The fundamental tenet of a working democracy is voting. Everyone should have a vote and everyone should exercise their right to vote. To that end we have been seeing posts attempting to shame/mock or otherwise influence people not to vote. While this is a meme community, the idea that people shouldn’t vote goes against the fundamentals of a democracy by the people and for the people. To that end, we are adding a new rule that disallows posts that discourage or shame people from voting. This doesn’t mean that you can’t address how people vote, but even those who don’t agree with you and your political views should still vote. We all should. Everyone. Part of the reason we are in the mess we are in now is because participation in democracy is abysmal. Posts discouraging people from voting are essentially propaganda and will be removed.
PoliticalMemes is a community for having fun at the expense of our political hellscape we find ourselves in. People not voting is a big part of why.
We are taking feedback on this change, please let us know if you agree or disagree in the comments and why.
Agree wholeheartedly. There’s no good-faith reason you would ever try to convince someone to not vote. None.
I guess that if that happened, voting would be the least of your concerns. You’d probably need to prepare to take arms, cause if that happened, the situation would be pretty fucked, and I doubt it’d happen without an accompanying civil war 🤷♂️
Be careful about unrealistic dilemmas. Reasoning in a void leads to disastrous positions that don’t apply in the real world because they are divorced from reality. Context matters a lot, and can’t be erased. There’s almost always a third, fourth, fifth option in reality.
Answering false dilemmas is the modus operandi of fascism. First, you imagine issues that don’t exist (like a caste of jewish puppeteers), then you apply insane politics to solve the problem you invented †. To be clear, I’m not saying you’re a fascist. I’m just outlining where that line of reasoning could lead you.
† This precise point is why I despise Attack on Titans and its debased premises. You basically empathize with a full-on fascist answering shitty questions that have no basis in reality.
Centrist Democrats love to interpret any dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party as encouragement to not vote at best and overt support for Trump at worst.
I have every expectation that this will be the standard by which this rule is implemented.
You can criticize and make jokes about 46 without discouraging voter turnout. They are just alot harder than making em about 45 who jokes write themselves.
Of course I can. That doesn’t stop centrist Democrats from making accusations in bad faith because they want to silence criticism.
Funny, i see much more bitching about nonexistent centrist dems than actual centrist dems on here. What i do see a lot of is apologists expaining why discussing the merits of not voting is actually for the best and not playing directly into the kremlins plans.
This rule will result in a slippery slope where any post critical of Biden will be be removed, resulting in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals with little engagement and discourse. It has the potential to stifle and eventually kill the community.
Seriously any criticism of Biden and the clowns come out to tell me I should fear Trump is gonna accomplish everything he wants on day one, but Biden can’t do most of what he promised because? You ask for a third party and get accused of dissuading voters from voting. I see Biden “supporters” calling him Hitler lite, and asking well if not Biden then who? Like believing the DNC tale is exactly how these clowns can make someone as unpalatable as Biden seem decent. And the best part is they will always say its no competition and I should be happy for the crumbs of the promises Biden kept because in contrast you better believe Trump is gonna keep all his promises 🙄🤣🤣🤣
It’s certainly easy to support this move when it applies to “discouraging voting”, but it gets murkier for posts about “discouraging voting for a certain candidate”.
The example given was one seemingly implying “X is bad - but you think Y is better??” If the net implication is “don’t vote”, then the concern is valid, but if it’s “Vote for a third party, likelihood be damned”, it does sound more valid. That said, I have yet to see memes positively highlighting a valid third party from front runners.
I’d definitely like a return to elections where we decide which candidate is best, not which is least worse.
Informed voting is what’s important. Voting in-and-of-itself doesn’t contribute to a healthy democracy. To the contrary, mindless voting almost killed democracy multiple times recently.
To that end, I disagree with the notion that everyone should vote: filling your ballot on name recognition or in accordance with some preacher’s orders or some shit is dangerous, and if that’s you, then you absolutely should not vote!
Dig. Get at least some basic info on the people on your ballot. Consider the secondary and tertiary effects of any proposed policy; consider how it could back fire, etc. Once you actually understand what you’re voting on, THEN vote. But if you won’t take the time to do that, just showing up isn’t doing any kind of civic duty.
It’s not misinformed voting that caused Trump’s ascension to power. Participation was abysmally low (55% of the adult population). I don’t think Trump, or any other far-right lunatic, can win an election without voter apathy.
Do not reinforce stereotypes that some people should not be allowed to vote because they’re too stupid. It is sterile and dangerous.
True, but the undemocratic idea that voting should be left to “informed” people (who decides who’s informed, or how do you make sure people are impartially informed, anyway?), is still dangerous. The idea that a part of the population is too dumb to take part in democracy is a core motivation of eugenism.
Don’t discourage people voting against their interest from voting. You need their vote to dislodge autocrats. You need to convince them instead. If you believe in democracy, that is.
Your right maybe we should have a test that you have to take before you can vote. But that might accidentally disinfancise people who are competent to vote, so to be safe if your family has a tradition of voting you probably learned about it at home, so if your grandfather could vote you don’t have to take the test. This is a good and original system you have created.
To vote answer this question.
Snow is the same color as:
- -flower
- -grass
- -skin
- -roses
Aight I thought the other guy was just trolling, so I didn’t bother with a reply, but it looks like you reached the same conclusion, so maybe I didn’t make myself clear.
No where in my post did I say uninformed voters shouldn’t be allowed to vote; I said they shouldn’t vote. That might sound pedantic, but it’s an important distinction.
My issue is with the cultural notion that “It’s your civic duty to vote!” cuz no, it isn’t. Voting is a tool, and like any other tool it can be used in a dangerous way if you don’t take the time to understand how it works.
If you’re not sure how to operate pneumatic hammer, you shouldn’t do that either; but I’m not saying you should be disallowed from handling one or face legal consequences for trying; I’m saying YOU should have the sense to recognize the potential for harm from misuse of the tool in question, and YOU should choose to abstain from trying until you’ve done some homework.
If you are asking people to self select not to vote, only informed voters will self select out. The vast majority of poorly informed or misinformed voters don’t know enough to identify their knowledge gaps. Like a voting Dunning-Kruger asking people to abstain from voting if they are uninformed will actually result in an overall less informed voting population. If you want informed voters then get everyone to vote and increase voter education.
Not voting is a vote of no confidence.
similar deliberative body indicate that they no longer support a leader, government,etc.
Voting is a choice. Not voting is a choice. If you take away the choice of not voting, while only allowing two candidates that a vast majority of Americans don’t want, then can you really call it a democracy?
If voting is important to you, then it would serve the community better if the suggestion of not voting was discussed and denounced in the community itself. That is the purpose of social forums, to discuss ideas.
A forum is a public meeting place for open discussions. This rule is the policing of thought, and the antithesis of a forum.
If voting is important to you, then it would serve the community better if the suggestion of not voting was discussed and denounced in the community itself.
…It would be kind of interesting if the amount of people voting plummeted so much so that it removed almost any sense of considering the results legitimate and representative of the populace whatsoever. So far as I’m aware I don’t know of any democracies that have a sort of minimal threshold explicitly set to account for and address such a situation…They all seem to presume sufficient civic participation and confidence in their institutions that their citizens wouldn’t simply not participate/vote en masse.
I think part of the reasoning for that being that if things have gotten that bad, surely the citizenry wouldn’t simply not vote, they’d actively be overthrowing the institutions they had lost confidence in.
The fact people are in this thread discussing the merits of voting should indicate to the mods why this is an ill-conceived rule.
Oh yes, of course! Its why antifazcist groups should welcome fascist speakers to engage in open, honest debate.
Got this account tagged as “russian shill”
Its incredible how often this one turns up whenever voting comes up to let us all know its uselss and not to do it. Almost like itd benefit them if you didnt.
