Yesterday, I was dialoging on here with all you smart fuckers and I typed something that really made a bunch of stuff click.
I've been recently talking about IMAPOL (Inversion of the Meaning And Purpose Of Language) and how it's feels like a core feature of our current cultural era, and this is related.
We all know the term "accelerationist". It's been used ad infinitum to invalidate and shut down people who think the only path out of whatever this is is a brutal correction.
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It's widely misused, too, to shut-down people who vote third party or don't participate in our captured electoral system because of its moral, ethical, and practical brokenness.
Adjudicated in the center and the left, the consensus is that accelerationists don't know what they're talking about and can be safely ignored or beaten about the head and neck.
But I don't think any of those people are the real accelerationists. At least if you take the term and its meaning literally.
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I've got an axe to grind with "lesser evil" voters, in large part because they always seem to be behind lot's of fucking evil shit that all-too-often fucks up my life. Supposedly it's "less evil" than the fucking evil shit that will fuck up my life under the other evil people (who are more evil, I guess?)
I also think the idea that voting for a political party you disagree with and giving them power for the purpose of convincing them to change is...dumb as rocks. Straight-up stupid.
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But my biggest complaint is that I don't think their strategy is an effective way to prevent what they call "greater evil" from achieving their very very evil goals, regardless of whether their "lesser evil" party wins elections/power or not.
It turns out, I was wrong.
Not only is it not a good strategy, it's the actual, real accelerationism that we've been criticizing all these "radicals" for for so long.
That's right: lesser evil voters are the accelerationists.
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The only truly consistent part of the modern era of US politics is the march of evil toward supremacy. Every time more and more people "do the responsible thing" and vote for something they think is "less evil", the greater evil advances farther and farther toward complete control.
As we've seen, every decade their advance gets faster, more confident, and less contained. It accelerates.
But that's not because the "lesser evil" political force hasn't been winning bc of "lesser evil" voters.
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I guess I'm saying that what always irked me about these voters is that I could see, transparently, that their ideas of harm reduction were creating more harm in the mid- and long-term. I could see that their devotion to voting Blue No Matter Who was driving the center of power in that party far to the right, and the incrementalism they were rewarding was being easily countered and erased by the seething fascist right wing. The quisling attitudes they were rewarding proliferated.
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It all seemed to be...accelerating toward the end the "lesser evil" people were ostensibly trying to avoid, in large part because of their strategy of rewarding bad faith Democrats with more power, regardless of their behavior or efficacy.
The real accelerationists are the "lesser evil" voters who, in their urge to appear "mature" and "responsible" to their peers, voted against their values for people incapable or uninterested in slowing down the slouching beast.
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I think like most things, we let this shit go on for way too long, and now the "correction" - that we're living through right now - is going to be really fucking rough, if not existentially dangerous. The harm to people is going to be overwhelmingly bad.
But I don't think it would have been if we'd done it earlier.
A lesson the universe has been trying to teach us is that if you "lesser evil" shit for too long, the price of correction gets higher and higher. (Think: climate change).
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@johnzajac I certainly share your disgust with the Democratic party, but I just don't know what to do in this situation. Abstaining is enabling fascism, voting Democrat is enabling fasicsm, voting for a nonserous stunt candidate like Stein or West is enabling fascism...
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@bhalpin
The point of the thread is that politicians understand only the path to power, not the amorphous ideas of "harm reduction" that animates the "lesser evil" voting strategy. IF that path is not blocked by anything, they will simply degenerate into corruption and fascism.
The real solution was always to exile Democrats until they became greater good, while building local power. The right understood this, and did it until their politicians aligned. Which is why they've won, for now.
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@johnzajac
I tend to judge people more for what they believe in. The choice between voting what you believe (even if you know it will be a "lost" vote) and voting strategically can be a tough one, especially in a country with a de-facto two party system. So I don't judge people for how they decide between those two options.
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