These people sound like exact copies of the people saying voting in 2000 didn't matter, and that turned out to be the most politically consequential of my lifetime. Gore was imperfect as they all are, but holy fuck did Dubya fuck up literally everything he touched.
Among many, many, many things, Dubya started forever wars killing untold hundreds of thousands of people. He accelerated oil and gas production, absolutely setting the Climate Change world on a pace for disaster. He seated Alito, unquestionably the biggest monster currently on the Supreme Court. And he passed a monster tax cut for the rich that set us on this path of unrestrained deficit spending.
And that's just the headlines. Remember when he tried to put his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court? lol
Gen X already tried this 25 years ago and it fucked the world up so badly that we need to be saved by the future generations. Imagine not learning that lesson and doing it again.
Probably a similar initial response, but no Iraq War two years later. Which would make a... massive (and positive, in case that wasn't clear) change in the direction and concerns of American foreign policy.
But remember there were 100s of people driving towards those topics. Career defense and security types making their damnedest case that they needed those tools to avoid 9/11 2.0.
I hope gore, and the staff he surrounded himself with would have had the vision to avoid all that, despite the pressure.
Based on after-the-fact reports, it may never have happened.
Maybe that's just exposure to all the conspiracy theories, though, I dunno if he would have acted any differently than Bush did to the intelligence reports.
It's questionable if it'd have even happened had gore been at the desk, y'know, because he'd have probably actually read the imminent attack report about the plot before it happened.
Al Gore won the popular vote, but there was some sketchiness down in Florida. During a recount, Roger Stone rallied the troops (Brooks Brothers riot) which caused the counting to be stopped, due to threats of violence. Setting up the supreme Court to decide Bush won Florida.
I, personally sat out that election because I didn't like Al's wife, Tipper Gore. She led the charge in a bunch of manufactured outrage about obscenity in music. I was also a jaded, cynical gen-xer who'd been hearing the importance of voting as long as I could remember, but every election was just choosing between a douchbag and a turd sandwich.
Looking back on everything that happened after that election, it's insane to imagine how different things would be now if Gore had been in office instead of the criminal enterprise that we ended up with.
Gore was the watershed moment of the white left deciding no progress is allowed to happen unless it's by their hands and they get all the credit.
Nader fired up his campaign in swing states as an act of retaliation against Gore posing himself as the climate candidate.
That's it.
The Greens had a meltdown that the thing that usually happens to third parties in this country, that is having their platforms become the mainstream if they make enough noise, was happening to them, and they decided we're not allowed to make any progress on climate unless we do it through them so fuck Gore and fuck anyone who'd dare support that disgusting "mOdErAtE!"
What really gets my goat is how some people now act like George W Bush is this respectable elder statesman that only did his best and oh, how cute, he's friends with Michelle Obama. Like, sure, next to Trump he looks like a political savant, but come on, he still was a total piece of shit that did lasting damage.
Protest voters who supported Stein alone would have flipped every single rust belt state had they decided on the country over feeling validated in wanting to vote "for" someone, and Zoomers and Millenials simply matching their share of the population in turnout could have propelled Bernie to the front of the primaries and over the finish line.
Nevermind how not voting let trump happen, not voting let clinton happen.
There are legitimate criticisms to be had of Biden, but in every case, Trump is unambiguously worse. If Trump were pro-Palestine, I could maybe understand single-issue voters preferring him to Biden...but he's not.
To be honest, I have little hope for 2024. Genuine fake news is rampant, and in pretty much every case it hurts Biden (misinformation about the economy, etc.). I'll be voting a straight Dem ticket in my very red state, and hoping against all hope that uninformed voters somehow do the right thing.
Lmao, that's the epitome of something that sounds smart but is incredibly stupid when you think about it. Especially in response to this meme.
In FPTP not voting for the chosen democratic representative means one vote less is required for the conservative. It doesn't matter if that's because you added a vote for Democrats, or didn't vote at all. Same for voting 3rd party, it just ensures you get the candidate you want the least.
I agree with this. Choosing a lesser evil in a FPTP, bicameral political system is not the answer. Pushing for ranked choice voting is the answer, and one step towards proportional representation like what we see in the EU.
Same for voting 3rd party, it just ensures you get the candidate you want the least.
this claim is obviously false, since I have provided proof against it. if you want to weaken the claim, moving the goalposts, that's fine, but don't break a sweat.
Not sure if you're just being intentionally thick or a troll.
Youre explaining yourself that despite you voting against him, Biden won, and you didn't want Trump and the person you voted for didn't win. So your actions gave you the least chance of having a candidate you were aligned with.
If anything, you are giving proof that it's a dumb thing to do. But that would be anecdotal evidence, and there's no need for that.
If you manually run the results and the effects of 3rd parties, it's pretty clear that it makes no sense in First Past the Post.
It's a thing known as The spoiler effect, or vote splitting and has always been a documented thing that dumb people don't understand. Who do you think funds these 3rd parties in the first place...
But they've been running the conservative party the same way for 50 years too. You're literally admitting to hate Biden so much you let the conservatives win even if that meant making the US worse.
Literally what the meme is about. Tell us, what have you gained from it aside from more frustration and hate? Biden didnt learn anything from 2016. You can blame biden when you lose your democracy, but you'll still have lost your democracy. I wouldn't wait for Biden to fix that. The democratic party is more than one person making decisions, and handing the power to your enemy is not how you make changes within your own team.
Yeah and we could find one person who voted for vermin supreme, Biden still won. What would their point be if they were here, I wonder? Speaking of points, what's yours?
I mean it practically is. The happy pain supporters will still show up to dish out their warped idea of hateful justice.
If water was flooding into your house and you said you won't bother to turn the water main off because the roof is failing you still end up with a flooded house.
The incident is happening whether or not you participate in it. The best you can do is push against it even if it's tiring and doesn't fix all things. And unless you are ending your own existence then you will be around to experience the fallout.
Self inflicted pain still hurts even if you think it's deserved. I know it's rough but the world keeps spinning without your input. Fate is for those that do not act.
I think it would be fun if every person on Reddit and Lemmy accused of being a paid shill was actually a paid shill. Basically, Reddit and Lemmy would be huge job creators and wouldn't hurt anyone because everyone was shilling at each other for money.
A critical refinement of this point: By all means, please do vote for whichever actual progressive candidate you favor in your state's Democratic primary. This is not sarcasm; do it. But when the general election comes around Biden is inevitably the candidate anyway, do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of office.
If you're in a red area, consider voting in the Republican primary in good faith. (Don't try nominating the worse candidate. The backfire is terrible.) You're still allowed to vote for whoever you want in the general. This election primaries will largely be about down ticket races, but that's important too.
That would require them to actually give enough of a shit to turn out for primaries, and president Bernie can tell you that none of these fake allies actually care enough to wrench themselves from their two bit Jean-Paul Marat act for such a herculean labor.
See Bernie 2016. Won the DNC, but got snake in the grass Hillary instead, which led to understandable mass apathy amongst the Democratic voters. I'm still pissed!
Kinda like what reportedly happened with McGovern '72
Woah woah woah, you mean actually try to win votes through rational and humane policy and not merely the fact that he's running against a human piece of shit and is technically better? You mean that we should have someone with actual principles on the democratic ticket instead of someone nodding along and sending weapons to a genocidal government? Outrageous wow why do you love Trump so much
It's not that simple. Changing positions will probably polarize people to vote against him as much as it will win over votes to him.
Especially because those who are likely to withhold votes over this will probably demand the most drastic of actions before Biden passes their purity test.
Geopolitically it's a bad move on top of that as it ends the relationship with practicallythe only middle Eastern power we have as an ally.
The reproductions of that alone is certain to energize opposition to Biden in the far right.
While he may lose voters over his current inaction, taking action could easily lead to a net loss on election day.
Unfortunately what is best for a country geopolitically and what is morally right often don't agree with each other.
Even from a moral choice Biden is the better option. You get someone pressuring for a Two-state solution keep aid flowing to Palestinians as well as to support in helping Ukraine who are being genocided by their definitions. While also supporting international efforts to re-open one of the busiest shipping channels so places like Africa & others experiencing hardships that will have trouble maintaining safety & stability if prices of common goods increases.
I just can't wait for those of us in the queer community to either be thrown in camps or flee the company, all so that the people who didn't vote can tell me it's actually because of Biden.
Reading these comments, it feels people are having a giant trolley problem moment. Do I vote for Biden and throw the switch so fewer people die, or do I not do it and let more people die, but at least I'm not complicit then?
I think the issue is more rooted in people like you. Spewing voter suppression rhetoric from somewhere but it's rooted in propaganda. Rather than rallying people to help and pointing out the good, which is what gets people motivated, you instead choose to blame the people trying not to turn America into a neo-nazi fascist theocracy. Which is the root at which the meme is getting at lol.
Unless it's simple cat and dog pics (even then sometimes) people on the internet just love to pretend they're above the people who watch reality TV, when it's just a different flavor of the same thing.
If you're interested in convincing people to vote for Biden (which I think is the best option we'll have this election) then I would urge you to talk about the contributions he's made, and to stop telling people who don't want to vote for him that they're the reason the fascists might win. Even if it were true, telling them that will not convince anyone to vote for Biden.
It's also misguided to blame voters for not voting the way you want. If you want a vote, you have to convince the voter! Oh, is the voter too stupid or evil to understand that the candidate is the best? That's a candidate problem. It's literally how democracy works.
But if they don’t vote for him, fascists WILL win. This is not an opinion. It’s a hard truth. And that should be motivation enough for one to hold their nose and vote- THEN make the decision to pay attention more than once every four years.
That same line gets thrown at leftists every election despite no concessions from liberals. Leftists are absolutely trying to make grassroots movement, but overcoming the liberal status quo and making positive change is tremendously difficult. Yes, leftists should vote for Biden, but the DNC should not be surprised that Leftists get desperate and can vote third party if the DNC continues to be a center-right Neoliberal mess.
If it's not motivating people whose fault is that?
I voted for Biden before and I'll do it again. I do think Trump is a threat to democracy. But if a restaurant goes out of business, is it reasonable or productive to say, "it's the person who didn't patronize our restaurant who did this"? "If it weren't for the naysayers and people going to our competitors we would have stayed open!"
Maybe the restaurant should have changed the menu. Maybe it should have offered better prices. Maybe they should have made it more welcoming and marketed better.
For people who don't want to eat shit, either don't offer them shit, explain how it's not shit, or make a pretty empathetic and convincing case why they've got to. My original point was that attempting to shame people and point the finger is not that winning case.
Except it isn't a restaurant, it's control of government, and a basic understanding of the rules of voting in the country shows that there are only two choices that have a reasonable chance of winning.
Yeah which takes ads, which require donations, and that is why politicians basically have to sell out in order to get votes.
EDIT: Everyone is right. The way the world works is that the Democratic candidate has to be a vaulted saint who single-handedly sheds decades old international alliances and ends all war and famine, is immune from money concerns, and disseminates his message via telepathy because traditional donations are beneath a being of his type...and he must be able to fully defeat a Republican demagogue who takes money from anyone, has the full support of Russia, and whose every utterance is covered in the press in addition to being a de-facto cult leader with a warchest of millions or even billions of dollars to be able to do traditional ad buys as well.
It's a convenient excuse to blame bad reviews for a restaurant closing. If the fundamentals of the business are good then bad reviews might hurt but aren't a fatal blow. We can push any analogy until it breaks, but your example is a good case where blaming bad reviews is a convenient way for a restaurant owner to absolve themselves of responsibility or having to think introspectively about why they're not doing well, similar to what Democratic leadership often does.
Staying home instead of voting because one is too busy pouring over a single issue ideology easily the most of tent and foolish thing one can do. The majority of these kids suffering people do this, and/or stating that they themselves are doing this- maybe should place been paying attention the over the last 8-10 years and being active about making change instead of whining o line ever four years.
If it's as serious as you say, you might consider trying to sway people who don't already agree with you instead of telling them they're the reason the country is in trouble.
It’s amusing that you think I haven’t tried this already. I tried it in 2016 with the Bernie Bros, and again in 2020. This year, I say fuck them. I will be voting to save democracy, but I’m done trying to reason with unreasonable children and I’m not about to kiss their smug asses to get them to see part their own ignorance.
Biden supports Two-State no other candidate does. Biden has increased aid into Gaza & advocated heavily to reduce the severity of fighting. Trump wants to deport any immigrant not supporting Israel & wants to get back into office to cut $200 million of funding to UNRWA that goes to Palestine. Biden works hard to stop Russia trying to genocide Ukraine. He is working to limit Iranian arms that are being used to kill Israelis, Arabs, Palestinians, and other in the region. He is working with peers to get trade flowing through one of the busiest shipping channels. That issue is further risking harm in Africa that has been experiencing massive turmoil & escalation of conflicts rising cost of food & resources would further expand that.
But please tell us your candidate, campaign, and actions that will improve or do anything for Palestinians let alone American fighting against wannabe theocrats & opposition that want to lower the quality of life for everyone but the ultra-rich.
I can, some of us live this shit enough that being able to not care is a fucking privilege we don't have.
I blame those backstabbing privileged twats all the way to my grave and then haunt their asses for being able to and choosing to not care.
Fuck your apathy, I want to live, and you shitbags owe it to me and those like me to do the literal minimum that helps achieve that if you want all the glitz and glam of marching alongside us at pride as if you are our allies.
You guys wouldn't have this clusterfuck if you just had a parliamentary system. Don't like the non-reactionary liberal candidate? Great, just vote for whoever else you like, and even if they don't win, they can still join efforts with the lesser evil to make sure the far right doesn't return to power. It also has the added benefit that it doesn't force the whole right wing of the country to cater to the rabid reactionaries on the rise, because those just make a different party that has to balance the distribution of their power with their less mad allies.
I feel like posts like these always fail to realize how fucked of a situation US 'democracy' is in where you must vote for one shitty candidate because the other is literally a fascist.
Like no actually some people have decided that the entire system is untenable - they know there's a lesser of two evils, but they refuse to partake of an illegitimate system.
I try to think that hopefully Trump would get stonewalled enough that he wouldn’t be able to get any of this done.
Then I realize that he seriously does not care. He doesn’t give a shit about Congress, or checks and balances. He and his party have clearly demonstrated that they have no interest in the system of “law and order” that they cling so close to.
Who’s gonna stop him? His courts? An impeachment? Antifa gonna go out and storm Pennsylvania Ave and live up to their damn name, which somehow became an insult?
The fact that this man is on a ballot in any state is shameful. The GOP of just a dozen fucking years ago would have tossed him out on his ass in a second. Somehow since then, Romney, McCain, and Liz Cheney have become the sole voices of reason within the party. One got blackballed, one got censured, and the other one died.
I try to think that hopefully Trump would get stonewalled enough that he wouldn’t be able to get any of this done.
Then I realize that he seriously does not care. He doesn’t give a shit about Congress, or checks and balances. He and his party have clearly demonstrated that they have no interest in the system of “law and order” that they cling so close to.
This cannot be understated enough. He will be a day one dictator. Then he'll be a day two dictator, and day three and four. He won't stop because he knows no one will stop him.
I think the most dissappointing is the current state of the Republican Party.
Seems like back in 2008, the Republican Party was a bit stubborn and stuck in the old days, but they were mostly harmless, like a grandpa who rattles his cane at “kids these days”. Endearing, but not crazy.
Then everything changed. They’ve gone full tilt crazy. They’ve actually managed to redeem 43 and make him look tame and competent (by comparison).
The nutter in me (what’s left of it, after /r/conspiracy got a cheeto mustache) is seriously starting to think that Reddits admiration of Ron Paul (that I very much got caught up in) was a practice run for some psyop astroturf shit that evolved into Trumps presidency.
I think they only get seen as harmless because they only had to perform small acts of violence to get their desired outcomes. They invaded a hotel to spy on their opponents, allied with people that murdered journalists and even in 2000 organized riots outside vote counting centers that gave fear of violence against arbiters of democracy. We cared a lot about the little things so they didn't have to do as much.
But the world is more chaotic now and the big violent movements get way more sway and leaves even more room for bigger grabs of power. It's just a progressing issue that came from us tolerating anything to keep status quo and let people make even more money regardless of how.
Did you hear of the robocalls in NH? Using a deepfaked Biden voice and the spoofed caller ID if someone from the state DNC, telling Democrats to “save their vote for November”?
Disgusting. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it played a hand in Haley’s surprisingly small loss in NH as undeclared voters are able to request either ballot.
What a weird concept. I'm not even entirely sure the desired outcome other than to see if it works and if they (the people doing this) could get away with it. I feel that it definitely sets dangerous precedent and makes it even muddier to have a well informed voter base.
You are thinking that people that would have voted for Biden then used their primary vote to go for Nikki Haley though?
No sense voting for Biden. He’s pretty much locked as the DNC candidate, the primary is really a formality (as often as it seems to be now).
No, NH has an open primary. Any undeclared voter can register for one party for the day to cast a primary ballot.
A lot of independents are undecided in these situations, since they can vote in either primary. Their vote is actually kind of especially powerful, since in this case they can use it to vote against someone in particular.
I live in MA which does the same. I am very left leaning but emphatically selected a republican ballot for the primaries.
Edit to add: this is also why Trumpists are lashing out against her, specifically in NH…they can’t fathom that voters can be independent. You’re either a modern republican or a librul.
What was it they used to say? Country before party? Facts not feelings? Law and order? Literally all of this shit is practically Orwellian. Ironically they really latch onto the “Ignorance is Strength” part.
I’d love to make a glib analogy like ‘my toast got burnt so I burned my house down and most of the neighbourhood’
but the literal fact that so many people are suffering makes that sort of thing rather tasteless.
I don’t think Biden is “Genocide Joe”. That’s ridiculous hyperbole which doesn’t help. We (the public) don’t know what kind of pressure is being levered in the background to end all the horrors of this situation.
People not voting Dem merely because of difficult historical relationships with Israel are dangerously deluded.
I will hold my nose and vote against a dictatorship but I do understand why people are so FUCKING ANGRY with the DNC for not even trying to find someone who is representative of the Democratic voters. They haven't done so for the last decades and it is getting to point where something serious needs to be done about it. As in, make it clear to those 'in power' that we will make their lives a living hell if they continue to ignore the people.
It's more than insulting. It's disgusting behavior by people who know they can do whatever the fuck they want and no one can say or do anything about it because TRUUUMP!! It's a fucking joke. It's a disgrace to democracy and I will never again vote for Democrats.
It's really not that hard to understand. I will vote this time, to prevent trump. Then I will ensure that there is another choice the next time. In any way I can.
well it's grammatically confusing; if you'd stated 'and going forward, I will never again' - sorry it's easy to get confused when the statements contradict each other. I wish you the best of luck, I despise the DNC and think, short of trump / gop, there are few orgs I dislike more, but I will always give them the carveout: well yeah if it's hitler/trump/etc, I'll have to. there are people in so many threads that can't grok there's a good reason for that carveout, and want to play fuck-around-and-find-out with trump-2.0 rebuilding our democracy into a fascistopia.
yeah I get comments pulled for hurting feelings all over. people can dish out insults but they really don't like retorts that come with facts linked, especially the facts that refute their ideals. I was hoping lemmy would be a bit more clinical.
Yeah I know. I really do.
Not excusing it all but progressive policy is hamstrung by all the insane compromise that has to be made. Most of it due to the machinations of both external meddling by countries like Russia, and a (metaphorical) handful of rich people polluting the public discourse with utter nonsense.
They have the media sewn up to spew garbage, and are destroying the education systems to weaken any intellectual resistance.
We have more power to select our democratic candidate than you might think. The primaries in 2020 were our opportunity to select our democratic candidate. Far less people vote in primaries than they do in the general election. Biden won the primaries, so he got the Democratic nomination. If more people voted for primaries we could have a more progressive president. It just turns out that a smaller subset of our population gets to pick the Democratic nominee
You say that as though the entirety of the DNC leadership didn't unite against Bernie Sanders when he was the clear front runner over Hillary. And again, in 2020. I agree, more people need to vote in the primaries. But there is clearly meddling and coercion happening behind the scenes to ensure an appropriately corporate candidate is selected.
Well, for me I actually quite like Biden. His Israel stance and protectionist economic policies are largely the only real policy positions he has that I disagree with him on, and he has done an exceptional job of accomplishing his stated policy goals within an extremely difficult and toxic political environment.
Here's some food for thought: The last time the democrats had a solid hold on the federal govt with a filibuster proof majority in congress, we got the affordable care act. Ever since that term, the dems have been hamstrung by the GOP and rogue DINOs like Manchin and Sinema.
I don't think there's any "controlled opposition" conspiracy. If there's a group to blame here the most, it's the American media for pretending that the reason dems don't get anything done is anything other than obstructionism and "both sides are bad hurr durr" rhetoric.
I'm not claiming there is a secret cabal of evil doers conspiring to ruin everything. But the interests of the rich all align and so they are all largely working towards the same thing. Having money in politics corrupts every single person in it, though to varying degrees. Both sides are very clearly bad. But also very clearly not to the same degree. I agree that Biden has done a lot that is good. But his whole platform is attempting to maintain status quo and while I haven't mentioned this before, my main concern is climate change.
Climate change is going to FUCK everyone. It is already and there is virtually no time to daudle about with half measures and false promises. There have been policies that claim to help and may even attempt to in good faith but they are consistently coopted or corrupted by lobbiests before being implemented or circumvented after. There needs to be strong, decisive action taken to reign in carbon emissions and not just do carbon offsets because carbon offsets are never going to solve this problem. All they do is delay actual action. The main reason I am so fucking angry with Biden is because he's fucking ancient and simply doesn't feel the same urgency as someone who will actually live with the consequences of the recklessness and stupidity of fossil fuels companies.
Everything he has tried to do with regards to this only ends up enriching companies further or passing the blame off to the poor of the country who have no other options than to use fossile fuels. I want someone who will take these oil oligarchs (Oiligarchs is something I saw once and it made me chuckle) to task and actually reign in their insane greed and violence against the natural world. He would and could never even dream of actually doing so. No one the DNC would ever allow to be the candidate would.
There is literally no time left to enact action but here we are twiddling our thumbs while Republicans debate whether Texas should secede for some insane reason. It's all distraction. I'm pissed the fuck off at it all and the ineffectiveness of liberal policy. They are all meek cowards who only exist to lose against the Republicans and then shrug and claim "well at least we tried. :( "
What could Biden have feasibly done other than what he's already done in regards to climate change?
The free market already knows that the fossil fuel industry is rapidly dying, as evidenced by the fact that renewable energy is now the cheapest option for building out new power gen and oil companies have been diversifying away from oil for years now. Don't be surprised if you see Shell building offshore wind farms instead of oil drilling platforms soon.
He's included absolutely massive amounts of funding for renewable projects in the infrastructure bills that have been passed. Enough so that I expect the entire energy landscape of the US to look totally different within the decade. It can't be overstated how big of deal this is, and realistically, this is the most effective climate action he could have taken that wouldn't get stonewalled by republican obstructionism.
Re. fossil fuels and poor people, he's done a good job of both not handing more power to the fossil fuel corps while also not hamstringing the industry and subsequently jacking up the price of energy and transportation across the board. As much as I'd like to ditch fossil fuels, enacting policy that would jack gas prices into the double digits before we're ready to switch by gutting the fossil fuels industry would be political suicide.
Sure, a lot of the legislation he's passing hands money to wealthy corporations. Somebody has to build the infrastructure to get us off fossil fuels after all. That doesn't mean it isn't also improving the world around us at a pace faster than any president in recent history, and being in a position that Biden is bringing us to is a much more stable platform to build real social and economic change off of. There will be no need for a messy revolution if we can incrementally design and build systems that handle the issues we face in a level headed, evidence based fasion.
The last time the democrats had a solid hold on the federal govt with a filibuster proof majority in congress, we got the affordable care act.
A giveaway to corporate America and they arrogantly decided not to codify Roe v. Wade. And don't forget, this was right after the financial crash and not one person from Wall Street went to jail over any of that shit.
It's a hell of a lot more than anything the republicans have done for me in my lifetime. I certainly wouldn't call it a giveaway to corporate america, they fought tooth and nail to try and keep anything even close to the ACA from passing. Is it an ideal system? No, but at least I can get a reasonable insurance package while un or self employed now, and that's a huge deal for the economic mobility of the masses.
Diverting any of the efforts that went into passing the ACA to stuff like codifying roe v wade or staging a big crackdown on wallstreet most likely would have ended up with the ACA getting axed. That's why we need to get the dems to have a secure position as the controlling party so they can focus on longer term goals and hammer the right wingers into irrelevancy. If we can get there, I'd hope to see the dems split into a liberal and leftist party so that way we can argue about which way we want to make progress happen instead of desperately trying to make any progress happen at all.
Buddy, I'm not content with "better than Republicans". The Republicans are getting worse every year and Democrats are happy to follow closely behind.
Diverting any of the efforts that went into passing the ACA to stuff like codifying roe v wade or staging a big crackdown on wallstreet most likely would have ended up with the ACA getting axed.
You're free to believe that. I believe they intentionally dragged it out specifically so they wouldn't have to deliver anything else. Because most Democrat politicians are pro-corporate trash who are enabling the drift into fascism if not outright facilitating it.
You shouldn't be content with just "better than Republicans" that's how we get progress. That said, I still think you're overstating how bad the democrats are. Yes, on some issues, they fold to corporate pressures and I'm not happy about that. In many other areas they are hamstrung by obstructionism and having to appeal to a big tent voter base; this is unavoidable until the republican party becomes irrelevant and the dems can split. There are plenty of areas however where they're making incredible progress, here's a list of stuff that the Biden admin has done just in 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhatBidenHasDone/comments/11lohnc/what_biden_has_done_year_three_year_one_two_are/
44 Democrat senators politicians and Joe Biden acted with lightning speed to block the rail strike. Meanwhile Biden has enlisted Yellen and Powell to go to war with American Workers. Fuck Joe Biden.
still think you’re overstating how bad the democrats are
Respectfully, go fuck yourself. If you genuinely don't think this is bad then you and I are not on the same side. Good luck in 2024 Elect your procorporate trash candidate all on your own.
Biden won the primary by millions and millions of votes, will easily do so again this year, and his policies are (and always have been) square in the middle of the Democratic mainstream. Say what you want about him but he's clearly representative of Democratic voters.
What does this snark have to do with the comment you responded to? Is the Democratic establishment supposed to be beyond even mild criticism? Yeah, they have voters stuck in a corner. We get it.
Now here is something for you to get. The people posting this shit are far more likely to harden people's resolve to punish the Democrats for their abuse of the situation. You are the flip side of the same coin, choosing virtue signaling instead of trying to heal the breech the Democratic establishment created. It's fucking tribalism, just like the Republicans.
What are you talking about? It's both a big- and small-D Democratic election. Biden got nearly 20 million votes, a majority of the total and almost double what Sanders got.
You're completely missing the point that leftists are making if you compare voting for yet another liberal Capitalist as "burnt toast," it's closer to your house being on fire under Biden or your neighborhood under Trump. Neither is good, both are bad, Biden isn't just an inconvenience unless you're privledged enough that you're fine with the Neoliberal status quo.
Will I be voting for Biden? Absolutely. Should I be told to stop whining about how he is a generic, lukewarm Capitalist perpetuating genocide? No.
If they were exerting pressure then Netanyahu would have complained to Congress, like he did with Bush and Obama. Cutting off arms shipments is exerting pressure. Removing the UN block is exerting pressure.
How come we don't talk about "Genocide Trump" more, this close to the election? I think the words "Genocide Trump" should be at least as important to hear online this close to the election. What about "Genocide Trump", what do you think, do you think "Genocide Trump" should be at least or at least not less popular than your alternative?
He went around Congress to give them weapons. That's pretty much all I have to know. Without threatening actual leverage, and that's basically the only leverage they have, his words mean nothing. Batman Begins has a good lesson about that. I just wish there was a non-genocide *choice. What a cool democracy for a cool country.
Could focus on working on congressional campaign advocacy disallowing the President from near unlimited War Reserve Stockpile Allies – Israel (WRSA-I). Republicans are on pretending to be Anti-War doves yet all these protest are alienating them with their disgusting support for Hamass & antisemitic Houthis as well as being a nuisance to the public. Pretty sure there are a lot of people that would agree with this if they weren't being interrupted in traffic picking up their family or trying to get to work on time.
The post has a point. Trump cut funding to UNRWA opposes Two-State unlike Biden and Trump has mentioned deporting any immigrant that doesn't support Israel. Not to mention Democrats provided a slew of "young" candidates in 2020 yet most of the "left" went for an older candidate Bernie Sanders that now agrees with President Biden & that recognizes Ceasefires not offered by Hamas are a joke. So nobody to blame but themselves for the consolidation of one of the most Progressives Presidents in the modern era.
Don't get mad when your fellow advocates refuse or reject to participate in Democracy. Israel & Palestine is a complex issue that many of you were asleep at the wheel on. I tried to bring up the matter up for a vote for amending our party platform at our State Democrat convention this summer because polling showed Democrats supported Palestinians more than Israel but it was the "Leftist" members that voted down claiming it wasn't time to discuss it.
You were are missing in action with Ukraine as Russia tries to genocide them again. Hard to take you all serious especially when its fickle. President Biden is fighting to aid to Gaza as well as reduce the severity of fighting & working to release hostages that is great while wanting to support helping Ukraine. We are also trying to keep Africa safe & access to shipping food to them while antisemitic Houthis attack ships indiscriminately.
If we don't at least pretend to be willing to wield our voting power to influence our govt, we might as well give up and accept we live in an oligarchy.
Sometimes just the threat of violence is enough to get people to act. Biden has already changed his administrations public stance and rhetoric towards Israel at merely the risk of losing votes. Ideally it would have been because of the loss of human lives, but beggars can't be choosers.
it's not the responsibility of voters to vote for certain politicians, it's the responsibility of the politicians to represent people so they vote for them.
if you think joe biden is gonna lose then you gotta force joe biden to take more popular positions (he is literally running right now it's the time you make up your platform), not yell at people "refusing" to vote for him as if they are just petulant children refusing to eat their veggies and act like the most logical and rational option is locking your vote for joe biden and whoever disagrees just cannot understand the correctness of your reasoning.
(to be clear i'm not american but it's just ridiculous how many times i have heard this exact song and dance)
Seriously. I have a hunch that if Trump were president this would be happening regardless except he would be saying how people should be assaulting Palestinians or something like that.
Instead Palestinians have huge support from U.S. citizens, the non/anti-Zionist ones anyway.
Our first amendment rights are only exercisable with the permission of the government, preferably in silence tucked away where no one can see us.
Our third amendment rights are non-existent because SCOTUS draws a line between the police and soldiers. (Never mind the British soldiers were here to police the colonies)
Our Fourth amendment rights exist only notionally. If officers get a dog to jump at your car or have a "good faith belief" that they're within their rights to search.
Fifth is almost just gone. Civil Asset Forfeiture means only the rich can afford to keep the state from taking their stuff at any time. States routinely re-run criminal trials by deliberately getting a mistrial declared if they're losing.
The sixth is a joke. Public defenders in some places have as little as 7 minutes to look at your case. And if you're accused of a misdemeanor you probably won't have a jury at all. But you will lose your job, your house, and everything else in a chain reaction as you have to figure out how to pay hefty fines with no job. Also you'll probably end up in prison for contempt of court when you have trouble paying.
The eighth amendment is likewise a joke. Instead of protecting poor people in the system, it's used as a cudgel to force confessions.
And this is all on top of decades of wealth transfer out of the working class to the point that it's getting hard to buy food for half the country.
Oh yeah, Trump would be horrible. But he's the guy we've been getting set up for, not the guy the establishment is trying to avoid. I'll probably vote for Biden but I'm not going to be surprised when the "status quo genocide" guy gets his ass handed to him. Democrats needed to fight for this and they just aren't.
Edit to add - Y'all know the second the GOP puts up a reasonable sounding asshole we're fucked right? Like if Nikki Haley got the nomination? All that pressure drops away and she'd still institute project 2025 just like Trump.
Palestine will be even more fucked under Trump, he's firmly on Israel's side and would probably increase aid or give them carte blanche to just exterminate Palestine completely. While Biden hasn't been much better, there's at least signs that his administration is trying to reign in the Israelis, though for whatever reason they haven't been terribly serious about it. I'm assuming it's because Israel is a client state that for the most part cooperates with the US and buys our weapons, they can help further whatever policy goals we might have in the region. IMO they seem like they're more trouble than they're worth, whatever we might gain from Israel is ruined by Israel's own conduct, they're dragging us down with them as they act belligerently to everyone around them. Maybe being surrounded by hostile nations on all sides does that, but from the outside looking in it doesn't look like they've seriously sought peace.
If anything, we should be withholding aid from them to get them to show a bit more humility and willingness to work towards peace, but I'm guessing they'd just turn to Russia or China instead and continue being belligerent. If that happened though, then Palestinians are just as fucked as before, if not more so. It's crazy how fickle we can be with any other nation that needs our help and have left plenty of other allies to die, but for whatever reason, we just can't quit Israel. Given all of the alternatives, Palestinians face a slow death unless some sort of two-state solution can be found (or if they could be integrated better into Israel instead of being dead-set on their own independent state), but from what I can see, the least-worst option is for the US to try to be a moderating influence on Israel like what Biden has been halfheartedly doing. It's not great, but the alternatives are worse.
Why do Americans only have these two candidate choices in the presidential election? They seem so diametrically opposed, it is difficult to fathom how a majority of Americans could think either align with them politically.
Yes, am agreeing that must not vote for Biden Genocide Joe. American President must be strong defender of freedoms like Trump, or like great president Putin.
Also, I am liberal sexually fluid college student who eats of many avocado toasts and demands money. Not voting Biden is shared by my many many friends of all races and economic class.
A little too hackneyed for my taste but it might be lost on Lemmy. Too often I see what I think to be legit satire on here and the people are dead ass.
It's the most radical of the left still falling for rich propaganda while pretending like they're enlightened and above class warfare. While still not being able to see the reality of the everyday world for most of their neighbors and vilifying every single one of them nearly carte blanche.
I can never tell if it's internet tough guy situations when they're as smooth as a ken doll IRL or if they just succumb to the same propagandists rhetoric as the right while thinking they're actually helping.
Hello, fellow sexually fluid student of avocado toast college. I choose vote for Trump because his name is Donald, and I favorite Donald Duck and Ronald McDonald.
I'm convinced if it wasn't the conflict in Palestine it would be some other issue that would prevent them from being able to "morally" support Biden.
Yes the conflict in Palestine is terrible, yes there are atrocities occuring, no I don't have any of the solutions.
There seem to be a subset of people that only want to see the negative in every aspect of life and this carries over to politicians/politics in general. The grass is forever more green elsewhere.
I recently asked a friend trapped in this bubble if they had seen the new Mario movie, as I attempt to avoid politics with them at this point in time, and I received the answer, "No, fuck Chris Pratt." I didn't bother asking why, but it seems that nearly ever aspect of life, except the ones they choose to conveniently ignore is reason for social outrage and some how it is "Biden's Fault," with complete disregard to what the alternative looks like.
But 3rd parties!!! Oh yes, because statistically splitting your vote between the only two groups with a chance of being elected to office is the "moral solution."
I don't ever want to hear about "harm reduction" from them again, when their "moral" decision results in women's healthcare being a literal afterthought and rights for a variety of marginalized communities being stripped away. 1,500 people a week are still dying from COVID in the U.S., but hey, let's help elect the party that wants to continue erroding any remaining social safety nets, because you know, people who get sick don't matter as much as this months zeitgeist of social outrage.
You can voice your displeasure while also making sure the world slides a little more slowly down the shithole (and potentionally has a chance to crawl back out). Voting for the president is important, but it's far from the only thing that is. Hedging everything you believe in on a single office is far more damaging than a single vote for Biden could ever be.
We've been living through at least 40+ years of "Vote for 20% more evil instead of 40% more evil" and wouldn't you know it we're at a substantial higher level of evil.
Everyone loves screeching about leftists/3rd party types being silly stupid babies, but yall are the ones who keep telling us the only way to less evil is by adding more evil. 🤷
We're at least trying. If everyone who was a little piss baby whenever third parties came up voted for one we'd have a few by now.
No, that's literally not how that works at all, and frankly if you're dumb enough to think that that is, or malicious enough to willfully ignore knowing that's not how that works, then it's pretty obvious you haven't lived through 40 years of this supposed droning on.
Oh look, screeching about leftists/3rd party types being silly stupid babies.
If Dem lossses are all the lefty's fault, it's probably time to start catering to those voters - instead of dedicating your time to fighting them harder than you've ever fought Republicans then shocked Pikachuing when they don't vote Dem.
No one says you can't vote, or think how you want to think, by all means this is a free country.
The issue I run into is that everyone is being purity tested to an extent that no individual who is at least somewhat tolerable to much of the political middle in the U.S., is acceptable to a specific subset of people who are constantly outraged by something.
Many of these same people complain endlessly about many of the issues a Trump presidency is going to greatly exacerbate, and don't seem to understand, none of us get what we want, but helping to elect him by not voting for the only real alternative seems insanely illogical in my mind. Much like the post states.
It makes no sense to me, "this person is going to burn everything down, but I'm not going to support the only alternative who does things that aren't nearly as bad..."
You don't agree that, speaking in generalities, people with more progressive values (obviously everything is a spectrum), are more likely to purity test their candidate than people with more conservative ideologies?
Speaking, again in generalities, the people I know that vote for conservative candidates do not seem to care what candidates do, no matter how much it runs counter to their core beliefs systems. Look how many, what I would consider abhorrent individuals are elected simply because they are a means to whatever end they are looking for.
Look around on political comments, especially on Lemmy, I see the exact behavior/thought process I'm speaking of on a very regular basis, and I truthfully only check in on this app when I have a client out or maybe before bed.
I'm not ignoring anything, I understand there are a variety of significant concerns about many candidates and processes within the Democratic party, especially when it comes to addressing the concerns of the more progressive issues. However; I think that many on the outer edges of the progressive spectrum over estimate how progressive the average American is, and often fail to consider just how disastrous a second Trump presidency would be for many many people.
Because we all know you're not asking why you can't criticise him, you're asking why you're not allowed to keep calling yourself our ally at pride when you use this as an excuse to not vote for him.
I was having the same conversation with people in 2016. In fact, for every election since 2000. Yes democrats often suck. But at least they believe in consensus based governance and the rule of law. The modern GOP (since the civil rights era) has been firmly authoritarian and anti-democratic. Unfortunately your choices are between “lackluster” and “truly horrifying.” Changing that will take a generation but if you don’t participate now and vote against the GOP, things will be far worse far more quickly than if Democrats just disappoint you.
Very much how I feel. One path gives us the opportunity to improve our situation eventually, the other wishes to burn it all down and create a religious dictatorship, or whatever the hell you'd call the Trump/MAGA/right wing of the U.S.' ideal version of government.
Some people can’t separate the ideal from the actual. Yeah the process sucks and we should demand better. Yeah we should demonstrate, protest, and riot. But we still have to fucking vote, and at the end of the day we have to win. In politics, you can’t play if you don’t win.
People who try to skip voting to go do the rest of the fun stuff should frankly get put in stockades at those riots and pelted.
Fuck these aesthetic allies, do the work or don't show up. Price of admittance to the instagramable protest march is the most recent "I Voted" sticker.
Reminds me of all the critics who took every opportunity to slag Obama for drone strikes while ignoring Trump ramping them way up with no transparency (while Biden virtually eliminated them).
They were trying to hammer railroad strike & the train derailment before. Funny most of them are rose twitter & DSA types that are facing a budget shortfall & are demanding that the Union workers they have on staff voluntarily resign so they don't have to pay benefits or negotiate with them.
Those aren't the folks that worry me. The folks that worry me are the ones that are voting Trump (as they put it) because "Biden is going to ban flavored cigarettes so no more Menthol".
Welcome to Germany. Many young people voted for a liberal party that only has the interest of the rich elite in mind. Because they said they would legalize Marijuana.
Spoiler: They do everything they can for rich people, Marijuana is still not legal.
My state legalized it a year or two ago though, and more and more are every day so I'm not sure what point you're really making.
Vote democrat, they legalized weed?
edit: I was being facetious because fuck the DNC. My state actually legalized it by constitutional amendment after the people voted on it, no thanks to any political party, it was outside groups organizing and gathering signatures.
If menthol cigarettes are banned, it will signal the end of america as we know it. George Washington will be screaming in terror from his grave. "NOOO. LOOK AT WHAT THEYVE DONE TO MY CREATION!!! THE MENTHOLS NOOOOOOO" The only proper course of action would be to clone the founding fathers, demolish all of the United States, and let them start over.
First of all, your system is broken. Second, what is a Palestinian American supposed to do? Biden is literally providing the ammunition to kill their families. Trump isn’t any better, but that doesn’t mean voting for another genocidal maniac is a viable option.
You asking Palestinian/Muslim Americans to simply look past that is a very self centered perspective. You say then people will be deported and thrown into camps. That’s what Palestinians were fleeing from in the first place. They fled before, they’ll do it again if they have to. They’re living in diaspora anyway. So do the millions of other Muslim Americans who are here because of Western geopolitics.
You on the other hand who try to bully them into voting for Biden because it serves your purpose, have nowhere to go. If you want progress for your country and you consider Biden only the lesser evil. Instead of bullying fellow Americans into serving your purpose, why don’t you focus on your common goal instead? Respect their opinion, support their cause.
Join their protests against Biden, pressurize him into stopping the genocide, pressurize the DNC into sending someone else as their presidential candidate.
If I've learned anything from talking with disgruntled tankies it's that Biden controls the universe and singlehandedly killed all the dinosaurs after stubbing his little toe on a coffee table. The monster.
As someone who is struggling to find a reason to vote for biden for who he is, rather than vote for him for what he is not, its so disheartening to see the only valid reason to vote for him is just that he isn’t trump.
And I hate that discussion about this is always so black and white about this, and just sneering at people who have no policy reason to vote for biden, throwing shade at people who genuinely hate biden’s neoliberal platform for criticizing because trump is the opponent.
Voting for someone because they aren’t trump didn’t work in 2016, and Im worried it isn’t going to work in 2024. And I’m starting to see why people are feeling so hopeless when it comes to electoralism
And what did Marx think about voting for the lesser evil:
Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.
Primaries are the right time to criticize incumbents. General is when we all fall in line. Not criticizing politicians when they do something wrong is what the republicans do - we shouldn't seek to emulate them.
Just a reminder that the DNC due to disagreeing on whether New Hampshire should be first primary or not has literally determined that regardless of the outcome that all delegates from New Hampshire would go to Biden this year.
He won a write-in campaign, but that's really not the point.
The fact that those are your choices should be enough to alert you to the reality - that voting is a charade to make you feel "heard" and to keep you from turning on your overlords, who will continue to wage war for profit (be it on Palestine or on their own poor and marginalised) no matter what.
Sadly the propaganda is so strong that most people can't see beyond the pretend field laid out in front of them and the "blue vs red" mentality that is enforced along with it, so focused on this artificial division that they don't see that the real "teams" are society and those who exploit it for profit and power (and who control the media and the education system, ensuring you're indoctrinated this way from birth).
By all means, vote for the lesser (but still) evil (I'm in the UK, we are able to vote "none" which I will be doing if there is no one on the ballot who represents me), but you don't get to pat yourself on the back for it as if you've just stormed the beach on D day and singlehandedly defeated fascism, because that's nowhere near the truth, which is that you've just participated in a bit of theatre where you were given an illusion of choice. You being uncomfortable doesn't change that.
It could change you, if you decide to engage the discomfort instead of ignoring it, you can start here:
People who think voting doesn't matter are the ones that make it a reality. Everyone who shows up to not vote, or throw a protest vote, make it that much easier for the fanatics who do show up to get their way.
It's not a perfect system, but refusing to participate doesn't make it better. And "patting yourself on the back" because you decided you'd rather support your pride and ego instead of change (imperfect as it always is) is no less a sign of delusion than believing one election for one position is all that matters.
Every election matters. From local dog-catcher to state reps to president.
Who said anything about not participating. All anarchists I know are at most lukewarm on voting but put more effort into political change by organizing that all the votes in all the elections of a lifetime combined.
The election system doesn't really change anything and makes people complicit by giving them the illusion of a democratic process that's actually worth a damn.
It doesn't change anything because people of action don't participate. Voter participation is shockingly low for a supposedly "free" population. It's not the only thing that matters, but it does a whole lot more than screaming from the rooftops about how much of a fool other people are for actually participating.
Are you claiming that activists don't vote? Or that being an activist isn't participating in the democratic process?
I'd like a source if you meant the former and seriously question your idea of democracy if youmeant the latter.
Voter participation is shockingly low for a supposedly “free” population.
I'd claim that this is the output for a system which alienates so much of the people's power in everyday concern. Not the reason why the system does that.
it does a whole lot more than screaming from the rooftops about how much of a fool other people are for actually participating.
Protesting is an important part of any democratic process. That's why freedom of speech is so paramount in (supposed) democracies.
This depends on your perspective. If the system does work in your favour, you might be right. If the system doesn't work in your favour, then agitating against it imho is more productive than participating.
Consider the french revolution. Was agitation against the aristrocracy more effective than praying and being sure that the people above did what was best for their country?
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
It is overly dramatic to the point of being annoying, but I wouldn't describe it as facetious. They say to vote for the lesser of two evils, I'm going to assume that's what they want people to do.
They never said anything about just "bitch[ing] and moan[ing]". Just that voting isn't as much saving the world as much as the people in power would like you to believe. Tell me how you didn't misrepresent what they said to make it easier for you to attack them (you know... Strawmanning)
I don't think anybody is legitimately saying that voting blue is the end of the matter. Activism is way more than that--it's attending local board meetings and making yourself heard, getting involved with your local/state parties to push for change, communicating with your elected representative (even, and especially if, they disagree with your position), attending donstrations and protests, volunteering for your preferred candidate's campaign, voting, and most importantly--never giving up, even if it takes decades. If your preferred candidate loses in the primary, you immediately switch to the next closest candidate and start campaigning for them and pushing them towards your preferred policies. If a referendum you support loses, immediately start pushing for a similar referendum in the next election that tweaks the wording to avoid the reason why it lost last time. And so on, and so forth, across all the various levels of government.
This exact playbook is what got Roe overturned. Religious mutters pushed, and pushed, and pushed. They voted in lockstep for the farthest-right candidate in the primary, and if they lost in the primary they voted for the farthest right candidate in the general. They protested outside abortion clinics daily. They pushed and pushed, and over the course of 50 years they gradually transformed an entire political party from having roughly equal representation of pro-choice and anti-choice candidates to one where supporting a nationwide 15-week abortion ban with no exceptions is considered "moderate."
I think a lot of people actually are saying that voting blue is the end of the matter. When you ask people who hate leftists what they are doing besides voting for Biden, most have no answer.
Yeah, because they're lazy, and/or don't have the ability to wage a sustained campaign. That's the vast majority of voters on both sides--myself included, sadly, though in my case it's largely because I'm afraid that a furry getting involved in a campaign would do more harm than good. Did you think every (or even a majority) of single-issue pro-birth voters were on the picket lines? Hell no. Most voters cast a vote, maybe in the primary (but usually just the general election, and only in the presidential elections) and that's pretty much it.
And for the record, I absolutely don't hate leftists, I agree with the vast majority of leftist positions, and I think protesting and advocating like this is a critical part of creating change. I just feel like it's just as important to practice harm reduction and push from the inside, too.
I would be happy if folks just stopped mindlessly repeating cnn msnbc npr neoliberal talking points as though it’s some kind of gotcha! Lol. Is that too much to fucking ask!
I am not american so I don't vote, but if I were, as a leftist, I would likely very begrudgingly vote Biden, however I find that this entitlement to leftists votes that liberals have is only gonna make leftists less willing to vote for Biden tbh. In fact I'd much rather vote a third party already your shitflinging isn't gonna make me any more willing tonsupport your shitlib.
If you got to the point where every election is "vote us or the fascist republicans win" maybe it's time to analyze and rethink your tactics and system instead of demanding leftists simply vote for you because a shitlib is somewhat less bad than a fashit. Maybe even do some leftist things, gasps, so they may actually want to vote for you. And you also might want to revisit this system that is so weak and vulnerable to democratic backsliding that every election is a threat to it.
Or you could wait for the leftists to bring out the guillotines and solve the issue for you, tho you're probably going to be on the chopping block after so many years of moving to the right and blaming leftists every time you lose, and maybe also cause your party is still ok with letting businesses do their thing including union busting or the genocide mentioned in the meme.
Huh, this is the most convincing vote blue no matter who argument I've seen. I'm in Canada so it's not up to me, but damn, this SpongeBob meme is poignant.
Question for the libs who are flailing, trying and failing to understand how their country is backsliding into genocidal fascism (and taking shots to the left):
The deluge of Biden admins who have resigned because of the war - are they now supporting Trump since they are withholding their support for the Biden campaign?
If those votes are important to him then Biden should earn them by not being complicit in a genocide. Maybe Biden is a Trump supporter by continuing to do so? After all if not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump, Biden doing genocide is also him voting for Trump.
You can look at it that way or you can look at it where Biden won't listen to the people who would elect him and decides to support genocide knowing it will probably mean he won't get re-elected. Why would you blame the voters when it's clearly one person who is making the wrong decision.
Edit: it's crazy people are defending Biden while he's supporting genocide and blaming the people who refuse to support it and don't attack the president that doesn't listen to 70% of his own party. If he doesn't listen here why would he listen to us anywhere else.
As much as I despise Trump, I disagree with this dangerous rhetoric. Biden seems the only person capable of inflecting the dire fate of gazans and he does not. Worse, he funnels money and military equipment to support this.
Trump may wreak havoc in the US if reelected, but if Biden is fine with genocide elsewhere, he should be fine to let America fall
Good juxtaposition - in the US situation, the solution to two evils is not choosing neither, but choosing the lesser of the two. Only then can we make progress towards a world we all want
Okay, you're willfully obtuse or have no reading comprehension. McConnell's position was discussed in the article as well. I thought Graham 's position statement was a better articulation of the point.
If you really need an article explaining this more clearly, you're lost.
I'm getting so many messages from people about how immature and impractical it is to be wary of voting for Biden just because he isn't trump, it's absurd.
Biden is probably as bad as trump in very different ways, but dipshit liberals would have you believe that it is your patriotic duty to vote with them, otherwise you give a vote to trump when you refuse to vote.
With that being said, please vote in your local elections and for pretty much everything else. As liberals seem to forget, the president is mostly just a figurehead, but your senators, representatives, congressmen, etc mean much more and affect your life more significantly.
Americans have some serious Stockholm syndrome if they believe voting for any of these candidates makes a meaningful difference when they are both war mongering fascists. The status quo can not be changed by voting but by anti-government protests forcing the current system to collapse.
Besides Roe ended under Biden, not Trump. There have also been more deportations under Biden than under Trump so this vote Biden or else blackmail isn't even based on facts. It's like choosing between Himmler and Hitler.
Whenever we see this same old point being made and think "yes, how stupid are people," remember that being shamed in to voting doesn't work and this even helped get Trump elected in 2016. The only thing that happens with this is a sense of self-validation.
If the Democrats really didn't want Trump, someone would deal with him how they deal with other existential threats. He's great for fundraising though, and most big donors support both parties.
Everyone told you last time that voting in biden would make Trump inevitable next time around and now that's playing out for you. Meanwhile your response is to bully women, muslims, and black people into voting for a guy who is openly against their fundamental human dignities? get over yourselves.
He did nothing to stop Roe v Wade overturning. He did nothing to stop Palestine being massacred. He did nothing to stop the insane levels of transphobia in red states. He did nothing to address basic economic hardships. He did nothing to stop kids being killed at the southern border. Anyone who wants to be complicit in that (like the dozen or so people who consistently spam lemmy with this virtue signalling BS) can go right ahead and watch as their golden boy gets throttled by a fascist populist just as people fucking warned you about.
Trump is actually not much worse than Biden on foreign policy. Bypassing congress to supply ammo for a genocide is something I would have literally only seen Trump do until three months ago. Then I found out the israeli lobbies supplied Biden with three times as much funds as Trump.
While Trump is pretty shit on American domestic policy, he doens't seem to be much worse for the Palestinians.
It's kind of word salady but I think it means "Democracts after Biden wins and they spend the next 4 years fighting the actual left wing of the party instead of fighting Republicans. And then Republicans win that election (2028), and carry on with their plan to end elections in the U.S. (and install some kind of Christian theocracy)."
But thats prettty short sighted. It assumes that going and voting in one presidential election is going to to get you the politicians and policies that you'd like which is obviously false.
Fuck American liberals you people are disgusting. Support your genocidal president who does fuck all for you anyway because you're stupid enough to fall for the good cop bad cop routine of the US government. If you vote for Joe Biden you are voting for genocide. The fact that the other option is just as genocidal does not absolve you of culpability for your complicity.
The final verdict is that you are human garbage.
Edit: Biden just halted all funding for UNRWA to prevent it from providing aid to Palestinians as much as possible. This is exactly the kind of unhinged policy decision that liberals would make a fuss about trump taking. Trump or Biden it makes no difference and you must be extremely propagandized to think it does.
Is this anyone's position? Calling him Genocide Joe, protesting at his campaign events, is about holding his feet to the fire. I don't think I've ever heard anyone saying they won't vote for Joe Biden because of it. Cause a vote for Joe isn't a vote for Joe, it's a vote against fascism.
Just because there's opposition, doesn't mean that not supporting someone means supporting the opposition.
There've literally been articles posted to the fediverse about people saying they'd rather not vote than vote for Biden because of his support for Netenyahu and the IDF.
Muslim Americans said they did not expect former President Donald Trump to treat their community any better if re-elected, but saw denying Biden votes as their only means to shape US policy.
“We’re not supporting Trump,” he said, adding the Muslim community would decide how to interview other candidates.
For the primary, sure that makes sense to try and enact change, but in the general election a vote for anyone other than Biden is the same as a vote for Trump.
I wanted to remain neutral when linking the article, but that's my take as well.
While I hate that people weaponize the saying "voting for an independent party is throwing away your vote" as a way to pressure others into voting for their preferred party, the logic behind it is not wrong. It would take a substantial amount of organization and commitment to make a third party viable. Considering that, any vote that isn't for Biden is effectively a vote for Trump.
It would take a substantial amount of organization to make a third party viable
That's the thing, FPTP doesn't allow that. It doesn't "make a third party viable" even if you get all the votes needed. It's "usurp one of the two parties" instead, as whichever party failed to conquer the contender gets subsumed by them, if their ideologies are in any way compatible.
I mean, I do think actually acting on that statement is foolish... but it doesn't mean they never made the statement. Just because we believe something to go against the common good doesn't mean people of generally good will don't take those actions for what they believe to be good reasons.
The situations sucks. It has sucked for a long time. And it's not going to get better quickly or easily. Unfortunately refusing to act in the main way you can to make that difference makes it that much harder and take that much more time.
If you haven't been a part of the larger conversation till now, and you're just jumping in with accusations and shit, you weren't adding anything to begin with.
I'm going to vote for RFK. I think he has a couple of good points about looking at source code, rather than banning apps made in China. The whole TikTok ban was just stupid. Google, Microsoft, and other corporate companies already do so much shady stuff; why the hell are we banning businesses from other countries when all we need is the source code? Also, he is against government surveillance, which I think is a really good thing that can really restore our democracy. I've felt as if we've lost so much of our freedoms just from all this mass surveillance. People cannot look for information freely, which is a very important part of our democracy.
These people sound like exact copies of the people saying voting in 2000 didn't matter, and that turned out to be the most politically consequential of my lifetime. Gore was imperfect as they all are, but holy fuck did Dubya fuck up literally everything he touched.
Among many, many, many things, Dubya started forever wars killing untold hundreds of thousands of people. He accelerated oil and gas production, absolutely setting the Climate Change world on a pace for disaster. He seated Alito, unquestionably the biggest monster currently on the Supreme Court. And he passed a monster tax cut for the rich that set us on this path of unrestrained deficit spending.
And that's just the headlines. Remember when he tried to put his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court? lol
Gen X already tried this 25 years ago and it fucked the world up so badly that we need to be saved by the future generations. Imagine not learning that lesson and doing it again.
I always wonder how Gore might have acted in response to 9/11.
Probably a similar initial response, but no Iraq War two years later. Which would make a... massive (and positive, in case that wasn't clear) change in the direction and concerns of American foreign policy.
He wouldn't have suspended civil rights, permitted torture and made a mockery of the rule of law.
We think that yes. I'm a gore fan.
But remember there were 100s of people driving towards those topics. Career defense and security types making their damnedest case that they needed those tools to avoid 9/11 2.0.
I hope gore, and the staff he surrounded himself with would have had the vision to avoid all that, despite the pressure.
Why am I reminded of the lone gunman pilot episode?
Never forget. If you want an even crazier mindfuck, watch the original "Utopia", the original 2013 British version. For real.
Based on after-the-fact reports, it may never have happened.
Maybe that's just exposure to all the conspiracy theories, though, I dunno if he would have acted any differently than Bush did to the intelligence reports.
After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong
It would have been very different.
I meant before 9/11, sorry for not making that clear :)
They had intelligence that terrorists from Al-Queda were training and planning for an attack, hijacking commercial planes.
Bush et al did next to nothing with that intel, at best.
It's questionable if it'd have even happened had gore been at the desk, y'know, because he'd have probably actually read the imminent attack report about the plot before it happened.
True dat. He wasn't part of the cabal. That's also why he wasn't elected, in spite of winning. Just like Hillary.
W was catastrophic. Honestly him and Reagan are the cause of most of our issues.
Nixon deserves a mention there too.
Nixon is inadvertently responsible for the creation of the right wing media circus which I would argue is fully responsible for W and trump.
If you're going to mention Nixon, then you have to include Andrew Johnson.
Y'all are also forgetting Wilson.
I liked his performance in Cast Away.
Nixon had some redeeming qualities, like enacting the EPA and Clear Water/Air acts
True. I only forget about him because his damage got limited by him getting fired
Don't forget in his first week or so he passed No Child Left Behind, which has irreparably damaged the education of children in this country.
https://www.epi.org/publication/what_went_wrong_with_no_child_left_behind/
Man, what I would do to have an unabashed giant nerd for president. I forget what people's issue with Gore even was.
Al Gore won the popular vote, but there was some sketchiness down in Florida. During a recount, Roger Stone rallied the troops (Brooks Brothers riot) which caused the counting to be stopped, due to threats of violence. Setting up the supreme Court to decide Bush won Florida.
In other words, the 2000 coup succeeded.
It's why they project so hard about Democrats cheating elections.
The Republicans have been for decades. And can't stand sometimes enough people show up that they still lose.
LOL yep. Constantly the conservatives manage to take their own manufactured outrage turn it into violence and then turn out the results they want.
Apparently burning down the Reichstag still works if you have the power to seize the moment.
Damn that sounds really really familiar. Almost like it happened just a couple years ago.
I, personally sat out that election because I didn't like Al's wife, Tipper Gore. She led the charge in a bunch of manufactured outrage about obscenity in music. I was also a jaded, cynical gen-xer who'd been hearing the importance of voting as long as I could remember, but every election was just choosing between a douchbag and a turd sandwich.
Looking back on everything that happened after that election, it's insane to imagine how different things would be now if Gore had been in office instead of the criminal enterprise that we ended up with.
Though the Bush presidency lead to Cheney's wife taking up that mantle anyways.
Gore was the watershed moment of the white left deciding no progress is allowed to happen unless it's by their hands and they get all the credit.
Nader fired up his campaign in swing states as an act of retaliation against Gore posing himself as the climate candidate.
That's it.
The Greens had a meltdown that the thing that usually happens to third parties in this country, that is having their platforms become the mainstream if they make enough noise, was happening to them, and they decided we're not allowed to make any progress on climate unless we do it through them so fuck Gore and fuck anyone who'd dare support that disgusting "mOdErAtE!"
You think you might be projecting just a little bit of internalized anger there?
He hates anyone to his left. And only his left.
What really gets my goat is how some people now act like George W Bush is this respectable elder statesman that only did his best and oh, how cute, he's friends with Michelle Obama. Like, sure, next to Trump he looks like a political savant, but come on, he still was a total piece of shit that did lasting damage.
He literally lost the popular vote, how does "vote more" mean anything
Protest voters who supported Stein alone would have flipped every single rust belt state had they decided on the country over feeling validated in wanting to vote "for" someone, and Zoomers and Millenials simply matching their share of the population in turnout could have propelled Bernie to the front of the primaries and over the finish line.
Nevermind how not voting let trump happen, not voting let clinton happen.
True story. If Gen X didn’t vote they literally died. /s
Be boring somewhere else.
Sorry, just trying to add some levity.
There are legitimate criticisms to be had of Biden, but in every case, Trump is unambiguously worse. If Trump were pro-Palestine, I could maybe understand single-issue voters preferring him to Biden...but he's not.
To be honest, I have little hope for 2024. Genuine fake news is rampant, and in pretty much every case it hurts Biden (misinformation about the economy, etc.). I'll be voting a straight Dem ticket in my very red state, and hoping against all hope that uninformed voters somehow do the right thing.
no one is saying they're going to vote for trump. they're saying they won't vote for biden
Lmao, that's the epitome of something that sounds smart but is incredibly stupid when you think about it. Especially in response to this meme.
In FPTP not voting for the chosen democratic representative means one vote less is required for the conservative. It doesn't matter if that's because you added a vote for Democrats, or didn't vote at all. Same for voting 3rd party, it just ensures you get the candidate you want the least.
I agree with this. Choosing a lesser evil in a FPTP, bicameral political system is not the answer. Pushing for ranked choice voting is the answer, and one step towards proportional representation like what we see in the EU.
And not voting is never the answer.
that the epitome of something that sounds smart but is incredibly stupid
I voted for Howie in 2020 and Biden won. you don't seem to know how voting works.
You don't seem to know what anecdotal evidence or statistical analysis works.
Biden barely won, and you didn't get the candidate you wanted. In 2016, it's people like you who gave trump the victory
this claim is obviously false, since I have provided proof against it. if you want to weaken the claim, moving the goalposts, that's fine, but don't break a sweat.
Not sure if you're just being intentionally thick or a troll.
Youre explaining yourself that despite you voting against him, Biden won, and you didn't want Trump and the person you voted for didn't win. So your actions gave you the least chance of having a candidate you were aligned with.
If anything, you are giving proof that it's a dumb thing to do. But that would be anecdotal evidence, and there's no need for that.
If you manually run the results and the effects of 3rd parties, it's pretty clear that it makes no sense in First Past the Post.
It's a thing known as The spoiler effect, or vote splitting and has always been a documented thing that dumb people don't understand. Who do you think funds these 3rd parties in the first place...
Youre being played.
if i'm just too thick to understand, a big big dummy, then you better make sure the vote isn't split: vote with me.
i was aligned with the candidate for whom i voted, and i was not aligned with the candidates i voted against.
people who voted for Trump gave him the victory. 50 years of people like Joe biden running the Democrat party gave Trump the victory. don't blame me.
But they've been running the conservative party the same way for 50 years too. You're literally admitting to hate Biden so much you let the conservatives win even if that meant making the US worse.
Literally what the meme is about. Tell us, what have you gained from it aside from more frustration and hate? Biden didnt learn anything from 2016. You can blame biden when you lose your democracy, but you'll still have lost your democracy. I wouldn't wait for Biden to fix that. The democratic party is more than one person making decisions, and handing the power to your enemy is not how you make changes within your own team.
the democrats aren't my team.
no, i'm not
Yeah and we could find one person who voted for vermin supreme, Biden still won. What would their point be if they were here, I wonder? Speaking of points, what's yours?
Oh man give me Vermin Supreme. I think he could make a real difference.
no one is saying they’re going to vote for trump. they’re saying they won’t vote for biden
I expect to have more choices on my ballot
The end result is the same.
no, it's not.
I mean it practically is. The happy pain supporters will still show up to dish out their warped idea of hateful justice.
If water was flooding into your house and you said you won't bother to turn the water main off because the roof is failing you still end up with a flooded house.
The incident is happening whether or not you participate in it. The best you can do is push against it even if it's tiring and doesn't fix all things. And unless you are ending your own existence then you will be around to experience the fallout.
Self inflicted pain still hurts even if you think it's deserved. I know it's rough but the world keeps spinning without your input. Fate is for those that do not act.
Fascinating
"Sure, I made the ongoing genocide worse, but at least I didn't vote for GENOCIDE JOE" - Useful idiots for the Israeli far-right
Is PugJesus hired by the DNC? David Brock's Correct The Record part deux?
Looks to me like PugJesus just made a simple observation. No sorosbucks needed.
I think it would be fun if every person on Reddit and Lemmy accused of being a paid shill was actually a paid shill. Basically, Reddit and Lemmy would be huge job creators and wouldn't hurt anyone because everyone was shilling at each other for money.
My Soros bucks spend, baby
A critical refinement of this point: By all means, please do vote for whichever actual progressive candidate you favor in your state's Democratic primary. This is not sarcasm; do it. But when the general election comes around Biden is inevitably the candidate anyway, do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of office.
If you're in a red area, consider voting in the Republican primary in good faith. (Don't try nominating the worse candidate. The backfire is terrible.) You're still allowed to vote for whoever you want in the general. This election primaries will largely be about down ticket races, but that's important too.
That would require them to actually give enough of a shit to turn out for primaries, and president Bernie can tell you that none of these fake allies actually care enough to wrench themselves from their two bit Jean-Paul Marat act for such a herculean labor.
See Bernie 2016. Won the DNC, but got snake in the grass Hillary instead, which led to understandable mass apathy amongst the Democratic voters. I'm still pissed! Kinda like what reportedly happened with McGovern '72
And why shouldn't Biden do whatever it takes to stop Trump? If supporting a genocide loses votes, there's an easy way to win those votes back.
How do we know supporting Israel isn’t getting him more votes then not supporting Israel?
Woah woah woah, you mean actually try to win votes through rational and humane policy and not merely the fact that he's running against a human piece of shit and is technically better? You mean that we should have someone with actual principles on the democratic ticket instead of someone nodding along and sending weapons to a genocidal government? Outrageous wow why do you love Trump so much
You can tell they're white because they phrased this like they're lecturing the party's manager at DNC Walmart
It's not that simple. Changing positions will probably polarize people to vote against him as much as it will win over votes to him.
Especially because those who are likely to withhold votes over this will probably demand the most drastic of actions before Biden passes their purity test.
Geopolitically it's a bad move on top of that as it ends the relationship with practicallythe only middle Eastern power we have as an ally.
The reproductions of that alone is certain to energize opposition to Biden in the far right.
While he may lose voters over his current inaction, taking action could easily lead to a net loss on election day.
Unfortunately what is best for a country geopolitically and what is morally right often don't agree with each other.
Even from a moral choice Biden is the better option. You get someone pressuring for a Two-state solution keep aid flowing to Palestinians as well as to support in helping Ukraine who are being genocided by their definitions. While also supporting international efforts to re-open one of the busiest shipping channels so places like Africa & others experiencing hardships that will have trouble maintaining safety & stability if prices of common goods increases.
I just can't wait for those of us in the queer community to either be thrown in camps or flee the company, all so that the people who didn't vote can tell me it's actually because of Biden.
Reading these comments, it feels people are having a giant trolley problem moment. Do I vote for Biden and throw the switch so fewer people die, or do I not do it and let more people die, but at least I'm not complicit then?
I think the issue is more rooted in people like you. Spewing voter suppression rhetoric from somewhere but it's rooted in propaganda. Rather than rallying people to help and pointing out the good, which is what gets people motivated, you instead choose to blame the people trying not to turn America into a neo-nazi fascist theocracy. Which is the root at which the meme is getting at lol.
Unless it's simple cat and dog pics (even then sometimes) people on the internet just love to pretend they're above the people who watch reality TV, when it's just a different flavor of the same thing.
If you're interested in convincing people to vote for Biden (which I think is the best option we'll have this election) then I would urge you to talk about the contributions he's made, and to stop telling people who don't want to vote for him that they're the reason the fascists might win. Even if it were true, telling them that will not convince anyone to vote for Biden.
It's also misguided to blame voters for not voting the way you want. If you want a vote, you have to convince the voter! Oh, is the voter too stupid or evil to understand that the candidate is the best? That's a candidate problem. It's literally how democracy works.
But if they don’t vote for him, fascists WILL win. This is not an opinion. It’s a hard truth. And that should be motivation enough for one to hold their nose and vote- THEN make the decision to pay attention more than once every four years.
That same line gets thrown at leftists every election despite no concessions from liberals. Leftists are absolutely trying to make grassroots movement, but overcoming the liberal status quo and making positive change is tremendously difficult. Yes, leftists should vote for Biden, but the DNC should not be surprised that Leftists get desperate and can vote third party if the DNC continues to be a center-right Neoliberal mess.
If it's not motivating people whose fault is that?
I voted for Biden before and I'll do it again. I do think Trump is a threat to democracy. But if a restaurant goes out of business, is it reasonable or productive to say, "it's the person who didn't patronize our restaurant who did this"? "If it weren't for the naysayers and people going to our competitors we would have stayed open!"
Maybe the restaurant should have changed the menu. Maybe it should have offered better prices. Maybe they should have made it more welcoming and marketed better.
For people who don't want to eat shit, either don't offer them shit, explain how it's not shit, or make a pretty empathetic and convincing case why they've got to. My original point was that attempting to shame people and point the finger is not that winning case.
Except it isn't a restaurant, it's control of government, and a basic understanding of the rules of voting in the country shows that there are only two choices that have a reasonable chance of winning.
And? If you want people to vote for the candidate you support, you have to convince them to do it!
Yeah which takes ads, which require donations, and that is why politicians basically have to sell out in order to get votes.
EDIT: Everyone is right. The way the world works is that the Democratic candidate has to be a vaulted saint who single-handedly sheds decades old international alliances and ends all war and famine, is immune from money concerns, and disseminates his message via telepathy because traditional donations are beneath a being of his type...and he must be able to fully defeat a Republican demagogue who takes money from anyone, has the full support of Russia, and whose every utterance is covered in the press in addition to being a de-facto cult leader with a warchest of millions or even billions of dollars to be able to do traditional ad buys as well.
Completely reasonable 🙄
It's entirely reasonable to blame review bombers for reducing business
It's a convenient excuse to blame bad reviews for a restaurant closing. If the fundamentals of the business are good then bad reviews might hurt but aren't a fatal blow. We can push any analogy until it breaks, but your example is a good case where blaming bad reviews is a convenient way for a restaurant owner to absolve themselves of responsibility or having to think introspectively about why they're not doing well, similar to what Democratic leadership often does.
How about NO analogies.
Staying home instead of voting because one is too busy pouring over a single issue ideology easily the most of tent and foolish thing one can do. The majority of these kids suffering people do this, and/or stating that they themselves are doing this- maybe should place been paying attention the over the last 8-10 years and being active about making change instead of whining o line ever four years.
There. No analogies.
We’re past motivation. It’s fight for the existence of destruction of democracy. Vote now and worry about who’s to blame later.
If it's as serious as you say, you might consider trying to sway people who don't already agree with you instead of telling them they're the reason the country is in trouble.
It’s amusing that you think I haven’t tried this already. I tried it in 2016 with the Bernie Bros, and again in 2020. This year, I say fuck them. I will be voting to save democracy, but I’m done trying to reason with unreasonable children and I’m not about to kiss their smug asses to get them to see part their own ignorance.
Biden supports Two-State no other candidate does. Biden has increased aid into Gaza & advocated heavily to reduce the severity of fighting. Trump wants to deport any immigrant not supporting Israel & wants to get back into office to cut $200 million of funding to UNRWA that goes to Palestine. Biden works hard to stop Russia trying to genocide Ukraine. He is working to limit Iranian arms that are being used to kill Israelis, Arabs, Palestinians, and other in the region. He is working with peers to get trade flowing through one of the busiest shipping channels. That issue is further risking harm in Africa that has been experiencing massive turmoil & escalation of conflicts rising cost of food & resources would further expand that.
But please tell us your candidate, campaign, and actions that will improve or do anything for Palestinians let alone American fighting against wannabe theocrats & opposition that want to lower the quality of life for everyone but the ultra-rich.
I like your first paragraph. I think your second is counterproductive. See my reply right next to this one. https://lemmy.world/comment/7000833
had me goin for a second.
Let me put it another way: The original comment has "I'm not racist, but..." energy.
let me put it another way: biden is terrible, and the issue is rooted in people voting for him.
I can, some of us live this shit enough that being able to not care is a fucking privilege we don't have.
I blame those backstabbing privileged twats all the way to my grave and then haunt their asses for being able to and choosing to not care.
Fuck your apathy, I want to live, and you shitbags owe it to me and those like me to do the literal minimum that helps achieve that if you want all the glitz and glam of marching alongside us at pride as if you are our allies.
Did people forget that Trump was up Netanyahu's ass during his presidency?
Don't forget the Deportation Force that's going to round up 11 million people and deport them. I wish I was joking.
And by deport they probably mean throw in concentration camps and then murder en masse.
If that happens, I wonder what the Mexican government and the cartels would say.
The Mexican government would be quite vocally mad and file lawsuits but nothing would really come of it.
The cartels wouldn't care as long as the flow of guns and money from the north didn't stop.
That is dark as fuck.
You guys wouldn't have this clusterfuck if you just had a parliamentary system. Don't like the non-reactionary liberal candidate? Great, just vote for whoever else you like, and even if they don't win, they can still join efforts with the lesser evil to make sure the far right doesn't return to power. It also has the added benefit that it doesn't force the whole right wing of the country to cater to the rabid reactionaries on the rise, because those just make a different party that has to balance the distribution of their power with their less mad allies.
This should be a lovely comment section... I'll have to return with some nice warm dinner and a drink later.
Don't forget some popcorn.
It's still pretty wild in here
I feel like posts like these always fail to realize how fucked of a situation US 'democracy' is in where you must vote for one shitty candidate because the other is literally a fascist.
Like no actually some people have decided that the entire system is untenable - they know there's a lesser of two evils, but they refuse to partake of an illegitimate system.
I try to think that hopefully Trump would get stonewalled enough that he wouldn’t be able to get any of this done.
Then I realize that he seriously does not care. He doesn’t give a shit about Congress, or checks and balances. He and his party have clearly demonstrated that they have no interest in the system of “law and order” that they cling so close to.
Who’s gonna stop him? His courts? An impeachment? Antifa gonna go out and storm Pennsylvania Ave and live up to their damn name, which somehow became an insult?
The fact that this man is on a ballot in any state is shameful. The GOP of just a dozen fucking years ago would have tossed him out on his ass in a second. Somehow since then, Romney, McCain, and Liz Cheney have become the sole voices of reason within the party. One got blackballed, one got censured, and the other one died.
This cannot be understated enough. He will be a day one dictator. Then he'll be a day two dictator, and day three and four. He won't stop because he knows no one will stop him.
I think the most dissappointing is the current state of the Republican Party.
Seems like back in 2008, the Republican Party was a bit stubborn and stuck in the old days, but they were mostly harmless, like a grandpa who rattles his cane at “kids these days”. Endearing, but not crazy.
Then everything changed. They’ve gone full tilt crazy. They’ve actually managed to redeem 43 and make him look tame and competent (by comparison).
The nutter in me (what’s left of it, after /r/conspiracy got a cheeto mustache) is seriously starting to think that Reddits admiration of Ron Paul (that I very much got caught up in) was a practice run for some psyop astroturf shit that evolved into Trumps presidency.
I think they only get seen as harmless because they only had to perform small acts of violence to get their desired outcomes. They invaded a hotel to spy on their opponents, allied with people that murdered journalists and even in 2000 organized riots outside vote counting centers that gave fear of violence against arbiters of democracy. We cared a lot about the little things so they didn't have to do as much.
But the world is more chaotic now and the big violent movements get way more sway and leaves even more room for bigger grabs of power. It's just a progressing issue that came from us tolerating anything to keep status quo and let people make even more money regardless of how.
Did you hear of the robocalls in NH? Using a deepfaked Biden voice and the spoofed caller ID if someone from the state DNC, telling Democrats to “save their vote for November”?
Disgusting. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it played a hand in Haley’s surprisingly small loss in NH as undeclared voters are able to request either ballot.
Woah what the hell? No! I didn't know about that!
What a weird concept. I'm not even entirely sure the desired outcome other than to see if it works and if they (the people doing this) could get away with it. I feel that it definitely sets dangerous precedent and makes it even muddier to have a well informed voter base.
You are thinking that people that would have voted for Biden then used their primary vote to go for Nikki Haley though?
No sense voting for Biden. He’s pretty much locked as the DNC candidate, the primary is really a formality (as often as it seems to be now).
No, NH has an open primary. Any undeclared voter can register for one party for the day to cast a primary ballot.
A lot of independents are undecided in these situations, since they can vote in either primary. Their vote is actually kind of especially powerful, since in this case they can use it to vote against someone in particular.
I live in MA which does the same. I am very left leaning but emphatically selected a republican ballot for the primaries.
Edit to add: this is also why Trumpists are lashing out against her, specifically in NH…they can’t fathom that voters can be independent. You’re either a modern republican or a librul.
What was it they used to say? Country before party? Facts not feelings? Law and order? Literally all of this shit is practically Orwellian. Ironically they really latch onto the “Ignorance is Strength” part.
I’d love to make a glib analogy like ‘my toast got burnt so I burned my house down and most of the neighbourhood’ but the literal fact that so many people are suffering makes that sort of thing rather tasteless.
I don’t think Biden is “Genocide Joe”. That’s ridiculous hyperbole which doesn’t help. We (the public) don’t know what kind of pressure is being levered in the background to end all the horrors of this situation.
People not voting Dem merely because of difficult historical relationships with Israel are dangerously deluded.
I will hold my nose and vote against a dictatorship but I do understand why people are so FUCKING ANGRY with the DNC for not even trying to find someone who is representative of the Democratic voters. They haven't done so for the last decades and it is getting to point where something serious needs to be done about it. As in, make it clear to those 'in power' that we will make their lives a living hell if they continue to ignore the people.
It's more than insulting. It's disgusting behavior by people who know they can do whatever the fuck they want and no one can say or do anything about it because TRUUUMP!! It's a fucking joke. It's a disgrace to democracy and I will never again vote for Democrats.
This country is in fucking shambles.
so which is it?
It's really not that hard to understand. I will vote this time, to prevent trump. Then I will ensure that there is another choice the next time. In any way I can.
well it's grammatically confusing; if you'd stated 'and going forward, I will never again' - sorry it's easy to get confused when the statements contradict each other. I wish you the best of luck, I despise the DNC and think, short of trump / gop, there are few orgs I dislike more, but I will always give them the carveout: well yeah if it's hitler/trump/etc, I'll have to. there are people in so many threads that can't grok there's a good reason for that carveout, and want to play fuck-around-and-find-out with trump-2.0 rebuilding our democracy into a fascistopia.
Fair point. It was somewhat confusing I suppose.
Careful about confusing them, theyre reporting comments and getting them removed by automod lmao. It's almost worse than reddit. Fuck this place
You sound whiney
yeah I get comments pulled for hurting feelings all over. people can dish out insults but they really don't like retorts that come with facts linked, especially the facts that refute their ideals. I was hoping lemmy would be a bit more clinical.
Yeah I know. I really do. Not excusing it all but progressive policy is hamstrung by all the insane compromise that has to be made. Most of it due to the machinations of both external meddling by countries like Russia, and a (metaphorical) handful of rich people polluting the public discourse with utter nonsense.
They have the media sewn up to spew garbage, and are destroying the education systems to weaken any intellectual resistance.
We have more power to select our democratic candidate than you might think. The primaries in 2020 were our opportunity to select our democratic candidate. Far less people vote in primaries than they do in the general election. Biden won the primaries, so he got the Democratic nomination. If more people voted for primaries we could have a more progressive president. It just turns out that a smaller subset of our population gets to pick the Democratic nominee
You say that as though the entirety of the DNC leadership didn't unite against Bernie Sanders when he was the clear front runner over Hillary. And again, in 2020. I agree, more people need to vote in the primaries. But there is clearly meddling and coercion happening behind the scenes to ensure an appropriately corporate candidate is selected.
Well, for me I actually quite like Biden. His Israel stance and protectionist economic policies are largely the only real policy positions he has that I disagree with him on, and he has done an exceptional job of accomplishing his stated policy goals within an extremely difficult and toxic political environment.
Here's some food for thought: The last time the democrats had a solid hold on the federal govt with a filibuster proof majority in congress, we got the affordable care act. Ever since that term, the dems have been hamstrung by the GOP and rogue DINOs like Manchin and Sinema.
I don't think there's any "controlled opposition" conspiracy. If there's a group to blame here the most, it's the American media for pretending that the reason dems don't get anything done is anything other than obstructionism and "both sides are bad hurr durr" rhetoric.
I'm not claiming there is a secret cabal of evil doers conspiring to ruin everything. But the interests of the rich all align and so they are all largely working towards the same thing. Having money in politics corrupts every single person in it, though to varying degrees. Both sides are very clearly bad. But also very clearly not to the same degree. I agree that Biden has done a lot that is good. But his whole platform is attempting to maintain status quo and while I haven't mentioned this before, my main concern is climate change.
Climate change is going to FUCK everyone. It is already and there is virtually no time to daudle about with half measures and false promises. There have been policies that claim to help and may even attempt to in good faith but they are consistently coopted or corrupted by lobbiests before being implemented or circumvented after. There needs to be strong, decisive action taken to reign in carbon emissions and not just do carbon offsets because carbon offsets are never going to solve this problem. All they do is delay actual action. The main reason I am so fucking angry with Biden is because he's fucking ancient and simply doesn't feel the same urgency as someone who will actually live with the consequences of the recklessness and stupidity of fossil fuels companies.
Everything he has tried to do with regards to this only ends up enriching companies further or passing the blame off to the poor of the country who have no other options than to use fossile fuels. I want someone who will take these oil oligarchs (Oiligarchs is something I saw once and it made me chuckle) to task and actually reign in their insane greed and violence against the natural world. He would and could never even dream of actually doing so. No one the DNC would ever allow to be the candidate would.
There is literally no time left to enact action but here we are twiddling our thumbs while Republicans debate whether Texas should secede for some insane reason. It's all distraction. I'm pissed the fuck off at it all and the ineffectiveness of liberal policy. They are all meek cowards who only exist to lose against the Republicans and then shrug and claim "well at least we tried. :( "
What could Biden have feasibly done other than what he's already done in regards to climate change?
The free market already knows that the fossil fuel industry is rapidly dying, as evidenced by the fact that renewable energy is now the cheapest option for building out new power gen and oil companies have been diversifying away from oil for years now. Don't be surprised if you see Shell building offshore wind farms instead of oil drilling platforms soon.
He's included absolutely massive amounts of funding for renewable projects in the infrastructure bills that have been passed. Enough so that I expect the entire energy landscape of the US to look totally different within the decade. It can't be overstated how big of deal this is, and realistically, this is the most effective climate action he could have taken that wouldn't get stonewalled by republican obstructionism.
Re. fossil fuels and poor people, he's done a good job of both not handing more power to the fossil fuel corps while also not hamstringing the industry and subsequently jacking up the price of energy and transportation across the board. As much as I'd like to ditch fossil fuels, enacting policy that would jack gas prices into the double digits before we're ready to switch by gutting the fossil fuels industry would be political suicide.
Sure, a lot of the legislation he's passing hands money to wealthy corporations. Somebody has to build the infrastructure to get us off fossil fuels after all. That doesn't mean it isn't also improving the world around us at a pace faster than any president in recent history, and being in a position that Biden is bringing us to is a much more stable platform to build real social and economic change off of. There will be no need for a messy revolution if we can incrementally design and build systems that handle the issues we face in a level headed, evidence based fasion.
A giveaway to corporate America and they arrogantly decided not to codify Roe v. Wade. And don't forget, this was right after the financial crash and not one person from Wall Street went to jail over any of that shit.
It's a hell of a lot more than anything the republicans have done for me in my lifetime. I certainly wouldn't call it a giveaway to corporate america, they fought tooth and nail to try and keep anything even close to the ACA from passing. Is it an ideal system? No, but at least I can get a reasonable insurance package while un or self employed now, and that's a huge deal for the economic mobility of the masses.
Diverting any of the efforts that went into passing the ACA to stuff like codifying roe v wade or staging a big crackdown on wallstreet most likely would have ended up with the ACA getting axed. That's why we need to get the dems to have a secure position as the controlling party so they can focus on longer term goals and hammer the right wingers into irrelevancy. If we can get there, I'd hope to see the dems split into a liberal and leftist party so that way we can argue about which way we want to make progress happen instead of desperately trying to make any progress happen at all.
Buddy, I'm not content with "better than Republicans". The Republicans are getting worse every year and Democrats are happy to follow closely behind.
You're free to believe that. I believe they intentionally dragged it out specifically so they wouldn't have to deliver anything else. Because most Democrat politicians are pro-corporate trash who are enabling the drift into fascism if not outright facilitating it.
You shouldn't be content with just "better than Republicans" that's how we get progress. That said, I still think you're overstating how bad the democrats are. Yes, on some issues, they fold to corporate pressures and I'm not happy about that. In many other areas they are hamstrung by obstructionism and having to appeal to a big tent voter base; this is unavoidable until the republican party becomes irrelevant and the dems can split. There are plenty of areas however where they're making incredible progress, here's a list of stuff that the Biden admin has done just in 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhatBidenHasDone/comments/11lohnc/what_biden_has_done_year_three_year_one_two_are/
44 Democrat senators politicians and Joe Biden acted with lightning speed to block the rail strike. Meanwhile Biden has enlisted Yellen and Powell to go to war with American Workers. Fuck Joe Biden.
Respectfully, go fuck yourself. If you genuinely don't think this is bad then you and I are not on the same side. Good luck in 2024 Elect your procorporate trash candidate all on your own.
Biden won the primary by millions and millions of votes, will easily do so again this year, and his policies are (and always have been) square in the middle of the Democratic mainstream. Say what you want about him but he's clearly representative of Democratic voters.
That "square in the middle" skews white and middle class.
I also think you underestimate the number of people who voted for him purely because he isn't Trump in 2020.
and now the logic is well he wasn't trump in 2020 so let's actually try trump who's literally planning a dictatorship?
make it make sense
What does this snark have to do with the comment you responded to? Is the Democratic establishment supposed to be beyond even mild criticism? Yeah, they have voters stuck in a corner. We get it.
Now here is something for you to get. The people posting this shit are far more likely to harden people's resolve to punish the Democrats for their abuse of the situation. You are the flip side of the same coin, choosing virtue signaling instead of trying to heal the breech the Democratic establishment created. It's fucking tribalism, just like the Republicans.
As a member of the Numpty tribe, you are a poopy head. Did I just persuade you to work with me?
What are you talking about? DNC primary is not a democratic election.
What are you talking about? It's both a big- and small-D Democratic election. Biden got nearly 20 million votes, a majority of the total and almost double what Sanders got.
You're completely missing the point that leftists are making if you compare voting for yet another liberal Capitalist as "burnt toast," it's closer to your house being on fire under Biden or your neighborhood under Trump. Neither is good, both are bad, Biden isn't just an inconvenience unless you're privledged enough that you're fine with the Neoliberal status quo.
Will I be voting for Biden? Absolutely. Should I be told to stop whining about how he is a generic, lukewarm Capitalist perpetuating genocide? No.
If they were exerting pressure then Netanyahu would have complained to Congress, like he did with Bush and Obama. Cutting off arms shipments is exerting pressure. Removing the UN block is exerting pressure.
Writing mean words in secret is nothing.
How come we don't talk about "Genocide Trump" more, this close to the election? I think the words "Genocide Trump" should be at least as important to hear online this close to the election. What about "Genocide Trump", what do you think, do you think "Genocide Trump" should be at least or at least not less popular than your alternative?
He went around Congress to give them weapons. That's pretty much all I have to know. Without threatening actual leverage, and that's basically the only leverage they have, his words mean nothing. Batman Begins has a good lesson about that. I just wish there was a non-genocide *choice. What a cool democracy for a cool country.
"All I have to know is what I learned from a batman movie".
Way to go, sport!
Man get off your own headspace... Seriously
Could focus on working on congressional campaign advocacy disallowing the President from near unlimited War Reserve Stockpile Allies – Israel (WRSA-I). Republicans are on pretending to be Anti-War doves yet all these protest are alienating them with their disgusting support for Hamass & antisemitic Houthis as well as being a nuisance to the public. Pretty sure there are a lot of people that would agree with this if they weren't being interrupted in traffic picking up their family or trying to get to work on time.
The post has a point. Trump cut funding to UNRWA opposes Two-State unlike Biden and Trump has mentioned deporting any immigrant that doesn't support Israel. Not to mention Democrats provided a slew of "young" candidates in 2020 yet most of the "left" went for an older candidate Bernie Sanders that now agrees with President Biden & that recognizes Ceasefires not offered by Hamas are a joke. So nobody to blame but themselves for the consolidation of one of the most Progressives Presidents in the modern era.
Don't get mad when your fellow advocates refuse or reject to participate in Democracy. Israel & Palestine is a complex issue that many of you were asleep at the wheel on. I tried to bring up the matter up for a vote for amending our party platform at our State Democrat convention this summer because polling showed Democrats supported Palestinians more than Israel but it was the "Leftist" members that voted down claiming it wasn't time to discuss it.
You were are missing in action with Ukraine as Russia tries to genocide them again. Hard to take you all serious especially when its fickle. President Biden is fighting to aid to Gaza as well as reduce the severity of fighting & working to release hostages that is great while wanting to support helping Ukraine. We are also trying to keep Africa safe & access to shipping food to them while antisemitic Houthis attack ships indiscriminately.
ITT: Right wing trolls pretend to be leftists.
If we don't at least pretend to be willing to wield our voting power to influence our govt, we might as well give up and accept we live in an oligarchy.
Sometimes just the threat of violence is enough to get people to act. Biden has already changed his administrations public stance and rhetoric towards Israel at merely the risk of losing votes. Ideally it would have been because of the loss of human lives, but beggars can't be choosers.
Are you telling me your democracy is held together with tape and needles ?
it's not the responsibility of voters to vote for certain politicians, it's the responsibility of the politicians to represent people so they vote for them.
if you think joe biden is gonna lose then you gotta force joe biden to take more popular positions (he is literally running right now it's the time you make up your platform), not yell at people "refusing" to vote for him as if they are just petulant children refusing to eat their veggies and act like the most logical and rational option is locking your vote for joe biden and whoever disagrees just cannot understand the correctness of your reasoning.
(to be clear i'm not american but it's just ridiculous how many times i have heard this exact song and dance)
This feel like a shocked Pikachu meme where Biden is surprised the left despised him when the Democratic party does nothing at all progressive.
Seriously. I have a hunch that if Trump were president this would be happening regardless except he would be saying how people should be assaulting Palestinians or something like that.
Instead Palestinians have huge support from U.S. citizens, the non/anti-Zionist ones anyway.
If only there were more candidates to choose from than these two genocide lovers.
That's a current picture, not a future picture.
Our first amendment rights are only exercisable with the permission of the government, preferably in silence tucked away where no one can see us.
Our third amendment rights are non-existent because SCOTUS draws a line between the police and soldiers. (Never mind the British soldiers were here to police the colonies)
Our Fourth amendment rights exist only notionally. If officers get a dog to jump at your car or have a "good faith belief" that they're within their rights to search.
Fifth is almost just gone. Civil Asset Forfeiture means only the rich can afford to keep the state from taking their stuff at any time. States routinely re-run criminal trials by deliberately getting a mistrial declared if they're losing.
The sixth is a joke. Public defenders in some places have as little as 7 minutes to look at your case. And if you're accused of a misdemeanor you probably won't have a jury at all. But you will lose your job, your house, and everything else in a chain reaction as you have to figure out how to pay hefty fines with no job. Also you'll probably end up in prison for contempt of court when you have trouble paying.
The eighth amendment is likewise a joke. Instead of protecting poor people in the system, it's used as a cudgel to force confessions.
And this is all on top of decades of wealth transfer out of the working class to the point that it's getting hard to buy food for half the country.
Oh yeah, Trump would be horrible. But he's the guy we've been getting set up for, not the guy the establishment is trying to avoid. I'll probably vote for Biden but I'm not going to be surprised when the "status quo genocide" guy gets his ass handed to him. Democrats needed to fight for this and they just aren't.
Edit to add - Y'all know the second the GOP puts up a reasonable sounding asshole we're fucked right? Like if Nikki Haley got the nomination? All that pressure drops away and she'd still institute project 2025 just like Trump.
Palestine will be even more fucked under Trump, he's firmly on Israel's side and would probably increase aid or give them carte blanche to just exterminate Palestine completely. While Biden hasn't been much better, there's at least signs that his administration is trying to reign in the Israelis, though for whatever reason they haven't been terribly serious about it. I'm assuming it's because Israel is a client state that for the most part cooperates with the US and buys our weapons, they can help further whatever policy goals we might have in the region. IMO they seem like they're more trouble than they're worth, whatever we might gain from Israel is ruined by Israel's own conduct, they're dragging us down with them as they act belligerently to everyone around them. Maybe being surrounded by hostile nations on all sides does that, but from the outside looking in it doesn't look like they've seriously sought peace.
If anything, we should be withholding aid from them to get them to show a bit more humility and willingness to work towards peace, but I'm guessing they'd just turn to Russia or China instead and continue being belligerent. If that happened though, then Palestinians are just as fucked as before, if not more so. It's crazy how fickle we can be with any other nation that needs our help and have left plenty of other allies to die, but for whatever reason, we just can't quit Israel. Given all of the alternatives, Palestinians face a slow death unless some sort of two-state solution can be found (or if they could be integrated better into Israel instead of being dead-set on their own independent state), but from what I can see, the least-worst option is for the US to try to be a moderating influence on Israel like what Biden has been halfheartedly doing. It's not great, but the alternatives are worse.
Why do Americans only have these two candidate choices in the presidential election? They seem so diametrically opposed, it is difficult to fathom how a majority of Americans could think either align with them politically.
Yes, am agreeing that must not vote for Biden Genocide Joe. American President must be strong defender of freedoms like Trump, or like great president Putin.
Also, I am liberal sexually fluid college student who eats of many avocado toasts and demands money. Not voting Biden is shared by my many many friends of all races and economic class.
This is quality satire.
A little too hackneyed for my taste but it might be lost on Lemmy. Too often I see what I think to be legit satire on here and the people are dead ass.
It's the most radical of the left still falling for rich propaganda while pretending like they're enlightened and above class warfare. While still not being able to see the reality of the everyday world for most of their neighbors and vilifying every single one of them nearly carte blanche.
I can never tell if it's internet tough guy situations when they're as smooth as a ken doll IRL or if they just succumb to the same propagandists rhetoric as the right while thinking they're actually helping.
Hello, fellow sexually fluid student of avocado toast college. I choose vote for Trump because his name is Donald, and I favorite Donald Duck and Ronald McDonald.
I just want someone who will live in this country for another 30 or 40 years after they leave office...
"Rich people livin" in America and "poor people livin" in America are way different, no matter how much longer they have left.
Id rather someone who is close enough to the "poor people livin" generally. They tend to make better decisions for more people.
I'm convinced if it wasn't the conflict in Palestine it would be some other issue that would prevent them from being able to "morally" support Biden.
Yes the conflict in Palestine is terrible, yes there are atrocities occuring, no I don't have any of the solutions.
There seem to be a subset of people that only want to see the negative in every aspect of life and this carries over to politicians/politics in general. The grass is forever more green elsewhere.
I recently asked a friend trapped in this bubble if they had seen the new Mario movie, as I attempt to avoid politics with them at this point in time, and I received the answer, "No, fuck Chris Pratt." I didn't bother asking why, but it seems that nearly ever aspect of life, except the ones they choose to conveniently ignore is reason for social outrage and some how it is "Biden's Fault," with complete disregard to what the alternative looks like.
But 3rd parties!!! Oh yes, because statistically splitting your vote between the only two groups with a chance of being elected to office is the "moral solution."
I don't ever want to hear about "harm reduction" from them again, when their "moral" decision results in women's healthcare being a literal afterthought and rights for a variety of marginalized communities being stripped away. 1,500 people a week are still dying from COVID in the U.S., but hey, let's help elect the party that wants to continue erroding any remaining social safety nets, because you know, people who get sick don't matter as much as this months zeitgeist of social outrage.
Barely holding back genocide and civil war in the U.S. That's what we're doing here
You can voice your displeasure while also making sure the world slides a little more slowly down the shithole (and potentionally has a chance to crawl back out). Voting for the president is important, but it's far from the only thing that is. Hedging everything you believe in on a single office is far more damaging than a single vote for Biden could ever be.
We've been living through at least 40+ years of "Vote for 20% more evil instead of 40% more evil" and wouldn't you know it we're at a substantial higher level of evil.
Everyone loves screeching about leftists/3rd party types being silly stupid babies, but yall are the ones who keep telling us the only way to less evil is by adding more evil. 🤷
We're at least trying. If everyone who was a little piss baby whenever third parties came up voted for one we'd have a few by now.
No, that's literally not how that works at all, and frankly if you're dumb enough to think that that is, or malicious enough to willfully ignore knowing that's not how that works, then it's pretty obvious you haven't lived through 40 years of this supposed droning on.
Oh look, screeching about leftists/3rd party types being silly stupid babies.
If Dem lossses are all the lefty's fault, it's probably time to start catering to those voters - instead of dedicating your time to fighting them harder than you've ever fought Republicans then shocked Pikachuing when they don't vote Dem.
No one says you can't vote, or think how you want to think, by all means this is a free country.
The issue I run into is that everyone is being purity tested to an extent that no individual who is at least somewhat tolerable to much of the political middle in the U.S., is acceptable to a specific subset of people who are constantly outraged by something.
Many of these same people complain endlessly about many of the issues a Trump presidency is going to greatly exacerbate, and don't seem to understand, none of us get what we want, but helping to elect him by not voting for the only real alternative seems insanely illogical in my mind. Much like the post states.
It makes no sense to me, "this person is going to burn everything down, but I'm not going to support the only alternative who does things that aren't nearly as bad..."
I don't have to scarecrow people I know, who are examples of this exact behavior. If I didn't know people like this why would I bring it up?
You don't agree that, speaking in generalities, people with more progressive values (obviously everything is a spectrum), are more likely to purity test their candidate than people with more conservative ideologies?
Speaking, again in generalities, the people I know that vote for conservative candidates do not seem to care what candidates do, no matter how much it runs counter to their core beliefs systems. Look how many, what I would consider abhorrent individuals are elected simply because they are a means to whatever end they are looking for.
Look around on political comments, especially on Lemmy, I see the exact behavior/thought process I'm speaking of on a very regular basis, and I truthfully only check in on this app when I have a client out or maybe before bed.
I'm not ignoring anything, I understand there are a variety of significant concerns about many candidates and processes within the Democratic party, especially when it comes to addressing the concerns of the more progressive issues. However; I think that many on the outer edges of the progressive spectrum over estimate how progressive the average American is, and often fail to consider just how disastrous a second Trump presidency would be for many many people.
Because we all know you're not asking why you can't criticise him, you're asking why you're not allowed to keep calling yourself our ally at pride when you use this as an excuse to not vote for him.
I was having the same conversation with people in 2016. In fact, for every election since 2000. Yes democrats often suck. But at least they believe in consensus based governance and the rule of law. The modern GOP (since the civil rights era) has been firmly authoritarian and anti-democratic. Unfortunately your choices are between “lackluster” and “truly horrifying.” Changing that will take a generation but if you don’t participate now and vote against the GOP, things will be far worse far more quickly than if Democrats just disappoint you.
Like Nina Turner said... Choices are "a bowl of shit or half a bowl of shit". Oof.
Very much how I feel. One path gives us the opportunity to improve our situation eventually, the other wishes to burn it all down and create a religious dictatorship, or whatever the hell you'd call the Trump/MAGA/right wing of the U.S.' ideal version of government.
Some people can’t separate the ideal from the actual. Yeah the process sucks and we should demand better. Yeah we should demonstrate, protest, and riot. But we still have to fucking vote, and at the end of the day we have to win. In politics, you can’t play if you don’t win.
People who try to skip voting to go do the rest of the fun stuff should frankly get put in stockades at those riots and pelted.
Fuck these aesthetic allies, do the work or don't show up. Price of admittance to the instagramable protest march is the most recent "I Voted" sticker.
Well shit I’m not really in favor of stockades lol
Re: Chris Pratt He's a member of an anti-LGBT church and has tried to deny that his church is anti-LGBT. (Chad Veach is the pastor)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Veach#Controversy
Edit: oops, misphrased this
I literally can't keep up with every individuals flaws, or perceived flaws from a public eye.
Reminds me of all the critics who took every opportunity to slag Obama for drone strikes while ignoring Trump ramping them way up with no transparency (while Biden virtually eliminated them).
They were trying to hammer railroad strike & the train derailment before. Funny most of them are rose twitter & DSA types that are facing a budget shortfall & are demanding that the Union workers they have on staff voluntarily resign so they don't have to pay benefits or negotiate with them.
I'm a Palestinian American and honestly I feel fucking violated by how these people have been using the tragedy in Gaza to serve their ends.
They love us as corpses, because corpses don't have any expectations of them for them to get away with pretending they're allies.
Mf-ers out here acting allergic to periods.
There is Taiwan also
Not voting for my candidate is the same as voting for my opposition, but not voting for my opposition is not the same as voting for my candidate.
Those aren't the folks that worry me. The folks that worry me are the ones that are voting Trump (as they put it) because "Biden is going to ban flavored cigarettes so no more Menthol".
Welcome to Germany. Many young people voted for a liberal party that only has the interest of the rich elite in mind. Because they said they would legalize Marijuana.
Spoiler: They do everything they can for rich people, Marijuana is still not legal.
Bidens playing that card right now for the election year.
Never mind that democrats have done that for like 20 years
My state legalized it a year or two ago though, and more and more are every day so I'm not sure what point you're really making.
Vote democrat, they legalized weed?
edit: I was being facetious because fuck the DNC. My state actually legalized it by constitutional amendment after the people voted on it, no thanks to any political party, it was outside groups organizing and gathering signatures.
Those folks are just conservatives pretending that they would have ever voted for Biden in the first place.
Banning menthols would probably have helped me quit earlier. I thought non-menthols were too harsh when I smoked.
If menthol cigarettes are banned, it will signal the end of america as we know it. George Washington will be screaming in terror from his grave. "NOOO. LOOK AT WHAT THEYVE DONE TO MY CREATION!!! THE MENTHOLS NOOOOOOO" The only proper course of action would be to clone the founding fathers, demolish all of the United States, and let them start over.
what a great comment section
Unless you guys are ready to have the revolution today, you need to vote Biden if you don't want Trump to win. Period.
The Democratic party when it absolutely refuses to appeal to anyone, but feels entitled to their votes anyway:
"We did Patrick! We saved nothing."
Trump isn't even pro palestinian and if he's not clarifying this, goes to show.
First of all, your system is broken. Second, what is a Palestinian American supposed to do? Biden is literally providing the ammunition to kill their families. Trump isn’t any better, but that doesn’t mean voting for another genocidal maniac is a viable option.
You asking Palestinian/Muslim Americans to simply look past that is a very self centered perspective. You say then people will be deported and thrown into camps. That’s what Palestinians were fleeing from in the first place. They fled before, they’ll do it again if they have to. They’re living in diaspora anyway. So do the millions of other Muslim Americans who are here because of Western geopolitics.
You on the other hand who try to bully them into voting for Biden because it serves your purpose, have nowhere to go. If you want progress for your country and you consider Biden only the lesser evil. Instead of bullying fellow Americans into serving your purpose, why don’t you focus on your common goal instead? Respect their opinion, support their cause.
Join their protests against Biden, pressurize him into stopping the genocide, pressurize the DNC into sending someone else as their presidential candidate.
If I've learned anything from talking with disgruntled tankies it's that Biden controls the universe and singlehandedly killed all the dinosaurs after stubbing his little toe on a coffee table. The monster.
As someone who is struggling to find a reason to vote for biden for who he is, rather than vote for him for what he is not, its so disheartening to see the only valid reason to vote for him is just that he isn’t trump.
And I hate that discussion about this is always so black and white about this, and just sneering at people who have no policy reason to vote for biden, throwing shade at people who genuinely hate biden’s neoliberal platform for criticizing because trump is the opponent.
Voting for someone because they aren’t trump didn’t work in 2016, and Im worried it isn’t going to work in 2024. And I’m starting to see why people are feeling so hopeless when it comes to electoralism
And what did Marx think about voting for the lesser evil:
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, London, March 1850
Primaries are the right time to criticize incumbents. General is when we all fall in line. Not criticizing politicians when they do something wrong is what the republicans do - we shouldn't seek to emulate them.
Just a reminder that the DNC due to disagreeing on whether New Hampshire should be first primary or not has literally determined that regardless of the outcome that all delegates from New Hampshire would go to Biden this year.
He won a write-in campaign, but that's really not the point.
I am...off the loop with US politics. Could someone explain please? :(
The fact that those are your choices should be enough to alert you to the reality - that voting is a charade to make you feel "heard" and to keep you from turning on your overlords, who will continue to wage war for profit (be it on Palestine or on their own poor and marginalised) no matter what.
Sadly the propaganda is so strong that most people can't see beyond the pretend field laid out in front of them and the "blue vs red" mentality that is enforced along with it, so focused on this artificial division that they don't see that the real "teams" are society and those who exploit it for profit and power (and who control the media and the education system, ensuring you're indoctrinated this way from birth).
By all means, vote for the lesser (but still) evil (I'm in the UK, we are able to vote "none" which I will be doing if there is no one on the ballot who represents me), but you don't get to pat yourself on the back for it as if you've just stormed the beach on D day and singlehandedly defeated fascism, because that's nowhere near the truth, which is that you've just participated in a bit of theatre where you were given an illusion of choice. You being uncomfortable doesn't change that.
It could change you, if you decide to engage the discomfort instead of ignoring it, you can start here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230803021951/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/american-democracy-was-never-designed-to-be-democratic
https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
People who think voting doesn't matter are the ones that make it a reality. Everyone who shows up to not vote, or throw a protest vote, make it that much easier for the fanatics who do show up to get their way.
It's not a perfect system, but refusing to participate doesn't make it better. And "patting yourself on the back" because you decided you'd rather support your pride and ego instead of change (imperfect as it always is) is no less a sign of delusion than believing one election for one position is all that matters.
Every election matters. From local dog-catcher to state reps to president.
Who said anything about not participating. All anarchists I know are at most lukewarm on voting but put more effort into political change by organizing that all the votes in all the elections of a lifetime combined.
The election system doesn't really change anything and makes people complicit by giving them the illusion of a democratic process that's actually worth a damn.
It doesn't change anything because people of action don't participate. Voter participation is shockingly low for a supposedly "free" population. It's not the only thing that matters, but it does a whole lot more than screaming from the rooftops about how much of a fool other people are for actually participating.
Are you claiming that activists don't vote? Or that being an activist isn't participating in the democratic process?
I'd like a source if you meant the former and seriously question your idea of democracy if youmeant the latter.
I'd claim that this is the output for a system which alienates so much of the people's power in everyday concern. Not the reason why the system does that.
Consider the french revolution. Was agitation against the aristrocracy more effective than praying and being sure that the people above did what was best for their country?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
We get it bro, youre the arbiter of truth. Voting is meaningless, so don't do anything other than bitch and moan about everything.
They literally tell you to vote but ok
Read the last paragraph. It's facetious.
It is overly dramatic to the point of being annoying, but I wouldn't describe it as facetious. They say to vote for the lesser of two evils, I'm going to assume that's what they want people to do.
No, you've just constructed a strawman.
Not sure you know what that means, buddy.
They never said anything about just "bitch[ing] and moan[ing]". Just that voting isn't as much saving the world as much as the people in power would like you to believe. Tell me how you didn't misrepresent what they said to make it easier for you to attack them (you know... Strawmanning)
Lol, brush up on some English Composition. This isn't the gotcha you think it is.
Well, yes. The entire point of democracy was to stop the cycle of regular revolution and bloodshed by spreading out power.
I don't think anybody is legitimately saying that voting blue is the end of the matter. Activism is way more than that--it's attending local board meetings and making yourself heard, getting involved with your local/state parties to push for change, communicating with your elected representative (even, and especially if, they disagree with your position), attending donstrations and protests, volunteering for your preferred candidate's campaign, voting, and most importantly--never giving up, even if it takes decades. If your preferred candidate loses in the primary, you immediately switch to the next closest candidate and start campaigning for them and pushing them towards your preferred policies. If a referendum you support loses, immediately start pushing for a similar referendum in the next election that tweaks the wording to avoid the reason why it lost last time. And so on, and so forth, across all the various levels of government.
This exact playbook is what got Roe overturned. Religious mutters pushed, and pushed, and pushed. They voted in lockstep for the farthest-right candidate in the primary, and if they lost in the primary they voted for the farthest right candidate in the general. They protested outside abortion clinics daily. They pushed and pushed, and over the course of 50 years they gradually transformed an entire political party from having roughly equal representation of pro-choice and anti-choice candidates to one where supporting a nationwide 15-week abortion ban with no exceptions is considered "moderate."
I think a lot of people actually are saying that voting blue is the end of the matter. When you ask people who hate leftists what they are doing besides voting for Biden, most have no answer.
Be fair. Abuse, gaslighting, condescension and baseless accusations are all answers.
Yeah, because they're lazy, and/or don't have the ability to wage a sustained campaign. That's the vast majority of voters on both sides--myself included, sadly, though in my case it's largely because I'm afraid that a furry getting involved in a campaign would do more harm than good. Did you think every (or even a majority) of single-issue pro-birth voters were on the picket lines? Hell no. Most voters cast a vote, maybe in the primary (but usually just the general election, and only in the presidential elections) and that's pretty much it.
And for the record, I absolutely don't hate leftists, I agree with the vast majority of leftist positions, and I think protesting and advocating like this is a critical part of creating change. I just feel like it's just as important to practice harm reduction and push from the inside, too.
I would be happy if folks just stopped mindlessly repeating cnn msnbc npr neoliberal talking points as though it’s some kind of gotcha! Lol. Is that too much to fucking ask!
I am not american so I don't vote, but if I were, as a leftist, I would likely very begrudgingly vote Biden, however I find that this entitlement to leftists votes that liberals have is only gonna make leftists less willing to vote for Biden tbh. In fact I'd much rather vote a third party already your shitflinging isn't gonna make me any more willing tonsupport your shitlib.
If you got to the point where every election is "vote us or the fascist republicans win" maybe it's time to analyze and rethink your tactics and system instead of demanding leftists simply vote for you because a shitlib is somewhat less bad than a fashit. Maybe even do some leftist things, gasps, so they may actually want to vote for you. And you also might want to revisit this system that is so weak and vulnerable to democratic backsliding that every election is a threat to it.
Or you could wait for the leftists to bring out the guillotines and solve the issue for you, tho you're probably going to be on the chopping block after so many years of moving to the right and blaming leftists every time you lose, and maybe also cause your party is still ok with letting businesses do their thing including union busting or the genocide mentioned in the meme.
Didn't exist something called primaries?
Huh, this is the most convincing vote blue no matter who argument I've seen. I'm in Canada so it's not up to me, but damn, this SpongeBob meme is poignant.
Question for the libs who are flailing, trying and failing to understand how their country is backsliding into genocidal fascism (and taking shots to the left):
The deluge of Biden admins who have resigned because of the war - are they now supporting Trump since they are withholding their support for the Biden campaign?
We did it reddit!
If those votes are important to him then Biden should earn them by not being complicit in a genocide. Maybe Biden is a Trump supporter by continuing to do so? After all if not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump, Biden doing genocide is also him voting for Trump.
You can look at it that way or you can look at it where Biden won't listen to the people who would elect him and decides to support genocide knowing it will probably mean he won't get re-elected. Why would you blame the voters when it's clearly one person who is making the wrong decision. Edit: it's crazy people are defending Biden while he's supporting genocide and blaming the people who refuse to support it and don't attack the president that doesn't listen to 70% of his own party. If he doesn't listen here why would he listen to us anywhere else.
If Biden is unelectable its the voters fault for not electing him anyway
This is my new favorite meme
As much as I despise Trump, I disagree with this dangerous rhetoric. Biden seems the only person capable of inflecting the dire fate of gazans and he does not. Worse, he funnels money and military equipment to support this. Trump may wreak havoc in the US if reelected, but if Biden is fine with genocide elsewhere, he should be fine to let America fall
those things are bound to happen anyway regardless of the clown you guys elected.
ukraine is already abandoned, too, under the flag of a democrat you voted in.
voting doesnt work because we vote then go right back to doing absolutely nothing
Good juxtaposition - in the US situation, the solution to two evils is not choosing neither, but choosing the lesser of the two. Only then can we make progress towards a world we all want
Just say they both fucking suck OP, it's not that hard.
Okay, you're willfully obtuse or have no reading comprehension. McConnell's position was discussed in the article as well. I thought Graham 's position statement was a better articulation of the point.
If you really need an article explaining this more clearly, you're lost.
I'm getting so many messages from people about how immature and impractical it is to be wary of voting for Biden just because he isn't trump, it's absurd.
Biden is probably as bad as trump in very different ways, but dipshit liberals would have you believe that it is your patriotic duty to vote with them, otherwise you give a vote to trump when you refuse to vote.
With that being said, please vote in your local elections and for pretty much everything else. As liberals seem to forget, the president is mostly just a figurehead, but your senators, representatives, congressmen, etc mean much more and affect your life more significantly.
they don't give a shit if it makes any sense, they're all running from reality
Americans have some serious Stockholm syndrome if they believe voting for any of these candidates makes a meaningful difference when they are both war mongering fascists. The status quo can not be changed by voting but by anti-government protests forcing the current system to collapse.
Besides Roe ended under Biden, not Trump. There have also been more deportations under Biden than under Trump so this vote Biden or else blackmail isn't even based on facts. It's like choosing between Himmler and Hitler.
I agree, it should be illegal to criticize Biden in any way since he’s not Trump
Whenever we see this same old point being made and think "yes, how stupid are people," remember that being shamed in to voting doesn't work and this even helped get Trump elected in 2016. The only thing that happens with this is a sense of self-validation.
If the Democrats really didn't want Trump, someone would deal with him how they deal with other existential threats. He's great for fundraising though, and most big donors support both parties.
This kind of "argument" brought us down to the current disaster.
Everyone told you last time that voting in biden would make Trump inevitable next time around and now that's playing out for you. Meanwhile your response is to bully women, muslims, and black people into voting for a guy who is openly against their fundamental human dignities? get over yourselves.
He did nothing to stop Roe v Wade overturning. He did nothing to stop Palestine being massacred. He did nothing to stop the insane levels of transphobia in red states. He did nothing to address basic economic hardships. He did nothing to stop kids being killed at the southern border. Anyone who wants to be complicit in that (like the dozen or so people who consistently spam lemmy with this virtue signalling BS) can go right ahead and watch as their golden boy gets throttled by a fascist populist just as people fucking warned you about.
OP thinks genociding Palestinians is a character quirk and not a serious flaw that disqualifies a politician
All he's got to do is say he wants affordable housing. Otherwise yeah I'll let it burn.
I never get tired of these kinds of low effort posts.
You Liberals are so tiresome.
100% percent accurate. The same dumb shit happened when the Bernie Bros threw their tantrums in 2016.
Sorry but trump is way funnier than Biden. I don't make the rules.
Trump is actually not much worse than Biden on foreign policy. Bypassing congress to supply ammo for a genocide is something I would have literally only seen Trump do until three months ago. Then I found out the israeli lobbies supplied Biden with three times as much funds as Trump.
While Trump is pretty shit on American domestic policy, he doens't seem to be much worse for the Palestinians.
Vote third party.
Either I’m an idiot or this doesn’t make any sense at all.
I can’t be certain of either, so…
Well, it makes sense to idiots, so looks like you're in the clear this time.
It's kind of word salady but I think it means "Democracts after Biden wins and they spend the next 4 years fighting the actual left wing of the party instead of fighting Republicans. And then Republicans win that election (2028), and carry on with their plan to end elections in the U.S. (and install some kind of Christian theocracy)."
But thats prettty short sighted. It assumes that going and voting in one presidential election is going to to get you the politicians and policies that you'd like which is obviously false.
The White Left thinks getting called out for their dumb privileged shit is "fighting the left harder than Republicans"
Fuck American liberals you people are disgusting. Support your genocidal president who does fuck all for you anyway because you're stupid enough to fall for the good cop bad cop routine of the US government. If you vote for Joe Biden you are voting for genocide. The fact that the other option is just as genocidal does not absolve you of culpability for your complicity.
The final verdict is that you are human garbage.
Edit: Biden just halted all funding for UNRWA to prevent it from providing aid to Palestinians as much as possible. This is exactly the kind of unhinged policy decision that liberals would make a fuss about trump taking. Trump or Biden it makes no difference and you must be extremely propagandized to think it does.
Is this anyone's position? Calling him Genocide Joe, protesting at his campaign events, is about holding his feet to the fire. I don't think I've ever heard anyone saying they won't vote for Joe Biden because of it. Cause a vote for Joe isn't a vote for Joe, it's a vote against fascism.
Just because there's opposition, doesn't mean that not supporting someone means supporting the opposition.
There've literally been articles posted to the fediverse about people saying they'd rather not vote than vote for Biden because of his support for Netenyahu and the IDF.
Then give me one. I haven't seen these posts and you say they're here, show me please.
Here's one. It took me longer to type the search query than to find a relevant article from the search results.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/3/us-muslims-pledge-to-ditch-biden-in-2024-over-his-stance-on-israel-gaza-war
For the primary, sure that makes sense to try and enact change, but in the general election a vote for anyone other than Biden is the same as a vote for Trump.
I wanted to remain neutral when linking the article, but that's my take as well.
While I hate that people weaponize the saying "voting for an independent party is throwing away your vote" as a way to pressure others into voting for their preferred party, the logic behind it is not wrong. It would take a substantial amount of organization and commitment to make a third party viable. Considering that, any vote that isn't for Biden is effectively a vote for Trump.
That's the thing, FPTP doesn't allow that. It doesn't "make a third party viable" even if you get all the votes needed. It's "usurp one of the two parties" instead, as whichever party failed to conquer the contender gets subsumed by them, if their ideologies are in any way compatible.
I mean, I do think actually acting on that statement is foolish... but it doesn't mean they never made the statement. Just because we believe something to go against the common good doesn't mean people of generally good will don't take those actions for what they believe to be good reasons.
The situations sucks. It has sucked for a long time. And it's not going to get better quickly or easily. Unfortunately refusing to act in the main way you can to make that difference makes it that much harder and take that much more time.
Thanks!
snappy retort
See how that doesn't add anything to the conversation?
If you haven't been a part of the larger conversation till now, and you're just jumping in with accusations and shit, you weren't adding anything to begin with.
If you worry about other countries while Biden opens our own borders and then still vote for him, you might be a moron.
I'm going to vote for RFK. I think he has a couple of good points about looking at source code, rather than banning apps made in China. The whole TikTok ban was just stupid. Google, Microsoft, and other corporate companies already do so much shady stuff; why the hell are we banning businesses from other countries when all we need is the source code? Also, he is against government surveillance, which I think is a really good thing that can really restore our democracy. I've felt as if we've lost so much of our freedoms just from all this mass surveillance. People cannot look for information freely, which is a very important part of our democracy.