Eh, boy, here we go. Tough to do this in a sub that strongly polices disparaging comments about any side, so I'm gonna have to do a little bit of "both sidesing" here, much to my chagrin.

In the US, our elections suck. They are garbage, but they are what we have right now, and that's the hand we have to play. The two candidates suck. They just do. I'm sure virtually everyone, no matter how you plan to spend your Tuesday in November, wishes they had some better option. And we won't, barring some extraordinarily serendipitous events.

You can do whatever you want with your vote. You can vote for the Blue Team, you can vote for the Red Team, or you can take your vote to a concert, huff some illicit substances, pass out on a stranger's floor, and wake up hungover with your vote nowhere to be found. It's your choice, and I won't judge you for refusing to vote D or R. You have your own personal convictions and what you do in that ballot box - or outside it - is your right in a democracy.

But what you should not do is try to draw others into protests about moral imperatives that entail predictably bad outcomes in order to make some high-ground moralizing point. If you think a candidate is bad on an issue and you don't want to support them, that's your right, and I withhold judgement; but if both candidates are essentially the same on this particular issue and you urge other people to withhold their votes on the grounds that neither is perfect on that issue, well now I do have a problem with that.

You see, that is not activism. That is virtue-signaling. There are many issues which are very important and depending on who is elected, there could be very significantly worse outcomes for some people. By urging others to follow your single-issue purity test, you are asking others to sacrifice their rights, their safety, their dignity, while doing absolutely nothing to solve the very problem you say you care about.

Urging others to not vote isn't activism, it's sabotage and "boogaloo" bullshirt.

Withholding your vote isn't activism, just as voting itself isn't activism. Activism is organizing; it's forming unions; it's engaging in mutual aid and community building; it's engaging in civil protests; it's taking direct action. You're not making the world better by insisting that others sacrifice themselves and their humanity and their dignity in a way that has no direct bearing on solving any problems. What you're doing is attempting to inflict pain on others as a form of punishment for not doing it your way. And that is not very civil, kind, helpful, or good.