Every time I advocate for voting people are like “no you shouldn’t vote! Read this literature, it’ll totally change the way you view voting!” And every single time it’s the same fucking “you shouldn’t vote because both parties are exactly the same so it won’t make a difference who wins” bullshit wrapped up in some fancy language
“OP you need to read ‘Voting is not Harm Reduction” OP has read Voting is not Harm Reduction. It opens with the acknowledgement that for the most vulnerable people, even a tiny degree of harm reduction can mean life or death and then continues to advocate for not participating in that harm reduction lest you “participate in your own oppression”. Pardon me for not finding “vulnerable people should die for my ideology” very convincing.
“Vulnerable people should die for my ideology”
Thank you for summing up my entire issue with anti-vote people in one sentence.
An empty idealogical gesture that doesn’t make anything better, let alone even engage in harm reduction, is not leftism.
Especially if they think there’s nothing that can be done that will make a difference, so they’re just planning to make empty idealogical gestures until circumstances get bad enough that someone else gets forced to start a revolution for them because if they were going to do it instead of ranting about how useless voting is they’d have tried it already.
That’s not leftism and I will never shut up about how that’s not leftism. Because leftism is not about dying an honorable death on a hill that’s stupid.
I don’t even know what to call it. Defeatism maybe.
People who think of themselves as white knights but who are actually empty suits of armor set to crash into the people they claim to protect.