Not sure about the spreading terror part, since hope for a better future is a more sustainable motivator than fear, even in good times, and people are completely feared out these days. But agreed that people need to understand there’s no room for slacking off and staying home, no matter how many headlines try to convince us of precisely that.

lazy voters who … vote dem only when shit is completely falling apart and not a second before

I’ll take them. I’ll welcome them with open arms. I’ve seen with my own eyes Orthodox Jews show up to pro-Palestinian protests en masse wielding the biggest signs and creating phalanxes to shield seated student protestors. I’ve seen obvious suburbanites show up to urban BLM protests in country club pastels to stand as meat shields in front of riot police.

There are groups in the US who stay out of politics completely as a matter of cultural or religious separatism who nevertheless observe from afar and will break their rules to emerge in times of great upheaval and bolster the ranks of those fighting injustice and oppression.

There are Americans of privilege who will accept physical, financial, and social risk on their neighbors’ behalf.

There are Americans who have very little and can’t show up to the fight without risking their livelihood, yet do so anyway.

And yes, there are the lazy, the homebodies, and agoraphobic types who nonetheless quietly turn up to do their part, even if all they can contribute is their presence.

I will always welcome them.

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Fuck Lauren Boebert. But please do it poorly. Sincerely, Everyone she’s fucked richly

Opt in. Nothing new. Behold all the super literate free thinkers in the comments.

this is such a small brained take

Well you know us “DSA types”

news takes place where people are engaging

Not all reality tho

Facebook, Xitter, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and whatever popular social media are where most people get their news

That’s great for them

it makes me angry that I need to engage with such a stupid fucking take

Clearly

Look I’m in my 30s and don’t have time for games. If Hasan can actually motivate people in their 20s to participate in something off-platform, in the real world, where elections happen, and if he’s willing to do the work to mobilize votes, then I’d say that makes him an organizer, and I’d be happy to work beside him. But until he brings in those votes, his popularity on a gaming streamer platform means less than nothing to me.

lol I literally just said I didn’t know him slick

OK so I’ll make a twitch channel dedicated to telling everyone what great friends you and I are. I’ll talk you up every chance I get. We’ll just be inseparable in the twitchy verse, you dig? I’ll become your spokesperson to all the twitches on there, and say whatever I want on your behalf because seriously, what twitcher is interested in who you actually are if you’re not even on the twitch?

Sorry for delay. Not on twitch and had to read up on this guy. He has no DSA affiliation, certainly nothing formal. He appears to be politically aligned but his wiki makes no mention of DSA and his influence appears to be primarily in online/streaming spaces rather than in traditional political organizing or offline movements.

The reason I say DSA won’t discourage you from voting is because they are a political organization with a strategy built around reform, which is impossible with single-issue purity testing.

DSA are Democrats, just progressive ones like Bernie AOC Mamdani etc. They literally run as Dems and would never discourage you from voting. Activism is a big part of their brand.

If you’re talking about the chucklefuck reactionary edgelords and ID-politic protest non-voters on Lemmy, I dont know if these have a name. Accelerationist doomers describes some. Hardline single issue voters would probably describe the rest who aren’t bots or feds.

AFAIK you don’t have to move. Candidates are not required to live in the district for which they seek office. There are tons of districts across the US with basically unchallenged status quo incumbents who could be easily replaced by progressives.

What does this have to do with DSA?

The VBNMW crowd got us to where we are.

Common opinion, but incorrect. The longterm near-complete lack of voter turnout in primary elections, especially Democratic primaries, especially outside presidential election years, and especially by all but the elderly, is by far the greatest predictor of the rightward political shift of the DNC, because it essentially abdicated agenda-setting power over which candidates end up on the ballot to DNC elites.

General election voter turnout has almost zero effect on the policies adopted by future candidates. Not voting in a general election, especially if you did not vote in the primary, is quite likely the worst possible way to communicate your preference as a voter.

If you didn’t participate in the primary, attempting to “take a stand” in the general by not voting is utterly ambiguous. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. There are any number of reasons you might have stayed home. The primary election was your chance to say why.

But let’s say you did participate in the primary, and can safely assume your reasons were recorded. It remains that, by not voting, you join the elgible-non-voter category of the population (majority of the electorate in most US elections) for an election cycle. Since those who don’t vote in one election are more likely to not vote in the next, future candidates have less incentive to consider the non-voter’s political concerns.

All to say, the general election is not the place to communicate your values, especially if you do so by not voting, and especially if you didn’t participate in the primary election. It works against you, against those you care about, against our planet, and may god have mercy on your soul QED

Fact. Not voting might succeed in teaching Dems a lesson about how important it is to vote for bills that contain pro-trans legislation and against bills that contain anti-trans legislation.

But do you want to know what not voting is far better at? Giving Republicans the power to end us.

Early election begins in two weeks. Not voting Democrat = voting to exterminate trans people. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or wants us to die.

As a trans person I beg you, do not listen to my sister, Erin. She is not thinking clearly or responsibly about what will happen to us if Democrats lose.

If you would like to protest on our behalf, please don’t do it by not voting.

A Republican victory costs the community one seat for one term

No. Republicans plan to “end” us. Letting them win costs us our very lives.

Even if that weren’t the case, we are not so selfish as to sacrifice other people, and our planet, just to prove a point.

… Or maybe he’s buying targeted ads to mobilize republican votes, aka the primary use of excess campaign funding

When the ill-served grow tired of despair

I should’ve been a plumber like Castorini

I was just calling out the defeatist children on here who like to write despair polemics for each other mocking grassroots activism, collective organizing, and any notion of reform as “liberal” naïveté, elevating instead accelerationism and “what’s really necessary.” Play dumb and they’ll proudly reveal that they mean lone-wolf vigilantism or full-on stochastic terrorism. They gravitate to negative news stories though, and rarely comment on stories like this except to explain how the progress isn’t real or how the fascists will undo it, then complain that no one will do anything about it.

But you’re right. While I am a leftist, never was a big fan of Biden, and think he made some serious blunders with consequences we’re living through now, I despise the current trend of sacrificing truth on the altar of narrative amplification. For example, a criticism I often heard repeated was that the Biden administration was sleeping on judicial appointments (like, decrying his inaction next to Trump’s aggressive judicial capture). It seemed like an easy thing to check, so I did, and it turned out the opposite was true. By the numbers, his administration was uniquely proactive and had obviously made it a priority. But because the hearsay “felt more right” to so many of us, the corrections were often buried, and I still see this “fact” shared in leftist circles to this day. This is not the way.

Huh, interesting. Not a peep in the comments from our usual doomers and edgelords. Where are all the fear boner fluffers? No smug derision of voting and political activism? Come on. “Do something.”

Edit: OK I see you BigMacHole and Diddlydee. Thank you both for your integrity.

“Holsters” lol. Always prepared.