It's also funny how they pretend that the two actions are mutually exclusive, as if the rules of the universe won't allow you to firebomb Walmarts the minute you cast a vote. It's almost like discouraging people from voting is the actual purpose.

I don't believe that voting will save the world but neither will this comment, still I wrote it and still I vote.

"Both sides are the same, you shouldn't bother voting"

People don't bother voting, the bad guys win, things get worse

"See? I was right!"

People on Lemmy too. Just hop on over to !latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world and there’s the same sentiment.

I was banned from a certain "leftist" sub for arguing it's stupid to dismiss voting or dislike voting instead of whatever-else because election outcomes have very practical consequences for a lot of people in the here and now and you might need to start looking at Plan B's in the event your systemic revolution that gets rid of the US government and allows you to rebuild– a messy process that you've not elaborated on– doesn't happen.

Far as I'm concerned, it's proof some leftists are just as dumb and easily mislead as ultra conservatives; your rhetoric is indistinguishable from anti-voting memes that came right out of a Russian bot farm.

You must vote out every Republican, then drag every Democrat kicking and screaming to the Left.

We cannot make progress if we're (barely at that) fighting the Republicans everytime they wanna hunt the homeless for sport or force transpeople to strip naked for perverts.

The revolution is just leftist rapture. It'll have fire and punish the ones who deserve it and it'll happen any day now and when it's done it'll be a utopia and even though people have said it'll happen for hundreds of years it'll happen this lifetime for sure and we can do some things to push for it but just wait it'll happen any day now

Had a very long argument on here with some "leftist" several months back where they were trying to argue voting does nothing and makes you complicit with the genocide in Gaza, but during the argument they conceded that republicans had a much more extreme on Gaza as well as were doing worse things to citizens than any democrat, and that voting doesn't stop you from doing any other kind of activists, but they still just doubled down on "voting bad"

Genuinely insane

i regularly get flamed by asking my fellow so-called (internet) leftists one piercing question: "how?" i've been called a nazi, maga, etc. because i want people to actually consider how they would go about implementing their big ideas.

it's great to have big endgame ideas, it's important to have a direction. but if all you have are the big endgame ideas and nothing else, you are simply not a serious person and you have a lot of political literacy you need to work on. being terminally online and jockeying with nothing but ideas is not praxis, it's not even theory. it's just attention whoring for updoots and likes.

You can do both. It's not like voting voids some firebombing permit you never had anyway. Just mind the timing, because firebombing might end up barring you from voting.

Also, please don't firebomb Walmart. You'd just hurt other victims of the systemic evil. The people who are to blame don't shop there.

Unrelatedly, I hear there's a killer recipe for flame-grilled parasite...

If you think voting is useless, I gotta ask then why do so many politicians try to surpress it?

That’s lemmy as well. Tons of talk. Absolutely zero action.

The whole "everyone is 12" extends to things like this btw, if voting meant nothing, why is there a constant concerted effort of making voting particularly difficult? Are the politicians bored? Or is there something to a vote we're not seeing that they do? Of course you don't think those things you're 12.

As Eminem once put it, "Talk is cheap, motherfucker, if you're feeling frogish, leap."

Does voting cause Americans some obscure form of pain or anguish?

I can see no other reason why not to vote.

Vote-suppression micro-targeting is more effective and harder to differentiate than traditional negative or positive messaging around candidates. They particularly target minorities who they know are unlikely to be swayed to one side, so the most effective strategy is to convince them not to vote. They often rely on the idea that not voting will "send a message" to those in power. In reality, it just makes the targeted demographics appear unreachable.

A team led by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recruited more than 10,000 people across the United States — a group representative of the country’s voting population — to install an app that captured every ad they viewed for the six weeks leading up to the November election in 2016.

The study participants who saw the ads with vote-suppressing messages on Facebook were 1.9 percent less likely to actually vote in the election than people who did not see the ads...

“In fact, those minority users got the vote-suppression messages nearly 10 times more often than white people in white-majority counties in non-battleground states,” says Young Mie Kim, UW–Madison professor of journalism and mass communication and the lead author of the study...

While a 1.9 percent shift in the behavior of some voters is small, the researchers say, so were the margins of victory in many states in 2016. And, compared to white voters in white-majority counties in non-battleground states, nonwhites in nonwhite-majority counties in states with tight presidential races were about 14 percent less likely to vote. Extrapolated across the country for the 2016 election, the effect of the ads may have kept about 4.7 million people from voting.

Even a good politician whose goal is to help people can't help people if they don't have any power. That means winning elections. If one group votes at 2x the rate of another group, then enacting policy that pleases that group is 2x as effective at retaining the power needed to help all of the people when you can. That's why the groups with the highest voting rates are held as sacred across parties. You can never enact policy changes that will negatively impact them because you will lose power.

Its okay, they didn't vote either.

Firebombing a single building does nothing. You need coordinated violence with a massive group of people. Things that many tend to write off as "riots" like the 2020 BLM protests. My problem is never with voting, but it's with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other? Both are completely necessary to achieve the end goal desired. We should be seeing more Luigis and Tyler Robinsons at the very least every month instead of telling everyone that peaceful protests and a bit of community outreach is the only things worth doing outside of election time.

In their defense, it's the Walmart they shop at, and they don't want to miss out on those great deals for highly processed food like substances.

walmarts have insurance, firebomb the CEOs instead

To anti-quote Carlin, if voting didn't do anything, they wouldn't be trying so hard to stop us from doing it.

Bots are out spamming whatever sticks to get you to not vote.

Sometimes it's that, sometimes it's the other person refusing to believe that actual activists exist

There are discrete opportunities to firebomb walmarts and I support each instance