
they made me in a lab & probably regret that || art @androgyne
Voting for a presidential candidate has nothing to do with upholding so-called western democracy, and playing by its rules is not the same thing as supporting it. Voting right now is a means to minimize suffering and give us time to organize for an eventual revolution that will hopefully benefit many more people than any US president would. Voting is just a stopgap to make sure that everyone who isn’t white and cis doesn’t have their rights to their bodies taken away, get deported, or put in camps (the idea that voting for one candidate or another is “pain relocation” is a complete false equivalence). I do agree that financially supporting a presidential candidate through donations or going to their rallies or whatever is three steps two far and at that point is supporting the terrible ideas a candidate like Harris stands for, though. That said, not voting for Harris more than anything means that the lives of women, queer people and people of color in the US are necessary sacrifices for voters to make a point. And then Trump wins and both those groups AND Palestinians are on the chopping block and no one wins. The solution to the US government supporting the ongoing genocide of an entire people is not to let a president that will start three more genocides into office. It’s like the trolley problem but if you don’t move tracks everyone on both tracks gets run over anyways.
deportation has literally gotten worse under Biden, who very recently passed legislature that has rendered asylum practically nonexistent, so i dont think this is true
And it’ll get even worse under Trump, who himself claims time and time again as one of his major campaign promises that he’ll perform the largest deportation operation in US history. Things suck and are terrible now but they’ll get so much worse in every way otherwise.
okay but your claim that "Voting is just a stopgap to make sure that everyone who isn’t white and cis doesn’t have their rights to their bodies taken away, get deported, or put in camps" is inherently false regardless so idc
It’s not a black-and-white situation. Any president is going to cause suffering to marginalized populations because the US is a hellscape, but you can’t pretend that Trump won’t cause much more suffering. Swearing voting off entirely because they’ll both cause some degree of suffering is like the people who are confronted with a moral thought experiment like the trolley problem and just refuse to answer the question because they don’t like either answer. It sucks that American politics are like this and that we only have an illusion of democracy upheld through corruption but it’s still in everyone’s best interest to vote however will cause the LEAST harm, even if that choice still causes a lot of harm.
im not validating settlerism publicly and that has been true p much my whole adult life. i think publicly encouraging voting and playing along with this fake system is not real politics and hurts the victims of the american state when they see americans do this
yr not gunna change my mind and im not interested in changing yours. we are not from the same political framework and are not capable of having a meaningful conversation with each other. i have never voted in a national election and that will continue to be the case; Palestine has solidified this for me
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but in practice there’s just too much at stake. Your perspective is valid and I understand where you’re coming from. You’re right that no one’s convincing anything else, so I’ll end it off there.