If you don’t engage in good faith, you don’t get further effort and discussion. And you haven’t, even when you’ve been offered it.

As mentioned in another thread, I’ve been getting replies on about 25 threads, and I’m trying to reply to each in a reasonable way. I wasn’t really expecting this level of response to what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial comment that the supreme court had been packed by trump. We’ve definitely covered a fair amount more since then, and I appreciate the time people have taken to do so. I’ve also noticed that you are one of the most prolific of those responders, so thank you, I know I am almost certainly trying your patience.

Your original premise, that you’ve repeated, is that not doing this is unacceptable. You also never addressed why you draw the line there when I asked elsewhere.

It seems to me that at each election, the sensible thing to do is act to minimise the resultant harm. Between elections is when the work of changing course needs to happen. Yes there are multiple cycles of elections at different levels, each can be treated as it’s own task. I think that’s what you’re asking, but I’m not certain.

Then why would one do something that you acknowledge makes the task much more difficult?

Because not doing so makes it even harder. The further right politics drifts the harder it will be to pull it left and the harder life will be for a great many people.

And then add all the other myriad restrictions you’ve dictated

The only things I’ve be advocating are not doing anything that would increase the chance of trump winning and making sure that candidates in any election know why you would withhold your vote early enough that they can actually do something about it without losing more of the rest of their voters.

Literally hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people throughout history have done this to great success, as I have pointed out elsewhere.

I think we’re talking at cross-purposes here. Yes, many have advocated for different approaches throughout history, and in other countries, with some success. What I am referring to is the here-and-now. Over the last electoral cycles, where has the messaging been to actually inspire large enough groups of the electorate that there is a better way? The fact that large enough groups haven’t been inspired to demand change means the messaging isn’t getting out effectively.

People in this thread have articulated everything from broad marxist philosphies on developing proletarian power, to specific use of strikes, to even electoral strategies that fit within your deliberately impossibly narrow ‘acceptable’ electoral frame. You’ve ignored or handwaved all of them away.

They have, and I thank them for it. I have tried to respond as best I can, if I have missed points, or not articulated myself well that’s on me, but I have certainly not handwaved away anyone. I do worry that the approach of “I’m not going to vote for biden because he is evil/hasn’t earned my vote/isn’t left enough/whatever” ignores the fact that the outcome of the presidential election is a simple either/or at this point. Assuming you are closer to biden’s politics that trumps, not voting just tips the balance slightly towards trump. This doesn’t penalize biden in any meaningful way, but it does penalize the people who trump wants to harm. He’s made it clear he supports all the same genocide that biden does, but to an even greater degree, so that won’t change for the better, and he’s demonizing minorities, so they’ll suffer even more. To me that seems like a simple choice, but it seems it’s not to everyone. Further down ticket I feel like the dems remain the least bad choice, if only to limit trump should he get in.

One of the other posters suggested they would vote for a presidential candidate who couldn’t win, and then dems doe the rest of the ticket, and whilst that certainly wasn’t my first approach, I agreed that it could actually work. They made a good point that that could open up some space for more left wing candidates by showing the votes were there if they were earned. That approach sort of matches with what I was saying before that as long as the dems hold one or more of the houses it would limit the harm from a trump presidency. I don’t like the concept, but I can see how it could have the desired outcome.

But if you really want to look deeper into the issue I’d suggest starting here.

Har har. I was sort of expecting that. As I said, I’m doing my best to engage in good faith, but I think we might be coming at this from such different directions that neither of us are actually getting our meaning across effectively.