freagle

Nope. That’s a myth.

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/does-high-voter-turnout-help-one-party

https://goodauthority.org/news/voter-registration-turnout-democrats-republicans/

The civil rights movement was absolutely a combination of voting and direct action

The HIGHEST black voter turn out in any state during the civil rights movement was around 25% with most states below 10%. Voting did literally nothing. Besides, if you know your history, Nixon was just as motivated to make concessions to the civil rights movement as LBJ was. And remember, why LBJ was giving ground to the civil rights movement, he was ordering the murder of civilians on the other side of the world.

You don’t seem to understand, we’re not supporting the Democrats, we’re choosing the slower form of rot to minimize the damage caused while we actually organize direct action

Yeah, I understand your message. I just disagree that it has a basis in reality. Democrats do not slow the rot. Again, it was Clinton that setup the global financial crisis of 2008 and it was Obama that bailed out the corporations and left the average American to rot. Again, Clinton passed the Crime Bill that Biden championed, vastly increasing and accelerating the rot. Obama empowered DHS/ICE to deployed into American cities for enforcement, increasing the rot, and then proceeded to deport 3M people, increasing the rot. Biden/Harris deported over 4M, again increasing the rot. You are not operating in reality.

I am doing my part, you know nothing about my own direct action

Is it mobilizing voters? You seem to have no problem with talking about electoralism but not a word for direct action? Doubt.

voting still helps nudge things so that direct action is more effective

No. It doesn’t. And it never has. There’s no evidence of this in any of American electoral politics.

Doing both is better by far than giving lip service to the revolution which had been coming for over a century now, which we’re clearly no closer to actually implementing.

So how’s that direct action thing working out for you? Like I said, let everyone vote the way they’re going to vote. Again, most people are probably equally or better informed than you and they can figure out how to vote without you wasting your time telling people about the virtues of lesser evil voting, like we can’t figure it out. You don’t need to know how I vote. You can just shut up and talk about the things that will actually make a difference.

You are blind if you can’t see the extra Republican machines. This administration alone is ample evidence. Democrats didn’t have ICE executing people in the streets.

ICE executing people in the streets is fundamentally just police executing people in the streets. And yes, Democrats have police executing people in the streets all the fucking time. The fact that it’s this particular agency is, again, a creation of the Obama administration. Without Obama accelerating the fascism in this particular agency, Trump wouldn’t be able to use them this way. Literally. Voting for Obama created these conditions.

That’s why electoralism will never change anything. You need to give up on it. Everyone needs to just hold their own relationship to the vote and not waste any more than the few hours a year that it takes. Focus on actually saving lives, focus on educating people, not about how they need to vote, but about why voting won’t save them and why they need to do something else if they want change.

I’ve posted the similar litanies to BlueMAGA on lemmy for the better part of the year and they never have anything to say about it

I’ll consider it. Thanks for the feedback

Ugh. This whole argument again. No friendo, what I did is not equivalent to what they did. What I did was spend the time to spread the information that helps my case that electoralism is a failure and that we must move beyond it. I provided evidence that most electoralists need to see so that they too can abandon the electoral path and join the rest of us in tearing it down.

What my opponent is doing is moralizing to try to get people to vote correctly and every character they write is in the service of this. I never said writing is bad. I said spending energy on convincing people of the electoral path is bad. Spending energy on convincing people against the electoral path is good.

You are repeating the same hollow rhetoric that if I disagree with the US fighting wars then I should disagree with Iran fighting wars, or that if I disagree with the master beating slaves then I should disagree with slaves beating the master.

Game theory only works if you assign your values correctly.

Obama/Biden changed the policies, budget, headcount, and leaderships of DHS and ICE. They explicitly made it possible for ICE to be deployed in US cities. They appointed Tom Homan to lead it. They deported 3M people. Trump used the framework Obama/Biden put in place. He made Tom Homan his deportation czar in term 1. Biden took office next and did literally nothing to stop any of this from happening except for the fact that he chose not to use ICE the way it was able to be used, knowing full well what would happen on the next swing. Trump started term 2, brought Tom Homan back.

Numbers? Obama deported 3M. Biden deported 4.4M Trump has deported slightly less than 1M in term 1 and about the same number in this term so far. He might be on track to match Biden/Harris.

Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat just to impose more collective punishment on the citizens there. Obama/Clinton destroyed the country of Libya. Clinton literally said she laughed watching the video of the murder of 80-year-old Gaddafi when he was videotaped being sodomized by a bayonet.

You’re a fool if you think one party kills fewer orphans.

US economic sanctions are a bi-partisan consensus and they kill more children than wars do. Averaging 800k deaths per year, every year, for 50 years, without abatement. The Democrats every ounce as responsible as the Republicans. And of those 800k deaths, the most impacted are children, the sick, and the elderly.

It was Truman that saved 10k Nazis from facing trial, Truman that nuked Japan twice, Truman that oversaw the mass murder of 10% of the population in the Northern half of Korea, Truman that supported the fascist dictatorship in the Southern half of Korea that killed 100k civilians in political purges, and Truman who propped up Chiang Kai-Shek while he was fascist dictator in Taiwan and killed or disappeared 10k+ civilians in political purges.

It was LBJ who saw the most heinous crimes committed against Vietnam, building on what JFK had started. It was LBJ who oversee the mass use of Agent Orange and napalm against civilians in Vietnam while the Vietnamese were fighting to expel their colonial oppressors. My Lai, Rolling Thunder, and “free fire” were all LBJ. It was LBJ that decided to make Laos a target and bumb their civilian infrastructure to stop the supply chains feeding the Vietnamese freedom fighters. It was LBJ that oversaw the US leadership of the Indonesian military dictatorship that killed a million people in political purges. It was LBJ who sent Marines to the Dominican Republic to ensure that the democratically elected president did not take his seat and installed a right-wing authoritarian.

Clinton: Yugoslavia, neoliberal destruction of Haiti’s agriculture, corrupt vulture capitalism of post-earthquake Haiti, Bill and Hillary with black house slaves in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, “superpredator” lies and the Crime Bill, blocking UN intervention in Rwanda, undoing the New Deal, undoing the financial protections that crashed the US economy in the 1920s which literally setup the exact mechanisms for the 2008 crisis.

You’re falling for the PR. The Democrats and the Republicans are collaborators. They are the good cop and the bad cop. They both work for the same department. You are convinced that the good cop is someone you should support. You think the good cop is somehow going to lead to better outcomes. You are wrong. And you need to stop trying to convince everyone else to go with the good cop. You need to join the group of people who have refused to support the good cop because they understand the game.

If you want better outcomes just look for the historical examples. Women’s Suffrage? Didn’t happen by voting. Civil Rights? Didn’t happen by voting. Gay rights? Didn’t happen by voting.

You are actively wasting your time fighting with people on the internet about this when you could be doing literally anything else to work on dismantling the orphan crushing machine. And no, you’re wrong that Republicans turn on more machines. They don’t. They use the exact same machine that the Democrats use. They built it together. They maintain it together. It’s a single machine.

You really just gotta get out of the private space of who people vote for and do actual work that matters. Wasting your energy trying to get polite genocidaires elected is costing lives every day. You only have so much time. Vote the way you understand the system works, assume everyone else is as smart or smarter than you and they can figure out how to vote. And then spend the other 364 days of the year putting all this effort you want to put into vote mongering and put it into dismantling the orphan crushing machine.

Because the way this works is that there’s an orphan crushing machine and there are two parties who take turns operating the orphan crushing machine and we need all the help we can get dismantling the orphan crushing machine.

And when you spend all your effort screaming at the people who want to dismantle the orphan crushing machine that they should ALSO be sure they vote for the correct people to operate the orphan crushing machine, wait let me put it in your terms:

If you help us dismantle the orphan crushing machine, that’s -1 for the orphan crushers and +1 for the people fighting the orphan crushers

If you don’t help us dismantle the machine, that’s 0 for the orphan crushers

If you consume time and energy from other people who would otherwise be convinced to help us dismantle the orphan crushing machine, that -1 or more for the people fighting the orphan crushers and +1 or more for the orphan crushers.

It’s just the way game theory works out. Trust me. I’m a doctor of game theory.

As a communist myself, point number 1 was proven to be incorrect by the USSR. Suppressing all religious expression was the wrong move and created a massive reactionary backlash that could not be managed. Religions must be allowed to wither away and repression only employed when the religion is being used as a cover for counter-revolutionary organizing.

Yes, that’s why missile defense is part of nuclear strategy and has been for decades. MAD keeps everyone safe. The US has been trying to figure out a way to win a nuclear war for decades, because if they can, they can do to the rest of the world what they did to Japan.

Political correctness was about language and word choice, primarily aesthetics.

Woke comes from the black community about being aware of root causes of various problems and particularly how those root causes relate to class, race, patriarchy, and other forms of systemic and systematized forms of manipulation by the elite against everyone else.

Fighting border disputes is not imperialism. Since 1992 Russia has engaged in military conflict almost exclusively with its neighbors (totalling about 5 countries depending on how you count conflicts) and has not ever taken over any of its neighbors through these conflicts and managed their economic affairs to Russia’s benefits.

By comparison, the US has engaged in military conflict with none of its neighbors, and yet in the same 34-year span has engaged in military conflict with 12 - 15 countries depending on how you count military conflicts. And the objectives were either total domination and economic extraction, total economic devastation of countries operating outside their economic control, or disruption and elimination of resistance to their control. In most cases, the US took over hugely profitable economic operations like mining and opium farming or destroyed competitive economic operations like oil and gas and food production that directly competed with US corporations.

One of these is imperialism. One of these is the border disputes arising from being the target of Western dominance-oriented aggression for 175 years.