VOTE VOTE VOTE

this is a bonus post; for regular content see the previous &/or next buttons.

washington state midterms rolled right up on me.  not good.  there are reasons in the US why voting early can be a good idea.  i missed that boat.  but it’s not too late to vote!  ballots have to be postmarked no later than the 5th.  if you have to change your voter registration status or information and forgot past the mail deadline, you can do it in person on election night, but go early.  polling places close right at 8:00 pm.

another useful thing for last minute voters:  voter’s guides.  it’s good to have at least two you can check against each other.  there’s a guide for progressive voters online.  not sure who runs it or how they pick their endorsements, but you don’t have to take their word for anything.  they spell out their reasoning, list other endorsements, and line up well compared to other sources – at least for elections in my area.  useful enough for me, especially since my other main source does not make endorsements for municipalities outside of seattle.  you can also read what the candidates say about themselves in the official voter’s guide.  since that is often carefully worded to not offend voters on the opposite side of the political divide, it can be tricky to parse.  in that situation, look to who’s endorsing them for clues.

anyway, as slim as hope is these days, you’d be an asshole to throw away the tiny tiny say you have in things.  if enough of us get our asses in gear, we can make a difference.  it’s real.  my trailer park town had a city council that moved to ensure abortion access would be available here, right after roe v wade fell.  that’s because more decent people than asswipes voted here, at that time.

do what you can, and VOTE VOTE VOTE.

–

Red State Leftists Please Start Voting

You heard about all the businesses capitulating to the fresh fashy vibes of the new ameriKKKa?  Tossing diversity initiatives, LGBTetc protections?  Amazon doing this is particularly shit because like many tech companies, they have a disproportionate number of trans women in computer programming.  You’d think that would count for something, but here we fucken are.

Red state leftists don’t want to vote because it feels hopeless, but here’s the thing.  If all of you got up and voted at the next opportunity and lost, it would send a message to the world, loud and clear.  The kind of message electoral politics can ignore, yes, but not the kind of message that corporate america can afford to ignore.  If the nazis win the next one by electoral margins but lose by 80% of the popular vote?  That is a show of force for human rights, for humane policies, for progress.  Corporations will realize that catering to the nazis is not the wisdom, and at least one source of human misery will become substantially less miserable.

That’s where the real power is at the moment.  Corporations.  They have all these fiefdoms carved out in the legalized monopoly game, so boycotts can only do so much.  But demographic information that their advertisers can use, that is something they’ll pay attention to.

Give it a whirl, please?  And who knows?  Maybe there’s still a sliver of a hope in hell that democracy can move this needle slightly away from endless calamity, right?  Throw me a fuckin’ bone here.  Do it on a lark.  Do it on a dare.  Do it high on bin laden weed with a six-pack of beer.  Just do it.

–

I Knew It

Remember my post about leftist accelerationists?  Saw some evidence of it in the wild.  Couldn’t get a screencap and lost track of where it was, but it was one of those pro-palestine trans anarcho-whateverist tumblr gals who discourage voting and mock people for promoting it.  And in this post she said something like, “how can you be aware of the US and what it does in the world and not want it to fail?  not yearn for its utter destruction?”

This is what I mean.  The only way for the USA to improve, in their eyes, is to be utterly destroyed.  And if that takes X years of fascist rule and a million dead LGBTQ people and women who needed reproductive healthcare and unionists?  Fuck all those dead people, serves ’em right for being born in the wrong country.  And every other country that will be worse off because fascists control the USA, including Palestine?  Fuck them too.

Given this accelerationist impulse, I wonder if they would look at the terrorist actions of Hamas that inspired the current genocidal push and think, yeah, no matter how many Palestinians are slaughtered, it’s worth it to see the world being inspired to stop Israel and liberate the leftover living among the mountain of corpses.

Accelerationism bad.  Anti-voting leftists are accelerationists, and they’re bad.  Don’t be like that.

–