this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
935 points (87.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
29233 readers
493 users here now
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.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Posts must be original/unique
- Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Holy shit, you are, okay. A protest vote, as the name suggests, protests the current system by showing that we would rather take time out of our day to show up to the polls and "throw away" our votes than to participate and be complicit in the current, forced 2-party system, where they both put forward absolute fucking rat-shit candidates, year after year after year.
Like, should I show my support for the fucking pathologically-lying felonious authoritarian sex abuser with the vocabulary of a 3rd-grader? Or the former DA who did what DAs do in the early '00s, and obscured exculpatory evidence so she could send people to live out the rest of their lives in a fucking prison in order to further her career (AKA a fucking psychopath), and whose main qualification is being a half-black female?
Now you may not like that, especially if you oppose voter reform, but don't be disingenuous by pretending to not understand how it works.
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.
I really don't know how to explain this further and at this point your questions feel very disingenuous.
It's not invisible to the people who need to see it.
Why would you assume that, other than that it's just what you want to believe? Do you also assume this about people who vote for Kamala and Trump?