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Harris delivered a ‘masterclass’ debate. Will it change the race?
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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People not voting for Harris because of Gaza need to avoid watching the debate, otherwise they’ll change their minds. No matter how bad things are, they can get worse.
Why is it always 'voters need to lower their standards', and never 'candidates need to be decent human beings'?
Because we have an unjust voting system, and petulantly refusing to vote can and will get people killed, and rights stripped from millions.
Why do you only frame the issue in terms of the voters' responsibilities, and never in terms of the candidate's responsibilities?
Why aren't the politicians the ones who need to make hard choices? Why can't they get wedged on the issues for once?
Because that's not the reality or the America that we live in. Every time a truly leftist candidate tries to run, they get slapped down by the majority of the DNC's voting base.
This is a center-right, Pro-Capitalist country with a center-right, pro-capitalist population. You don't have to like it, I certainly don't, but that's the reality.
Without ranked choice voting, there is no way in hell an actual leftist will ever appear anywhere on a presidential ballot.
So hold your nose, put on your big boy pants, and vote for the lesser of two evils with the rest of us, because if you don't the fucking Nazis will win again.
You're not wrong. It all sucks. But this is the reality we live in. Life is about choosing the best choices out of the options given to us and very rarely are any of those choices exactly what we want.
Because voting has very limited choice and a winner takes all mechanism. Ob-fucking-viously the candidates should be better, but not voting won't make that change. Trump elected will just make this worse.
Voting is harm reduction.
If you want to make things better and promote your own idealised society, get involved, donate to causes you consider to be up to your standards. But even then getting involved and convincing future candidates will be much harder if Trump is elected than if it's Harris.
We can and should pressure put politicians to be better, but refusing to vote doesn't do that.
Because the candidates do have those responsibilities, but have shirked them. Ideally, we'd want a better voting system, that didn't mathematically garuntee that only two viable parties emerge, so that when the politicians refuse to use their power as they should, people who will may be chosen instead, but we don't have that, and changing that is a long and difficult process that only gets harder if the more authoritarian types get power anyway. If you're in a lifeboat with holes, and there are two people that have rigged things so that one of them is going to be in charge, and one wants to stop bailing out water and the other wants to scoop it back into the boat, then even though those two aren't following their responsibilities, it doesn't mean you should stop bailing the water out, because it has to get done by somebody or you drown. And if you have a say in which of the two is in charge, the guy that just wants to sit there uselessly is still the option you must pick, because at least they aren't trying to undo the progress you're making. Ideally you'd want to figure out how to undo the rigged system too, but you have to deal with the water first, lest you all drown fighting over who's in charge.