As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.
Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.
I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.
Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.
Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.
Remember that in online spaces (and IRL in reality), there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts that will make claims to sway public opinions.
Good point. Although, I would question whether Lemmy is such a place as we really don’t have the numbers to warrant the effort, imo.
We get drug spam and stock spam, no reason to expect that political spam is any less likely.
Lemmy has a huge amount of hardcore lefty’s. If you can get them to not vote, and especially if you can get them to tell their friends not to vote, that is a big win.
Astroturfing/sockpuppeting is dirty cheap to do, so no reason not to try.
You do see some users here that will post continously on about a certain topic repeatedly, with no other opinions. They might be legit, but I have my suspicions.
“Hardcore lefties” have a very different understanding of the value of their vote, which is to say, it means very little.
Have you deigned to ask them questions?
I disagree - it feels like Lemmy is seeing the same kind of shills that 4chan saw in the last several elections. These bad actors are trying to sway dems to vote third party or not vote at all “in protest” across many small and large online spaces.
Are the shills in the room with us right now?
Yes, in fact I see one now.
Interesting. What am I shilling for? What are my real opinions? What are the fake ones I’m presenting?
There are, but not on Lemmy, because Lemmy is still much too small to bother with.
Yeah like all of these people out here telling me to vote for genociders. There’s no way that real humans would think so little of Palestinian lives, right?
Right?
And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide? Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue. One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.
Suppose you have two buttons. If you press one, it kills someone. If you press the second, it kills two people. If you don’t press the first button, someone else is eagerly waiting who will press the second. Whoever has placed the buttons here, has enough power that neither the buttons nor the other person are within your personal ability to harm at the moment, and you have neither the time nor the popularity to amass enough people to change this before the other guy pushes the “kill two people” button. Your only options are to press one or press neither and allow the second be pressed. If your answer to this scenario is “I press neither button, because pressing the first kills someone, don’t you care about people’s lives!?”, then you are not choosing morality, you are choosing selfishness, because you care more about the notion that your hands will be clean than about the net life saved if you press the button that kills fewer people. In fact, the blood is as much on your hands by inaction if you decide to reject your choice, as it would be had you killed the additional victim yourself.
And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide?
When you are offered two candidates and both support genocide, including one being an active part of the current one, you can say, “no, never again means never again” and work against both rather than pretending you now have to support genocide.
Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue.
You should believe your lying eyes and see that Biden has gotten your consent for genocide, with Harris helping. The genocide has only ramped up as the election draws close.
There is not worse that can be done. It is full, unequivocal support for basically anything Israel wants for genocide including the weapons and supplies on which they depend to carry out this genocide. If anything, Dems are more effective at this kind of thing, as they secure European support and offer better stipulations to the Israelis around when to escalate and when to play it a little cooler.
Though your electoral logic is seld-defeating anyways. Your consent for the lesser evil keeps you politically anemic and unable to have solidarity with those who need it. You make yourself subservient.
One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.
This is a fantasy.
Suppose you have two buttons.
I am not interested in childish metaphors.
If you reject the lesser evil, and all options possible to you are evil, then you by inaction support the greater evil, which, by definition, makes you evil. “Working against both”, when evil is inherit in all means by which you might do that work, is a fantasy you tell yourself to justify sabotaging efforts to limit the damage by practicing and encouraging what effective amounts to surrendering one of the few levers of power that you have any limited ability to pull.
I already addressed your lesser evilism logic. If you want to continue this conversation you will need to respond to what I say and not dither and repeat yourself.
The elected leaders of Palestine don’t care about Palestinian lives, I’m not sure why you’d be surprised that others don’t.
Pray tell, which elected leaders?
They elected Hamas. Granted it was in 2005. I suppose I should have said the dictator leaders.
They’re both not elected anymore and a resistance organization. They were elected on a platform of not-exclusively-peaceful resistance (peaceful resistance inside Palestine and especially inside Gaza was render impossible by Israel by 2006-2007, so their resistance activities are now exclusively violent). Resistance activities are supported by the population of Gaza, even if many don’t support Hamas specifically. If your point is that October 7th implies they don’t care about Gazan lives, that’s patently false. If that’s not what you meant, then explain what you mean by “they don’t care about Gazan lives”.
The comprador government of the West Bank is just that, compradors. You should care about the people who live under a comprador government, yes.
The government of Gaza is led by those taking direct militant action against their genocidal settler colonial invaders. They fight and die alongside their people.
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I never said I didn’t care. In fact I care very much.
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Hamas is a terrorist organization. Lets not pretend that they’re some force of good.
I never said I didn’t care. In fact I care very much.
From Merriam Webster: “one” example: “you never know what will happen”
Hamas is a terrorist organization. Lets not pretend that they’re some force of good.
Hamas is a Palestinian resistance organization against apartheid settlers that routinely use and used extensive terrorism. While the Zionist entity bombs residential blocks, schools, and refugee camps, the axis of resistance, which includes Hamas, focus on military targets and building if leverage for their own liberation.
The term “terrorist” is used selectively and in a racist way. When the Western Imperialists like a resistance organization they call them freedom fighters. When they dislike them, they get called terrorists. The ANC, including Mandela, were similarly labelled terrorists in their own fight against apartheid. Similarly, the Americans supported apartheid in South Africa and its mainstream political adherents gladly adopted their white supremacist framing.
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Majority of the people who are saying this are Arab-Americans. They know how bad Trump will be, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of Biden back in 2020. Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring. There have been repeated instsnces of Democrats actually silencing them from speaking up as well. They’ve adopted a scorched earth mentality and are deciding to send a giant “fuck you” to Harris and the entire Democratic party.
And the Democrats are also allowing Israel to do whatever they want. There’s not much of a difference between the two on this topic.
There is a difference between them on this topic.
If Trump were in office now, every liberal here would be screaming for the genocide to end and trying to understand how anyone could let this happen.
With Biden in office and his VP as candidate, they are trying to sell you on their candidate rather than working against the genocide.
I’ve actually seen some Muslim American leader (not sure who, maybe the mayor of Dearborn?) saying something like this. At least with Republicans in charge democrats would need to oppose them instead of gleefully supporting the genocide. Not sure how much this logic checks out, but it’s a thing I guess.
Assuming you are exactly average, 49% of people are dumber than you. This should help you understand why the US is in this situation.
There are many contributing factors. Part of it is russian and american oligarchs spending heaps of cash to amplify any and every message that could help trump win.
I’m going to tell you a secret.
The people who say this, the leftists that threaten to withhold their votes, tend to vote strategically anyways. But threatening to withhold votes is one way to apply pressure to politicians to do things like, say, stop promoting a fucking genocide. And then liberals lose their minds for some reason and make it totally irrelevant. And then we have a genocide that lasts for 75 years and starts world war 3.
As per the Mueller report: Russian trolling doesnt just affect the GOP.
And now we know that India, China and Iran(at absolute minimum) have their own efforts to that effect too. Israel has had the AIPAC for decades, so theyre guilty of it too.
Conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists everywhere.
AIPAC is doing what is actually effective: lobbying (AKA bribing) politicians.
So are the Saudis.
But to deny that the known efforts of the Russians to fuck with the GOP and at least one known instance of them fucking with BLM is foolish. Go to the Canada subreddit on any news related to India and its full of atrocious asfroturf.
Russia and Trump proved it effective, now everyone is doing it.
Russia and Trump proved it effective, now everyone is doing it.
It did not in fact prove that.
- IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
- Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
- Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
- Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
- Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
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And should Harris lose this election, the Democrats will again look anywhere but in the mirror for the reasons.I actually read the public mueller report for myself. I know what it said.
Wait til you get a load of the CIA
Whattaboutism.
Whataboutism is just having perspective.
Are you against having perspective?
The vote should be for someone who can get enough electoral college votes to win in the first place, and from there the one who is more likely to listen to public pressure, as well as the same for any congressional seats on the ballot. And probably not vote for the one who is threatening to send the military after those who disagree with them.
Which as a non-American seems to be Harris, right?
For a vote, yes. I can’t even imagine what Trump would do with the situation given another chance. Some may say the same thing as the US has always done, which is one of the problems that will need to be addressed regardless of who wins, but Trump also likes dictators, so support would probably be bumped up even more for Netanyahu.
Yes, Harris is the only realistic option. Anyone voting for Trump is a Nazi in the most literal sense of the word.
If the people voting for Trump in the most literal sense of the word then they wouldn’t support Israel.
They aren’t supporting Israel because they care about the Israeli or Jewish people. They’re supporting Israel because they love blowing up brown people, with an unhealthy dollop of trying to bring about the apocalypse
In my situation, I’m in a solid blue state so I’m voting for a third party to push the country to the left.
If only USA had ranked choice voting, then everyone could do that.
Or literally any voting system with more than two seconds thought put into it
This kinda makes sense, I guess that means not a swing state (I’m not American).
Do you have to be in a heavy blue state to do this without fear that if enough people do this it will swing red?
Yes, exactly. If you live in a solid blue or red state, your vote is a drop in the bucket, so it won’t matter if you vote third party. But in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania… in 2016, the number of votes won by Jill Stein was slightly greater than the difference between Trump/Clinton. Ouch! Was it worth it? Did it move the country left?
The country did move left under Trump and has moved right under Biden. While your logic on Stein’s influence is flawed, if your goal was to shift the population left you’re basically making an argument for voting for Trump in swing states.
Yeah it’s a strategy that would work in any heavy red or blue state, because there’s an absolute zero percent chance the dems lose my state.
Do you understand how voting works?
Do you not understand how the Electoral College works?
Yes and your vote does absolutely nothing in “pushing” the country left. Who taught you that? Please do better research as the future of your country depends on it.
Sometimes being principled in your vote is a good first step towards doing something politically meaningful. Many liberals are chained to the idea that their vote is their political being. And then they go vote for genociders!
That first step of pulling at their chains can lead to further political education.
No, go ahead and explain it to me!
@rocci CGP Grey already did.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLej2SlXPEd37YwwEY7mm0WyZ8cfB1TxXa
They were joking. Also CGP grey didnt cover things like how fptp is influenced by there being multiple branches of government, having the electoral college in the mix, etc.
While it’s a great video its overly simplistic to apply to america. While i believe fptp has to go. You absolutely can vote third party safely without risking trump if the conditions are right and they often are in the us there are few battle ground states where it’s higher risk
@jatone Every video and every model will be overly simplistic when applied to any reality. Every abstraction is a leaky abstraction.
STV! I’m in!
@rocci I want this as a poll format option in the Fediverse.
So playing the first round of Russian Roulette for no real benefit.
Congrats I guess.
Losing the election is the only kind of accountability Harris and the Democrats are likely to face for their part in the genocide. Otherwise, what incentive is there for either party to ever oppose it? What message would Americans be sending to the world that we would keep in office someone who’s been actively supporting a genocide?
Do you think electing Trump will be read as “wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights” by the world?
What message would we be sending if our replacement for them is a guy that wants Isreal to “finish the job” with it? Killing fewer people matters more than accountability
Your vote is your consent.
Imagine for a minute that your perfect political candidate was running. The only catch is that if they win they are promising to personally execute your family in front of you. The other guy is gonna kill your family too so everyone tells you to stop being such a single issue voter and vote for the lesser evil.
Do you still vote for them? Or do you refuse to participate in the execution of your family?
Your vote is not your consent; that’s some nonsense made up to get people to not vote.
In your metaphor, you vote for one your family dies, you vote for another your family and another family dies. You refuse to participate in the system and both families die.
You didn’t consent to that, but you allowed it to happen via your vote of INDIFFERENCE which is what not voting means. It means you don’t care which way things go, because that’s all it can mean to not make a choice.
Easy to say when it’s not your family getting slaughtered.
But we all know you’re a paragon of rationality who would enthusiastically vote for an administration who has promised to kill your family because your love of lesser evilism outweighs anything else.
You know, you can find something evil in just about any politician’s policy depending on your personal perspective.
So let’s just not vote, because we shouldn’t choose. We should just morally abstain from having choices because making no choice is the only way to make a choice.
Do you realize how absurd that sounds?
Of course we are talking about politics, not their metaphor. Metaphors break down pretty quickly in politics, as the actual material logic requires more than a five minute toy example.
In our current scenario, the Dems have a genocide candidate. If you vote for that and tell other people to vote for that, you are telling yourself and those around you that genocide is tolerable. Not just tolerable, even - recommendable in certain circumstances, pleading that it is reluctant. You are, in fact, helping to normalize genocide, and with it, dehumanize Palestinians. And if that genocidal candidate wins with your support, what will be the accepted consciousness? What will you and others internalize? It sure as shut will not be, “wow we should not have supported a fucking genocide what the fuck is wrong with us?” It will be, “hey cool we will support you no matter what, 98% Hitler”. The party will see this and nod their heads, “let’s start doing criminal charges for supporting Palestine” (they are already starting in this direction, e.g. Samidoun) and, “we never have to do anything our voters want”.
Basically, y’all have no concept of leverage but you do have a concept of personal morality and are absolutely trashing it. You will, of course, never be forgjven by those who consider Palestinians to be human. One must hope that you overcome this implicit racism.
We are literally in a battle for our ability to vote.
Abstaining from said battle is effectively saying “I don’t care” and letting Trump do what he will. If he chooses to send nukes to Palestine to end the conflict immediately, that’s on everyone that abstained. If he ends aid to Ukraine and those people die, that’s on everyone that abstained.
If he ends voting, you “won some moral battle” but you’ve all but permanently lost the war against genocide as the most powerful military and weapons on the planet are now in the hands of an authoritarian, raciest, fascist, regime that previously imposed a “Muslim ban” and I’m sure would happily do so again.
There is no hypocrisy here, and it’s disingenuous to imply there is.
You forgot the other scenario. You talk of not having leverage because of a vote, and yet the other choice absolutely has no leverage at all, and possibly makes things even harder to change.
Let me ask this - would you recommend not voting for either President, but voting on the rest of the ballot? Because telling people to not vote usually implies don’t show up at all, and that is part of why nothing changes. Local and state representation can matter more than the President.
Re: your question, I recommend that people consider Palestinians full humans and work backwards from there. I cannot prescribe much more than that outside of recommending they also challenge the omnipresent racist narratives used to manufacture consent for this genocide. That enough to begin a political education.
I don’t really care how an individual decides to check their electoral box, I care about your normalization of genocide and application if lesser evil logic in service of a fucking genocide. If some person wants to vote for some loser for Congress, have at it. But let this moment of genocid apoligeticss awaken you politically and to begin challenging these narratives that led you down this path. Read and learn and understand why genocide is in the table, and no it is not because AIPAC is a big donor. Biden was being real when he said if Israel didn’t exiat they would need to invent one.
You forgot the other scenario. You talk of not having leverage because of a vote, and yet the other choice absolutely has no leverage at all, and possibly makes things even harder to change.
I haven’t said anything like, “not having leverage because of a vote”. The relevance of leverage is that the entire premise of y’all’s framings is that your role is to cheerlead your corronated genocidal candidate and accept anything they do, at least up to genocide. You throw away any concept of your own ability to make demands or organize and subordinate yourself to a genocidal political class. It makes you actively work against those who build leverage as well, you try to sheepdog them back into your self-defeating mindset.
So, having thrown away any real political analysis for building and using power, your vote is really reduced to a reflection of your personal morality. And that morality? To look at Palestinians as subhuman.
Re: harder to change, your electoral logic is already self-defeatjng. What do you think you are changing when your electoral logic is, “fall in line vite blue no matter who” including fucking genocide. Who would ever take you seriously? You think they’re going to do anything to “win your vote”? Genocide apologist, they know they already have it. You announced you were giving it to them free of charge, that you will tolerate anything they do and still vote for them, and are actually pressuring others to do the same on their behalf.
You have thrown away any semblance of power or influence, and that is already within the limited confinea of electoralism. We all know that folks who think this way aren’t out there working against the party in alternative organizations.
It amuses me how rational you think you are while simultaneously missing the point. The gop will collapse, and then the dems will be the right wing party that they want to be. And the fight will begin anew. Harris shift to the right is a fine demonstration of this.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. When would the GOP collapse? Dems of course want to move right, there is no capitalist draw to the left, if you can call it a left. They would love to be able to manage their party without a “left” flank to handle and pivot fully to nationalism.
Does refusing to vote stop your family from being executed?
When you cease being part of the execution squad itself it becomes much easier to fight them.
Probably not. But it doesn’t include your consent at the very least.
Maybe you’re a perfectly objective person who can still vote for your families execution. But I think most people would struggle with it, if they’re being truly honest with themselves.
It boils down to if you think any admin will ever change how the US deals with Israel. And if that’s true, then how does change happen? Maybe if the rest of the world pushes against the US? Other countries are having their own struggle with any change suggested being labeled as a convenient antisemitism. This is a huge US problem, but not JUST a US problem. And I know OP didn’t want to get into the politics of it, but it’s hard to avoid when that’s exactly what it is, politics while people die and other people try to object and question it but get stomped down for doing so.
Does it? Or does it boil down to whether or not you are willing to rubber stamp the death of your loved ones.
When it’s theoretical gamesmanship people like you are more than willing to act like dispassionate chess masters but I have a hard time believing that if it was your family getting killed you would be so cavalier.
I knew I’d get downvoted by some for asking how to arrive at some solution with the given dilemma we’re in. Maybe some people don’t want to fix it.
Because the only actual solutions violate us law to even talk about, and lemmy is subject to us law.
Yeah! If you don’t vote, nobody becomes president!
The system marches on with or without your input.
Sounds like a good reason to work on opposing the system and thinking of your vote as a minor expression of your personal morality. And I would hope that personal morality draws the line at supporting genocide.
Does it?
Does your action help Gaza?
No.
So any moralizing based on that is wrong.
My actions? They certainly do, yes.
But you have deflected. Are you afraid of what I said?
Some people think the trolley problem is just a funny template.
Some people think it’s the height of political thought and a sufficient salve for supporting genocide.
Was that why people couldn’t vote for Hillary?
Or Kerry?
Or Gore?
It’s always something with people’s excuses for letting things get worse and feeling smug about it. This is worse than usual - but the system hasn’t changed, and your inaction still makes things worse. Y’think open American fascism is gonna make anything better?
Your questions don’t make sense.
Do you think that the people overinvested in trolley problem electoral logic vote shaming are the ones that didn’t vote for Hillary? You seem to be confused about who gets gung-ho about that kind of stuff.
I get the sense that you were just searching for phrases you feel comfortable with but didn’t know how to put them together in any kind of coherent way.
Gore won the popular vote and the electoral college. Kerry wasn’t voted for because more than 80% of democrats fully supported the w bush admin.
Clinton was a genocidal monster, as she has always been.
We e had open American fascism since the 1980s, we just invested tens of billions into things like project mockingbird to eliminate realization amongst most the population.
Obama dropped an average of 60 bombs every day on the middle east and north africa during his presidency.
The US isn’t a democracy, and it’s elections are nothing but theatre. I recommend asking about this on lemmygrad or hexbear also.