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I brought it here because I feel that the discussion misses the point and redirects anger away from the systems and structures that actually cause it onto other people in the same position as them. It is important that people understand what is happening or this and similar lines of divide and conquer (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it) are going to keep recurring. You might all be good eggs in every other regard, I have no reason to doubt that you are, but if you see how it can happen to you, you start to understand how it happens to others in worse ways. Understanding something is the first step in remedying it.

I definitely can see how it might just seem irrelevant from your perspective though, so that’s absolutely fair enough.

Nobody says only vote, but by design people do only vote. It’s made to disguise inaction as action, to make you feel like you have done something when all you have done is wash your hands of the responsibility.

That involves exactly the kinds of grass-roots activities your describe

Hard disagree on this one, there is a qualitative difference in acting to empower yourselves and acting to empower somebody above you, anyone who has done more than a little of both is conscious of this.

One of my ‘favourite’ experiences along these lines was during the lockdowns, local anarchists set up mutual aid groups and helped people do so across the city I was living in at the time (not a small one). After a point local politicians recognised that there was political capital to be made by involving themselves, so in many cases they barged in and took over, pushing everything through their own networks, and both the quality and quantity of assistance consistently declined in the places that they were successful. Their actions killed people, and not only will they never be held accountable, they got celebrated for it.

Absolutely everything here still runs foul of my original concern, when you have systemic forces pushing towards the concentration of power, anything you do (whilst of course still varying in severity) whilst not addressing this is both temporary and superficial^* as more and more things get redirected to serve and feed these concentrations. This necessarily leads to conflict and potential collapse, as these concentrations run out of sources of power that aren’t held by other concentrations, they begin to come into conflict. You see an example in the economy at large, first they eat all of the little fish, then the big players start targeting each other with leveraged buyouts and the like. Their power lies in money, so their violence is felt and expressed in financial terms, state power lies in the threat of physical violence.

We can’t just ignore the more passive (in our direct experiences) violence. As I said before, if the conditions for it exist then it will grow, and there are systemic pressures maintaining these conditions that need to be addressed before this gets any more out of hand, no matter what brief respite the next election brings.

Edit: * Superficial in that it doesn’t address the problem, not that it doesn’t necessarily have tangible positives for people, hence why I say “voting is not enough” and not “don’t vote” (not to accuse you of suggesting otherwise, you have been clear there).

I recommended a place to start, I am not naive enough to think that jumping to the end is any way viable, and that was just to make you happy so that you might engage with what was actually being said. My aim has always been to encourage people to think for themselves, not to tell them what to think or do.

It is also worth noting that you haven’t offered any solution yourself, just saying ‘vote’ doesn’t mean anything unless your whole recommended course of action is just to vote (blindly? Blue no matter who?) and wash your hands of it. That is also known as a capitulation.

You also recommended thinking more locally, it’s almost as if you acknowledge that proof of concept on smaller scales empowers people to try it for themselves in other contexts, including those same people as they suddenly find themselves with a group of people to start from. Honestly, I appreciate that it sounds a bit airy-fairy, but experiencing such things for ourselves can have a transformative effect upon you and your perspectives.

Why argue when you won’t actually argue the point? Trying to pretend that you are being polite whilst dismissing someone out of hand without the decency to explain why (beyond a few common sidestepping soundbites that don’t) is just condescending. Especially to not suggest any proposal for stopping the bloodshed that hitherto has gone hand-in-hand with the structure that you are publicly throwing your support behind, I thought bloodshed was important to you, or does it only feel real when it has a perceived chance of pointing at you?

People’s first reactions are most often fears of things that already happen getting worse, because we desperately crave stability and force ourselves into a sunk cost fallacy (prisoners dilemma, if you prefer) on that basis. This is unfortunately a huge misdirect on ourselves- if you have the conditions for something to already exist or happen, the subtle changes in condition are usually what lead to this getting worse (often cumulatively as a misdirect itself from where power actually lies, immigration is a great example with its consequences currently laid bare). Plus, it is already happening, if we can’t bring ourselves to care just because it doesn’t directly affect us, we probably shouldn’t be proposing any societal solutions or paths of action as we are clearly unable to operate adequately on a societal level.

Apologies for how worked up I have got at a couple of points, absolutely nothing personal, I just feel passionately about these things and have seen decades go by where we have loudly shouted what will happen only to be ignored and later asked (rhetorically, of course) ‘how could this have happened?’ over and over again… It’s hard not to get frustrated, but none of that is your fault, so I’m sorry.

That’s a complete misread of what I said, I said that bloodshed will be inflicted upon us, I said it already is. You are ignoring that in the name of ‘progress’.

Okay, but stop pretending that you are offering anything more than burying your head in the sand, it’s embarrassing.

We are going to have bloodshed no matter what, when state power feels threatened it will lash out violently, we don’t get to decide this.

There is already bloodshed, and there always was, states fundamentally rely upon violence to enforce their interests both domestically and internationally. The point is to finally stop this cycle.

Personally, I feel that our best hope lies in parallel power structures, so the best place to start with that would be in trying to organise members of your community to get together and sort x problem yourselves. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, it’s fine to start anywhere, it just seems to me that an important step is in people realising how much power they have when they work together.

Everything else happens through protest and voting at a variety of levels.

That is just simply not true, unless you use a very broad definition of protest which goes up to and including the Coal Wars, but given the general sentiment I expect you have calmly marching along and begging for your masters to consider you for once in mind.

Even if it was true, you still haven’t attempted to address the power problem that I discussed at length (that being the point of my comment, not the broad solutions that you appear to deem a requirement), I have fulfilled your arbitrary demand, now please answer what I actually said.

Edit: Also, to respond to a comment centred on voting not being a solution due to the fundamental structure this takes with “actually, you just need to vote more”, without even mentioning a single point I raised, is incredibly obnoxious.

Voting will not save us, huge numbers of problems stem from fundamental imbalances in power, power which the political class require in order to impose their will (or that of whomever they serve further up the chain), even when their will is genuinely benign.

Voting just decides which people (with already powerful people/structures frequently playing an outsized role in exactly who you get to choose between) get into power, then this power both alters their brain and causes their lived experiences to diverge from those of the electorate.

Our solutions need to include a fundamental redistribution of power or we are just maintaining the conditions (a key component being the concentration of power centres, which has been dramatically accelerating for the past few decades regardless of how people have voted) that will lead us right back here. This redistribution is not going to come from people who, however pure their intentions, require power over others to fulfil these intentions.

I won’t discourage voting,^* but we have to stop pretending that we just need the right rulers and everything will be fine, voting is not enough.

*Although I do understand people; particularly in FPTP safe seats; who choose not to play their part in the theatre of pretending that we are granting them some kind of justified authority over us- if not one single vote was placed, they would just choose how to distribute power amongst themselves after all, they wouldn’t leave the seats empty to reflect the outcome of the theatre, because that isn’t where their power actually comes from. This becomes clear when you consider ideas such as designated survivors, they collectively assume power over all of us and have a clear delineation of the rulers and the ruled.

If a primary motivation is fear of the ‘wrong’ people getting into power, that structure was not built to serve you.

Too many don’t, they vote and consider it done with, but the voting is not the solution part of this. With how things are, particularly under FPTP voting systems, it is mostly holding off the worst of it until enough people feel disenfranchised enough to either not bother or vote for some far right conman or another…

Our only way out is by building systems of mutual support for ourselves and one another, but regrettably voting is much easier than that, so it rarely happens.

Sure, but calling people fuckstick isn’t used on a large scale to shut down conversation, there is a qualitative difference here.

Edit: I belatedly see your point that it could have been directly in response to that, in which case the pattern recognition was misfiring and I apologise.

I don’t need you to tell me any of this, much less in such a condescending way, I am perfectly aware of how the world works. It does, however, amount to a rhetorical sidestep, and I know how it goes from here. Have a good one.

Why is it that every single time you see someone trying to claim the role of ‘adult in the room’, they appear to be speaking from a perspective of being perfectly oblivious (albeit sometimes for the purpose of obfuscation)?

Even if you disagree with them, people who oppose LLM usage for ethical reasons still exist for example.

You aren’t making yourself seem above it as you would like, you are making yourself look unable to intellectually engage with the concept.

I don’t know why I bother sometimes. Talk to you again to say the same thing in a few years I guess. Just please remember and learn something in the process.

This is the same conversation I had countless times in the first Trump presidency, and how if [exactly what ended up happening when the Democrats got back in] happened it would be straight back to him or something worse. Nobody listened then either, and here we are.

You are attacking a strawman, I specifically said we should work not to cede power to Trump et al, you should always deal with the “what” of the problem, but if you don’t deal with the “why” the same or another “what” will always come along.

If this was all just something that popped up out of nowhere for one election I would agree with you, but this is the very loudly and repeatedly predicted (and roundly ignored) cumulative effect of decades of elections.

I am just begging you to stop making the same mistake over and over and over again.

If you can’t see that the Democrats (presumably unintentionally) enabled this situation by proceeding to do little to nothing after getting Trump out, and just assuming that it had been bad enough previously that people will still go for them, I don’t know what to tell you.

They are holding their electorate hostage, why are people surprised that people disengage after continuously seeing everything get worse around them regardless of how they vote?

This isn’t necessarily to say that I agree with that inaction; nor did I say otherwise; but if we keep on ignoring why things happen and so never addressing the causes, the same things will keep happening.

I always have the same line here, although often paraphrased: I won’t discourage voting but in isolation it is not enough, and pretending that it is is deeply irresponsible. Granting authority over your lives to a ruling class (as in, people whose lived experiences become further from yours every day that they hold power, with predictable consequences) is not freedom, it is just choosing the padding for your chains. Voting under these conditions is a surrender of your power to someone ‘above’ you, not an expression of your power but an expression of the power of the people being voted for, so of course work to prevent ceding it to the worst options (pretty clear who in this case, thankfully) but if you don’t take that power back afterwards this general decline and the resulting rightward drift will continue.

The big issue with electoralism is the tendency to reduce people down to believing in fairy tales about just needing the right rulers and everything will be fixed. Expecting a group of people, who keep threatening you with an increasingly right wing opposition rather than listening to their electorate, to actually serve your interests seems mindblowingly naive, especially given all the evidence to the contrary we have to hand by now.

It is possible to responsibly advocate for voting (obviously alongside taking more effective measures to put power back in people’s hands directly where possible), but this is incredibly rarely seen. Instead the voting becomes the be all and end all, and things keep sliding further and further.

Disenfranchising the vast majority of people by making them choose between two groups that won’t represent their interests to rule over them didn’t help matters.

Nor did Democrats putting the spotlight on the far right, and so giving them a substantial boost, to try to intimidate people into supporting them, all whilst crushing any attempt at a move left whenever they get the opportunity.

Aggressively passing blame onto individuals and ignoring the obvious systems at work will never fix anything. You aren’t more responsible or even doing anything productive here, you are just showing that you are either emotionally invested in a failed system or scared of change.

Voting is not enough, it never was.