this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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In case you haven't noticed, https://time.com/7212848/trump-gaza-own/ and https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-palestinians-leave-gaza-us-rebuild/story?id=118463249
I’m not defecting to Trump. I’m a socialist. I’m not supporting either of your genocidal fascists. Both gotta go.
So the solution in this case, would be to not vote? Think about this, if both sides have the same views on a topic, but they aren't totally the same on every topic, then voters should pick them based on stuff they disagree on. This is actually entirely obvious
Voters should vote for those who represent their interests. If any candidate is endorsing (let alone committing) genocide, and that is a violation of a given voter's interests (and it damn well better be), then that voter should not vote for that candidate, period. If there are only 2 options and both are genocidal, then neither should be rewarded with a vote. You want "harm reduction"? Then vote for PSL - if your liberal obsession with voting has convinced you that voting has any power whatsoever, then don't use it to reward genocide, use that power to say no to it entirely. If your position is that "we live under a system where we are getting genocide no matter what" then rather than going "well, there's a chance this one might be one iota less genocide" maybe start coming to the correct conclusion that the system is indeed irredeemably rotten and rigged FOR genocide, that it is designed to be this way which makes all of that system your enemy, not just the orange team that says the quiet part out loud too much, but also the one that smiles politely and gives the right lip service while literally, not figuratively, but very much actually mass murdering children. Yep, that blue team is your enemy too. So now it's time to get down to the hard work of building alternative power structures through organization in direct defiance of the genocidal machine, having done away with your petty red(orange)/blue team false dichotomy. Join us in actually working for a better world rather than tossing up your hands and voting for the genocidaires that cry crocodile tears and pretend it's such a sad state of affairs as they massacre little kids for power and profit. You aren't actually beholden to support them. They aren't the "lesser" evil, they're just another piece of the entire evil machine!
If you boil the entirety political action one can take to a binary choice between 2 Imperialist parties, then you'd have a point. To get to that point, though, you have had to fundamentally ignore the entire argument about voting being perhaps the weakest form of expressing political power one can do.
While voting, the only votes that matter are for the 2 leading parties. A third party vote is equivalent to not voting. Outside of the voting booth, there's more you can do to push what you actually want. Doing stuff other than voting doesn't mean you have to completely waste your vote too.
Third party votes do a number of things, from signaling disapproval for the electoral system in general, to supporting parties that one of the lead parties will need to bend towards to capture votes.
Also, only a handful of states even matter, most states aren't swing states. In these non-swing states, no vote matters. This is part of why voter apathy is so high.
Nobody in power gives a crap about a protest vote, If you spend that time protesting elsewhere you'll make a bigger impact.
People out of power care. The Working Class should signal its own strength by fronting its own party, not the bourgeois parties.
Sure, just dilute your power even more.
Run on a third party ticket when you have the numbers to win an election, until then organize a group, and trade support for concessions.
Concessions aren't coming, Capital doesn't want them.
That's how you play the game. Your other choices are being a piece on the board, or violence.
So then revolution, that's what has worked, historically.
If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t spend millions of dollars to block “protest candidates” from ballots and debates.
If they aren't trying to get my vote, why would I vote for them? They're telling me to fuck off!
A party that's moderately responsive to its constituents would see their usual voters defecting and try to do something to bring them back. Democrats don't even clear that low bar.
I had planned to vote for Claudia De La Cruz, but the Democrats sued her off of the ballot in my state.
But they won’t let us take control at the ballot box. The capitalists will turn the guns on us before they hand over their power, even if we followed their rules.
Also, the Dems are working with the GOP to ban ranked choice voting nation wide.
So what? You can write in a candidate. It's not like it would make any difference either way.
So we’re just going to placidly accept that only two parties can have ballot access in this country?
The thing to fight for is ranked choice voting, or some other method without a spoiler effect. Until you have that, the only thing that matters in the ballot box is the top two candidates. Anything else is equivalent to not voting. I'm saying you should make the choices that have the best actual effect, not make a worthless protest vote to make yourself feel good.
No. The thing is for candidates to endorse ranked choice voting and implement it, and until they do that, they are going to have to deal with the spoiler effect.
This shit is so stupid. "You have to fall in line unconditionally forever, until, out of the kindness of their hearts and against their own interests, the party decides to let you out of that situation." That's just saying we have to fall in line unconditionally forever. They're never going to just give us systemic change, it's designed this way on purpose and is working exactly the way they want it to.
The only way to actually apply pressure towards getting necessary policies is through setting conditions on your vote based on those policies. This ideology of "lesser-evilism" is completely illogical and incoherent, and the whole reason we're here is because it's such an egregious failure. There is no incentive for politicians to implement RCV if they know they'll have your vote either way. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.
Whataboutism. And to defend genocide too
I'm saying on that issue both sides are the same
Ok. Still whataboutism