If you spend time with real boots-on-the-ground activism to support and prop up legitimate leftist candidates, policies, and parties in advance of election years, then yeah fine I'll accept your righteous abstaining from voting the general election.
But if your "protest" begins and ends with choosing to not vote the lesser of two evils while you're not doing anything to actually upend the system, fuck you. Your ideological purity is causing real world harm while you pout and expect some other magical force to swoop in and save you.
Nobody is coming to save you.
Nobody.
Either put in the fucking work and put in the real effort to change things, or fall in line. As is, you're just in everyone's way.
Well put. Thing is, I don't see people who don't vote going around telling people not to vote. They usually want nothing to do with an election and don't like to hear about it either.
So I always assume that the people who are telling you not to vote are doing it specifically to discredit whoever runs against Trump. Which makes them either MAGA shills or russian trolls. Both equally bad.
To your first point, unsurprisingly, the boots on the ground folks typically are fans of damage control in the system as it stands in the first place. Turns out allowing the authoritarians to have their way is not the way to effect leftward change in the slightest.
Dont worry internet stranger, i caught ur drift, but in times like these u can never do without additional clarification/elaboration. I think it helps if the actual leftists take the effort to distance themselves from any efforts that put Dr. Fascismo in the seat of the most powerful nation in the world.