your bait is rotten and stinks, you know how to read. "Interpreting" = strawmanning/otherwise putting words in my mouth. Do I think they contributed? Absolutely. Dipshits are everywhere and many of them happen to reside here, and I read many comments from the usual tankie trolls doing nothing but shit-talk Harris as often as they could on Lemmy in the leadup to the election, which probably influenced a nonzero number of peoples opinions (again, dipshits everywhere). Does that in any way imply I think they're solely responsible?
please take your chum elsewhere, thank you. I hear 4chan is back up these days, now you run along.
Friend, I'm sorry you read my comment as being an attack or an attempt to lure you out. It's miscommunications like this that make me want to clarify things, which is why I asked instead of assuming. Another misunderstanding: By "throwing the election", I didn't mean being solely responsible for the electoral loss. What I mean by that is if you removed the tankie factor from the election, it could have gone the other way. Elections are won and lost on very fine margins. There may be 100 other things that had a similar impact which you could also say threw the election; none of them are solely responsible for it.
If you aren't saying that they influenced the election to a degree that might have flipped it, then what is it we are "finding out" from their "fucking around"? And, do you consider having read many comments on lemmy as sufficient evidence to think that might be the case?
I don't think that is what OP is referring to. I interpreted it as the strange measuring stick tankies use to compare the democrats and the republicans. Even accelerationists agree that the Republicans are way worse than the democrats.
Prior to the second election of trump. I would wholeheartedly agree with you.
But as time goes on, it's looking like we don't have a democracy but a fascist dictatorship or oligarchy. In which case accelerationism may actually be the lesser evil.
Tankues hve advocated to not vote democrat over gaza and less people voted for hillary than for biden.
Of course there's no way proving this is true (and it shouldn't, since voting should be nonymous) and it certainly was until a certain part also racism and sexism, but the intensity of the calls to boycott dems and Harris having way less votes than Biden is suspicious.
the intensity of the calls to boycott dems and Harris having way less votes than Biden is suspicious
There's nothing suspicious about it. Voters have spent the last eight years watching their bills for food, health care, child care, and everything else spiral out of control without any meaningful help from Republicans or Democrats.
These millions opted not to miss work to vote because they know definitively that the two choices they had wouldn't do anything to change how hard their lives have become.
Do people only work every hour of a weekday in America? Plus don't they have a system for voting ahead of time via post too, which you could sort out on a weekend leading up as well?
Do people only work every hour of a weekday in America?
Many do, yes. The majority of our population is so vastly underpaid that they work upwards of 100 hours a week at multiple jobs. (Which, as you can imagine, might inspire them to see a sort of futility in voting to begin with.) Also elections can entail hours-long waiting in line.
Plus don’t they have a system for voting ahead of time via post too
It depends on your state and local jurisdiction. Your right to vote by mail (or to vote conveniently) depends on where you live.
Even when there isn't a clearly superior option; there's no excuse to not vote in the U. S. when the right to vote is such a pivotable portion of your history. We are barely over a half century away; only a mere 60 years. Unconscionable.
IMO, progressives (who's not too bothered by Stein's cozying up to Russia a bit) from California, most of New England, DC, Maryland, Hawaii, or Washington (state), and yet yammer on about how bad third parties are because they split the Democrat vote, are probably stupid, or at least ignorant, and should give some of the time they spend watching CNN or Vaush to reading election stats.
how bad third parties are because they split the Democrat vote, are probably stupid, or at least ignorant, and should give some of the time they spend watching CNN or Vaush to reading election stats.
Hey, I don't need to comment because you said it all for me.
I simply cannot grasp why some people believe voting 3rd party in a presidential election isn't one of the dumbest possible things you can do in life.
Like, beyond the fact that the 3rd party candidate with the most votes in 2024 got a whopping HALF OF A SINGLE PERCENT of the total votes cast, meaning a 3rd party literally cannot win, there's still the reality that even if they did win, no 3rd party has A SINGLE MEMBER IN CONGRESS, so if a 3rd party presidential candidate actually won, they wouldn't be able to do shit, because they'd have literally ZERO allies in Congress.
I'm pretty sure anyone voting 3rd party for president has absolutely no clue how our government works. They have no concept of the reality they live in.
I simply cannot grasp why some people believe voting 3rd party in a presidential election isn’t one of the dumbest possible things you can do in life.
You might want to say that to Michiganders who voted for Stein (and Oliver) because of Gaza and the US presence in the Middle East.
The 2024 Presidential election isn't the only one in US history: there have been 57 others.
Trump had few allies in Congress before 2016, but now members are the Republican caucus are falling all over themselves to curry favour from him.
I’m pretty sure anyone voting 3rd party for president has absolutely no clue how our government works. They have no concept of the reality they live in.
You are so correct—as members of the herd generally are. I like people who resort to exaggerations, over generalizations, and distortions.
Non-voters are beneath Trump supporters in my opinion. They're the lowest of the low. A complete failure to understand their civic duty that a ton of people died to allow them to have. At least Trump supporters get involved. In the worst, dumbest possible way, but involved nonetheless.
"I would proudly vote for Hitler if slightly to the right of Hitler was on the ballot". Good fucking job, you're voting for Hitler. If you vote for Hitler you also deserve slightly to the right of Hitler.
In Sweden the far-right tried to play this game. They started chirping about the social democrats being rasist and made a list on like an A4 with names and events. Then the same was done to them, matching the font, their list was taken up a skylift and holding one end they folded it out to the ground in a television program.
Well, I would not give them that much credit. The majority governing coallition is with the far-right. They were clear before the election they were going to work with the far-right. They have a common platform with the far right which has a large overlap with e.g. Trumps; mass deportation of immigrants (like for reasons like being a victim of a crime), slashing government agencies, extreme restrictions on free speech, and so on. It is just a bit slower here when it comes to reaching their goals.
Wow, a country that experienced harsh Japanese colonial rule from 1910 until being forcibly divided by the US after the second world war, creating a war-torn pariah state facing crushing international economic sanctions, is a shit hole? Color me surprised!
Huh??? Did I say anything about that? Does this racism excuse anything we've done to them? Seriously, project much?
What the hell should we do about it, fucking invade them again? Continue blockades that don't even achieve their stated purpose and just make things worse for their people? Cause that's gone over so well... the only real interaction with most foreign nations being that of sanctions, acts of war and colonization, arbitrarily imposing their own values, and constantly talking down on them both as a nation and as a people, definitely is going to make them love foreigners.
It's not an "excuse" brother it's just material reality, why do I have to be "excusing" anything? Is it too much to treat them like humans worthy of a basic level of respect??
Let's talk excuses though. It'd really be no fucking wonder if they hate us like you say they do. You would hate foreigners too if they talked about you like that and preyed on your downfall the way western nations do to the DPRK. In fact you've shown very clearly that you have the exact same hate which you're trying to condemn here. Calling their home a "shithole", your only response to a very brief overview of their history not being one of understanding or empathy but simply to lash out and call them racist, which I can only assume is to imply they deserved it. What's your excuse??
They'd campaign hard against Lincoln for being a defender of slavery, despite him being the only anti-slavery candidate with a chance of winning in 1860.
They don't care how many marginalized groups are beat, raped, starved, and murdered, so long as they can jerk themselves off over how pure (or nonexistent) their ballot was.
Here's the tankie of the time. Liberals would be out defending the slave owners rights for free market ideals and the law . Possibly demanding that more women should be allowed to hold the whip.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
I'm not even usaian but I now that republican and democrats were the opposite sides compared to today. Are you deliberately trying to be dishonest or are you just stupid?
Also liberalism is a word usaians have a hard time grasping what it is. it's a specific ideology not a party. Neoliberal ideas are shared on both heads of the US plutocracy
So glad you made sure that shitlib Lincoln wasn't elected, it would have been truly terrible if someone who wasn't an unconditional supporter of slavery was in charge of the country.
Maybe there would be more than Side A and Side B if we had voting reform and Democrats didn't systematically sue third-parties off the ballot.
People (not just authoritarians) criticize Side A because they have way more tallies than most have been led to believe. Everybody who pays any amount of attention knows that Side B has a lot of tallies. What good comes out of specifically pointing out the tallies of Side B when literally everybody on non-conservative social media is blasted with the knowledge of those tallies? If you want somebody to preach to the choir or inform you about Side B's tallies, just ask. If you think people paying attention to or being informed about Side A's tallies is dangerous and harmful, just say so.
Side A tolerates third-world exploitation (labor, resources, goods) that the US economy still relies on, they tolerate the US economy still relying on slavery and child slavery, they tolerate or support US imperialism and regime change, they refuse to address or come up with solutions for the fresh water crisis (by 2030, demand will exceed supply by 40%), they refuse to properly address many issues that the US people face (the economy, the housing crisis, the health care crisis, etc.), they support harmful policies like fracking, they have allowed corporations/et. al to go out of control under their power, and they generally have not advocated for strong regulation and protections for the American people. Yes, Side B is undesirable, but Side A is insufficient.
1/3 of Americans don't vote and plenty of people only voted Kamala because they didn't want Trump (and there are other factors than Gaza, misogyny, and Jill Stein voters at play to explain why people didn't come out to vote for her). Plenty of people probably don't want Trump (or anybody like him) if they've been paying any attention and didn't fall for the propaganda.
Side A would get bonus points for not alienating progressives, for supporting the loosening of requirements for ballot access (and stop engaging in lawfare to restrict ballot access), and for supporting fair and inclusive debates on public property where they would have to address perspectives and topics that are potentially uncomfortable or inconvenient for them.
I realize there are plenty of unserious actors who run for president (like Kayne West) who would try their best to poison open debates and abuse expanded ballot access, but there has to be some fair mechanism to filter (openly racist and insane) people like him out. Perhaps a competency test of sorts with independent observation would be appropriate.
This is an unprecedented time for the American people, with human rights and due process in jeopardy. We are facing multiple serious crises with no solutions or progress in sight - voting and election reform, in addition to term limits, are all urgent and necessary.
I don't care if you want to vote for Side A no matter what — we can only suppress criticism and stay in denial of major issues for so long before (e.g.) the fresh water crisis hits us and humanity is completely and utterly unprepared.
I appreciate the depth of your response. You're right, critiquing Side A doesn't mean endorsing Side B. It means demanding better from those who claim to represent us. The meme calls out false equivalency, but that shouldn't silence legitimate concerns about the system itself.
It’s like this: if the house is on fire, I’ll vote to put out the biggest flame, but I’m also going to ask why the fire keeps spreading, and who’s refusing to fix the wiring. Reform isn’t a distraction; it’s how we stop the next blaze before it starts.
Thanks for adding a more nuanced layer to the conversation.
Whether they use them intentionally or not, we need voting reform. In the 2024 election, third-parties barely made a dent — they weren't a spoiler.
FPTP is exactly why third-parties can be a "spoiler". There are plenty of valid alternative voting systems to explore that are way more fair and democratic.
And it doesn't sound very democratic of the Democratic Party to repeatedly and systematically restrict ballot access through lawsuits. Ballot access is hard enough for third-parties to achieve in most states.
Wait I'm lost, are we talking foreign invasions done by the US vs foreign invasions done by China? Or the number of victims of Hamas vs the victims of the IDF? What are we counting here? Military bases abroad?
Sure, but on average when some self proclaimed leftist's opening is "Democrats did a bad thing" in a vacuum my immediate assumption is they're a campist/tankie, accelerationist, or a rightwing psyop and my instinct is to immediately challenge them (most of the time... sometimes its me critiquing the dems)
Sometimes it turns out they're giving an earnest critique but usually not.
I'm the arbiter of who I trust is arguing coherently or in good faith and I am ultimately not trusting of the average internet poster by default.
I've been arguing on dedicated internet debate spaces for a very very large portion of my life and I have a good eye for when someone isn't worth being taken seriously.
Talking about how some people deny or justify the horrendous things done by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim Dynastie, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Honecker, Guevara, Ho Chi Min, and so on and all their helpers, because others also did horrendous things and both have to be called out for it. Justification of unneccesary murdering shows you are in favor for that which is unacceptable
If we take "kill" to mean like manslaughter through poor policy and famine, probably Mao, by an order of magnitude. But I'm guessing that's not what you're thinking about, because that's kind of a silly comparison. It's like asking "who killed more Americans, Mao or the US", to which the answer is both obvious and completely uninteresting.
So I'm gonna take it to mean "murder", like the killing of landlords during the cultural revolution. And then it's actually kind of close, and I'm not sure who's killed more Asians. So the most liberal estimates for Mao there are 7 million, but the range is pretty big. The most conservative estimates put him at 2 million.
Let's look at the US' kill count. I know of bombing campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Respectively, the ranges here are 300k-2M, 1.5M-3.1M, 80k-350k, 50k-150k. So that's a range of 1.9M-5.6M. Then there's the suppression of the movement for independence in colonized phillipines, which adds 200k, and Afghanistan, 250k. So that puts us at 2.5M-6M for the US to 2-7 for Mao.
It should be noted that I'm not counting indirect deaths via training and arming dictatorships (if someone hands an assassin a gun, and the assassin kills your mother, the first person is not a murderer, but they are culpable in some way. If we add these, you get Timor, and the murder of leftists in Indonesia in the 60s, among others, which adds another 1-1.5M to the US count.
So I guess it's kind of close. I gotta say, I'm a little surprised, I always thought Mao was much worse, but the US is a strong contender.
You're welcome to include Iraq, Iran, South America, Africa, Gaza, Turkish Kurds, and so on. You're welcome to restrict to some arbitrary timeframe, you're welcome to exclude indirect fatalities. Ultimately it's a fairly futile exercise. But I do know that if we restrict to the period including the invasion of Vietnam by China and onward, the US "wins" very, very comfortably.
And I object to your use of the word artificial. These are human lives that were snuffed out for the sake of greed. These were people, like your father, your mother, your friends. There's nothing artificial about these numbers.
IIUC, 50 years ago, the UN GA passed a motion that Zionism was racism.
Did that scare the people of Israel?
I predict that Israel will still have relations with much of the world as dealing with Israel is more profitable than dealing with Arabs in Golan, West Bank, and Gaza; and Netanyahu won't go to jail, particularly as his 80th birthday is less than 60 months away.
Why are you blaming leftists for Trumps win? We make up like 1% of the population, tops. You should instead point the finger at Republicans for voting for him. Or the Dems for running a totally weak and ineffectual campaign. (Or how about the oligarchs who only want to divide us so that they can rob us blind?)
Absolutely. Trump only goes more insane. At least with Kamala we would have had a chance to push left policies, and they wouldn't be going directly to fucking fascism, unlike t-Rump.
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said Washington will continue to pressure Israel and other players in the Middle East to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza
She said she'd continue pressure that wasn't happening? Wow, what a fucking saint.
Former Israeli ambassador, Michael Herzog, made a startling admission about Biden’s support: “God did the State of Israel a favour that Biden was the president during this period. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.”
For the first four months of the Gaza war, the Biden administration opposed a full ceasefire, instead opting at best for a temporary “pause” to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, which was briefly achieved in late November 2023. Biden said earlier that month: “a cease-fire is not peace… every cease-fire is time [Hamas members] exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing.”
A senior member of Israel’s negotiating team said in April that “Since January, it’s clear to everyone that we’re not conducting negotiations. It happens again and again: You get a mandate during the day, then the prime minister makes phone calls at night, instructs ‘don’t say that’ and ‘I’m not approving this,’ thus bypassing both the team leaders and the war cabinet.”
Throughout this period, Biden refrained completely from publicly calling out Netanyahu for explicitly sabotaging the talks.
On May 5, Hamas accepted the April proposal with reservations and amendments, but before the Israeli negotiating team got to formulate a response, Israel’s prime minister rushed to denounce Hamas’ position as “delusional” and ordered the immediate invasion of Rafah on May 7.
Biden, who had promised to halt arm supplies to Israel if it violated his “red line” of invading Rafah, decided to instead suspend one shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and nothing more.
After lengthy negotiations, on July 2 Hamas accepted an updated Biden proposal with minor amendments, particularly relating to assurances that the ceasefire would lead to ending the war instead of a mere pause, according to multiple senior Arab and Palestinian officials involved in the talks. Hamas were informed that the US and Israeli negotiating team were both on board. However, a few days later, Netanyahu issued four new “non-negotiable” conditions that mediators and even Israeli security officials saw as intentionally sabotaging the deal. The conditions were: resuming the war after a pause “until [Israel’s] war aims are achieved”; no IDF withdrawal from the Philadelphia corridor between Rafah and Egypt; Israel would restrict the return of over one million displaced Gazans to the Northern half of the enclave; maximizing the number of living hostages to be released in the first phase.
In August, ahead of the Democratic National Convention, the US opened a renewed round of negotiations, having received Iranian and Hezbollah promises of refraining from retaliation if a deal was reached.
Instead of building upon Biden’s proposal and pressing Israel to compromise, the Americans simply incorporated Netanyahu’s four impossible conditions as “a bridging proposal.” They attempted to entice Hamas to the table by getting Israel to reduce its veto on which Palestinian detainees it would release in a deal (Hamas presented a list of 300 heavily sentenced individuals, “the VIPs.” Netanyahu vetoed 100 names, including Marwan Barghouti, and insisted on only releasing prisoners with less than 22 years left in their sentence. The Americans lowered this veto to 75 names then 65 in August, per a senior Arab mediator).
As soon as the DNC ended, Biden blamed Hamas again for the failure of the talks, and effectively stopped trying to get a deal, with US officials declaring in September that a ceasefire deal has become unlikely during Biden’s term. Since then, the White House has attempted to re-write history and promote an official narrative blaming Hamas for Netanyahu’s systematic foiling of the talks.
Sorry to make you read more than the first sentence of an article. In fact I suggest you read the whole thing, since I picked out these quotes pretty arbitrarily. I know you won't though, because you probably think you're immune to propaganda so long as you only read the "right" news that just happens to be entirely in agreement with both you and the status quo that has allowed a genocide to happen before our eyes.
People have a hard time with percentages, propensity, likelihood, etc. They can only think in binary terms. I used to think it was the right but looks like it's everyone.
It's crazy the amount of people that think the evil voters are at fault and not the political party that made a wedge issue out of fucking genocide of all things.
So glad the current guys got in! How's that going for ya btw? That genocide stop? No? It's accelerating? So glad more children can die so you can still confidently hold your nose in the air.
I hate the current guy even more. It seriously bothers me that the dems lost to him because they thought genocide was more important then you and me. I really wish they would have ran a proper platform, so we didnt have to vote for democracy and genocide at the same time, and still lose.
Keep blaming everyone but them and maybe we can have the same circus next election too. We all just have to come together and accept genocide, apathy and status quo like maybe three or four more times.
It seriously bothers me that the dems lost to him because they thought genocide was more important then you and me. I really wish they would have ran a proper platform, so we didnt have to vote for democracy and genocide at the same time, and still lose.
We will remember the devil's bargain we were forced to answer, so will the rest of the world.
next election? there won't be an election next time, democracy is dead and you killed it.
good job on the protest vote, now that you have defeated the "status quo" gaza will be a luxurious hotel with golf courses instead, so much better, right?
do us a favor and go back to your tankie echo chambers / your right wing troll friends, depending on what you actually are
No, the Democrats killed it when they handed our democracy over to a facist on a silver platter. Rememer that they did this because they valued genocide and corporate donations more than they cared about beating trump.
I'm going to keep blaming stupid Americans because that's where the fault primarily lies.
Oh no, a political party didn't run a picture perfect campaign against a felon rapist's racist fascist campaign. Guess that means we have to let the felon rapist win.
Do you know how many less fucks I give about 2 countries on the other side of the planet continuing an everlasting religious conflict compared to creeping fascism in my own fucking country?
American voters couldn't see the forest for the trees, because they're stupid. So now we sit squarely in the stupidest timeline.
Wait, you mean the thing that we told the Dems would happen, happened? Crazy, who could have seen that coming? It's almost like we wanted them to be a party of decency, so we could tell people to vote for them without having to defend the killing of children.
Maybe next time, the Dems should put up a candidate people want to vote for, instead of shaming people for being against Genocide.
So glad that you held the country, and especially vulnerable populations like LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, immigrants, and disabled people, not to mention the Palestinian and Ukrainian people, hostage while demanding that Dems do things that have zero historical evidence of them agreeing to. I can't speak for all of us but, I bet the others are also glad that you were able to keep your moral high-ground and didn't feel at all betrayed and upset about it. /s
I always find it fascinating that people get mad at those that couldn't stomach genocide, rather than getting mad at the people with the power, the money and the platform who chose genocide and money over fighting fascism. We kept telling the Democrats that their position was unpopular, they told us to sit down and shut up. Maybe the Democrats should play seriously next time.
Maybe the Democrats should play seriously next time.
So glad you taught those Dems a lesson, I'm sure the elite in the DNC are going to be very harmed by this, and not the numerous marginalized groups on the ground.
And if they don't learn their lesson, of course, you can just murder some more minorities next time! That will really show them!
Leftist here who voted for Kamala and is also a minority:
So glad you taught those Dems a lesson, I’m sure the elite in the DNC are going to be very harmed by this, and not the numerous marginalized groups on the ground.
You recognize that how you're describing the situation is eerily close to the definition of collective punishment, right? "Don't argue with the people in charge who have been screwing us over for the entirety of our lives and who are actively doing a genocide because at least they're not gonna hurt us as bad". That's not an argument for keeping those people in power. Stop defending the people who are willfully causing the deaths of children halfway across the world because at least less people will die here. Stop trading Palestinian lives for American ones.
We have one enemy right now and it's the billionaires who are actively and maliciously trying to keep us fighting against each other so that they can r*pe and decimate the working class. Shut the fuck up about who voted last election and for whom and actually gear up behind candidates that actually want to solve problems. The dem establishment does not give a shit about the working class. How many fucking articles have to come out basically spelling out for you that they are abandoning the working class? They're courting corporate interest too. Get off the sinking ship and hold your fucking public servants accountable for their actions for once.
You recognize that how you’re describing the situation is eerily close to the definition of collective punishment, right?
"Collective punishment is when you recognize that actions have consequences for everyone in society"
Yikes.
Stop trading Palestinian lives for American ones.
Oh cool, how many Palestinian lives did preferring the fascist save?
Oh, no Palestinians were saved?
In fact, more Palestinians are going to die now?
Stop trading American and Palestinian lives for your own ego.
Shut the fuck up about who voted last election and for whom and actually gear up behind candidates that actually want to solve problems.
Don't worry, any time there's a candidate who might end up with a chance of preventing fascism, I'm sure you'll find a reason to asspat everyone who sabotages that candidate.
I'm sure that if you just encourage this self-destructive behavior and praise the 'bravery' of those who engage in purity-test insanity at the cost of the lives of people like us more, it'll make the next anti-fascist coalition that much more likely to succeed. Less support for an anti-fascist coalition is better, right?
The dem establishment does not give a shit about the working class.
Okay. Cool. Would you like to remind me what the pro-working class options were in 2024?
We were offered a punch in the face or a .50 cal through the head, and you're sitting here defending people who opted for the .50 cal because a punch in the face is bad. No shit a punch in the face is bad. But anyone who can't see the difference between the two, or a reason to support one over the other when it comes down to the wire, is the exact kind of purity-obsessed ghoul who would've opposed supporting the USSR and USA against Nazi Germany during WW2. "Good job on sending Poles to the death camps, you really showed those Just-As-Bad Allied tyrants that you'll never work with Bad People(tm)!"
I always find it fascinating that people get mad at those that couldn't stomach genocide, rather than getting mad at the people with the power, the money and the platform who chose genocide and money over fighting fascism.
Do you get mad at a mountain lion for killing an elk? Or ivy for strangling a tree? It's just what they do. Same with the corrupt elite and bourgeoisie. They're corrupt and feed their own selfish desires because they are fundamentally broken, antisocial people. When one claims to be an ally but refuses to act like one in the most important and meaningful ways, it feels like betrayal and that hits differently than known malignancies acting malicious.
It was not a threat, it was a warning. If you keep putting up bad candidates and bad policies, people aren't going to want to vote for you. I voted against fascism. The Democrats told me to sit down and shut up so that they could assist in ushering in fascism. Get mad at them, not me.
"I'm warning you, I'm going to support fascism if you don't change your platform (after which, of course, I will find some other policy to make this identical demand on)"
But I didn't support fascism. I voted against it. And I told the Democrats that it was unpopular and they didn't care.
And yes, genocide is one out of a hundred other policies that I don't support the Democrats because of. Maybe bombing kids, or bankrupting people with hospital bills, or imprisoning people for life for minor crimes, or deporting immigrants, or supporting rapists isn't a big deal to you, but it is for me.
Of course I'm russian. It couldn't possible be that I am against the murder of the innocent, or against rapists, or against open corruption, or against torture and imprisonment. I can only point out the obvious failings of the party with terrible approval ratings because I'm a foreign agent.
Well, I'm not sure if theres gonna be a next time or not. I assume Trump is gonna fight his damndest to make sure there isn't another vote. If there is another vote, I assume it's gonna be Trump, and a highly unpopular Democrat because they still can't be bothered to give a shit about fighting fascism.
because they still can’t be bothered to give a shit about fighting fascism.
Lol. They ran a campaign repeatedly explaining the dangers of another Trump presidency to the American people. But Americans were too concerned about a conflict on the other side of the planet to care about fascism at home.
The other comments are right. Your brain is broken.
Welcome to reality, and adulthood, where, more often than not, you are working to mitigate shitty situations to get the least destructive outcome possible.
Americans failed to do so, because they chose to squabble over a party not being perfect while a felon rapist and his enabling party of fascists took complete control.
Maybe next time (if there is one) we can cry again about the party that's provably better for average Americans while we descend further into fascism. That'll make things better.
...chose to squabble over a party not being perfect...
Looking at the party for the last few years, I see: Choosing a rapist, child-killing, genocide supporter as the candidate. Gaslighting everyone on the cognitive abilities of said candidate. Continuously screwing over the working class. Gaslighting everyone on the state of the economy. Bailing out their rich friends, while telling the poor and homeless that they need to suck it up. Propping up the fascist that beat them as their opponent. Bombing innocent people. Saying that they would be harder on immigrants than the fascist. Helping build a stupid border wall. Increasing funding to violent assholes that attack the working class. Picking unpopular candidates and running on right-wing values.
I feel like that is a far cry from "not being perfect"
You brain-dead college kid protesters don't know what "gEnOciDe" is.
If you ever actually went to Gaza, you'd almost immediately be murdered, enslaved, or imprisoned by the Hamas terrorists you've been brainwashed in to believing are the "good guys".
Biden was clearly the better choice for Gaza no matter how much copium you huff or how much you wish it wasn't true.
Anyhow, enjoy watching the Trump Casino/Resort Gaza being built atop the bones of dead Palestinian kids, chump, because it's what you supported. "Trump Gaza, number one!"
Oh, well that's okay. Nobody has a moral obligation to resist fascism. Calling people evil for letting a neo-nazi wannabe dictator take control of the government is absurd
Your totally right. It's OK to support genocide because the "good" party (that builds the infrastructure for facism, and doesn't fight against it) is such a better option. I mean, how can people not be supportive of that?
I didn't "let" Trump win, I voted against him. The Democrats handed the election to him because they valued genocide and money more than they valued fighting fascism. The Democrats openly bombed the shit out of kids world-wide. Do you think they were happy with you when Biden was bombing them? or do you think they cursed as they were dying?
I am indeed happy that I didn't "support genocide". But no, it didn't make the world a better place. Are you happy that you supported genocide? Did that make the world a better place?
Funnily enough your moral high grounding resulted in school lunch programs being discontinued. So good job now we have a genocide AND more hungry kids domestically
This isn't entirely new or unique to America, but the dynamic is essentially:
Party A improves the odds fascism is successfully implemented.
Party B implements it.
Reducing the conditions for fascism to take hold is strictly off the table for both A and B.
Fundamentally changing the system of Party A (or B for that matter) through voting alone would at least require a Party C.
But even so it is the internal party politics prior to and outside of elections that are keeping this fascism paradigm in place. And that's where people's frustrations tend to lie.
Do you do nothing and watch fascism implemented or physically support and fund the genocide just so fascism is implemented 2 years later without anyone opposing this time?
lemmy.world does not appear to be blocked in China [1][2]. It seems to just be lemmy.ml and hexbear.net (e.g. not .world, lemmygradm sh.itjust.works, etc.)
I don't know that I've ever seen anyone say that both sides are the same. I have seen people (when talking about the US) call out when both sides do the same things, such as: Put forth rapists and child-killers as candidates, back a genocide, send people to torture prisons, refuse to fix the healthcare system, etc.
B is indeed worse than A, but I've seen too many people use that to pretend that one side is "actually good", instead of being able to see that both sides are bad.
Political scientists evaluate all politicians in the United States as liberals in the academic sense.[28] In general, rather than the Democratic Party, which is close to social liberalism, the Republican Party is evaluated as a conservative-liberal party.
Funny how you guys have latched onto Gaza like shit on velcro, but have not had a single thing to say about Sudan, Myanmar, and the Uighur's being ethnically cleansed.
You just found a hot button cause to latch onto, and are trying to sound morally superior to people.
Funny how you guys have latched onto Gaza like shit on velcro, but have not had a single thing to say about Sudan, Myanmar, and the Uighur’s being ethnically cleansed.
My government is not supplying weapons to those other conflicts, of course I care more about the one that me and the people around me have more ability to stop. There's no merit to whining about the world, the point is to change it, and I have worked with people to disrupt weapons shipments to the Zionist Regime, just like the union movements before me did with shipments to Apartheid South Africa and Imperial Japan.
Then don't act like you know any my positions regarding any of those issues. If you can't take the same criticism used against you, maybe it's bad criticism.
There's those who commit unintended mistakes, then there's those who give in to the temptation of behaving badly in their moments of weakness, and then there's those who can't wait for any given opportunity to behave maliciously and justify it by saying they aren't the only ones doing it.
Hey, don't judge me for commiting ethnic cleansing! Hitler did it as well, after all! And that one single bad apple in your group is mildly racist as well, so you're no better!
both sides is primarly used by conservatives, 100% of the time, lol. its pretty obvious even on reddit. thier talking points often are right wing in nature and pretty disengeniously disguised. i have never seen a "liberal" if there is anything left of center right in america, say that at all.
Can we just stop having this discussion? It's so boring. Both sides misrepresent the other. Tankies are stupid. Also nobody is a tankie. The Biden administration sanctioned a genocide. Every other US president is a war criminal. This discussion never goes anywhere.
"both sides are the same" for example. Do you really need me to list all the propaganda they repeat? Just go to .ml or grad and you'll see. The discussion is not pointless because ignoring them and not responding to their bullshit isn't gonna work.
Defending and arguing that the two parties aren't the same isn't the same thing. Just check out last week's news involving trump. Just last week. And then multiply that by 50. Nobody said the democrats are good. Just that the republicans are 10 times worse, that's all.
Me: gives my definition of tankie
Tankie: so is a tankie too?
And ofc:
Shunning a dictatorship and pointing out their horrible doing, means you obviousely cant be left, nooo you must be a libertarian or fascist.
And one of my favorit tankie talking points:
"Democracy is when you have to be approved by the government in order to even get on a list. That you can either vote for the state party or "no", like it was in east germany, and 99.4% voted for the state party but then suddenly after the dictatorship fell, 4 years later they dropped down to 16.4 %. aah yes seems legit. Truely a grand democracy.
How dare I point out that Biden committed genocide. Have you no shame in yourself? Does it feel good to turn a blind eye to a modern day holocaust and pretend like nothing is happening?
Complete with the signature hysterical accusations and the misconstruing of the facts. 👏 Well done, you've become the meme of the post by thinking you're doing something constructive but only shrieking nonsense and alienating people instead of making an resonating and true statement that we can rally behind.
Please don't forget to also accuse me of contributing to genocide when I tell you that your shit stinks and is unhelpful and unproductive. Go ahead, say the line, Bart.
Let's say that if in every Presidential and Congressional election from 2028 to 2058, everyone who'd otherwise vote for 3rd parties instead voted Democrat, and Democrats always won the White House, >45% of the House and Senate each, always had a majority in at least 1 house, and at least 1/2 the time won majorities in both houses.
Do you think the US would be any closer to voter reform—e.g. proportional representation, ranked ballots, whatever, even re-drawing districts more sensibly?
If 1.5 million Californians who voted for Harris, instead voted for Trump, Harris would have still won that state;
or,
If 3 million Californians who voted for Harris, instead voted for 3rd parties (e.g. Stein), Harris would have still won that state.
4 835 250 Texans voted for Harris. That's more votes for Harris than any other state besides California. It was still over 1.5 million votes less than what Trump got in Texas.
If those who voted for Harris in Texas instead voted 3rd party, Harris would be no worse the loser in terms of Texan Electoral votes.
But yeah, I have no understanding of American politics.
(minor correction about 20 minutes after posting: for 3rd party into for 3rd parties)
I think firewitch's point was that third parties almost by definition have zero chance of getting a candidate elected in a first past the post system. This is pretty common knowledge.
I don't think it's zero, but it's quite unlikely for the next few decades at least.
My point is if an American is in a non-swing state, then wt:thons vote counts for little: so thon might as well vote for thons heart, and maybe the number of votes might get attention.
The best a third party can hope for us to split the vote from whatever majority party they are most like and allow the other side to win. And only one time in our history has a third party gotten more votes than the party it split from. Teddy Roosevelt, Bull Moose Party, 1912
The best a third party can hope for us to split the vote from whatever majority party they are most like and allow the other side to win.
Progressive Democrats in non-swing states can vote 3rd party and scare future delegates and contenders into being more progressive. Also, they could support Libertarians and Constitutionalists a little in non-swing states.
The Progressive Party, popularly nicknamed the Bull Moose Party, was a third party in the United States formed in 1912 by former president Theodore Roosevelt after he lost the presidential nomination of the Republican Party to his former protégé turned rival, incumbent president William Howard Taft. The new party was known for taking advanced positions on progressive reforms and attracting leading national reformers. The party was also ideologically deeply connected with America's radical-liberal tradition.[2]
Trump got 312 Electoral College votes, while Harris got 226.
If Trump lost 44 of those votes to Harris, she would be President today.
If you got 120 000 Georgians, 60 000 Nevadans, 121 000 Pennsyvanians, 90 000 Michiganders and 30 000 Wisconsinites who voted for Trump last year to instead vote for wp:Chase Oliver, Trump would have lost 46 Electoral College votes to Harris.
I applaud you if you vote 3rd party in local/state elections. But if you're voting 3rd party in a presidential election, you're dumber than the chair you're sitting on right now.
but please, tell me why those who voted for Presidential candidates other than Trump or Harris in non-swing states, or who are very much concerned about Palestine, the US military-industrial complex, or IP (i.e. "intellectual property") trolls are dumber than chairs.
IIUC, in neither the 1992 nor 2024 Presidential elections did a candidate win a (popular) majority.
If those who voted for Perot instead voted for Clinton, Clinton would still have been elected, probably with a majority. If they voted for Bush, then he'd been elected, probably with a majority, and those-more-left-wing-than-Republicans would have been (more) disappointed.
I suppose run-offs are interesting when there are strong 3rd party candidates. As this is not currently the case in the USA, it'd mean little—the 2 party-state continues (and multi-millionaire Democrats would still complain about Stein, Greens, and/or other alternative parties).
If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. … The weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," in Responsibility and Judgment (2003)
It's very interesting that those who screamed that we had to choose the lesser of two evils in 2020, thereby admitting to the evil of the Democrats, immediately shut up about this evil as soon as Biden took office. Now that the greater evil has taken power, you never talk about actually fighting it, you just spend your time bashing people with a conscience.
immediately shut up about this evil as soon as Biden took office
Citation needed.
Every single person I know who reluctantly voted for Biden spent the next 4 years complaining constantly. Online forums were full of liberals calling Biden "basically a Republican". Plenty of news stories covered how more progressive Democrats felt Biden wasn't doing enough.
That's the opposite of what I saw. I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that I saw differently. I saw Democrats spend most of their time saying that it's not OK to attack the current Democratic president. I wonder how much of that difference is based on the circles we run in, or the news sites that we visit.
For a reference point: I'm a millennial, living in a pretty liberal state of the US. Reading the front page of Reddit (not logged in, running ad-blockers so I think I get a "generic" experience), Ars Technica, occasional HackerNews threads, Something Awful forums. My friend circles are unanimous that Israel is an apartheid state, Russia is an invader, immigrants are not any kind of problem. It includes a few trans people who are vocal about their experiences. I would not call it a radically progressive group. For example, I don't think most of them would actually be comfortable with mass-executions of wealthy people.
Before joining Lemmy, I'd never encountered "tankies" in enough quantity for them to have any kind of label or for anyone to self-identify as "anti-tankie". It's still a weird idea to me.
Now that the greater evil has taken power, you never talk about actually fighting it
We did fight it, and won, in 2020. In 2024 a few people stopped fighting, so we lost. And now the people who were complaining about Biden being evil are being deported for speaking their mind.
This reply is a perfect example of the disconnect between liberals and leftists. The democrats did not meaningfully fight fascism in 2020-2024! As I've said elsewhere, fighting fascism effectively would have entailed hanging Trump after J6. Instead they allowed Trump to get away with a coup attempt. This allowed the fascists to iteratively test coup strategies, and they might have found the correct one this time around.
fighting fascism effectively would have entailed hanging Trump after J6
Aside from other considerations, you don't want to turn Trump into a martyr—maybe in February 2017 they should have made Mar-a-lago a prison where Trump could/can only communicate with the outside world by writing or silent videos.
Had Biden resigned into an honorable retirement between, say, Feb 2022 to Feb 2024, Harris probably would have won in 2024; but power corrupts, or reveals, or something. When Mussolini died, he was only 61 years old.
fighting fascism effectively would have entailed hanging Trump after J6.
And how would that happen? After all, the Supreme Court gave him immunity, and all Democrats controlled was the presidency. So you're saying Joe Biden should've told the Supreme Court and every other court to suck it, and used I assume the military to arrest and execute Trump while skipping due process?
I don't think that's fighting fascism. That's implementing it.
What needed to happen was for Trump to not win a second time. Had he died at home peacefully we wouldn't be in the shit right now, and we wouldn't have even needed to do the fascism ourselves to stop it. People just needed to fucking stop the fascist from winning the election.
I mean it's easy to say these were the good guys and they were killing the bad guys so it was great. But look at it without that context and it's pretty hard to justify. Sure, if Mussolini would've been put on trial the result would've been the same. But his mistress?
Don't know what the fuck you're on about but that's hogwash. No self aware individual on the left doesn't hate their own party's faults, at least in the US. The same simply can't be said for the other side.
The Democratic party is not a leftist party. It's a center-right liberal party. The point of my post was that "self aware" Democrat voters pay lip service to acknowledge the evil of the Democratic party, but then do absolutely nothing to challenge it when the Democrats are in power.
I'm an anarchist with years of on the ground organizing experience. I have friends in prison. I've had friends killed by the police. Shut the fuck up you liberal piece of shit.
All that hard work and compromise and yet, you can't bring yourself to get your hands a little dirty by voting for the lesser evil. You are accelerating the rate at witch your friends die by police. For what reason?
Whether or not someone takes 15 minutes out of their life to vote every 2 years is quite literally the least important facet of their political activity. It effects exactly nothing. All your supposed concern over fascism, and you can't bring yourself to get your hands a little dirty by torching an ICE van or stealing some clothes and giving them to homeless people. For what reason?
You can both vote and organize. Why vote? The more fascist the government is the harder it is to organize. For only 15 minutes every 2 years, it's actually a pretty powerful tool. It may not move things left but it slows down the fascism.
Leftists: Maybe we shouldn't fund genocide and perhaps the average worker should be able to afford to put food on their table
Liberals: HOW DARE YOU PROMOTE YOUR RADICAL TANKIE AGENDA, DONT YOU KNOW THE GDP AND STOCK MARKET ARE GOING UP WHICH MEANS THE ECONOMY IS GOOD SO STOP COMPLAINING. IN FACT THE POLITICANS DONT EVEN NEED TO GIVE YOU ANYTHING BECAUSE THEY DESERVE YOUR VOTE, NEVER BLAME THE SYSTEM, NEVER ASK FOR CHANGE AND NEVER THINK ABOUT WHO PULLS THE STRINGS
Not especially. Many groups of people, conservatives and leftists and "centrists" alike, love to suggest the parties are equal. I've heard it in real life. I've heard it online. All over reddit when I was still on it and lemmy even now.
Though I wouldn't especially attribute the logic to tankies, so in that way, perhaps
Prominent leftists I know argue that democrats dont deliver meaningful change but they still encourage people to vote. they say dems go harder against progressives than they do against republicans. And I agree with them.
Not voting does nothing. It doesn't deliver meaningful change. It doesn't help. Doesn't fix.
There's a lot to lose by not voting. It's a privilege to vote and run for office, and as a Republic, it's people's civic duty to use it.
If you don't like it, running for election yourself, organizing, unionizing, those are the strongest methods to realistically to fight back. Revolution rarely comes as long as people are moderately comfortable --- and that's the only other option.
For presidential, there's only 2 options. But if you go down to local level, third parties can be viable.
Only just over 60% of democracies go back to democracy after being authoritarian, and I have never been one to play with gambling the odds
god tier politics challenge: ask a blue dem to name the last time the Ds did something the opposite to what the Rs have done, and was actually good for the average American
The voters should just sit in the corner and be joyful about the fact that food staples are becoming cost-prohibitive, and then laugh along with you when you all joke about it and pretend it doesn't matter.
No one cares about the differences between the two parties if your party doesn't care that they can't feed their families.
Would you rather have Trump's fascist regime and be an activist, or have Biden's much less worse administration and be an activist? Voting doesn't decrease your ability to participate in protests and so on.
When you're working 100 hours a week at three jobs and all your labor buys for you is a roach-infested studio apartment, it doesn't matter how nice the president speaks. The working class and poor have been living under fascism for years.
The message here isn't: "Vote for us because Trump's a fascist."
The message is: "Trump promised you this, but he's doing this instead and it's hurting your family. Vote for us and we'll put a stop to it." (Not that anyone thinks Democrats actually will, judging by their near-total lack of action so far.)
And for Christ's sake stop joking about how expensive food has become, because that's a very real problem and when people see Democrats joking about it, they think you don't care that they're starving.
If more people had voted for democrats it would've been a lot easier to get out of this shit by campaigning for a ranked choice voting system and taxing the rich. Instead you got fascism × 2 and expensive food.
Not blaming the global post covid inflation solely on the democrats.
Truthfully a lot of it was simply corporate greed, and they should have spoken out against it. They didn't because they're subpar. They ignored the issue of the worsening economy because they're inadequate.
However, we could have had a chance at making at least some changes. Democrats at the very least would have pushed to codify abortion rights and not have tried to dismantle every government agency. But instead we have whatever the hell this is. It's actually delusional to believe Democrats would have been "exactly the same".
I don't love Democrats, but at least I have a basic sense of self preservation
It’s actually delusional to believe Democrats would have been “exactly the same”.
I'm sure that Harris would have given us some glorious speeches while she allowed corporations to run roughshod over workers and added another four-percent to the war budget every year, but none of that matters for the reasons I stated above in the thread.
The problem here is that Democrats don't differentiate themselves in ways that matter to the vast majority of the poor and working class.
>looks at the absolute gutting of worker protections, union rights, funding to Medicare, funding to food stamps, and an unimaginable number of federal grants that go directly to providing services to impoverished Americans being pushed through executive action and congress
Yeah sure exactly the same, absolutely no difference between the two. The working class definitely won't be suffering any more
"Perfect is, in fact, the enemy of good, and if we can't have perfect then we shouldn't settle for good!"
I do so wish their fucking around would limit the finding out to just them, but alas.
No, flipflops don't work at all. My uncle's neighbors former roommate only has 1 toe, so they solve nothing.
Am I correctly interpreting this to mean you think tankies threw the US presidential election? If so, do you have evidence that this is the case?
your bait is rotten and stinks, you know how to read. "Interpreting" = strawmanning/otherwise putting words in my mouth. Do I think they contributed? Absolutely. Dipshits are everywhere and many of them happen to reside here, and I read many comments from the usual tankie trolls doing nothing but shit-talk Harris as often as they could on Lemmy in the leadup to the election, which probably influenced a nonzero number of peoples opinions (again, dipshits everywhere). Does that in any way imply I think they're solely responsible?
please take your chum elsewhere, thank you. I hear 4chan is back up these days, now you run along.
Friend, I'm sorry you read my comment as being an attack or an attempt to lure you out. It's miscommunications like this that make me want to clarify things, which is why I asked instead of assuming. Another misunderstanding: By "throwing the election", I didn't mean being solely responsible for the electoral loss. What I mean by that is if you removed the tankie factor from the election, it could have gone the other way. Elections are won and lost on very fine margins. There may be 100 other things that had a similar impact which you could also say threw the election; none of them are solely responsible for it.
If you aren't saying that they influenced the election to a degree that might have flipped it, then what is it we are "finding out" from their "fucking around"? And, do you consider having read many comments on lemmy as sufficient evidence to think that might be the case?
I don't think that is what OP is referring to. I interpreted it as the strange measuring stick tankies use to compare the democrats and the republicans. Even accelerationists agree that the Republicans are way worse than the democrats.
100%, republicans are way worse than democrats. To be clear I'm not an accelerationist, I find it repugnant.
Prior to the second election of trump. I would wholeheartedly agree with you.
But as time goes on, it's looking like we don't have a democracy but a fascist dictatorship or oligarchy. In which case accelerationism may actually be the lesser evil.
Even if OP isn't advocating thta, I am.
Tankues hve advocated to not vote democrat over gaza and less people voted for hillary than for biden.
Of course there's no way proving this is true (and it shouldn't, since voting should be nonymous) and it certainly was until a certain part also racism and sexism, but the intensity of the calls to boycott dems and Harris having way less votes than Biden is suspicious.
There's nothing suspicious about it. Voters have spent the last eight years watching their bills for food, health care, child care, and everything else spiral out of control without any meaningful help from Republicans or Democrats.
These millions opted not to miss work to vote because they know definitively that the two choices they had wouldn't do anything to change how hard their lives have become.
It's that simple.
Why would you have to miss work to vote?
Because elections occur on a weekday.
Do people only work every hour of a weekday in America? Plus don't they have a system for voting ahead of time via post too, which you could sort out on a weekend leading up as well?
Many do, yes. The majority of our population is so vastly underpaid that they work upwards of 100 hours a week at multiple jobs. (Which, as you can imagine, might inspire them to see a sort of futility in voting to begin with.) Also elections can entail hours-long waiting in line.
It depends on your state and local jurisdiction. Your right to vote by mail (or to vote conveniently) depends on where you live.
Ugh. Such a tired, stupid argument.
It doesn't matter whether tankies actually threw the election to Trump.
THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHETHER THEIR ACTIONS WOULD CAUSE THAT TO HAPPEN WHEN THEY CHOSE TO DO SO.
People who refuse to vote when there is a clearly superior option deserve whatever the greater evil brings forth when they win.
Even when there isn't a clearly superior option; there's no excuse to not vote in the U. S. when the right to vote is such a pivotable portion of your history. We are barely over a half century away; only a mere 60 years. Unconscionable.
On the one hand, corporatist party, on the other, literal fascists. Yes, clearly there is no superior option.
You seem to be deriving meaning unstated in my comment.
Then maybe vote for a third party.
A vote for a third party in presidential is not a vote.
It is a vote, and over 1.5 million Americans (excluding those for RFK) made such votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election#Results
IMO, progressives (who's not too bothered by Stein's cozying up to Russia a bit) from California, most of New England, DC, Maryland, Hawaii, or Washington (state), and yet yammer on about how bad third parties are because they split the Democrat vote, are probably stupid, or at least ignorant, and should give some of the time they spend watching CNN or Vaush to reading election stats.
Hey, I don't need to comment because you said it all for me.
Election stats? You ever hear the phrase "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"
Stats on their own given a poor analysis of an average joe/jane can mislead just as much if not more than a talking head can.
The core fact remains that voting for a third party under a first past the post system is risking permitting the greater evil to win.
Yes, I think it's from Twain.
I backed my assertions with stats, however poor you think they are as analysis.
What do yo back up your assertions with, other than lame DNC, CNN, and Vaush talking points?
I simply cannot grasp why some people believe voting 3rd party in a presidential election isn't one of the dumbest possible things you can do in life.
Like, beyond the fact that the 3rd party candidate with the most votes in 2024 got a whopping HALF OF A SINGLE PERCENT of the total votes cast, meaning a 3rd party literally cannot win, there's still the reality that even if they did win, no 3rd party has A SINGLE MEMBER IN CONGRESS, so if a 3rd party presidential candidate actually won, they wouldn't be able to do shit, because they'd have literally ZERO allies in Congress.
I'm pretty sure anyone voting 3rd party for president has absolutely no clue how our government works. They have no concept of the reality they live in.
You might want to say that to Michiganders who voted for Stein (and Oliver) because of Gaza and the US presence in the Middle East.
The 2024 Presidential election isn't the only one in US history: there have been 57 others.
Trump had few allies in Congress before 2016, but now members are the Republican caucus are falling all over themselves to curry favour from him.
You are so correct—as members of the herd generally are. I like people who resort to exaggerations, over generalizations, and distortions.
If voting is a right, then surely not voting is also a right. You seem to be confusing it with the word "responsibility."
Considering I never said that one doesn't have the right to not vote, I don't believe I am; but you are correct that I consider it a responsibility.
Non-voters are beneath Trump supporters in my opinion. They're the lowest of the low. A complete failure to understand their civic duty that a ton of people died to allow them to have. At least Trump supporters get involved. In the worst, dumbest possible way, but involved nonetheless.
Aka "have the day you voted for".
People who voted for the lesser evil is still voting for evil
"I would proudly vote for Hitler if slightly to the right of Hitler was on the ballot". Good fucking job, you're voting for Hitler. If you vote for Hitler you also deserve slightly to the right of Hitler.
Exactly
And people who didn't vote for the lesser evil could have helped avoid the greater evil, but chose not to.
Given that you can act (in this case vote), your hands are more dirty permitting the worse evil to win through inaction.
You don't get to clean your hands of things when you have the power to act to effect the outcome.
So saying "People voted for evil" is a selective self-benefiting myopia. Vote abstainers are not virtuous, they are a narcissists.
And not voting is the greatest evil.
Lol. You sweet summer child.
In Sweden the far-right tried to play this game. They started chirping about the social democrats being rasist and made a list on like an A4 with names and events. Then the same was done to them, matching the font, their list was taken up a skylift and holding one end they folded it out to the ground in a television program.
Based
In the US, the 'left' would just amplify the voice of the far-right.
Good on Swedish voters for being less stupid than we are.
Well, I would not give them that much credit. The majority governing coallition is with the far-right. They were clear before the election they were going to work with the far-right. They have a common platform with the far right which has a large overlap with e.g. Trumps; mass deportation of immigrants (like for reasons like being a victim of a crime), slashing government agencies, extreme restrictions on free speech, and so on. It is just a bit slower here when it comes to reaching their goals.
Lately, they have been trying to tell me that North Korea is a democracy.
I mean it is in the name. The DEMOCRATIC People's Republic of Korea.
Dumb libs can't even read
I prefer the liberated Korea ,the south is the occupied Korea.
I lived in SK. It's a racist shit hole. I've also been to NK for work and it's absolutely and even bigger, darker, shit hole.
If you're willing to share, I would very much appreciate a new post about this.
I can throw something up this weekend.
Thank you.
Wow, a country that experienced harsh Japanese colonial rule from 1910 until being forcibly divided by the US after the second world war, creating a war-torn pariah state facing crushing international economic sanctions, is a shit hole? Color me surprised!
You act like I don't know that. I also don't see how that excuses the insane levels of racism towards anyone not from the peninsula they exhibit.
Huh??? Did I say anything about that? Does this racism excuse anything we've done to them? Seriously, project much?
What the hell should we do about it, fucking invade them again? Continue blockades that don't even achieve their stated purpose and just make things worse for their people? Cause that's gone over so well... the only real interaction with most foreign nations being that of sanctions, acts of war and colonization, arbitrarily imposing their own values, and constantly talking down on them both as a nation and as a people, definitely is going to make them love foreigners.
It's not an "excuse" brother it's just material reality, why do I have to be "excusing" anything? Is it too much to treat them like humans worthy of a basic level of respect??
Let's talk excuses though. It'd really be no fucking wonder if they hate us like you say they do. You would hate foreigners too if they talked about you like that and preyed on your downfall the way western nations do to the DPRK. In fact you've shown very clearly that you have the exact same hate which you're trying to condemn here. Calling their home a "shithole", your only response to a very brief overview of their history not being one of understanding or empathy but simply to lash out and call them racist, which I can only assume is to imply they deserved it. What's your excuse??
Let's not forget the current right winged idiocy claiming he's a current Republican and the Democrats were racist.
They'd campaign hard against Lincoln for being a defender of slavery, despite him being the only anti-slavery candidate with a chance of winning in 1860.
They don't care how many marginalized groups are beat, raped, starved, and murdered, so long as they can jerk themselves off over how pure (or nonexistent) their ballot was.
Here's the tankie of the time. Liberals would be out defending the slave owners rights for free market ideals and the law . Possibly demanding that more women should be allowed to hold the whip. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
John Brown, who was widely celebrated by Republicans in the Union? The 'Liberals' you so despise?
I'm not even usaian but I now that republican and democrats were the opposite sides compared to today. Are you deliberately trying to be dishonest or are you just stupid?
Also liberalism is a word usaians have a hard time grasping what it is. it's a specific ideology not a party. Neoliberal ideas are shared on both heads of the US plutocracy
Yes, and the Republicans of the time were very much liberals.
Big Dunning-Kruger energy.
Ah I take it as the first one there. Maybe you could have vote harder against slavery? John Brown is a terrorist for you. Not for me.
So glad you made sure that shitlib Lincoln wasn't elected, it would have been truly terrible if someone who wasn't an unconditional supporter of slavery was in charge of the country.
Maybe there would be more than Side A and Side B if we had voting reform and Democrats didn't systematically sue third-parties off the ballot.
People (not just authoritarians) criticize Side A because they have way more tallies than most have been led to believe. Everybody who pays any amount of attention knows that Side B has a lot of tallies. What good comes out of specifically pointing out the tallies of Side B when literally everybody on non-conservative social media is blasted with the knowledge of those tallies? If you want somebody to preach to the choir or inform you about Side B's tallies, just ask. If you think people paying attention to or being informed about Side A's tallies is dangerous and harmful, just say so.
Side A tolerates third-world exploitation (labor, resources, goods) that the US economy still relies on, they tolerate the US economy still relying on slavery and child slavery, they tolerate or support US imperialism and regime change, they refuse to address or come up with solutions for the fresh water crisis (by 2030, demand will exceed supply by 40%), they refuse to properly address many issues that the US people face (the economy, the housing crisis, the health care crisis, etc.), they support harmful policies like fracking, they have allowed corporations/et. al to go out of control under their power, and they generally have not advocated for strong regulation and protections for the American people. Yes, Side B is undesirable, but Side A is insufficient.
If Side A's hands are always tied in a two-party system, then they should impeach the bad actor, push voting/election reform and term limits, and hold fair and democratic primaries and elections. Side A not propping up extreme right-wing candidates (like Trump) and telling the media to take them seriously would be nice, too.
1/3 of Americans don't vote and plenty of people only voted Kamala because they didn't want Trump (and there are other factors than Gaza, misogyny, and Jill Stein voters at play to explain why people didn't come out to vote for her). Plenty of people probably don't want Trump (or anybody like him) if they've been paying any attention and didn't fall for the propaganda.
Side A would get bonus points for not alienating progressives, for supporting the loosening of requirements for ballot access (and stop engaging in lawfare to restrict ballot access), and for supporting fair and inclusive debates on public property where they would have to address perspectives and topics that are potentially uncomfortable or inconvenient for them.
I realize there are plenty of unserious actors who run for president (like Kayne West) who would try their best to poison open debates and abuse expanded ballot access, but there has to be some fair mechanism to filter (openly racist and insane) people like him out. Perhaps a competency test of sorts with independent observation would be appropriate.
And I realize a lot of people find Jill Stein to be harmful (and individuals like her), but maybe we shouldn't arrest her (or any other presidential candidate) and put her in a black site, shackling her to a chair for 8 hours, because she wanted to be present at the presidential debate?
This is an unprecedented time for the American people, with human rights and due process in jeopardy. We are facing multiple serious crises with no solutions or progress in sight - voting and election reform, in addition to term limits, are all urgent and necessary.
I don't care if you want to vote for Side A no matter what — we can only suppress criticism and stay in denial of major issues for so long before (e.g.) the fresh water crisis hits us and humanity is completely and utterly unprepared.
I appreciate the depth of your response. You're right, critiquing Side A doesn't mean endorsing Side B. It means demanding better from those who claim to represent us. The meme calls out false equivalency, but that shouldn't silence legitimate concerns about the system itself.
It’s like this: if the house is on fire, I’ll vote to put out the biggest flame, but I’m also going to ask why the fire keeps spreading, and who’s refusing to fix the wiring. Reform isn’t a distraction; it’s how we stop the next blaze before it starts.
Thanks for adding a more nuanced layer to the conversation.
Republicans also use 3rd party as a spoiler and to siphon off D voters too.
Whether they use them intentionally or not, we need voting reform. In the 2024 election, third-parties barely made a dent — they weren't a spoiler.
FPTP is exactly why third-parties can be a "spoiler". There are plenty of valid alternative voting systems to explore that are way more fair and democratic.
And it doesn't sound very democratic of the Democratic Party to repeatedly and systematically restrict ballot access through lawsuits. Ballot access is hard enough for third-parties to achieve in most states.
its well known Republicans have funded 3rd parties to do this, not all of them but enough that its suspicious. its not all of them.
There were a bunch of stories of Republicans helping Cornel West's campaign last year to act as a spoiler.
https://apnews.com/article/ballot-deception-cornel-west-conservatives-0d2c94da68bbd136442e63edadf14398
There's two sides to this argument, and one is wrong and the other is right.
One says "Both sides do it, so it's okay that my side does it."
The other says "Your side does it. A few on my side do it, too. But it doesn't matter, we should stop both sides from doing it."
"It happens on both sides! you don't condemn it on your side, isnt that hypocritical?!"
"I... Actually condemn everyone doing it and I think me and you should look for and support people who don't support this heinous thing."
"..."
"So, do you condemn the people on your side doing it as wel-"
"But look at this person who has done it on your side!"
Wait I'm lost, are we talking foreign invasions done by the US vs foreign invasions done by China? Or the number of victims of Hamas vs the victims of the IDF? What are we counting here? Military bases abroad?
Evil policies supported by democrats vs evil policies supported by republicans
what evil polices do dems support that the republicans don't?
Policies can be checked on both sides
Sure, but on average when some self proclaimed leftist's opening is "Democrats did a bad thing" in a vacuum my immediate assumption is they're a campist/tankie, accelerationist, or a rightwing psyop and my instinct is to immediately challenge them (most of the time... sometimes its me critiquing the dems)
Sometimes it turns out they're giving an earnest critique but usually not.
What in the word salad are you talking about.
Leftists say funding Israel's war crimes is bad. Check mark in both columns.
That's not a critique of democrats, that's a critique of a portion of democrats and all of republicans.
It's a critique of the democrats that were in the running for president
Who made you the arbiter of another person's earnestness? Can you read minds? And if you're the one criticizing the Dems, does someone else take over?
I'm the arbiter of who I trust is arguing coherently or in good faith and I am ultimately not trusting of the average internet poster by default.
I've been arguing on dedicated internet debate spaces for a very very large portion of my life and I have a good eye for when someone isn't worth being taken seriously.
I'll take your word for it.
Drone strike deaths under Obama vs under Trump?
Talking about how some people deny or justify the horrendous things done by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim Dynastie, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Honecker, Guevara, Ho Chi Min, and so on and all their helpers, because others also did horrendous things and both have to be called out for it. Justification of unneccesary murdering shows you are in favor for that which is unacceptable
Are the people justifying these things in the room with us?
If the room is .ml, yes.
Who killed more Asians: US or Mao?
Hamas are arguably a gift for Israel.
If we take "kill" to mean like manslaughter through poor policy and famine, probably Mao, by an order of magnitude. But I'm guessing that's not what you're thinking about, because that's kind of a silly comparison. It's like asking "who killed more Americans, Mao or the US", to which the answer is both obvious and completely uninteresting.
So I'm gonna take it to mean "murder", like the killing of landlords during the cultural revolution. And then it's actually kind of close, and I'm not sure who's killed more Asians. So the most liberal estimates for Mao there are 7 million, but the range is pretty big. The most conservative estimates put him at 2 million.
Let's look at the US' kill count. I know of bombing campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Respectively, the ranges here are 300k-2M, 1.5M-3.1M, 80k-350k, 50k-150k. So that's a range of 1.9M-5.6M. Then there's the suppression of the movement for independence in colonized phillipines, which adds 200k, and Afghanistan, 250k. So that puts us at 2.5M-6M for the US to 2-7 for Mao.
It should be noted that I'm not counting indirect deaths via training and arming dictatorships (if someone hands an assassin a gun, and the assassin kills your mother, the first person is not a murderer, but they are culpable in some way. If we add these, you get Timor, and the murder of leftists in Indonesia in the 60s, among others, which adds another 1-1.5M to the US count.
So I guess it's kind of close. I gotta say, I'm a little surprised, I always thought Mao was much worse, but the US is a strong contender.
Woah! We skipped over the Pacific theater of WWII entirely it looks like.
Also skipping all MidEast action, but that can be considered a different tally for purposes of this exercise.
But realistically we should also have approximately similar timeframes for both- otherwise we just inflate US counts artificially.
You're welcome to include Iraq, Iran, South America, Africa, Gaza, Turkish Kurds, and so on. You're welcome to restrict to some arbitrary timeframe, you're welcome to exclude indirect fatalities. Ultimately it's a fairly futile exercise. But I do know that if we restrict to the period including the invasion of Vietnam by China and onward, the US "wins" very, very comfortably.
And I object to your use of the word artificial. These are human lives that were snuffed out for the sake of greed. These were people, like your father, your mother, your friends. There's nothing artificial about these numbers.
That's a good reply. 😁
Thank you. 🙂
It's only a gift if you get it for free. Israel funded Hamas to make themselves look more sympathetic.
Israel got a good R.O.I.
Hard disagree.
Gaza was under siege by Israel, but it was coping.
Hamas then did their stupid attack on Putin's 71st birthday, inflicting relatively insignificant damage to Israel;
but it was an excuse that Israel used/is using for the current bulldozing of Gaza (and, IIUC, more of the West Bank).
Perhaps when the Riviera has been fully developed, Netanyahu should send the leaders of Hamas some gift baskets.
The world is turning against Israel. Netanyahu is headed for a jail cell.
IIUC, 50 years ago, the UN GA passed a motion that Zionism was racism.
Did that scare the people of Israel?
I predict that Israel will still have relations with much of the world as dealing with Israel is more profitable than dealing with Arabs in Golan, West Bank, and Gaza; and Netanyahu won't go to jail, particularly as his 80th birthday is less than 60 months away.
Both sides'd themselves into proto-fascism. And taking us along for the ride.
Fucking morons.
Why are you blaming leftists for Trumps win? We make up like 1% of the population, tops. You should instead point the finger at Republicans for voting for him. Or the Dems for running a totally weak and ineffectual campaign. (Or how about the oligarchs who only want to divide us so that they can rob us blind?)
Absolutely. Trump only goes more insane. At least with Kamala we would have had a chance to push left policies, and they wouldn't be going directly to fucking fascism, unlike t-Rump.
I always just post this article.
Literally the first fucking sentence.
She said she'd continue pressure that wasn't happening? Wow, what a fucking saint.
Biden never pressured Israel for ceasefire, as Israeli officials boast of exploiting US support
The Biden Administration’s False History of Ceasefire Negotiations
Sorry to make you read more than the first sentence of an article. In fact I suggest you read the whole thing, since I picked out these quotes pretty arbitrarily. I know you won't though, because you probably think you're immune to propaganda so long as you only read the "right" news that just happens to be entirely in agreement with both you and the status quo that has allowed a genocide to happen before our eyes.
Thanks, tankie. Trump appreciates your non vote.
Can we just rename this instance from politicalmemes to tankierants
People have a hard time with percentages, propensity, likelihood, etc. They can only think in binary terms. I used to think it was the right but looks like it's everyone.
It's crazy the amount of people that think the evil voters are at fault and not the political party that made a wedge issue out of fucking genocide of all things.
So glad the current guys got in! How's that going for ya btw? That genocide stop? No? It's accelerating? So glad more children can die so you can still confidently hold your nose in the air.
I hate the current guy even more. It seriously bothers me that the dems lost to him because they thought genocide was more important then you and me. I really wish they would have ran a proper platform, so we didnt have to vote for democracy and genocide at the same time, and still lose.
Keep blaming everyone but them and maybe we can have the same circus next election too. We all just have to come together and accept genocide, apathy and status quo like maybe three or four more times.
We will remember the devil's bargain we were forced to answer, so will the rest of the world.
This is a watershed moment in world history.
next election? there won't be an election next time, democracy is dead and you killed it.
good job on the protest vote, now that you have defeated the "status quo" gaza will be a luxurious hotel with golf courses instead, so much better, right?
do us a favor and go back to your tankie echo chambers / your right wing troll friends, depending on what you actually are
No, the Democrats killed it when they handed our democracy over to a facist on a silver platter. Rememer that they did this because they valued genocide and corporate donations more than they cared about beating trump.
"It's all your fault for not doing what I wanted."
Buddy, I'd be careful throwing those stones when your argument boils down to "It's all your fault for not voting how I wanted."
Well, that would have kept an actual fucking fascist out of office, sooooooooo.......
I'm going to keep blaming stupid Americans because that's where the fault primarily lies.
Oh no, a political party didn't run a picture perfect campaign against a felon rapist's racist fascist campaign. Guess that means we have to let the felon rapist win.
Do you know how many less fucks I give about 2 countries on the other side of the planet continuing an everlasting religious conflict compared to creeping fascism in my own fucking country?
American voters couldn't see the forest for the trees, because they're stupid. So now we sit squarely in the stupidest timeline.
Oh no, a political party *threw a presidential campaign rather than win and risk acknowledging the humanity of Palestinians.
FTFY
Repeat after me: Israel is committing a genocide.
Yes they are.
As is Russia, half a dozen countries, and oh we stopped funding the who and usaid.
So we're now aiding multiple genocides.
MISSION fucking ACCOMPLISHED.
I wish I read this earlier, but it feels refreshing to read even if I'm a few hours late.
Yeah, fucking duh! I'm not arguing that brain child.
Wait, you mean the thing that we told the Dems would happen, happened? Crazy, who could have seen that coming? It's almost like we wanted them to be a party of decency, so we could tell people to vote for them without having to defend the killing of children.
Maybe next time, the Dems should put up a candidate people want to vote for, instead of shaming people for being against Genocide.
So glad that you held the country, and especially vulnerable populations like LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, immigrants, and disabled people, not to mention the Palestinian and Ukrainian people, hostage while demanding that Dems do things that have zero historical evidence of them agreeing to. I can't speak for all of us but, I bet the others are also glad that you were able to keep your moral high-ground and didn't feel at all betrayed and upset about it. /s
I always find it fascinating that people get mad at those that couldn't stomach genocide, rather than getting mad at the people with the power, the money and the platform who chose genocide and money over fighting fascism. We kept telling the Democrats that their position was unpopular, they told us to sit down and shut up. Maybe the Democrats should play seriously next time.
So glad you taught those Dems a lesson, I'm sure the elite in the DNC are going to be very harmed by this, and not the numerous marginalized groups on the ground.
And if they don't learn their lesson, of course, you can just murder some more minorities next time! That will really show them!
Leftist here who voted for Kamala and is also a minority:
You recognize that how you're describing the situation is eerily close to the definition of collective punishment, right? "Don't argue with the people in charge who have been screwing us over for the entirety of our lives and who are actively doing a genocide because at least they're not gonna hurt us as bad". That's not an argument for keeping those people in power. Stop defending the people who are willfully causing the deaths of children halfway across the world because at least less people will die here. Stop trading Palestinian lives for American ones.
We have one enemy right now and it's the billionaires who are actively and maliciously trying to keep us fighting against each other so that they can r*pe and decimate the working class. Shut the fuck up about who voted last election and for whom and actually gear up behind candidates that actually want to solve problems. The dem establishment does not give a shit about the working class. How many fucking articles have to come out basically spelling out for you that they are abandoning the working class? They're courting corporate interest too. Get off the sinking ship and hold your fucking public servants accountable for their actions for once.
"Collective punishment is when you recognize that actions have consequences for everyone in society"
Yikes.
Oh cool, how many Palestinian lives did preferring the fascist save?
Oh, no Palestinians were saved?
In fact, more Palestinians are going to die now?
Stop trading American and Palestinian lives for your own ego.
Don't worry, any time there's a candidate who might end up with a chance of preventing fascism, I'm sure you'll find a reason to asspat everyone who sabotages that candidate.
I'm sure that if you just encourage this self-destructive behavior and praise the 'bravery' of those who engage in purity-test insanity at the cost of the lives of people like us more, it'll make the next anti-fascist coalition that much more likely to succeed. Less support for an anti-fascist coalition is better, right?
Okay. Cool. Would you like to remind me what the pro-working class options were in 2024?
We were offered a punch in the face or a .50 cal through the head, and you're sitting here defending people who opted for the .50 cal because a punch in the face is bad. No shit a punch in the face is bad. But anyone who can't see the difference between the two, or a reason to support one over the other when it comes down to the wire, is the exact kind of purity-obsessed ghoul who would've opposed supporting the USSR and USA against Nazi Germany during WW2. "Good job on sending Poles to the death camps, you really showed those Just-As-Bad Allied tyrants that you'll never work with Bad People(tm)!"
Go ahead and let me know which option in the 2024 election was best for billionaires.
I'll wait.
Hint: It's the one all the billionaires gave money to.
No. It matters.
Their voting history literally proves you wrong.
Do you get mad at a mountain lion for killing an elk? Or ivy for strangling a tree? It's just what they do. Same with the corrupt elite and bourgeoisie. They're corrupt and feed their own selfish desires because they are fundamentally broken, antisocial people. When one claims to be an ally but refuses to act like one in the most important and meaningful ways, it feels like betrayal and that hits differently than known malignancies acting malicious.
Palestine wedge issue
Hey kid, know what's worse than genocide on the other side of the planet?
Fascism at home!!!
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Maybe you fucking learned something.
Yes, you successfully ushered in fascism, just like you threatened to do. Give yourself a pat on the back.
It was not a threat, it was a warning. If you keep putting up bad candidates and bad policies, people aren't going to want to vote for you. I voted against fascism. The Democrats told me to sit down and shut up so that they could assist in ushering in fascism. Get mad at them, not me.
"I'm warning you, I'm going to support fascism if you don't change your platform (after which, of course, I will find some other policy to make this identical demand on)"
But I didn't support fascism. I voted against it. And I told the Democrats that it was unpopular and they didn't care.
And yes, genocide is one out of a hundred other policies that I don't support the Democrats because of. Maybe bombing kids, or bankrupting people with hospital bills, or imprisoning people for life for minor crimes, or deporting immigrants, or supporting rapists isn't a big deal to you, but it is for me.
Is that "I don't understand math" or "I'm refusing to engage in introspection of any sort because I only want the world around me to be at fault"?
There's no point, the Russians just needed to give them an excuse to throw temper tantrums, they didn't even have to push that hard.
Of course I'm russian. It couldn't possible be that I am against the murder of the innocent, or against rapists, or against open corruption, or against torture and imprisonment. I can only point out the obvious failings of the party with terrible approval ratings because I'm a foreign agent.
Are you on meth?
yeah sure there's gonna be a next time... keep hoping, buddy
Well, I'm not sure if theres gonna be a next time or not. I assume Trump is gonna fight his damndest to make sure there isn't another vote. If there is another vote, I assume it's gonna be Trump, and a highly unpopular Democrat because they still can't be bothered to give a shit about fighting fascism.
Lol. They ran a campaign repeatedly explaining the dangers of another Trump presidency to the American people. But Americans were too concerned about a conflict on the other side of the planet to care about fascism at home.
The other comments are right. Your brain is broken.
Welcome to reality, and adulthood, where, more often than not, you are working to mitigate shitty situations to get the least destructive outcome possible.
Americans failed to do so, because they chose to squabble over a party not being perfect while a felon rapist and his enabling party of fascists took complete control.
Maybe next time (if there is one) we can cry again about the party that's provably better for average Americans while we descend further into fascism. That'll make things better.
Looking at the party for the last few years, I see: Choosing a rapist, child-killing, genocide supporter as the candidate. Gaslighting everyone on the cognitive abilities of said candidate. Continuously screwing over the working class. Gaslighting everyone on the state of the economy. Bailing out their rich friends, while telling the poor and homeless that they need to suck it up. Propping up the fascist that beat them as their opponent. Bombing innocent people. Saying that they would be harder on immigrants than the fascist. Helping build a stupid border wall. Increasing funding to violent assholes that attack the working class. Picking unpopular candidates and running on right-wing values.
I feel like that is a far cry from "not being perfect"
You brain-dead college kid protesters don't know what "gEnOciDe" is.
If you ever actually went to Gaza, you'd almost immediately be murdered, enslaved, or imprisoned by the Hamas terrorists you've been brainwashed in to believing are the "good guys".
Biden was clearly the better choice for Gaza no matter how much copium you huff or how much you wish it wasn't true.
Anyhow, enjoy watching the Trump Casino/Resort Gaza being built atop the bones of dead Palestinian kids, chump, because it's what you supported. "Trump Gaza, number one!"
So you're saying it's not any fascist's fault for voting for a fascist, because they were manipulated?
I think they are referring to the protest non voters because of the Palestine Israeli conflict.
Oh, well that's okay. Nobody has a moral obligation to resist fascism. Calling people evil for letting a neo-nazi wannabe dictator take control of the government is absurd
/s
Your totally right. It's OK to support genocide because the "good" party (that builds the infrastructure for facism, and doesn't fight against it) is such a better option. I mean, how can people not be supportive of that?
/s
You killed 10 Gazas by letting trump win.
In opposing 1 genocide you chose 10 more, and threw away any hope to resist them.
So many dying kids curse you right now.
I didn't "let" Trump win, I voted against him. The Democrats handed the election to him because they valued genocide and money more than they valued fighting fascism. The Democrats openly bombed the shit out of kids world-wide. Do you think they were happy with you when Biden was bombing them? or do you think they cursed as they were dying?
They didn't hand shit.
Nobody should have voted FOR Harris.
Everyone should have voted AGAINST Trump.
It's childish to even have this discussion.
If the dems had literally run Mitt Romney I would have voted for him gladly.
Becauae, unlike you, I don't want MORE genocide, and Trump is nothing if not openly pro-genocide.
Are you happy you didn't "support genocide"? Did it make the world a better place?
I am indeed happy that I didn't "support genocide". But no, it didn't make the world a better place. Are you happy that you supported genocide? Did that make the world a better place?
Funnily enough your moral high grounding resulted in school lunch programs being discontinued. So good job now we have a genocide AND more hungry kids domestically
The fact that you think people who supported Democrats supported genocide is infantile and shows that you are arguing in bad faith.
This isn't entirely new or unique to America, but the dynamic is essentially:
Party A improves the odds fascism is successfully implemented.
Party B implements it.
Reducing the conditions for fascism to take hold is strictly off the table for both A and B.
Fundamentally changing the system of Party A (or B for that matter) through voting alone would at least require a Party C.
But even so it is the internal party politics prior to and outside of elections that are keeping this fascism paradigm in place. And that's where people's frustrations tend to lie.
It becomes a trolley problem at some point too.
Do you do nothing and watch fascism implemented or physically support and fund the genocide just so fascism is implemented 2 years later without anyone opposing this time?
Number of their own people disappeared for speech. If people aren't allowed to even speak about changing things, then there's no hope of improvement.
And yes, Lemmy is banned in China.
lemmy.world does not appear to be blocked in China [1][2]. It seems to just be lemmy.ml and hexbear.net (e.g. not .world, lemmygradm sh.itjust.works, etc.)
Ironic
I don't know that I've ever seen anyone say that both sides are the same. I have seen people (when talking about the US) call out when both sides do the same things, such as: Put forth rapists and child-killers as candidates, back a genocide, send people to torture prisons, refuse to fix the healthcare system, etc.
B is indeed worse than A, but I've seen too many people use that to pretend that one side is "actually good", instead of being able to see that both sides are bad.
That's according to political science in general, including Wikipedia^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_liberalism]. The US is a liberal democracy.
Well said, both sides are bad, but one is so much worse than the other
you might wanna visit hexbear/lemmygrad
One side has good PR so eveyone here bootlicks them
Well this is a blatant lie.
My god the irony.
This is false though.
One side is bad, the other side has some people who are bad.
That is not the same thing.
Well, if "some people" can get the whole side to support things like genocide, rapists, and child-killers, I'd say the whole side is bad.
Funny how you guys have latched onto Gaza like shit on velcro, but have not had a single thing to say about Sudan, Myanmar, and the Uighur's being ethnically cleansed.
You just found a hot button cause to latch onto, and are trying to sound morally superior to people.
My government is not supplying weapons to those other conflicts, of course I care more about the one that me and the people around me have more ability to stop. There's no merit to whining about the world, the point is to change it, and I have worked with people to disrupt weapons shipments to the Zionist Regime, just like the union movements before me did with shipments to Apartheid South Africa and Imperial Japan.
Funny how you guys have latched onto Facism like shit on velcro, but have not had a single thing to say about genocide, child-killing, and torture.
You just found a hot button cause to latch onto, and are trying to sound morally superior to people.
Dude, I don't think the state of Israel should exist period. Don't act like you know any of my positions regarding this issue.
Then don't act like you know any my positions regarding any of those issues. If you can't take the same criticism used against you, maybe it's bad criticism.
Man fascists are delusional , scratch a liberal and all that...
There's those who commit unintended mistakes, then there's those who give in to the temptation of behaving badly in their moments of weakness, and then there's those who can't wait for any given opportunity to behave maliciously and justify it by saying they aren't the only ones doing it.
"both sides"= a disengenious comment by conservative mainly also uses the same thing to say thier not as bad.
"Both sides" also used by liberals to tell you it doesn't matter they voted for genocide because trump will do the same
both sides is primarly used by conservatives, 100% of the time, lol. its pretty obvious even on reddit. thier talking points often are right wing in nature and pretty disengeniously disguised. i have never seen a "liberal" if there is anything left of center right in america, say that at all.
Funny words coming from the fake "progressive" that claimed boths sides and sat at home or threw away a vote.
Does third party count then? One bar is a bar
Can we just stop having this discussion? It's so boring. Both sides misrepresent the other. Tankies are stupid. Also nobody is a tankie. The Biden administration sanctioned a genocide. Every other US president is a war criminal. This discussion never goes anywhere.
So you propose ignoring the propaganda and hope it'll go away? Doesn't sound like a very good plan.
You mean the two party system propaganda?
"both sides are the same" for example. Do you really need me to list all the propaganda they repeat? Just go to .ml or grad and you'll see. The discussion is not pointless because ignoring them and not responding to their bullshit isn't gonna work.
Defending and arguing that the two parties aren't the same isn't the same thing. Just check out last week's news involving trump. Just last week. And then multiply that by 50. Nobody said the democrats are good. Just that the republicans are 10 times worse, that's all.
Oof. You should really think twice before posting a comment this dumb. There's a delete option. Do yourself a favor and use it.
Another classic:
Me: gives my definition of tankie Tankie: so is a tankie too?
And ofc: Shunning a dictatorship and pointing out their horrible doing, means you obviousely cant be left, nooo you must be a libertarian or fascist.
And one of my favorit tankie talking points: "Democracy is when you have to be approved by the government in order to even get on a list. That you can either vote for the state party or "no", like it was in east germany, and 99.4% voted for the state party but then suddenly after the dictatorship fell, 4 years later they dropped down to 16.4 %. aah yes seems legit. Truely a grand democracy.
Difficult to vote between genocide and genocide. At least with one you punished the other candidate for it.
Not this shit again lol Every single time
How dare I point out that Biden committed genocide. Have you no shame in yourself? Does it feel good to turn a blind eye to a modern day holocaust and pretend like nothing is happening?
Complete with the signature hysterical accusations and the misconstruing of the facts. 👏 Well done, you've become the meme of the post by thinking you're doing something constructive but only shrieking nonsense and alienating people instead of making an resonating and true statement that we can rally behind.
Please don't forget to also accuse me of contributing to genocide when I tell you that your shit stinks and is unhelpful and unproductive. Go ahead, say the line, Bart.
Nah, delete this
two words: third parties
Tell me you don't understand American politics without telling me you don't understand American politics
Let's say that if in every Presidential and Congressional election from 2028 to 2058, everyone who'd otherwise vote for 3rd parties instead voted Democrat, and Democrats always won the White House, >45% of the House and Senate each, always had a majority in at least 1 house, and at least 1/2 the time won majorities in both houses.
Do you think the US would be any closer to voter reform—e.g. proportional representation, ranked ballots, whatever, even re-drawing districts more sensibly?
wp:2024 United States presidential election#Results by state
If 1.5 million Californians who voted for Harris, instead voted for Trump, Harris would have still won that state;
or,
If 3 million Californians who voted for Harris, instead voted for 3rd parties (e.g. Stein), Harris would have still won that state.
4 835 250 Texans voted for Harris. That's more votes for Harris than any other state besides California. It was still over 1.5 million votes less than what Trump got in Texas.
If those who voted for Harris in Texas instead voted 3rd party, Harris would be no worse the loser in terms of Texan Electoral votes.
But yeah, I have no understanding of American politics.
(minor correction about 20 minutes after posting: for 3rd party into for 3rd parties)
I think firewitch's point was that third parties almost by definition have zero chance of getting a candidate elected in a first past the post system. This is pretty common knowledge.
I don't think it's zero, but it's quite unlikely for the next few decades at least.
My point is if an American is in a non-swing state, then wt:thons vote counts for little: so thon might as well vote for thons heart, and maybe the number of votes might get attention.
Ah, I see, you have done the math. Ok, this is the only condition which I would consider voting 3rd party not morally dubious. Thanks!
The best a third party can hope for us to split the vote from whatever majority party they are most like and allow the other side to win. And only one time in our history has a third party gotten more votes than the party it split from. Teddy Roosevelt, Bull Moose Party, 1912
Progressive Democrats in non-swing states can vote 3rd party and scare future delegates and contenders into being more progressive. Also, they could support Libertarians and Constitutionalists a little in non-swing states.
source for pic: wc:File:Progressive Moose walking.png
wp:Bull Moose Party
wp:1912 United States presidential election
In 1848, it was just the Democrats and the Whigs.
Then in 1856, the Republicans ran their first candidate for President: John C. Frémont;
and in 1860, it was Lincoln.
(minor correction about 3 hours after replying: "and in 1856, it was Lincoln." to "and in 1860, it was Lincoln.")
Lol. Why would I support Libertarians? They're dumber than Trump supporters and have about as many solutions when you inquire.
See, you actually think that there's a good 3rd party worth voting for.
There's not.
Trump got 312 Electoral College votes, while Harris got 226.
If Trump lost 44 of those votes to Harris, she would be President today.
If you got 120 000 Georgians, 60 000 Nevadans, 121 000 Pennsyvanians, 90 000 Michiganders and 30 000 Wisconsinites who voted for Trump last year to instead vote for wp:Chase Oliver, Trump would have lost 46 Electoral College votes to Harris.
Right, and not voting at all is the surefire way to make third parties happen. Sure.
So, ultimately this whole thing hangs on how possible or likely is making the rise of a significant third party
I vote for 3rd parties, but people say I should vote for the lesser-evil wing of the 2-party-state.
That is because you are effectively throwing your vote away.
Or you don't care or want to give the more evil of the two dominate parties a small advantage while telling yourself you are good. I guess you do you.
Please read my other reply ITT: https://lemmy.world/post/29892234/17151202 .
Thanks, yes, in this case I think it makes sense to vote third party.
I applaud you if you vote 3rd party in local/state elections. But if you're voting 3rd party in a presidential election, you're dumber than the chair you're sitting on right now.
As a Canadian I don't vote in US elections,
but please, tell me why those who voted for Presidential candidates other than Trump or Harris in non-swing states, or who are very much concerned about Palestine, the US military-industrial complex, or IP (i.e. "intellectual property") trolls are dumber than chairs.
Instant runoff voting, then third parties
and the run-off in 2024 would be Trump versus Harris, and in 1992, Bush versus Clinton.
If we assume the first round goes the same, but without a spoiler effect third parties would do better in the first round.
IIUC, in neither the 1992 nor 2024 Presidential elections did a candidate win a (popular) majority.
If those who voted for Perot instead voted for Clinton, Clinton would still have been elected, probably with a majority. If they voted for Bush, then he'd been elected, probably with a majority, and those-more-left-wing-than-Republicans would have been (more) disappointed.
If those who voted for 3rd parties last year instead voted for Harris, she still would have lost the first round, including Michigan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state ). I doubt she would have won the run-off.
I suppose run-offs are interesting when there are strong 3rd party candidates. As this is not currently the case in the USA, it'd mean little—the 2 party-state continues (and multi-millionaire Democrats would still complain about Stein, Greens, and/or other alternative parties).
Two words: NOT VIABLE
Unless you completely, or mostly, agree with Trump or Harris—and I repeat, agree, not just consider one the lesser evil—then no one is viable.
A vote for Harris in a non-swing state was a vote wasted.
What is Marxist-Leninism?
It's very interesting that those who screamed that we had to choose the lesser of two evils in 2020, thereby admitting to the evil of the Democrats, immediately shut up about this evil as soon as Biden took office. Now that the greater evil has taken power, you never talk about actually fighting it, you just spend your time bashing people with a conscience.
Citation needed.
Every single person I know who reluctantly voted for Biden spent the next 4 years complaining constantly. Online forums were full of liberals calling Biden "basically a Republican". Plenty of news stories covered how more progressive Democrats felt Biden wasn't doing enough.
That's the opposite of what I saw. I'm not saying that you are wrong, just that I saw differently. I saw Democrats spend most of their time saying that it's not OK to attack the current Democratic president. I wonder how much of that difference is based on the circles we run in, or the news sites that we visit.
Makes sense.
For a reference point: I'm a millennial, living in a pretty liberal state of the US. Reading the front page of Reddit (not logged in, running ad-blockers so I think I get a "generic" experience), Ars Technica, occasional HackerNews threads, Something Awful forums. My friend circles are unanimous that Israel is an apartheid state, Russia is an invader, immigrants are not any kind of problem. It includes a few trans people who are vocal about their experiences. I would not call it a radically progressive group. For example, I don't think most of them would actually be comfortable with mass-executions of wealthy people.
Before joining Lemmy, I'd never encountered "tankies" in enough quantity for them to have any kind of label or for anyone to self-identify as "anti-tankie". It's still a weird idea to me.
We did fight it, and won, in 2020. In 2024 a few people stopped fighting, so we lost. And now the people who were complaining about Biden being evil are being deported for speaking their mind.
This reply is a perfect example of the disconnect between liberals and leftists. The democrats did not meaningfully fight fascism in 2020-2024! As I've said elsewhere, fighting fascism effectively would have entailed hanging Trump after J6. Instead they allowed Trump to get away with a coup attempt. This allowed the fascists to iteratively test coup strategies, and they might have found the correct one this time around.
Aside from other considerations, you don't want to turn Trump into a martyr—maybe in February 2017 they should have made Mar-a-lago a prison where Trump could/can only communicate with the outside world by writing or silent videos.
Had Biden resigned into an honorable retirement between, say, Feb 2022 to Feb 2024, Harris probably would have won in 2024; but power corrupts, or reveals, or something. When Mussolini died, he was only 61 years old.
And how would that happen? After all, the Supreme Court gave him immunity, and all Democrats controlled was the presidency. So you're saying Joe Biden should've told the Supreme Court and every other court to suck it, and used I assume the military to arrest and execute Trump while skipping due process?
I don't think that's fighting fascism. That's implementing it.
What needed to happen was for Trump to not win a second time. Had he died at home peacefully we wouldn't be in the shit right now, and we wouldn't have even needed to do the fascism ourselves to stop it. People just needed to fucking stop the fascist from winning the election.
Uhhh antifascists drag him out of whatever hole he tries to hide in and hang him from a lamppost? The Mussolini Special, if you will.
I mean it's easy to say these were the good guys and they were killing the bad guys so it was great. But look at it without that context and it's pretty hard to justify. Sure, if Mussolini would've been put on trial the result would've been the same. But his mistress?
The ones not being deported are attempting to on top their high horse and act like them not voting was somehow better than the alternative.
Don't know what the fuck you're on about but that's hogwash. No self aware individual on the left doesn't hate their own party's faults, at least in the US. The same simply can't be said for the other side.
The Democratic party is not a leftist party. It's a center-right liberal party. The point of my post was that "self aware" Democrat voters pay lip service to acknowledge the evil of the Democratic party, but then do absolutely nothing to challenge it when the Democrats are in power.
You didn't say anything wrong but the takeaway is really vague and open ended. What do you propose they do?
The US doesn’t have a left
They have a far right and a less far right
The US only has two authoritarian parties.
Says the person who never has done evil ever. /s
My friend, I don't know how you are still alive. The only action these days that doesn't involve some kind of negative consequence is breathing air.
For the rest of us who actually do stuff, so you can whine at us from your computer, we make compromises all the time. That is life.
I'm an anarchist with years of on the ground organizing experience. I have friends in prison. I've had friends killed by the police. Shut the fuck up you liberal piece of shit.
All that hard work and compromise and yet, you can't bring yourself to get your hands a little dirty by voting for the lesser evil. You are accelerating the rate at witch your friends die by police. For what reason?
Whether or not someone takes 15 minutes out of their life to vote every 2 years is quite literally the least important facet of their political activity. It effects exactly nothing. All your supposed concern over fascism, and you can't bring yourself to get your hands a little dirty by torching an ICE van or stealing some clothes and giving them to homeless people. For what reason?
You can both vote and organize. Why vote? The more fascist the government is the harder it is to organize. For only 15 minutes every 2 years, it's actually a pretty powerful tool. It may not move things left but it slows down the fascism.
Leftists: Maybe we shouldn't fund genocide and perhaps the average worker should be able to afford to put food on their table
Liberals: HOW DARE YOU PROMOTE YOUR RADICAL TANKIE AGENDA, DONT YOU KNOW THE GDP AND STOCK MARKET ARE GOING UP WHICH MEANS THE ECONOMY IS GOOD SO STOP COMPLAINING. IN FACT THE POLITICANS DONT EVEN NEED TO GIVE YOU ANYTHING BECAUSE THEY DESERVE YOUR VOTE, NEVER BLAME THE SYSTEM, NEVER ASK FOR CHANGE AND NEVER THINK ABOUT WHO PULLS THE STRINGS
Straw men are so easy, aren't they?
I mean the meme itself is a strawmen too
Not especially. Many groups of people, conservatives and leftists and "centrists" alike, love to suggest the parties are equal. I've heard it in real life. I've heard it online. All over reddit when I was still on it and lemmy even now.
Though I wouldn't especially attribute the logic to tankies, so in that way, perhaps
Prominent leftists I know argue that democrats dont deliver meaningful change but they still encourage people to vote. they say dems go harder against progressives than they do against republicans. And I agree with them.
Not voting does nothing. It doesn't deliver meaningful change. It doesn't help. Doesn't fix.
There's a lot to lose by not voting. It's a privilege to vote and run for office, and as a Republic, it's people's civic duty to use it.
If you don't like it, running for election yourself, organizing, unionizing, those are the strongest methods to realistically to fight back. Revolution rarely comes as long as people are moderately comfortable --- and that's the only other option.
For presidential, there's only 2 options. But if you go down to local level, third parties can be viable.
Only just over 60% of democracies go back to democracy after being authoritarian, and I have never been one to play with gambling the odds
Ofc it's a straw man! It's at least so vague and free from annotation that the only way it works at all is for the reader to apply there own.
god tier politics challenge: ask a blue dem to name the last time the Ds did something the opposite to what the Rs have done, and was actually good for the average American
(Not proposed, mind you, but did)
Ah but you see its making fun of people with wrongthink™.
That was entirely based on my interactions with liberals, yes I was acturally called a Tankie for caring about basic human dignity
Go outside and interact with actual people.
Usually when talking to people irl I get called woke
I mean this is literally a strawman post so
Another lemmy.world banger
You're right, Lena.
The voters should just sit in the corner and be joyful about the fact that food staples are becoming cost-prohibitive, and then laugh along with you when you all joke about it and pretend it doesn't matter.
No one cares about the differences between the two parties if your party doesn't care that they can't feed their families.
Would you rather have Trump's fascist regime and be an activist, or have Biden's much less worse administration and be an activist? Voting doesn't decrease your ability to participate in protests and so on.
False. You're significantly more likely to end up being human-traficked to an El Salvador prison under Trump.
that's literally the argument he made.
Vote for dems and be an activist.
Vote for reps and be a political prisoner.
I don't think they were actually disagreeing. Just making a tongue-in-cheek remark.
Indeed
Sadly true
You're not getting it.
When you're working 100 hours a week at three jobs and all your labor buys for you is a roach-infested studio apartment, it doesn't matter how nice the president speaks. The working class and poor have been living under fascism for years.
The message here isn't: "Vote for us because Trump's a fascist."
The message is: "Trump promised you this, but he's doing this instead and it's hurting your family. Vote for us and we'll put a stop to it." (Not that anyone thinks Democrats actually will, judging by their near-total lack of action so far.)
And for Christ's sake stop joking about how expensive food has become, because that's a very real problem and when people see Democrats joking about it, they think you don't care that they're starving.
If more people had voted for democrats it would've been a lot easier to get out of this shit by campaigning for a ranked choice voting system and taxing the rich. Instead you got fascism × 2 and expensive food.
Based on what facts? The impoverishment accelerated in a time when Democrats had the presidency AND Congress.
Not blaming the global post covid inflation solely on the democrats.
Truthfully a lot of it was simply corporate greed, and they should have spoken out against it. They didn't because they're subpar. They ignored the issue of the worsening economy because they're inadequate.
However, we could have had a chance at making at least some changes. Democrats at the very least would have pushed to codify abortion rights and not have tried to dismantle every government agency. But instead we have whatever the hell this is. It's actually delusional to believe Democrats would have been "exactly the same".
I don't love Democrats, but at least I have a basic sense of self preservation
I'm sure that Harris would have given us some glorious speeches while she allowed corporations to run roughshod over workers and added another four-percent to the war budget every year, but none of that matters for the reasons I stated above in the thread.
The problem here is that Democrats don't differentiate themselves in ways that matter to the vast majority of the poor and working class.
>looks at the absolute gutting of worker protections, union rights, funding to Medicare, funding to food stamps, and an unimaginable number of federal grants that go directly to providing services to impoverished Americans being pushed through executive action and congress
Yeah sure exactly the same, absolutely no difference between the two. The working class definitely won't be suffering any more
So you think the only difference between the two is how "nice the president speaks". I guess which party controls the government doesn't affect you.
Love that for you, you privileged out-of-touch piece of shit.