@davoyager@mastodon.social
we are currently suffering through 4 more years of trump as a direct consequence of assholes staying home and not voting for harris
some of this is racism
but some of it is toxic idealism: demanding something better before they get off their lazy entitled ass and prevent fascism
@benroyce@mastodon.social and a great deal of it is sexism.
Imagine if all those idiots in 2000 hadn't voted for Ralph Nader or stayed home instead of voting for Gore.
It would be a totally different world today.
@benroyce@mastodon.social @davoyager@mastodon.social
I think 2000 can be more accurately blamed on Florida just blatantly stealing the election than people staying home
@gbargoud@masto.nyc @davoyager@mastodon.social
florida 2000 wasn't example of people staying home, it was an example of the other problem: idiots who don't understand what a third party vote means in an FPTP voting system
certainly moron nader voters didn't put bush into the win column, what they did was put the results into the hands of a shitbag supreme court
@davoyager@mastodon.social @benroyce@mastodon.social
When voters were purged from the rolls before the election and then ballots were not counted for various badly defined reasons after the election leading to the governor's brother winning the state by a razor thin margin, I find it hard to blame voters themselves even if fewer Nader voters would have made the margins large enough to block that theft.
@gbargoud@masto.nyc @davoyager@mastodon.social
i mean it can all be true right?
and when you look at how many voted for nader, and how thin the margin was, it's pretty obvious that played a roll. and i will castigate such morons for helping to give us bush
@davoyager@mastodon.social @benroyce@mastodon.social
Looking back on the 2000 election (which happened before I lived in the US citizen or turned 18 so I didn't really follow it that hard at the time) it is wild just how fucking corrupt that was right out in the open
@gbargoud@masto.nyc @davoyager@mastodon.social @benroyce@mastodon.social Though Clinton's sexual exploits disgust me, the whole 'getting revenge for Nixon' vibe of the right was pretty sad. They impeached him over whether or not 'sexual relations' meant 'intercourse' or not; after six years of DESPERATELY trying to pin ANYTHING on him with regard to WhiteWater (which is such small potatoes compared with Trump's many scams as to be truly laughable now) The right's been blatantly corrupt and morally bankrupt a LONG time.
@davoyager@mastodon.social @benroyce@mastodon.social @obscurestar@mastodon.social
I'm just amazed that there are people who keep getting elected to national positions in the democratic party who just let such blatant election theft slide.
They should have been primaried a quarter century ago and we're still dealing with their shit.
@gbargoud@masto.nyc @davoyager@mastodon.social @obscurestar@mastodon.social
I blame nonvoters
It's a feedback of alienation. Things suck, so they detach. So things suck more. Rinse repeat
I'm not letting leaders off the hook. But you can't change who they are. Meanwhile if people just fucking voted we could get rid of them
Someone might say "well you can't change nonvoters either." In that case we're just fucked. I don't accept that. So I prefer to hammer at the one thing we might be able to change:
Nonvoters, fucking vote already
@benroyce@mastodon.social @gbargoud@masto.nyc @davoyager@mastodon.social Yeah. I know how you feel but at the same time, shaming isn't a good tool for reaching people and helping them grow. Tends to re-enforce negative behaviors instead. Lest I become too much a purity troll myself, I try to lay my shaming of them aside so that I might focus on reaching them. It's just hard. I'd like to not be political too. If they could just see we are all the same light and let go of preconceptions, the right would not exist. It is made of fear.
@obscurestar@mastodon.social @gbargoud@masto.nyc @davoyager@mastodon.social
I understand what you're saying about shaming but I can't buy it
"I'm not voting because someone was mean on Mastodon" is ridiculous. The concept describes someone so emotionally addled they won't ever figure out how to coherently advocate for their own self-interests, nevermind all of our interests
So shaming of nonvoters is for everyone else reading along who aren't so incompetent
Respecting low emotional intelligence is not a path to anything constructive
@benroyce@mastodon.social @obscurestar@mastodon.social @gbargoud@masto.nyc @davoyager@mastodon.social people on mastodon often fail to understand that discourse has more than one purpose. conversations work on multiple levels.
1. you might convince the other person.
2. you might convince silent bystanders to speak up or take action.
3. the more people condemn an unacceptable viewpoint, the further that viewpoint is pushed from the window of acceptable discourse.
4. conversely, the more people share a good idea, the more dominant that idea becomes.
people will say that you will never achieve objective 1, so your conversation is pointless. this ignores objectives 2 through 4, which may actually be more important.
Ben Royce 🇺🇦
🇸🇩
