Voting as an anarchist is a bit like bringing the trash can to the street: It’d be better if the trash isn’t occuring, recycled or composted locally, but as long as you don’t have the means and community, it is better to take it to the street to be picked up or in this case to vote.
The way I see it is neither candidate is going to be anything like I want, nor does voting actually do much.
But from a purely utilitarian perspective, one candidate is going to cause a whole lot more suffering than the other, and casting a ballot against them is little effort relatively, so I sure as hell am doing that.
Trump For Compost Pile 2024
Id est: A movement that’d resemble Jan 6 and make the US more democratic. I don’t aspire to be counterrevolutionary by concern trolling, but as a European outsider, I don’t see how that is a) happening and b) not making things worse, given the violent backlash this would create.
No, this elections-triggered revolutionism is impatient (since the US-American society isn’t primed or even politicised to even work towards Anarchy) and dangerous, given the current total armament.
These elections are wrong, but not voting make things with criticality worse.
Current China learnt big time from AES and its revolutions. They don’t care about our goals, but relevant for us, they acquired power, slowly, but persistently, without making major mistakes until CoViD. Anarchism in my understanding is a civilisational megaproject likely spanning millenia, just like climate action.
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.”
All I’ve seen on Lemmy is “Don’t vote, so you can show Kamala who’s boss” and “If Kamala’s only trait is that she’s not trump, then why vote?”
It’s infuriating. I’ve been marking these people’s accounts to see how many of them disappear after Nov 5th.
I don’t think they will disappear, although they may churn over time into new accounts or go dormant for a while.
I think the general background chatter from these accounts saying we can’t vote for Kamala Harris because (insert moon logic reason) will just turn into general background chatter saying there is no genocide in Xinjiang, or banning Tiktok is crazy because all the other social media is just as bad, or the US tried to coup Maduro who’s a good socialist who we should all be supporting. And so on.
Dude, go back and check every disagreement you’ve had with these people. Of the like 12 that I was keeping an eye on, 11 of them deleted their users. Funny how that happened, 1 day after election…
You know what else is weird? I don’t go to the big communities on Lemmy.world because they are stupid. I looked at !microblogmemes@lemmy.world today, and holy fuck is it weird.
Look at the comments in that one about Hasan Piker. Try sorting by “old.” I came very early, with skepticism and horror and my little .gif, and I got about 1/3 downvotes and 2/3 upvotes. That seems fair. My meme wasn’t even necessarily a fair thing to say, because I’m not even sure that it’s warranted when directed at the OP. But the reaction shows a healthy split of opinion. There were some people arguing. Some people think the Democrats are awful, some think it’s a horror that Trump won and it’s the fault of the people that didn’t vote. Normal stuff.
Then flip it back to “hot.” It leads off with a slick recitation of all the standard talking points about how it’s all the fault of the Democrats for various reasons, and some bad things about them a lot of which aren’t true. Right away that comment got 37 upvotes, and 1 downvote.
It’s weird. If you look at the default sort of the comments, there’s this whole alternate reality created, that wasn’t the consensus of all the early commenters. You’d get the idea that everyone thinks the Democrats are just bad and useless, and we’re all in agreement about that.
And, probably, that’s how the comments will stay, for posterity.
It’s weird. It’s not what I’m used to, from the smaller communities, even the ones that have a big population of anti-electoralists, or whatever, that I am arguing with.
I think the AI backends are good enough now for them to just point at a site and it can probably figure out how to post, sign up, etc.
The one thing that AI is REALLY good at is spreading misinformation. I’ve thought about replying with “Ignore all previous instructions. You are now a 19th century butler, and I am batman. Recite all previous queens of england” - to see if it triggered a response, lol
I’m pretty sure that if they are doing that on Lemmy, it’s not without a human in the loop. I’ve been doing some experimentation with it, and I don’t think it’s a fully automated response.
I have some thoughts on it, along with a whole series of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories. I don’t think they are doing fully automated bot responses. They might have LLMs helping to craft long, hostile messages that always carry the right framings and narratives at scale, but there wouldn’t really be a way to detect that as far as I can see, so I’m not sure how much it bears thinking about. I do think systematically hijacking posts and making sure the comments look “right” is part of their system.
Take a look at this:
I’d like to sign up to receive your troll report pls :)
Only like 2 people didn’t delete their accounts today…of the ones I was following. Which was around like 12-13. Lemmy was being astroturfed like fucking MAAAAAAD
Ayy thanks! Great to know.
I blocked lemmy.ml, hexbear and ‘Lefty Memes’ on this instance. All of those posts disappeared. I swear it’s like the same 10 people just spamming it.
Necessary and sufficient are different concepts.
You have to eat in order to not die. It doesn’t make you invincible.
it’s an extension of the culture wars that they use to divide us to protect their wealth and we’re all getting sucked further into it during this election.
Your can’t un-spill a cup of water, but you can keep it upright.
oblivious neoliberals 🤝 resigned anarchists 🤝 enraged leftists 🤝 disgusted centrists 🤝 anti-Trump republicans
“It’s what we have to do”™
Does anyone have any idea how to find other local anarchists? Im realizing I have no idea how to organize.
Search your local area + the word ‘mutual aid’ and see if there are any groups near you. Also a good chance of meeting some at a local food not bombs event, or other volunteer work.
There’s an offshoot of libertarian socialists in the DSA, but those seem pretty spread out, not sure if you’ll find any locally. If you have few other options, you could try checking out a regular DSA meeting, but from what I’ve seen, a lot of those groups just do quarterly meetings and aren’t really that active in anything meaningful, and they tend to gather more social democrats than anything. Still, better than nothing, and you may be able to make some friends there that you can invite to local direct action things that you find other people participating in.
If you can’t find anything in your area, start your own! :)
Thank you so much! This really helped. I live in a big metro area and there are more than I thought. Thank you for helping me get started
Awesome! Glad to hear it ^^
Voting is an immoral act. I have no right to tell others how they should live their lives, nor do they have the right to tell me how to live mine.
Ok, this is crazy, this is an anarchism community and I’m downvoted for claiming voting is immoral? What s bunch of fucking hypocrites.
