Problem is, voting is none of those things because it is totally ineffectual. It doesn't enact any meaningful change. It takes time and energy away from effort better spent organising.
Voting isn't leaving the house and getting exercise, it's ordering a diet coke along with 20 burgers and expecting to improve your health.
it's ordering a diet coke along with 20 burgers and expecting to improve your health.
the other guy would make you order a normal coke with 20 burgers, so you gotta vote blue jack
Those burgers didn't just fall out of a coconut tree! They exist within the context of all that came before.
Problem is, voting is none of those things because it is totally ineffectual.
It's worse than that: voting for the dems acts against meaningful change: no one votes for 3rd options, so 3rd options never develop any potential, so no one votes for 3rd options. So they queue up to kiss either cheek of the same ass and say there was nothing they could do.
Voting 3rd party or not voting are far, far better than this stubborn nonsense.
I'll always drop the exception that it's potentially worth voting in local politics, particularly in small remote communities. These vary in frequency and often don't always overlap the major elections and are largely ignored.
City and county positions can have a real tangible impact on your daily life and the amount of votes to swing these elections can be really small in a lot of America. It's still an uphill battle against landlords and small business tyrants, but it's something real local organizing can overcome.
I think the fact that you can actually organize voting at that level is often overlooked when talking about local elections.
The load-bearing word is organize. With that alone you can accomplish great things.
Also keeping QAnon freaks off of the local school board.
Voting itself isn’t much of a time/energy sink, it’s like 30 minutes every couple years, but yeah burning organizational time/energy to run a low profile, lost cause third party or primary campaign is typically less useful than labor organizing, tenant organizing, etc.
Stepping back, this is depressing as hell. Like what do these posters think people did for decades? Where did that all lead us? Right to fucking Trump.
Every single one of these posters needs to
, 
, and start fucking doorknocking! I've said it before and I'll say it again; half of the voting population does not vote. Get your ass off the computer and start pounding doors!Even at my peak annoyance I still sympathize with these people. The Democrats haven't done any organizing since the 80s after shifting entirely to polls. The DNC have no platform to defend when confronted with actual people having actual problems. All of these posts are, in as many words, a cry of helplessness.
Like what do these posters think people did for decades? Where did that all lead us? Right to fucking Trump.
I think liberals like these people do genuinely believe in some kind of divine intervention/perversion of reality/magical curses, rather than a series of cause-and-effect chains that lead towards bad outcomes.
On the right wing, you have the "our memes and pepes got Trump in office! we did that!" which is bizarre and self-important and delusional but does at least acknowledge that there was a cause and effect. whereas liberals look at 2016 and go "Well, look. In 1981, Reagan cast a magical curse on America that made things worse and worse every year. And then we got to Obama and the curse broke, but then Trump cast the curse again in 2016, rolled a nat20 on a persuasion check for convincing the Republicans to be freaking fascists, and now we're screwed again. Maybe if we elect Harris, the curse will be lifted again." There is no inkling that somehow Obama could have led to Trump. Or that trying to elect Hillary Clinton, with one of the most uninspiring political platforms in human history, could have led to Trump. That electing feckless and useless Democrats for the sake of "lesser-evilism" could, perhaps, actually be the cause of Republicans gaining power later and doing awful shit. If Trump is polling better than Biden, then perhaps instead of blaming X or Y group and insisting that they just aren't paying attention to all the great things that Biden is done, you need to sit down and accept reality and go "Huh. Fuck. Maybe Biden does fucking suck, actually. Maybe electing Joe "nothing will fundamentally change" Biden in 2020 might in fact have created the material conditions for Trump's return to power. Hm. Shit."
Whereas a person with political curiosity and a willingness to learn in 2017 might be like "Hm, this is bad. Trump is president and he sucks. I think we need to take a hard look at how we got here. Let's do some reading and... oh, huh! It seems like Lesser Evilism has been a long-running current throughout modern American electoral politics and has lead to the shitty outcome we just saw, because voting for a bad candidate instead of aiming for societal change against the system itself has never actually fixed anything and is a mere can-kicking exercise! We need an alternative theory of how to do politics that will benefit minorities." One might even become increasingly internationalist and understand how the US fits into global geopolitics.
But no; as western "leftists" like on tumblr are alienated little treatfiends, they can only conceive of individualistic solutions. In their own words: you either vote, or you firebomb supermarkets. They cannot even imagine the creation of alternative political structures with other people, they are so deep in the mire. As you say, they can't even imagine going out door-knocking for Biden and now Harris as part of an organization.
voting extends life
voting expands consciousness
voting is vital to space travelVoting is washing your dirty ass
Voting is popping a festering, infected boil on your inner thigh
Voting is blowing your nose into your hand and then looking around before discreetly wiping it on a wall and then walking away
mark fisher come pick me up they're pathologizing political dissatisfaction
They would be bald-ass stealing a Rick-n-Morty quote to make this useless point too, natch.
If I have serious health issues that require at minimum significant diet changes and exercise, drinking more water is not really different from doing nothing
You know what? I wasn’t going to vote, but after reading these Tumblr posts I have finally decided to try it in November. Give me a few hours and I’ll upload my voter registration ID here as proof.
Voting is like taking 10 ibuprofen pills a day to dull the pain until you develop a stomach ulcer and begin to vomit blood.
