#not voting is worse than voting. the fascists try to strip away voting rights for a reason.

[12u3ie]

reminder that anyone telling you not to vote is either an idiot or trying to strip away your rights 😊

[lizajane2]

This will be the only time I speak on politics on THIS blog. I stand with Palestine but I do not stand by people who think my rights aren't important. Mine, as a woman, will be stripped away because of Trump being in office. If I got pregnant right now, I'd die from having a miscarriage because the doctor would refuse to perform surgery.

And I'm embarrassed to even be remotely in the same sentence as "white women failed us." 52% of the vote?! 20% of registered Democrats refused to vote because "A vote for Kamala means you support genocide." No, we were trying to preserve the rights we had rather than vote for a man who is a racist, fascist, homophobic, and a rapist. Let's also mention the fact that he is a felon. That is the man who will be sitting in office and if you think he's going to help Palestine, he's not.

"Oh well, you should've just voted third-party or not at all." No. The US is not built for a third-party system. They never win a certain percentage of the popular vote and they are denied Federal Funding. Not voting is also worse. It helps put Trump in office which is exactly what happened when millions of registered voters didn't exercise their right.

"Well, Kamala has been Vice President for 4 years." Do you know what the VP does? Their role is to break tie votes in the Senate. They also prercide over impeachment trials, presiding over electoral vote counts, successor to the President, and acting President. They are also a governing partner, a representative at events, a congressional liaison, and a national security council member. All those things don't involve foreign policy.

And as a white woman who voted for Kamala, I mean this with my whole fucking chest, i don't wanna hear white women MAGA supporters complaining about how they're not getting the healthcare they need after their daughter, sister, aunt, or life long friend dies of sepsis because the doctor refused to perform surgery and save her life. I feel for the women having to go through that. But you, who voted for that, who WANTED that, well that's your bed and you get to lie in it. Don't look to my white ass asking for help because you can't afford the funeral expenses. Don't come to me looking for sympathy. I'll have sympathy for your daughter, who probably could've lived but you stripped that right away from her because you had to stand on being pro-life. I will not help you.

[qqueenofhades]

People just assume The republicans will fall in line with Desantis. The guys anti woke crusade is failing more than giving. Disney defeated him and the educators are not backing down. Everything else in Florida sucks crime, finances the list goes on, plus the only reason he won was because of Trump and redistricting in black areas and side note between him and Libs of TikTok they have no have no personality, self awareness or basic emotional range.

Basically, DeSantis is in a catch-22. He needs Trump's voters to vote for him if he's gonna win the GOP nomination, and he needs the general public to vote for him if he's going to win the presidency, at a time when solid majorities of Americans disagree with his platform and don't buy his views. So he has to somehow go more extreme to win over the TrumpCultists (who are already disinclined to vote for anyone who isn't Trump), and pretend to be less extreme to win the general public. What is a fascist shitgibbon to do?

Obviously, the far right doesn't care about the state of anything else as long as they have officially approved hate and Owning The Libs, but that's much less true about the general electorate. The cliché about the Economy is a cliché for a reason. DeSantis is already losing ground with the GOP base, and he has to support Trump and prove that he's a loyal Trump acolyte while also trying to get people to vote for him by insisting that he's NOT Trump. Hence he will tweet the usual buzzword-laden condemnation of Trump's indictment, but Trump certainly won't pay back the loyalty and will just attack DeSantis every chance he gets. DeSantis is also dumb as a rock and has no personal/charisma skills at all, which even those close to him have been remarking on. As I've said, he's done well because he can hide in Florida and staff the government with toadies and only grant interviews to select fawning outlets, but the national exposure of a presidential campaign will not be kind to him.

I don't want to make anyone overconfident; obviously, DeSantis is a true-believer Christofascist who could do endless damage if he did get elected, and even if he's a fucking moron, so was Trump and the establishment still rallied around him as long as he was picking extremist judges and passing tax cuts for the rich. There is also a significant element of this country that will vote for white supremacist fascism Because Gas Prices. So while we need to be vigilant and work hard, there's no point in casting DeSantis as some almighty, clever, unbeatable opponent. He's just as dumb and mean as Trump, he's peddling the same set of hateful ideas that don't solve anything, and the sooner we strip away that mystique, the idea that he's worse because Trump is the Devil We Know and DeSantis is the Devil We Don't, we'll realize we do know him after all, and we can beat him. So yes, let's do that.

[willfrominternet]

Exactly, because here's the thing once again:

Your third-party leftist candidate may align more with your values and the values you wish to see in America, but they do not have the current massive national support like the Democratic Party does. That's unfortunate. I sure would like to see someone like Claudia de la Cruz get more attention, or for some other major left-learning party to balance the centrism of the Democrats and the conservative and reactionary politics of the Republicans. But no such party or candidate has had the major optics and support necessary to make them a real contender in the national political sphere. Such a party/candidate needs to start on a smaller scale - municipal or state government - in order to climb the ladder to the national stage. (We do not support Jill Stein or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this household, by the way. I know RFK isn't leftist, but I included him anyway, because... No. Just no.)

Not voting is not an option. You know every single Republican is going to turn out for their big beautiful bouncing baby boy. If Kamala doesn't have a big turnout because you decided she wasn't worth your vote, that fascist fucker Donald J. Trump will fart his way back into the White House and destroy everything all over again while eating his Big Macs and drinking his Diet Cokes. And when you watch him and his Heritage Foundation friends unleash Project 2025 and strip your rights and your friends' and family's rights away, increase your taxes while decreasing those of the uber-wealthy, and drag America further down the well towards an idiocracy, you'll have some serious FOMO.

So what do you do, even if Kamala Harris doesn't strike you as the perfect politician? You go out and vote for her anyway. Trust me: She, her team, and her party will be more sympathetic towards leftist policies and protecting civil rights than the other side, and they will be more eager to listen to ways they can govern better. The Democratic Party will at least try to steer this ship in the right direction and keep it from sinking; if the Republicans win in November, they will set it on fire.

Think of what we feared back in 2020 when we had Trump vs. Biden. We knew Biden was old. We knew he was more centrist than we liked. We knew he wasn't the best option. But he was a hell of a lot better than Trump, and we voted for him despite our reservations. It could have been a whole lot worse.

Vote blue in November. Holy shit, please vote blue in November.

You motherfuckers yes I hate Kamala too but when she is announced to be the Democratic candidate we are all going to shoot fireworks and go to the goddamn polls

[silvermoon424]

You know... I can empathize with Centrists, particularly the anti-voting crowd. I get it. You don't want to compromise on your ethics to bring the lesser of two evils into power. I get it. You don't want to compromise with the real world because the real world is utter crap. I get it. You want to preach and prattle on about how the Left is "just as bad" while not making waves over what fresh hell the Right wrought upon us on a daily basis. I. Get. It. (cont.)

(cont.) But like it or not, the Right has been actively worse than the Left ever will be. Like it or not, voting out the Republicans must be priority number one. Like it or not, you're not doing the world any good by playing contrarian. It's easy to believe in something that comforts you like a post decrying the Left so you can be "justified" in not voting for them.

Well... I'm voting blue. I'm "compromising" my ethics if it means that I may not have to do so again in the future. I'm casting my vote even if "it won't make a difference." I'm voting because just this once in the year of our lord 2020, I want to seize any chance of the world getting better. I want to walk up one November morning and find #TrumpDumped trending on Twitter. I want to smile like the Ninth Doctor and proclaim with a goddamn grin on my face, "Just this once, Rose, EVERYBODY LIVES!"

I completely agree with everything you said, anon. I can sympathize with third-party and non-voters because I was one in 2016. Admittedly I voted Libertarian just to get a third party vote out there (and tbh I was a lot less liberal 4 years ago), but looking back on it I really wish I had voted for Hillary. Not because I like her now, but because I should have been smart and aware enough to see how important it was make sure Trump didn’t get into office.

Republican politicians have shown time and time again that they don’t give a shit about this country or the people who live in it, as shown with their track records with voting on issues about the environment, LGBTQ+ people, workers’ rights, regulations for corporations, etc. They have shown how spineless they are with their kowtowing to Trump even though they fucking hated him before he got elected. They have shown their willingness to embrace corruption. No, the Democrats aren’t anywhere close to perfect and have their fair share of corruption too, but at least they’re not actively trying to strip rights away from LGBTQ+ people and immigrants. 

The reason why the Right has been able to get so much shit done is because they’re willing to compromise their ethics and overlook idealogical differences if it means getting what they want. Like, white supremacists will work with Evangelicals and young Alt-Righters will work with old, out-of-touch Republicans. Meanwhile the Left is obsessed with purity tests and cannibalizing itself because some leftists have convinced themselves that a leftist who isn’t 100% ideologically perfect is worse than a literal fascist. I have seen this happen so many times and I’m so tired of it. We are our own worst enemy. 

I’m begging everyone who reads this to vote blue down the ballot this November so we can maybe try to get our country back on track. 

[random2908]

Seen on Twitter, https://twitter.com/alexandraerin/status/1035196520918863873?s=21

a transcript of the tweet thread (tweets quoted within are italicized including links) since I could only otherwise find difficult-to-read screenshots:

A while back, I tweeted that in case anyone isn't clear, we are well past the "first they came for" point.

This is a big story and I'm not sure it's possible for it to get enough attention.

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings.” Article: http://wapo.st/2PNIf68

I'm sure the "no need to panic" brigade would want us to point out that this affecting "only" hundreds or thousands of Latinx Americans living in a narrow region along the border.

But.

First of all, that's too many people.

Because...

Because here is the thing about due process.

Everybody gets it, or no one really has it.

And from the moment the Trump regime decided it just doesn't apply to "illegal" immigrants, we were always heading here.

Some (white) people replied to suspension of due process for non-citizens by saying "Well, I could prove my citizenship easily." But how do you do that when you're not entitled to any process to prove anything?

If we passed an amendment to the Constitution saying that Constitutional protections don't apply to waterbed repair technicians named Sleven Trusbucket, all the government would have to do is say that's you and you would be out of options for proving them wrong.

And to the sort of person who is sure that life operates on formal logic and strict proof, the sort of person who is sure if they can present the right argument just the right way they can convince anyone of the truth of anything, it feels like there must be some way around that.

But that's part of the horror of a situation like this, part of why Kafka's The Trial is so viscerally uncomfortable to read. The proof does not matter if no one is bound to accept the proof. It feels like it should. It always feels like truth should matter, proof should matter.

Now I said long ago, and again at the head of this thread, that we're past the point of "first they came for". For most of the people reading this, they're still not up to "they came for me", and probably won't be for a while. They're working to expand the ranks of "non-American"

They redefined huge swathes of undocumented immigrants -- including ones working with the system to fix their status -- as "criminals" and "gangmembers" and "animals". They slammed the door in the face of immigrants with papers, finding pretexts to call them "illegal".

They started revoking the citizenship of naturalized citizens for whatever excuse they could find, and the next step is to strip citizenship of natural born citizens who don't fit their profile of a Real American.

Right now their excuse for doing so is restricting them to people born in a border region but the excuse will widen and so will the scope of the action.

And they aren't just moving in one direction here. They've been revoking the passports of trans people while all this is happening.

Now, the flipside of revoking citizenship and "deporting" someone is: the United States cannot bestow citizenship for another country. Just because the man in the low castle thinks someone looks "Mexican" doesn't mean they default to that when they lose US citizenship.

There's been a lot of talk on Twitter about the dangers of statelessness, in regard to Canada and ending birthright citizenship (something the Trumpers would love to do if they can swing it.)

People who lose their citizenship are thrown into a legal limbo, effectively becoming unpersoned for many purposes.”

Tweet/ https://twitter.com/bashirmoham…/status/1033585831544410112… “I am shocked and disturbed that the Conservative Party of Canada voted to end birth right citizenship in Canada.

I say this as someone who was born stateless - legally without a country. I'll tell you my story and why this is move is so reckless and dangerous.”

And while nationalists whip up fear of the foreign, they hate and despise the stateless even more. They're deliberately making the "immigration crisis" worse.

Nazi apologists will be happy to tell you that the great humanitarian Hitler tried so hard to get Jewish Germans settled happily and healthily elsewhere but that no one would take them in, thus leaving him with a problem in need of a final solution.

So what's going to happen when Trump has stripped citizenship from everyone who doesn't "look American", doesn't "look like they should be voting", but there's nowhere to deport all these people, no home country for them to return to?

And maybe you're thinking that we don't have the resources to actually disenfranchise and denaturalize *everybody* who doesn't "look American" buuuut the magic of not giving due process is they don't have to.

If you knew that people whose last names are in the same language as yours are getting rounded up, stripped of rights, and arrested when they go to apply for or renew a passport... how dire would it have to be, before you'd dare try?

And then what if it expands to, say, people showing up at polling places? DMVs? Hospitals?

What if it goes on to the point where "everyone knows" that people with certain names and/or skin tones aren't really citizens and don't have to be afforded any particular rights?

Before the SCOTUS struck down sodomy laws, in a lot of states being seen as gay could be used to justify just about any level of discrimination. Gay couple needs an apartment? "We can't make landlords rent to a criminal if they don't want to." Were the couple ever convicted? No.

But ~*everybody knew*~ what gay people got up into their bedrooms was illegal, doing illegal things made you a criminal, and being a criminal was grounds for termination, eviction, expulsion, exclusion.

Or if you want to see what the future of law enforcement looks like in a fascist state, look at the standards used to arrest and prosecute sex workers.

For years now, in the land of Innocent Until Proven Guilty, you could be arrested for "suspicion" of a victimless crime because of entirely legal materials in your purse and entirely legal conduct within a place you had every legal right to be.

The actual ideal is that the cops could know you're a sex worker, could know for a certain fact that you're engaged in sex work, but if they couldn't prove it then you are an innocent in the eyes of the law. That's how it's supposed to work and how it works for some crimes.

Everyone in town can know that J. Doe up on the hill beats his wife and kids but if the cops can't prove it they will tell you nothing can be done, and proof has to be more than the fear in their eyes or bruises on their arms. Or even him "allegedly" bragging about it.

Meanwhile they'll pick people up off the street for ~*suspicion*~ of sex work and "prove" it through entirely circumstantial means, none of which points to actual lawbreaking.

Now here's the crux of that: being able to claim that any woman carrying condoms (for instance) is a sex worker doesn't mean they detain everyone and make them turn out their pockets.

It just gives them a tool, a weapon, to use when they feel like it.

And that's the future of policing. Increasingly broad rules that could apply to increasingly wide swaths of the population, that can be deployed by the authorities when someone "looks" like they might be trouble, much less starts to actually make any.

They practice these techniques on populations they think they can get away with practicing them on, and when they do get away with it, they start looking to expand.

Cf. stop and frisk in New York City, where white kids were more likely to have marijuana but less likely to be stopped and ordered to turn out their pockets. It was a tool of control.

Obviously I'm talking about practices that go back years before when Trump came to power. He's part of a progression, not the source.

And if you want to know where the progression is heading, just look at how the law has treated people on the margins since the year seventeen seventy forever.

That's where we're heading.

And I don't think enough people are alarmed enough by this.

I saw somebody QTing the Washington Post story at the head of this thread with "And Democrats want to tell us to vote every two years like that's enough."

It's not enough. But we haven't been voting every two years, and that's part of how we got here. Just part. A crucial part.

I think we should add this (specifically: stripping people near the border of citizenship) to the things we call our representatives about, especially but not only if you're in Texas. And if we can vote in a Democratic majority we'll have more tractable reps to yell at about it.

Tweet/ https://twitter.com/herhandsmyh…/status/1035206932938801152… “Plus: we have to start somewhere. Voting every single time is an essential step.”

Essential. Necessary. Not sufficient, but necessary.

A scary thing in all of this: the wave of revocation of trans passports I alluded to upthread doesn't appear to have *originated* anywhere. Select federal employees just decided it's time to start doing it.

I can't tell you from the outside which escalations of "enforcement" (to abuse the term) against immigrants and what I guess are "accused immigrants" among citizens were also spontaneous decisions made at the level at which they occur but I'm sure some of them were.

What I'm saying is, there have always been people within the federal enforcement apparatus and bureaucracy who were waiting for favorable winds to launch their warships.

Tweet/ https://twitter.com/queer_i_am/status/1035207525363200001… “Anti-homeless laws are also a really good example, especially because they target actions _everyone_ does. Pull over after working a night shift to nap and avoid an accident? Illegal.

I stopped to watch a cop once and he got in my space and threatened to take me in on loitering.”

See also: anti-loitering laws. A law against existing in space. Used to run off white kids who aren't driving business, run in anyone the cops feel like making a criminal. Not enforced against anyone ~*respectable*~, who "belongs".

With so much of this enforcement being subjective and self-directed, it is also decentralized. Which makes it harder to block or even attack.

Bank involvement in forfeiture/seizure of assets. (h/t @herhandsmyhands) This should scare you.

Tweet/https://twitter.com/sacbee_news/status/1035172325463736320… “Bank of America freezing accounts of customers suspected of not being US citizens : https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article217567300.html

I know people are waiting for a point where it feels real, where it really feels like Nazi Germany. That point is going to be too far along to have any practical chance of stopping it.

Instead it's going to keep happening piecmeal and every time it happens, those who sound the alarm will be met with "You're overreacting, this isn't like a law against Jewish business ownership, this is only affecting a specific group of people in specific circumstances."

Relax: The monster's not eating your whole body, it's just eating one bite at a time.

The piecemeal, self-directed, subjective nature of these actions makes them harder to fight. Bank of America, the State Department, and DHS are all saying the same thing when questioned on this: "This is the same policy we've always followed." It's just being applied differently.

"We've always exercised discretion..." but now it's being exercised in different directions, towards different ends.

Someone asked what to do, besides be scared:

Make a lot of noise. If we are silent, we are complicit. If the only voices heard are those who support what's happening, they can claim universal assent.

If you work in a workplace, try telling your coworkers, "You know, they're taking citizenship away from people who live near the borders. If they can do that to anyone, they could do that to us. I don't think it's right." You don't have to make it partisan or anti-Trump.

Yell at your elected representatives. Democratic politicians should be aware that the GOP is reshaping the electorate in their favor. It's cynical, but they have to care about that.

Tweet about it, share it on social media. These things are not sufficient but they are necessary.

Vote in November. Same.

I know it feels like making noise isn't doing anything except complaining and we're taught that talk is the opposite of action but I promise you: talk is an action. When there is enough of an outcry they back down. Not all the way always. But slowing and mitigating damage helps.

[qqueenofhades]

Trump's SCOTUS pick scares the ever loving shit out of me. I'm trying not to have a full blown panic attack actually.

Sigh. I know.

I’m not going to say that picking someone literally, un-exaggeratedly out of The Handmaid’s Tale for SCOTUS, especially to replace someone like RBG, isn’t mother fucking terrifying. It is.  Especially since Mitch McConnell is trying to set her final confirmation vote for October 29, literally five days before the election. Yes indeed, that would be a third Supreme Court seat filled by an impeached president who lost the popular vote by three million votes, (possibly) confirmed by Republican enablers (some of whom are absolutely going to lose their seats in this election) who represent a sizeably smaller fraction of the US population than their Democratic counterparts, in a display of outright, staggering, truly breathtaking hypocrisy about the protocol of election-year vacancies on SCOTUS, which they themselves shouted about to no end with Merrick Garland in 2016. This is how tyranny by minority rule works, and... yeah. It’s bad. It’s awful. When is this going to end.

That said, however: we do not yet exist in this theoretical grimdark future where some dystopian 6-3 (or even 7-2) conservative SCOTUS strips us of our rights at every turn, with no recourse except for us to sit passively and take it, and there are a lot of things that we ourselves can do between now and then to make sure that it never happens. First off, House Democrats have proposed a bill to introduce 18-year term limits for SCOTUS justices, rather than it being an automatic lifetime appointment. This would also give every president the ability to appoint two justices per four-year term. Because SCOTUS has become such an instrument of partisan warfare, and because the obvious implications of having a partisan head of state pick the senior federal judges for a lifetime is part of what has fucked us up now, this would be a GREAT improvement. House Dems can’t make it into law right now, because Democrats do not hold a majority in both chambers of Congress and they do not hold the presidency. You know how this COULD be passed? If Joe Biden was elected with a blue House and Senate. That way, even if God forbid the GOP horror show snuck Coney Barrett onto the bench just before the election, this could be fixed.

Here’s another way to think about it. I myself have a HUGE problem with catastrophizing: a bad thing happens, and then it seems like an inevitable chain of nonstop bad things until everything gets irredeemably, unfixably even worse. This year, obviously, has not done much to help that, because yes, the bad things keep coming. But they’re still individual events and have not yet crystallized into some unbreakable, unavoidable future. History is made up of thousands of millions of choices, accidents, unforeseen developments, total random bullshit, and much more, as much or more as it is made up by the macro-scale actions of oligarchs. Obviously, globalization and capitalism have made us all more connected to each other, and thus changes to the system can ripple more broadly, but they are not the only people who make history. If there’s one thing I can tell you as a historian, it’s this: the future is just history that hasn’t been made yet, and it is subject to the exact same unpredictable bullshit that has constituted history throughout, well, history. Nothing is unavoidable and we have never existed in a world where we can’t do anything at all. Also, authoritarian regimes (especially those imposed without the consent of the people -- willing subjection to authoritarianism is one thing, but the other, yeah) have a relatively short shelf life, historically speaking. That won’t help all of us who could be hurt right now (though we can STILL fight back and speak up and help our neighbors), but it’s the truth. Authoritarian rule (especially when it’s not balanced by economic security, which sure as hell isn’t happening right now) can last for a while, sure. But it is always its own worst enemy, and it will always be ended. How that ends is a choice we can make.

This isn’t the “get out on the streets and Start The Glorious Revolution!!!” nonsense that the armchair internet leftists, none of whom are actually starting a glorious revolution or doing anything except bitching on Twitter about how Biden and Trump are alike, are fond of. This is an active choice to realize that there are always things you can do, that there are things you can do right now, and one of them, most obviously, is voting. This mess was all completely goddamn avoidable if people had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But well, they didn’t, and we get one last shot to fix this by democratic process. Trump is already openly setting up to contest the election results/try to invalidate them/throw out ballots. This is all old-school fascism. This is what is happening. He is counting on another razor-thin margin of votes that he can then contest in his hand-picked SCOTUS; he wants another Bush v. Gore very, very badly. The only way to blow away any legitimacy for anything like this is to vote in such overwhelming numbers that there’s no question of Biden’s victory, no need to wait for mail-in ballots (another reason the GOP has been trying so hard to destroy the post office) or anything else. At heart, Trump is a coward. He’s also an egomaniac. If it comes to stepping aside peacefully or being dragged out of the White House by the FBI for everyone to laugh at for the rest of time, hmm, I doubt he’s going to go for that. (And if he does, well, I will also savor the sight of him in handcuffs for all eternity.) However, that doesn’t mean the GOP machine won’t TRY, because Trump is not just Trump, but is his entire miserable cabal of enablers. I have written my fingers raw about how badly people need to vote. This is literally your last chance to do it.

I’ve seen a lot of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-doomed, they-have-the-votes-so-don’t-even-bother handwringing in the last few days. To some degree, yes. We all feel doomed. We have all been asked to find strength to deal with massive and unending waves of terrifying bullshit past anyone’s normal capacity, and we’re tired. We want it to end. But it’s SO CLOSE to ending, if we can all just get out and vote for Joe Biden in massive numbers on November 3 (or if your state has early voting, sooner; BANK YOUR VOTE). That’s such an easy thing to do. Nothing is set in stone. We can still fix things and make it so, you know, we’re not living in a fascist state ruled by Gilead. (And besides, all this Chicken Little rhetoric is super easy for the Russian troll farms to exploit. Don’t listen to it. Shut it down. Reject it.)

They want you to think you’re powerless. You’re not.

They want you to think this will never end. It will. We decide how.

They want you to think this is a foregone conclusion and you should just go back home and let it happen. You don’t have to.

They want you to think your vote doesn’t matter. It does.

They want you to think your rights are gone. They’re not.

They want you to think this future is inevitable.

IT’S NOT.

Hang in there.

Lots of hugs.

[mkfshard]

That's fair, it's a bit hyperbolic. It was the first thing I thought of and it doesn't fully map to the situation, I just wanted to evoke 'awful thing that will never get better' vs 'slightly less awful thing that has a chance of getting better.

That's also fair, my wording regarding his involvement was too light. He is absolutely materially supporting genocide and punishing those who protest against it.

This is 100% true and the electoral college should be torn down. It's also true that more people should have voted for her to avoid a conservative presidency, and part of why that didn't happen is the reasons I stated.

If you're not aware of how fascism surged when Trump was President, with his brazen bigotry emboldening awful people who then proceeded to do awful things, I don't know what to tell you. It's not Trump alone who's an avowed fascist, it's the entire republican party, banding behind his cult of personality. Not once here have I denied that Joe Biden hasn't done fucking awful things, and I do not dispute any example you've given. The only thing I do dispute here is the asinine idea that, somehow, giving republicans more power will make any of this better instead of infinitely worse. Biden and the democrats might've failed to codify Roe V. Wade, but it was Trump that installed the conservative judges that had it overturned, and who will continue to attack basic rights in this country until they die, resign, or are somehow impeached. Democrats frequently do awful, shitty things that hurt everyone and maddeningly fail in their duties to protect our rights. But they're not doing that and denying basic facts about reality and trying to break down the separation of church and state, and trying to destroy the education system, and trying to strip away corporate regulations and trying make the rich keep getting richer and trying to incite violence and legalize discrimination against anyone who isn't them. And, of course, having a formal and public plan detailing how exactly they plan to turn the country into a conservative dictatorship. To say there's no difference between the parties is patently absurd. The shittiest, leakiest dam in the world is better than the flood, because the flood will drown and kill and it will never stop or get better.

The lesser evil is getting more evil by the day.

[fadinglight123]

Also! Even if it’s not moving back to the left fast or enough or at all? That is still preferable to the wheel turning further to the right!

Like holy shit, your response to a group of politicians are actively spouting authoritarian and often blatant fascist talking points and screwing people over is to……completely give up on participating in ensuring there’s any stopgaps at all to slow them down and keep things from getting worse until more people who can and will change things are in a position to be able to run and get elected? Really?

You can roll over and and throw in the towel. I refuse to let them strip away basic rights and walk back all the progress we have made without a fight. I fucking loathe how useless and slow to change and centrist most democrats are rn as much as anyone. But the alternative is worse!!! And I don’t care what you say about both sides are bad, one is objectively less bad than the other and I want that side in charge so that the other side can’t pull off their bullshit.

I’m not saying it’s a permanent solution and to never look for a better option but you need to be practical about politics and play the long game sometimes. And sometimes that means voting and electing the better of two bad options until another viable better option that’s likely to succeed can get in the race.

It’s like that metaphor I saw back at the height of the “Biden is just as bad as trump” bullshit during the 2020 election cycle. About various marginalized and suffering groups trying to paddle the ocean on rafts, while Biden was offering to give all of them dingy little rowboats that are leaky but will at least stay afloat while trump wanted to take away their raft. And some people were screaming how those people shouldn’t support Biden bc they deserve speedboats.

We know we deserve better. We agree. But those were the viable options, and one would at least give some breathing room. A minor, long-overdue, bare-fucking-minimum upgrade in assistance/protections/etc. (or at very least a guarantee the government wouldn’t actively be trying to strip away what we already have) or losing what little of that we had. I’ll take that breathing room thank you very much, and use the energy and time it frees up from being in survival mode to work on pushing for new ways to inch progress along and increase the chances that the next time we choose, one side raises the bar just a little bit higher.

And frankly, even if Biden and the Democrats haven’t fulfilled the promise of that metaphorical rowboat. Hell, even if he doesn’t at all in this term or, if he runs and gets re-elected, in his second term, I won’t regret that choice. Because at least he isn’t actively ripping away the supports and protections we do have. At least he can be bullied and pressured and shamed into doing the right thing by us. That is still a victory and an improvement over the Republicans. Keeping things from getting worse is important, because it’s going to be a long, hard fight to fix things and make things better, and if it gets worse in the meantime because you decided it wasn’t worth putting in that effort, it just makes that fight harder and gets more vulnerable people hurt or killed in the meantime.

It doesn’t matter that we technically have other political parties, the reality is that the US is currently a two-party system with two candidates who had a chance in hell of winning. I hate it too, but that’s not the kind of system you can or should be trying to dismantle in the midst of a tight race where many marginalized peoples’ ability to survive in this country was on the line!

That’s the kind of change that needs to happen slowly, over the course of years, not just during election cycles. And in the meantime, you take the better or less awful of the options you have, and prevent things from getting worse for the most vulnerable. Always. You don’t give up and let it get worse just because fixing a broken system nearly 250 years in the making that has been actively rigged and manipulated by one side in particular for the last 50 years can’t be fixed easily or quickly in a single election. Insisting on moral purity and ideal solutions when your current realistic options are “actively making things worse” or “blocking the ones making it worse and at least attempting to inch us towards improvement” is not helpful, and refusing to participate at all when the things you want are currently out of reach but attainable with time and effort is immature, irresponsible, AND unhelpful.

And if you value perfect, ideal solutions, or morally pure candidates over doing as much as you can every chance you get to prevent as much harm as possible to the most marginalized people? You are not the better person. You are not helping. You do not care about helping make people’s lives better. You are just like the religious conservatives you hate who preach from a book that calls for tolerance and kindness and love while supporting treating anyone not white, cishet, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc. as less than.

Reducing harm, preventing things from getting worse, and protecting the most vulnerable as much as possible in the present is more important than holding out for some perfect ideal. Always.

Republicans are actively trying to destroy what democratic process the US has left and y’all out here like “voting is pointless!”

You’re right: a lot of more liberal politicians aren’t left enough, by far. It pisses me off; I think they’re not trying hard enough. But how do you think things will go if you throw away a vote for the people who will try to protect the democratic process? If those seats are filled by conservative legislators? What do you think will happen if conservatives have their way and make the US into the autocracy they so blatantly support?

If you think things are bad right now – which btw is a result of years of conservative legislation and tearing apart protections for the average citizen – I can guarantee you it would get so, so much worse. Conservatives aren’t even shy about what they want to do, they’ll happily talk about it to any reporter or podcaster who gives them airtime.

Who stands to benefit the most from our refusal to vote? Give you a hint: it’s not us.

[rjalker]

This post makes it very clear you don't listen to indigenous people at all

and that you are not actually listening to a single thing anyone who refuses to support genocide is saying, and that you think there's literally only two options for voting at all.

twelves rambles#us politics#serious posting time baby!#'im not voting for biden-' well then. either youre not voting (bad) or voting for trump (really bad) #so. you dont care.#biden isnt good by any means#but do you know how bad trump would be?#no really. do you have any idea how fucking worse trump would be?#i would literally flee the us if trump was elected. not kidding at all here.#i would uproot my whole fucking life rather than live under trump again#'biden doesnt care about palestine or poc or-' neither does trump!#at least biden gives half a shit about bodily autonomy and queer rights and clean energy etc etc#if you are not voting blue in america this election i do not trust you. full stop#(not including those who cant vote obvs)#not voting is worse than voting. the fascists try to strip away voting rights for a reason.#voting is important#thank you for coming to my ted talk

Joe Biden is literally comitting genocide right now. As you read this response. He is fascist. He is comitting genocide. You cannot pretend that the people who refuse to support genocide simply "don't care" and insist that by refusing to vote for the man who is literally comitting genocide, that's the exact same thing as voting for Trump.

Either you think this country has a real democracy, or you think that not voting for Biden is the same thing as voting for Trump. You can't have it both ways.

And you do not get to call people who refuse to vote idiots who want to oppress others when a ton of the people who refuse to vote are literally indigenous people refusing to give legitimacy to the government that has been comitting genocide against them since before it was even written up in the constitution.

You cannot demand people vote for the leopards eating people's faces party and then pretend that everyone who refuses to do so is actually just a hateful bigot.

You are literally trying to shame people into supporting genocide because you think it'll benefit you.

There's a word for that. It starts with an F and ends with an M.

Read this whole entire article before responding. The entire thing.

Here's some short quotes:

“Voting consolidates the power of a whole society in the hands of a few politicians.” When this process is conducted under colonial authority, there is no option but political death for Indigenous Peoples. In other words, voting can never be a survival strategy under colonial rule. It’s a strategy of defeat and victimhood that protracts the suffering and historical harm induced by ongoing settler colonialism. And while the harm reduction sentiment may be sincere, even hard won marginal reforms gained through popular support can be just as easily reversed by the stroke of a politician’s pen. If voting is the democratic participation in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps us at the mercy of our oppressors.

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Lucy Parsons, an Afro-Indigenous anarchist was among many who critiqued suffrage at the time. Parsons wrote in 1905, “Can you blame an Anarchist who declares that man-made laws are not sacred?…The fact is money and not votes is what rules the people. And the capitalists no longer care to buy the voters, they simply buy the ‘servants’ after they have been elected to ‘serve.’ The idea that the poor man’s vote amounts to anything is the veriest delusion.The ballot is only the paper veil that hides the tricks.”

reminder that anyone telling you not to vote is either an idiot or trying to strip away your rights 😊

[arrowawsome]

#twelves rambles#us politics#serious posting time baby!#'im not voting for biden-' well then. either youre not voting (bad) or voting for trump (really bad)#so. you dont care.#biden isnt good by any means#but do you know how bad trump would be?#no really. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW FUCKING WORSE TRUMP WOULD BE?#i would literally flee the us if trump was elected. not kidding at all here.#i would uproot my whole fucking life rather than live under trump again#'biden doesnt care about palestine or poc or-' NEITHER DOES TRUMP!#at least biden gives half a shit about bodily autonomy and queer rights and clean energy etc etc#if you are not voting blue in america this election i do not trust you. full stop#(not including those who cant vote obvs)#not voting is worse than voting. the fascists try to strip away voting rights for a reason.#voting is important#thank you for coming to my ted talk

this is so important do not leave in the tags

reminder that anyone telling you not to vote is either an idiot or trying to strip away your rights 😊