I never said voting is the most important thing to do. Voting is the bare ass minimum. It’s (usually) easy and zero risk.
Actual progress nearly always requires direct action. Women’s suffrage involved firebombs. Abolition took a whole ass war in the US and the new deal happened after strikes and outright war all over the continent.
Voting is not sufficient it’s just the easiest possible way to give leadership information.
Focusing on voting over direct action where one has a <1% impact on things over the far more impactful thing kind of implies you think it is the most important thing. My apologies if that wasn’t your meaning. It just comes across like “of course we have global warming when Jerry down the road didn’t recycle that one time”, ignoring the blatant destruction of our planet by oligarchs. Yes, Harris would’ve likely been better for me as well, but I’m done thinking that sacrificing others for my own comfort is justifiable because of my gender identity.
That’s the thing. There was no sacrifice. There was no pro Palestine candidate. There was a quiet genocide supporter and a loud genocide supporter. You can’t punish the quiet candidate by abstaining or voting for the loud genocide supporter.
The message they take from that is voters don’t give a shit about Palestine or genocide except that some voters want it to happen faster with more death and suffering.
You are correct that we cannot vote our way to peace, prosperity, justice, or any other desireable goal. Voting is not the end, it’s the first step on a long road to building those things. Do unionize your workplace. Volunteer for your local aid agency. Build dual power. It’s just so easy (nearly always) that there is no excuse to not vote.
Do you honestly believe politicians don’t know what we want if we don’t vote? Sure, they can gauge how much they can truly get away with, but we have the internet and polling and email and phone calls and protests and petitions and every manner of just as ineffective tools as voting that tells people in power what regular people think, which is generally ignored for the wishes of the mega donors.
Like I said earlier, I voted, but hyper fixating on it only distracts from the knowledge that there’s far better things to do than talk about voting other than the single day every couple of years where you go to the polls.
Voting is at it’s base a means of information transfer, but it’s also a way to transfer power.
Legislators presidents are not all powerful, but there can be real consequences to who gets to make the rules.
We do not disagree about what is most important. But voting is a gateway to civic involvement. I don’t think people who don’t vote are more likely to organize labor, volunteer, or engage in activism. I think it’s the opposite. Voters are more likely to be engaged and engaged active people are more likely to be voters.
I never said voting is the most important thing to do. Voting is the bare ass minimum. It’s (usually) easy and zero risk.
Actual progress nearly always requires direct action. Women’s suffrage involved firebombs. Abolition took a whole ass war in the US and the new deal happened after strikes and outright war all over the continent.
Voting is not sufficient it’s just the easiest possible way to give leadership information.
Focusing on voting over direct action where one has a <1% impact on things over the far more impactful thing kind of implies you think it is the most important thing. My apologies if that wasn’t your meaning. It just comes across like “of course we have global warming when Jerry down the road didn’t recycle that one time”, ignoring the blatant destruction of our planet by oligarchs. Yes, Harris would’ve likely been better for me as well, but I’m done thinking that sacrificing others for my own comfort is justifiable because of my gender identity.
That’s the thing. There was no sacrifice. There was no pro Palestine candidate. There was a quiet genocide supporter and a loud genocide supporter. You can’t punish the quiet candidate by abstaining or voting for the loud genocide supporter.
The message they take from that is voters don’t give a shit about Palestine or genocide except that some voters want it to happen faster with more death and suffering.
You are correct that we cannot vote our way to peace, prosperity, justice, or any other desireable goal. Voting is not the end, it’s the first step on a long road to building those things. Do unionize your workplace. Volunteer for your local aid agency. Build dual power. It’s just so easy (nearly always) that there is no excuse to not vote.
Do you honestly believe politicians don’t know what we want if we don’t vote? Sure, they can gauge how much they can truly get away with, but we have the internet and polling and email and phone calls and protests and petitions and every manner of just as ineffective tools as voting that tells people in power what regular people think, which is generally ignored for the wishes of the mega donors.
Like I said earlier, I voted, but hyper fixating on it only distracts from the knowledge that there’s far better things to do than talk about voting other than the single day every couple of years where you go to the polls.
Voting is at it’s base a means of information transfer, but it’s also a way to transfer power.
Legislators presidents are not all powerful, but there can be real consequences to who gets to make the rules.
We do not disagree about what is most important. But voting is a gateway to civic involvement. I don’t think people who don’t vote are more likely to organize labor, volunteer, or engage in activism. I think it’s the opposite. Voters are more likely to be engaged and engaged active people are more likely to be voters.