What an immense tension there must be between “Trump is a fascist who would turn the US into a Nazi regime” and “all that I can or must do to stop Trump is cast a single ballot one time.”
I don’t envy anyone caught in that contradiction.
Who was saying that all we need to do is vote one time?
The only people I have seen saying this are the people presenting it as a strawman while they are arguing that it is specifically good not to vote, which is of course insane.
You can send letters to people encouraging them to vote, you can text bank, you can knock on doors, you can have a protest against both sides’s awful Gaza policy, you can organize with one side or the other, you can join up with some kind of group which is getting ready if some shit goes down over the course of the next week or the next two months.
What do you even mean? I’m not being rude, I really don’t understand your point. There are a ton of things besides voting that are really good to do, and people have been doing them. I think we’ll have to do them in order for things to ever be good in this country. In what sense is all you can do to vote?
Yes. Depending on a person’s other comments, a statement like this is either advocacy to do more or an attempt at demotivation to do nothing. Unfortunately many groups attempting the former are infected with bad faith actors trying to cause the latter.
Elsewhere today I saw a “both sides” ratchet meme. “Dems are blocking progress to the left,” is the premise, and then the conclusions are either; “therefore primary them with progressives so we are able to move left,” or “throw your hands in the air and let the ratchet spin freely to the right.”
“What do you mean, I have to WORK to make progress in the world. Like, every single election? And then also OUTSIDE the election? Or else things will keep getting worse because some bad people have a lot of power? Fuck that. I think I’ll just let things get as bad as they get. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like anything bad could happen in the world, if I just refuse to participate.”
Who was saying that all we need to do is vote one time?
The only people I have seen saying this are the people presenting it as a strawman while they are arguing that it is specifically good not to vote, which is of course insane.
I think the point is that in this election, as important as it is, all you can do is cast one single vote.
What?
You can send letters to people encouraging them to vote, you can text bank, you can knock on doors, you can have a protest against both sides’s awful Gaza policy, you can organize with one side or the other, you can join up with some kind of group which is getting ready if some shit goes down over the course of the next week or the next two months.
What do you even mean? I’m not being rude, I really don’t understand your point. There are a ton of things besides voting that are really good to do, and people have been doing them. I think we’ll have to do them in order for things to ever be good in this country. In what sense is all you can do to vote?
When you misunderstood the original post I should have known you would misunderstand anything I was going to say.
Okay, so explain it to me. What have I gotten wrong and what do I need to understand?
Yes. Depending on a person’s other comments, a statement like this is either advocacy to do more or an attempt at demotivation to do nothing. Unfortunately many groups attempting the former are infected with bad faith actors trying to cause the latter.
Elsewhere today I saw a “both sides” ratchet meme. “Dems are blocking progress to the left,” is the premise, and then the conclusions are either; “therefore primary them with progressives so we are able to move left,” or “throw your hands in the air and let the ratchet spin freely to the right.”
“What do you mean, I have to WORK to make progress in the world. Like, every single election? And then also OUTSIDE the election? Or else things will keep getting worse because some bad people have a lot of power? Fuck that. I think I’ll just let things get as bad as they get. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like anything bad could happen in the world, if I just refuse to participate.”