Political Memes

And you, what culpabilty do you accept? (I’ve tried to word this civilly, it just doesn’t read as anything other than hostile, it isn’t meant as such, take the following as the bad orator that I am). Someone deriding purity politics wouldn’t suggest they’re pure in the situation. (Again, not intending to be a dick… I just can’t figure out a better way, seems like something to put into an llm and get it reworded… I dunno)

No worries, no offense taken. Like I said - I definitely hold that I made the least bad decision I could, but also that making that decision also saddles me with blame for effectively every cruelty Harris would have perpetuated. If Harris was elected, I would have had to have owned up to some amount of responsibility for all of her ghoulist, centrist, bootlicking actions and inaction. That would weigh heavier on me, except that Trump had the unique quality of being worse in literally every way - something I would not have said even as recently as 2012, despite Romney being a vulture capitalist neotheocratic ghoul.

If given a choice between breaking a man's fingers, or breaking all of his fingers - with abstaining being accepting whatever the group decides - it would be immoral of me to abstain or opt to break all of his fingers, just like it would be immoral of me to ignore that the decision itself is deeply fucked, and just like it would be ridiculous for me to claim no responsibility once his finger was broken.

I voted for Biden in 2020. I am responsible, in some small way, for all the fucked things that Biden did and perpetuated, including his support of Israel and its genocide. I don't get to absolve myself of that just because it was the "least bad choice" - it WAS the least bad choice, and I don't think voting for Biden was morally optional - but it also doesn't fucking absolve me from my support, however strategic it may have been. When the US supported the Soviet Union, which was committing its own set of genocides, massacres, and imperialism, in WW2, we bear responsibility for that - but it was also the right decision, or at least the least bad one, since the alternative was letting the literal fucking Nazis win.

We all collect guilt by our actions, and most actions bear some amount of responsibility for shitty things, at least on the societal scale. The two things we must do is pick the least bad, and accept responsibility for what we have chosen - or accept responsibility for our inaction.

I’m suggesting the culpabilty you accept (I suggested at the time and now) was getting angry at the vegans, constantly hate posting against them instead of pushing leadership to plan with, for, or around them. In effect, I’m pointing out you punched down, not up. The vegans have less power than the animal rights group leaders, if you can’t make the leaders close the puppy farms, at least make them stop supporting puppy farms.

Okay, but this runs into several issues.

First, this presumes that I have sway with the leadership - leadership is a smaller group to convince, but very often also, because of that, a more restricted group to convince. If I send a meme to Pelosi, do you think it will get through to her?

Second, the leadership may not share the same values I do. I might agree with the more radical view of the vegans, but the leadership might not care except insofar as it helps them fundraise and raise their own profiles. With that in mind, what will me arguing with the leadership result in? We operate from different axioms, different values. The vegans, supposedly, share some of my values - the leadership, it's less likely. To route this back to the actual situation, the ghouls in the DNC who fucking caused this are not going to be convinced of the sudden quality of leftism by argument - the only thing they understand is benefit to themselves and their allies. And that means rally voters to operate strategically either to show them that left policy has significant support or overthrowing them entirely - in both cases, primaries, and then leading progressive primary candidates to success in the general - being the most 'conventional' form of both routes of action.

In both cases, abstaining from voting in a country where a third of the electorate regularly abstains from voting anyone, and on a wide variety of issues and reasons sends no message of worth to the leadership. "Please stop supporting puppy farms" is the line many of us progressives peddled to the DNC, and what we got was Harris taking an ambiguous, rather than openly pro-Zionist, line on Israel-Palestine. And for that... she was punished by the electorate in favor of the pro-Zionist candidate. When we go knocking to the leadership again, asking "Please be less ghoulish", do you think they'll listen again with that electoral lesson having been handed out? Not without serious changes in Dem leadership and the actions and expressed opinions OF THE ELECTORATE ITSELF, the people I'm talking to

This is why while I regard third party voters as similarly culpable to protest nonvoters, but less dumb - if they had actually rallied any significant numbers to third parties, we'd still be suffering under a fucking fascist regime, but at least it would show serious political opposition to the ongoing state of things. As it stands, they managed jack fucking shit - even less success than in the 2016, when things were less certain and dire.

Third, getting the leadership to plan around radical leftists is the last thing I fucking want, man. They already try to ignore leftists as much as possible. I want leftists to be acknowledged, and while that requires bullying the fuckwits in the DNC, it also requires leftists taking serious and STRATEGIC action to show their strength.

Fourth, part of this is that I don't want this comm, where I hang out, to be a place for people to peddle that kind of Nazi-enabling shite. We can't always change the world, but sometimes we can change our communities, in small ways. I doubt any member of the DNC is on here, but there are a nonzero number of American voters.

You can’t force voters to take blame for something they don’t want to (look what a bear of a time I’m having with you). Certainly not with memes. It takes an involved, and I hope like this one, empathetic conversation to do that. That’s just people… They don’t play the ultimatum game the way the game theorists said they should, that’s just people. some people have hard lines and genocide isn’t an unreasonable one, that’s just people.

At the same time, you're looking at this as a matter of individual persuasion, where I'm making the argument explicitly from the point of view of cultural norms. Establishing that is it normal, or even, as many in this very thread have argued, laudable to abstain from voting on purity politics terms, even in the face of literal fucking Nazis, encourages people to do so or accepting the thought as natural and normal; establishing the opposite, that it is unacceptable, discourages people in the community from doing so or accepting the thought as natural or normal.

It's not about giving someone an epiphany. It's about creating community cultures that reject the normalization of these things - just like creating community cultures that reject racism being important to reducing racism, even if few, if any, outright racists will ever be convinced.