g_g [she/her, comrade/them]

me and my 89,922 friends

it looks so cute tho

have at it. i refuse to dignify the actions of any genocidal maniac with an endorsement in the form of my vote. simple as.

okay so I read the whole thing. it describes a really shitty, extant system. it defines the spoiler effect. it shows how the spoiler effect makes the already shitty system even more shitty. all that’s fine and well. never once does it say that voting for minor party candidates is literally a vote for republicans, which was the actual statement that I took issue with.

you’re welcome to make the argument that the result is the same and that’s why you specifically will only vote strategically. that’s fine. it does absolutely nothing to compel me to vote for either democrats or for republicans. or even to vote at all for that matter. why participate in such a fundamentally broken system at all then? just to give one more point to 99% hitler? no thank you.

abstention is, quite literally, not a vote for the person you like less.

voting for a minor party candidate is, quite literally, not a vote for republicans.

Zuzak’s comment is great and i wouldn’t dare to suggest that I could do a better job - I just want to hammer on the point that you are not the agent of karma

when I say you, i don’t mean you DragonWasabi, or you DragonWasabi’s friend, i really mean anyone. especially in most Buddhist schools, there really isn’t a “distributer of karmic justice” or what have you. it’s just, as i understand the Buddhist perspective, a force of nature and it is how it is. it doesn’t need an agent, and acting as if one is that is almost certain to worsen one’s karmic load, hence ahimsa.

disclaimer that i myself do not identify as Buddhist or anything resembling a Buddhism expert. i took one intro to Buddhism class in college and that’s all i’ve got.

Yes and/but -

that seems to be where the buddhist view regarding karma separates itself from, say, hinduism, where karma becomes the entire basis for the caste system

“hinduism” (itself a colonial term with little basis in material reality regarding actual practices and beliefs) is just as multifaceted and diverse as buddhism, if not moreso. i largely agree with your comment, i just think it’s important to point out that among vedic traditions you will get very different thoughts on the caste system and it’s justifications and it’s relation to karma. a dualistic vaishnavite will likely see the castes very differently than a follower of non-dual tantric shaktism. both are likely to have perceptions of karma, but one might argue that it justifies castes, another might argue that castes are entirely an illusion as is the whole imminent world (as in some forms of advaita vedanta), and yet another might argue that castes are merely part of god’s play but don’t have any more significant implications than that.