“Every previous president would have ended it by now.”
“Biden literally couldn’t do worse.”
Donald Trump is Genocide at home and abroad.
Joe Biden is “only” Genocide abroad, and probably less of it.
Therefore, a vote for Joe Biden is a Vote against genocide.
No, it doesn’t matter that he’s an active participant in the apparatus that’s creating the genocide, because if he’s in office there’s less genocide. Which is the important part, and pretending otherwise is sophistry. If you abstain from voting, you are increasing the likelihood of more genocide and if you discourage others from voting, you are an active participant in the overall social apparatus that is probabilistically increasing the amount of genocide.
The utility calculation is dead simple: more votes for Biden in key states makes more genocide less likely, and discouraging people from voting for Biden makes more genocide more likely. Therefore, discouraging people from voting for Biden is a pro-genocide strategy and voting for Biden in battleground states is an anti-genocide strategy. You should vote for Biden unless you live in a solid blue state, and even then it’s not a bad idea.
TLDR: if you encourage people to not vote for Biden, that’s supporting genocide. Accelerationism never works for us.
Basically just the trolley problem, but the tracks are already aligned to killing fewer people. There is a vote on whether to divert the trolley to the track which would kill more people or stay the course. Is there blood on your hands if you abstained and convinced others to abstain which resulted in a win for changing tracks?
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.
– John Stuart Mill
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Not working on dark mode :'( is it false equivalence?
Straw man, but I suppose that would apply as well.
He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.
Wow this part is great
Be careful, you might have the 5 real users of Lemmy.ml use their 500 accounts to harass you for posting this.
I just blocked the whole instance when they removed my comment pointing out that Al Jazeera might not be unbiased in the matters of Hamas vs Israel, because they are funded by Qatar who also shelter Hamas leaders.
And even Al Jazeera think Trump would be an even bigger fucking disaster for Palestine.
Wait, we can block whole instances ourselves? I think that might be my vest option.
Yeah, as long as you’re on 0.19 I think, which most instances will be by now.
Thank you for this!
I use Sync, and I can but I don’t know if it’s a function of the app or of the Lemmy platform.
I use voyager. I will be looking more into this function. My original thinking was that I would have to switch over to an instance already blocking .ml or start my own.
I am just tired of people getting away with being explicitly pro-terrorism just because they tell other users they are trans, as if that made sociopathy and psychopathy OK.
It is indeed a feature on Voyager (hello fellow Voyager user!) and you can find it in the filter settings near the bottom.
Thanks for this! Just blocked them! I think I just solved 100% of the harassment issue I have been having with that instance.
Idk how much i want to do this… ive been followed around by trolls for being vocal, but i wonder if it’s not a good idea to know what their talking points are. Not to mention the possibility of good daith youngins being attracted to their stink needing to hear something not advantageous to hostile foreign powers.
Also i like linux memes. Lots of linux shit is on .ml bc of it supposedly being sooper extra privacy oriented.
Don’t be thinking you can change them. Post something against groupthink and it just gets silently removed. There’s no discussions to be had.
And I don’t think any amount of blocking can get you away from Linux memes without just leaving Lemmy completely.
Haha u speak truth! I was blocked from world news.ml right quick. First day or two on lemmy. I was calling out shills for spreading russian/chinese talking points. Shame on me, i suppose!
To think i jumped ship from reddit to escape the bans from the same following the api changes and thought id find refuge here.
They go after leftist spaces in particular with the shit u have seen. They know what theyre doing. That’s why i think the pushback is so necessary. SY what they will, truth is truth, even in the post-truth era. It must be echoed, bans and whines from shills and tankies be damned.
You think that hasn’t already happened? 😂
Yeah I dunno, I’m still not going to vote for him. Just goes against my conscious
Cool I’ll tell that to my trans friends when Trump tried to pass Floridas laws federally
At least your “conscious” is clear
Cool, when you and your friends band together and vote for someone who’s not apart of the war machine, then you can ride your high horses
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Your solution to losing is to now bandwagon with “the lesser of two evils”? Why wouldn’t you abandon that party entirely? There’s more than two choices.
They’ll kill and take away the rights of people who aren’t you though…yay…
To top it off, you go on to bash those who think that’s not a good choice
The irony.
But don’t listen to me, I’m the stupid one.
At least you recognize it.
There’s two choices. Protests votes in the general election in the system we have today are at best no votes, but are often just votes for the other candidate. Your moral high ground is nothing and smugly voting third party doesn’t actually DO anything right now.
How else would you go about removing the two parties from power?
I don’t think continuing to support the party with a vote is really the answer here.
There’s more than two choices the same way there’s more than two choices for calling a coin. You can call a side. You can call for the edges. You can call that it balances diagonally. You can even call for a unicorn to magically appear over one of the sides. The chances are so slim that you might as well have chosen no side at all, but it could happen, and it is a choice.
Personally, anyone that says there are more than two parties has no idea how statistics and/or voting works, or they don’t really care about the outcome.
They can take it up with the DNC. I have no guilt
Nah we can take it up with you, because the choice is Biden or Trump, not Biden, Trump, or time travel. Pull your head out of your ass - your little protest vote doesn’t matter now, but your ACTUAL vote does.
Go ahead. Take it up with me then. Hope it helps. I doubt it will.
Same strategy as you take towards social good, then: being fucking worthless
Is this helping your trans friends yet?
Your conscience can be a good indicator that something immoral is happening, but it’s certainly not infallible. While I think abstaining is a worse choice, the most egregious course of action being discussed is actively arguing against voting, which is actively harmful and supports multiple genocides including the one ostensibly being denounced by the people who act as such.
I think everyone should vote. I’m just voting third party in this case
This is the only sane answer in here
I’d love to see your solution to the trolley problem 🤣
RIP those track-people.
I voted third party too once. I couldn’t in good conscience vote for either major party. I was living in Florida, and voted for Nader in 2000.
I’ve not been so naive since.
Did I not vote for the killing of children in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did I not vote for the curtailing of medical research? Did I not vote for the hundreds of millions that will die due to climate change?
Learn from my mistake. Because the lessons you learn from yours may not be applicable given what will be lost by the time you realize what you’ve done.
I hear you. And I appreciate your candor and politeness, which can be hard to ask for sometimes.
I’m still planning on voting third party. I’ve voted dem every time since I could vote, I feel like I gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere. But! By golly, if he says he’s going to cut some of the money out of the police, and maybe tighten some things up in the Middle East, he’ll have me again. And he’s got months to do that! And I’m hoping. But if that effort isn’t made and he focuses on the center-right… I just can’t do it.
You want very reasonable things in a unreasonable system.
Youll either get the status quo as it stands, or you’ll get Dr. Fascismo doing away with free elections on top of an Eastern European genocide courtesy of trumps master, minorities being actively persecuted for just existing, and saying the things youre saying being documented and held against you as thoughtcrimes.
The US is on the cusp of moving past the stain that is rhe baby boomer voting block that insists on unfettered neoliberalism and conservative social policy by and large. Thisd be the time to ensure we dont double down on it.
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Of all of the self diluted mental gymnastics…
it’s literally double speak: war is peace, voting for genocide is antigenocide.
…what?
Do you work for the onion?
If you spend time with real boots-on-the-ground activism to support and prop up legitimate leftist candidates, policies, and parties in advance of election years, then yeah fine I’ll accept your righteous abstaining from voting the general election.
But if your “protest” begins and ends with choosing to not vote the lesser of two evils while you’re not doing anything to actually upend the system, fuck you. Your ideological purity is causing real world harm while you pout and expect some other magical force to swoop in and save you.
Nobody is coming to save you.
Nobody.
Either put in the fucking work and put in the real effort to change things, or fall in line. As is, you’re just in everyone’s way.
Well put. Thing is, I don’t see people who don’t vote going around telling people not to vote. They usually want nothing to do with an election and don’t like to hear about it either. So I always assume that the people who are telling you not to vote are doing it specifically to discredit whoever runs against Trump. Which makes them either MAGA shills or russian trolls. Both equally bad.
To your first point, unsurprisingly, the boots on the ground folks typically are fans of damage control in the system as it stands in the first place. Turns out allowing the authoritarians to have their way is not the way to effect leftward change in the slightest.
I concur. I wasn’t really speaking to the boots on the ground crowd, I was talking to the “standing in the way” crowd.
Dont worry internet stranger, i caught ur drift, but in times like these u can never do without additional clarification/elaboration. I think it helps if the actual leftists take the effort to distance themselves from any efforts that put Dr. Fascismo in the seat of the most powerful nation in the world.
I’m just to figure out why the Hexbear communities are even federated into some Lemmy instances. They are blatantly racist to users.
“False, you can’t be racist to crackkkers. Also calling for nuking an entire hemisphere of the planet will only bring prosperity to everyone.”
-a hexbear or something idk
You forgot to add 10 oversized emojis for good measure!
Shit, and here I am using words to convey my thoughts like a fucking LIB
You’re not going to convince anyone to participate in your game by insulting them. Unfortunately as the party who wants someone else to change their behavior, you have to be the bigger person. If you actually care, ya know.
Sort of this, but also the person who is acting like a crazed extremist shilling for a genocidal maniac is accusing the peaceful abstainers of being MAGA.
Biden moving the Democrat party right and courting rightwing voters is what is disenfranchising liberals.
It is projection in its ultimate form.
Kind of the irony of these situations. People saying “We all need to vote for Biden and if you don’t you’re a STUPID, CRYING BABY” don’t truly want to get people to vote for Biden. If they did they’d have some tact, maybe made their case and discuss the pros and cons of voting for him and hopefully actually get some conversions in rather than just looking down their nose at people.
It’s little different than the evangelical Christian’s who show up to events with big signs saying “GAYS will burn IN HELL!”. They don’t actually want to convert people. If they did they would be so alienating. They just want to scream their position to feel something.
There was an entertaining little exchange here.
Someone misunderstood math and claimed that more people voted “uncommitted” than had voted for Biden in “last year’s” election.
Someone else explained the misunderstanding, and the real explanation (that the “uncommitted” number was higher than Biden’s margin over Trump, not Biden’s total).
The mod of the liberty place replied “This is a false statement and reeks of debatebro. Please remove this from your comment.”
I’ll let the rest speak for itself; exactly what you think happened happened.
As a mathematician, I find that proficiency in the art and self-consistency tend to be correlated.
I understood the math you ass, I just misspoke.
Imagine leaving your safety net to come to another thread and say this
I just … saw this thread lol, it was very bizarre and surprising to see
I haven’t read the discussion in question, and I don’t know you. I am speaking of a trend I noticed that is relevant to what I was told, nothing more.
It wasn’t a misunderstanding, I just misspoke and I already explained that. This is weird.
Ah yes, “misspoke.”
I kid. What you said sounded fine to me actually; you said something wrong, someone called you out, you said “okay you are right” but defended your overall point which I think was pretty legitimate, there was a little hostility from both sides, the end.
I had nothing to do with the conversation btw, I just observed it. But my comment here was more calling out the mod for telling people directly that they needed to revise their comments to be according to his liking, and deleting them when they weren’t, peeking out from behind a fig-leaf of it being because of the hostility instead of the viewpoint that was being expressed.
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Am I being combative? I’m being blunt, a little bit, but IDK how you got from “What you said sounded fine to me” to combativeness. All I meant by putting “misspoke” in quotes was, it wasn’t a typo or something; you very clearly (edit:
misunderstood the math) were wrong and IDK how anybody should be getting mad at someone else coming into it and giving the correct math instead. Doesn’t sound like anyone was coming with any bad intention though, just a little arguing about what’s going on, normal stuff.The deleted comment’s in the modlog; it was:
I provided sources on how they are incorrect. Provide sources supporting their claims or get fucked. And don’t bother with the popularity shit, that isn’t what’s being contested nor is that what the comment says.
Oh, I thought it was a joke so I deleted my comment.
No, I wrote it wrong. I know what a margin is. Sometimes people just don’t write what they mean to say. This is a social media website, not a fucking essay writing class. I feel like you’re trying to gaslight me or something. I know what a margin is, and moved on when my comment was corrected, why can’t you just believe what someone tells you and move on too?
Are you observing me repeatedly trying to move on? Saying, yeah my main disagreement was with the mod in question, all good.
IDK, maybe you’re trying to correct the record on why you wrote the initial statement, in which case fine.
You were “moving on” while simultaneously basically calling me a liar for no reason, and pretending it was a joke…
I live in a swing state and I’m voting third party. It’s not great, but it’s the only thing I can bring myself to do. Between Gaza and Bidens commitment to pour billions of dollars into more cops and more surveillance, I just can’t do it.
If he stepped down or they put someone else up I’d probably be happily voting dem, but they didn’t. It’s a shame. They said themselves that they’re fine to lose some progressive votes if they scoop up 3 or 4 Nikki Haley voters for every progressive lost. I guess I’m one of those. I dunno. I wish it was a better circumstance.
Just say you’re voting for Trump because that is what you’re doing.
You’re just giving yourself deniability to yourself, but no one else is fooled in the slightest. In the general election, a vote for anyone but Biden amounts to a vote for Trump.
Just say you prefer Trump’s approach to Palestine, Ukraine, human rights, women’s health, religious freedom, freedom of speech, gun rights, net neutrality, Healthcare, etc, etc, ect. Just say that.
Actually, I’m voting third party. If I wanted to vote for Trump I would just vote for Trump.
I’m familiar with these coping mechanisms, and any other year I’d tell you to vote your conscience.
This year, a vote against Biden in a swing state is a vote for Trump and it tells me everything about your conscience I need to know.
People think it’s hyperbole because they’ve heard Wolf too many times, but this is about democracy or not.
I suspect you think you’re sending a message to Biden by voting third party. You’re not. You’re just messaging to the rest of society that you want Trump over Biden. It really is that simple. Don’t insult us by pretending it’s not. You are in a fucking swing state.
It’s not a coping mechanism. I simply have an idealogical difference to you. Calling it a coping mechanism insults your own intelligence.
Your ideological difference is that you don’t mind if Trump wins if that means Biden loses.
Nobody is changing a voter’s views on genocide.
Wouldn’t it be better for Biden’s re-election if he stopped the genocide?
No shit it would be better.
I’m not voting against Biden. I’m voting for a third party.
I’ve frequently seen this claim, and similar ones, but it doesn’t really make sense. If not voting for Biden or not voting at all is actually a vote for Trump then his votes outnumber Biden’s by a landslide since ~80 million people don’t vote. So, by this logic, Trump should win and it shouldn’t even be close.
I think most folks can deduce that the intended meaning is that not voting for Biden is a choice that makes it more likely that Trump will win.
Nobody is believing that not voting results in a filled out ballot for trump magically appearing.
Can you imagine the mental gymnastics at play?
In a couple years they’ll be blaming the libs for letting Trump get into power again and starting a more industrial genocide.
What do you believe is the underlying set of values and principles guiding Hexbear?
What do you believe the goals of people on Hexbear are?
Is it possible to analyze the beliefs that lead them to the conclusions they have, so as to better argue against them, than to call them MAGA supporters?
I myself will probably be voting Biden, for transparency, but this meme is just a gross misunderstanding of how disaffected leftists, and Marxists in general, operate, and why.
The creeps on Hexbear aren’t leftists. I’ve never come across a coherent and useful definition of “leftist” that includes them.
Why do you say that? They oppose Capitalism, colonialism, Imperialism, and bigotry. They support Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism. They read Marx, Lenin, and Goldman, and share memes based on Marxist theory.
On what grounds do you decide that they aren’t leftists? Is it because you disagree with their stances, as a presumed leftist, therefore anyone you disagree with cannot be a leftist? Is it because you think they are bad people, and bad people can’t be leftists? Is it just vibes?
What is your coherent and useful definition of leftism? We can compare Hexbear’s stated goals and see if it lines up better with leftism or rightism.
Being a leftist requires one to oppose capitalism.
Leninism is a blatantly capitalist system that pretends otherwise.
Also, they don’t oppose bigotry. Once someone from Hexbear said that Hexbear was more pro-trans than any trans space was, and their fellows seemed to agree with them. Paying lip service to anti-bigotry does not mean one is not an ignorant bigot to the core.
Edit: there are other problems with what you said, but frankly, I’m not going to waste my time addressing every part of the gish-Gallup.
Hexbear is anticapitalist. Like I already stated, they are Marxists and Anarchists, and oppose Capitalism.
Marxism-Leninism is not Capitalist. You don’t have to agree with it being a good idea, or support it, but to pretend that advocating for a worker state and elimination of the bourgeois class is somehow Capitalist is anti-Marxist, not just anti-Lenin.
Hexbear does oppose bigotry. It’s a bannable offense there. Some of the largest trans spaces on Lemmy are on Hexbear, so trans people agreeing that it is a good trans space doesn’t somehow indicate that they are actually pro-bigotry, that’s absurd.
Is it all just vibes from you?
Edit for your Edit: what problems are there with what I’ve said? Do you think a group of right-wingers are reading Marx and supporting trans people for shits and giggles?
What part of refusing to engage with a gish-gallop is difficult to understand?
Let’s talk about one thing: MLs aren’t socialists. And stalinists (the loudest part of Hexbear) definitely aren’t socialists. Capitalism is defined by the employee-employer relationship. MLism enshrines this relationship, and turns the state into a universal employer. That makes MLism a capitalist ideology by definition.
It wasn’t gish-gallop, I had a clear set of questions to ask, to which you ignored.
MLs are Socialists. Stalinists are also Socialists. You do not have to agree with them, in any way, but pretending they are not Socialists is a rejection of Marx himself.
Capitalism is defined not strictly by an employer-employee relationship, but necessarily by Capital production, accumulation, and control via Capitalists in an M-C-M’ circuit of commodity production. A worker state, controlled by the proletariat, is Socialist.
MLism enshrines a worker-state, and a rejection of Capitalism as the basis mode of prodiction. You can agree more with Anarchism, Libertarian Socialism, Syndicalism, Democratic Socialism, and even think MLism evil, all while recognizing it correctly as Socialist.
Have you read Marx? Critique of the Gotha Programme might help you understand Leftism a bit better.
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Im with u, but the HBers apparently came out in force. Hexbear regularly has sided with russia over Ukraine, as well, AKA imperialism.
Cashless, classless, stateless does not align with with the ccp or russia who they continually defend and whose talking points they parrot. The gish gallop u called out is a fave of theirs. Just leaving this here so theres more traces of sanity against them.
Weird, I had this made already for some reason…
Lmao, I had a chat with a couple of these folks. Keep taunting them and burying them when they step out of their echo chambers. The whole “both sides” and “I’m gonna piss away my vote on a 3rd party in 2 party system” schtick couldn’t be any more hollow than it is this year.
Biden sucks. Trump is a blight on this earth. Like it or not, you get those two choices, and the literal fuckin Nazis and the scum that break bread with them are really motivated to get their dictator “for a day” back in.
Its a terrible tagline, “vote for the one that sucks bc anything else endangers democracy,” and i understand that that makes it feel like nothing is changing, but something thats worth hammering home is, do u realize how nonexistent its been in our countrys history that everyone realizes how radical the change we need is?
The efforts to keep voters home/vote third party to spoil their vote are only this amplified bc thats how much it takes to try and keep the fascist party and their shrinking demographic in power. Theres a young generation rising to ascendency… 10 years from now the overton window is going to be remarkably shifted if the those in power hope to stay there. Of course that wont happen if we dont get to have any more free elections…
The sudden “don’t vote biden” push has always felt like astroturf to me. “Divide the opposition” is literally politics 101, but I guess some people really think doing nothing is going to somehow do something.
Oh, and voting third party counts as not voting. You know that, you’re not fucking stupid.
“B-but he was against student loan forgiveness in the 90’s! DONTLOOKATHISRECENTACTIONS”
(based on my observations) Hexbear users’ typical response is absolutely authoritarian, just extreme left flavor of it.
You can’t, however, build a reasonable discourse with an absolutist pro-authoritarian type, no matter how hard you try. And it’s no wonder they are going for the authoritarian representative one way or another.
Id argue its not left at all. Simping for authoritarian regimes from the east that mask themselves behind pretty images/words of workers’ governments doesnt hand the means of production to the working class, and it most certainly implies one is not so very keen on establishing a classless, cashless, stateless society. They call themselves a dictatorship of the proletariat, but all the emphasis goes on the first part.
Word!
Democrats love genocide too much to give it up and improve their poll numbers. Clearly it’s the fault of the voters for not giving democrats the votes they’re owed for simply not being the fascists who they purposely promote to pretend they’re the heroes.
Save democracy by always guaranteeing your vote for the one and only good party that also happens to carry out genocide and fund fascists.
Careful, you’ll cut yourself with that edge.
You must think conformity is the new counterculture. Be careful with that plain mayo, it may be too spicy for you.
Sure bud 👍
I remember meeting a man from Libya at an old job of mine. He was more supportive of Republicans which surprised me . (My initial thought was why would an Arab support Republicans.) He said that Democrats had a stronger tendency to invade other countries. He had a point in that Obama and Hilary absolutely brought upon a Libyan apocalypse but he totally ignored Reagan and both Bushes who are Republicans (who destroyed the Iraqi government).
Though I should stop before it sounds like I’m “both sidings” again.
That’s the thing, democrats and republicans are the same when it comes to many critical problems, stemming from both of them being parties of the rich. Accusations of "both sides"ing is used to shut down any discussions of how the system itself is rotten to the core. Yes, both parties aren’t the exact same but there are enough similarities to show that voting won’t be the solution for a lot of key issues.
The system in the US necessitates one cast their vote tactically instead of emotionally to effect necessary change, and most of these changes bear out only in the long term by design. Because of this, capital interest toils to encourage voters into precisely the opposite behavior; a populace which is driven to make voting decisions by an atomic, emotionally-charged view of a singular candidate’s actions, as opposed to a contextual view of the broader system which enables such actions to begin with, is a populace which is much easier to fragment—and much easier to control.
Meaningful change requires a path to follow, but results by a reformist method alone come painfully slow—again, by the system’s very design. It’s more comfortable to believe that rallying behind a third party advocating radical change is the better way, but power has been consolidated so heavily into the largest two parties that the effectiveness of any others (outside of very specific circumstances) is gutted almost entirely. It has been this way especially since the campaign finance mal-reforms that followed the Bush v Gore race. Abstaining from participation or jumping to a niche cause in protest of atrocities that are occurring now is an understandable sentiment, but in a system tuned to overlook and perpetuate said atrocities it’s missing the bigger picture.
Try not to look at your vote as a wholesale endorsement; look at it instead as a carefully-considered stake in the ultimate goal to tear down the walls which have kept third parties unfairly irrelevant for decades—centuries, arguably. Stake it with the goal of working to reform or abolish unjust systems. Stake it with the goal of laying the groundwork for more radical progressive change in the future.
Despite all I’ve attempted to lay out, if you insist on voting third party anyways, I urge you to find someone to vote for and make that your movement to stand in contrast against reprehensible genocide-enabling. The time for such a nomination is long overdue, and as it stands a candidate does not seem to currently exist in a way capable of capturing the majority of Americans’ votes—especially in time for election day. This means a lot of work needs to be done if that’s your ultimatum to the current situation, I encourage you to start as soon as you are able. Please understand that the third party route is not only victory or bust, but a bust means the genocide gets considerably and immediately worse if you rally too many to your cause who would have cast their vote for Biden otherwise. This outcome has an extremely well-established historical precedent in the United States, having happened multiple times in elections past, and will continue to be a concern unless/until vote tally reforms are adopted. Such are the considerations in US electoral tactics.
