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bombastic side eye
(lemmy.cafe)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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I’m not voting for anyone who supports what Israel is doing in Gaza.
If the Democrats want my support, they’ll have to replace Biden with someone who’ll stand up to Israel. Otherwise, my support is going third-party.
If Trump wins, that’s on the people who voted for Trump. It’s not on me.
Your actions have effects in the real world! Shocking, I know. But not voting for the lesser evil in a FPTP voting system like the US’s increases the likelihood of the bigger evil winning.
You don't get to deny responsibility, however minor, for the consequences of your actions.
See, what’s happening here is that you’re viewing my behaviour as deviant, because in the US, voting for one of the two main parties is a social norm. But there’s no need for it to be a social norm.
US politics will not get better until people choose better options. The Democrats and the Republicans have no incentive to be better until people are willing to vote for other parties.
It’s time for that social norm to go.
Blaming, say, Green party voters for a Trump victory “because they should have voted Democrat” makes just as much sense as me blaming Democrat voters for a Trump victory “because they should have voted Green party”.
The truth is, none of us are obligated to vote for anyone except the candidate our heart feels is best.
Look, I'm going to criticize you for your well-intended but impractical behaviour, mainly because of the immediacy of the high-risk problem rather than considering your point of view as a futile long-term proposal, but know that taking time to bother with criticizing you by forming new sentences and paragraphs is because there is value in arguing with you for a bit rather than simply forgetting about you like we do with the nutcases supporting Trump. Anyway, here comes my main points:
With the time left before the elections, your previously understandable efforts to promote and establish a 3rd party to become a major contender has failed. All I've seen on discussion platforms like many politics communities in Lemmy or R*eddit have failed to plant the name of a single 3rd party in people's memory, and I'm reaching to this conclusion by the lack of specific naming of the 3rd parties in these discussions, which should a good indicator of visibility of those parties.
İımproving the adoption of a 3rd party in such a long-standing battle between 2 parties is a long and difficult effort. Toiling against the difficulty for a better alternative is commendable and a good thing, but if your long and hard toil is in risk of being to to the trash bin by the Republicans in the next election, you make sure your other neighbor the Democrats keep the dictatorial Republicans at bay while you keep toiling to get closer to fruition, even if you don't like the Democrats either in the first place.
3rd parties don't have time to gain any impactful ground within the time left. Even if all of them increase their votes and chairs and have more than 50% of the votes in the decision making with all 3rd parties combined, your government structure enables firmly-united minority groups to pass or fail decisions when the majority is undecided and disunited, which can easily be said on most matters about competing 3rd parties. A united 30% can beat a disunited and illusioned combination of a 5+5+5+10+15+5+10=55% if 2-3 of these decide to not act together with the rest on a decision.
While it can be a risk of authoritarianism to put any party far ahead of another, it is much less with one that mostly acts in the favor of its citizens than it is with one that openly advocates for indefinite hold of power through all-but-unnamed authoritarian actions. You can still think and put forward the evidence of Democrat wrongdoings and most of the leftist people will agree with you, but when you advocate for a divided fight against the threat of Trump or claim a less known party that can even be rivaled by another less known party in terms of current chance winning the elections, you can be considered inexperienced at best and a division instigator at worst, both very understandable because both are very plausible in politics.
Similar to 1, I am considering that most of you who keep suggesting 3rd parties don't even know about what those parties advocate for, did and/or do, who they are funded by, who they are talking with, who they are cooperating with and who they are opposed to, the whole scheme I mean. Again, reaching to this from lack of presenting information in these regards about these parties. All I hear from those advocate 3rd party votes is just that they don't have Biden or Trump, nothing else. "We are not our competitors" is what the Dems or Republicans supporters also say, but they say it as one point among many other points they make.
I'm not claiming any knowledge to support or debunk your knowledge or internet-fu of the U.S. parties, I am just a citizen of Turkey who has just surface knowledge of some U.S. political parties but also someone who went through the same "vote for a 3rd party, vote for another candidate in the leftist party" in the last few months before the election last year. It is a worse lack of show of governing power than Biden dozing, gazing off and stammering. Do you know what it is? It is an openly declared invitation to the bickering but prey-focused wolf pack by showing you'd rather eat the grass over there instead of here or mate with this uncooperative herd animal instead of that uncooperative herd animal.
Go toil for the Green party, go toil for another party. Take part in local promotion of these parties, help spread knowledge about them. But instead of eyeing for popularity by aiming to double your votes from 1% to 2% this election, do it on one where the wolves are starved and separated after consecutive and heavy shepherd dog victories. That is when you are safe to build lasting support for whatever you stand for.
I don't care. I'm not voting for anyone who supports genocide. I have to be able to live with myself.
And if I end up in death camp (because, by the way, I'm gay), that would be better than knowing I supported a genocide.
Consciousness is a weird thing: It will get stung by a lot of stuff, and rightfully so, but will rarely suggest taking planned action that would have more chance of success, but will rather suggest immediately resigning from taking part in something so as not to take responsibility for it. When all options are bad enough to sting it, it does not help.
The fascists thank you for your support of Gazan genocide.
That is some twisted mental gymnastics.
American munitions are being used to rip apart Gazan children as we speak. Biden supports it. Trump supports it.
People who vote for Biden are supporting it. People who vote for Trump are supporting it.
The only ones who aren’t supporting it are the people voting third-party.
Sorry that looking at the actual consequences of one's actions and not "What I want to happen" is twisted mental gymnastics to you.
No, you’re trying to make me responsible for other people’s actions, and that is fucked up.
If Trump wins, that is the fault of the people who voted for Trump.
If you want to use mental gymnastics to blame it on other people, why not say it’s Biden’s fault for supporting genocide.
No, I'm making you responsible for your own actions in voting to allow fascism. Sorry that you think that's fucked up. Maybe you can try not voting to allow fascism.
Is this the Democrats’ strategy? Acting entitled, as if they’re owed votes, and any voter who wants better is a traitor?
Good luck with that strategy.
Oh, you 'wanted better', cool, that will really comfort us vulnerable minorities when we're herded into death camps and Israel is given a blank check for their ongoing genocide. Your intentions matter MUCH more than their consequences, mea culpa.
Democrats aren't entitled to your vote. If you want to support fascism, that's your right under a democratic system. Just don't ask for asspats for your fascist-supporting bullshit from people who are actually working against fascism.
Your scaremongering hypotheticals are not going to distract me from the actual genocide I can see unfolding in front of us.
I'm glad you're privileged enough that fascism is just a 'scaremongering hypothetical' to you.
You already seem pretty distracted from the actual genocide going on, considering that you're openly advocating for letting the "Finish The Job" types accumulate control over the government because [checks notes] voting for harm reduction wouldn't be as satisfying as voting for self-aggrandizement and total genocide of the Gaza Strip.
Oh, I do think Trump is a fascist. (And Biden is supporting a fascist in Israel, so what’s the difference?)
I meant that the bit about death camps was scaremongering.
Trump says murderers and rapists will pour across the border. You say Trump will bring in death camps. Aren’t you sick of all the scaremongering?
And even if death camps are a possibility, you’re asking me to weigh the possibility of death camps against a very real genocide that is happening right now.
And, I’m sorry, but it is not even close. You still have more power than any Palestinian has. You have not been bombed by your government. Your borders have not been closed. You can flee to Canada if you need to. The Palestinians can’t.
What's the difference between a fascist who has openly stated an intention to shift to unlimited support for Israel to 'finish the job' and someone who has expressed limited (if insufficient) support for restraining Israel?
I wonder. Or maybe it's the difference between one openly stating an intention to end democracy here, in the US, while the other quite openly opposes the idea of ending democracy in the US?
I guess those are minor differences in the end. Who cares if fascism comes to America, right? It won't affect the people voting to let it in.
Wow, I'm so glad that the prospect of the death of minorities at the hands of a regime you yourself admit is fascist is equivalent to baseless right-wing claims of "murderers and rapists" pouring across the border. Great.
I'm really not. I'm asking you to weigh one thing, and one thing only - what difference your vote and advocacy will make in this election.
As much as it would thrill me to have the American electorate take a sudden and sharp turn left, erasing the past several decades of voting trends, in the next four months, it is exceedingly unlikely, especially considering polling on the current issues that dominate people's minds. Therefore, one must ask what the risks are for each realistic candidate's victory.
For a Biden victory, the risk is insufficient opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and a lack of substantive resolutions to any of the problems facing the US at this point in time.
For a Trump victory, the risk is total US support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the abolition of what democracy the US does have, genocide in Ukraine, sterilization camps for immigrants (we had those during the Trump years, before you cry "Well that's just scaremongering", it was kind of a big deal to those few of us who pay attention to politics in this country), a self-proclaimed 'day-one dictator', and everything in the fucking Project 2025 outline coming to fruition.
Voting third party on the presidential level in this election is nothing more than an abstain. "I don't care which of those outcomes comes true."
Are those two victories equivalent in your eyes?
You’re trying to make this a false dichotomy. That’s a form of logical fallacy, and it’s manipulative.
It’s like those trolley problems about “do you throw the switch or not”? The thing I would do is try to fix the brakes. And if people on the track die, that is the fault of whoever tied them to the track, not me.
I’m not supporting either Trump or Biden, and neither should you.
You’re trying to say Trump is worse than Biden, and though I disagree with some of your points, it also doesn’t matter because I am not choosing either of them. I’m trying to fix the brakes.
You do realize that not all dichotomies are false dichotomies, right?
Here - why don't you outline a realistic plan that leads to neither Biden nor Trump being elected, and how you plan to achieve that. That way you can prove that "The two near-majority polling candidates, and the only two that will be on the ballot in every state, aren't the only practical options", and that you aren't just misusing terms out of an ignorance of what they mean.
It's astounding that you manage to miss the entire point of a trolley problem.
The Democrats replace Biden with a better candidate, like Gretchen Whitman.
(Not Gavin Newsom. He’s just as pro-Israel as Biden.)
Why is that my job?
Internet memes about the trolley problem actually fail to present it completely. After the ponderer decides that killing one person is better than killing five people, they are then asked if it’s okay to push a bystander off a bridge onto the train tracks if that would derail the train and prevent it killing five people.
To me, the ultimate lesson of the trolley problem is that morality is not a matter of trading fewer lives for more lives. That’s why I’m not listening to your “Biden probably means fewer deaths than Trump” argument. Voting for either of them violates my sense of morality.
I’d rather work on dismantling the tracks, even if it might take a while.
Because you're a citizen. That's what being a citizen means. If you don't want to share in political power, I'm given to understand there's an wannabe autocrat who you're currently assisting who will gladly take the 'burden' of responsibility away from you. That way when you smile at all the minorities being herded into death camps, you can say "Don't worry! It wasn't my decision!" as you close the gate behind them.
Cool, so instead of seeing Palestinians die, you're going to see MORE Palestinians die AND Americans AND Ukrainians AND see a decline in freedom, equality, and living standards across the board. Fucking wonderful. "Let's make things worse, because that's what my morality says is best!"
You save literally no one, kill additional people, make the system worse, because... you don't want to make a decision.
That's fucking vile.
Cool, how do you think that's going to work under an openly fascist regime?
As a citizen, I am working on building support for third-party candidates who are outside of the Democrat-Republican Duopoly (which is really just a Monopoly).
I don’t care if it’s realistic. It’s the only option I see. I’m not supporting a genocide.
Relevant pic: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/11rrvt/be_this_guy/
Cool, you do realize that voting against fascism in this election doesn't disable you from doing that, right? You... you do realize that a fascist getting in power will make building that support harder, right?
... right...?
This is the equivalent of 'thoughts and prayers'. May not be realistic, but boy does it make you feel like you're keeping your hands clean. I mean, ignore the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to die in various horrible ways because of your inaction, at least you didn't have to make a choice. That would truly be terrible.
Tens of thousands of men, women, and children are dying right now, and your guy is supporting it.
And I am making a choice. I’m choosing third-party.
Thanks for affirming that you still don't understand the trolley problem.
Keep giving out those thoughts and prayers to help the fascists. There's not much difference between you and them.
voting is not enabling. you have a right to your position, but i encourage you to consider the material outcomes of your actions rather than just the exterior aesthetics of it. :)
And I would like everyone in America to consider the material outcomes (genocide, environmental collapse, corporate oligarchy) of voting for the Democrats instead of voting for the Greens.