it’s really grasping for anything

Absolutely not! It’s like the lowest hanging fruit of a bountiful tree of evil she’s a part of. Anarchists also have a long history of advocacy for the abolition of police, so again this kind of rhetoric coming from actual humans should not come as a surprise.

In most communities, I’d agree. But in an anarchist community, especially this C/, the only thing I’d be surprised at is that the meme is stale. This place is usually pretty fresh on the meme train.

Tbh, most of the blahaj political C/s, you can essentially not worry much about farming. There’s really not going to be any posts of the usual propaganda subjects that would be out of the norm for the various communities. I’m mostly a lurker on blahaj, but it’s pretty damn lefty friendly overall.

No bullshit, just lurk for a while and it’ll be easy enough to see.

I don’t tell people to vote or not, people can make that decision themselves, I’m not their master(I keep that in the bedroom). I was a politico/activist, I did a hell of a lot more then vote every couple of years. I became an anarchist because of all of the subtile out in the open corruption that I saw. If voting could produce substantial reform it would have been made illegal. There is never an appropriate time for holding anyone accountable, during the primaries everyone says we can’t support a reform candidate because they’ll loss in the general, we have to support the nominee because other side bad, & we can’t have change next election because other side bad. If you never hold anyone accountable for their actions why would they ever change? I’m not saying tactical voting is useless but blind support for a political establishment is dangerous. People are so afraid of other side that they bend over backwards to not view their politicians critically & the two parties in general are a lot closer on policy then people like to think. The fact I get so much angry push back for even minor critisism is evidence that people have let themselves be cooped. The more corrupt & brutal police departments are in Democratic strongholds. We just had the largest most sustained anti police protest in history & all of the reforms have been largely cooped or underminded & rolled back & now we have a former prosecutor who defended corrupt police & other corrupt prosecutors who has been ordained the new candidate with no real candidate electoral process. An across the board Democratic landslide would have it’s own pitfalls. The Democrats efforts on gun control will disproportionately effect marginalized people because gun control always has. The Stop & Frisck program is a good example of the harm gun control policies have. Only two percent of the stops found guns, POC & trans women where grossly over represented & NY cops were allowed to arrest women in possession of condoms for prostetution. Harris as a prosecutor prosecuted non violent gun possession cases harshly, a subset of those cases would have been marginalized people who had a gun only for self defense. I honesty think mutual aid activism is far more productive then spending time trying to get people to vote.

Neither of those sources give a particularly compelling practical justification for abstentionism.

I don’t agree with you. Ward’s piece talks about how compromising on voting helped cost the CNT-FAI the Spanish Revolution.

Sitting idly by while the right systematically entrenches authoritarianism yields objectively worse results for anarchists.

Not voting ≠ sitting idly by. Quoting a different section of the same Anarchist FAQ:

We do this by organising what Bakunin called “antipolitical social power of the working classes.” [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 263] This activity which bases itself on the two broad strategies of encouraging direct action and building alternatives where we live and work.

But more importantly, I really wanted to demonstrate in my previous comment that we’re not fucking bots, which I’m so tired of seeing, and that we’re real fucking people and our perspectives are just as valid as yours. I don’t give a fuck whether or not you agree with me on going to the ballot box because I’m not interested in debating whether or not you or anyone else go to the ballot box. You do whatever makes you comfortable.

But I’m not going to do it myself because I’ve been there and done that. I’m not going to debate it because the possible good that can come out of it, almost zero, is not enough to justify the vigorous debate it attracts, sucking bandwidth away from actually important stuff. And I’m not going to lose any extra sleep over my nonparticipation in the election if Trump or Harris wins because ultimately, elections serve to ratify decisions already made by capital. And I refuse to be guilted over choosing not to participate in the ratification of our own oppression.