FAQ
Q: why not organize and stop treating the bus as a legitimate entity? why aren’t you working to stop the bus?
A: do both. cut the fuel line. break windows. put oatmeal in the gas tank. but maybe your efforts don’t succeed this election cycle. and if so don’t fucking throw away your vote if it can help your neighbors fucking survive. “harm reduction” is not a political strategy for action. it is a last minute, end of the line decision to save lives, after all other resources have been exhausted.
And because of how FPTP works, they unfortunately translate to “Trump”, “Biden”, “Whatever” and “I don’t care”.
this is straight up election misinformation. a vote for any candidate may only be voted for that candidate, and it can't be discarded.
So you think Kennedy or the other candidates are likely to get more votes than Trump and Biden?
no, but that's not what i said, either.
…and you think in a FPTP system voting for someone who is very unlikely to win isn’t effectively the same as voting “whatever”? What’s the difference?
the difference is that voting "whatever" is the same as not voting. by contrast, voting for a candidate is voting... for that candidate.
So the difference is for one you have to waste your time to achieve the same result?
it's not the same result. in one scenario, the vote total doesn't change. in the other, a candidate gets one more vote.
So you don’t care who wins but want to increase voter turnout?
of course i care who wins. i want my candidate to win. that's why i vote for them.
And you already admitted it’s unlikely that’s going to happen.
I’d also like to become a millionaire, but that doesn’t mean spending all my money on slot machines makes sense.
it's the right thing to do. ends don't justify means.
You’re just letting perfect be the enemy of good. And while unfortunately “good” is not really that good, the alternative is way too dangerous to risk it over moral principles. It’s sad, but as long as FPTP stays in place the only correct choice is to vote for the “least bad” of the main two.
voting for bad people is bad. it's not that I'm letting perfect be the enemy of the good. im letting good be the enemy of bad.
I mean, do whatever you want, it’s clear you’re not going to change your mind. Just keep in mind that if Trump wins, you also contributed to that.
no, i didn't. biden won in 2020 and i voted for howie. am i allowed to take credit for that? it makes no sense.
You contributed to that by not voting for Trump, yes. That’s FPTP.
It absolutely makes no sense but it’s the system in place and there’s pretty much nothing people can do about it short of overthrowing the government.
your story seems convoluted. i say the people who vote for trump are responsible for trump getting elected, and the people who vote for biden are responsible for him getting elected, and someone who votes for neither of them is not responsible for either of them getting elected.
>It absolutely makes no sense
because it's not true
You're not getting it, it doesn't matter who wins the next election because Trump and Biden are so very similar. So many of the things people are saying Trump will do is already happening under the Biden administration. If the Democrats saw that they lost the election bc 10-20% of voters issued a protest or third party vote, which actually happened during the primaries, it would make a huge impact.
…because of officials elected by Trump.
There’s a crapload of policies others already pointed out that make Biden extremely different from Trump, if you still think they’re “very similar” you’re just being willfully ignorant at this point.
Biden is definitely more palatable, but at the end of the day, either way we will have a president happy to fund genocide. Either way we waste billions on military, have a huge incarcerated prison population, deport immigrants, could go on. Biden was vice president during Obama's drone strikes.
That’s undeniably true. But to say they’re very similar is a huge exaggeration.
It’s the difference between drinking expired milk with or without cyanide inside. You’re still getting food poisoning but one is most definitely worse.
It's more like drinking expired milk and both have different quantities of cyanide, and both milks are funding genocide. You're dying either way. Strategic action could shift things, blindly voting for Democrats no matter what they do gives them no incentive to change their behavior.
No matter how much you want to make Biden look bad, the end results are not the same (unless you live in Gaza, but even then I highly doubt strategic actions matter unless you mean straight-up overthrowing the government).