Edit: new and improved image, now with 100% less support! Used my expert photo editing skills to change "supporting" to say "voting for"
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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We don't get to vote for "better" in the US. We get to vote for "less worse" or "more worse." But not "better."
Better takes ages. Massive organizing. And probably some violence on someone's part. But you don't get to vote for "better" in this country.
As evidence: We're the only country that needed a war to decide that slavery was wrong.
And voting in LOCAL elections, which way, way too many people ignore as not important. We can actually have "better" in a lot of those elections, if people would pay attention. People started paying a lot more attention where I live after a council member skipped 3 straight months of meetings but still had time to go to campaign events, and we realized that there were serious issues with several council members who all voted for conservative bs in lockstep. We managed to flip enough seats that it's now a 5-4 Democrat majority so the mayor can't just force through her pro-oil & gas nonsense at every turn, and the new members actually give a shit about the community.
My dad is a local official and he couldn't stop some giant, ugly, car-brained development from going in. He could only vote for the least bad one. Which is still terrible.
So, no, I don't think even local elections get us "better." But "less worse" is still worth voting for because it honestly doesn't take that much time.
They do though? It would be much easier to mobilize on a smaller scale and build up. ike I’m sorry that happened to you but some places are getting better. A few areas have ranked choice which I think is a step forward. Do don’t gone up hope and keep trying to make things better
This is true, and it's kind of structurally inherent to how we do voting here. Gerrymandering and fptp voting are still in place with lots of local elections. Shit is something only targeted en masse local organization against these long term, niche, easily distracted issues can really solve.
Uh. Pretty sure that's not even close to true.
Okay, Haiti, too. But I don't really count that because it was a slave revolt.
But most of Europe just passed a law saying it was illegal.
Most of Europe didn't have any significant amount of slavery to ban. Even then, there was considerable resistance - France abolished slavery during the French Revolution (a time of civil war, if you will remember), then reimplemented it, then abolished it again. Most of Latin America abolished slavery only with wars of independence; many of them not even then, having civil wars of their own during which the issue was resolved. Brazil had a coup over abolishing slavery, much of Africa and the Middle East retained the institution until stripped of independence (via war) during the colonial era... the list goes on.
Wars over slavery are presented any time there is a powerful slave-holding elite in a post-Enlightenment society.
While Europe just reformed and compensated the slavers with money, at least we fought a bloody war to end the slavery menace, bringing the emancipation cause to the forefront of the world. Albeit Reconstruction was sadly misused but at least some good was done for the world.
Didn’t European countries invade several African kingdoms and tribes and brought emancipation to their slaves?
Goddamn if this ain't the truest thing I've read in weeks. Just an addendum, slavery has never gone away. It built the foundation of this country and continues to be the reliable and cheaply paid engine that drives it. Slavery exists, it just has been frosted in corpo speak and glitter to fool the masses.
Where do you believe slavery still exists in the US? Can you give an example of humans being owned by an individual or company and forced to work for no wages in 2024?
Sure: in prisons that are disproportionately filled with minorities, as is explicitly allowed in the amendment.
I can see that, prisons are a good example.
Chattel slavery ended, which is where people literally owned other people as their deeded property. There are other forms of slavery though, like the other commenter mentioned with involuntary labor in prisons. Wage slavery is also a thing.
We don't get to vote for the best option because we don't have ranked choice voting.
We will always be voting for the lesser of two evils because we are afraid of throwing our vote away on a third party or lesser known candidate.
If we had ranked choice voting, we could actually vote for people we like instead of voting against people we don't like.
It would open the doors for so many new politicians to stand a chance against the ones who simply have the most name recognition.
This is the most bullshit comment I’ve read in this thread