Bold of you to assume that last third is even aware that there was an election.

Im pointing out excusing nonvoters never works, as evidenced.

I'm not asking you to excuse them, I'm asking you to stop casting blame to try and feel better about this sorry situation we're in. Doing something to help someone who's hurting right now will make you feel much better

Maybe if nonvoters ever came out

"If only" is the trap of grief. Denial, anger, and bargaining all rolled into one. We're all grieving for the future we could have had, and you deserve the chance to grieve in your own way, but lashing out won't lessen your own pain.

Why is that so hard to agree with?

Because it's an impossible demand that tries to blame a hundred million people for failing to overcome all the various impediments to voting. You might as well blame the moon for all the good that will do.

if progressivism is so popular then why can't people turn out and overtake the Democrat party?

Because the Democrat party is more conservative than it is progressive, but the opportunity to change that is right now.

I am doing something. Im fighting against this idea it's all Democrats fault when they were barely given any power to begin with and no one cared to vote in primaries for Anyone better.

What primary? The Democrats didn't hold one this election...

You aren't fighting an idea. Ideas can't be fought, we either hold on to them or we abandon them. If you want people to abandon the idea that it was the Democrats' fault then you're going to need more than just blame, you're going to need evidence so overwhelming it can blot out people's personal feelings on the matter and a culprit with meaningful culpability.

Stop with the excuses so that no one ever feels THEY are responsible for all this horseshit we see today.

You're doing that right now, making excuses for your own powerlessness by casting blame. I had 10 years to come to terms with what you're feeling today (including a six month prepper phase before I reached the last phase of acceptance), so trust me when I say you won't feel any better about it until you get away from your screens, get out of your bubble, and go make a difference in someone else's life. Everyone else who's suffering right now feels alone and helpless, even the smallest gesture of solidarity might be the boost they need to pay your kindness forward tenfold.

You have far more power than you know. Don't let the horrors lull you into despair. Let them radicalize you into being the change you want to see in the world.

Again, I'm not telling you whether or not I went through with it. You're assuming that I didn't vote and getting very angry at me instead of at the people who had actual power to do something and chose not to rock the boat.

Divisive rhetoric like playing the blame game is not productive and serves only to help the fascists waste our time. Being mad at people isn't going to convince them that they voted wrong, it only cements the opinion that you can't be reasoned with.

What we need now is Truth and Reconciliation, and to get that we have to have power, and to get that we have to have organization. Take all that disparate, individual rage and point it in a useful direction. Go join a union. If there isn't one at your workplace, start it.

Don't misunderstand, I live in a solid blue state. Whether or not I made good on my threat to abstain from voting is an entirely moot question for the presidential election. As far as the electoral college is concerned, my voting power went to Harris.

Yeah it's working! Everything is burning down. It's great!

And it's been inevitable since the DNC decided to fuck Bernie and push establishment candidates back in late 2015.

It's a waste of rage to blame the voters for their obvious response, as every election since then was cynically forseeable. The party would fuck around in 2020 and win anyway because Trump was awful, continue fucking around during their administration because "bipartisanship", and now we get to find out if we get to have elections again or how long it takes America to descend into it's own unique brand of fascism.

But Im sure people like you think we can just undo all this calamity in a few years huh?

Of course not, but the Democrat Party chose this future. They had every opportunity to avoid this path, but they have always preferred the negative peace that is the absence of tension to the positive peace that is the presence of justice.

There is no undoing this now, the American Empire is over and just hasn't realized it yet. We have reached The Cool Zone™ and the only question that remains is how we'll organize to survive the years ahead. If the Democrats won't lead the resistance then we'll have to do it ourselves.

Reality is this current backwards turn won't be fixed in our lives, let alone progressing forward. Dumbest fucking gamble ever.

I agree, and so do a lot of people who are unhappy with the Democrat party these days. They gambled on another pro-establishment, "everything is fine, nothing will change" campaign when they know they win when they run a "hope and change" campaign. They lost, we get to pay the price, and too much of the party leadership joins you in blaming the voters instead of taking responsibility for their own leadership.

But hey, at least the new chair of the DNC is starting to point in the right direction, and might not even stomp out a popular candidate this time: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/18/dnc-chair-outlines-pro-worker-union-focus

You've got that precisely backwards.

It is not the job of voters to vote correctly, it's the party's job to convince the voting population that they are worth voting for.

The Republicans are really effective at this because they can lie and cheat and overpromise on anything and their base will love them for it. Democrats are remarkably ineffective because they can't promise anything that might raise taxes on their campaign financiers.

If you want the Democrats to stop losing, then they need to fear losing your vote more than they fear offending billionaires. The only way to do that is to threaten to withhold your vote.

And it's working! AOC and Bernie's rally tours have more people excited about the Democrats than there have been since Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC kicked Bernie out of the 2016 primary. AOC is a front-runner for the 2028 election, the campaign for which appears to have already started.

I need tthose leggings, where'd you find them?

I agree. Whether it was ignorance or arrogance, the Democrats are entirely responsible for driving so many people away from the polls and squandering what could otherwise have been a shoe-in for Harris.

"Didn't vote" always beats out the votes for either candidate, though. A small downward shift in the numbers is probably the fault of Democrats dividing their own base by endorsing genocide.

So, not any different from any other presidential election in the USA?

Me fuckin' too.

Just existing has been exhausting lately.

It was big news 75 years ago too.

I suppose if there was a wine config that had an appropriate dosdevice setup for the boot sector then it'd be able to write to it, but wine doesn't need to boot so I don't think that would do anything.

By that definition, gossip with friends is advertisement too whenever it mentions a business. It's an excessively broad view of ads, and that's coming from an enby that won't play live service games because of the dark patterns inherent to their design.

I'm not just talking about targeted advertising, I'm also talking about paid preferential treatment on black-box algorithmic social networks.

A business could self-publish its own newsletter and it wouldn't be advertisement until they start mailing them to people who didn't sign up for it. If someone follows an artist on social then they have signed up to see those posts.

Buildings provide shelter, advertising provides nothing.

Artists who post their work on social media aren't advertising unless they are also paying to have their posts injected into the feeds of people who don't follow them.

Time to move to the opposite side of the planet, right?

I'm jelly, that looks like an interesting life.

I'm not making a moral argument, I'm describing the state of things.

According to the law as it is now enforced, murder is less bad than protesting against the genocide in Palestine, because murderers get a trial. Protesters don't, they just get shipped straight to a foreign gulag.

The resources used to make the sign don't come from nowhere. They have go be mined, processed, transported, fabricated into a finished product, and shipped again. That's a non-zero environmental impact even for a basic non-illuminated sign.