It’s because they are secretly proud of their past

Not only did I not mean to imply that, I didn’t imply that. If you read that into my comment it’s 100% you.

No worries, it happens.

Yeah, I basically agree with your first paragraph, but the point I was trying to make is that I do see people doing much else. I do know people who reject voting but spend a lot of time and energy doing organising and activism. Whether or not that applies to the other poster on this thread, I feel it’s better not to overly shame people for not having voted. Life sucks and people rationalise the dumb stuff they do in all sorts of crazy ways. I’d prefer to talk about something more positive.

Mamdani seems cool. It’s nice to see someone win on a straight affordability campaign without openly throwing marginalised people under the bus. Of course, it’s NY. But it shows it’s something we could unite around.

I’m not that person, check the usernames.

My only point is I think there’s actually better stuff to focus on than whether people voted or not. I think it’s probably on the whole better to vote for the democrats than not vote. But I think there are good faith arguments against it and what really matters is more active ways of fighting fascism.

That’s not what I said, why bother replying if you didn’t read my comment?

in the context of the US, if you (generally) chose not to vote in the 2024 election then you are guilty of doing nothing to prevent the atrocities committed by the Trump administration

This is really a false dichotomy. There are so many other ways to fight against the atrocities. Given how enthusiastically the democrats are cooperating with the fascist agenda, if you didn’t vote but you uploaded some info to one of those ice watch apps, or went and protested in LA, or shuffled papers to slow down their progress in your federal job, you probably already did more tangible good than someone who did the other way around.

Just for the sake of discussion, I think there’s a real argument to be made that reversing 25% is actually worse than doing nothing, because it makes people complacent. “Controlled opposition”, if you will.

I’m not saying that’s necessarily always the case, there are obviously tangible benefits to reducing some of the damage. But if it comes with allowing even more damage to be done later, because the changes are superficial and don’t address the ways in which the right extremists can manipulate the political system, then people might be fooled into thinking the system still works and the long run consequences would be even more severe than if they realised it doesn’t.

And if you fully realise that the political system doesn’t work then I don’t think it entirely makes sense to get on someone’s case about voting or not. Not that they shouldn’t, but there are much bigger issues.

It also reads quite a bit like an AI “insulting their blog in a Reddit copypasta style” or something

Fairphone would need to substantially modify their hardware to make that work