#vote because millions of lives depend on it

[allpplareequal]

Types of people that tell you not to vote:

Upper-middle class white/cishet/abled """communists""" who have nothing at stake should fascists take power.

Accelerationists who want social collapse because they glorify violence.

Far right douches pretending to be leftists and/or minorities on their alt accounts.

Russian trolls

Puritans-in-denial who are too obsessed with doing nothing wrong to consider doing something good.

Terminally online troglodytes who have spent so much time in an echo chamber that they forgot how politics work.

Hardcore conspiracy theorists

Genuine idiots.

In conclusion, fucking vote, if not for yourself, then for those who cannot vote for themselves.

[allpplareequal]

Also: those posts are more than likely bots.

In the 2016 election, there was a massive botting campaign encouraging people not to vote. These accounts were banned after they were revealed to be operated from Russia.

To those people that do genuinely believe that not voting is the moral option:

Trump will kill a lot more than Gaza.

Do you really value your flimsy moral high-ground over the lives of millions of people, including yourself?

You are an American citizen. You are complicit in genocide by the mere act of living and working in this country. You will be complicit in a lot more genocide if you continue to believe inaction and compliance free you from responsibility.

When the trumpists are at your door, will you be satisfied that you let every Palestinian die, instead of some? Will you find happiness in a concentration camp, because the lesser of two evils is still evil?

You've been given a choice to lose a hand or lose your head. And you would rather kill the whole village than make a decision.

So with the growing support behind Kamala Harris, I've been seeing more of THESE:

Do NOT pay them any attention.

Not only are these posts incredibly ignorant, narrow minded and naive....if we lose our rights how can we help the seas abroad?? I ask this because I NEVER get a concrete answer.

Kamala Harris is PRO-Palestine whereas Trump said he would "finish the job".

So between an Accomplished Attorney NOT COP who jailed pieces of gutter shit like Donald Trump or a Convicted Felon known for being a scammer, failed businessman and rapist; pick your poison.

[beemovieerotica]

struggling with how to word this, but putting it out there anyway:

i can fully understand the posts on here from a lot of americans being tired of "vote blue no matter who" posts when the #1 thing that people are constantly (and sometimes only?) addressing is how the republican party is going treat trans/queer people if elected.

it's part of an unfortunate pattern of prioritizing the effects on a demographic that includes white + upper class people, when people of color and those in the global south are actively and currently being killed or relegated to circumstances in which their survival is very unlikely

it is genuinely exhausting to witness this, and i was also on the fence about even participating in voting because i a) felt like it didn't matter and b) every time i voiced being frustrated with the current state of the country, white queer people would immediately step in with "but what about trans people!" -> (i am mixed race trans man)

and i say this with unending patience toward people who do this, because i know that it's not something they actively think about. but everyone already knows how the republican party is going to treat queer people. you are probably talking to another queer person when you bring up project 2025. the issue is that, for those of us who aren't white, or for those of us who are but who are conscious of ongoing struggles for people of color worldwide, the safety of people around the world feels more urgent than our own. that is the calculation that's being made.

you're not going to win votes for the democratic party by dismissing or minimizing these realities and by continually centering (white) queer people.

very few people on here and twitter are actually talking about issues beyond queer rights that concern people of color, or how the two administrations differ on these issues instead of constantly circling back to single-issue politics. this isn't an exhaustive list. but these are the issues that have actually altered my perspective and motivated me to the point of committing to casting a vote

the biden administration has been engaged in a years-long fight to allow new applicants to DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program that allows undocumented individuals who arrived as children to remain in the country) after the Trump administration attempted to terminate it. the program is in limbo currently because of the actions of Trump-backed judges, with those who applied before the ruling being allowed to stay, but no new applications are being processed. Trump has repeatedly toyed with the idea of just deporting the 1.8 million people, but he continues to change his mind depending on whatever the fuck goes on in his head. he cannot be relied on to be sympathetic toward people of hispanic descent or to guarantee that DREAMers will be allowed stay in the country. biden + a democratic controlled congress will allow legal challenges to the DACA moratorium to gain ground.

the biden administration is open to returning and protecting portions of culturally important indigenous land in a way that the trump administration absolutely does not give a fuck. as of may 2024, they have established seven national monuments with plans to expand the San Gabriel Monument where the Gabrielino, Kizh / Tongva, the Chumash, Kitanemuk, Serrano, and Tataviam reside. the Berryessa Snow Mountain is also on the list, as a sacred region to the Patwin.

i'm recognizing that the US's plans for clean energy have often come into conflict with tribal sovereignty, and the biden administration could absolutely do better in navigating this. but the unfortunate dichotomy is that there would be zero commitment or investment in clean energy under a trump-led government, which poses an astounding existential threat and destabilizing force to the global south beyond any human-to-human conflict. climate change has caused and will continue to cause resource shortages, greater natural disasters, and near-lethal living conditions for those in the tropics - and the actions of the highest energy consumers (US) are to blame. biden has funneled billions of dollars into climate change mitigation and clean energy generation - trump does not believe that any of it matters.

i may circle back to this and add more as it comes up, but i'm hoping that those who are skeptical / discouraged / tired of the white queer-centric discourse on tumblr and twitter can at least process some of this. please feel free to add more articles + points but i'm asking for the sake of this post to please focus on issues that affect people of color.

[friskyfreddie2024]

America: You Fucked Up

You could have chosen Hope. You chose Hate.

You could have chosen Empathy. You chose Enmity.

You could have chosen a New Beginning. You chose the Nazi.

We could have finally been rid of this cancer on American democracy. He could have been banished to obscurity, remembered only as the worst president in American history, and finally held responsible for his numerous crimes.

The ignorant, racist, misogynistic, white supremacist, pathologicial liar is now going back to the White House. He is a convicted felon, an admitted sexual predator, a total fraud, and a demented old man. He belongs in prison.

What did you do?

You ignored that the U.S. economy is the strongest in the world, that inflation is at its lowest level in four years, that unemployment is at its lowest level in three years. You believed the lies about how terrible the economy is. I knew better.

You forgot about his 30,000+ lies while he was in office. I remember.

You forgot about his complete mismanagement and ignorance over COVID, resulting in the deaths of over one million Americans. I remember.

You forgot about the saber rattling over military exercises in the pacific, when Kim Jong Un threatened us with nuclear missiles, causing us to fear whether we'd see another day. I remember.

You forgot about waking up every morning dreading to hear the latest abomination he tweeted. I remember.

You forgot about "very fine people on both sides." I remember.

You forgot about "only the best people" like Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Steve Mnuchin, and many others who were given cabinet positions despite having zero qualifications for the job. I remember.

You forgot that 40 of his former cabinet members and dozens of former generals and officials refused to support him, saying he was "unfit to serve." I remember.

You forgot about January 6, "fight like hell". I remember.

You forgot that when he was told that his vice president was secured because the rioters wanted to kill him, he said, "So what?" I remember

You forgot about The Big Lie, "Release the Kraken" and 60+ failed attempts to overturn the election in the courts. I remember.

You forgot about "I just need you to find 11,780 votes." I remember.

You forgot about "They're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!" I remember.

What now?

When a woman suffering an ectopic pregnancy dies because she doesn't have access to medical care, that's on you.

When they take away your neighbor, your co-worker, your friend, and deport them, that's on you.

When a woman is forced to suffer the agony of carrying her rapist's baby to term, that's on you.

When a transgender kid harms themselves because they can't get the medical care they need, that's on you.

When your middle-class taxes GO UP, while billionaires get even more tax breaks, that's on you.

When schoolchildren are killed by an assault rifle in a mass shooting, that's on you.

When children grow up ignorant because you banned books and dictated how history is taught, that's on you.

When Grandma can no longer afford a comfortable life because the Social Security she paid into all her working life, and provided income on which she now depends, has been cut, that's on you.

When violence against Jews, Asians, Hispanics rises again, that's on you.

When prices on the goods you buy skyrocket due to tariffs, that's on you.

When Ukraine, deprived of our support, is overrun by Russia, that's on you.

When the U.S. is the laughing stock of the world (as we were 2016-2020), that's on you.

What should you have done?

You should have exercised critical thinking skills, recognized the thousands of lies you were being told, recalled that his administration had four years to live up to his promises and failed at all of them. You should have realized that he is a profoundly stupid individual who doesn't give a shit about you or your family or anything except himself.

You had the last nine years to see that, and you still fell for his bullshit.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

[akindplace]

to anyone who doesn’t want to vote: your voice matters. staying silent means that maybe your life won’t change depending on who wins; but the lives of others will. your silence is not a protest, because you’re part of the system, like it or not. silence makes you look complicit and apathetic, it is not a protest. your hands aren’t clean if you don’t do anything. it means you had an option to do something but chose to do nothing, and it helps anyone. it can feel paralyzing to be faced with options that are not the greatest, but the greatest politician does not exist. but you still have a choice to make. so vote against the worst of them, instead of expecting to find the best candidate.

action will always wield more result than inaction. and inaction only gives you the illusion of having your hands clean. bust because you don’t see the direct results of your inaction doesn’t mean they don’t exist. you may think your hands are clean because you didn’t use them, but the truth is that pretending your hands are clean doesn’t mean they are. trying to absolve your own conscience doesn’t mean that doing nothing doesn’t have any real immediate impact in the lives of millions. democracy is not only about you. silent protests only feel like complicity to whoever wins.

your voice matters.

my country has lived in a brutal dictatorship for decades, and our democracy is very young compared to the democracy of the us. don’t take your right to vote for granted. use your voice before it’s taken away from you. if you want change, vote. inaction will bring nothing, except the illusion that you protested something when you’re actually paralyzed, changing nothing. you’re still a part of the democratic system, so don’t take it for granted: it is a gift to be able to express your political opinion by voting, but some politicians don’t care for you to have that, and they are counting on you to stay silent.

[11queensupreme11]

About the humans, how misoginistic would they be since they are from ancient periods (especially Adam) ? If Percy was raped by one of the gods, what would the humans do (especially Adam) ?

so for this question, it all stems down on not only what they believed back when they were alive, but how willing they were to change their beliefs after their deaths as times went on and stuff became more progressive

adam was the first ever human and since he got booted outta valhalla along with eve, he never got influenced by the gods' misogyny THANK GOD plus he's just too good to ever think of such a thing especially since his own wife was nearly sexually assaulted by that snake bitch. ALSO, since he was the first ever human, the concept of misogyny (at least for humans) didn't exist for him. misogyny only ever became a thing when more and more humans started popping out

unfortunately, all of the human fighters came from a time where misogyny was extremely rampant and in some cases (depending on countries maybe) before women even had voting rights 💀 the youngest is simo hayha (1905-2002) 💀💀💀💀

confucianism was already a thing before qin shi huang's reign, but thankfully he hated it so much that he had confucian scholars buried alive and their books burned LMAO (he was known as a tyrant just like a certain daddy we know) but it definitely wasn't because of how misogynist confucianism was. i'm trying to google some more stuff about him rn, but all i could find rn is that women still had shitty lives under his rule, and he had no wife, just concubines. not much info on how he treated women, but then again, in ror we know he loved and respected his mother figure, chun yan. but just because he treated one woman right doesn't mean he's like that with all women unfortunately, but lets hope chun yan can keep him under control 💀💀

then there's also leonidas. i can't find any excepts of him being particularly cruel towards women or saying anything crass, but he's from ancient fucking greece 💀💀

i don't have time to search up more about the others, but i feel like tesla's probably decent. he was alive between 1856-1943 which was also a very bad time for women, but i found stuff about how he has praised some women for their intelligence (though sometimes it could come off as patronizing but again, 1856-1943). for arsenic blues, i'm planning on writing him off as a very progressive and caring more about intelligence rather than gender. so he definitely won't be sexist.

SO ANYWAY, realistically, more than half of these people were probably sexist to various degrees in real life 💀💀 but i most likely won't write all of them like that in arsenic blues. the more ancient characters would probably be pretty bull-headed in their sexist views, but i'll just have them be more patronizing (especially since percy's not just a girl, but a CHILD in their eyes), rather than full-on spitting vitriol at her for her gender.

(they're basically picking favorites, like ppl in real life would do 💀 "yeah [insert marginalized group] are kinda inferior, but not you though, you're different!" 💀💀💀💀)

also, as for your question, ALL of them would be pissed. yes, even the sexist ones. percy is someone close to them, a child they all care about. so ofc they'd be pissed, and it doesn't help that they already HATE the gods for all the shit they've put humanity through over the millions of years 💀💀

[passerkirbius]

Compulsory Voting Looks Like...?

In my Voting With Spite post, I mentioned that Australia has compulsory voting, and I noted that quite a few people had either positive or negative reactions to that idea. I thought it might be a good idea to talk briefly about what Compulsory Voting actually does to your voting scene.

Now, to be clear, I'm going to be talking about the Australian Experience - that's what I know. I'm aware that Brazil and Belgium both have Compulsory Voting as well, and their experiences are likely to be a bit different. So, let's go through the big ones:

Do you need ID to vote?

Here, the answer is no - an ID can help, because when you get your name marked off the roll at a voting station, they use your name and address, and our driver's licenses have that, but it's not essential. Indeed, if you've changed address and that hasn't been recorded on the roll, you can still vote - this is called a "declaration vote", because the vote is put into an envelope where you "declare" that the information provided is correct, and the vote is counted once the electoral commission has verified the information.

One might think that this open up our system to a lot of fraud, but one of the fun parts about compulsory voting is that voter fraud is very easy to study - in such a system, if someone steals someone else's identity to vote, it will appear that that person has voted twice, and it gets investigated. The only other big fraud option is fraudulent enrolment - and again, because everyone is on the electoral role, if there's concern regarding a fraudulent enrolment, the electoral commission can check with people at the address of the enrolment. The AEC do these sorts of checks after every election, and it turns out, while there are often double votes, most of those are administrative errors (crossing off the wrong person somewhere), or entirely innocent (people with memory issues voting multiple times because they forgot that they'd already voted). During the 2018 election, only 118 cases were deemed worth forwarding to the Federal Police, out of over 20 million votes.

Do Politicians still play to the base?

In Voluntary voting systems, there is a well-known phenomenon where there's an incentive for politicians to, instead of trying to aim for policies that will satisfy the most people, to instead aim directly at their "base", their natural political home voters. The idea is that you don't actually need to persuade the other side to vote for you, you actually need to persuade your side to vote for you. The only prevailing counter to this is that you don't want to be so egregious that you motivate the other side to vote against you.

Historically, this has not been the case in Australia. In Australia, you can depend on your base to vote for you - they aren't going to stay at home, because it's compulsory to vote.

So they play to the centre?

Honestly, it's complicated. The question is often not about whether you're politically "in the middle", but where you live - Just like in other electorates, there are safe seats (where voter movement isn't likely to kick out the incumbent party) and marginal seats (where the margin of votes for a given party is quite small, generally less than 5%). Marginal seats are where political parties can potentially score a seat with only a little bit of a push, so it's standard strategy to build your campaign promises to directly target those marginal voters.

What those marginal voters actually want varies quite a bit, depending on where in the country they are - a marginal seat in Rural NSW need different targeting than a tiny marginal seat in Melbourne. In general these voters are looking for actual improvements in facilities and economic policy, rather than ideology, so while politicians from those seats may be absolute culture warriors, that often isn't what people in the seat are asking about or listening to - they want to know what the nutcase is actually going to do for them.

With that said, rural voters are more likely to want a personal connection to their MP and are much more likely to vote on who they, personally, like the most. This is less the case in Urban electorates, who care much less about who the MP is and what they're like, and much more about their party's platform.

But also also, there is a strong emphasis in politics about playing to "Ordinary Australians", which one can consider a code for "centre views". Of course, Australia as a society is pretty conservative in many ways, so what you consider "centre" may be a little left of what we consider "centre"...

So yeah, not nearly as simple as "playing to the centre" - there's a lot more involved there.

Are there such thing as "Independent" voters?

In Australia, at least, the idea of an "Independent" voter doesn't really exist - Australia's leaders aren't voted for in Primaries, so you don't need to have your political affiliation marked. Some Australians are members of political parties, but that number is tiny - in 2022, the two major parties had 100,000 members between them, in a population of 26 million people - about 0.4% of the population, maybe 0.5% if we count all the minor parties as well.

Are compulsory voters more engaged voters?

In a word? No. Australian society in general doesn't encourage people being overly involved or engaged in politics, especially in working-class subcultures (and of course, every Australian claims to be working class, regardless of their actual class). Like in many places, there's a pressure in face-to-face conversation to suppress political discussion to avoid conflict, and I can assure you that researching your candidates/parties before an election isn't a common activity (and I understand why - there's so many of them).

As a consequence, Australians don't tend to change their vote that often - in fact, studies in Australia have shown that there's a strong correlation between how you vote, and how your parents vote. A Labor voter is likely to stay a Labor voter, and a Liberal voter is likely to stay a Liberal voter, even if they're not a member of the party. This is why most election promises are much more about giving stuff to voters, rather than about legislation around society itself - It's considered safer to deal with infrastructure than it is to deal in culture wars issues.

Wait, if voters don't change often, how do opposition win?

Well, rarely is the honest answer to that question here. Since 1950, the party in federal government has changed only seven times:

Once in 1972, from the Coalition to Labor

Once in 1975, from Labor to the Coalition (although that one was a particularly odd one)

Once in 1983, from the Coalition to Labor

Once in 1996, from Labor to the Coalition

Once in 2007, from the Coalition to Labor

Once in 2013, from Labor to the Coalition

Once in 2022, from the Coalition to Labor

And during that time, there's been 27 elections, so in 20 out of 27 elections, the incumbent won. But with that said, every time the opposition wins, it's in a landslide, winning a huge number of seats.

The reasons for this are obviously complex, but the way I like to think about is that in Australia there's a certain inertia in the voting populace. Once your vote is set, there's not a lot that's going to change that vote - you're generally going to vote for the party that aligns most with you, and that isn't likely to change much. But as a party keeps fucking up (because they always fuck up), the more that votes wobbles - it might, initially, move your party down the preferences, which you might not notice (because it still funnels to you), but eventually, you've pissed off so many people that everyone votes for anyone but you arseholes, which results in the other party getting in with a landslide.

The previous government is usually horrifically savaged, to the point that it takes a few election cycles for them to slowly rebuild numbers, regain talent, and get themselves into a position where, now that the other side has fucked up sufficiently, voters are willing to let them have another shot at the big time.

This, awkwardly, also tends to stifle politically-lead social change, as well. Firstly, it can take decade or more for a party that is willing to engage with your chosen direction of society to become the Government, and even once they are there, it tends to be the case that Governments won't consider leading such changes until they are certain that everyone wants it - The Gay Marriage Postal Survey is an example. Any opinion poll could show you that the majority of Australians were for gay marriage, but the Coalition government of the time was against it. As a delaying tactic, they insisted on a postal survey (it couldn't be a plebiscite, because they couldn't get that through their own MPs) so every Australian had to vote on the issue. The result? 61.6% were for Gay Marriage (and up to 90% in some electorates!).

What if you can't vote?

Australia is something of a world leader in working to ensure that everyone can vote, because it's been generally established that you can't punish someone for not doing something the government has made it impossible for you to do. So, all Australians have access to:

Early Voting (usually for at least 3 weeks before election day)

Postal Voting (and you just have to post it on Election day, it can be received afterwards).

The voting infrastructure is set up that you can vote at any polling station in your state (we now print lower house ballots on demand, so every station has access to every ballot), and there are specific polling stations for interstate voters (where upper house ballots for every state are available).

There are mobile polling stations for voters, so even if you live in a remote town and can't drive to the nearest polling station, polling stations can drive out to you!

These mobile polling stations also attend prisons and hospitals to provide voting access for people who cannot leave to vote.

We even now have telephone voting for Blind folk, with a specialised system set up to allow for a secret ballot, so the phone person assisting the blind voter won't know who the blind voter is.

Australian embassies in other countries are also available for voters, although you are not actually required to vote if you're not in the country during the election campaign.

So, our voting infrastructure is built, as much as is practicable, to ensure that every voter gets every opportunity to vote. If you can't get to a booth on the day, you can early vote or postal vote.

To be clear, this is not a requirement of compulsory voting - it's quite possible to go to this level of effort in a voluntary voting system, and I can absolutely imagine a compulsory voting system that also made it difficult for people to vote (likely disproportionately affecting your political enemies).

Does Compulsory Voting help Minor Parties?

Not really - Preferential voting definitely helps minor parties, but not Compulsory voting. There is one way it might help though - As noted above, if you're pissed off with your current party, you may bump another party higher up on your preferences, even put them as your "1" vote. In a Voluntary voting system, such people might, instead choose not to vote and stay at home, so in that sense, I guess minor parties can be the beneficiaries of voter anger, but of course, that couldn't be the case without preferential voting.

Got more questions? My asks are always open! Ask away!

[icaruspendragon]

Hi! A while ago I saw one of your tiktoks about how northern democrats typically view people from Appalachia, and it really made me re-examine some biases I had and I deeply appreciated that. I'm from New Hampshire, and basically this primary season we were completely ignored by democratic candidates because of some issues with the DNC and our primary being labeled "unsanctioned". It was weird to not feel supported or valued by my party for the first time ever, (especially when NH tends to get a lot of attention) and it reminded me of your tiktok and how you mentioned that republicans tend to reach out to people in the south while democrats tend to ignore them as a lost cause. Because I saw that happening here with an insanly disproportionate republican presence in my state leading to the primaries. I know the comparisons aren't equal, but it helped drive home the message for me and gave me just a taste of what you explained so clearly in your tiktok. I understand if you choose not to post this, but I really wanted to thank you for opening my eyes and helping me face some biases I didn't know I had.

hello and thank you (for re-examining your biases and for writing me this message). i'm gonna use this as a chance to restate some of the things i mentioned in the video you're talking about.

i'd like to start this by saying i know appalachia and the south aren't perfect. there's racism and homophobia and bigotry. being someone who is marginalized or minoritized in appalachia/the south isn't always easy. but appalachia/the south doesn't have the monopoly on bigotry. america is rife with it. it's something marginalized folks all over the country have to face. and when northern dems act like racism and homophobia and bigotry are things that don't occur in their state simply because it's a blue state, they're doing an incredible disservice to the marginalized people that live in their communities who are facing the results of bigotry.

the folks living in appalachia/the south are heavily stereotyped as nothing more than ignorant backwood cousin fucking hillbillies, and while there are people that live here that fit that bill, appalachia/the south is not a monolith.

appalachia is region that spans from mississippi all the way to new york. the south (depending on who you ask) consists of 17 different states. and here's a little fun fact about the south for ya: according to the 2020 census, out of the 41.6 million black people that live in america, 38.9% of them live in the south.

so when that entire region is written off, forgotten about, and treated as a lost cause it's not the bigots that are being left behind; it's the marginalized people that live here that are being written off. the very same folks democrats and liberals love claiming they care about are the ones being left behind.

one of the reasons republicans have such a strong hold on appalachia/the south is because they put in the work to earn the trust of the voter. work that democrats just don't do. so of course republicans are gonna get the vote, they earned it.

other reasons for the stronghold existing (that people never wanna talk about for some reason) are: gerrymandering, voter suppression, lack of state funding that leads to lack of education, general lack of education, high poverty rates, lack of internet access. i could go on and on.

there are so many marginalized people that live in this region that are working themselves to the bone and trying their damndest to make appalachia/the south a better place for EVERYONE to live and when high falutin yankees act like every single person that lives here is the racist uncle you have to ignore at christmas, they are discrediting the work being done to try and change the region for the better.

allow me to say this again: when appalachia/the south is written off as nothing more than a home to bigots, it's not the bigots being written off, it's the people affected by bigotry.

there are people fighting to make these areas better. we are trying. so please, please stop writing us off.

we are not a lost cause.

[allpplareequal]

A poem about voting

“Choose.” says the king, “Let your friend die, or let the beast rampage freely.”

“I can't!” you plead.

“Choose, or the choice will be made for you.”

You look at your friend, but the snake slithers to block your view.

“You would support your friend’s death?” the snake hisses.

“No!”

“You would be choosing to kill them. It would be your fault.” it argues.

“But I can't choose the beast!”

“The lesser of two evils is still evil.”

“What if the beast kills me?”

“Don't be selfish, you should value the life of your friend!”

“I do!” you refute angrily.

“Then don't choose to kill them.”

“The beast might kill them too!”

“Then leave the choice to another,” the snake offers, “don’t be complicit with evil.”

“Your time is up.” the king interrupts.

“No! I'm not going to enable evil.” you declare.

“Snake, the choice is yours: Kill their friend, or release the beast.”

“I choose the beast.”

You bleed out side by side with your friend, the king, and the snake.

[thydungeongal]

I'm just about completely out of hope with this election. The only meaningful choices within the voting system are both awful and the overall political shift in this country is just going towards fascism so it probably doesn't even matter anyways. More people will still be hurt, this country will continue to just... be the way it is but worse, nothing is or will be ok about what this country does and has done, and the thing that kills me the most is that however painful it is for me emotionally to just think about what this country is doing, it cannot compare at all to the pain of the people being more literally killed by it.

Nothing is ok about any of this and I don't know how to cope with it anymore. We are a damned people standing on soil stained with blood.

I understand, but I hope you don't settle into doomerism, because it's not going to lead into anything productive. The current system depends on people being so checked out that all of this stuff falls into the background as someone else's problem or so paralyzed with fear they will vote for the less objectionable party despite what they represent.

I've seen some people say they can't wait for "politics to be boring again" which is ultimately a position borne of privilege, because as you have identified, the millions of people living under the everyday pressures visited upon them by the state or one of the many US-backed regimes in the world will never have the luxury of seeing politics as boring. That sort of complacent acceptance of the world of politics as someone else's problem only benefits those in power.

But again, you don't want to fall into doomerism, neither of the "there's nothing I can do to make things better" nor the "I must keep voting for one party no matter what" variety. Get in touch with people who share your disillusionment with the system and talk to them about how you can work to improve things. I personally recommend online commie trans girls. But at the end of the day, whatever happens, don't fall into despair.

[wavingalight]

watching both leftists and libs try to pin down exactly one reason why the election was lost like. Man i think it depends. pretending as if there is zero overlap here except for what exactly aligns with your pov is silly.

kamala harris and the democrats mismanaged their campaign and rejected arab/muslim voters by funding genocide. there is an extreme radicalization problem within young men of the united states. people who buy into trump's prejudice acted out of their prejudiced self interest. platforming war criminals killed harris's campaign momentum. america has an apathy and underfunded education problem. america is built on violent imperialism. people are tired of false promises. there is an undoubtable rise of bigotry embedded in american culture, the idea of steadfast loyal patriotism and hard, blond blue eyed dreams. all of this is true.

do not pretend as if kamala harris being a woman had zero effect on her loss. that is a lie. i thought after the articles about femicides, rape, and assault rising all over the world we'd understand that women are seen as subordinate by a large majority of the global population, certainly by the united states. you are insulated in your bubble. you cannot reblog posts about misogyny and then brazenly behave as if that's not part of the problem. what cognitive dissonance are you living in? you really believe black women face zero prejudice whatsoever? look me in the eye, because i don't believe you.

do not pretend as if kamala harris being a woman was the only reason why she lost. that is a lie. the democrats veering right showed they had no spine and policy to appeal to their voterbase. they muzzled themselves and regressed the progressive momentum they'd gained. they staunchly refused to listen to palestinian activists, talking over them with such smugness you'd think they were certain they'd bite their tongue and forget. they continued to support israeli apartheid. they have blood of children on their hands. israel has razed gaza to the ground for their ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing. in an ultimate pursuit of capital, the united states has violated and massacred palestinians.

acting as if 71 million people of the united states voting for a rapist with his brain melting out of his ears is a totally normal, fine part of society is laughable. acting as if there was zero veering towards trump from any demographic is laughable. so too is victimizing harris so much that you're blind to her sins. You cannot shut your ears and blindly talk over the other. Like it or fucking not, accept that these things don't exist in a vacuum. They work together and they always will.

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

On a January day in 1948, a hefty book filled with turgid scientific prose, and scores of tables and charts, landed amid an unsuspecting American public. The tome reported, matter-of-factly and without judgment, that American men were up to all manner of sexual exploits behind closed doors, and that the minds of huge numbers of them were churning with taboo desires.

The book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by biologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University, was an utter revelation for a populace living in a time when masturbation was frowned upon, oral sex (even between husband and wife) was illegal in some states, and homosexuality was considered an extremely rare, criminal deviance.

Overnight, millions of American men realized that they were not lone freaks for doing what they did.

Based on thousands of exhaustive, confidential interviews with churchgoers, college students, prison inmates and more, Kinsey reported, for example, that 92% of men had masturbated and half of married men had had extramarital affairs. A full 37% of men said they had had some form of homosexual experience at some point in their lives.

Five years later, Kinsey’s second volume — Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — came through with more revelations. A full 62% of women, for instance, reported they had masturbated, about half of the women said that they had engaged in premarital sex, and two-thirds of participants said that they had experienced overtly sexual dreams. The book was widely attacked as an affront to the dignity of womanhood.

Kinsey’s work did more than reassure people they were not alone: It highlighted a disconnect between certain laws of the land and actual sexual practice. “Everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin,” Kinsey once said.

Sex researchers say Kinsey’s biggest contribution was the sheer cataloging of variation. But his most-famous findings revolve around the issue of homosexuality. He devised the famous Kinsey scale — a numerical gradation of levels of homosexual orientation, with 0 representing those who were exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual. The scale is still used by researchers.

Kinsey also reported that 10% of the men he interviewed said they engaged in predominantly homosexual activity between the ages of 16 and 55. “That changed the thinking about homosexuality,” says Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York psychoanalyst. “If it was more common than people thought it to be, then perhaps it was what we would call a normal variation of sexuality rather than a form of mental illness.”

Perhaps above all, researchers say Kinsey’s work and the later studies it inspired showed social scientists, public health workers, therapists and geneticists just how much there was and still remains for them to study.

Based on work such as Kinsey’s and Evelyn Hooker’s, the American Psychiatric Assn. voted in 1973, after intense debate, to drop homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Today, experts believe that Kinsey’s precise numbers were inflated, partly because the people he interviewed to draw his conclusions — especially in the book on males -- were not nationally representative. A posthumous reanalysis of his massive dataset found that when interviews from prisoners and other sources likely to over-sample the number of homosexual participants were removed, the percentage of those with exclusively homosexual experiences fell to 3%; another 3% reporting that such experiences were extensive but not exclusive. Those figures are in line with more recent studies.

Kinsey, meanwhile, has been accused of, or credited with — depending on one’s point of view — doing more than laying the groundwork for a new field. He radically altered the way society thinks of sex, and ushered in far greater sexual freedom.

“His influence was tremendous — it opened up the field,” says Vern Bullough, founder of the Center for Sex Research at Cal State Northridge, and author of Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research.

Full article: "The Kinsey Effect" [Los Angeles Times]

[lil-tumbles]

I need to say some stuff about the election. Voting is a choice. But it's not only a choice - it's a privilege. A privilege that may be taken from us if trump wins. Everyone should be free to vote for who they want to vote for, but this election isn't like other elections - more is at stake now than has ever been during my lifetime, and probably during yours, too. Millions of people across the world are depending on you to make the right decision, not just for yourself, but for them. I'm sorry if what I'm about to say would mean sacrificing your morals, I'm sorry that everything is so broken that this is the position we're in, but: it doesn't matter what you think. I don't care if you don't like Kamala. I don't care if you hate her pro-Israel nonsense. Vote anyway. Vote for her anyway. If you are a one-issue voter and this makes you not want to vote? You may never get the chance again. Kamala wants a ceasefire; trump wants to wipe every Palestinian from the face of the earth. Kamala won't strip away your rights; trump has done nothing but take things away from us. If you are gay and you want to keep the right to adopt, to marry, to work with protection from discrimination in the workplace, to get somewhere to live without being turned away because you're gay? Vote Kamala. If you wan tot get married to someone who's a different race than you? Vote Kamala. Because Trump is trying to take all of this away from us.

A vote for third party is a vote for trump. I know we all want to be able to vote for who we actually agree with, actually want running the country, and in a perfect world you'd be able to without risking so much, but this is not a perfect world. This is not an ordinary election. If Harris loses by one vote and I didn't vote, I would spend the next four years blaming myself for every loss, every death, every new genocide. And it might not only be four years - not if trump gets his way. He wants to rule forever. Don't let him. Vote Harris.

[theothin]

It's time.

Vote like millions of lives depend on it. Because they do.

[tuttle-did-it]

You know what? You're not going to reason with your pro-trump family, partner and friends. They won't apologise for destroying your life. They're not going to suddenly agree with you, and you need to accept that they are the kinds of people who can knowingly and intentionally put a monster in charge of everything.

Don't argue with them. Don't debate them. Everything you will say will only make them dig their heels in the ground.

If it's a big enough deal to you, cut them off. I personally would, but maybe you're a better person than I am. (And if you're in a situation where your survival is dependent on them and cannot, I don't blame you for doing what you have to do.)

Let them live with the consequences. They wanted to watch the world burn. They had the petrol and the match, and they intentionally did it all.

Let them realise how much they have completely fucked over not themselves, not just the US, but the entire world.

Let them realise that trump did actually mean them when he was talking about deportation. Their workers. Their children. Their families.

Let them realise trump actually did mean her, her daughter, her mother and all of her friends when he promised to control every choice a woman makes whether she likes it or not.

Let them realise trump actually did mean their own bank accounts when he talked about tariffs and taxes. Let them understand when the entire economy collapses and they are laid off that this was not only avoidable, but something they chose.

They voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, and when the leopards come and eat their faces, that is something they will have to accept.

They wanted a dictator. They wanted a fascist. They wanted a monster. They wanted someone who didn't care whether they lived or died. And now, that's exactly what they're going to get.

Let them learn that fascist dictators aren't nice to them just because they voted for them. That monsters don't care whether they eat someone who likes them, or someone who hates them.

Let them learn that corrupt, billionaires (bankrupt or not) won't just hand them a million dollars and treat them like a best friend. That they literally don't care if they live or die.

This is what they asked for. Let them live with the consequences. Let them figure it out. Let them cry when their lives, families, jobs and everything else in their world are destroyed.

So cut them off if you need to (and can without hurting yourself). Break up with them. Stop letting them stay in your basement for free. Kick them the fuck out into the world they created. Don't invite them for dinners, don't invite them for Christmas, don't bother trying to save them.

If they come to regret it and come to you for comfort... well. You get to decide what you want to do next. (Personally, I would just laugh at them and tell them to never speak to me again, but maybe you're a better person than I am.)

They did it knowing it could destroy your life. Knowing it could destroy us all. So if they can make that choice, they obviously don't care about you. So stop trying to save them, and stop trying to reason with them.

They made this choice. They asked for this. Gleefully, and eagerly.

Let 'em have it.