albonium]

wild to me that it takes hours for people in the usa to vote. it's never taken me more than 10 minutes and that's including the inevitable chit chat with the people there because they're either my parents' neighbours or the parents of people i went to school with.

[vivaciouscynner]

To USians again

I know, I know, I'm very likely to yelling into the echo chamber.

A lot of news networks and magazines are full on endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

GREAT

but don't forget this happened in 2016 with Hilary Clinton.

If you were ever on the fence about casting a vote and feel like yours doesn't matter, I'm very emphatically telling you

IT DOES

Please make an effort to vote for Harris this election.

Any other action really is a vote for fascist orange.

[beeseverywhen]

"All political parties face a trade-off under a first-past-the-post electoral system. Governing depends on attracting a broad coalition of voters, inevitably involving compromises that leave a party’s base disgruntled.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that as we move closer to a general election, the discontent from the anti-Labour left who claim there is little to distinguish Keir Starmer from Rishi Sunak in the battle for the premiership is only getting noisier."

"The argument is threefold: there’s no meaningful difference between the Conservatives and Labour; Starmer supposedly can’t be trusted because he has dropped pledges he made in the 2020 leadership election to shift his party towards the centre; finally, the “Tories are toast” and Labour can’t lose, so disgruntled left voters can safely vote for other parties, such as the Greens.

With Labour so far ahead in the polls, the urge to debunk these sentiments may seem like an expression of paranoia. But all three aspects of this narrative are comprehensively wrong, including the reassurance that it is safe for anyone who would prefer a Labour government to vote for another party in Labour-Tory contests."

"But what this underplays is the number of Labour-Tory marginals where a relatively small vote for other left candidates could cost Labour a win. James Kanagasooriam, of the polling company Focaldata, has written about the “sandcastle” nature of Labour’s likely majority; his forecast is that there will be many more marginal seats in the 2024 parliament compared with 2019. If more than predicted numbers of those who voted Green in the locals decide they can afford to do so in the general election because Labour is so far ahead in national polls, that will boost the Conservatives.

Next up is the idea that Starmer’s dropping of some of his leadership pledges makes him dangerously untrustworthy. But this is the product of a system in which the tiny unrepresentative slice of the electorate that is a party membership pick their leader before voters choose their prime minister. Anyone hoping to be PM would have to shift position between a leadership selection and a general election: a Labour leader’s most important job is to connect with potential voters, not to coddle members with the comfort blanket of a policy platform such as the “free broadband for all” 2019 pledge that was roundly rejected.

Liz Truss provides a cautionary tale of what happens when a party leader seeks to impose a membership-endorsed platform on the country without a general election. For Starmer to have stuck to his 2020 leadership election pledges, instead of spending the past four years understanding voters, would have been fundamentally anti-democratic.

The most egregious aspect of the anti-Labour left argument is there isn’t much to choose between Starmer and Sunak. Yes, Labour’s “Ming vase” election strategy has seen it take a much more cautious fiscal approach than many of us would like: it has effectively adopted the Tory macroeconomic worldview and with it a set of spending constraints that no one sensible thinks either party could stick to in the wake of the election.

That is frustrating for anyone hoping this election campaign may illuminate some of the tough trade-offs facing Britain; but it would have been incredibly risky for one side to go it alone on this. The alternative is Labour walking into the trap and handing the Conservatives a “Labour tax bombshell” election campaign.

From a commitment to scrap the Rwanda plan to making clear that in an ideal world Labour would discard the two-child benefit cap, there are plenty of reasons that it is preposterous to think that a Starmer government would make the same trade-offs as successive Conservative governments that have financed billions of pounds worth of tax cuts for more affluent families by cutting tax credits and benefits for low-income parents. The six pledges Starmer launched two weeks ago may be incremental, but Labour needs voters to believe they are deliverable, and they are indicative of a very different set of priorities than those that animate Sunak."

"Starmer is not without weaknesses, as shown by the days he took to clarify an interview last October in which he gave the impression he thought Israel had the right to withhold power and food from Gaza. But there is no doubt whatsoever he would make a vastly more compassionate and competent prime minister than Sunak. To encourage people to put that outcome at risk by casting a protest vote against a Labour government that does not yet exist is perhaps the ultimate form of luxury belief campaigning."

[coldflasher]

extremely fucking stressed about who to vote for in the election ngl

[personnotfound]

if you don't vote, someone still gets to be president

idk, i see a lot of people talking about the election and criticizing the democratic candidates, which is great, please do that, but please also acknowledge the stakes and the context here. If you're saying talking about something horrible the dems have done/are doing, and saying not to vote for them because of it, then at least let it be a criticism that does not also apply tenfold to the republicans. Because SOMEONE IS GOING TO BE PRESIDENT. It's one or the other. Realistically, it is Trump, or it is Harris. Convincing people not to vote for Harris is advocating for Trump to win. Period. End of. That is what you are doing.

Since I am going over project 2025 - which was written by some very good friends of Trump, and which the man himself has tried to distance himself from without actually addressing any of the contents of the document itself, which align quite well with how he talks about his values and intentions - here are some quotes i have selected to contextualize the stakes of this election (under the cut for length and tw for transphobia, misogyny, )

If you are trans, here is what they think of us, "Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries" (from the foreward by Kevin D Roberts, PhD, on page 1. Kevin is the president of The Heritage Foundation, which describes itself under the 'membership' tab of their 'about' page on their website as the "most influential conservative group in america")

and here are a few of the policies they would like to inact in regards to us, "Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended." (Page 104),

"Reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination. CMS should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans." (Page 474)

"Restrict the application of Bostock. The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexualorientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing" (Bostock in this context is a legal case regarding workers protections against discrimination in the workplace, this is page 584 saying that they would like it to be legal to fire people for being trans)

Or how about this from pages 4-5, "The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civilsociety hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi-tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists." Still the foreward there, same author. Literally calling to restrict speech in the name of 'freedom of speech'. Some irony there. The next paragraph starts by describing 'transgender ideology' (the existence of trans people) as 'pornography'.

Page 5, literally the next paragraph. "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

How are we feeling? But what about foreign policy? What about Palestine?

Page 94 reads, "Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively"

That does not sound like pulling support from Israel to me.

Oh, also on page 94 is this, "Implement nuclear modernization and expansion. The United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal. Russia maintains and is actively brandishing a very large nuclear arsenal, but China is also undertaking a historic nuclear breakout."

Because what we definitely 100% need is more military spending on nuclear weapons. I also cannot help reading that in connection to Palestine, Israel, and our country's allyship with Israel.

I'm getting stressed. I have linked the full document below. Please look up these quotes yourself, check my work, read the context for yourself. Decide for yourself if you feel I have been unfair. Decide for yourself which of the two sets of options is going to do the least damage. Because remember, it's not just the one person you're voting for. The president gets to appoint the people who run the rest of the government. The people Trump likes very much wrote this document.

Please do not play games with weather or not I can be fired from my job for being trans. Please do not play games with my access to healthcare.

It is horrific that we do not have a choice that will end US support for the genocide going on right now. But that choice isn't on the table. Our choices are genocidal fascist or a lot less genocidal fascist.

[npdclaraoswald]

.

[chaos-in-one]

This election is going to make me lose my fucking mind, some of y'all are not using your brains at all and it shows

[daz4i]

bro i hate my country's politicians so much it's unreal

[finitevariety]

the UK getting rid of the Tories doesn't mean they avoided a right wing government, sorry. Keir Starmer outflanked the Tories on the right in just about every way he could. He is a craven moral bankrupt and his party continues to enact disastrous policies for every working class or marginalised person in the UK and abroad.

for example, they have moved to permanently ban puberty blockers, continue to sell arms to israel, and are going all-in on AI w/o regard for the consequences. The deposed dictator in Bangladesh you mentioned? Yeah, she's the aunt of one of Keir Starmer's ministers (who has since resigned following corruption allegations--ironically, she was, as the Treasury's Economic Secretary, responsible for tackling corruption).

In many countries, political power and hope lies outside of electoralism, as you point to with the Bangladesh example.

You're right that there's a tendency on this website (and others) to act as though America is the world, and generalise doom/hope accordingly. But, like you say, America is the dominant political force currently. Its decisions do have significant impact on everyone, particularly regarding climate.

Your 'wah wah everyone is doomed' is just making up a guy to get mad at. You're presupposing that that person doesn't think they have any political power, and then attempting to show otherwise by giving a big list of primarily electoral victories (or almost victories, or not-victories but at least it's a change of face). The crux of the problem isn't that people are feeling hopeless and need to be alerted that there is still some good to be achieved via politics and legislatures. The crux of the problem is that political institutions have and are continuing to fail people worldwide, to drain hope from them, and to convince them that what political power they do have resides in suffrage alone. As well-intentioned as your post is, I think it falls into the same trap.

Because the real thing to take hope from is that your political power is far greater than that conferred by the ballot every couple of years.

'wah wah everywhere is falling to the right wing the whole world is doomed' literally like 6 months ago we were talking about how there was a trend in countries getting rid of their right wing governments. poland at the end of last year, france voted in a unified centre left/left alliance, even the UK finally got rid of the tories after 15 years (right wing splitting be damned, it still happened). outside of europe, bangladesh removed a dictator in like 2 seconds, india may have reelected their Evil Guy but on a DISTINCTLY reduced majority, theres been queer rights successes in thailand, with gay marriage set to be legal by 2025, and thereve been positive court cases on it in japan. and this is just stuff i vaguely remember hearing about. im sure theres more if you care to look for anything aside from more reasons to make yourself miserable

the US has a distinct effect on everyone, so this won't be fun for anyone (least of all its population. sorry guys), and there ARE a lot of people sliding into right wing extremism, but presenting this like its an unchallenged worldwide phenomenon is inaccurate, its damagingly bleak, and all it does is encourage despair and apathy. you DO have political power, and you shouldnt forget that just because of bad election results and the media's desperation to make you lose hope

[lycorid]

How the fuck do you have a Neo-Nazi phase?

[a9saga]

i know i said the men on big brother 5 are pigs but after jase and scott go its honestly fine. marvin is a better guy than some of his comments about women in the first few episodes suggested, which his own mother up and said she disapproved of which i respect her for. but for real he's been quite decent and a good player. oh my god diane is pissing me off