when you see people speaking AGAINST voting in the midterms

the-real-seebs:

jumpingjacktrash:

think back to the last time you saw a bunch of bloggers saying those things

and how many of them turned out to be employed by the Russian Internet Research Agency to get trump elected

i don’t know whether the russian agitprop bloggers are back under new names or whether there’s a fresh new footbullet brigade who actually bought their nihilistic message, but in the end it doesn’t matter

anyone telling you that, if you hate the way america is turning into a fascist puppet state, you should do nothing, is an enemy

anyone telling you that exercising your rights as a citizen is a bad thing, and that you should totally stick it to the man by sitting around with your thumb up your ass fantasizing about ‘burning it all down’, is a dangerous enemy, or dangerously stupid

and anyone who actually tries to get you to make real plans to go out and blow shit up, do murders, start fires, and get a lot of gung-ho idiots and innocent bystanders killed, is a literal felon, and either it’s a sting or they’re a terrorist

i don’t care if the thought of being a gun-toting shoot-first patriot sounds a-ok to you as long as you’re a leftist gun-toting shoot-first patriot, i am telling you, as Internet Dad, Local Calm Person, and Guy Who Has Seen This Shit Before, put the hateboner back in your pants, wash your hands, and go do what real americans do when they want freedom and progress: VOTE.

things we’ve gotten through voting and persuading people, with some demonstrations but fundamentally by pursuing legalization and persuasion as strategies:

• women can vote
• gays can be gay
• gays can marry
• an attempt at making health coverage available to everyone, even if it has flaws
• civil rights laws banning discrimination against people based on a lot of things that used to be 100% legal to discriminate based on
• laws against child labor
• laws against child abuse
• women and gays allowed to serve in the military

things we couldn’t get by persuading people, and ended up having to go to war to try to get, but lost so we didn’t get it anyway:

• continued legalization of chattel slavery

note the pattern here: (1) the violent revolution lost (2) also they were the bad guys