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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I'm going to copy /u/kiniz0r's comment from a few months ago because I think it's extremely perceptive and accurate:
original comment
Your political choices shouldn't be performative, they should be as effective as possible in the present.
You do the best you can with what you have.
My favorite analogy is that voting is like taking the bus, just because it doesn't drop you off in front of your house, doesn't mean you're better off walking.
And also - do you want the next bus or the last bus?
Idk why people think negotiation starts after voting happens
We're negotiating right now, this is the negotiation.
Absolutely, but the negotiation also continues after the voting happens, so it's probably worthwhile to vote for someone who can be negotiated with.
Not If your negotiation partner is unwilling to provide concessions before you give them what they want....
No no, see the best time to negotiate is after you've already given someone everything they want from you. This totally isn't a textbook recipe for being taken advantage of. /s
I'll have to keep that in mind. That's very well put.
A most poignant and apt critique.
I have observed that a lot of us treat the enormous good luck of democratic participation as a team sport, and it's depressing.
I’ve talked to a bunch of people who were barely of voting age in 2016 and who treated their first voting experience as an edgy popularity contest, who didn’t think about anything other than the presidential race.
Then Roe was overturned and they were like ‘Ohhh. I get it now.’ And then it was too late.
I also hear from people who are just coming into voting age saying similar things. Biden isn’t doing enough about Isreal (as if he has the power to unilaterally stop the fighting), and they seem completely unaware that Congress, not the president, controls most things. This is not (yet) a dictatorship.
But they’re planning to vote like it’s a horse race. Sorry Buttercup, but that’s not how this works. Biden is at least sane. The entire right is not. Please for the love of humanity, please don’t lock us into fascism because you think Biden is too old or whatever. I agree, we should have better candidates – nobody seems to be mentioning that trump is only 3 years younger than Biden, which at their age is nothing – the fact is these are the two we will be choosing from. There is no third option in this system, and no amount of protest votes will change that. It’s just a fact.
I would vote for Biden’s corpse before trump and the fascism he openly calls for. If you wouldn’t, you need to learn more about this system and processes before casting your vote. It shouldn’t even be a question.
The bigger issue is the whole system behind voting, not the symptoms that we call our candidates.
Oh yes, well another commenter already put out the recommendation for ranked choice voting which would be a great improvement over our current first-past-the-post system.
I'm really not sure how we even start getting such a change implemented though.