This person's outright sadistic blindness or trolling aside, anyone reading this comment with good faith and not immediately having an aneurysm should remember that the once and current president once said, and I quote:
I like taking guns away early. Take the guns first, go through due process second.
I don't believe I have treated you with hostility, but please forgive me if I have.
But I must ask - does "not voting" discredit the illusion of democracy? To who? How?
Do you think there is a meaningful number of people who currently believe the statement "American democracy is working" but would cease to believe that when faced with voter turnout statistics?
Not voting is absolutely both a symptom and a cause. How do you think we got here, if not by voting for the people who won the elections for the past century, and by not voting for the people who lost the elections?
Voting won’t fix the ruin that is the neo liberal project and the debt its forced us into.
Again, almost everyone knows that. For most "radicalized" people that are actually doing things, voting is openly acknowledged as a stalling tactic designed to give us more time to do what must be done for real change.
What exactly will not voting do? Who will face the consequences of not voting? Who will be helped? Who will be harmed? Do you honestly think the wealthy will be harmed by you not voting?
I never said that, nor did I ever think that. But you have made clear that this discussion is unwanted, and I will respect that and say no more on it. Farewell.
Did you? To me? Where?
Please don't feel that the best thing you can do is shut up! You deserve a voice in the matter, even if it is much harder for you to use it the way others can use theirs.
Besides, not everyone can always be or even needs to always be the person who spreads the message. We need people to help figure out what the problems and solutions are just as much as we need people to share those problems and solutions with the world.
It is usually a necessary evil that we have marketers to sell the things that wouldn't exist without the engineers to produce them.
I already told you what I didn’t agree with and why I didn’t agree with it several times
I didn't and still don't see any explanations for why you disagree, other than "being athiest" which I do not believe is sufficient explanation in and of itself. There are plenty of athiests who find reasons to agree or disagree on this topic beyond that single belief.
I apologize if my approach seems insistent that you need to agree with me. I only wanted to explore the topic further, and am happy to discontinue that if the desire is not reciprocated. Farewell.
I have no idea how to interpret “improve our conscious contact with God” any other way.
... All they’re really doing is using their imagination to simulate a being greater than themselves and then asking “what would that being want for my life?”
This is a secular interpretation of "improve our conscious contact with God" that doesn't actually involve "communicating with a God"
Is there something about this interpretation that you don't understand or disagree with?
You are missing the point, voting in a party that has been moving slowly right isn’t a way to fix it.
Most of us are well aware voting them in wasn't going to fix the core problems of the United States.
However, most of us are also well aware that voting them out is making the core problems worse. One need only apply a blindfold and throw a dart at any of the executive decisions made over the last week to find incontrovertible evidence of that.
Accelerationism is nothing but supporting facism. There is no magical moment where fascists run a nation into the ground, the system collapses, and somehow you get to decide what happens after.
What comes after can be just as bad - if not worse - than what came before. And you will do nothing - less than nothing - to stop it by choosing not to vote.
I'm not questioning the value of non-electoral political action. That is just as - if not more - important. Get involved. Use your voice. Donate. Rally. Please.
I am only challenging this naive idea that "not voting" = "protesting". You cannot protest by staying home. You cannot protest by sitting out. Not voting isn't action, it's inaction and no revolution will ever, ever start with inaction.
They want to use military planes because they can hide the cost of this program in the "whoops it's too big to audit" defense budget. The cost of civilian contractors would be publically disclosed.