Thank you
@StarkRG @benroyce Pleasure. And since this is getting boosted a lot, I'll repeat what I said to you before: I know hardcore anarchists - the sort who think all top-down power structures (including the state itself) should be completely dismantled, and the only real democracy is grassroots and community-led - who 👉🏼still vote👈🏼, because they recognise that however broken the current system may be, keeping the far right out of government, both locally and nationally, is still hugely important!
@StarkRG @benroyce @ApostateEnglishman I firmly believe that doing any little bit of harm reduction you have available to you, however insignificant, is worth doing. And voting is one of those things (particularly in local council elections in the UK, where turnout is around 30% but actually the ideology of the council makes a huge difference to things in people's day to day lives like road or cycle lane funding, recycling collections etc)
@StarkRG @benroyce @afewbugs Yeah. I was part of a team of 18 volunteers who dropped around 13,000 leaflets across two campaigns - an unofficial one against Reform UK, and an official one in support of the independent candidate - in the run-up to a local by-election. Sadly Reform still narrowly won, but we did manage to shave a few percentile points off their vote share.
Yet most of us think the electoral system is beyond repair. Allowing cynicism to become inaction is, as Ben says, juvenile. 🤷🏻♂️
@StarkRG @benroyce @ApostateEnglishman it's a commitment to personal purity, never sullying yourself by touching a system that's less than 100% perfect, over actually attempting to make things a bit better in the world
@afewbugs @StarkRG @ApostateEnglishman
yup
and this toxic idealism is selfish, self-serving navel gazing ineffectuality
nonvoters don't have political positions, they have psychological positions
it's a form of coping. it has nothing to do with making the world a better place
morality without action isn't morality, it's ego masturbation
also:
action is always imprecise and messy
and toxic idealists can't deal with that
so they are not moral people. they're just utterly useless whiners
Edited 20d ago
@benroyce @afewbugs @StarkRG @ApostateEnglishman It's also a great way of not having to take responsibility for any decisions you make except OOPS it's not. But I'm convinced a lot of people - on some level, maybe not top level but it's in there - think it is.