You make it seem so black and white. I don’t think it’s as simple as the lesser evil choice is 100% wrong full stop. For instance, I support the lesser evil mindset over the not voting mindset. However, if one exists, I support voting for a politician that genuinely supports your views over the lesser evil mindset.
Not voting makes no sense to me, because a null vote has the same effect as a vote for whichever candidate you like the least.
I guess the fundamental difference between your perspective and mine is that I don’t see it as refusing to play their game, I see it as just another move in their game. I think there is no way to avoid playing the game, and so you should make a move that leads to the least bad outcome. It doesn’t take much effort, maybe a day of research at most to pick whoever you want to vote for. Not voting is technically a vote for whichever candidate you like the least, at least it has the same outcome.
That being said, I agree with you in that that won’t result in change on a larger, long-term scale, and that actions must be taken outside of the system to get what you want. But that stance and my stance on not voting are not mutually exclusive.
I don’t agree with this, but I understand the sentiment. While I think, at the core of it, the folks at the top of both sides have the same goals in mind, I don’t think the elections are rigged to that degree. Also, while voting 3rd party feels like a waste of a vote, I don’t see it as one, since third party votes are counted, and can have some semblance of social sway. Not voting and voting for a party that you disagree most with will have the same effect however, since both pull the vote towards the candidate you like the least.
As someone with a little insider baseball knowledge, it was just a few hours down of DynamoDB and DNS. However, that caused EC2 to go down for ~1 day, which causes pretty much 1/3 of the internet to go down. Once EC2 sorts themselves out, then teams/companies (almost all amazon services use EC2 in the back end) that use EC2 have to get their ducks back in a row, and that can take any span of time, depending on how well their code was written to handle failures + how many people they are willing to pay oncall/overtime.
Oh, then I think we agree with each other. I’m specifically wondering why someone would abstain from voting
I don’t know if I understand what you are suggesting. Are you saying the working class should vote third party, or each person should vote for themself? Or when you say vote for our own parties do you mean not vote at all?
I don’t think I understand what you’re saying. Are you saying that the time it takes to look into a candidate is the damage being done? I was thinking on a larger scale. All 4 options lead to a politician getting sworn in, who will inevitably, directly cause people to die. Picking the option that appears to be likely to kill the least people would theoretically cause the least damage in their 4 years. I’m calling 4 years the short term here.
I’d love to have a discussion about this. I am a socialist through and through. I believe that the system needs to be dismantled to achieve any meaningful change, and that no progress can realistically be made within the system.
I’d argue that there are 4 actions within the system. Vote red, vote blue, vote third party, and don’t vote. I’d argue that all 4 options will never lead to meaningful change. However, given this, every American who is eligible to vote is forced into playing the game, there is no way to abstain. Even not voting leads to a meaningful outcome within the system, and thus is still playing the game.
If no actions within the system can change things, I pose that the only way to disrupt this system is by dismantling it from the outside via revolution.
This however, cannot be done overnight, even if you are consistently acting on it. These types of things take a general sense of civil unrest to get kicked off. I believe that under capitalism, this unrest is inevitable, and once it hits a tipping point, the revolution will start. In the meantime, I feel we have two actions we can take.
First, we should be ushering in the revolution. Organize, make people aware of the alternative, disrupt the system in any means you reasonably can, try to get people to be sympathetic to the cause, etc. Don’t slack on your responsibility to prepare and eventually initiate the revolution.
Second, since we have no choice but to play the game we’ve been dropped in to, you should vote for short term damage mitigation. If you are forced to take an action within the system, I feel people have a moral obligation to try to reduce the harm to others as much as possible. This involves making a vote, since not voting results in almost the same outcome as a vote for the candidate furthest away from the one you considered least harmful.
I have yet to see an argument that shows how not voting is going against or dismantling the system. However, considering so many people believe that not voting is the right choice, I’m really interested in hearing someone explain it to me, as there must be some reasoning behind it that I’m not seeing.
E-reader support is still pretty clunky on Kavita, but doable. I normally host my books on Kavita, and then download them to my eReader, and that does a fine job, but it won’t sync progress across devices
I partially agree. I think not voting is a vote for whichever candidate you like the least, since if you had voted somewhere else, the candidate you like the least would have gotten a smaller percentage of the votes. If you want to cast a blank vote, vote for whichever party would do the least damage., since that will actually have a measurable outcome. If you think all candidates are equally bad, including 3rd party, I think voting for someone who has some level of cultural relevance and holds the same views you do makes the most sense, since that makes the statement that you would vote for candidates like that person.