Hey, I quite enjoy some of those highly processed food like substances.

At this point we're fucked anyway but I want the opium that is slightly better governance with the democrats as the world sinks into a trash fire so I voted for them.

Several reasons -
People are lazy AF, maybe a bit "soft disenfranchised" in terms of not preceiving that they have credible information, and also there are active demoralization campaigns going on.

All those are reasons but none are valid excuses. Get off your ass and vote. Many places allow you to vote early. Federal law requires your employer to give you time off to vote.

No excuses... inform yourself and vote.

Liberals need to make up criticisms of Marxists in order to feel like they're part of the conversation. Nobody wants to firebomb a Walmart. That's adventurism and pointless. You made that up and assigned it to Marxists because you're anticommunist.

Marxists believe in organizing the working class to defeat the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we all live under and are being oppressed by, not randomly attacking buildings. Reducing all of leftist theory to "lol they want to firebomb Walmart" is exactly the type of behavior we point to when we call liberal debate idealistic and not rooted in material reality.

Tl;dr youre a bunch of moronic liberals lashing out in incoherent ways. If you people actually studied Marxism, you could form much more pithy memes that actually offend leftists properly.

Nah, if people cared about politics before Election Day we could be pushing for better candates in the primaries.

We absolutely will continue to get the choice between a shit sandwich and a shit burrito every time if we keep refusing to take part in the ingredient selection.

Just so people know because this is important, many states have laws requiring employers to allow time off to vote. Check your local laws. Some states even require that time to be paid.

Wilding v. DNC is the court case where the DNC admitted that they don't have to abide by the primaries because they are a private entity and can nominate whomever they want.

They admitted this in open court because so many people voted in the primaries for Bernie, and yet they nominated Hillary, that they could no longer hide this fact from the majority of the Democrat voting public.

The truth was short lived though, as that case is almost completely memory holed, and everyone pretends like none of that happened a decade ago.

I was there. I remember. Sure, vote in the primaries and vote for the "lesser evil", but we won't win anything without infiltrating the Democrat bureaucracy and forming unions and serious protests.

I was banned from a certain "leftist" sub for arguing it's stupid to dismiss voting or dislike voting instead of whatever-else because election outcomes have very practical consequences for a lot of people in the here and now and you might need to start looking at Plan B's in the event your systemic revolution that gets rid of the US government and allows you to rebuild– a messy process that you've not elaborated on– doesn't happen.

Far as I'm concerned, it's proof some leftists are just as dumb and easily mislead as ultra conservatives; your rhetoric is indistinguishable from anti-voting memes that came right out of a Russian bot farm.

Felons should be able to vote!

You're supposed to "improve living reality" before and after voting, not instead of... Voting doesn't preclude protesting or working to that end.

Bill to Criminalise Being Poor narrowly passes with a 51/49 vote.

Sorry, no can do, but how about we make one president?

/s

I'm not USian, but here are some assorted reasons why one might choose not to vote. I do not necessarily agree (or disagree) with any of them, and this is my attempt at a reasonably balanced analysis as a person who is not an expert in politics, but has read a lot of arguments in the comments.

1. Voting makes you complicit.
   (Let's say for the sake of argument that it is a given that Democrats will continue aiding Israel's genocide and ethnic cleansing just as much as the Republicans, but will improve things for marginalised communities domestically.)
   The argument here is that voting for a politician that will perpetuate a genocide makes you complicit in a genocide in a way that inaction does not. The counter-argument is that refusing to exercise what influence you have in the choice between make a choice between Palestinian genocide or Palestinian genocide and trans genocide makes you complicit in trans genocide. This is literally the kind of thing that the trolley problem thought experiment was made to explore.

2. Voting for the lesser evil increases harm in the long run.
   The argument here is that demonstrating a willingness to vote for the lesser evil - with no red lines whatsoever - incentivises Democrats to only ever be slightly less bad than the Republicans, whereas having red lines and allowing Democrats who cross them to lose will incentivise the Democratic party to change their policies. The counter-argument is that Dems haven't exactly demonstrated that they willing to adopt certain policies even when it would be demonstrably beneficial to their election prospects, and so the pragmatic thing to do is to delay harm for as long as possible to give a better chance that non-electoral politics will shift in the interim. The counter-counter-argument is that such a shift will not occur while that harm is being delayed, which leads us on to...

3. Accelerationism.
   (Yes, I'm aware that what I'm about to write isn't the original meaning of accelerationism. Don't @ me.)
   The argument here is electoral politics either can never progress toward socialism/anarchism/your-flavour-of-leftism (if you're a leftist), or even that it is no longer even capable of halting a descent into fascism (if you're a pessimistic liberal), and so we should simply allow shit to get fucked so that a critical mass of people have it bad enough to do some revolution and/or non-voting-based direct action about it. The counter-arguments here include, but are not limited to: a) well, that's just like, you're opinion, man; b) that's an awfully big gamble to take when there's no guarantee that what will come after will be better; and c) you should prioritise the lives of people that currently exist, now, rather than those of hypothetical future people, and immediate harm reduction is of more benefit to those people specifically.

In case any one cares, I'm English. My position on voting is that I may vote in an election where the Greens or possibly the Lib Dems stand a chance of winning, but otherwise I spoil my ballot. Yes, I'm aware that the Lib Dems are shitlibs. Still better than Labour. I will never vote Labour for as long as it remains transphobic or as long as the likes of Luke Akehurst remain in the party.

No state's permanently bar all felons from voting anymore. The key difference now is when they're allowed to vote again.

For some, prisoners can vote, for some it's after you get out of jail, and for some, it's when your parole is up.

There are still certain crimes that do require the governor to grant permission, though.

Are you talking about Great Value Cheese Wow! Spray on Cheddar Cheese!!!!!!!

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Cheese-Wow-Spray-Cheese-Cheddar-8-oz-Can/10315764?classType=VARIANT

Had a very long argument on here with some "leftist" several months back where they were trying to argue voting does nothing and makes you complicit with the genocide in Gaza, but during the argument they conceded that republicans had a much more extreme on Gaza as well as were doing worse things to citizens than any democrat, and that voting doesn't stop you from doing any other kind of activists, but they still just doubled down on "voting bad"

Genuinely insane

I guess the Tankies didn't get the memo that Twitter is only for fascists and hookers now.

They boil down to:

1. Paid trolls
2. Genuinely mentally ill people whose decision making centers are broken

Either way the solution is not to engage with them in anyway. You will not convince them to be reasonable and your energy is better spent elsewhere.

I'm gonna need to stop you right there.

Pushing for better candidates means defining a coherent set of qualities one wants in a candidate and then actually doing legwork for them instead of flinging shit everywhere from the lazy safety of your bedroom in your parents' house.

Or ai bots that have lost the plot in the argument

i regularly get flamed by asking my fellow so-called (internet) leftists one piercing question: "how?" i've been called a nazi, maga, etc. because i want people to actually consider how they would go about implementing their big ideas.

it's great to have big endgame ideas, it's important to have a direction. but if all you have are the big endgame ideas and nothing else, you are simply not a serious person and you have a lot of political literacy you need to work on. being terminally online and jockeying with nothing but ideas is not praxis, it's not even theory. it's just attention whoring for updoots and likes.

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Damn AI bots taking away jobs from paid trolls

Agreed. Voters holding out for the perfect candidate infuriate me. The only “perfect” candidate is staring at you in the mirror. Outside of that, compromises are necessary.

We need to democratize our workplaces

This is a spot-on analysis, especially for someone not in the US.

The people too scared to vote because there might be a guy saying mean things about them. Are the same ones claiming they'll be the face of the revolution.

People like that are on the same political level as that one Nickelback song.

Reading this reminded me of a quote. I unfortunately can't remember for the life of me who said this, but it was something to the effect of: "I appreciate many leftist ideas. But, in my experience, if your only acceptable outcome is 'utopia', and your only acceptable timeline is 'immediately', then things aren't likely to go your way."

It's important to remember the famous song "everyone I don't like is literally hitler" by rusty cage and that it applies to a shocking number of people online

Firebombing a single building does nothing. You need coordinated violence with a massive group of people. Things that many tend to write off as "riots" like the 2020 BLM protests. My problem is never with voting, but it's with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other? Both are completely necessary to achieve the end goal desired. We should be seeing more Luigis and Tyler Robinsons at the very least every month instead of telling everyone that peaceful protests and a bit of community outreach is the only things worth doing outside of election time.

I don't believe firebombing walmart will do us any good. I believe forcibly removing the current administration by physical means or otherwise is necessary to achieving some long term progress towards recovery. Might not be peace at the end of that tunnel, but it will be better than letting than ruin things even more like they continue to be as I type this out.

And yet, you aren’t out there assassinating CEOs.

Curious.

/s

It's easy as fuck to tell everyone else to be a martyr. I think that's the dilemma we might be in here

If you think voting is useless, I gotta ask then why do so many politicians try to surpress it?

walmarts have insurance, firebomb the CEOs instead

The water law was specifically in Texas, not a federal law.

It's stupid how difficult some places make it to vote. Also, in a surprise turn off events, the military was specifically ordered to make sure everyone gets a "down day" to vote.

Probably because of the amount of stupid people in the military that will vote red. I hope it flips this year though.

That's been my experience, except for any concessions.

If only this county's politicians can follow this advice

The revolution is just leftist rapture. It'll have fire and punish the ones who deserve it and it'll happen any day now and when it's done it'll be a utopia and even though people have said it'll happen for hundreds of years it'll happen this lifetime for sure and we can do some things to push for it but just wait it'll happen any day now

Honestly for all my bloodthist, ya ain't wrong. Fact of the matter is most leftists are either too chickenshit or too insular to do jack for shit. Or they get into petty and stupid squabbles effectively preventing any attempts at outreach, seriously id happily join a group of leftists who can stop fighting about theory for five fucking seconds and do something.

I'm a Redneck who follows the old ways of being an anti corporate asshole, I really don't care about your Soviet larp let's just set up a communal food pantry you fuckwits. I've never felt more rage than when some yuppie ass twig tried fucking purity testing me via quize.

Does anybody require the employee to prove they actually voted?

My problem is never with voting, but it's with people who tell everyone to use every tool and refuse to use political violence. Why is it ok to refuse to use 1 tool, but not the other?

Devil's advocate-- Trump is provoking the public so he could invoke the Insurrection Act and legitimise the use of violence to purge any opposition.

There has already been numerous instances of violations of constitution and civil rights, but where does the public draw the line? I don't know, but I think the test will be the midterms on whether or not Trump will rig it. Or, if not the midterms, wait in two years if he doesn't want to step down.

Last time the democrats had control of all three branches of government, americans got slightly better healthcare, and now insurance companies can't just refuse to cover conditions they claim you had before you got insurance. Also no more lifetime maximums.

Shhhh the Democrats will hear you!

Are there a lot of Marxists on Twitter? This didn't seem directed at Marxists.

Teaching the population learned helplessness.

You can use the logic of "they're just waiting for us to get violent so they can oppress us harder" all the way to the camps.

Not saying you're necessarily wrong about the insurrection act but if he was really trying to do it he would whether someone really did it or not. I mean he's already been shot at. Hes got the false grounds to go for it.

Unfortunately you're batting for the other side. All they want to do is throw out any reason they can to keep the status quo of non violence so they can continue to steamroll forward. Because the secret is that they're fragile. It's not a majority of the population that's doing this, it's a very small minority with a slightly larger minority supporting it and a vast majority saying "well don't get too rowdy yet, that's what they want."

Oh boy these comments are gonna be full of wimpy whatabouts here we go 🙏 🪑