is it really so wrong for me not to vote?

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
I'm a life time non-voter, but I also campaigned against voting, and was an activist in a general sense, which seemed lot more productive than ticking a box for some fucker who wouldn't represent me or my beliefs.

That said, I'd probably vote now (if I was allowed to vote here) as my principles are all well and good but they're not doing people who are actually disavangtaged much good. The National Party got kicked out in NZ, and people's lives actually DID get better. Not much better, but sometimes you have to cope with a little better.

So vote for some scum bag and be glad if a small bit of change comes from it.
 

version

Well-known member
I've been thinking about this recently. I usually vote, but haven't since the pandemic due to not being arsed enough to risk getting ill and I've become so disillusioned with politics altogether I've considered not bothering for the foreseeable future, but this Owen Paterson business has reminded me I never really voted out of enthusiasm for anyone anyway, it was always an anti-Tory vote and I dislike them now perhaps more than ever.
 

Leo

Well-known member
When you are fed up with politicians is the most important time to vote. Things might not immediately change or improve if do, but they absolutely won't if you don't vote. We've had local elections here where someone has literally won by a handful of votes, so you never know. Of course, sometimes the choice is between the lesser of two evils, which sucks.
 

sus

Well-known member
The ethical thing to do is convince everyone else to vote on social media etc, to spread memes and kickstart feedback loops of social approval and guilt

(But not vote yourself because it's irrational; no important election has ever been decided by a single or even single digit votes)
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Im almost positive everyone who posted 'I know you may not like the candidate but its still important to...' after biden got the nod did so with a plastic bag around their head and their hands down their pants
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
where do you vote in europe? here its usually an elementary school or the cities dingiest municipal building
 
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Leo

Well-known member
All you disaffected young pantywaists need to live under an iron-fisted authoritarian or face a real threat to your democratic freedoms, THEN you'll cherish your right to vote! Soldiers died in battle to defend your right to free and fair elections, quit whining and do your duty!
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
When you are fed up with politicians is the most important time to vote. Things might not immediately change or improve if do, but they absolutely won't if you don't vote. We've had local elections here where someone has literally won by a handful of votes, so you never know. Of course, sometimes the choice is between the lesser of two evils, which sucks.

Hm I don't agree. I think the lesser evil is a post-hoc justification and not very rational. I.E: it's always a gut feeling, something that cannot be falsified because its unqualifiable. In fact this is where I butted heads with b*x*dj*y who claimed that not voting was a position of privilege - strange given that it was labour with the benefits integrity project of 98-99 who laid the bedrock for workfare - a good thousand deaths of the disabled and all. If anything, the problem with the lesser evil approach is precisely that it is not political, that it affixes moral characteristics to the fortitude of politicians, and in this respect one has to at least applaud the later Soviet approach, because whilst they could not escape the economic contradictions of transition to a capitalist society (so they could never deliver what they promised) the personal conduct of politicians was largely irrelevant, a dutiful party bureaucrat or else. But history is always the vengeful mistress who levels down as the great equaliser.

Anyway, here's uncle Freddie Fresh spittin' some street knowledge in 1891

What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society, as can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally also in the democratic republic. Nowhere do "politicians" form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.
It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends -- and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.

 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
All you disaffected young pantywaists need to live under an iron-fisted authoritarian or face a real threat to your democratic freedoms, THEN you'll cherish your right to vote! Soldiers died in battle to defend your right to free and fair elections, quit whining and do your duty!

tbf, turkey is an authoritarian democracy.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I've been thinking about this recently. I usually vote, but haven't since the pandemic due to not being arsed enough to risk getting ill and I've become so disillusioned with politics altogether I've considered not bothering for the foreseeable future, but this Owen Paterson business has reminded me I never really voted out of enthusiasm for anyone anyway, it was always an anti-Tory vote and I dislike them now perhaps more than ever.

Well this is it. How anti-tory can you really be if you are solely involved in politics to combat them? It's one of the most disgraceful plagues of British society - not because being anti-tory is wrong, but it plays into their culture war nonsense. The tories were well aware that by going down hard on the left of labour before 2019 they could embolden the right of the lp, and thereby ensure that the left could remain as a meager opposition. In this sense I do wish Corbyn had won sorry @DannyL but only to disabuse many anti-tories of their illusions. Then they would see that running a state machine is tough business and not based on the whims of a few moralists with self-indulgent, slapdash theoretical habits.
 

version

Well-known member
Then they would see that running a state machine is tough business and not based on the whims of a few moralists with self-indulgent, slapdash theoretical habits.
This is an interesting point. There's definitely an assumption among some that if Labour got in and just weren't as corrupt as the Tories then everything would run smoothly.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
As far as I know there aren’t any public sector applications of this tech yet, although there are some proto-union applications in the works, such as PubDAO for journalists.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
This is an interesting point. There's definitely an assumption among some that if Labour got in and just weren't as corrupt as the Tories then everything would run smoothly.

But the cause isn’t to be found in the existence of the capitalist, or indeed of the capitalist class, for these are not only just effects, but unnecessary effects at that. “Whereas, on the basis of capitalist production, the mass of direct producers is confronted by the social character of their production in the form of strictly regulating authority and a social mechanism of the labour-process organised as a complete hierarchy (i.e. bureaucratic!) – this authority reaching its bearers, however, only as the personification of the conditions of labour in contrast to labour, and not as political or theocratic leaders as under earlier modes of production – among the bearers of this authority, the capitalists themselves, there reigns the most complete anarchy within which the social interrelations of production assert themselves only as an overwhelming natural law in relation to individual free will”.

Keeping to the formidable invariance of the original text is therefore all that is required to link the would-be ’updaters’ to that murky, and most slipshod of bourgeois prejudices, which seeks to blame every social inferiority either on the “individual will”, or, at most, the collective “responsibility of a social class”. Whereas it was entirely clear from then on, whether it was the individual capitalist or the capitalist class which might here and there cease to be the “personification” of capital, that capital itself would continue facing us, confronting us, as a “social mechanism”, as an “overwhelming natural law” of the production process.

Biggie Smalls - The false Resource of Activism.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Hm I don't agree. I think the lesser evil is a post-hoc justification and not very rational. I.E: it's always a gut feeling, something that cannot be falsified because its unqualifiable. In fact this is where I butted heads with b*x*dj*y who claimed that not voting was a position of privilege - strange given that it was labour with the benefits integrity project of 98-99 who laid the bedrock for workfare - a good thousand deaths of the disabled and all. If anything, the problem with the lesser evil approach is precisely that it is not political, that it affixes moral characteristics to the fortitude of politicians, and in this respect one has to at least applaud the later Soviet approach, because whilst they could not escape the economic contradictions of transition to a capitalist society (so they could never deliver what they promised) the personal conduct of politicians was largely irrelevant, a dutiful party bureaucrat or else. But history is always the vengeful mistress who levels down as the great equaliser.

Anyway, here's uncle Freddie Fresh spittin' some street knowledge in 1891




you're over thinking it. lesser of two evils is simply that neither candidate is in line with your beliefs and desires, but one of them is not quite as misaligned as the other. one candidate holding four positions I disagree with versus an opponent who holds just one or two I disagree with. I still dislike the latter, but I dislike the former more. and for lack of a better third choice, I hold my nose and vote for the latter.

the question is whether that results in a potential better outcome than not voting at all, since neither candidate is someone you can full get behind. Some people will feel a bird in the hand, etc.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
and are people unoppressed, with all inherent freedoms and fair elections? just asking, you know better than i.

There are elections. They are balanced out, oppressed, and there are paper thin freedoms. That's my point though. It's not as if Erdogan gets above 40% of the total national vote, yet he still rules with an iron fist. The mandates of majority can always be redefined ad nauseam. I wish I could remember the term that was used to describe turkeys type of system. Cos it's not liberal democracy in the way the West would define it, but it's not like the soviet systems either. One could say a logical culmination of all of liberal democracies unsavory elements.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
can't find the precise neologism, but this passage from cihan tuğal's fall of Turkish model hints at exactly what I'm getting at. The AKP approach is procedurally democratic, insofar as it references the imutability of democratic processes, in a mechanical way. But in that regard it is not democracy as ideology.

Some analysts perceived demilitarization and the government's position on the Kurds as proofs of its allegiance to democracy. Since the AKP was able to marginalize the military -- which had come to constitute the root of all evil in this new, liberal, revisionist and quite simplistic interpretation of Turkish history -- its 'minor' infringements on rights could be forgiven. But even here the outcome was mixed. During the course of the 'Ergenekon' trials, the pro-government prosecutors and journalists courageously attacked some murderous groups within the state. A network called Ergenekon (after a Central Asian--Turkic legend) had been allegedly assassinating minorities and fomenting violence. However, a number of opposition figures (at best) loosely or ideologically connected to these murderous groups were also imprisoned. Moreover, any opposition to the government after that point was labelled publicly as 'pro-Ergenekon' without any proof (such as a major strike in 2010 by Tekel workers who had lost their rights as a result of privatization). On the one hand, ethnically oppressive laws were rescinded. On the other hand, the courts and security forces ratcheted up the pressure against legal Kurdish parties and associations, alleging that they had ties to the illegal guerrilla organization, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, or PKK). Even children were put on trial for participating in demonstrations organized by legal Kurdish parties. While secular and religious liberals celebrated the Ergenekon and Kurdish processes, critics (Kemalists, secular-nationalist Kurds, and socialists, who were all losing support to an endlessly expanding pro-AKP liberal intelligentsia in the 2000s) raised the suspicion that the AKP was democratic only to the extent that doing so benefited the party and its bloc.

During the late 2000s, not only Islamists but also many liberals and Marxists were absorbed into the AKP's conservative agenda. Partly based on the social science of the last three decades (the common argument of which tended to be that pious people represent the 'periphery' and 'civil society' in opposition to the centre and the authoritarian state tradition), partly motivated by the European and American search for a 'moderate Islam', these liberals and leftists joined forces with the ex-Islamists to fight the bureaucracy, Kemalist intelligentsia and the intensifying labour, environmental and youth activism -- all of which they now perceived as one bloc against democracy. Another hope was that the AKP would resolve the Kurdish issue through its mix of Islamic conservatism and democracy.

Not surprisingly, therefore, many Turkish and Western liberals and leftists were mobilized to help pass constitutional amendments that would increase the scope of the executive's powers through curbing the powers of the judiciary (which remained, quite mistakenly, perceived as a secularist stronghold) and the military. After a successful referendum in 2010, the 1980 constitution was indeed amended. Instead of curbing military excesses, however, the government ratcheted up military pressure on the Kurdish national movement (and to the dismay of only a few of the leftists in its coalition) police pressure on labour and other Turkish activism. The AKP also received carte blanche from these forces in its pre- and post-referendum cleansing of the media from 'anti-democratic' (read anti-AKP) elements. In sum, what marked AKP success was not deploying authoritarianism (as all neoliberal parties since 1980 have done), but dressing it in 'democratic' and 'Islamic' garb. Liberalism, like any other project, needs to repress some of its enemies; its relative success lies in its more persistent blending of such repression with fluctuating inclusiveness.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Mansoor Hekmat (iranian marxist-ish person) also observed this in the 1990s.

In the political arena, however, democracy as such, democracy sans phrase, does not tell us much and provides no tool to distinguish between various social trends and movements. That is why the term acquires a clearer meaning only after adjectives have been added to it; so you have liberal democracy, populist democracy, parliamentary or representative democracy, direct democracy, Western democracy and so on. These terms are politically understandable and definable, and their differences, and often their contradictions, can be explained. The movements and forces behind each one can also be defined and in many cases distinguished from one another.

The meaning of democracy is the primacy of the people’s or the majority’s decision. For the moment we shall not concern ourselves with whether this proposition is true or false in the real world. Any decision taken by the majority of the people in the course of a democratic process, such as through their representatives in the parliament, is, from the point of view of democracy, legitimate. Liberalism, however, holds some a priori political and civil values, which it declares to be the inalienable natural or civil rights of all humanity. In other words, from the standpoint of liberalism, the freedom of action of democracy, and that of the people’s rule, should be controlled or limited. According to this school of thought, a democratic decision that revokes or violates the natural rights postulated by liberalism lacks legitimacy and credibility. It is not the function of liberalism to form the content of the democratic government but to act as its controlling and limiting condition. The content of liberalism is the definition of the rights of the individual and their protection against the ruler, the government, or, in a sense, the ‘society’. Liberalism welcomes parliamentary, or, at any rate, elective government, because it assumes that, as John Stuart Mill believed, the government ‘of the people’ does not encroach on people’s civil rights. Liberalism holds these rights to be principal and the form of government secondary. This liberal assumption, however, both in theory and in reality, is not entirely reliable, and the dual character of the system leads to internal eclecticism and contradictions within the theory of liberal democracy itself which cause significant political conflicts in the course the movement of liberal democracies.

 
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