RE: (Voting = Violence) = Dangerous Leftist Idea
"If one subscribed to your argument, then if someone hired a hitman to whack a guy, he wouldn't be responsible for the hit, because he didn't physically do the thing."
hmm. You're changing the goalposts with the "responsible for" thing.
If you put a hit out on someone, there's a causality between your behavior and the ensuing violence, so it's correct to hold you responsible for what happened. But still, your behavior (of the soundwaves going thru the telephone or whatever) was not the act of violence.
Similarly, when you make an expression of voting, it's not an act of violence.
Allegedly, perhaps, the government actually responds to what a person votes for? (It would be on you to demonstrate that this is the case.) In this case, ya, then you'd hold people responsible for what they caused the government to do. But that doesn't mean their behavior was the act of violence.
(And I don't think you'd truly find a connection between making a vote and how the government acted. I know if I were to go to the fire station and select someone's name that I don't think my conscience would feel any burden by it. I'd just feel like I wasted my time.)
I hear you @full-measure. I guess for me I think about all the systems that are currently in place. Take for example marijuana the way it is now. It’s still federally illegal, and Trump’s guy seems to have a hard on for enforcing this ancient law to persecute people who use this herb. In my mind the people who voted for Trump endorsed his future actions / and lack thereof. So when some young kid goes to jail for having weed and it ruins his life. It can be directly correlated to the fact that someone voted for Trump, and that Trump failed to do the right thing. I guess, I'm just the type that doesn't make endorsement's lightly. I see voting as vouching for someone, and my conscience is on the line if I vouch for someone and they make horrible mistakes. I would feel responsible for those mistakes, because I can see the interconnectedness and causality of my choices. Maybe i'm looking at it too deeply, whereas someone else could easily compartmentalize it. It's kind of in the realm of the butterfly effect, where I am coming from.
My conscience would, because every act government does and everything government has done, and is going to do, is done by violence or the threat of violence. Everything it has, or everything it pays for it has gotten through violence or the thread of violence. I would not be the tiny part of bringing or keeping that in the world. But it's my personal opinion of course :)
I don't make endorsements lightly either.
I also don't vote, and even shiver at the idea of mis-clicking 'like' on a bad facebook post that I disagree with.
But whether any of this is technically an act of violence is a different question.
I don't like describing something as something that it isn't as a tactic to encourage people not to do it. So my only issue is over the technicalities, and I basically share all of your thoughts in terms of not wanting to endorse people who may do bad things etc.
I guess I also wonder this:
Who do you think is more responsible for state violence, the diehard statist (watches cable news, believes all the typical things) who didn't bother to go vote, or the anarchist who was bored and lol'd his way thru the voting booth?
I'd say it's definitely the first.
Which seems to nerf how connected voting is to the state's behavior.
I'm not sure the state is so much responsive to the votes people make as much as it's based on what's in peoples' minds and what they're currently able to get away with.
Hello thanks for the reply.
It's debatable yes, most people have never thought as how far their belief makes the continuation of violence of their belief system, go on.
I'm not sure. Can you blame an indoctrinated cult member, who was born in an echo chamber, for whom this awful system, is just "what is"?
It's not about the blaming, for me it's about making people aware of the belief.
I can tell you who I find most responsible, the police and the army, they bring the actual violence in manifestation.......... in reality.
I think the politicians have their own agenda and only "listen" to the people if it happens to match their agenda or to get more power.
It's very much the belief in statism that keeps it going, without believers, no
legitimacy for the state and it's hired mercenaries.
I can see how you might think that voting is not violence, because if you compartmentalize the physical act, it seems relatively harmless. However, in voting, what you are doing is giving one man the power to command and control the military, which was paid for with the money that was stolen from the American people.
The American military has been killing people overseas in acts of aggression for quite some time now, and it’s doing so for business purposes, which is why all wars have to come with a false pretext, because our wars are always dishonorable ones.
I guess when I stack all those dominos side by side, that’s how I come to that result. I’m not trying to get people not to vote for Adam, I just want them to see the whole domino effect from a bird’s eye view of voting in general.
One example is, let’s say the exit polls were um not going well for the LP near the end of the race. The worst case scenario in my mind is if Adam only has 8% of the vote, and doesn’t drop out and endorse someone, it could directly result in the worse of the two evils prevailing.
So in this sense, there is a danger that the good will of Libertarian voters could be used to directly benefit the worst case scenario candidate. In my mind Libertarians and conservatives (with Trump as the conservative candidate) have more in common with each other, than they do with Democrats.
So if they were divided and ruled without a backup plan, then a vote for the LP could in essence eliminate votes that would have prevented a worse case scenario. It's all very complex when you wargame what could potentially happen. As far as your question about who would be more responsible. That's a very difficult question to answer. If I had to guess it would be either;
or
I know that voting is not supposed to work like this, I know that when you vote you are supposed to vote who you want to win. However, when dealing with multiple horses in the end phase. If people got divided on candidates, that division itself can potentially influence the end result.
Oh, I wasn't trying to blame anyone. The question was in terms of "does X cause Y", it wasn't meant to bring 'blame' into the mix.
And yes, even if they're a vehicle for evil, I agree that we can and should recognize that they were taught things that aren't true and it may not be so easy to just snap your fingers and get out of the spell.
I agree, I don't think they care what people vote, it's more just whatever is optimal for them as individuals or coordinated interests.
In some ways I almost feel like voting when you don't really mean it would (if anything) be bad for the state, because you're sending a signal of misinformation (rather than helping them keep track of how many people aren't buying it) 😀
I know :)
It's not easy for sure.......haven't tried the finger snapping though..............lol
Well thank you for your thoughts and the nice exchange :)
Unrelated but you don't have a recent blog post I can reply to...
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You're welcome. Thanks @blaineb :)