Disclaimer since based on my last comment i know the accusation is coming: i voted for claudia already. I think socialists should vote for Claudia if shes available.
I just also think voting is not the ultimate expression of politics and doesnt mean that much. The “its an endorsement” thing is true, but one extra endorsement does not equal one extra dead Palestinian. Thats just magical thinking. (Also, ive tried telling people the endorsement thing because its what changed my mind about lesser evilism, it doesnt work.)
And the idea that every Kamala voter is horrific evil when many are scared, propagandized, gaslit marginalized people doing what they think they need to do to not die is misguided. You guys claim to be the ultimate propaganda understanders but dont seem to understand its power. Are people still responsible for their actions? Sure. Does a vote of all things matter as an action all that much? Lmao fuck no. Its basically pointless.
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, “not forgiving”, or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
Calling it now
I will stay out of it, except for this comment.
I think I get what you’re trying to say, and I don’t entirely agree. As you’ve said it though I think I disagree a lot instead of just a little. I think presenting it as “1 vote =/= 1 dead palestinian” is flawed and a bit ghoulish and does you no favours. Likewise I think presenting yourself as a grass-toucher as opposed to those that disagree with you as being not-grass-touchers likewise will do nothing but inflame something that could otherwise give you a good and productive discussion, which I think is what you aim to do. As someone who is proud of being able to talk to liberals, I am a bit bemused that this is how you would phrase yourself when in discussion with comrades. Surely you yourself can see how provocative you are being?
I think that while voting normally does not significy a lot about morals due to people being surrounded by capitalist propaganda, this vote does, due to the fact it requires the voter to somehow rationalize accepting genocide (yes I know the rationalisation is “trump is worse”, but I’ve got a lot of hangups with that.)
There’s a blurry line of performative grass touching that makes that contradiction hard to read sometimes, which is “the person I disagree with and don’t like must touch grass which will banish their bad opinions,” which is technically if temporarily true because if that magic phrase worked, the bad opinion haver becomes absent for a time.
/srs That’s exactly my point, if you’re on this site you’re already not touching grass lol. The fact that a huge number of our struggle sessions are based on that contradiction is ridiculous because being on this site already proves you’re way more online than you seem to think you are.
Oh, I see now.
Yeah, whenever “touch grass” is said as a thought terminating cliche it’s almost always from another power user that just wants to stand alone on top of posting hill.
A certain mod on chapo gave me a temp ban with “touch grass” before deleting not only my posts in the thread, but unrelated posts I made that day because I lost my patience with them wanting to shoot people over property.
Much easier to stand on the hill instead of doing the self-crit about why there was a need to kill strangers or how that rhetoric results in kids getting shot because they rang the wrong doorbell.
HUH
Okay this is my last comment in this thread, I swear. It almost doesn’t count, it’s just an addendum to my own comment really
I agree. It’s kinda comical how we can objectively mock the “I depicted myself as the chad and you as the soyjack” tendencies of other online forums, but then immediately revert to “I have depicted myself as the grass toucher and you as the online weirdo” arguments. It’s the worst when people start listing their leftist credentials (at least one of our mods is heavily active in organising lots of direct action stuff, so it’s not like being online has lots of correlations to being able or unable to do other stuff.)
There’s been quite a few discussions related to this tendency. Early chapo had a group of users who were miffed at the crass tendencies of the website, because it ruined what they saw as fertile grounds for organizing more serious things. It was from this group the “we need to distance ourselves from chapotraphouse” idea came from, as far as I am aware anyway.
Personally I don’t really see the website as anything super serious. The biggest potential it has is as agitprop and I think it would be cool if it could grow in size and influence, but I don’t think that has a lot of relation to wether or not we have a comm called chapotraphouse… This got away from me, I forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. I hope this was somewhat coherent.
it’s a completely false political policy but an extraordinarily effective mental excuse. I don’t inherently distrust people who fall for it because we’ve been taught to think in trolley problem morality for ages
but yes grass touching is a very silly and non serious metric for being an authority on any subject