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To those in countries where democracy might last another election - harm reduction is not optional
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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If "harm" and "less harm" are the only two options, then the only question is how quickly you die. There's the argument that we have to do "harm reduction" in order to buy time to organize for something better, but we've been procrastinating for decades apparently. Since all of history informs us that humans act only when inaction is no longer tenable (and sometimes not even then), really the only material difference between "harm reduction" and accelerationism is, again, the timeline.
The harm or less harm are thanks to Ordinal voting.
First Past the Post is the absolute worst offender, but every single Ordinal voting system will eventually devolve into a forced choice between this or that.
Thankfully there are Cardinal voting systems. Those always boil down to the word and. For example, I can say that I support getting ice cream, and sandwiches, and a slushy, and even just finishing the route, but not going over that cliff.
My support for any given item is counted independently of my support for any other option.
To see what option wins, you just look at total support.
Different Cardinal systems have their own little quirks, but the key in all of them is that ability to give multiple items identical levels of support.
You're absolutely right, as a wise leftist in the vein of this thinking recently said, we're all going to die anyway, so what's the point?
That's not even remotely the same vein of thinking, even though both Ernst and I used the word "die."
It's not? The argument in both is that increasing harm doesn't matter because everyone dies in the end, and the timeframe wherein people die thus shouldn't matter to decision-making. Would you like to explain how that's not the same vein of thinking?
I'm having trouble believing that this is a good-faith comment, as the strawman bears so little resemblance to what I wrote. The vein of thinking is that reduced-harm is still harm—maybe Harm Lite—and that we can only sustain any level of harm for so long before it's fatal. Without the metaphor: The harm-reduction argument of "vote blue no matter who" is utterly stupid, because it only works if "blue" wins every election forevermore. That's highly unrealistic. The fascists were never just going to go away; they took over one of the only two viable political parties and were going to win an election sooner or later because U.S. elections routinely swing back and forth between the only two viable political parties.
Furthermore, the accelerationist concept is to shock the people into action with the contrast of how bad things got so quickly, while the harm-reduction concept seems to entail letting some people non-figuratively die along the way, as Sen. Ernst applauds, as long as it's fewer people than it could have been. (No, I don't think that the harm-reduction proponents want that, I'm just observing what appears to be the real-world implementation.) Personally, I have hoped against hope that we could change course, and fix the only-two-viable-political-parties problem before things got bad, before any metaphorical or non-figurative dying.