ID: photo of Martin Luther King Jr. waving at the crowd during the March on Washington, on it is his quote: “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
In a similar vein, anyone eligible to vote and chooses not to implicitly supports whoever wins.
Fuck that. Protesting today ain’t what it was in his day. There ain’t much sanity left anymore and don’t matter how you try to stand let alone move.
So… Don’t protest* evil. Got it. 🙄
(on a more serious note, you having a narrow and wilfully ignorant view of what protesting actually means doesn’t change the fact that not protesting evil makes you complicit with it)
Complacency is complicity
Exactly.
You know, a lot of comments are bringing up voting like there was any chance of votes preventing this. A lifetime of gerrymandering, court stacking, propaganda, and general fuckery led to this, and the only question was when the religious right wing and oligarchs made their move
Voting? That’s not shit.
What matters is real change brought by real people.
The people that didn’t vote? That wasn’t all protest non participation. Voter turnout has always been low because the average person just does not care.
Which means they won’t care if the people that do care tear down the currently successful right wing revolution with a counter revolution. All you have to do is keep just enough comfort during transition, and nobody will lift a finger from that group. They will not give a flying fuck at all.
Frankly, even if they did care, they’re also the segment least able to do a damn thing about any of it. They lack the will, the training, and the functional personal motivation to do anything but hunker down and wait, even if their comfort level does drop to the bottom.
I can’t say that’s good or bad, but it is what it is.
It’s up to the people that care to make changes. Right now, the right seems to care a fuck ton more than anyone else, so they’re pulling it off.
What do you mean votes couldn’t prevent this? You really think if Kamala had won by the electoral college that Trump would have won anyways??
I’m saying that this is the end goal the right wing, particularly the general Republican party and the Christian right in particular have been working towards since Nixon. The southern strategy, combined with the oligarchs dominating the party.
Democrats have never had a good plan to oppose that, and still don’t.
Even if Kamala had won, which was never likely, it would have been someone, at some point in the next fifty years because the first Trump term stacked the supreme court, and the party pushed hard to put decisive cases up.
There’s no way the halfassed efforts that democrats have been using my entire lifetime would have prevented an eventual lock on Congress and the presidency.
Mind you, I’m fairly convinced that had kamala won, there was a plan in the works for an outright attack. Not a genuine right wing revolution scale attack, but a disruptive series of attacks on the power grid and infrastructure to sow chaos and strengthen the militarization of the police even more, get people used to marshal law, etc. But that’s impossible to prove, and unsourceable.
In a roundabout way, any democrat winning would have had exactly as much effect on their long term plans. They’ve been working at this, laying multiple options down so that as soon as opportunity rose, they could strike in one way or another.
Voting can’t fix that. Voting democrat can’t fix that for sure. There is no viable alternative party to oppose it, and there’s no time to build one, despite the feeble bullshit being tried to rebuild the democrat establishment. You can’t take a party that gives lip service to the populace, but works to maintain the status quo of corporate interests on average, and turn it into a serious engine of change.
We’re past the point of waiting four years and hoping. We were past that when Biden eked out a win. But nobody took that respite to even try and shift things.
I always go beans and potato salad.
“Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented”
- Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize 1986
Quoted from his acceptance speech -
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/acceptance-speech/Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in the town of Sighet, now part of Romania. During World War II, he, with his family and other Jews from the area, were deported to the German concentration and extermination camps, where his parents and little sister perished. Wiesel and his two older sisters survived. Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 by advancing Allied troops, he was taken to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist.
I take the side of the minority!
^Lemmy ^says ^Republicans ^are ^the ^minority
I need to do more protests . I always seem to hear about them after the event, or they’re always in London or something
Your state capitol building on Wednesday at noon. Every state.
Does this include not voting because one is a single issue voter?
Edit: lmao, yall will really say whatever to justify your decision to make things worse.
Absolutely. Non-voters and “protest” voters chose not to oppose a known fascist. Their refusal to strategically use their voice has led to increased suffering of minorities, LGBTQ+, and likely an end to any semblance of US democracy.
Yeah, well, they’ve done it, 95 million Americans didn’t vote. Now what?
Are we gonna point the finger at them, lay the blame at their feet, and feel superior because WE VOTED, while the oligarchs and fascists loot our treasury and put our minority and LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters you seem to care so much about in camps? Or are we gonna go and fight the good fight like the people out in LA yesterday?
Yeah, well, they’ve done it, 95 million Americans didn’t vote. Now what?
Y’all really are unble to take any kind of accountability whatsoever. “It’s done so it’s not relevant anymore” is a textbook example of what abusers say.
Are we gonna point the finger at them, lay the blame at their feet
Yes, absolutely. Non-voters are neglectful assholes whose inaction has had devastating impacts for multiple different countries. You are all just typical abusers trying to escape accountability.
Are we gonna point the finger at them, lay the blame at their feet,
Absolutely.
If those 95 million would’ve voted together for Mike the local crackhead, Mike would’ve won the popular vote with about 20 million votes to spare… I don’t know, seems stupid to me to just go on the Internet to complain and then not use one of the only tools you have in a democracy?
I understand that going out voting is “accepting the system” but that is the only legal way to bring about change. If you don’t want to support the system that’s fine, work to dismantle it, take the fight to them. But just staying at home, doing nothing and then saying “I told you so” is just dumb.
I understand your point, but as you said:
But just staying at home, doing nothing and then saying “I told you so” is just dumb.
There are people WHO VOTED who are doing this, because it’s “not their responsibility” anymore.
There are people WHO VOTED who are doing this, because it’s “not their responsibility” anymore.
There are a lot of people like this, they did the bare minimum and feel like that’s enough, I mean at least it’s something? Still far from enough, I agree with that.
In these times I often think about the Berthold Brecht poem “Wer Zuhause bleibt”-“Whoever stays at home”.
Wer zu Hause bleibt, wenn der Kampf beginnt Und lässt andere kämpfen für seine Sache Der muss sich vorsehen: denn Wer den Kampf nicht geteilt hat Der wird teilen die Niederlage. Nicht einmal den Kampf vermeidet Wer den Kampf vermeiden will: denn Es wird kämpfen für die Sache des Feinds Wer für seine eigene Sache nicht gekämpft hat.
Translation :
Whoever stays at home when the fight begins and lets others fight for his cause must beware: For whoever has not shared the fight will share the defeat. Not even avoiding the fight helps anymore, because he who has not fought (for his own cause) has fought for the cause of the enemy.
Italics added by me
This right here.
Not only this but, if those non-voters organized and taken action in the last half-century, they would have been able to move the Overton to the Left, instead of the unending Right-ward crawl that we’ve been seeing. That could have prevented the likes of Clinton and Thatcher and erosion of workers’ rights.
Thank you for also making this point. There’s a lot of with to do. In-person protests, education and outreach, mutual aid and are some of the necessary avenues. Not everyone is able to march but there are many other ways to contribute to the fight.
Voting (and in any other way participating) in an oppressive system (E: and for an oppressive party, either way) is literally the opposite of protesting it.
Welcome to the point lmao
MLK: Moderates might be literally worse than the KKK
Libs: Yeah but have you considered that you’re racist if you don’t vote for someone actively trying to make your life worse
Without fucking fail.
And all with an overinflated and unearned sense of self righteousness to replace the deep sense of irony, and shame, they should be feeling.
Refusing to use one’s voice strategically to prevent increased suffering is an example of cooperating with evil.
There is nothing “strategic” about unconditionally voting for the Democratic party.
There is, to those whose strategy is to give themselves a pat on the back for doing the barest of bare minimum and successfully maintaining the status quo, rather than doing anything actually useful to oppose fascism (or the capitalism that will always decay in to it), or in the words of MLK himself those “more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” - it gives them a dopamine hit and an ego boost so potent they seem able to ride on the smell of their own farts for 4 years at a time while doing fuck all else to change society for the better (for anyone but themselves, that is) because they’ve already “done their part”, and is seemingly all they need to convince themsleves they’re the brave hero-saviours of humanity, rather than the enablers of fascism they actually are.
It’s precisely why the second cult exists - to provide an illusion of choice (E: and of impact), and make “the left” (I can’t even type that without cracking up, but part of the cult is being convinced they are “the left”) feel like they’re fighting the establishment, when in reality, they’re holding it up just as much as the other cult is, some might argue, even more, because they’ll turn on those actually opposing fascism long before they’ll dare be rude to fascists.
There absolutely is, whether privileged non-voters and anti-electoralists perceive it or not. Enabling fascists to take over literally is making life worse for everyone. Voting for non-fascists and putting in work outside of the general election to try to push the party left is how strategic voting works, or would work if those claiming to care about ending genocide and improving the human condition were actually serious about doing anything but circle-jerking about how morally superior they are for enabling expansion of the genocide in Palestine and the one against LGBTQ+ people in the US that’s now kicking off.
You don’t even want them!!! You’re using an idealized version of them, that does not exist to convince me that anything else is “enabling fascism”. They’re capitalists!! They don’t give a fuck about you if you do not serve their bottom line. Your unconditional vote only serves to legitimize them and prevent any other parties from gaining legitimacy, you cannot singlehandedly win them the election if they are not doing the work to earn the people’s vote!!!
You have the privilege of not recognizing that. You belong to a class that still serves their capital interests of nominally appearing progressive but acting fucking incompetent and feckless when they are in a position to do anything to materially improve the lives of the vast majority of americans, somehow convincing the public that our “democracy” is anything other than a sham. You have the privilege of the identity politics, that they drive between us like a wedge and only pretend to care about, that they actively damage by divorcing them from their real material basis, that distract from very real issues which the establishment parties don’t even bother pretending to give you a choice on anymore, being your single fucking issue.
The Democrats will not be pushed left, they fucking despise the left and take every opportunity they get to destroy and delegitimize leftist movements. Look at any of their actions this election!! Actually listen to them when they talk!! When the Republicans attack them for being too left, for defending trans people, for defending immigrants, look at how they crumble and fall back instead of defending their positions. Look at how they let the Republicans look like anti-war candidates. It would be so easy to disprove any republican talking point, if the Democrats actually believed in anything other than putting on a show for their donors. They let the Republicans define what the acceptable positions are, and you let them get away with it because of imaginary “moderate” voters that this election should have proved do not exist without a single person defending left wing positions nationally and driving the less engaged voters away from the right.
Who is defending the homeless, the imprisoned, the food insecure, the migrants, the minimum wage workers, the invisible victims of natural disasters, the people at the fucking mercy of the healthcare industry??? Our planet!!! Not to mention the people our tax dollars are murdering on the other side of the planet!! I could go on!!! You let your party turn their backs on them for fucking identity politics, because you are privileged enough to avoid coming to terms with the fact we’ve already lost any sense of electoral democracy on the issues that actually stand to improve the human condition!!! You only care about what personally affects and is visible to you.
The Democrats are not a tool for the left, they are not a weapon against the right, they are the left wing of the very capitalist establishment that got us here in the first place and they are nothing but an obstacle to clear on the way to forming a legitimate populist left wing movement in this country.
Found the person who didnt use all available options of protest.
You don’t understand I can do more good by withholding my vote and standing outside with my witty sign (for a few hours).
Yes because so much is earned in this country by sitting around and waiting for politicians to do the right thing.
