Voting is changing the Oil to keep the engine running
Voting is changing the Oil to keep the engine running
While Education and Organizing is building the parts for a new engine the rest of the year.
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Voting is changing the Oil to keep the engine running
Unfortunately, its the Torment Engine from the Sci Fi classic novel "Don't Build The Torment Engine", and its slowly crawling across the country sucking people up into its maw and eviscerating them.
But hey, someone's got to change the oil on this thing, and it keeps you from being on the business end (most of the time). Better keep our national Roko's Basilisk running smoothly, lest it turn its gaze upon thee.
The issue is that way more people will be eviscerated if we let trump regain power. It will harm our most vulnerable demographics. Refugees, pregnant people, trans people, all will suffer exponentially more if we don't vote.
You have a faction in American politics that gleefully eggs on the evisceration and a faction that's horrified by it.
Then you've got a Presidential candidate that screams at the top of his lungs how he's going to turn that evisceration engine on his domestic opponents. And you've got another candidate who just kinda shrugs and says "Let's aim the evisceration engine at those brown foreigners, so it won't bother us over here."
At some point, "We have to do war crimes abroad so they don't come back home" just isn't a motivating force. I think there's a certain masochism within the liberal voter base that's almost eager to see Trump bring the empire back into the core. A kind-of death drive that concedes we've failed to deliver on a promise of a better country and now we just need to let the forces we've unleashed destroy ourselves.
Refugees, pregnant people, trans people, all will suffer exponentially more if we don’t vote.
They'll suffer regardless of whether we vote. The only question is whether these people will be in our immediate line of view or if they'll be buried half a world away.
People will suffer more abroad under trump as well. It's not even close to equal.
Obviously voting isn't enough, there's a lot we need to fix that can't be addressed by ballot, but allowing another trump presidency will make life unimaginably harder for millions of people.
I'm not sitting passively by; I have been organizing direct action groups to protect Planned Parenthood from intimidation, volunteering to protect forests and streams from being demolished, participating in climate justice groups. All of those efforts became radically more difficult under the trump administration; anti-abortion groups were emboldened, environmental protections were rolled back, and protected public lands were given to fossil fuel companies.
Do you think for a moment trump would be less bullish on helping Israel? The motherfucker moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he assassinated Soleimani, he extorted Ukraine; it would be more suffering all over.
People will suffer more abroad under trump as well.
They'll suffer more abroad under whichever President comes next. The ratchet only turns one way.
I’m not sitting passively by; I have been organizing direct action groups to protect Planned Parenthood from intimidation
From the police? I mean, good luck.
Do you think for a moment trump would be less bullish on helping Israel?
Joe Biden has demonstrated a zealous support for the Israeli state that pales beside any President before him. Even Reagan knew enough to tell the Israelis to back off of Lebanon.
When the Biden Administration has actively encouraged the sitting Israeli government to exterminate a full percentage point of the Gazan population inside a few months, the problem isn't in what Trump could do but what the current Democratic Administration cannot. Biden's refusal to halt the bombings and killings means he's absolutely unacceptable as President.
In the same vein, his refusal to close down Gitmo, his refusal to end the violence at the border, his refusal to intercede with the DOJ and protect women seeking legal abortions in red state, and his general inability to contest his Republican rivals in anything more than rhetorical jabs means he's setting the party as a whole up for failure.
This is absolutely beyond me. I don't get to decide if Biden gets a second term. First Term Biden is doing that. He's destroying his own ability to rally voters and ceding policy to the oppostion without a fight. He's ceding democracy without a fight.
The asshole couldn't even get DC statehood over the line. TWICE, now, despite Congressional majorities in both '09 and '21. Those votes in the House, the Senate, and the EC probably would have helped him out.