Why are so many Pro-Palestine (I am pro-Palestine and anti-genocide) Americans refusing to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel?
As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.
Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.
I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.
Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.
Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.
Edit 2: This blew up, it’s a little overwhelming right now but I do intent on replying to everybody that took the time to comment. Just need to get in the right headspace.
Remember that in online spaces (and IRL in reality), there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts that will make claims to sway public opinions.
Good point. Although, I would question whether Lemmy is such a place as we really don’t have the numbers to warrant the effort, imo.
We get drug spam and stock spam, no reason to expect that political spam is any less likely.
Lemmy has a huge amount of hardcore lefty's. If you can get them to not vote, and especially if you can get them to tell their friends not to vote, that is a big win.
Astroturfing/sockpuppeting is dirty cheap to do, so no reason not to try.
You do see some users here that will post continously on about a certain topic repeatedly, with no other opinions. They might be legit, but I have my suspicions.
"Hardcore lefties" have a very different understanding of the value of their vote, which is to say, it means very little.
Have you deigned to ask them questions?
I disagree - it feels like Lemmy is seeing the same kind of shills that 4chan saw in the last several elections. These bad actors are trying to sway dems to vote third party or not vote at all "in protest" across many small and large online spaces.
Are the shills in the room with us right now?
Yes, in fact I see one now.
Interesting. What am I shilling for? What are my real opinions? What are the fake ones I'm presenting?
Your real opinions are the ones I like, and your fake opinions are the ones I don’t. It’s not rocket surgery.
Obviously a huge genocide isn't enough for you - you clearly want Every Palestinian to be killed or imprisoned when Trump is elected. And not just the ones in Gaza, if I were a Palestinian in the US, I'd be terrified of that madman winning, and I'd do everything I could to support Harris like my life depended on it (because it very well might)
More generally you are trying to convince us that the genocide is the only important issue in the world, and that it's somehow worth not supporting someone who is in all ways (not just all other) the far better of the two electable candidates.
Please do your best to act in good faith and not lie about me.
No, that is what you, a non-Palestinian, believe you get to decide for Palestinians, people who have lost half or more of their family in the last year. The Palestinian diaspira, generally speaking, rejects Biden and Harris.
However, you have not answered my questions.
Now you are downplaying the magnitude of genocide. Never again means never again for anyone, not just when it is politically convenient for you.
Welp, looks like you didn't answer my questions. Maybe next time, right?
It's literally the worst crime in the world.
Davidgro out here trying to minimize the literal worst crime in the world for political reasons.
It is not currently such a place. I’ve yet to hear a Lemmy admin say otherwise.
Edit to add: Russiagate conspiracy theorists want it to be true so they can simply dismiss voices that contradict their beliefs.
I've seen cryptospam, drugspam, generic adspam on here. Why would a political astroturfspam be a conspiracy theory?
It does exist. It just doesn’t currently exist here, and Russian/Chinese/Iranian bots 1) hardly exist at all and 2) so far have had virtually no effect.
The reason people are seeing
$evil_countrybots everywhere is because our own government and our own corporate media tell us they are everywhere, not because they are everywhere. The propaganda is coming from inside the house. They’ve spent the last seven years and who knows how much money trying to convince us of. They’re trying to manufacture our consent to censorship.They tell us what opinions are
$evil_dictatortalking points so we know what opinions to dismiss out of hand, and to see the people & organizations that express those opinions as malevolent foreign agents, so we never listen to them again. They’re training us to do some of the censoring for them.The first step is to understand the media and propaganda.
I linked upthread about this specific propaganda campaign, but since people don’t click links, I’ll copypasta myself.
takes no effort with modern technology
yeah, mostly CIA and Israeli bots/paid posters. all of reddit is astroturfed. All social media is controlled by the feds as well. Look into the twitter leaks to see how they do it. Mintpressnews also has great articles about feds in censorship positions in all these social media companies ranging from Facebook to TikTok (100% CIA controlled btw).
Is there any evidence of these CIA/Israeli bots / paid posters?
If somebody makes a pro-Israel post, maybe they just genuinely support Israel (I wouldn't say that's my view currently - I think both Israel and Hamas are wrong because both have killed civilians).
Edit: your downvotes aren't evidence.
Who has killed more civilians?
By multiple orders of magnitude?
This is like "Man, I don't like the sun and light bulbs, they're both so bright."
Ideally I don't think any civilian deaths should happen, so they're both wrong. I'm not going to say Hamas is somehow better because they killed fewer people. To me that seems like saying "oh you didn't kill too many people, that's fine then". Which would be completely wrong in my view.
They also don't have systemized rape and torture camps paid for with your taxes.
By any quantitative value system, Hamas commits less evil than the state of Israel
Comparing them is as useful as comparing the relative brightness between the sun and a lightbulb. The two sides are not comparable. One is committing genocide. Trying to gloss over that fact is propaganda trying to cover up the fact that we're paying for the weapons doing the killing.
Yeah I'm not into the whole "let's excuse Hamas" thing. In my view killing civilians is bad, which is why I think both Hamas and the Israeli government are bad. Neither should kill civilians at all - not 1, not 100, not 1,000, etc.
Good job responding to something I didn't say to try and discredit what I did.
Don't think that goes unnoticed.
I'm not excusing Hamas. The fact that you read what I did says that you are either responding in bad faith, didn't read my response very carefully, or are stupid. I'll go with the middle one to be generous.
I don't excuse Hamas. I don't control Hamas, and much more importantly, I don't pay for the weapons that Hamas use.
I pay, or rather my country pays, for the weapons that Israel uses to bomb apartment building, schools, and hospitals.
Hamas has killed somewhere between 1000-2000 civilians in this conflict, and that is being generous because we know that a large number of causalities were from Israel enacting the Hannibal directive and intentionally killing their own to keep them from being made prisoners (If Israel gets to grab 11,400 West Bank civilians without trial or due process and call them prisoners, then Hamas gets to do the same). Furthermore, if we count anyone who was in the IDF or the IDF's military reserves as active military, then the number of civilians goes WAAAAY down. Remember that the IDF considers the trashmen, police, and hospital administrators as active combatants with Hamas affiliation. So, once again, if that is the standard that Israel is setting then it applies to all parties, including Israelis.
Israel, by all best estimates, has killed somewhere between 100,000-200,000 civilians. That is between 5% - 10% of the ENTIRE POPULATION OF GAZA. In all honesty, the number is probably higher.
That is completely ignoring the systemized rape and torture camps that Israel has set up, and the Israeli media discovered. Also, something that there is no evidence that Hamas has set up.
Acting like those two numbers are equivalent, or pointing out that Israel is quantitatively a minimum of 2 orders of magnitude worse, or that the two sides are the same is either stupidity, or evil. Take your pick.
None of this is justifying Hamas. It is pointing out how much more fantastically, cartoonishly fucking evil the Israeli government is.
You should ask yourself why you view the above as justifying Hamas. You might discover something.
There are, but not on Lemmy, because Lemmy is still much too small to bother with.
Lemmy being small makes astroturfers seem like an actual minority even when they aren't. It's actually way worse here than on Reddit.
Funny, good one
Are you a Lemmy sock puppetry expert? Because I am.
Which Lemmy admins are saying there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts? Because I haven’t heard any.
There is the occasional spammer or corpo shill, who is quickly dealt with, and that’s about it.
Oh wow, a real sock puppetry expert! That's so amazing, can I have your autograph to show to my children?
Buddy, I admin lemmy.ml. I do know a thing or two about the Lemmyverse.
Oh, that certainly explains your answers.
Go ask admins of other instances then.
Spoken like someone that has never been an admin of anything.
There are ways to observe sock puppets solely from metadata that the admins have access to without even looking at the content of the posts.
The admins are literally one of the few groups that can actually, quantitatively, state that there are few sock puppets.
Yeah like all of these people out here telling me to vote for genociders. There's no way that real humans would think so little of Palestinian lives, right?
Right?
And who, of those who aren't mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn't about to help Isreal with their genocide? Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn't Biden, it seems hard to imagine she'd be much worse than current administration on that issue. One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.
Suppose you have two buttons. If you press one, it kills someone. If you press the second, it kills two people. If you don't press the first button, someone else is eagerly waiting who will press the second. Whoever has placed the buttons here, has enough power that neither the buttons nor the other person are within your personal ability to harm at the moment, and you have neither the time nor the popularity to amass enough people to change this before the other guy pushes the "kill two people" button. Your only options are to press one or press neither and allow the second be pressed. If your answer to this scenario is "I press neither button, because pressing the first kills someone, don't you care about people's lives!?", then you are not choosing morality, you are choosing selfishness, because you care more about the notion that your hands will be clean than about the net life saved if you press the button that kills fewer people. In fact, the blood is as much on your hands by inaction if you decide to reject your choice, as it would be had you killed the additional victim yourself.
You know how you can trick a stupid fucking child into doing what you want by presenting them a false choice of two alternatives you're happy with? "Do you want to go to bed now or after one more show?"
So what are the other choices?
Just because you can't stop something doesn't mean you have to participate in it. But if you wanted to do something about it: these weapons come from this country and they have to get there in trucks traveling on roads to ports that load them on ships. And it's not like there's not a value to making genocide come with electoral consequences...
Not voting is a choice. You can't not participate in politics.
You can chose not to vote for a party actively committing the literal worst crime in the world.
We are discussing voting, though. That's a bit tangential, because you can vote or not vote and still commit acts of... resistance...
If you otherwise would have voted Dem against the Republicans, who are as bad or worse when it comes to the specific issue you're punishing the Dems for, you are hurting one group committing genocide by helping one who commits and wants to commit even more genocide.
All under the mistaken belief that by refusing to vote for the group you would otherwise vote for, you will get them to move Left. But if the Dems lose to the VERY right wing party, if the voting shows that Americans favor more right-leaning policies, they would move to gain the votes of the people who actually voted.
The reality is, refusing to vote is still a choice. As long as you are an adult who can legally vote in the US election, you are partly responsible for the results of the election. You don't get to wash your hands of it. Choosing to abstain because you don't want to partipate out of moral self-righteousness is saying your soapbox is more important than the lives affected by your choices, from the Palestinians to the Ukrainians, immigrants to LGBTQ. Nobody is more important than your ability to say "I didn't vote for a party that commit genocide."
Don't project your dumb shit on me
wooooooooow no shiiiiiiiiiit
You mean I'm exercising agency right now? You don't saaaaaaaayyyyyyy.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. "Virtue signalling" you say?
You're a nazi. You're giving material support to the perpetrators of a genocide. You're trash. Diminishing basic morality as a vice just like any other fucking 8chan fascist. Trash.
Smirking fucking nazi invoking "the lives affected by your choices" and "washing your hands" like the worst crime in history isn't hanging behind you as you say that shit.
You're fucking trash.
The difference is that there are real, material differences between the actions the candidates take. It's not a fair choice, but it isn't false either, and choosing not to go along won't give you a better outcome
NO THERE FUCKING AREN'T. And if you believe that, you completely went to brunch when Trump left office and don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
I can say the same about you. Putting "no there aren't" in all caps and adding profanity and personal insults doesn't make it more true, but it does make people remember that a block button exists for the kind of person that uses things as disgusting as a genocide as an opportunity to troll. I do not think that anyone who both has paid any attention to the past 8 years and is arguing in good faith can possibly support that conclusion.
Deeply maddening watching people who materially support genocide complaining about people "playing the genocide card"
And you think there's a difference between you and the fascist party?
You're literally simping FOR THE WORST CRIME IT IS POSSIBLE TO COMMIT!
It's not a card.
It's obvious you would use the same style arguments as a Democrat in the 1880s.
When you are offered two candidates and both support genocide, including one being an active part of the current one, you can say, "no, never again means never again" and work against both rather than pretending you now have to support genocide.
You should believe your lying eyes and see that Biden has gotten your consent for genocide, with Harris helping. The genocide has only ramped up as the election draws close.
There is not worse that can be done. It is full, unequivocal support for basically anything Israel wants for genocide including the weapons and supplies on which they depend to carry out this genocide. If anything, Dems are more effective at this kind of thing, as they secure European support and offer better stipulations to the Israelis around when to escalate and when to play it a little cooler.
Though your electoral logic is seld-defeating anyways. Your consent for the lesser evil keeps you politically anemic and unable to have solidarity with those who need it. You make yourself subservient.
This is a fantasy.
I am not interested in childish metaphors.
If you reject the lesser evil, and all options possible to you are evil, then you by inaction support the greater evil, which, by definition, makes you evil. "Working against both", when evil is inherit in all means by which you might do that work, is a fantasy you tell yourself to justify sabotaging efforts to limit the damage by practicing and encouraging what effective amounts to surrendering one of the few levers of power that you have any limited ability to pull.
I already addressed your lesser evilism logic. If you want to continue this conversation you will need to respond to what I say and not dither and repeat yourself.
I am repeating myself because the notion that the least evil option available is the best one, that the lesser evil if you will is preferable to the more evil one, is axiomatic, that is, it's a basis one takes when constructing a moral framework, not a consequence of one that can be reasoned through. If you do not agree with someone's moral axioms, then there is simply nothing to debate, you and they are simply operating under mutually incompatible definitions for what is and is not the right thing to do. Restating that in a slightly different way is a way of testing if the axioms we are operating under are truly different, in which case further argument is pointless, or if we merely misunderstood eachother the first time around.
Your problem is one of timeframes.
You might, though I personally don't think so, be right on a single election time frame.
They're definitely right on a timescale spanning multiple elections.
Right now, you are forced to vote for someone committing genocide because people kept choosing the lesser evil in previous general elections, and the party cheats in the primaries.
The situation you're in, right now, disproves your argument.
I await your response to what I said. I'm not interesting in watching you masturbate.
You live in a fantasy and sabotage real effort to limit damage in the real world. You are responsible because you can’t swallow your pride. How incredibly selfish of you.
“You are responsible because you can’t swallow your pride. How incredibly selfish of you.”
you guys need to be a bit subtle in the gaslighting effort. where was all this anger for her supporting innocent kids being burned alive. go shout at her rallies to stop being a genocidal two faced hack. else you all are trolls trivialising an ongoing genocide and enabling future ones.
The effort to limit damage in the real world like advocating for a genocider?
Also, please do your best to act in good faith and not make things up about people.
If both of them support genocide, but one also supports banning abortion, the ethical choice is to vote for the one that won’t ban abortion.
If you’d rather wait until a candidate arrives that agrees with you on every issue, that’s fine, but you’ll probably never vote, and in the meantime, by not voting, supporting whichever candidate you like less.
While there’s no honor in the presidency, there is honor in doing what you can to reduce harm, and if you can’t reduce harm to the Palestinians, at least you can reduce harm to American women and girls.
Never again means never again for anyone.
Trying to lesser evil genocide makes you complicit.
Repeat after me: "I am against genocide and will not vote for genociders".
So you hate women and don’t want them to have bodily autonomy? You see how that sounds? It’s the same logic as your argument.
In what way is that the same logic as my argument? I am not voting for misogynists.
The comprador government of the West Bank is just that, compradors. You should care about the people who live under a comprador government, yes.
The government of Gaza is led by those taking direct militant action against their genocidal settler colonial invaders. They fight and die alongside their people.
From Merriam Webster: "one" example: "you never know what will happen"
Hamas is a Palestinian resistance organization against apartheid settlers that routinely use and used extensive terrorism. While the Zionist entity bombs residential blocks, schools, and refugee camps, the axis of resistance, which includes Hamas, focus on military targets and building if leverage for their own liberation.
The term "terrorist" is used selectively and in a racist way. When the Western Imperialists like a resistance organization they call them freedom fighters. When they dislike them, they get called terrorists. The ANC, including Mandela, were similarly labelled terrorists in their own fight against apartheid. Similarly, the Americans supported apartheid in South Africa and its mainstream political adherents gladly adopted their white supremacist framing.
In conclusion, there are two terrorist groups fighting, and the civilians of both groups are suffering for it.
Sorry you're afraid to engage with what I said. You'll get the courage of your convictions someday. Might want to stop sharing your onions until then, sport.
Pray tell, which elected leaders?
They're both not elected anymore and a resistance organization. They were elected on a platform of not-exclusively-peaceful resistance (peaceful resistance inside Palestine and especially inside Gaza was render impossible by Israel by 2006-2007, so their resistance activities are now exclusively violent). Resistance activities are supported by the population of Gaza, even if many don't support Hamas specifically. If your point is that October 7th implies they don't care about Gazan lives, that's patently false. If that's not what you meant, then explain what you mean by "they don't care about Gazan lives".
Fucking brain broken if you think the bots are on the side opposite entrenched power
Majority of the people who are saying this are Arab-Americans. They know how bad Trump will be, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of Biden back in 2020. Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they've become numb and just stopped caring. There have been repeated instsnces of Democrats actually silencing them from speaking up as well. They've adopted a scorched earth mentality and are deciding to send a giant "fuck you" to Harris and the entire Democratic party.
And the Democrats are also allowing Israel to do whatever they want. There's not much of a difference between the two on this topic.
There is a difference between them on this topic.
If Trump were in office now, every liberal here would be screaming for the genocide to end and trying to understand how anyone could let this happen.
With Biden in office and his VP as candidate, they are trying to sell you on their candidate rather than working against the genocide.
I've actually seen some Muslim American leader (not sure who, maybe the mayor of Dearborn?) saying something like this. At least with Republicans in charge democrats would need to oppose them instead of gleefully supporting the genocide. Not sure how much this logic checks out, but it's a thing I guess.
The logic definitely checks out. It was far easier to mobilize and educate mainstream liberals under Trump. They have gone to sleep under Biden and become fully accepting of what the administration does. They might say they don't approve in a poll or something, but get them to leave the house? Only the college students can be mobilized at this time.
I think assuming that people are completely accepting of what the administration is doing, even when they try to voice their opinions in polls, is in bad faith. They simply don't feel they have the option to not vote. In any other democratic system I genuinely think a third party (greens?) would have a good chance to win this election, but the two party system is so entrenched (at the minimum in the minds of voters), that to not vote is seen as the functional equivalent of voting for the other side.
I'm not in the US so my opinion doesn't really matter, but I do think that political discourse would be much more productive if people would stop talking past each other and dismissing the motivations/logic of the opposing side.
Checking in from Germany. We have a parliamentary system and ~60 of the population is against the genocide and only ~30% are pro-genocide. And this despite a continuous pro-genocide propaganda by almost all media and politicians. It honestly is batshit insane what the german media is becoming. The whole discurse they produce is basically directly restating IDF statements.
But 90+% of the parliament is pro-genocide. Only one fraction (BSW ~1,4%) is strictly against the genocide (but are assholes in other topics) and 1 fraction is divided on the issue (Die Linke ~4%). Our green party is the most stringently pro-genocide party.
It is honestly really hard to not completly lose trust in democracy itself right now.
Bourgeois democracy has always been like this. It presents itself as representative of the people while using a massive array of capitalist-controlled apparatuses to call the shots. Media, jobs, capital strikes, education materials, think tanks, threats to the government. Their first line of defense is "democratic" institutions with enough structure and hurdles to prevent popular will from directly having influence. And, of course, vigilantes and organized right wing thugs when the former don't work.
I can definitely empathise with the lack of trust in democracy. I'm holding out some hope that things might change once a newer generation starts to take office, but we will see.
But this failing of democracy just makes it seem all the more important that we as a people try to resist the divisiveness of modern politics and media, as that seems to be a common tool of control used by those in power.
Polls happen because paid pollsters call people and do surveys, then compile the results and format it into something consumable for research, entertainment, or propaganda purposes. Polls are not a reflection of what people care about, they reflect what a few hundred or thousand people answered some questions on a Tuesday.
Polls do not tell you what anyone really cares about, because anyone can say they care 4 out of 5 stars even though they won't leave their house to do anything for anyone else over a 3 year period.
To get people to care, you have to educate them and provide them with a pathway to build power. That is actually the opposite of what these self-appointed genocide salesmen are doing, where the lesson they teach is, "suck it up and vote for the genocider, you are stuck with what was chosen for us".
They use the same line every time, just with different issues of the day. It is a focus-group-tested way to convince people that otherwise have a conscience that it is okay to check that little box for that sociopath and hey, "why not tell others to do the same? And maybe even start saying they are wrong and bad for not pushing the sociopath as well. And sure, the whole party is full of such people and they only really listen to capital, but also this is your chance to have a voice."
So you should tell them that they don't have to vote for any genocide, just like me.
Uh-huh. Still shouldn't vote for genocide, let alone tell other people to. It is bad to normalize genocide. Do I need to tell you this? Did you not already know?
I disagree. You are free to develop and share any informed position about any country. And sharing informed opinions is helpful.
That would be nice but it is not exactly a balanced equation on that front; all it takes is for one "side" to be racist and panicking for it to all go off the rails. Such as what is happening right now. Every other reply to my "don't support genocide" schtick is someone simply making things up and guessing and avoiding what was said. This is because the people who reply are the ones who get the most defensive about their personal morality being questioned, i.e. someone did not accept their support for a genocidal candidate and how dare someone do that to them.
Unfortunately this is literally the only way to agitate. You have to unseat and challenge with a truth that disagrees with the prevailing wisdom. The people that reply will act like absolute pieces of shit at first, but there will also be an audience where some of them go, "huh, that is a good point" and there will be others that start out defensive but then digest and read and move in a better direction.
Finally, you cannot understand societal behaviors without looking at the realities of motivations and tendencies. We are not all independent agents with tabula rasa brains, we are a product of our societies, and yes sometimes those societies are racist and teach you to devalue the lives of, say, black people and brown people and people overseas. And if you cannot recognize that and call that out, you will have a false understanding of how to tackle injustice.
If I understand you correctly, then I very much agree, but I don't see this happening very much. On one side I see people saying "vote for the lesser of two evils, and then we can focus on changing the system/changing the democrat policies" without actually any clear idea how to do that. On the other side I see "don't vote for either party, neither major party deserves to win" without any clear idea of how to give any realistic chance for a third party to win.
Here again you are using bad faith tactics to dismiss the idea that people in favour of voting might have valid reasons to, instead presenting it as if these people think normalising genocide is a good thing. This is divisive and not constructive at all.
Yes I know how quickly controversial discourse can go downhill, but to be that seems all the more reason to not allow our arguments to disintegrate, even if the other sides are.
I definitely agree, I think all widespread "truths" should stand up to scrutiny, but my point is about the way this is done. Challenging a truth/point of view should mean approaching the logical base of that view, and presenting an alternative with reasons why the alternative is better. But so often I see people ignoring the logical base of the other side's viewpoint, and instead creating straw-men to attack instead, or simply just dismissing the other side entirely through one tactic or another. To be clear, this is done by all sides, I see many people dismissing the argument to vote as simply being "supportive of genocide" (which is obviously ridiculous), while people dismissing the argument to vote third party as being "stupid/ignorant" or other things to that effect, which is also obviously false.
Like you say, we are all products of our societies with different values, but the vast majority of people are reasonably smart and have good intentions. And dismissing people is not a good way of "calling them out", it only causes further division and makes them even less likely to be receptive to your ideas. If you cannot see the reasons for someone's beliefs (even if you strongly disagree with those reasons) then you stand very little chance of changing their mind.
It happens all the time on a per-organizer basis if you actively do it. The left is currently small but has the capacity to rapidly snowball if it is principled and follows good practices. When you recruit 10 people per year per organizer and 2 of them become organizers, etc etc. And these things will come in waves if you make yourself known and build capacity for onboarding. One year it's 10 per organizer, the next it may be 50.
My organizations experienced rapid growth under Trump and in Winter-Spring 2024 due to us actively doing work.
Yes this is just a line, they don't really man it. They can't even say what their goal is most of the time. They just say "push left", leaving it vague. And of course they're really telling you to stop making demands when you have the most leverage, to then give up that leverage by pledging to be a guaranteed vote then make their demands when they have the least leverage and gave already proven that they will vote blue regardless.
This line is repeated constantly because it keeps empathetic voters contained and powerless while also gaining some votes for their monstrous candidate.
Why does the third party need to win? There are many other outcomes to shedding the false consciousness of lesser evil voting. At the moment, I am highlighting liberals normalizing genocide. One outcone is to recognize that this "democracy" is a genocidal sham and you need to work against its underlying forces. Another is to effectively boycott so as to demonstrate illegitimacy of who is elected, which has a long history. Another us to begin creating a voting bloc that doesn't ounch itself in the face every 4 years and actually makes demands with a credible threat. That voting bloc would also eventually fail because again, this "democracy" is a sham, but those people can then be organized against the genocidal status quo.
It is not bad faith, it is the truth. Treating genocide like a typical lesser evil you have to accept is normalizing it. It was, allegedly, a red line, and now liberals are falling over themselves to erase that line.
This revelation probably makes you uncomfortable, but it is not false or unfair. You can see it throughout this thread. They try to avoid the topic at first, then speak euphemistically. Try asking them to say this: "I am against genocide and will never vote for a genocider". Can you say that?
"Controversial" my ass, I said they were panicking and racist. So much for "good faith", eh? Don't whitewash my framings and pretend it is what we are talking about.
You are being so vague that I can't even tell what you are recommending. This topic is something you brought up, trying to both sides communication, and what I am telling you is that there is a verifiable imbalance.
Incorrect. That is fine for internal strategy discussions among people that agree with one another. It is absolutely terrible media and discursive strategy.
There is not a logical base for most political views. That is usually a rationalization for more basic feelings, like status, security, whether you are a good person, whether the bad people are getting what they deserve.
Because it isn't about the logical base. I can present concrete facts and demonstrate pure logical contradiction in another person's arguments and they will simply deflect. Their ego gets in the way, an ego taught to them by a society where having an opinion is important for status and self-worth and every disagreement is about destroying the other side. They will lie, deflect, insult, say racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic things. Having revealed that they have no logical base and are just Himmler Lite, any pretense that you are just going after logic and debate will undermine you and become a trolling session for them.
These are not the people you are trying to reach anyways. It is the audience at the borderline that need that, "oh shit my side is racist and I reject that" kind of push. Again, not about a logical base.
It is not ridiculous you are literally voting for someone doing a genocide and telling other people to do the same. Despite your complaints you have not addressed the clear basis for this claim and are doing that thing right now: deflecting through dismissal built entirely on sentiment, not any logical basis. I should not need to explain to you that "I am voting for a genocider and so should you" is a pro-genocide stance. But your discomfort in your complicity, the threat to you feeling like a good person, means you need to start dissembling.
The people dismissing that are repeating canards handed to them by their faction of the political class. They are only needed insofar as the person returns to feeling like they are good and smart for voting for a genocider. You can watch them fall apart in real time when you try to discuss their alleged "logical base", like discusing game theory and electoral strategy. They were not actually convinced to vote that way because of simplistic half-understood electoral math, they were convinced by allegiance to a political program that aligns with their idea of being a good person. And as bourgeous morality goes, they will then start making personal moralizung arguments, and then they must be reminded they are voting for a genocider.
Then we come full circle and they fall apart. Repeat ad nauseum.
Not true. Intentions are not inherently good when the society that crafted them is racist, genocidal, misigynist, etc. Being the product of conditions means the dominant intention can be oppressive and violent. With education they could acquire good intentions. If raised in a less oppresser society, they could have good intentions. But you don't get to whitewash the bad intentions of those shoring up violence and oppression, including genocide. Those are not good intentions, they ar self-serving corrosive behaviors learned from their social circles.
100% incorrect, certainly when it comes to media and fronts, which is more like how social media operates. The most effective means of agitation is direct callouts, particularly when it comes to reactionary positions that need to be made socially unacceptable.
The person receiving the callout will get defensive, but they do that anyways regardless of how you frame the problem in what they are saying. But now they get to coast by and pretend to be in the right and the audience will also miss this. Over time, that defensiveness can and does lead to change, where many go and do some research and come back in a few months as if they had always held a different position. Online, they might just make a new account. I've seen users bullied for their transphobia do this repeatedly, they got less transphobic over time but were still recognizably the same user.
If, on the other hand, someone is already sympathetic and not oppositional, they will let you know this early on. The main thing they will do is commiserate and ask questions. These are the people you can gently correct as they are not just trying to reaffirm their biases - such as to the white race and whose suffering they care about - and status as a good person by retaining them.
Buddy I have recruited more people than you've ever talked to online.
this is strangely true? but I can see the feds (who control the media) pivot narratives again where trump is still bad, but what he's doing is okay because (hasbara such as beheaded babies & mass rape claims, false flag, atrocity propaganda). feds aren't very intelligent. they do the same shit over and over again.
Yeah, the first time the press core deigned to call him "presidential" was when he launched rockets at Syria. The second time was when he assassinated Suleimani.
That's the thing. I see a more likely scenario where the genocide is hindered under Trump. Not because Trump opposes it, but because it would suddenly become fashionable for liberals to oppose it.
If anyone hasn't already lost their Israel-colored glasses, they're not coming off.
I think they would continue staying hone, this time out of spite, until Trump ramps something up and they are given permission to care by their political class, who would attempt to coopt the the pro-Palestine movement while still being explicitly Zionist.
Hes gonna genocide better than harris, he guarantees it
There is nothing more you can do to a people beyond killing and expelling nearly all of them.
nah trump is gonna suck at genocide he's all talk
If the election were between Trump and somehow someone even worse who was calling to nuke the entire area and turn it into glass, then I would absolutely be pushing for Trump. Shockingly, if we are trapped in a horrifying, dystopian version of the trolley problem (which we are), I'm going to make the choice that causes the least damage.
Using another analogy, if you have a badly broken arm, you can either set it and try to keep it immobilized, or you can let it stay how it is and all but guarantee that it gets fucked up even worse as it heals wrong. Voting third party is like saying "I don't like either of those options since they both involve my broken arm, so I choose to pray to the Moon Goddess". There is no option that immediately stops your arm from being broken. You can delude yourself and say the Moon Goddess will magically fix it, but in reality, you are choosing the option that does nothing and makes it worse. Choosing to set your broken arm doesn't make you "pro-broken arm", it's just the only practical choice given a terrible situation.
It does not get worse than genocide. The habit of inventing a hypothetical bigger and harder gun to hold to marginalized peoples' heads doesn't work on this one.
We are not trapped in a trolley problem. You are a human with agency. You can join organizations, you can educate, you can take action. Reducing your political agency to a lever pull for genocide is a helplessness taught to you by the political class because they just want you to vote for them even when they commit genocide right in front of your eyes. They want you to think of Palestinian lives as strategically expendable and that you are actually smart, not racist, for toeing that line. And your compliance with their demands is exactly what ensures they can shove any monster down your throat as a candidate. Harris is complicit in genocide and didn't win a single primary but Dems say, "well, time to fall in line". Dems strategists know that "progressive" Dems do this so they do nothing for them in policy, they just deploy PR goons to vote against every 4 years. Compliant voters enable their own irrelevance.
Though of course, voting is very limited and there is much more to be done.
I refuse to entertain analogies justifying genocide.
The craziest part of this to me is that this isn't the first time this has happened since it's started like... since the country has been founded. So the fact they're really still willing to engage politically at all is a pretty good testament to their character, I would say.
This was all laid out in 2020 and we said the fight wasn't over. We said even if biden won the dems will never be, 'good enough' because we all remember Obama. Objectively the best president of my lifetime and catches shit on a number of issues. The dems won't ever be good enough. The fight can't end until people learn that politics doesn't stop when a presidential election is over.
Joe Biden should have been primaried. I said it for 4 fucking years. I will say the same about Kamala. She needs to actually win the fucking primary.
That doesn't change the course, though. No amount of moral posturing is going to ignite a fire in out despondent electorate. You want a government that works for you. Participate.
See, doing it as a bloc with public visibility I can see. That actually has some chance of swaying at least the rhetoric. But I still think if they actually go through with not voting, they're voting against their own interests. The right is rabidly xenophobic and loves Israel, the only thing Trump will do to end the genocide is send even more military support.
They believe that taking a moral stand against the Democrats, who are supporting Israeli genocide, is worth it even if that means that Trump, who even more fervently supports Israeli genocide, becomes president.
Trump has been deliberately framing himself as a protector of Israel who supports them doing whatever they want to.
nice hasbara
Even calling it "Israeli genocide" is transferring responsibility. "Supporting" is an understatement. The democrats ARE THE ONES DOING THE GENOCIDE. Biden can stop it with a single phone call. Israel is not an independent state; it is a subordinate of the US.
Telling people to vote for your party, a nazi party, at the absolute peak of your depraved inhuman bloodthirst, because the other side might be worse, is the most cynical fucking thing I've ever heard.
I genuinely do believe we're going to look back this time as inexcusable. Right now, Netanyahu's extreme right flank is now advocating for settlement of the parts of Gaza that have been ethnically cleansed. Specifically, they're saying that as long as the army stays there for a permanent long-term occupation, that can be the first step to proceeding with settlements.
It's so much worse than even the Iraq war. I've seen by some estimates that the Iraq war displaced 2 million people, and the deaths, before they stopped counting, were between 100,000 and a quarter million.
I think the deaths and displacements in Gaza probably are going to exceed those, and it's concentrated in a much smaller area, and it's horrifyingly closer to affecting the whole population.
Simply put there's no excuse for this moral atrocity.
And here's the but: I don't see how a strategic attitude of indifference to who runs the State department brings it closer to an end. And I don't see that that attitude is one of even pretending to try for an alternative. I do think supporting politicians especially in their Democratic primaries is a positive step. And I do think, as with the Iraq war, galvanizing a sea change and discrediting everyone who is associated with what happened in Gaza is necessary. I believe it is urgent to do something, and the actual channels of aid that can meaningfully do something right now exist entirely outside of party infrastructure of either party. But I also think, for how true that is, using that to lose sight a very real and very serious differences between the parties that also affect human welfare in numerous ways, would be to needlessly visit tragedy upon tragedy. I wouldn't want to lose American democracy into the bargain, and I don't think it's nuanced to be in indifferent to that.
it's the greater Israel project. they openly talk about it
tl;dr: "Can't beat them, might as well join them!"
Nope, not even close to what I said.
So when Trump wins and my rights to exist are stripped even further, I’ll be sure to thank you for it
The dems are not bringing your rights back. Project 2025 is happening regardless of who wins president due to how captured the court system is.
stop voting for genocide.
Every vote or lack thereof is a vote for genocide. There isn't really a way to vote against it.
Yes, it's cynical. It's based on the jaded belief that democracy is 90% dead, and Americans only get to make one of two meaningful choices.
The opposite belief, which is that America is a democracy and you can vote for whoever you want, is hopeful and patriotic. It puts a lot of trust in the American system. It shows faith that politicians have our best interests at heart, and that it'll all work out if you just say what you want.
Is that how you want to describe yourself? As a patriot who believes in America? It doesn't seem to align with your worldview, but it's what your actions are saying.
you're a silly one
I honestly appreciate the downvotes as a counter of angry people shamed into silence
Good. You should be fucking ashamed.
Yeah the "democrats are the REAL nazis" is tiring when you get comments from the republican hero agent Orange: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/
Shut the fuck up. I never said the republicans weren't nazis. I'm just fucking sick of you being an out and open nazi and acting like you fucking aren't.
“Everyone I don’t like is a nazi”
I like everyone but nazis
Everyone on the side of genocide can be called a Nazi, yes.
I’m not voting democrat because I “support genocide”, I’m voting democrat because if Trump gets elected, shit is about to get a WHOLE lot worse. It is damage control
You can keep sitting here and acting like a fucking child throwing a temper tantrum because you don’t like the reality of our only choices, but you are being just that. A child.
You can sit on the sidelines on your little soapbox and virtue signal all you want, but when Trump wins I won’t be blaming the republicans. I’ll be blaming all of you.
Genocide is a necessary but not sufficient condition for nazism.
Not voting blue is voting red in the current system. So how do I not vote for a nazi party?
Well good news! I'm not voting red, so therefore I'm voting blue! Happy now, dipshit? Now you've got the swing state of California in the bag!
Don't worry comrade I'm holding the line here in Michigan 🫡 one less vote for Trump!!
As I said, I want to personally thank you and your ilk for Trump winning this election.
Congratulations. You let the fascists win to “stick it to the libs”
Oh please. As if my actions were for petty spite and not the actual reasons I stated. As if the focus of my anger is dipshits like you and not the people with the actual blood on their hands? You annoy the fuck out of me but my hatred isn't directed at you.
That said, I think it's fucking good you're pissed off and upset. You deserve to be. You did a terrible thing. And you didn't even get what you sold out your basic human decency for. Not to mention selling out people having their entire families killed day after day. Now you're a nazi and a loser. How does it feel?
My fault? I fucking wish. The democrats did such a deliberately dogshit job with such a dogshit candidate leftists (and the muslims that will never forget your vicious racism towards them) were a fraction of the votes they threw away. I don't even live in one of the two states that even had a realistic claim to a vote in this election. Why are you getting upset at people for not voting when you don't even live in a real democracy in the first place?
Your anger needs to be directed at the political system itself. God I wish people like you would stop and have a sober assessment of what the democratic party does and why. You're angry because the people committing a genocide lost because that means the fascists won?? Are you fucking hearing yourself?? By any semi-rigorous definition of the word, the democratic party are fascists. When BLM happened they brutalized the protestors and responded on the backend by ballooning the police state. (The budget at least even if they can't find recruits). Fascism is capitalism in decay discarding the soft power that keeps people in line and resorting to the tactics that work on the imperial periphery against the domestic population.
You cannot vote fascism out of a fascist country. The frustration you feel right now is built into the system. This is the only outcome you're ever going to get. I'm glad you're feeling it right now. I wish you still felt it when Biden was doing literally fucking everything Trump was doing and will now continue to. Please take this time to reassess your political understanding. You will never save yourself with voting.
Blah blah. You helped Trump. Blocked.
Yeah, you're misreading that.
I'd rather vote for the party that's 85% nazi than 100%. And in a world where it's entirely unrealistic that anyone else can win between past-the-post voting and voter disenfranchisement, that's the best we're getting.
This was a meme like 6 years ago, that we'd get to the point that US democrats would accept a candidate that's 99% pro-genocide compared to the 100% republican one. It's worked, and now democrats are falling over themselves to defend this genocide and their party's staunch material support for it.
Keep voting tho, its working great so far. The USA keeps improving by doing the same thing over and over again. /s
holy shit they're actually doing the 99% hitler meme now, this country is cooked
oh to be clear. I know the democrats are doing terrible things, I just think it's easier and more practical to get them to stop than it is to keep them out of office.
Yeah good luck with that buddy that's definitely been effective in the past and totally isn't more of what got us here in the first place and isn't actively undermined by the current protests going on and the presidency being at stake for them and their policies still not budging or their voters' demands even being acknowledged.
Dude. Sentences are useful.
eh. Not my style.
Lol, living in a world where "anti-genocide" is actually a thing people say is messed up.
I think is actually kind of nice.
I mean of all species living on earth, human is the only species that would consider genocide a bad thing. Some random plant on prehistoric ages would just produce oxygen an cause a mass extinction without sweating it.
And for most human history Humans would actually try to genocide others.
At least now there is people who is anti-genocide. And it's probably a growing stance.
I was always confused by the polcie criminalizing antifa. So fascism good, anti fascism bad these days? Genocide is the same. If you are anti genocide you'll be brutalized.
It's the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, "Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people".
But if you take a step back it's reasonable to ask, "WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don't spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus' forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose."
So given that realization it's also reasonable when told you must choose to say, "Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt."
That's the essential argument. There's the realpolitik decision to do "less harm", but you can also reject the fucked up premise.
The U.S. also has a huge defense industry that has made people ridiculously rich at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Those billionaires are heavily invested in the defense industry, so it's not in their interests that wars end at all.
This is that "military-industrial complex" that former President Eisenhower warned us about so many years ago. His concern was that the U.S. would become bogged down in an endless series of "forever wars" that do nothing but transfer wealth to the already-wealthy.
Keeping that military industrial complex well-fed is the reason why so many politicians have such a boner for war. Not only to keep their wealthy sponsors happy, but to keep tax money and jobs flowing to their states, which just happen to manufacture war materiel.
I’m going to tell you a secret.
The people who say this, the leftists that threaten to withhold their votes, tend to vote strategically anyways. But threatening to withhold votes is one way to apply pressure to politicians to do things like, say, stop promoting a fucking genocide. And then liberals lose their minds for some reason and make it totally irrelevant. And then we have a genocide that lasts for 75 years and starts world war 3.
4 years ago, Democrats said the border wall was stupid and bad. They said that Republicans were racist for claiming all Mexicans were drug dealers and criminals. Today, Harris is saying she's gonna build the border wall, be tough on migrants, and has basically adopted Trump's policies on immigration.
There is no indication that the Democrats will not be just as bad as the Republicans on Israel in 4 years.
To address your second point "not voting for Harris is a vote for Trump"; why isn't the opposite true? "Not voting for Trump is a vote for Harris", follows the same logic, so refusing to vote or voting independent should be net neutral, no?
This election should be a slam dunk victory for Harris. The data shows that adopting leftist progressive policies is popular. Biden dropping out resulted in $4 million in small donor fundraising. Picking Walz resulted in another $2 million. People got really excited when it looked like the Democratic party was making leftist progressive movement.
Since then, the Dems have been aggressively moving towards the center. More lethal military, inciting panic about the border, ignoring Palestine. This has resulted in an extremely tight race as people are no longer excited to vote for Harris.
I want Harris to win. Moving leftward politically will attract more voters. Taking a firm stance on stopping the Israeli government's genocide is a leftist progressive policy. The bag is right there, she just needs to grab it.
She's campaigning on building the wall. she's endorsed by dick cheney and 200+ reagan and Bush admin staffers. we have sent more aid to Israel in the past year than we ever have since Israel was invented. she has stated that her support of Israel is iron-clad. the current admin has broken records for the amount of oil and gas extracted extracted in the past 4 years. she has refused to voice support for the trans people who are supposedly going to be protected by her admin. she has kicked Palestinian people out of her campaign events, while instead parading around Richie Torres, a person who famously has stated multiple times that Palestinians deserve their eradication. her policy page has removed all mentions of medicare for all and paths to citizenship. she has promised to make america's military the most lethal fighting force in the world.
she has decided that the "moderate conservative" who will never vote for her is more important than all the progressives and leftists who probably would've. just like Hillary Clinton and Dale Earnhardt, she's going to crash into a wall because she can't turn left.
The vote should be for someone who can get enough electoral college votes to win in the first place, and from there the one who is more likely to listen to public pressure, as well as the same for any congressional seats on the ballot. And probably not vote for the one who is threatening to send the military after those who disagree with them.
Which as a non-American seems to be Harris, right?
Yes, Harris is the only realistic option. Anyone voting for Trump is a Nazi in the most literal sense of the word.
If the people voting for Trump in the most literal sense of the word then they wouldn't support Israel.
They aren't supporting Israel because they care about the Israeli or Jewish people. They're supporting Israel because they love blowing up brown people, with an unhealthy dollop of trying to bring about the apocalypse
For a vote, yes. I can't even imagine what Trump would do with the situation given another chance. Some may say the same thing as the US has always done, which is one of the problems that will need to be addressed regardless of who wins, but Trump also likes dictators, so support would probably be bumped up even more for Netanyahu.
Hardly okay with it. Some Americans don't even know how things work to begin with, so ignorance is worse than knowing things are broken but what we have at the moment. Just because I acknowledge that's the current election system doesn't mean I don't think we could do a lot better. That is its own topic with a lot of hills to climb, but some states have started.
And it's a representative democracy with various flaws, one being not the proper number of constituents per representative, and far too much influence from other places that override the public's opinions. Another separate debate.
Single issue voters just seem to be the excuse of Democrat party for if they lose.
Just like election fraud is of the Republican party.
I voted for Harris, but I feel like it's pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.
One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I'm not saying "is" here. I'm saying "should be".
We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there's value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.
And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu's whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.
For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It's not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!
Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that's not something we can do everywhere. We can't repeatedly choose the "least miserable option" and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It's just not possible.
Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, "on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is."
Some people's hill is their ballot.
And what if they seem equally likely to escalate the situation?
Trump says he'll let Israel finish the job. Kamala says she disapproves of what's happening in Gaza, but will always support Israel and will always provide them with weapons.
Same fuckin' thing.
I feel like you have to understand the circumstances of those affected most by this genocide to understand. It's easy to be logical and vote Harris as she is the least worse option, but that's harder to do when directly affected. I consider the blame to be entirely on the Democratic Administration and Harris' Campaign Strategy. They have had every opportunity to change course, and them deciding not to may very well cost them the election. I will not blame anti-genocide voters, especially those who are directly affected and have lost loved ones.
I'm still voting for Harris, on the basis that change from public pressure is far more unlikely under Trump.
https://theintercept.com/2024/10/09/white-house-oct-7-israel-war-gaza/
Here you can track the rhetoric and actions of the Biden Administration month by month. The US has been supplying the weapons used for Israel's genocide unconditionally for a year. Against international law, against domestic law, against the will of the majority of the population, and all with US taxpayer money. This is pro-genocide foreign policy.
Harris, instead of breaking from Biden on this issue, has not deviated. She has repeatedly ignored the voices of Palestinian Americans, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans on this issue. These people are directly affected, they have friends and family in Palestine and Lebanon that have been killed by Israel. She has not only taken their votes for granted, but has offered no concessions and ignored their voices. People are angry at Biden and Harris for this. They desperately want change, but they don't see that from the Democratic administration.
Despite Trump's horrendous track record, he has gained in their support solely because of how Harris has campaigned. It's not logical, but it's hard to be when directly affected by the actions of the current administration and no prospect for change. Advocating them to vote for the 'lesser evil' doesn't work when the 'lesser evil' is directly responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. Trump successfully framed himself as a Dove and Hillary as a warmonger in 2016. He's using that same tactic now. It would be a completely unsuccessful framing if Harris pivoted to Arms Embargo or Conditional Aid, but that has not happened.
Breaking from Biden would be a major boost in voter output.
::: spoiler Quote
:::
::: spoiler Quotes
:::
::: spoiler Quotes
:::
::: spoiler Quotes
:::
::: spoiler Quotes
:::
i wonder how much of a single issue a genocide is
Upvoted for proving the point.
And there it is, liberal genocide support going mask off yet again
Jesus wept. Get a grip.
The single issue? Genocide.
Does your logic apply to single issue (anti Trump) voters?
Yep
If you don't live in one of the 7 states that matter in an election then you can vote your morality, safe in the knowledge that the EC will ignore your input, anyway
Inb4 some dipshit mentions down ballots when we're talking about the fucking presidential election
Three points:
In summary:
Because it's a far right party. Trump happens to be more far right, but that doesn't change that fact. I'm not voting for far right, neoliberal, genocidal freaks.
At how many genocides do you draw the line? If the democrats committed a second one along with the Palestinian genocide they are committing right now? You'd again say trump would be worse, vote for Harris. If they committed three? Four? No matter what they do, Trump would do worse, so again you'd tell us to vote for Harris.
I draw the line at a genocide and at everything this neoliberal party stands for. I am not giving that party my approval because it is going in the exact opposite direction of what I stand for. At some point, the lesser evil is too evil.
The US needs to fix their voting system before they can start voting third party. It's probably even more difficult with Trump
Losing the election is the only kind of accountability Harris and the Democrats are likely to face for their part in the genocide. Otherwise, what incentive is there for either party to ever oppose it? What message would Americans be sending to the world that we would keep in office someone who's been actively supporting a genocide?
What message would we be sending if our replacement for them is a guy that wants Isreal to "finish the job" with it? Killing fewer people matters more than accountability
There is not a big difference between one who say finish the job and one who doesn't say it but give every resources for Israel to finish the job
The message would be that voting Americans are not okay with genocide. Harris is actually culpable, while the idea that Trump would be significantly worse for the Palestinians and Lebanese is just hypothetical. Trump is actually the lesser of two evils this time. The allegations against him don't amount to genocide by a long shot.
The message will be that Americans chose the guy who is complaining that the massacres are going too slowly
Remember that he was ardently supportive of the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen when he was president. We have seen how he handles this situation. He is absolutely not a lesser evil here.
can you describe this in Marvel or Harry Potter terms though?
He's got a ways to go to prove himself more evil than Harris.
Why is his backing of the Saudi campaign in Yemen not enough to you? The war has a far higher civilian death toll than Israel's current actions do, the Saudi forces in the area have a long record of likely war crimes including bombing a school bus full of children in Dahyan and declaration of an entire city of 50,000 people as a military target, Trump actually vetoed congress to prevent them from stopping arms sales to SA, and dozens of actual direct American drone strikes were carried out under Trump's presidency.
Over a period of about six years and three US presidential administrations, the death toll in the Yemen war is estimated to have reached 377,000. In just over a year, solely under the Biden-Harris administration, 335,500 are estimated to have died in Gaza. Based on the death rate and the relative sizes of the affected populations, it's clear who has more blood on their hands. Furthermore, support from the Biden-Harris administration has continued even though Israeli leaders have come right out and admitted their genocidal intent. The MBS regime certainly did commit atrocities in Yemen with catastrophic effects, but in that case at least there's a shred of deniability regarding complicity to genocide. Harris has no excuse for continuing to support Israel, but the weapons and financing keep flowing. Therefore we have no excuse for supporting her.
So is your position that if the Saudis had killed Yemenis at the same rate as Israel is killing Palestinians, Trump would have reversed course? Bearing in mind that the war crimes weren't enough, and he supported it significantly more actively than Biden and Harris are supporting Israel
Never again means never again, I will not be party to it.
Because they don't understand that voting is just one part of the democratic process.
In my situation, I'm in a solid blue state so I'm voting for a third party to push the country to the left.
If only USA had ranked choice voting, then everyone could do that.
Or literally any voting system with more than two seconds thought put into it
they put a lot of thought into our system; the electoral college was intentional and it's doing it's job very well.
it's meant as a firewall to guard against poor people from getting sufficient political representation. our ruling class uses it today to keep this country conservative.
This kinda makes sense, I guess that means not a swing state (I’m not American).
Do you have to be in a heavy blue state to do this without fear that if enough people do this it will swing red?
Yes, exactly. If you live in a solid blue or red state, your vote is a drop in the bucket, so it won't matter if you vote third party. But in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.... in 2016, the number of votes won by Jill Stein was slightly greater than the difference between Trump/Clinton. Ouch! Was it worth it? Did it move the country left?
the strategy definitely wasn't worth it, but we're doing it again anyways.
The country did move left under Trump and has moved right under Biden. While your logic on Stein's influence is flawed, if your goal was to shift the population left you're basically making an argument for voting for Trump in swing states.
While it sometimes feels like this, it's because the vocal minorities on the side not associated with the current president are always the loudest political figures.
No, it is because liberals were agitated under Trump and were told to care about women, black people, abortion rights, etc, and mobilize to spaces where they could be recruited for political education. Under Biden, they feel a sense of normalcy and have returned to supporting the equally violent status quo.
Yeah it's a strategy that would work in any heavy red or blue state, because there's an absolute zero percent chance the dems lose my state.
So playing the first round of Russian Roulette for no real benefit.
Congrats I guess.
Do you understand how voting works?
Do you not understand how the Electoral College works?
Yes and your vote does absolutely nothing in “pushing” the country left. Who taught you that? Please do better research as the future of your country depends on it.
Sometimes being principled in your vote is a good first step towards doing something politically meaningful. Many liberals are chained to the idea that their vote is their political being. And then they go vote for genociders!
That first step of pulling at their chains can lead to further political education.
I would say you have to be the stupidest person on earth to vote 3rd party but I know that Magidiots exist.
You do nothing but enable genocide by voting 3rd party. A Democrat loss in November GUARANTEES the genocide continues. The Republican Party is the party of Israel and they would bend over backwards to give them whatever is necessary to bring back Jesus Christ
Yep just big dum-dums that won't support your genocider candidate. If only they were smart like you and supported 98% Hitler!
You know Dems are doing the genocide, right? And at the point where they have the most to fear from supporting it, they aren't even pandering.
You're the baddies, bud.
The Democratic Party is also the party of Israel.
It's impressive that you're calling people names while writing polemic that obviously applies to "your team".
I am not a Democrat. At this point I’m closer to Independent because both parties have gone off the rails over that last decade. However I understand the importance of this election and I understand how our system works. Voting 3rd party does nothing but pull votes from Democrats. It happens EVERY election. I’m sorry to burst your bubble but voting third party doesn’t give you the moral high ground. It just makes you an idiot because not only will your candidate not be elected but more often than not you enable Republicans to win elections based on how our voting system works.
No, go ahead and explain it to me!
@rocci CGP Grey already did.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLej2SlXPEd37YwwEY7mm0WyZ8cfB1TxXa
@Pacattack57
@jatone Every video and every model will be overly simplistic when applied to any reality. Every abstraction is a leaky abstraction.
STV! I'm in!
https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI?si=y5DQdCjA-QTOfAwM
@rocci I want this as a poll format option in the Fediverse.
To push her to change her stance... you only own your vote. That's the only leverage. She is the reason they aren't voting for her.
Your vote is your consent.
Imagine for a minute that your perfect political candidate was running. The only catch is that if they win they are promising to personally execute your family in front of you. The other guy is gonna kill your family too so everyone tells you to stop being such a single issue voter and vote for the lesser evil.
Do you still vote for them? Or do you refuse to participate in the execution of your family?
Does refusing to vote stop your family from being executed?
When you cease being part of the execution squad itself it becomes much easier to fight them.
Probably not. But it doesn’t include your consent at the very least.
Maybe you’re a perfectly objective person who can still vote for your families execution. But I think most people would struggle with it, if they’re being truly honest with themselves.
It boils down to if you think any admin will ever change how the US deals with Israel. And if that's true, then how does change happen? Maybe if the rest of the world pushes against the US? Other countries are having their own struggle with any change suggested being labeled as a convenient antisemitism. This is a huge US problem, but not JUST a US problem. And I know OP didn't want to get into the politics of it, but it's hard to avoid when that's exactly what it is, politics while people die and other people try to object and question it but get stomped down for doing so.
Does it? Or does it boil down to whether or not you are willing to rubber stamp the death of your loved ones.
When it’s theoretical gamesmanship people like you are more than willing to act like dispassionate chess masters but I have a hard time believing that if it was your family getting killed you would be so cavalier.
I knew I'd get downvoted by some for asking how to arrive at some solution with the given dilemma we're in. Maybe some people don't want to fix it.
Because the only actual solutions violate us law to even talk about, and lemmy is subject to us law.
Your vote is not your consent; that's some nonsense made up to get people to not vote.
In your metaphor, you vote for one your family dies, you vote for another your family and another family dies. You refuse to participate in the system and both families die.
You didn't consent to that, but you allowed it to happen via your vote of INDIFFERENCE which is what not voting means. It means you don't care which way things go, because that's all it can mean to not make a choice.
Easy to say when it’s not your family getting slaughtered.
But we all know you’re a paragon of rationality who would enthusiastically vote for an administration who has promised to kill your family because your love of lesser evilism outweighs anything else.
You know, you can find something evil in just about any politician's policy depending on your personal perspective.
So let's just not vote, because we shouldn't choose. We should just morally abstain from having choices because making no choice is the only way to make a choice.
Do you realize how absurd that sounds?
If you want to protest genocide, then GO DO IT, don't throw away a vote because that's not a protest, it's a pathetic excuse.
Of course we are talking about politics, not their metaphor. Metaphors break down pretty quickly in politics, as the actual material logic requires more than a five minute toy example.
In our current scenario, the Dems have a genocide candidate. If you vote for that and tell other people to vote for that, you are telling yourself and those around you that genocide is tolerable. Not just tolerable, even - recommendable in certain circumstances, pleading that it is reluctant. You are, in fact, helping to normalize genocide, and with it, dehumanize Palestinians. And if that genocidal candidate wins with your support, what will be the accepted consciousness? What will you and others internalize? It sure as shut will not be, "wow we should not have supported a fucking genocide what the fuck is wrong with us?" It will be, "hey cool we will support you no matter what, 98% Hitler". The party will see this and nod their heads, "let's start doing criminal charges for supporting Palestine" (they are already starting in this direction, e.g. Samidoun) and, "we never have to do anything our voters want".
Basically, y'all have no concept of leverage but you do have a concept of personal morality and are absolutely trashing it. You will, of course, never be forgjven by those who consider Palestinians to be human. One must hope that you overcome this implicit racism.
You forgot the other scenario. You talk of not having leverage because of a vote, and yet the other choice absolutely has no leverage at all, and possibly makes things even harder to change.
Let me ask this - would you recommend not voting for either President, but voting on the rest of the ballot? Because telling people to not vote usually implies don't show up at all, and that is part of why nothing changes. Local and state representation can matter more than the President.
Re: your question, I recommend that people consider Palestinians full humans and work backwards from there. I cannot prescribe much more than that outside of recommending they also challenge the omnipresent racist narratives used to manufacture consent for this genocide. That enough to begin a political education.
I don't really care how an individual decides to check their electoral box, I care about your normalization of genocide and application if lesser evil logic in service of a fucking genocide. If some person wants to vote for some loser for Congress, have at it. But let this moment of genocid apoligeticss awaken you politically and to begin challenging these narratives that led you down this path. Read and learn and understand why genocide is in the table, and no it is not because AIPAC is a big donor. Biden was being real when he said if Israel didn't exiat they would need to invent one.
I haven't said anything like, "not having leverage because of a vote". The relevance of leverage is that the entire premise of y'all's framings is that your role is to cheerlead your corronated genocidal candidate and accept anything they do, at least up to genocide. You throw away any concept of your own ability to make demands or organize and subordinate yourself to a genocidal political class. It makes you actively work against those who build leverage as well, you try to sheepdog them back into your self-defeating mindset.
So, having thrown away any real political analysis for building and using power, your vote is really reduced to a reflection of your personal morality. And that morality? To look at Palestinians as subhuman.
Re: harder to change, your electoral logic is already self-defeatjng. What do you think you are changing when your electoral logic is, "fall in line vite blue no matter who" including fucking genocide. Who would ever take you seriously? You think they're going to do anything to "win your vote"? Genocide apologist, they know they already have it. You announced you were giving it to them free of charge, that you will tolerate anything they do and still vote for them, and are actually pressuring others to do the same on their behalf.
You have thrown away any semblance of power or influence, and that is already within the limited confinea of electoralism. We all know that folks who think this way aren't out there working against the party in alternative organizations.
The correct time to express such thoughts is during a primary. We didn't have one because we had an incumbent; it happens.
The better place to have this fight is through congress anyways. They're the ones that actually approve the aid.
Better yet, go talk to the Israel people and get them to vote for someone that stops using our weapons in such an offensive manor. Israel knows that their position is critical to the US interest and their current leaders are happy to exploit that.
Literally, abstaining makes you part of the "party of not voting" and nobody does anything for them, because they don't vote.
There is no wrong time to be against genocide. It is, in fact, your basic duty as a human being claiming to have any empathu whatsoever.
Despite your pretense of knowing familiarity with how the system works, Buden has been bypassing Congress to send weapons to Israel for their genocide. Good ol' JDAMs produced right here in the US of A, even.
Israel is a settler-colonial state whose material interests are deeply tied to the dehumanization and oppression of Palestinians. There is no chance for a grassroots mobilization within Israel against the genocide. They want more blood than Bibi gives them. The most helpful thing for someone in the refion to do is to work directly to against Israel and their own governments' complicity. The US has similar challenges in its material base and society but I am succeeding in my organizing goals here. Every person in the US has a responsibility to work against its war machine.
And Israel is not a separate actor, here. It is fully dependent on the US.
Right, they are actually close collaborators. You should work against them.
You should not vote for genociders or tell others to do so. Whether that means abstaining is up to the individual. I don't really care. But you need to shed this idea that you are fighting the good fight by supporting genocide, you are actively harmful to working for the good of humanity. Instead of sheepdogging for Dems, join the people with empathy and organize against imperialism.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. When would the GOP collapse? Dems of course want to move right, there is no capitalist draw to the left, if you can call it a left. They would love to be able to manage their party without a "left" flank to handle and pivot fully to nationalism.
We are literally in a battle for our ability to vote.
Abstaining from said battle is effectively saying "I don't care" and letting Trump do what he will. If he chooses to send nukes to Palestine to end the conflict immediately, that's on everyone that abstained. If he ends aid to Ukraine and those people die, that's on everyone that abstained.
If he ends voting, you "won some moral battle" but you've all but permanently lost the war against genocide as the most powerful military and weapons on the planet are now in the hands of an authoritarian, raciest, fascist, regime that previously imposed a "Muslim ban" and I'm sure would happily do so again.
There is no hypocrisy here, and it's disingenuous to imply there is.
If you want to protest genocide, then GO DO IT, don't throw away a vote because that's not a protest, it's a pathetic excuse.
If you (allegedly) feel compelled to vote for genocide there is little value in your vote in the first place.
You are not in a battle. You are a human looking at a phone or computer screen trying to normalize voting for genociders and after doing so you will stay home. If you believed your own words you'd be posting signup sheets for shifts in Voter Protection Brigades, ready to take the fight to those attempting to disenfranchise you.
Instead, you are sitting around trying to rationalize support for genocide.
The policy is already genocide, you don't have a bigger gun to try pointing at people's heads. If you cared about Palestinian life you would already understand this. Unfortunately you care more about your naive political sensibilities.
The Dems are certainly worse for Ukraine, they are using them as cannon fodder to hurt Russia.
Both parties' presidents are inherently authoritarian.
Both parties are exceptionally racist, one is just polite and euphemistic about it, normalizing their version of racism so that you accept it without a second thought.
In other news, have you seen Kamala's stellar polic for getting black guys to buy crypto?
To the extent Trumpnis fascist, we have already been there for decades and decades buddy.
Did you notice the recent EO for domestic military deployments? Betcha didn't. Y'all igmore fashy policies when your side does them. Incidentally, if your party is the bullwark against fascism, why is it giving the president so much power to invoke martial law? Hmmmmmmmmm.
That is the correct term for all American governments, yes.
Both parties have racist immigration policies, Dems just do it without much pushback. You see their "immigration reform" paxkage they tried to push through Congress?
I don't think it is hypocrisy per se. I think most Americans are just racist and too embarrassed to admit it.
I don't want to protest against genocide, I want to build power against it. And so far it is going relatively okay, though certainly not with any help from people like yourself. You are our explicit opponents that work against us.
I don’t see a lesser evil here, both are going to kill my family. The lesser evil would be if one party is only going to kill half my family and yes I would vote for that party over the one that is going to kill ALL my family, after all it’s a two party system and one of them is going to win.
Both candidates will support Israel, so for pro palestine voters it's a "Would you like to vote for the Shitty Party, or Less Shitty Party" situation, where not voting from these parties is shunned upon because it will help Shitty Party win.
They already lived through 4 years of Trump and have decided it is worth doing it again instead of letting the party most currently responsible for said genocide to win.
Point being that Harris has outright refused to meet any sort of demands on Israel. There was no reduction in arms nor any restrictions placed on Israel, and Harris fully intends to continue that policy.
If she loses, it means that she failed to meet her constituents demands, which means they'd have to actually meet them in the next election to win.
Also because I have a hard time seeing how anyone who lost entire family trees would listen to "uM AkShuLly TrUmP woUld bE 9999x WorSe, wE jUst NeEd tO ProTest aFTER tHe ELeCTion" as if we didn't just full send billions of dollars in munitions and weapons to Israel.
Electoral College with First Past The Post electors. Hundreds of millions of american votes are dumpstered for the presidential election. So a significant portion of protest voters in deep red OR deep blue states aren't impacting the outcome. Only swing states decide the outcome and even then it is only a few districts within those states. And so the electoral outcome for the presidency gets reduced to the most salient wedge issues in those communities.
It just so happens some things are not so localized an issue. So the idea (or one of them) is to demonstrate whether there is a meaningful voting bloc to be had here that deserves to be listened to, or can continue to be ignored.
Simple. You punish zionists and democrats for backing genocide. If they keep losing on their positions then they'll learn to work for your vote. That's why always voting red or blue no matter what is bad. It just makes your vote worthless because you'll vote for them no matter what.
it's like people forget that trump was already president before. the Israel/Palestine conflict is not new. i'm pretty sure every US president since Israel was founded has supported Israel in every form the conflict has taken. there's more gas on the fire now, but it's not like trump wasn't stoking the flames when he was president last time, and it's weird to think he wouldn't actually contine the bipartisan US policy of providing material aid to Israel, regardless of what fucked up shit they do.
both candidates will support genocide, so at that point you can either not vote, and just let the chips fall where they may, vote for a third party candidate who won't support genocide (because they won't get elected), or choose between the two genocidal options based on other factors, and try and minimize the damage in other arenas.
I think something that contributes to people talking past each other here is a difference in belief in how necessary/desirable revolution/overthrow of the U.S government is. Like many of the people who I've talked to online, who advocate not voting and are also highly engaged, believe in revolution as the necessary alternative. Which does make sense. It's hard to believe that the system is fundamentally genocidal and not worth working within (by voting for the lesser evil) without also believing that the solution is to overthrow that system.
And in that case, we're discussing the wrong thing. Like the question isn't whether you should vote or not . it's whether the system is worth preserving (and of course what do you do to change it. How much violence in a revolution is necessary/acceptable). Like if you believe it is worth preserving, then clearly you should vote. And if you believe it isn't, there's stronger case for not voting and instead working on a revolution.
Does anyone here believe that revolution isn't necessary and also that voting for the lesser isn't necessary?
The opposite is more plausible to me: believing in the necessity of revolution while also voting
Personally I believe that revolution or its attempt is unlikely to effective and voting+activism is more effective, and also requires agreement from fewer people in order to progress on its goals. Tragically, this likely means that thousands more people will be murdered, but I don't know what can actually be effective at stopping that.
They can't be arsed to choose pragmatically between two bad candidates when voting and we're to believe they can do a revolution that involves several harder choices? Do these people think revolutions are easy walks in the park where you never have to make hard choices like, for example, killing your neighbors for being in the way of the revolution or how to handle POWs, etc.
Some people assume that voting and political activism are mutually exclusive, these people are stupid and won't win a revolution. These two things are not mutually exclusive, voting doesn't stop you from protesting and being politically engaged and vice versa.
Voting while planning a revolution is like sealing up a broken window with plastic until you can replace it. Basic maintenance so the whole thing doesn't get worse before the replacement is ready.
Oh man this thread is a real breath of fresh air, thank you three for having heads on your shoulders.
US Elections are decided when they do redistricting and manipulate the voting districts to ensure the results they want and isn't a real democracy. The US is run by oligarchs who run their enterprise corporations and the power is concentrated there, not in the government.
I think it's because of stuff like this:
I'm not a U.S.A-ian. From my view(might be too critical), I don't think the foreign policy would be greatly affected by the President or party, unless there's some massive movement and notion of losing resources like during the invasion of Vietnam.
to put pressure on the US government with regards to the situation in the Middle East
What has the current administration actually stopped Israel from doing? Every line in the sand has been crossed and there have been no consequences, trump won't be worse for Palestine than Kamala
You got many answers, but part of it is because of shit like this.
good god, one would think this is something trump would do. at this point the choice is between an orange turd and an aipac approved vomit. and still there people questioning why we don’t want to eat either.
people dont seem to see the difference between ending up with a party for which a good chunk of their supporters think that what Israel is doing is a genocide vs ending up with a party for which all of their supporters think not only that what Israel is doing is justified but should also do the same to all middle eastern countries (together with direct USA involvement).
I think there are two major subgroups within this group.
First one is immigrants whose families are from the middle east/Palestine who are rightfully very angry at all the world for doing jack shit about Israel committing genocide. What they have to realize is there are unfortunately only two options going ahead: 1- as it is now, maybe somewhat better in future, or 2- much worse. There is no third option that is going to come out of these elections but one where there is potential for change (potential coming from the supporters mentioned above) vs %100 chance of things going for the worse. Note that I am not talking at all about the candidates themselves at all, just the demographic that generally votes for them.
The second group is probably China or Russia fans who just want to see America suffer by getting Trump elected. These are very short sighted people with whom you cannot really have a coherent conversation with.
Because I live in one of the many many states were my vote doesn't matter at all.
What's the point of casting a worthless vote in favor of genocide?
People here act like we live in some kind of actual democracy lol.
Conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists everywhere.
AIPAC is doing what is actually effective: lobbying (AKA bribing) politicians.
So are the Saudis.
But to deny that the known efforts of the Russians to fuck with the GOP and at least one known instance of them fucking with BLM is foolish. Go to the Canada subreddit on any news related to India and its full of atrocious asfroturf.
Russia and Trump proved it effective, now everyone is doing it.
It did not in fact prove that.
.
And should Harris lose this election, the Democrats will again look anywhere but in the mirror for the reasons.
I actually read the public mueller report for myself. I know what it said.
Damn I applaud you for the effort in compiling those sources.
All Canadian subs are extremely racist, it's most likely Israeli botting actually. They are behind right wing movements all around the world. Remember the UK anti-immigrant rights? A Israeli Zionist was behind that.
Wait til you get a load of the CIA
Whattaboutism.
Whataboutism is just having perspective.
Are you against having perspective?
Russia doesn't do SHIT in the US. The only thing that was proven was that they spent like 200k on buff Bernie facebook memes. Russiagate was debunked by the CEO of Crowdstrike who testified that they saw no evidence of Russia hacking Hillary's email servers.
China and Iran do less than nothing, they are completely ineffective at propaganda. I live in Taiwan, you would think with a shared language (mandarin), the "CCP" (CPC is what they're actually called) would be effective at brainwashing Taiwanese right into believing their narratives right? FUCK no.
I wonder the same thing, specially since Trump is also pro-Israel and voting for either one wont save Palestine
Being against nazis doing a genocide makes you a bootlicker according to the pro nazi doing genocide instance
There are many contributing factors. Part of it is russian and american oligarchs spending heaps of cash to amplify any and every message that could help trump win.
Obama dropped an average of 60 bombs every day on the middle east and north africa during his presidency.
The US isn't a democracy, and it's elections are nothing but theatre. I recommend asking about this on lemmygrad or hexbear also.
it's the famous Dessalines of github US atrocities fame :D :D
Sometimes, I see a quality discussion between principled people who care deeply about the issues. They both want to do what’s best, but simply disagree on what "best" is.
Their opinions can be so far apart, though, that they’re unable to even comprehend the other position.
Lots of people foolishly think political parties can learn lessons.
This was where I was at 6 months ago. They even had the gall to say, "things will shape up as we get closer." This is an attack vector and no, it will only go away after the election. People who defend the stance who aren't foreign actors are useful idiots.
Because they're stupid enough to think a Trump presidency will be better for their cause somehow. Or they're delusional enough to think that a 3rd party candidate will be anything but a spoiler, like they were in 2016. Seriously, protest votes after the DNC forced out Bernie were likely what led to Trump getting in. So while it's the DNC and Hillary's fault, the feet on the ground were the idiots.
Why in the world would you make this thread? Almost every single day for at least the last month (and still often beforehand) there have been threads where the liberals and the leftists aggressively talk in circles on this issue. The odds of you hearing anything new are incredibly low, and you might as well just go back to .ml's c/news threads for the same material.
I just can't keep having people yell the same nonsense at me over and over. If you're really badly in need of leftist takes, I'll DM you on request, but I don't really want to talk about it publicly anymore except in more convincingly leftist spaces than .ml has been rendered by its federation.
If you want a more leftist space without so many liberals, you should try the dbzer0 instance.
I already found (and in fact am coming from, this is an alt account) some more appropriate instances, but I appreciate your trying to be helpful.
I voted party for socialism and liberation and you can too!
They’re running Claudia de la Cruz on a platform of Palestinian statehood and an end to arms shipments to israel.
Psl is eligible for enough electoral votes to win in a landslide!
If genocide is your red line then they’ve crossed it. How will you respond?
So many? What kinda numbers are we talking here?
I reject your original false premise that "so many" are actually doing this.
I have faith that pro-Palestinian folks are on the whole, rational and empathetic enough to know that trump will end the comfort, and even lives, of so many groups of vulnerable people, decidedly inclusive of the Palestinians there. We elect Harris today so that our democracy lives another day. That preserves our rights to fill the streets in protest and interrupt commerce until Israel's genocide ends WHEN Kamala actually has the power to stop it, after being sworn in.
Until then, we stay vocal and we place the pressure to end this where it firmly belongs - Netanyahu and the Israelis instigating and enabling this historically horrible thing.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17919598
Could be bad actors trying to sway the vote. Could be sweet summer children who believe the means justify the end.
Who are these people and where are they? I don't know of and haven't heard of any pro Palestinian voters refusing to vote for her over the alternative.
Everyone else is basically going to give you dogshit answers, here, and I'm not gonna read through the thread to confirm that because I've been in enough of these threads on lemmy to know that it's going to be the most oversimplified and horrible hand-wavy explanations you could've hoped for. I think maybe the collective effort people put into their posts on the internet is dwindling as a result of mass adoption and various social media incentive structures, to the point where even platforms like lemmy are gonna get filled with horrible dogshit and just the worst oldest facebook memes of all time. Don't listen to all those fucking morons, listen to me, I'm the only one effortposting in this removed, because I have psychosis and like to write these out as a way to take notes and review my talking points.
SO, at the lowest level, you have gerrymandering. This applies to things like city council seats within cities, it applies to what gets defined as "inside" and "outside" the city and the county, it applies to districts that elect representatives at the state level, and it even, to a certain degree, applies to the states themselves. Basically, every time the electorate gets subdivided, something you would otherwise think is a good thing, as it lets people be governed more with concerns local to that subdivision, instead, those lines get drawn up most often to favor the party that is currently sitting in that seat. Being that this is instituted at pretty much every level of governance, and that people don't tend to change addresses super often, especially homeowners, this contributes to why most states are not swing states, and why most votes are very predictably "wasted", or, are used by the parties to cancel out other very predictable votes, or are used to further secure and entrench power with more overwhelming margins.
You also have first-past-the-post voting in the vast majority of places, abbreviated as fptp voting, in which you have a single, non-transferable vote. Proponents of this system can basically only defend it on its braindead simplicity, because there's not really any reality in which it accurately represents the interests of the voters. If you think of a voting system as being a way for voters to clearly communicate their preferences, and have those preferences followed, then fptp voting only provides one bit of information: "I want this guy". It doesn't rate candidates in relation to each other, it doesn't tell anyone whether or not you would prefer one candidate over another. So, people get locked in to voting for one candidate which has proved to be consistently popular, and has a good chance of winning so they don't "waste" their vote, which as previously described, is probably already wasted, and so we get locked into a two-party system pretty much everywhere.
Both these systems combine to severely limit the weight of anyone's vote. It effectively means that, outside a couple gerrymandered suburbs, in particular swing states, which can be figured out well in advance of elections, the rest of the votes don't matter. Most votes are just locked in a system where they are effectively being used by the sitting parties to cancel each other out.
Most local races are funded at the local level, meaning they tend to favor older, much more well-off candidates which don't necessarily represent the majority of people's interests. This outsized power can be increased with gerrymandering. Americans also tend to favor sitting candidates over new candidates, both because of FPTP, and also because culturally FPTP has become ingrained, meaning incumbent candidates tend to be able to sit around for as long as they want. Primaries are pretty much unilaterally controlled by the parties that run them, as we have seen in this election, and they are able to pretty effectively select who it is that they want to be elected through the funding and backing of the party, within their territories, which is something that's happening at every level, and not just at the presidential level. So, economics and economic disparity has a great role to play in who is able to run for local positions, on top of obviously having a very clear role at higher levels. Less money can also have a very outsized impact in local, smaller elections, where candidates can court corporate interests and party interests and then bankroll their way into a position pretty much guaranteed. This is why you can pretty much dismiss anyone who's going to suggest that you go and run for local office, as though that's some gotcha. They wouldn't know, because they probably also haven't run for their local offices, but especially at the higher levels, those local offices tend to be controlled by elderly small business owners and a bunch of lawyers. Canvassing and commercials are pretty effective, especially when you can concentrate these on the gerrymandered fraction of the population with values already favorable to institutional powers, which is having an outsized impact.
So, given that your vote is pretty much guaranteed to not matter, is especially guaranteed to not matter at the federal level, and is very especially not going to matter if you live anywhere with any significant population density, lots of people take that as an opportunity to piss their vote away on jill stein or whatever other scammer that's running. Of course, third parties would probably be more effective at the smaller local levels, building up larger and larger bases of support until they are more adequately able to challenge the major parties at the federal level, and even try for federal funding, but we've seen such a level of institutional capture at pretty much every level that it's sort of a fucked game to begin with.
It's so fucked up at every level that I'm not sure I would really fault the parties that are running with like, 2% of the votes, in polling, compared to the fucking massive country-wide institutions that are actually controlling elections and messaging. Those that can even get 2% of the votes are likely to get those votes because they've been donated to by one side, the other, or, much more commonly, both, on top of business interests and foreign powers, who all believe that adding in another spoiler candidate will help their candidate get elected.
To hopefully dissuade some idiotic criticisms before they happen:
Q: Well, then what am I to do!?! If I can't vote on a candidate, and have my vote be effective for that candidate, then what have I done politically? What's the alternative?
A: None of that really contradicts any of what I'm currently saying, it's not a valid counterargument. I've told you the reality of the system, if you have a problem with how your current strategy is not effective in that reality, then take it up with reality, not me. I would probably say that organizations outside of the system, organizations owned by a majority of the people within them, organizations that can wield political power, those would probably be useful. Organizations that can punch above their weight class economically would be most useful. We've seen a recent, very minor rise in unionization and union activity, after decades of downturn as a result of government policies, which has been good, but I am concerned again about many of these unions, and especially the older ones, being subject to institutional capture at the highest levels as a result of ill-thought out internal structures and a desire to "keep out the raffle", from elitism, classism, or racism. If I had thoughts of reformism, then I would aim there, and I would probably also aim to create a lot more interconnections between these smaller unions which are more individually vulnerable. One big union, would be a good idea suited to the moment, and I haven't seen it taken up a lot.
And sure, go out and vote, right, but, don't harbor any illusions about what you're doing when you go out and vote. Focus more on your local candidates and your obscure, idiotic local laws and regulations which are probably going to be explained poorly in some half-baked blogpost or news article, if you're even afforded that dignity rather than just having to read shit straight from the charters and laws themselves. Don't just get invested every 4 years when you get threatened with a new form of fascism by corporate media. If you're falling for that shit, then you're probably running around like a chicken with their head cut off, doing worse than nothing. If you're not willing to put in an hour or two of concentrated reading and research in the right places, then you would be better off, at that point, just ignoring all those anxieties, not voting, and eating jalapeno poppers at chili's or whatever else.
Q: This shit is too long, I can't read it all!
A: Tl;dr GOTO 10
The US two-party system is a duopoly, so whichever party you vote for doesn't matter. They are two sides of the same coin pretending to be opposites.
2 reasons jump to mind.
When I listen to people who personally identify with the people of Gaza, it goes way beyond logic. They have a completely emotional reaction. Their choices are almost completely driven by the question of, "Who is doing what, right now?" Questions of, "Who will do what 6 months from now?" take a distant back seat.
Every time the topic comes up, Democrats dogpile on them and call them morons. People will often respond with something like, "Yeah but that's OK because they ARE morons." I won't argue if that's true or not but it's pretty obvious that line of reasoning won't win a lot of converts.
Propaganda brain rot /thread
The Pro-Palestinians fail to understand it does not matter who is the US President because the key advisors within the cabinet are usually Pro-Israeli and many have dual US and Israeli citizenship. No matter what, Israel has the USA by the balls and they will continue to receive billions of dollars of free money. and weapons.
It feels like watching Trump burn the middle east to the ground instead of Harris would be cold comfort for anyone proud of not actively voting for a different genocide abetting candidate. There is no anti-genocide candidate, sadly, but one party has at least the shadow of a conscience that can be pressured later.
It's the difference between those for whom leftism is an aesthetic and those who want material progress. Those who value the aesthetic can't bear to compromise their aesthetic by voting for Harris, while those who care about people's material conditions and doing work to actually make progress do vote for her.
Her stance is practically indistinguishable from Trump's and enables Israel to continue the genocide.
Assuming you are exactly average, 49% of people are dumber than you. This should help you understand why the US is in this situation.
are you seriously going to vote for genocide? wtf? i hope you are a CIA/Israeli bot and not a real person