this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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The fuckery inherent in the current system being not your fault does not absolve you from voting responsibly in context of the current system. If you are going to throw in a protest vote you are asserting your portion of responsibility for the practical end result of that vote.
How does a strategic practical vote within the current system perpetuate it any more or less than a throwaway protest vote?
I'm asking you how, specifically, a protest vote and a strategic vote are any different in terms of perpetuating the shitty system currently in place.
Who do you feel you're "showing" anything with a protest vote?
Protesting in the street works by showing the people in view that you're there in protest of a thing. However the viewer feels about you, the issue, or the concept of protesting, the fact that you're there doing it in that moment is public and undeniable. Protest votes, on the other hand, are a blip of mostly-invisible data that just get silently decoupled from the process and filed away once their irrelevance to the result is established. The election system, fucked and in need of reform as it is, has that built-in mechanism for quietly doing nothing in real life with your protest vote, and the system is certainly not going to be subverted or reformed at all by your having done it.
If that protest vote is the only means by which you're hoping to accomplish anything on Election Day, I'm still not sure I understand why one would bother.
Because there are more effective forms of protest that don’t guarantee with 99.9% accuracy that a fascist is elected if people vote for an alternate party (literally the case this year with the margins, and “dictator day 1”).
Voting should be pragmatic. There are a million other ways to protest/lobby, but honestly the Democrats of today are far more progressive than 20 years ago, because of people who understand the system and change it from the inside, like AOC/Bernie.