BrianBlackwell wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:22 am
Do you believe that you own yourself? By extension, do you believe that others also own themselves? It seems that the vegan ideal is founded on this very premise. To say that is is wrong to murder an unwilling animal is to say that the animal has a right to its own body -- that he owns himself -- and to act upon him against his will is a violation of that right.
However, every few years, millions of vegans step into a voting booth and push a button that says, "I grant this person the right to cast down dictates upon the 300,000,000 people within the arbitrary border called the United States, be they willing or not. Furthermore, I grant this person the right to do bodily harm to anyone who does not comply with these demands, denying that person his freedom by throwing him in a cage, and even killing him should he forcibly resist." Oddly enough, the people who push this button feel completely justified in doing so, and even claim that it's the responsible thing to do.
I do not understand how these mutually-exclusive ideas can reside within the same mind. If someone would like to shed some light on this, I would be interested to hear the rationale.
You think staying home is more ethical than picking between two very different logical inevitabilities and you couch it in egoist philosophy where your last egoist intuition was to vote Bush, yeah not a stellar sales pitch.
My comments to a friend on facebook the last election:
Wow Rufus you provoked a lot of conversation, good for you, I'd just ask that you think seriously about what is best for your common man dying because of the cuts and the propping up of dictatorships across the world and bombings, it does seem you are sympathetic to that, but you don't know if voting will change anything, let me give you my take on that problem:
The anarchist critique of voting between two almost identical candidates is a sound one, often even if you vote for the candidate who is slightly better they are able to push through a whole raft of bad legislation that we'd be able to rally popular support against if it was the worse candidate. Only to have them pass the baton of party power back to the worse candidate in 5 years anyway. In that case it is better to spoil your ballot or abstain and wake people up to this reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQY-wMdtGHU
In France 9% just went to the polls and spoilt their ballot after saying they would in polling Melanchon conducted, which reached major news and is great movement solidarity. You can see in this picture that Marine Le Pen (Fascism) and Macron (American Libertarianism) are equal distance from the Libertarian Socialism quadrant that is real freedom and mutual aid:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/images/france2017.png
But saying all that there are many examples in history of anarchists calling on people to head to the polls, when it is abundently clear the working class have something to gain. And there is a real lesser of two evils option that wont just fizzle out at the next election if power changes hands again.
In 1936 Spain, the CNT an anarchist union encouraged it's members to vote for the left alliance because it would free political prisoners. It had the allegiance of many peasant farmers who would usually abstain from party politics.
Corbyn is that today for people dying having their welfare cut, refugee children dying in Calais and all those people abroad suffering under dictatorship that Corbyn has put the spotlight on and will change Britains relationship to.
If you are in the bottom left quadrant of that political compass and there is a clear choice between someone on the opposite side and half way in between, you take that choice between the lesser of two evils because you have your voice heard and you change the conversation.
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The problem your suffering from is an all or nothing mentality, you have to way your actions up as to how it will move the needle from the status quo.
Ethical scale:
Voting Conservatives - Guaranteed to increase the chances of people dying.
Staying home - Guaranteed to do nothing.
Spoiling your ballot - Guaranteed to do little but symbolic.
Voting Labour - Guaranteed to increase the chances of saving people from dying.
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Forgetting about boundary changes and campaign spending for a second, and just thinking about the vote counting, if you could be convinced that there was no foul play in the counting of ballots, would you agree that everyone voting for the candidate they most agreed with would be a good thing in the example I provided where there is a legitimate choice between two vastly different mandates? Because it would save lives.
This happened just a few months ago in Gambia where the population decided to take an increasingly insane dictator (who thought he could cure AIDS with his bare hands and reading of the Quran) serious about a free and fair election monitored by international observers. And many times in history:
"The "People Power" moment of 1989, when whole populations brought down their absurd rulers by an exercise of arm-folding and sarcasm, had its origins partly in the Philippines in 1985, when the dictator Marcos called a "snap election" and the voters decided to take him seriously. They acted "as if" the vote were free and fair, and they made it so.
...He therefore proposed living "as if" he were a citizen of a free society, "as if" lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, "as if" his government had signed (which it actually had) the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic the "power of the powerless" because, even when disagreement is almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look stupid. At around the same time, and alarmed in a different way by many of the same things (the morbid relationship of the cold war to the nuclear arms race), Professor EP Thompson proposed that we live "as if" a free and independent Europe already existed"
