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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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We can now say that anyone who could and didn't vote for Harris in magastan is a genocide enabler.
Now that you got you dopamine, feel better?
Great, now it's time to stop pushing propaganda that makes poor people infight.
I've been saying since the election that anyone who voted for Trump or abstained in protest is complicit in Trump's regime of terror. Trump and his staff spent months on the campaign trail telling the public exactly what they would do when they took power, showing everyone exactly who they are, and now they're doing all of it. No one has the luxury of claiming ignorance.
Probably not helpful to be this divisive with your anti trump allies. Whether in your eyes the abstention voters made a mistake or not, we’re going to need all the solidarity we can get to oppose/survive this administration
We can't change the past, so the only choice we have is to work together to start fixing this situation. I understand why they did it, but they refused to think about how their actions would affect the larger outcome. We shouldn't let abstention voters forget the role they played in getting us into this mess while we encourage them to make better (or at least less bad choices) in the future.
These people pretend to be allies until the next election season where when they don't get exactly what they want, rabidly push everyone to not vote or vote fascist.
"These people" are strawmen you have been fooled into hating
Are they allies? They ushered in trump on a red carpet
But but but, how were we supposed to know? We were too busy not paying attention to anything important!!
That’s not how logic works.
Yes it is and it’s such a good example of logic that its archetype is now a formal part of game theory in the prisoner’s dilemma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
So, the 80 million nonvoters in 2020 voted for Biden? I voted for Biden and Harris. That does not imply my consent for genocide. Complicity is only maintained through inaction. When I denounce the genocidal action, my complicity ends.
Since we’re erroneously referencing logic thought experiments, the trolley problem refutes the prisoner’s dilemma.
The thing about the dilemma is that you need to realize that the prisoners are rational, feeling people. They have good reasons to do what they do, often enough. Often their goals are good ones, compassionate ones.
They aren’t trying to scheme or sabotage one another. But they wind up doing that, because the only success condition is mutual cooperation.
That didn’t happen for us, and the outcome is boolean, pass or fail. Any move except sticking to the coalition and acting to cooperate would have doomed the effort completely, and we didn’t do that. So, here we are.
Thank you for this. It's always nice to have valid reasoning backing up something you find so obvious lol
Not even close. Did you consent when voting for Biden that his administration could do a genocide? I hope not. This logic implies that we have a moral obligation to vote, which eliminates the free-will of individual choice.
To put it another way. If I am morally obligated to choose the lesser-evil, then that eliminates the freedom of choice. Let’s say you are in a coma during election season. Are you now complicit with everything Trump is doing because you couldn’t vote? Of course not.
By conflating voting with moral obligation, this syllogism affirms a conclusion from a negative premise.
A vote is a preference, a choice. It carries no burden of complicity. This is separate from ideological support. If one voted for Trump, but then regrets that support, they are no longer responsible for Trump’s actions.
Like most people... I live in a state where my "vote" literally doesn't matter at all.
It's hilarious how "adults" assume that voting actually matter and that there's a meaningful difference between the two flavors of the state.
It’s hilarious how people still think that something good will happen as a result of inaction. But no, all your refusal to participate said was that you are fine with the outcome either way. That you trust others to decide this for you. Refusing to choose doesn’t negate the results. Just as doing nothing won’t create something. If it helps, I can explain it in simpler terms:
• You can’t get an answer if you don’t ask the question.
• You won’t ever get anywhere if you don’t make plans to ever be somewhere
• You can’t rightfully expect any change for the better if you’re not willing to do the bare minimum it takes to make it happen.
Even simpler:
• No vote ≠ no election.
And additionally, do you not understand that saying “but I live in a red state! My vote doesn’t matter!” Only proves to everyone that things like gerrymandering are effective ways to manipulate votes? Because, congratulations… you’ve inadvertently discovered exactly why they do it!
Blue votes in red stats are FUCKING VITAL.
You know, it’s sadly funny in a very bleak way- how you all excused your poor decisions as “making a statement!” and “sending a message!” when the messages you should have been sending is that you will do WHATEVER THE FUCK IT TAKES to stop a rapist felon that laid out exactly what he intended to do to us- from taking away the rights of your brothers, sisters, and others. Even if it meant voting blue in a red state.
But you didn’t. So sit down, accept your responsibility, and if you’re fucking lucky, you’ll be given the chance to do better next time.
About 3 million voters who voted in 2020 decided their vote "didn't matter" in 2024. Kamala lost the popular by 2 million.
Always always vote, even if you think it's pointless.
Presidents aren’t elected by popular vote
No, but it at least prevents the appearance of a "mandate." Trump claims that he not only won the popular vote but also the electoral college so that means we're all totally cool with whatever he wants to do whatsoever.
They have less of an argument if more people voted against him, but our stupid system still gave him power.
This is such a liberal take. They would have acted exactly the same whether they had the 'spirit of the nation' behind them or not. Stop picking fights of symbolic victories.
Republicans have not cared about the decorum that the democrats have been trying to uphold since at the very least the second Obama term likely longer.
Democrats are refusing to employ the same tactics that the republicans use against them when they are in power.
No, they are not. But swinging the popular vote reduces their appearance of the public mandate. And Trump also only won by relatively small margins in a lot of the swing states for the electoral college (30k in Wisconsin, 50k in Nevada, 70k in Michigan, etc), where such additional votes matter even more.
Every single vote on the board counts, whether or not you think it does. Not voting is intentionally silencing your voice for no reason.
If everyone who thought like you got out and voted, the results would come out very different.
The adage for as long as I can remember has been, Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.
I desperately wish that liberals realize that reality is the arbiter, and no amount of wishing more folks would fall in line will work.
That adage is pretty much the opposite of true. Republicans make demands of their politicians, and have no reservations about loudly denouncing them as "RINOs" if they don't follow through. The biggest third party candidate in history was Ross Perot in '96, because Republican Bob Dole was seen as too moderate and mainstream. Part of the reason that the party establishment didn't stop Trump from getting the nomination was because they knew there was a credible threat that he'd run third party, while the Democratic establishment resisted Sanders, because they knew he'd fall in line anyway.
The reason the adage exists is, ironically, because democrats are more prone to shaming voters who step out of line. From what I've seen, in right-wing circles, complaining about RINOs and shitting on the Republican establishment will get much less pushback compared to the opposite. Those who try to lecture and vote-shame are more likely to lose credibility themselves than the person they're criticizing.
Of course, because the party has received the message and fallen in line, there's less internal dissent, which is used to push the message that "Republican [voters] fall in line," used to pressure Democratic voters to fall in line.