Yeah fuck that. We’re throwing the cliff people off the cliff. Y’all can keep playing these stupid games.
Replace ice cream with cocaine and that’s more realistic
This is why I voted for Kamala, as it would’ve reduced harm for a little while…Long enough to figure out an effective counter. Right now, I am using my voice as best as possible to reduce further harm (with the Big Bad Bill coming into effect soon) I dread losing my insurance and wasting away because untreated it’s a guarantee. Given that I live in a mostly Red State, I could be one of the 17 million affected, or spared because I work part-time… If there are elections in the future, I will be voting with harm reduction in mind every time. Unless America becomes a doomed Fascist Nation which devours itself from within.
Some of the people refuse to believe that the accelerator and steering wheel do anything, even though the pro-cliff people are clearly steering and accelerating.
Some people think we’ve already gone over the cliff, and thus trying to drive the bus is meaningless.
They’re wrong, but they believe it, and people’s beliefs are sometimes too precious to let go.
And some people aren’t on the bus, just on video chat, but for some reason are still arguing to drive off the cliff.
We need a “neither” option. If that one wins neither candiate gets to be president and the parties have to pick someone else. Not voting counts as neither.
If only.
Can we blast the last point with a megaphone 24/7 in people’s faces or is that too much to get the point across?
There are none so deaf as those who refuse to listen.
As Mark Twain once remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
Being made aware I’m lashed to a bunch of psychotic apes is terrifying and makes me want to kill the rest of the people on the bus and take control myself.
People are the absolute worst.
Every time I see people complaining about 3rd party voters all I can picture is the “Am I so out of touch?” meme. Like, y’all already shot yourselves in the face 3 times in a row and it surprisingly didn’t fail 1/3 times, but you’ll blame literally anyone but yourselves. Run a candidate people want, run policies people want, and support that candidate and those policies instead of throwing everything you can against them because you like money, and we would not be anywhere near where we are now. People vote for trump because they don’t want another fucking “nothing will fundamentally change” politician. The country is already shit. It needs to change. But dems are happy with it how it is. They don’t care about immigrants, or poor people, or social security, or women’s rights, or whatever. They just hold onto those as carrots on a stick. They just want to keep making millions, and would rather trump win so they don’t have to actually embrace populist policy. That’s why people don’t vote. The choice isn’t ice cream or drive off a cliff. Its do we drive into a wall and die now, or drive off a cliff so it takes slightly longer to die, the drive off a cliff people shot the 2 people who asked if they could vote for ice cream and that’s why the others didn’t vote.
Run a candidate people want, run policies people want, and support that candidate and those policies instead of throwing everything you can against them because you like money
Golly gee, if only there were some way that parties decided what candidates they were going to run, and what policies that candidate supported.
Unfortunately, as we all know, such decisions are made by The Secret Cabal and us lowly voters have no part in it.
Signed, someone who had a fever dream in 2016 and 2020 and remembered voting in something called a ‘primary’ for some ‘Bernie Sanders’ guy.
Sure dude, keep pretending the DNC doesn’t run anything and that they have zero influence or agenda and it’s all the perfect will of the people. You’re right, the people with billions of dollars in charge of the party are really just chill dudes who listen to what people really want.
Sorry for not thinking that every public poll was rigged by The Shadow Elite and that Bernie actually won the primaries by millions of votes which were shredded without a single hint of evidence left behind by the Puppetmasters of the DNC.
Maybe people are voting for what they want, and the issue is a lack of education…?
No, no, it must be the Shadow Cabal sabotaging all the polls. I’m SURE of it!
My brother in christ, could you strawman any harder?
NOBODY thinks bernie ‘actually won’. Pretty much everyone who saw the 2016 election knows that Hillary won the primary, due to smear campaigns against bernie backed by establishment democrats. You know, the EXACT same thing that’s going on with Zohran Mamdani RIGHT FUCKING NOW. He WON the primary, and not by some secret cabal type shit but by the will of the voters by running gasp populist policies that actually help out the working class. And the establishment DNC is doing everything they can to smear him even AFTER getting the will of the voters, in favor of Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams.
“If liberals are so fucking smart then why do they lose so god damn always?”
Instead of blaming the leftists who may or may not have voted (which for what it’s worth, I have never met a leftist irl who abstained voting even in a ruby red state) why don’t you fucking blame the people who are actively driving the bus off the cliff?
Or how about you LEARN from the last decade?
Because this right here is why establishment dems AND republicans ain’t doing too hot. You look at Trump’s victories and never ask ‘why did all these people vote for this fucking asshole?’. Instead, you write everyone who voted Trump as a racist or a sexist or a NAZI and while they’re perfectly willing to associate with NAZIs, it’s important to fucking learn why the fuck they voted for that asshole. And yeah, some of them definitely voted for racism or sexism reasons, but you’re absolutely braindead if you think the fact that he ran on eliminating corruption (‘drain the swamp’) and ran on making things better for the working class (‘price of eggs’). Was he lying? Yup. Is he a corrupt fascist? 100%, but unlike literally everyone else in the 3 presidential campaigns he ran in (excluding bernie ofc) absolutely NOBODY was speaking to the working class or populist policies. It was ‘I’m with her’ or ‘Trump bad’ or ‘It’s my turn’.
So, feel free sitting on your high horse saying ‘oh, well if the voters weren’t so dumb we would be at brunch’ instead of focusing on the people whose entire job it was to inspire people to vote for them, and keep dividing the working class more and more. You’re only playing into their hands, and yes I am talking about the billionaires that you’re sucking off rn.
The ice cream no longer exists. It hasn’t existed for a long time, and no amount of wishing will bring it back.
I want ice cream, too. But before we can have ice cream again, we need to not die.
You’re right - it’s more like one group voting to drive off a cliff and the other voting to just drive really close to the cliff in case we decide to go off on some other vote, but so long as the cliff doesn’t win now, we can focus on convincing people ice cream is the better option. We don’t, and instead wait 4 more years to complain about the lack of ice cream, but that’s a separate problem.
Still better than not voting to not go off the cliff.
That’s QUITTER talk! I’m voting for Rocky Road.
So the cliff?
Brick on the pedal.
Is that bold in a title?
Yes.
That’s cool, I didn’t know you could do that. Does all markdown work or only a subsection?
Do you think people who are too stupid to vote for their own and their fellow citizens’ best interests are going to understand it in analogy form? Just try a straight forward “Hey, when you use a stapler on your own forehead, it actually hurts you, believe it or not, you fucking moron.”
Just try a straight forward “Hey, when you use a stapler on your own forehead, it actually hurts you, believe it or not, you fucking moron.”
We tried. Unfortunately, they’re too stupid to understand that too.
I realized after I wrote that that that, itself, is an analogy. So, maybe just carry a stapler. :)
The people who don’t vote don’t care when it comes down to it. its like when people call Nazis Nazis as if offends them. Or when someone calls a gay person gay… It’s just like… Oh okay.
Trying to reach the “I don’t do politics” crowd with “harm reduction” doesn’t really work as a strategy.
Like, they’re already admitting that when something is an unappealing and controversial, they’d rather check out than engage. Going on to explain the gritty strategy for approaching unappealing and controversial politics is just adding more reasons onto the “I don’t do politics” pile.
It’s a crass comparison, but it would be like if someone said “I don’t play MOBAs” and the response was to immediately launch into an explanation of League’s current meta-strategy. Don’t be surprised when they immediately check out of the conversation. (Yes I know games are frivolous and politics is life and death – but the people who “don’t do politics” don’t see it that way)
More than that, nearly all of the “I don’t do politics” people are almost certainly never going to see this image. We’re in an online forum dedicated to talking about politics. The only people who see this are the people who already choose to spend their personal time on the subject. So ask yourself, is this image really about the people who are checked out of politics? Because, practically (regardless of intent) all this really seems to be is a thought-terminating cliche to throw at anyone who points out that running a “We’re the lesser evil candidate!” doesn’t actually engage or activate anyone who’s already checked out!
More than that, nearly all of the “I don’t do politics” people are almost certainly never going to see this image. We’re in an online forum dedicated to talking about politics.
And yet plenty of people here insist that they don’t do bourgeois politics.
But bourgeois politics is sure as fuck going to do them.
20 people voted to drive over the cliff. 30 people voted to fucking gun it and send that shit straight into the abyss. 1 person voted for ice cream but the cliff voters beat him to death. 50 people didn’t vote
Not really
Look, I really appreciate the sentiment, but it’s time to acknowledge that those non-voters are not “misinformed future allies” any more than the MAGAs are. They are either accelerationists or fundamentally broken logically, and which form their indecision takes makes no difference -they are enemies of progress all the same, and to the extent there is ANY hope for the future, it relies on building a path AROUND them, not WITH them.
At least some of them need to be peeled off, however, considering the raw numbers. If there are no gains at all in votes for the anti-fascist candidate, that just means the fascists would continue winning, indefinitely.
… assuming, of course, elections matter going forward.
There’s a third, less pleasant option that you’re avoiding. I understand why - I don’t relish it. But the ballot box has failed. Even if it hasn’t COMPLETELY yet, we are not even 5 months into this term, and look where we are. Harping on getting non-voters to vote is the 2025 equivalent of the reactionary generals running cavalry charges across no-man’s land in WW1. It is fighting the last war. But that war is lost.
Not avoiding. The cartridge box may end up as necessary. But regardless of whether fascism ends like Franco (by luck), like Pinochet (by ballot), like Portugal (by mass resistance), or like Italy (by the bullet), the ballot is both a useful addition (insofar as it can reduce the legitimacy of the government) and a necessary tool for the postwar society. I don’t want to endure a fascist government now because people were too stupid to vote, so I can say that I definitely don’t want to get rid of these fascist fucks only for it to happen the same way again.
If we let the principle of “Not voting against fascism is okay if you feel really strongly about teaching the shitlibs a lesson!” endure, we will be seeing it make additional visits, along with the fascist ghouls it benefits.
Also, I noted in the title that I was speaking to an international audience, and not just… here, in the US.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s okay. I would never say it’s okay. I AM saying that they’re a stubborn distraction, and engaging with them is a waste of time. It took us a good long time for people to finally realize that the MAGAs and Republicans were unreachable, and by then, how many millions of collective man-hours were wasted? The stakes in 2024 could NOT have been clearer, and these non-voters STILL rejected the logic. We don’t have the time or energy to waste now pursuing THEM either. Now is the time to engage in asymmetric warfare of various kinds, including not only protests, but ensuring continued access to “subversive” information despite the tightening noose of control by setting up reliable hosting for it outside of the US government’s control, and otherwise generally trying to preserve what we can in the face of what’s going to become an ever worsening environment. We simply don’t have the time to waste on these people.
