Do the eligible voters in the US who didn't vote for Kamala Harris realize how much they fucked up?
in reply to Maggie Maybe

@maggiejk I've yet to encounter an anarchist whose ideas can actually work in the world in which I've lived for 66 years.

I love the idealism, but in my experience people are not naturally so ready and willing to share with everyone, everywhere, all the time, rather than to hoard and grab, as the underlying philosophy seems to require.

Good luck to them though 👍🏿🤷🏿‍♂️

in reply to Alice McFlurry

I know a number of people who justify it because they don't live in swing states so their vote didn't matter (some were furious over the genocide in Gaza even though Trump wants a much more thorough eradication of Gaza residents so he can build a resort). There were quite a few of these in California. Had those folks voted for Harris, she still would have lost the electoral college but might well have won the popular vote.
in reply to Joe ❌👑

@not2b those people are victims of propaganda though, and I’m not saying that to excuse them. I’m just saying that they’ve been fed that line forever.

My brother was very republican and I remember 20 years ago him trying to convince me that there’s no point in me voting because we didn’t live in a swing state. So I asked him why he would be voting then, he just changed the subject. Of course I went to vote, Then some stupid hanging Chad gave it to Bush. That was made me mad enough that I continued to vote from then on.

in reply to Alice McFlurry

In such cases it is generally the candidates who fucked up. This is no exception. (Mitigating circumstances as she picked up the pieces from an imploded campaign, but she made her own mistakes.)

When your strategy fails on that many million people, your strategy has failed.

Campaigning would be much easier if the candidates could choose the electorate. To some extent, that works for the Republicans, but it's not an ideal strategy.

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Mastodon Migration

@nazokiyoubinbou
Yes, history is replete with influence operations targeted at getting people to act in ways contrary to their best interest. But also in examples of people seeing through the manipulations and pushing back, sometimes very hard. Hopefully, things like yesterday will contribute to the growing awareness that we have been victims of a sophisticated psy-ops campaign.
@Nazo
in reply to Alice McFlurry

the bubble is big. Musk owns twitter & has his thumb on that algorithm. Zuck & the bad faith GOP meta employs have their thumbs on the scale for GOP. Bezos & Patrick MD are moving their papers into the right wing sphere. The NYT is mostly made for people that might helicopter into the city from the hamptons. Cable news is bent GOP. Most AM talk is GOP. USA Today owns most local papers & plays "nonpartisan" / plays nice with GOP.
If you're a low info voter, you're not hearing a boo.
in reply to Alice McFlurry

Some may. Most don't. Many never will. Do the democratic strategists realize how badly they fucked letting 2 wedge driving campaigns remain active & uncontested in their ranks? Or switching up candidates weeks before the most important election in living memory? Just to appease party whiners?
There's plenty of guilt to go round. Enough for everyone to get a heaping helping. Lets focus on the problem at hand. Everyone can argue over who owes what on the tab after the danger has passed.
in reply to Alice McFlurry

We all need to take responsibility. Those of us who are American citizens and voted for #47 first and foremost, of course. Those who could have voted but didn't, next. Those who live in the USA but failed to show others why voting against 47 would actually have been in their interest, next. Finally, the rest of us, we, outside the USA, who failed to show you guys that that man and his entourage would irreparably damage your country's relationship with us.

We ALL failed to prevent this.

in reply to McWabbit 🇺🇦🍋🌻🍉

@McWabbit I think the excuse here is less “we didn’t know how bad Trump would be” and more “it’s the Dems’ fault for running [any given candidate]” or “I can’t vote for genocide! = I don’t want to FEEL responsible for genocide, even if the actions I fail to take contribute to that”.
in reply to Jay

@WhiteCatTamer @McWabbit A lot of people seem to think voting is an endorsement. It's not, or at least it shouldn't be if you're even remotely progressive. You're voting to slow the horrors, to stop the bleeding. To create a less dangerous environment for the next four years.

Voting is not the real work. But it makes the real work possible.

Democracy Matters reshared this.

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Alice McFlurry

@arisummerland @glitzersachen @Flisty @dannotdaniel Agreed! I have my own theories about voter fraud meaning that not as many people voted for Trump as there were votes counted for him, but I don't have any facts so I’m not commenting on it and I'm intentionally leaving it out of the discussion.

Even so, assuming all Trump votes were legitimate, a lot of idiots voted for him and a lot of other jerks didn't use their own votes in a useful way to effectively count against him.

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Ari "Two Elements" Jackson

@glitzersachen @Flisty @dannotdaniel I don't really want to go down the tinfoil hat road, but I would not put it past someone having rigged something this time around, with the weird comments about Pennsylvania, especially, and the fact that a lot of ballots were undervoted. It's all blood under the bridge at this point, though.
in reply to Alice McFlurry

@arisummerland @glitzersachen @dannotdaniel also massive voter roll purges, affecting mostly POCs using resurrected Jim Crow laws. Greg Palast has been trying to publicise that one. gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote…
in reply to Ericka Simone

@ErickaSimone @ClintonAnderson @dannotdaniel @shaknais And no, of course I'm not surprised. I don't even know if it's limited to white people, though I'm certainly not pushing back on that either. Conservatives in general do not revise their positions readily; if they could do so, they wouldn't remain conservatives.
in reply to Three plus or minus five

And conversely, by voting you are not culpable for the repercussions, because your vote cannot express your exact political beliefs. Nobody voted to ruin themselves, or remove their health care, or wreck their climate, or murder their grandmother. They were voting for someone else entirely, a heroic figure crafted by the expert manipulation all around them. And he didn't get elected, because he doesn't exist.

The fact is we all have to deal with terrible candidates, the destruction of democracy, and wealthy bastards enslaving us all, no matter who we voted for, whether or not we voted. We're under attack, and it's either defend against the media moguls, or die. It's either come together, and stop getting mad at people for voting wrong in a broken election, or divided, we fall.

CC: @Alice@beige.party @nazokiyoubinbou@mastodon.social @janvenetor@mastodontti.fi @noondlyt@hellions.cloud

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Cy

Experts whom they'd already been poisoned against by FUD, who they didn't know, who didn't know them. Experts who have lied about important things in the past. Some people even think destroying democracy is a good idea, because they don't know what that means for them. They don't know what they're voting for. They're not rational robots who always make sensible choices. They're human beings fallen prey to a cult, because cults have been calculated to have the maximum chance of controlling them by the few among us who believe themselves to be rational robots.
in reply to Alice McFlurry

we need to try and realise your question has an answer: it is no. and they will die not realising it.

there is a recurrence scenario up in here:

1. they are incapable of realizing what they did wrong.

2. we are incapable of realising they are incapable of realising what they did wrong.

the buck doesnt stop with them. never can, never will. it stops with us. we must abandon the mission of "make them realise" because it is impossible. we must instead try other solution paths.

in reply to Clinton Anderson SwordForHire

@ClintonAnderson @renardboy @ErickaSimone @dannotdaniel @shaknais Yeah, I hear you. You won't take responsibility for the harms other Canadians have done, but you'll judge others harshly for the harms their peers have done.

A lot of us white Americans are doing the difficult work of examining ourselves and challenging our brothers. You might want to try doing the same instead of being a schmuck online.

M.S. Bellows, Jr. reshared this.

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Ericka Simone

@renardboy fuck white Americans. You lazy, liberal racist, do nothing, change nothing, complain about everything liberal bigots who couldn’t keep your mom and dad from voting for a nazi. Gonna go hang you with your nazi father for 4th of July and all of that. Your vote for Kamala means nothing now, stupid bitch. Your dad and brother negated both our votes.

You’d never say this shit to my face, because I’ll beat your ass. Stay the fuck out my mentions misogynoir.