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 😊.
Edit 2: This blew up, it’s a little overwhelming right now but I do intent on replying to everybody that took the time to comment. Just need to get in the right headspace.
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.
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.
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.
This is a fantasy.
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.
You live in a fantasy and sabotage real effort to limit damage in the real world. You are responsible because you can’t swallow your pride. How incredibly selfish of you.
“You are responsible because you can’t swallow your pride. How incredibly selfish of you.”
you guys need to be a bit subtle in the gaslighting effort. where was all this anger for her supporting innocent kids being burned alive. go shout at her rallies to stop being a genocidal two faced hack. else you all are trolls trivialising an ongoing genocide and enabling future ones.
The effort to limit damage in the real world like advocating for a genocider?
Also, please do your best to act in good faith and not make things up about people.
Right now, you have 2 real choices. Every other choice is an effort to change your future choices. You want to push the democrats more left, and so do most of their voters… However your choices right now to effect the genocide are to either vote for someone that’s supporting the genocide or someone who cheers on and suggests more genocide faster. By abstaining, you’re putting yourself in the middle of the choice, which is potentially a worse outcome for Palestinians than making an upsetting choice.
That is the reality of the situation. By refusing to make an unpalatable choice, you’re helping to make a far worse outcome reality.
Does one of those choices include voting for PSL? Because that’s what I’m doing. Or is that not “real”? What if I write it in extra dark ink?
Remember, I said no more fibbing. Were you never taught that lying was wrong?
Maybe that believe that in their hearts but they do the exact opposite of what they should be doing to achieve that all the time.
Hmm PSL isn’t doing either sorry buddy looks like I managed to reach through the ether and do something other than vote for genociders.
PS the candidate you are defending is currently an active part of the genocide.
Remember, no fibbing!
Actually I am simply not voting for either genocidal candidate and spend my time doing meaningful work against it. And sometimes reminding liberals that they should not support genocide, since apparently they need to be told that.
There is no worse outcome than genocide.
Show me any examples of them limiting damage
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I am repeating myself because the notion that the least evil option available is the best one, that the lesser evil if you will is preferable to the more evil one, is axiomatic, that is, it’s a basis one takes when constructing a moral framework, not a consequence of one that can be reasoned through. If you do not agree with someone’s moral axioms, then there is simply nothing to debate, you and they are simply operating under mutually incompatible definitions for what is and is not the right thing to do. Restating that in a slightly different way is a way of testing if the axioms we are operating under are truly different, in which case further argument is pointless, or if we merely misunderstood eachother the first time around.
I await your response to what I said. I’m not interesting in watching you masturbate.
You came to the wrong thread then
Your problem is one of timeframes.
You might, though I personally don’t think so, be right on a single election time frame.
They’re definitely right on a timescale spanning multiple elections.
Right now, you are forced to vote for someone committing genocide because people kept choosing the lesser evil in previous general elections, and the party cheats in the primaries.
The situation you’re in, right now, disproves your argument.
You know how you can trick a stupid fucking child into doing what you want by presenting them a false choice of two alternatives you’re happy with? “Do you want to go to bed now or after one more show?”
The difference is that there are real, material differences between the actions the candidates take. It’s not a fair choice, but it isn’t false either, and choosing not to go along won’t give you a better outcome
NO THERE FUCKING AREN’T. And if you believe that, you completely went to brunch when Trump left office and don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
I can say the same about you. Putting “no there aren’t” in all caps and adding profanity and personal insults doesn’t make it more true, but it does make people remember that a block button exists for the kind of person that uses things as disgusting as a genocide as an opportunity to troll. I do not think that anyone who both has paid any attention to the past 8 years and is arguing in good faith can possibly support that conclusion.
Deeply maddening watching people who materially support genocide complaining about people “playing the genocide card”
And you think there’s a difference between you and the fascist party?
You’re literally simping FOR THE WORST CRIME IT IS POSSIBLE TO COMMIT!
It’s not a card.
It’s obvious you would use the same style arguments as a Democrat in the 1880s.
I am not simping for anything. I firmly believe Trump would be far worse for genocide (he has literally said that he thinks Israel should “finish the job” with regards to the war in Palestine, and when he was president, he was incredibly supportive of Netanyahu, and proposed a “peace plan” that was actually just carving up Palestine into a bunch of little pieces that could never constitute a viable state and giving Israel control of the paths between, effectively wishing to formalize Israeli control of the entire region) The only reason anyone can suggest he wouldnt be without getting laughed out of the room is that he happened to get lucky enough to not have the current escalation of Israel’s genocide happen during the time when he was president. From my point of view, any action that brings him closer to getting back in power is asking to throw gasoline on a genocidal fire, and saying that one’s motive for doing so is being against genocide is sickening in the kind of way that it would be if you saw someone suggest that Hitler should have won ww2 because of all the evil stuff that Winston Churchill was responsible for. Consider for a second what people making your argument look like, from that lens.
Fucking press the goddamn enter button. Do you have any idea how painful quoting you to respond on a phone is?
What do you think the situation is now?
What practical changes do you think that Trump will make that could speed things up?
What actions do you actually think Biden is taking to slow things down.
This is the wrong analogy.
The analogy that you are arguing is to vote for Gregor Strasser as an moderating influence on the Nazi Party.
Consider for a second what people like making your argument look like, from that lens.
I’m impressed you are aware of the intentional genocide of 4 million Indians caused by Churchill. I am not impressed by your apparent lack of awareness of other lessons from that same time period.
I’m also not impressed by people that believe they can protect their outgroup by backing someone happy committing genocide.
The Democratic party has long signaled it would be happy to throw out the T to protect the LGB. Those that think it would stop there need to re-read this poem:
There is quite a lot Trump could do to speed things up. He could, for one thing, send American troops to assist Israel on the ground; I have concern that he might do such, because Israel has increasingly been dragging other countries in the region into this, notably Iran, and Trump pursued a policy towards that country during his term in office that very well could have led to war had things gone slightly worse. Given his support for Netanyahu, whose government has itself been tempting fate of late by engaging in back and forth missile strikes, and his disregard for the consequences of attacks against Iran, I have serious fears that he might give Israel a green light to pursue a full scale war with that country, by promising to commit US forces in the event of such a thing.
At a lesser degree, he also could simply increase US military aid to Israel beyond the current level, and end what efforts (insufficient by a country mile but still better than their absence would be) have been made by the US to convince Israel to limit its actions, such as the recent threats to cut some of its military aid if Israel does not allow more food aid across Gaza. He appears to actively dislike Muslim populations, as seen by his efforts as president to ban travelers from Muslim majority countries, so it strikes me as rather unlikely that he would do anything, even something basic like that, to assist a Muslim majority country like Palestine against the wishes of one of his allies.
Also for the record, I do not think that I am simply protecting “my outgroup” in opposing him. I am of the view that he, (or more importantly, the fascistic movement that he has grown around him, of which Trump himself is the leader, but which may persist even after he is gone), presents an existential threat not just to myself and those whom I know, but to you, to everyone in the country, to everyone in the numerous countries who he seems actively hostile to (including but not limited to Palestine as I have said, and Iran, as I was saying earlier, and Ukraine), and to a lesser extent, to the future of every single person on this planet. That may sound a bit extreme, but we are talking about making a narcissistic old man showing signs of mental decline and known for lashing out at things that anger him the commander in chief of a nuclear armed state, we are talking about putting someone who does not seem to believe in climate change at the head of the world’s largest economy at a time when getting carbon emissions down is critical to keeping the planet livable in the future, and we are talking about putting the country with the world’s largest military budget in the hands of a person who idealizes fascists, has attempted to maintain power despite a previous election loss, and has a following composed to a large degree of racists and religious zealots.
I am not saying that I worry about what Trump will do as hyperbole, or to justify what the current dem administration has done in arming Israel while it bombs and shoots civilians, I am saying that I worry about what he will do, because thinking about it quite literally keeps me up at night and has quite literally given me actual panic attacks within recent weeks upon seeing the prevalence of his support in polls and among my coworkers.
I do not think the democrats are actually “willing to throw out trans people” the way you seem to suggest at the end there. I dont even think that they are happy with what their “ally” in Israel is doing. I think they are a fragile “everything that isn’t the R’s” alliance of much of the right and what passes for the left here that includes both LGBT people and their allies, and conservative types who never wanted them in their party in the first place but arent quite extreme enough for the republicans, who are sort of mashed together in a broad coalition that as a result has no real collectively agreed upon ideology and doesn’t have the guts to rock the boat by withholding military aid to a country traditionally seen as an ally, even though that country really deserves to have that aid cut right now. Their vague compromises of positions do not really align with mine on many if not most things, especially economic and foreign policy, and I resent that they stay just barely to the left of the republicans to get the support of the left while offering it little but scraps. I do not like them, except maybe a few on the leftmost edge. But we (or at least I, I guess I’ve just assumed you were probably also American if youre invested in our election but I guess with our international influence that doesnt actually mean much) live under a system that guarantees that if they dont win, Trump will, and when he and his cult look so startlingly similar to the fascists of history, just before they succeed in subverting the systems that constrained them, not voting for them is a luxury that I do not think that I or any of us in this country really have.
So what are the other choices?
Just because you can’t stop something doesn’t mean you have to participate in it. But if you wanted to do something about it: these weapons come from this country and they have to get there in trucks traveling on roads to ports that load them on ships. And it’s not like there’s not a value to making genocide come with electoral consequences…
We are discussing voting, though. That’s a bit tangential, because you can vote or not vote and still commit acts of… resistance…
If you otherwise would have voted Dem against the Republicans, who are as bad or worse when it comes to the specific issue you’re punishing the Dems for, you are hurting one group committing genocide by helping one who commits and wants to commit even more genocide.
All under the mistaken belief that by refusing to vote for the group you would otherwise vote for, you will get them to move Left. But if the Dems lose to the VERY right wing party, if the voting shows that Americans favor more right-leaning policies, they would move to gain the votes of the people who actually voted.
The reality is, refusing to vote is still a choice. As long as you are an adult who can legally vote in the US election, you are partly responsible for the results of the election. You don’t get to wash your hands of it. Choosing to abstain because you don’t want to partipate out of moral self-righteousness is saying your soapbox is more important than the lives affected by your choices, from the Palestinians to the Ukrainians, immigrants to LGBTQ. Nobody is more important than your ability to say “I didn’t vote for a party that commit genocide.”
Don’t project your dumb shit on me
wooooooooow no shiiiiiiiiiit
You mean I’m exercising agency right now? You don’t saaaaaaaayyyyyyy.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. “Virtue signalling” you say?
You’re a nazi. You’re giving material support to the perpetrators of a genocide. You’re trash. Diminishing basic morality as a vice just like any other fucking 8chan fascist. Trash.
Smirking fucking nazi invoking “the lives affected by your choices” and “washing your hands” like the worst crime in history isn’t hanging behind you as you say that shit.
You’re fucking trash.
TheDoozer@lemmy.world is not a Nazi, silly. They’re a liberal, and liberals are good, dontcha know?
Because morality is defined by what you believe, not your actions, so of course they’re good. Actively participating in a genocide doesn’t make them evil because they believe the right things.
Not voting is a choice. You can’t not participate in politics.
You can chose not to vote for a party actively committing the literal worst crime in the world.
No you can’t. Because we live under a system where one of them is going to be in power after the election, and every possible voter shares equal responsibility in the outcome.
We either live in a democracy where all votes matter, or we live in an oligarchy where we get to choose from choices presented to us.
Did you vote for Harris in the primary?
Was Biden illegally the only candidate on the ballot in some States where there were other contenders in the primary that met the requirements to be on the ballot?
I’m not morally responsible for things outside of my control in the same way as I’m not responsible for the sins of my father.
You want to try and make an argument that shove responsibility for a genocide that you’re fine with being complicit in, you’re going to need more than 2 sentences.
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What liberal brain rot is this?
Biden is fully engaging with his policy of genociding Palestinians. Harris has said that she will carry on with the policy with absolutely no change.
The fucking dissonance you people walk around with is astounding!
And before you come out with the usual other shit floating around your vacuous head, no, I’m not advocating voting for the shitty pants trust fund rapist.
You people cannot seem to grasp that what is being done in the Levant will be done to you. The DOD had just updated it’s rules so they can use lethal force against you.
It’s coming and you’ll are too fucking partisan to realise that you’re turkeys all voting for Christmas!
Current dead baby count would disagree