So I've been on the fence about whether to say something about this or not and I'm definitely going to offend some people I consider to be friends, because some of said people are definitely being addressed by this, but, not trying to be personal, might not actually be addressing

you, but there is this whole genre of post that makes me very angry when I see it where people who at least for argument's sake are very politically left-leaning get up on little soap boxes and bust out megaphones and start shouting about how much they hate the Democratic Party,

and I would like to ask all those people to really take an introspective moment and consider what the actual fuck they think they are actually accomplishing when they do that.

Now, to be clear, I don't especially care how you, the random person I am talking down to for this, do

when the time comes for you to cast a ballot. Vote for whoever you want, don't vote at all, make like those transphobes did in England a couple years ago and just crudely doodle garbage slogans in the scantron bubbles, whatever. Because you're just one person and your individual

vote does not carry a particular amount of weight. However, you shouting about things on twitter actually does carry quite a bit of weight, because a lot of people see it, and a good percentage of those people are impressionable idiots, and since we have already established that

you are at least nominally a leftist, the basic demographics here is your message is only going to reach very impressionable left-leaning folk, and regardless of what your actual intent is in shouting about that, the takeaway is going to be some combination of "I should just not

vote at all"/"I should vote Republican"/"I should vote for some 3rd party/write-in candidate despite that being functionally identical to not voting at all."

These are bad things to push any number of people who would otherwise do the thing that minimizes genocidal fascists'

ability to gain and hold power, which should be a pretty universal goal for anyone who is not a genocidal fascist.

Practically speaking, with any given election in the U.S., there are only three possible options:

1- A genocidal fascist claims a victory and gains/holds power.

2- A genocidal fascist conceeds a loss to someone who probably is not that great, but is not a genocidal fascist, which relatively speaking is much much better.

3- A genocidal fascist is fatally shot and their position/campaign hopes are passed along to someone else, who is most

likely also a genocidal fascist but might be less dangerous and definitely doesn't have the same momentum and is thus less likely to gain/hold/effectively exercise power.

And really that's it. There is no 4th option. You're going to get one of those 3 outcomes no matter what and

all you can do is push for the one that feels like the best outcome.

If you think that's #1, then OK you're an evil piece of garbage and not in a position to be taking any advice from me.

If you think that's #3 then wow you really should not be on social media at all you should

be as offline and off the grid as possible working out the logistics of how to do that and not be tracked through whatever you're connecting to twitter with. And I mean I guess you could be some sort of coward who doesn't want to get your hands dirty, but the way human psychology

political leanings and passion for causes work, you simply are not going to push a member of the left-leaning audience we've established you have into doing your dirty work for you, especially if you're being all coy and passive and indirect in your messaging. Like I'm not going

to encourage anyone to conduct political assassinations but if you're in a head space where you already think that's the one clear path forward, get serious about it and don't be one of those creeps who just posts their violent fantasies on social media.

Now, with option 2, you

have a whole lot of things you can do to push for that goal, and ideally you should be doing as many of them as you are capable of doing, at all times. And doing that works best when you put on your adult pants and soberly assess what options you actually have available to pursue

at any given moment. Some of the best options, like running for office yourself, or finding someone you really like and helping them run work only up to a certain cutoff point, where some combination of election rules formal or informal and basic realities about messaging reach

and group concensus lock you into a point where, for any given office, there is just the one person people have agreed is the single viable voting option to be on the ballot as the non-actively-murderous-monster choice. You definitely want to put a lot of time into those options

before those points are reached, but once they have been it's counter-productive to do anything but accept that that hand has been dealt and focus on the options that are on the table at that point. The three big gimmies are personally voting for the not-monster, doing everything

you can to encourage people to also vote for the not-monster, and doing everything you can to discourage people from voting for the monster. Past that there's a bunch of things that are kind of available at all times but they tend to be really time and labor intensive things like

forming concern groups and badgering currently-in-office people to suck less and exploiting loopholes that aren't legally considered to be forms of coercement but totally are in practice, and those are all kinda too involved for me to want to get into tonight.

And part of the

reason America is a terrible country to live in is that basically all supporters of the party with all the Nazis very clearly understands all this and focuses on gaming the system no matter what.

Like just as an example, do you think any given Republican actually thought Donald

Trump would be the best person to be president right now?

Like I'm not saying they aren't on board with all the evil stuff, they totally are, but there are so many people who are just as committed to the evil stuff but are more generally competent at getting results and/or more

easily manipulated by more competent people. Having this egomaniacal mobster who's never been told no, has to be managed like a toddler, and gets fixated on weird random nonsense like how his all McDonald's diet keeps clogging his toilet and wishing the flush was stronger really

slows down progress on all the genocide.

But nevertheless, pretty much the instant he was clearly far enough ahead in the polls that it was clear he was the nazi who was going to be the option on the ballots, everyone top to bottom fell into lockstep basicaly acting like he's a

perfect demigod who can do no wrong, and hitting his clearest opposition with... honestly straight up terrorist attacks quite frankly. Just really minmaxing the hell out of that whole "get people to vote for this person, prevent people from voting for that person" game.

And hey,

bitter a pill as it is to swallow, one of the real winning tactics in accomplishing that bit is spreading around propaganda with EXACTLY the sort of message this whole big rant is about. And... I'm not accusing anyone of being some kind of secret double agent trying to help Nazis

win elections or anything, but I totally am saying that your intentions absolutely do not fucking factor in here and the results of the actions you are taking are going to help nazis win elections, so maybe stop doing that.

So like, ideally, from a results-oriented option, the

best thing to do is is just adopt a persona where you are super enthusiastic about literally every individual person in every election who represents the clear not-a-nazi choice and hype the hell out of them and scare everyone you can who might vote the genocidal fascist way out

of doing that or even just flat out intimidate them out of voting in a fear for their lives sort of way, or rig systems, totally independent of your honest assessment of any candidates beyond that core "which of these people will kill people?" assessment.

I don't realistically

expect many if any people to actually do that, because at various steps along the line you're going to hit some sort of ethical quandries where that playbook bumps up against some core principle you hold yourself to and even if a session of really cold sober bit of moral calculus

would likely show that most/all of those principles are not actually as important in the grand scheme of things as doing what you can to avert the deaths of innocent people which really is what most politics generally boil down to one way or another, people are only so plastic on

personal philosophy and that conversation isn't going anywhere.

So you know, the compromise there is if you really are in a place in your life where you're going "I'm not going to compromise my moral principles by taking a ballot and filling in every D bubble I can," then, OK, I

reiterate my point that as an individual I don't really care what you do enough to really get into it with you. BUT, I am asking, in what is again, a more forceful tone than I'd prefer to use with people I generally like, that you just completely shut the hell up on the matter.

You can go whine about how you just do not like the hand you've been dealt in an actual pen and paper journal nobody's going to read, bow out of any and all political discussions and run no risk of shooting anyone in the foot by accidentally talking impressionable people who care

what you have to say into doing very stupid/self-destructive/terrible-for-everyone things.

Also just to address any concerns of how like, voting doesn't matter and the system's totally rigged and bla bla bla, no, voting definitely does always still matter.

The ways in which