Voting is the same as the trolley problem. You can make a conscious choice between two bad outcomes, but if you do nothing then one of those outcomes will happen anyway.
The trolley problem is usually a useful tool and nothing more, but it’s actually a great analogy for voting. You have two choices. Let the trolley continue or change its path. You may have different reasons for your choices, but those are the only two real choices. You can leave a note on the lever expressing your displeasure, but it still doesn’t get pulled. Not pulling it is as much a choice as pulling it. You’re a participant either way.
Except there’s not really a correlation between me pulling the lever in the voting booth and something happening.
Even if I vote as hard as I can the more bad thing can still happen because our system has big problems.
When people say “both sides are the same” they’re coming from a point of frustration with the system in general.
Signed,
An anarchist who’s had to pull the lever for a capitalist in every election he’s ever voted in.
Yeah, and the bad outcome isn’t happening because there wasn’t enough votes against it. It happens because the votes do nothing at all and are just a strawman for the actions of the powerful.
That’s true. I guess you could expand the analogy to a very heavy lever that needs a lot of people to pull, and if not enough people pull it the right way the other thing happens. That’s really butchering the analogy though and I don’t think it’s required. The point is to show that “not participating” is still a choice and still has an effect, so you are still playing a part just not one that’s useful.
Considering that someone can win the presidency without winning the popular vote, and that the Senate gives states with tiny populations equal power, and that the House should have over a thousand members if we kept the same ratio, sometimes it doesn’t matter if more people are pulling along with yout.
There’s so many undemocratic things built into our government - mainly to appease slaveowners - it’s really hard for me to work up any enthusiasm that my vote will do anything at all.
I can empathize with the people who have given up on voting, because I was at that point many times. Now I’ve lowered my expectations and given up hope, and I just vote because it means I don’t get told I’m not allowed to complain.
Totally agree with everything. Voting is pretty quick and easy though. I absolutely agree with people performing other actions that can possibly be more effective as well, but those take much more time and effort. Everyone should vote because, even if it doesn’t have much effect, the amount of effect it has compared to the amount of effort it takes is high.
Now that I can vote by mail I agree that the effort is worth the effect. But if I had to stand in line for hours just to see the Supreme Court or electoral college or Congress or a bunch of states jam the trolley handle in the other direction I don’t think I could bring myself to do it if it didn’t also mean I’m allowed to complain.
What bothers me, and I’ve seen expressed in other comments, is that the response to “voting doesn’t matter” or “both sides are the same” is immediate dismissal, as if nobody should have any problem with the way things work.
Even the line “If you don’t vote you can’t complain” is mean and dismissive.
You keep talking about every vote not mattering in a vote that was won by 200-some-odd people with over 3000 write-ins. That person who can make a measurable impact wouldn’t have been in the position to do anything if just a few hundred more people had believed it was hopeless and just stayed home. So how do you justify that with your beliefs?
I get that the presidential election is broken on many levels, and many people’s votes have little or no bearing on the final outcome, or that any likely outcome will even be ideal, but the implausible has happened before, depending on how people vote.
The one thing that has never improved the outcome is to shrug your shoulders and do nothing.
Honestly, if leftist spaces on the internet weren’t so infested with insufferable ML campists, I feel like we could actually move the Overton window a bit more among progressive liberals. Libertarian left ideas are pretty popular when presented in the right context. The thing which turns your average person off is the historical association with autocracy and oppression that MLs cling to for some reason.
I have been pretty vocal about this, but I just run into a sectarian wall over and over again. I wish more like-minded people would spend more time challenging ML orthodoxy and less time bashing liberals. I honestly feel like most liberals aren’t nearly as far gone as your average Lenin simp.
I always say, and I’m fairly confident it’s true, they’re more pro-autocracy than they are pro-leftist. They will defend a dictator when they harm people before they back the people being harmed. That’s not leftist. Leftism is on the side of the people being oppressed. They absolutely do more harm than good by making people think being left they have to agree with that group, but they’re a very loud minority.
While I don’t disagree that MLs online cause harm, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the root of the issue is decades of intergenerational indoctrination during the cold war that anything democratically socialist was directly equivalent to autocratic communism. There is a deep, cultural cognitive dissonance that occurs in the US about things like socialised medicine and welfare that I just don’t think tankies online influence as much as you think they do.
You’re a participant on the same ethical extent as a jigsaw killer victim. Someone else making fucked up circumstances around you doesn’t morally implicate you for anything.
You have more than two choices. Stop giving false information.
You really only havw two choices (for most elections) though. You can vote for the side you agree with more or not. Sure, there are lots of ways to do the latter, but it’s that. I guess you also have the choice to vote against the side you agree with more, but that’s not really a choice. In this case, it isn’t a false binary.
You can also participate in many other things outside of voting, but that’s totally separate and you can always do more separate things for anything. You can always follow a choice with other choices, but it doesn’t change the effect of the first choice.
You really only havw two choices (for most elections IN THE US) though.
ftfy
not effectively, you don’t.
Yeah, you could vote for someone who isn’t going to win (voting this way helps Trump win)
I call bullshit on voting that way helps Trump win.
Ok. You’re wrong, but you do you I guess
Well put
It’s just like the trolley problem. The stakes are made up and your decision might cause some discussion on the Internet. The real outcomes are decided by people with power and everything you see in media is a puppet show.
lol. you’re either completely delusional, or a very obvious Russian puppet.
Ah yes. Discredit your opposition with insults. Common fascist tactic.
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280*
I can imagine that there would be less reason for many to vote when there are only two options to vote for. What would it take for USA to implement a multi party system like many of the other democraties in the world?
2.4 MILLION PEOPLE… Why the fuck is every goddamn election 50/50!? Why the hell is it always the fucking razors edge!?
I’m no math guy but I feel like statistically it shouldn’t be possible for almost every goddamn election to be 50/50… 49/51… For fucks sake…
In Arizona it’s because the Democrats are rising. Elections used to be blowouts for Republicans.
It didn’t used to be that way. Big blowouts used to be common.
I think it’s a result of the GOP holding on to electoral legitimacy purely through electoral tricks which are expensive / criminal to a pretty large degree, since except for a little violent minority, almost all of the country has moved on from supporting them or anything they stand for. They don’t want to expend more money or risk than is needed, so they’ll do more or less the minimum that seems like it’ll let them hold on to power. Even that isn’t really working that well anymore, and so their grip is slipping, and with Trump now running the show and demolishing the RNC’s effectiveness just as thoroughly as he does everything else he touches, all bets are off for the upcoming election.
I think they’re planning to move to simple explicit violence during this election, since that’s all that is left if they want to avoid defeat, but you can’t completely write off how effective their propaganda is at convincing people.
In Arizona it’s simple. The Democrats are rising and the Republicans are falling. If the Arizona State Republicans don’t make a substantive change it will go back to blowouts, just in favor of Democrats instead.
The propaganda has always been my gripe. I definitely blame people for having such hate in their hearts that it works on them, but it’s the propagandists that twist reality in a way that make it “logical” for the average voter to believe their candidate is the “one who can save us.”
I don’t believe my father is that hateful, but boy did Fox News really get to him as far as “evil Democrats.” His arguments are always economic, he doesn’t care one way or the other about trans issues, immigration, etc, but he’ll eat up anything Fox has to say about “whales dying due to wind powered generators.”
Yeah. I really don’t like the mindset that Trump voters are evil or racist, they fully understand what he’s about and they want it. A tiny percentage of them are that way; most are not. In my experience, Trump supporters I’ve talked to have been victimized by extremely powerful extremely expensive / well produced propaganda that’s created this whole alternate reality in their minds that’s extremely convincing, and they’re just trying to do the right thing within that reality.
I don’t know what the solution to that is, but treating them as bad people (and particularly, ignoring or downplaying the economic / societal abandonment of them that created legitimate anger and resentment which the propaganda can play into) is definitely not the answer.
In my experience, it’s mostly been the “You’re one of the good ones!” type of racist that gets sucked in and consider it reasonable.
As in, without some seed of racism/misogyny/etc that propaganda fertilizer would mean nothing.
But that’s my experience with magats I know.
I like the cut of your jib! It’s too often I see blanket statements about all Republicans are Nazis, racist, etc. You can’t understand your opposition or why they might believe what they believe if you just see everyone as cartoon evil.
I like the idea that “no person is the villain of their own story.” As you say, they for the most part believe they are doing the right thing according to the information they’ve been subjected to. It’s an incredibly difficult problem especially as we understand the importance of a free press.
No person is the villain in their own story, yet I see people blatantly run red lights nearly every day. Most people know perfectly well the shit they do is atrocious.
I’m sorry, but those people have access to the exact same information I do. Maybe at first it was understandable that some people got taken in by it, but at this point there is no mistaking what Trump stands for, and anyone who continues supporting him is outright malicious or so ego driven they can’t possibly admit a mistake and will definitely follow him to untold atrocities.
I hate the terms “both sides” and “America is divided” because it implies that there is some form of symmetry to this madness. This is not the case. Trump supporters can come back to earth any time they want, but I am absolutely not going to meet them halfway to their shitty fascist endgame, even if that means we get another decade of milquetoast liberal democrats.
I’m sorry, but those people have access to the exact same information I do.
No they don’t. Or rather, the ones I’ve talked with extensively had no idea what was going on; media they genuinely trusted had given them this very incomplete, bizarre, and specifically constructed view of the world that was perfectly believable to them, but which bore absolutely no resemblance to reality. In particular it even has specific features to make it harder to be able to break yourself out of, make you resist learning new information that might challenge it. If you haven’t had your brain inside that type of box or talked extensively with people who did it’s sometimes hard to appreciate how pervasive and reality-defining it can be.
So like think of all those guys who went down to the border expecting there to be this army of Mexicans coming over and terrorizing the whole town, and they were ready to go down and help sign up for their patriotic duty to help, and they were surprised and confused when they got there and it was just a normal town. It’s not like they were like “oh okay let me start shooting any Mexicans I see on the street because that’s my main goal” – they had a perfectly humane reason for being there, in their minds. They had a perfectly humane response (like “wtf these guys lied to me, what even is going on here”). It’s easy to laugh at them because they were so wrong, but they really believed it. Because all the news they watch and all their friends they talk to and all the internet they observe told them that’s what’s going on.
I definitely will agree that there’s a way-too-large minority that’s like “hey I always wanted to shoot Mexicans / shoot up the Ramadan celebration / kill my family member who I suspect of being a Democrat.” I’m not trying to give everyone a free pass. I’m saying that the root of it for a lot of the rank and file is being duped, not being evil.
(Not that that makes them any less dangerous of course)
I hate the terms “both sides” and “America is divided” because it implies that there is some form of symmetry to this madness. This is not the case.
Fully agree on this part. The movement as a whole and its leaders are extremely dangerous and evil, and the media for the most part is looking for any excuse to avoid saying “these guys are Nazis WTF how do we stop them,” and “both sides” is one convenient excuse.
Trump supporters can come back to earth any time they want
Well, but they can’t. Not on their own. They’re either going to realize the reality through some outside force helping them see the truth, or they’re going to keep growing in numbers and fervor until their leaders can use them to enact a for-real fascist takeover.
So these guys who went to the border… Once they realized it was all fake, they swore off this media and stopped voting Republican?
Some of them, yeah. Not all, and maybe that’s a pretty valid reason to criticize their moral courage. But Jordan Klepper has done some pretty fascinating interviews with e.g. Nikki Haley supporters who have realized what a monster Trump is.
(Some of whom say they’ll maybe still vote for him…)
It’s because it’s all fake and designed to make you think you have a chance and that things are decided fairly. Your TV isn’t cheap because it’s subsidized by ads from whatever media company. It’s cheap because the media keeping you in line is the most cost effective tool they can come up with. Prices are determined by how much you’re pacified by the product rather than “market forces”.
If it’s a huge Democratic turn out in year X, then there’s going to be a lot of Dem voters that say “well, my vote doesn’t really matter so why bother” in year X+1. And vice versa.
So the turnout is going to edge closer and closer to equilibrium over time.
Been arguing with a tankie about this, decided to stop after they said a civil war and another genocide was preferable to voting for Biden because he supports Israel. Yeah ok bud
Yeah see, I don’t care for genocide. Genocide is not very cash money at all. So, see, in opposition to genocide, I’m gonna sit over here have a preference for a different not cash money genocide, you know, not really but yeah. Oh, and I’ve read accounts of war. I can handle it, I’m well read on the topic. Blood, guts, spit, and ass aren’t that scary. With all of my experience reading about war, I’m practically a shell shocked WWI vet anyway, hehe.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
I’m absolutely shocked that my comment calls for a /s.
Like, have things got so bad that obvious satire isn’t obvious anymore?
Like, have things got so bad that obvious satire isn’t obvious anymore?
You must be new here.
“President stares directly at Sun” isn’t satire anymore.
Ok, yeah. Haha. What a moment that was. God bless former president (hopefully forever) Donald J. Trump. Haha.
It was pretty obvious to me, but I’ve certainly missed /s before, so…
Yes, they have. I took it as satire but I can easily see people actually believing it.
Hell, just yesterday there was a guy still arguing that masks didn’t really make a difference for COVID. That improved hygiene, lock downs/isolation, and social distancing was what made all the difference.
I then made a comparison to seat belts, airbags, and bicycle helmets and he then made arguments against those too. I just left the “conversation” at that point. I’m really hoping it was just a bot. The responses were pretty long.
Don’t worry I understood your comment was satire but honestly it’s not far off from the tankie I was arguing with.
As if they would be there in the frontlines when shit hits the fan. It shows very clearly they don’t risk much (and lack the most basic level of empathy) if they really think Trump and Biden are the same. Ask our trans comrades. Or homeless people. Or journalists.
In abstention, they just found a way of feeling good about doing nothing at all. Voting is literally the least you could do and they won’t do even that.
The lack of snide comments about the US educational system is deeply disturbing.
1,254,809 - 1,254,529 = 280
If you really absolutely will not vote for moderates, at least vote for leninist-marxist peoples front of Arizona or something. There’s a politican somewhere who will see that 0.15% and think “that could make or brake my campaign, how can I win them over?”
They may ask that, but the answer is “no, appealing to the 0.15% of marxist-leninist voters would lose me 1% of my voter base”
PSL is the usual party Marxist-Leninists push for.
Party for Socialism and Liberation. That’s what I see MLs voting for most of the time.
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Speaking personally as a brit i’m not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election but in the case of britain at least im absolutely not going to be voting for Keir Starmer since most of the left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for the most right wing and second worst (to his “credit”, unlike Tony Blair, he doesnt have the blood of a million iraqis on his hands, only 30,000 palestinians) party leader labour’s had in recent memory were the exact same people 5 years ago saying they couldnt in good faith vote for the most far left, trans positive labour leader in decades because he criticised Israel which led to the largest conservative majority in years.
Under Sir Kid Starver, Labour stopped members from voting for a ceasefire right at the start of the Palestinian genocide, members have repeatedly been expelled over bogus antisemitism charges, starmerite labour’s trying to push to have the NHS privatised, the party has pivoted so far to the right that you have promiment members saying “Margaret Thatcher was a visionary leader for the U.K; no doubt about it", they’ve proposed policies to segregate trans people out of single sex NHS hospital wards and those are just the things from the last few months or so that i remember off the top of my head.
I’m going to vote for the Greens instead.
not twitter (tumblr)
no evidence that any of these people are white? advocates a position that protects the interests of POC?
why is this posted here? this is such a useful and well formed post but i have this community blocked and only found this thru some modlog drama. whatever lol. saving this for later reposting somewhere more relavant. thanks for sharing OP. :)
Not voting as a means to show dissatisfaction is probably the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever seen people do. And I say this knowing people willing vote for Trump.
They are at least voting.
Yeah because it means you actually think votes have some correlation with outcomes. Pretty dang stupid.
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It’s like the people who try to run from the cops and then once they get caught and asked why they did it, they say “because I didn’t want to go to jail.” My bro you have articulated the problem and I get it, but the solution you have chosen is going to make it quite a lot worse.
I ran into someone like this on Lemmy just yesterday. They said that “we” deserve to suffer if Trump gets elected. I said that I was guessing they weren’t queer or a person of color. They were not. Therefore they were not part of “we.” ‘Innocent people that are definitely not me deserve to suffer so that America gets what it deserves’ is a really fucking galling attitude.
Your voting system is so fucked. Like voting should be something that people like to do. I want to vote for people that align with my values the most. But no, you have to be strategic and choose the lesser evil to not accidentally end up with fucking fsscists like Trump again. It’s fucked. Still tho, please prevent Trump.
the “Voting is Not Harm Reduction” article is possibly the most covert insidious thing that’s happened to online political discourse since 2019.
somehow, it’s managed to SEO weasel its way on top of every other article since the dawn of the internet for the search terms “voting harm reduction” and similar. and not just once, but reposted to every corner of the internet imaginable. literally try it now, if you set your google search to find articles before February 5, 2020, you will see inumerable articles with diversity of positions on the topic. after that? literally just the same article reposted and crosslisted, with the occasional reddit/twitter/tumblr comment thread.
it’s not even a bad article per se, it’s just indecently self-contradictory as OOP says, admitting at the beginning that small rights can be preserved by engaging in voting, and then pulling a 180 and accusing those who vote of perpetuating white supremacy.
like i get it, harm reduction has a specific meaning originating in addiction treatment. but for heavens sake, this flub of language doesn’t mean you should throw away one of the only miniscule rights the oppressor class has granted you to help your neighbors.
editing to add this comment thread and article which i think give helpful insight.
This just emphasizes to me that every vote matters. Sure, both parties are terrible and the chance of a third party making any headway, nevermind winning an election is, at best, unlikely.
But not voting is being complicit in what comes next. Good or bad, you’re okay with whatever happens.
Harm reduction through voting is surreal, but it’s required at this point. Don’t be a filthy fucking collaborator, go vote.
They are both imperfect but only one is legitimately terrible. I’m actually pretty tired of everyone feeling the need to qualify this sentiment, as if the Democrats haven’t been behind basically every bit of progress in the US going back a century or more.
It’s like someone who keeps pointing out “Yeah, but we’re also running low on food!” on an spacecraft that is almost out of air.
True, these are both problems, but one is a MUCH bigger immediate threat and needs to be solved before we can spend time on the other, and doing nothing simply isn’t the correct option.
* 50 years or more
Not that I’m disagreeing with your thesis as applied to the modern day, but pre-Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats were the racist party. There was a massive sea change during the era of Nixon, when the Democrats decided after quite a bit of heated internal debate that they couldn’t possibly stomach depending on the support of the segregationists, whatever the cost, and the Southern Strategy scooped all the for real lynch-mob enthusiasts all up for Nixon. Except for Carter’s brief flirtation with actual human decency, which the US isn’t okay with for some reason, the Democrats got accustomed to losing elections for quite a while, until Clinton decided to make a pact with the neoliberal bastards since all the actual progressives were so ground down into not-voting-land that they weren’t even worth appealing to anymore. That worked and that set the tone which has continued to the modern day of slight steady progress under Democrats versus absolute naked fascism under the Republicans (accelerating year by year to its current breakneck pace.)
Side note, if you want to have your heart broke a little bit, read Hubert Humphrey’s speech at the DNC in NINETEEN FUCKING FORTY EIGHT, where he calls out the Democratic party for their acceptance of racism:
My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.
He was still around in 1968, in the literal bloody battle, inside and outside the convention hall, for what the Democrats were going to be. They never fulfilled their promise completely, and they still haven’t, and that year it cost them the presidency, just like it did in 2016.
I say this 1,000% agreeing that Biden has represented a big step forward and accomplished some genuine impressive things, and that voting for him in November is an affirmative good thing and not just a way to prevent Trump’s end of the world. But the Democrats had to be dragged kicking and screaming by their progressive wing into doing good things, just as they have to be now on Israel among some other issues.
The difference is that they can be dragged into good things, which is enough. And they’ve done pretty much all of the progress the country has made since 1976; I’ll fully agree with you there.
You need a different voting system for third parties to be viable
I agree. The problem is getting a new voting system to be implemented. Neither of the two parties want third parties to get a decent shot at dethroning them, so the two parties right now, are not going to willingly go for a new voting system since the current one ensures that they only have one rival during elections.
It doesn’t benefit either party, so neither is going to agree to change it.
Yes ok but still…
Genuinely not trying to be a dick, but I don’t understand what your response means?
The response means, “I agree, but it’s not relevant to the topic at hand.”
Yes, we need a better system. In the meantime, we need to work with what we have.
OK. The op mentioned voting third parties so my comment was a response to that. Thanks for explaining thou
Wasn’t sure at first but you brought me home safe in the second half
