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   Amadi Lovelace (amaditalks@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 13:34:12 JST Amadi Lovelace

   • William Lindsey :toad:

   I need people on the left, every flavor of the left, to understand this. Your passion right now cannot be for voting for whomever is making a stunt third party presidency bid because the passion on the right is to KILL us. Republicans are happily coalescing power with & through white supremacist terrorists who are murdering people regularly and terrorizing people daily, and they are creating policy to enable those killers and terrorists.

   From: @wdlindsy
   https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/110577447952690671

   • Embed this notice
     AnthonyJK-Admin (anthonyjk@mastodon.redgarterclub.com)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 13:34:10 JST AnthonyJK-Admin

     in reply to

     @amaditalks

     Sorry, but no.

     I have endured so many elections where I was told that I had no choice but to vote for the Democrat because any other choice enabled the Republicans, only to have the winning Democrat end up enabling and abetting the Republicans even more.

     You are perfectly free to ride that merry-go-round, but I'm getting off it.

     I am not a Democrat. I am a Left Independent. My vote will reflect my values. Neither Democrats nor Republicans reflect my values. My vote, my choice.

   • Embed this notice
     Amadi Lovelace (amaditalks@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 13:34:11 JST Amadi Lovelace

     in reply to

     Electoral politics in the US right now is about choose your opponent, not choose your player. We lost our opportunity to play choose your player via poor ballot design in South Florida and a compromised SCOTUS.

     Right now you have only ONE job in the voting booth: choosing the candidate with an actual chance of winning who isn’t going to worsen the climate catastrophe, destroy public education, abolish unions, destroy LGBTQ lives and arm every Nazi in the country.

     It’s not a hard choice.

   • Embed this notice
     AnthonyJK-Admin (anthonyjk@mastodon.redgarterclub.com)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 13:43:07 JST AnthonyJK-Admin

     in reply to

     @amaditalks

     In fact, it isn't even about Cornel West, Marianne Williamson, or even Bernie Sanders for me; it's about the ultimate failure of the Democratic Party to even live up to their promises, and to deliberately use working poor people and marginalized folk as fodder for votes, only to chase after billionaires and blank check wars and to cover for their own lurch to the Right.

     I'll take "Leftist purity" and building a real Left party over voting for backstabbing ConservaDems any day.

   • Embed this notice
     AnthonyJK-Admin (anthonyjk@mastodon.redgarterclub.com)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 14:01:46 JST AnthonyJK-Admin

     in reply to

     @amaditalks

     Ma'

   • Embed this notice
     Amadi Lovelace (amaditalks@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 14:01:47 JST Amadi Lovelace

     in reply to

     • AnthonyJK-Admin

     @AnthonyJK you have to live with your conscience and do what you think is best, but you need to keep in mind that you aren’t voting for you, and what makes you feel good, you are part of something much larger than that. Personally, my goal at this point is to staunch the bleeding, because if the trauma worsens, the body dies. I would love to do something better. White supremacy has stolen that choice.

   • Embed this notice
     AnthonyJK-Admin (anthonyjk@mastodon.redgarterclub.com)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 14:09:03 JST AnthonyJK-Admin

     in reply to

     @amaditalks

     Ma'am, please don't start with the vote-shaming and the "Think about others" canard. We've been "staunching the bleeding" for the past 40 years in voting for increasingly conservative Democrats, and every time it seems like we simply get bled worse.

     This is not about me voting to "feel good"; this is about survival. Mine has not been served by lesser evil politics that simply result in even greater evil down the road. If we can't seek an alternative now, then when if ever?

   • Embed this notice
     AnthonyJK-Admin (anthonyjk@mastodon.redgarterclub.com)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 14:18:27 JST AnthonyJK-Admin

     in reply to

     @amaditalks

     My conscience is perfectly fine with not voting for politicians who break promises on essential policy positions, who speak to us one way and then vote the exact opposite, and who talk about the dire threat of the opposition while voting with said opposition to undermine basic human needs-driven policy.

     My vote is not a free carrier. You have to earn it through actual policy. "We're not Trumpster/DeSantis" won't do it anymore.

   • Embed this notice
     Amadi Lovelace (amaditalks@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 15:27:45 JST Amadi Lovelace

     in reply to

     The right out-organized us by more than three decades. At the end of the 1980s they were holding trainings in church basements with the Christian Coalition, teaching people how to build what is the openly fascist Republican Party of 2023, using coded Christian language and appeals to white grievance to win seats on suburban school boards & town councils and from there, county level then state legislature seats, bypassing cities, then gerrymandering them to destroy their electoral power.

   • Embed this notice
     Amadi Lovelace (amaditalks@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 15:27:46 JST Amadi Lovelace

     in reply to

     And do not talk to me about ranked choice voting, runoff voting, ending the electoral college or any other changes to our electoral system that do not exist and will not exist in time for 2024, probably not for 2028 or even 2032.

     We all have to operate in the reality we have, not the hopes and dreams we don’t.

     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Amadi Lovelace (amaditalks@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 15:27:47 JST Amadi Lovelace

     in reply to

     And do not argue with me that if everybody just voted their conscience then the green candidate or the socialist candidate or the working families candidate or whoever else you want to be able to squander your vote on could win.

     No, they couldn’t. That is not reality.

     That will not ever be reality until those parties learn how to build a party base and create electability and build candidates with strong public support from the ground up.