- voting is useless and ineffective
- voting was useful and effective for Trump getting into office
- most Americans hate trump
- most Americans voted for Trump (well ok no but we’re also counting the people who didn’t vote as voting for Trump)
- Americans should do something!
- The Americans doing something aren’t doing it right, they should do a violence!
- Americans are so violent omg
- Americans should do a general strike!
- does not talk about or signal boost the general strike
- All Americans deserve what’s happening to them!
- Oh no these poor Americans getting shot and kidnapped!
- other countries should do something!
- it’s America’s mess they should be the one who clean it up!
- the opposition should be united!
- fuck Democrats, liberals, and anyone who isn’t my specific level of left, no compromise for getting anyone into office!
- vote the Republicans out!
- but fuck Democrats don’t vote for them!
- but also fuck third party voting is useless anyway!
- This is Donald Trump’s fault!
- actually we’re going to blame Democrats though
Like, I get that it’s different people, but I never see anyone calling this out. I think the worst is people who say we should be united and then actively do things to divide people.
It’s this seriously the best we can do? It just feels like people can’t get their shit together. I’m tired of my own side being more willing to fight each other than the GOP.
Lemmy doesn’t have opinions, it’s a collection of forums made up of completely different people with completely different opinions. What possible reason could you have for expecting everyone to think the same thing as each other?
I know that these are all different people and won’t agree on everything. I thought I said so on the post. I’m just tired of people not calling each other out on this stuff at least. People will post these contradictory things and almost never point it out.
Call them out for what, disagreeing with a previous post? Life’s too short to be arguing with total strangers on the internet.
Calling out people online usually reinforces their stance.
Sounds like this Lemmy person is a real nutter
People have differing opinions.
Also, faux-grassroots organizations supporting the GOP are absolutely on the Fediverse to convince you the Democrats are just as bad hoping you don’t take their power in November.
Block everything news and politics related. Lemmy becomes a lot better, as with every platform you do that with.
☝️ This. This. A thousand times this! ☝️
Definitely improves the experience
Im not sure what you mean by calling out though. that opinions vary. I mean many seem crazy to me sure and honestly I can’t even understand how people think that way but I don’t expect the fediverse to be in lockstep. It is kinda funny how polarized it is but at the same time there are plenty of center nuanced things to.
I’m fed up with Lemmy constantly contradicting itself when talking about US politics
Yeah that’s why I go to R*ddit where everyone is a fucking liberal and all discussion is mediated through the capitalist lens of profitability /s
- voting is useless and ineffective
True
- voting was useful and effective for Trump getting into office
False. Voting merely decorates what the bourgeoisie has planned for us.
- most Americans hate trump
Only cosmetically. AmeriKKKan settlers have zero problem with settler colonialism.
- most Americans voted for Trump (well ok no but we’re also counting the people who didn’t vote as voting for Trump)
Nope, the plurality of AmeriKKKans voted for nobody.
- Americans should do something!
Yes, they should do something valuable.
- The Americans doing something aren’t doing it right, they should do a violence!
Not necessarily, just not another do-nothing milquetoast liberal protest. Mutual aid need not be violent. But yeah, we’re probably gonna need violence to defend ourselves against the capitalists and their evil agenda.
- Americans are so violent omg
Only against the vulnerable, never against the powerful.
- Americans should do a general strike!
Yeah, would be nice.
- does not talk about or signal boost the general strike
Point taken.
- All Americans deserve what’s happening to them!
Not literally, no. But settler AmeriKKKans (myself included!) are way too fucking complicit with this evil system. Anything is acceptable as long as the treats keep coming. Even Epstein shit, apparently.
- Oh no these poor Americans getting shot and kidnapped!
Yeah it sucks.
- other countries should do something!
Yeah they should.
- it’s America’s mess they should be the one who clean it up!
Failure of one party to meet their responsibilities does not, in general, absolve other parties from their responsibilities.
- the opposition should be united!
Hell no! We gotta have standards! E.g., no fucking Zionists, no fucking Nazis, no fucking conservatives, no racists, no LGBTphobes, no sexists. All these groups can do the world a favor by dying or choosing to be someone else.
- fuck Democrats, liberals, and anyone who isn’t my specific level of left, no compromise for getting anyone into office!
Fuck getting into office, I want to light the office on fucking fire.
- vote the Republicans out!
Nah I’m not a fucking liberal. Wall for the lot of them. Their role in the Gaza genocide alone is enough cause. 🧱🤯🔫👿🏴
- but fuck Democrats don’t vote for them!
Still not a fucking liberal. Wall for the lot of them. Their role in the Gaza genocide alone is enough cause.
🧱🤯🔫👿🏴- but also fuck third party voting is useless anyway!
Still not a fucking liberal.
- This is Donald Trump’s fault!
Nah, Trump’s a figurehead for what the capitalists want to do to us.
- actually we’re going to blame Democrats though
Like, I get that it’s different people, but I never see anyone calling this out. I think the worst is people who say we should be united and then actively do things to divide people.
Well I definitely want to divide our the Nazis, Zionists, and other monsters from… fucking every facet of life.
It’s this seriously the best we can do? It just feels like people can’t get their shit together. I’m tired of my own side being more willing to fight each other than the GOP.
If you’re an adult and still a fucking liberal then I’m done waiting for you to catch up.
You need to make the effort to reject capitalism. If you make that effort, I have literally infinite patience for you to grow and learn how to navigate the horrible world you’ve been born into. But if you refuse to do that, then you’re a class traitor, and I have negatively infinite patience for class traitors (against the proletariat).
Voting = being a liberal
I don’t trust anyone’s opinions if they try to convince people not to vote. It’s literally the most baseline minimal form of activism you can do. It’s not a right, left, capitalist or communist action, so I’m not sure why you think it’s a bad thing to vote.
I’ve heard people say that the people who didn’t vote should count as people who voted for Trump because they “let this happen” but still will say that not voting somehow is a baller left tactic. If it was such a great idea, why is the right trying to make it harder for people? And more importantly, why are you promoting the idea that the right wants?
I’m not sure why you think it’s a bad thing to vote.
Because we should simply refuse to participate in an inherently genocidal system. Reject the notion that it even remotely represents us.
If it was such a great idea, why is the right trying to make it harder for people?
Because capital has factions. The right wing of capital wants to make it harder for the left wing of capital to get their way. The leftist view is: reject capital in all its forms. Leftists are not literally right-contrarians, i.e. do what the right tells us they don’t want. This would make leftists manipulable. Rightists are notorious liars.
I’ve heard people say that the people who didn’t vote should count as people who voted for Trump because they “let this happen” but still will say that not voting somehow is a baller left tactic.
You’re conflating the opinions of two diametrically opposed camps of people.
And more importantly, why are you promoting the idea that the right wants?
The right wants us to fuck off and die. How that gets achieved is subject to debate within their circles. The right most certainly does not want us to give them the wall. The right most certainly does not want us to develop dual power, take direct action to right the wrongs of capitalism, do mutual aid and community defense, and generally live outside their imposed norms and morality. If the right wing of capital has to lose at all, they would rather lose to the left wing of capital, for a simple reason: they understand that losing to the left wing of capital is neither permanent nor substantiative.
You’re so far up the rhetoric you’re actively promoting a right wing capitalist objective to gain and maintain power, I’m genuinely impressed.
Refusing to vote literally just hands power over to capital. It’s handing over the reins of power to the people who want you to fuck off and die. It’s not an effective tactic and honestly what they would want you to do.
The system as it is now, with whomever getting the most votes wins, means that the less people voting, the more influential the remaining votes are. If only three people voted in an election, reach vote has 33% of the decision making power.
“Oh yeah but what if we get everyone to be super communist and refuse to vote” won’t ever happen because people will vote for themselves. It’s just going to make their votes stronger.
By refusing to try to make things better within the system as well as outside of it, you’re hamstringing your own movement.
The system sucks but the strategy of “just let the right wing take over everything and don’t even vote against it” doesn’t sound viable.
By refusing to try to make things better within the system as well as outside of it, you’re hamstringing your own movement.
Yes, this is why we need to make things better outside the system! I’m not even remotely saying to do nothing or let the capitalists win. I’m saying, aim for more than simply trying to win at liberal democracy.
The State is an enemy of the people. You cannot reform a system that is inherently designed to oppress the people.
The system as it is now, with whomever getting the most votes wins, means that the less people voting, the more influential the remaining votes are. If only three people voted in an election, reach vote has 33% of the decision making power.
Again, that “democracy” is decoration over what the people who control the system actually want to do to us. As the proletariat, our class does not get to materially affect the trajectory of the bourgeois system. The whole thing is structured to impose this reality upon us. Liberal democracy is a pressure valve to make sure proletarian revolution never happens. It decreases our ability to affect the trajectory of the system by focusing all our anger and effort towards harmless, nonsensical political theater.
I guaran-fucking-tee you, if the system somehow managed to register a vote to democratically take the capitalists out of power, or even just make their lives harder enough, it would get couped in like three seconds and replaced with competent fascists.
Look. Imagine you’re on a bus. It’s falling apart and the driver is insane, but you and other passengers can at least lean to one side or the other to shift it so you’re not running into a tree. You need a lot of passengers to do this though, so you need as many people to do it as possible. You want to get off the bus, get onto a new bus, but right now, you’re still inside of this bus.
There are people inside the bus who love what the crazy driver is doing, gate other passengers, and want to crash the bus so that people on one side of it die, and they don’t.
You want to get off, and another bus is being built as you’re going along. You are throwing stuff out of the bus so that it can get built, while slowing down the bus you’re on. You and everyone else can hop off this crazy bus when it’s built, but it’s nowhere near done yet.
The most sensible thing to do, while getting that other bus built, is also to lean the bus out of danger. You have the ability to shift the bus so it does as little damage to people in the short term, while working towards a better bus.
Arguing that we shouldn’t even do that because of how much this bus sucks will only get people hurt in the short term.
If you’re not using all the tools you have to fight, you’re not fighting effectively.
So yeah, work on stuff outside the system. But also work on what you have in the system as well. It’s doesn’t take long to vote, it’s the least you could do to keep more crazy bus drivers from taking the wheel.
The right thing to do is take direct action: one person beats the tar out of the bus driver, other person pulls the handbrake or hits the brake pedal. The bus has far too much inertia for even all the passengers to materially affect where it’s going. Liberalism demands that you override your survival instincts to do meaningless performative bullshit so you can smash into a tree on their terms.
And I honestly cannot believe that anyone would think anything other than direct action is the right option in this scenario. I mean this in the nicest way possible…how could you possibly think that rearranging the passengers could even be a realistic way to avoid a tree, or anything at all, in any situation? It doesn’t comport with physics. It’s completely unintuitive, and it’s not one of those counterintuitive things that makes sense under closer scrutiny. It doesn’t even begin to fix the actual problem. And even if you could affect the trajectory for a moment, the bus driver can just countersteer a few degrees.
Like if you actually did this in real life, you would just end up with a bus full of bodies all crammed together on one side wrapped around a tree.
Like honestly, not trying to be mean but I literally cannot explain this in any other way: this is how it actually feels to talk to liberals about their views. It’s literally “you’re on a bus being driven by a madman into a tree, here’s why you’re a monster for saying ‘we should physically directly try to stop him’”. Liberal electoralism doesn’t even give sensible solutions in the best of times, it’s against all physical and empirical evidence, but liberalism still manages to bring people, who are rightfully desperate for collective action and a sense of belonging, into doing harmless nonsense, anything for a whiff of the hopium that the monsters in the DNC peddle to us.
Oh shit, I didn’t realize the communist revolution was literally about to happen tomorrow, and the whole government is going to shut down, and the army is all going to quit, exactly tomorrow at 3pm, so it’s so immediate that we don’t have to worry about voting.
Oh wait, it’s not. That sort of things takes time. So maybe, like how I’ve been saying, we should do direct action, and, you know, while the government is still around, do our best to not let psychopaths into office by not letting them get elected.
Sorry it’s not glorious, but, ya know, since that revolution isn’t going to be happening tomorrow, we may as well.
Or hey, preemptively try to elect people who would be more sympathetic to the cause and hand the power over. Or vote in people from the Communist party where you can, that would be cool.
But until that direct action is finished, the government is still around, so we should vote. I’m not saying we should only vote, obviously, I haven’t this whole conversation, because, you know, do both.
