• Lena@gregtech.eu
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    29 days ago

    Better than not voting and doing nothing.

    The best would be voting and being an activist.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      29 days ago

      The US is not a democracy, it’s a capitalist dictatorship.

      Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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          29 days ago

          If your democracy is staged like reality TV, then it does nothing.

          Does voting in a capitalist dictatorship work? It got the US to where it is now. Doing the same strategy over and over again, when proven that historically things keep getting worse, should tell you that not only is it a pointless strategy, it’s actively harmful because it draws energy into an electoral contest that does nothing to improve people’s lives.

          Bourgeois democracy is an elaborate theatre piece used to keep people distracted, and give them the illusion of choice.

            • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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              29 days ago

              That doesn’t address anything. Saying vote over and over doesn’t make it a viable strategy, especially in bourgeois “democracy”'s staged elections, where the vote choices are stacked between various capitalist puppets.

              Essentially you’re asking us to play a rigged game, and insisting both that it’s not rigged, and that it’s super important to play it. Also that anyone who refuses to play it deserves ridicule. This is the level of zealotry people have in their fake political system.

              • Lena@gregtech.eu
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                29 days ago

                I never said it wasn’t rigged. Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder. Democrats are, of course, the party of the rich, but so are Republicans. Republicans, however, are way more against the redistribution of wealth.

                • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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                  29 days ago

                  Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder.

                  You can only make statements like this, by ignoring history. People in the US have voted for 150+ years. This is the result.

                  Again, if voting is working so well, why do things keep getting worse? Are they just not voting hard enough? No, it’s the system that’s broken, it’s theatre, a catch-22, a rigged game. Those of us who’ve studied US history and it’s class history learned this a long time ago. The liberals coming and telling us to vote to fix things, aren’t bringing any new arguments, and appear to us like fanatical zealots, who think that if they repeat mantras over and over, it cancels history.

                  • S3verin@slrpnk.net
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                    29 days ago

                    You are absolutely right! And there is so much more we should stop doing:

                    • We protested for more than 150+ years and see where we are now!
                    • The world did strikes and for over a century and what did it bring us? A dictatorship!
                    • We opened up communities and grassroot movements, and the only thing they done for us: Donald Trump! We need to stop all of this RIGHT NOW.