“Yes don’t vote at all to get rid of fascism”
There’s two sides to this argument, and one is wrong and the other is right.
One says “Both sides do it, so it’s okay that my side does it.”
The other says “Your side does it. A few on my side do it, too. But it doesn’t matter, we should stop both sides from doing it.”
“It happens on both sides! you don’t condemn it on your side, isnt that hypocritical?!”
“I… Actually condemn everyone doing it and I think me and you should look for and support people who don’t support this heinous thing.”
“…”
“So, do you condemn the people on your side doing it as wel-”
“But look at this person who has done it on your side!”
Both sides’d themselves into proto-fascism. And taking us along for the ride.
Fucking morons.
Why are you blaming leftists for Trumps win? We make up like 1% of the population, tops. You should instead point the finger at Republicans for voting for him. Or the Dems for running a totally weak and ineffectual campaign. (Or how about the oligarchs who only want to divide us so that they can rob us blind?)
Absolutely. Trump only goes more insane. At least with Kamala we would have had a chance to push left policies, and they wouldn’t be going directly to fucking fascism, unlike t-Rump.
I always just post this article.
Literally the first fucking sentence.
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said Washington will continue to pressure Israel and other players in the Middle East to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza
Nah, delete this
Difficult to vote between genocide and genocide. At least with one you punished the other candidate for it.
“both sides”= a disengenious comment by conservative mainly also uses the same thing to say thier not as bad.
“Both sides” also used by liberals to tell you it doesn’t matter they voted for genocide because trump will do the same
Funny words coming from the fake “progressive” that claimed boths sides and sat at home or threw away a vote.
both sides is primarly used by conservatives, 100% of the time, lol. its pretty obvious even on reddit. thier talking points often are right wing in nature and pretty disengeniously disguised. i have never seen a “liberal” if there is anything left of center right in america, say that at all.
Maybe there would be more than Side A and Side B if we had voting reform and Democrats didn’t systematically sue third-parties off the ballot.
People (not just authoritarians) criticize Side A because they have way more tallies than most have been led to believe. Everybody who pays any amount of attention knows that Side B has a lot of tallies. What good comes out of specifically pointing out the tallies of Side B when literally everybody on non-conservative social media is blasted with the knowledge of those tallies? If you want somebody to preach to the choir or inform you about Side B’s tallies, just ask. If you think people paying attention to or being informed about Side A’s tallies is dangerous and harmful, just say so.
Side A tolerates third-world exploitation (labor, resources, goods) that the US economy still relies on, they tolerate the US economy still relying on slavery and child slavery, they tolerate or support US imperialism and regime change, they refuse to address or come up with solutions for the fresh water crisis (by 2030, demand will exceed supply by 40%), they refuse to properly address many issues that the US people face (the economy, the housing crisis, the health care crisis, etc.), they support harmful policies like fracking, they have allowed corporations/et. al to go out of control under their power, and they generally have not advocated for strong regulation and protections for the American people. Yes, Side B is undesirable, but Side A is insufficient.
If Side A’s hands are always tied in a two-party system, then they should impeach the bad actor, push voting/election reform and term limits, and hold fair and democratic primaries and elections. Side A not propping up extreme right-wing candidates (like Trump) and telling the media to take them seriously would be nice, too.
1/3 of Americans don’t vote and plenty of people only voted Kamala because they didn’t want Trump (and there are other factors than Gaza, misogyny, and Jill Stein voters at play to explain why people didn’t come out to vote for her). Plenty of people probably don’t want Trump (or anybody like him) if they’ve been paying any attention and didn’t fall for the propaganda.
Side A would get bonus points for not alienating progressives, for supporting the loosening of requirements for ballot access (and stop engaging in lawfare to restrict ballot access), and for supporting fair and inclusive debates on public property where they would have to address perspectives and topics that are potentially uncomfortable or inconvenient for them.
I realize there are plenty of unserious actors who run for president (like Kayne West) who would try their best to poison open debates and abuse expanded ballot access, but there has to be some fair mechanism to filter (openly racist and insane) people like him out. Perhaps a competency test of sorts with independent observation would be appropriate.
And I realize a lot of people find Jill Stein to be harmful (and individuals like her), but maybe we shouldn’t arrest her (or any other presidential candidate) and put her in a black site, shackling her to a chair for 8 hours, because she wanted to be present at the presidential debate?
This is an unprecedented time for the American people, with human rights and due process in jeopardy. We are facing multiple serious crises with no solutions or progress in sight - voting and election reform, in addition to term limits, are all urgent and necessary.
I don’t care if you want to vote for Side A no matter what — we can only suppress criticism and stay in denial of major issues for so long before (e.g.) the fresh water crisis hits us and humanity is completely and utterly unprepared.
I appreciate the depth of your response. You’re right, critiquing Side A doesn’t mean endorsing Side B. It means demanding better from those who claim to represent us. The meme calls out false equivalency, but that shouldn’t silence legitimate concerns about the system itself.
It’s like this: if the house is on fire, I’ll vote to put out the biggest flame, but I’m also going to ask why the fire keeps spreading, and who’s refusing to fix the wiring. Reform isn’t a distraction; it’s how we stop the next blaze before it starts.
Thanks for adding a more nuanced layer to the conversation.
There’s also the fact that both sides support capitalism, which is an evil ideology that has killed more people than communism ever did. Like for real, capitalism kills 10 million people every year just through starvation and withholding lifesaving medication. That means that every decade capitalism kills more than even the highest estimates of communism’s total headcount over the last 100 years (which, btw, those estimates include Nazis killed in WW2).
Hey cockhead, look up the fucking holodomor, and don’t just read the denialist BS.
Or the Katyn Massacre.
Or the Blagoveshchensk Massacre.
Or the Kyiv Massacre.
Or the Amur River Massacre.
I can go on, if you’d like?Ok great, you can name a bunch of the events that make up the alleged 100 million deaths caused by communists. That doesn’t take away from the fact that capitalist governments have FAR more blood on their hands.
And we can debate back and forth on the historicity of the events you named, but you should at least know that the Holodomor was literally coined by a self-proclaimed fascist to try and conflate Nazi crimes with Soviet errors.
Republicans also use 3rd party as a spoiler and to siphon off D voters too.
There were a bunch of stories of Republicans helping Cornel West’s campaign last year to act as a spoiler.
Whether they use them intentionally or not, we need voting reform. In the 2024 election, third-parties barely made a dent — they weren’t a spoiler.
FPTP is exactly why third-parties can be a “spoiler”. There are plenty of valid alternative voting systems to explore that are way more fair and democratic.
And it doesn’t sound very democratic of the Democratic Party to repeatedly and systematically restrict ballot access through lawsuits. Ballot access is hard enough for third-parties to achieve in most states.
its well known Republicans have funded 3rd parties to do this, not all of them but enough that its suspicious. its not all of them.
Does third party count then? One bar is a bar
Man fascists are delusional , scratch a liberal and all that…
Can we just stop having this discussion? It’s so boring. Both sides misrepresent the other. Tankies are stupid. Also nobody is a tankie. The Biden administration sanctioned a genocide. Every other US president is a war criminal. This discussion never goes anywhere.
So you propose ignoring the propaganda and hope it’ll go away? Doesn’t sound like a very good plan.
You mean the two party system propaganda?
What propaganda are you even talking about? It sounds like you’re trying to continue a discussion by ignoring the comment that says the discussion is pointless.
“both sides are the same” for example. Do you really need me to list all the propaganda they repeat? Just go to .ml or grad and you’ll see. The discussion is not pointless because ignoring them and not responding to their bullshit isn’t gonna work.
Leftists: Maybe we shouldn’t fund genocide and perhaps the average worker should be able to afford to put food on their table
Liberals: HOW DARE YOU PROMOTE YOUR RADICAL TANKIE AGENDA, DONT YOU KNOW THE GDP AND STOCK MARKET ARE GOING UP WHICH MEANS THE ECONOMY IS GOOD SO STOP COMPLAINING. IN FACT THE POLITICANS DONT EVEN NEED TO GIVE YOU ANYTHING BECAUSE THEY DESERVE YOUR VOTE, NEVER BLAME THE SYSTEM, NEVER ASK FOR CHANGE AND NEVER THINK ABOUT WHO PULLS THE STRINGS
Straw men are so easy, aren’t they?
I mean this is literally a strawman post so
I mean the meme itself is a strawmen too
Ah but you see its making fun of people with wrongthink™.
Not especially. Many groups of people, conservatives and leftists and “centrists” alike, love to suggest the parties are equal. I’ve heard it in real life. I’ve heard it online. All over reddit when I was still on it and lemmy even now.
Though I wouldn’t especially attribute the logic to tankies, so in that way, perhaps
god tier politics challenge: ask a blue dem to name the last time the Ds did something the opposite to what the Rs have done, and was actually good for the average American
(Not proposed, mind you, but did)
Prominent leftists I know argue that democrats dont deliver meaningful change but they still encourage people to vote. they say dems go harder against progressives than they do against republicans. And I agree with them.
Not voting does nothing. It doesn’t deliver meaningful change. It doesn’t help. Doesn’t fix.
There’s a lot to lose by not voting. It’s a privilege to vote and run for office, and as a Republic, it’s people’s civic duty to use it.
If you don’t like it, running for election yourself, organizing, unionizing, those are the strongest methods to realistically to fight back. Revolution rarely comes as long as people are moderately comfortable — and that’s the only other option.
For presidential, there’s only 2 options. But if you go down to local level, third parties can be viable.
Only just over 60% of democracies go back to democracy after being authoritarian, and I have never been one to play with gambling the odds
Ofc it’s a straw man! It’s at least so vague and free from annotation that the only way it works at all is for the reader to apply there own.
That was entirely based on my interactions with liberals, yes I was acturally called a Tankie for caring about basic human dignity
Go outside and interact with actual people.
Usually when talking to people irl I get called woke
Wait I’m lost, are we talking foreign invasions done by the US vs foreign invasions done by China? Or the number of victims of Hamas vs the victims of the IDF? What are we counting here? Military bases abroad?
What are we counting here?
Evil policies supported by democrats vs evil policies supported by republicans
what evil polices do dems support that the republicans don’t?
There have been many at various times, and it also depends on your values, obviously. It also depends on whether you’re looking at things in specific times as opposed to generally.
There have been many times when many mainstream Democrats were pro-censorship but most Republicans were not.
Then there are other situations that I think are edge cases and therefore interesting. For example, Obamacare did make life better for real numbers of Americans, but it also guaranteed that we wouldn’t be looking at universal healthcare for a few more decades, if ever. And that was a law pushed for and passed by Democrats. Of course you could argue that it’s better than nothing, maybe it was, but medical debt is far worse now than it ever has been, and predictably so. So then you wonder why Democrats pushed for it, and we all know the answer to that, corruption. Of course they would say that it’s the best they could do, but is that even true? We’ll never find out, cuz they didn’t try.
So how do you rate rate these gray area situations? Things that are better than nothing but worse than a lot, but the politicians are only voting for them because they are corrupt.
So can you name a few?
Policies can be checked on both sides
Sure, but on average when some self proclaimed leftist’s opening is “Democrats did a bad thing” in a vacuum my immediate assumption is they’re a campist/tankie, accelerationist, or a rightwing psyop and my instinct is to immediately challenge them (most of the time… sometimes its me critiquing the dems)
Sometimes it turns out they’re giving an earnest critique but usually not.
What in the word salad are you talking about.
Leftists say funding Israel’s war crimes is bad. Check mark in both columns.
That’s not a critique of democrats, that’s a critique of a portion of democrats and all of republicans.
It’s a critique of the democrats that were in the running for president
Who made you the arbiter of another person’s earnestness? Can you read minds? And if you’re the one criticizing the Dems, does someone else take over?
I’m the arbiter of who I trust is arguing coherently or in good faith and I am ultimately not trusting of the average internet poster by default.
I’ve been arguing on dedicated internet debate spaces for a very very large portion of my life and I have a good eye for when someone isn’t worth being taken seriously.
I’ll take your word for it.
Talking about how some people deny or justify the horrendous things done by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim Dynastie, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Honecker, Guevara, Ho Chi Min, and so on and all their helpers, because others also did horrendous things and both have to be called out for it. Justification of unneccesary murdering shows you are in favor for that which is unacceptable
Are the people justifying these things in the room with us?
If the room is .ml, yes.
Who killed more Asians: US or Mao?
Hamas are arguably a gift for Israel.
If we take “kill” to mean like manslaughter through poor policy and famine, probably Mao, by an order of magnitude. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’re thinking about, because that’s kind of a silly comparison. It’s like asking “who killed more Americans, Mao or the US”, to which the answer is both obvious and completely uninteresting.
So I’m gonna take it to mean “murder”, like the killing of landlords during the cultural revolution. And then it’s actually kind of close, and I’m not sure who’s killed more Asians. So the most liberal estimates for Mao there are 7 million, but the range is pretty big. The most conservative estimates put him at 2 million.
Let’s look at the US’ kill count. I know of bombing campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Respectively, the ranges here are 300k-2M, 1.5M-3.1M, 80k-350k, 50k-150k. So that’s a range of 1.9M-5.6M. Then there’s the suppression of the movement for independence in colonized phillipines, which adds 200k, and Afghanistan, 250k. So that puts us at 2.5M-6M for the US to 2-7 for Mao.
It should be noted that I’m not counting indirect deaths via training and arming dictatorships (if someone hands an assassin a gun, and the assassin kills your mother, the first person is not a murderer, but they are culpable in some way. If we add these, you get Timor, and the murder of leftists in Indonesia in the 60s, among others, which adds another 1-1.5M to the US count.
So I guess it’s kind of close. I gotta say, I’m a little surprised, I always thought Mao was much worse, but the US is a strong contender.
Woah! We skipped over the Pacific theater of WWII entirely it looks like.
Also skipping all MidEast action, but that can be considered a different tally for purposes of this exercise.
But realistically we should also have approximately similar timeframes for both- otherwise we just inflate US counts artificially.
You’re welcome to include Iraq, Iran, South America, Africa, Gaza, Turkish Kurds, and so on. You’re welcome to restrict to some arbitrary timeframe, you’re welcome to exclude indirect fatalities. Ultimately it’s a fairly futile exercise. But I do know that if we restrict to the period including the invasion of Vietnam by China and onward, the US “wins” very, very comfortably.
And I object to your use of the word artificial. These are human lives that were snuffed out for the sake of greed. These were people, like your father, your mother, your friends. There’s nothing artificial about these numbers.
That’s a good reply. 😁
Thank you. 🙂
It’s only a gift if you get it for free. Israel funded Hamas to make themselves look more sympathetic.
Israel got a good R.O.I.
Hard disagree.
Gaza was under siege by Israel, but it was coping.
Hamas then did their stupid attack on Putin’s 71st birthday, inflicting relatively insignificant damage to Israel;
but it was an excuse that Israel used/is using for the current bulldozing of Gaza (and, IIUC, more of the West Bank).
Perhaps when the Riviera has been fully developed, Netanyahu should send the leaders of Hamas some gift baskets.
The world is turning against Israel. Netanyahu is headed for a jail cell.
IIUC, 50 years ago, the UN GA passed a motion that Zionism was racism.
Did that scare the people of Israel?
I predict that Israel will still have relations with much of the world as dealing with Israel is more profitable than dealing with Arabs in Golan, West Bank, and Gaza; and Netanyahu won’t go to jail, particularly as his 80th birthday is less than 60 months away.
There’s those who commit unintended mistakes, then there’s those who give in to the temptation of behaving badly in their moments of weakness, and then there’s those who can’t wait for any given opportunity to behave maliciously and justify it by saying they aren’t the only ones doing it.
Hey, don’t judge me for commiting ethnic cleansing! Hitler did it as well, after all! And that one single bad apple in your group is mildly racist as well, so you’re no better!
Another classic:
Me: gives my definition of tankie Tankie: so <name of leftist who doesnt match the given definition> is a tankie too?
And ofc: Shunning a dictatorship and pointing out their horrible doing, means you obviousely cant be left, nooo you must be a libertarian or fascist.
And one of my favorit tankie talking points: "Democracy is when you have to be approved by the government in order to even get on a list. That you can either vote for the state party or “no”, like it was in east germany, and 99.4% voted for the state party but then suddenly after the dictatorship fell, 4 years later they dropped down to 16.4 %. aah yes seems legit. Truely a grand democracy.
People who refuse to vote when there is a clearly superior option deserve whatever the greater evil brings forth when they win.
People who voted for the lesser evil is still voting for evil
“I would proudly vote for Hitler if slightly to the right of Hitler was on the ballot”. Good fucking job, you’re voting for Hitler. If you vote for Hitler you also deserve slightly to the right of Hitler.
Exactly
Given that you can act (in this case vote), your hands are more dirty permitting the worse evil to win through inaction.
You don’t get to clean your hands of things when you have the power to act to effect the outcome.
So saying “People voted for evil” is a selective self-benefiting myopia. Vote abstainers are not virtuous, they are a narcissists.
And people who didn’t vote for the lesser evil could have helped avoid the greater evil, but chose not to.
And not voting is the greatest evil.
Lol. You sweet summer child.
Even when there isn’t a clearly superior option; there’s no excuse to not vote in the U. S. when the right to vote is such a pivotable portion of your history. We are barely over a half century away; only a mere 60 years. Unconscionable.
If voting is a right, then surely not voting is also a right. You seem to be confusing it with the word “responsibility.”
Considering I never said that one doesn’t have the right to not vote, I don’t believe I am; but you are correct that I consider it a responsibility.
Non-voters are beneath Trump supporters in my opinion. They’re the lowest of the low. A complete failure to understand their civic duty that a ton of people died to allow them to have. At least Trump supporters get involved. In the worst, dumbest possible way, but involved nonetheless.
On the one hand, corporatist party, on the other, literal fascists. Yes, clearly there is no superior option.
You seem to be deriving meaning unstated in my comment.
Then maybe vote for a third party.
I simply cannot grasp why some people believe voting 3rd party in a presidential election isn’t one of the dumbest possible things you can do in life.
Like, beyond the fact that the 3rd party candidate with the most votes in 2024 got a whopping HALF OF A SINGLE PERCENT of the total votes cast, meaning a 3rd party literally cannot win, there’s still the reality that even if they did win, no 3rd party has A SINGLE MEMBER IN CONGRESS, so if a 3rd party presidential candidate actually won, they wouldn’t be able to do shit, because they’d have literally ZERO allies in Congress.
I’m pretty sure anyone voting 3rd party for president has absolutely no clue how our government works. They have no concept of the reality they live in.
I simply cannot grasp why some people believe voting 3rd party in a presidential election isn’t one of the dumbest possible things you can do in life.
You might want to say that to Michiganders who voted for Stein (and Oliver) because of Gaza and the US presence in the Middle East.
The 2024 Presidential election isn’t the only one in US history: there have been 57 others.
Trump had few allies in Congress before 2016, but now members are the Republican caucus are falling all over themselves to curry favour from him.
I’m pretty sure anyone voting 3rd party for president has absolutely no clue how our government works. They have no concept of the reality they live in.
You are so correct—as members of the herd generally are. I like people who resort to exaggerations, over generalizations, and distortions.
A vote for a third party in presidential is not a vote.
It is a vote, and over 1.5 million Americans (excluding those for RFK) made such votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election#Results
IMO, progressives (who’s not too bothered by Stein’s cozying up to Russia a bit) from California, most of New England, DC, Maryland, Hawaii, or Washington (state), and yet yammer on about how bad third parties are because they split the Democrat vote, are probably stupid, or at least ignorant, and should give some of the time they spend watching CNN or Vaush to reading election stats.
how bad third parties are because they split the Democrat vote, are probably stupid, or at least ignorant, and should give some of the time they spend watching CNN or Vaush to reading election stats.
Hey, I don’t need to comment because you said it all for me.
Election stats? You ever hear the phrase “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”
Stats on their own given a poor analysis of an average joe/jane can mislead just as much if not more than a talking head can.
The core fact remains that voting for a third party under a first past the post system is risking permitting the greater evil to win.
Yes, I think it’s from Twain.
I backed my assertions with stats, however poor you think they are as analysis.
What do yo back up your assertions with, other than lame DNC, CNN, and Vaush talking points?
Aka “have the day you voted for”.
Using the term “tankie” while defending a party carrying out a modern day holocaust is quite something.
Defending and arguing that the two parties aren’t the same isn’t the same thing. Just check out last week’s news involving trump. Just last week. And then multiply that by 50. Nobody said the democrats are good. Just that the republicans are 10 times worse, that’s all.
When Democrats win next election they will spend the whole election carrying on Trump’s policies and therefore normalizing them. Republicans go farther right, people like you say that’s proof they’re worse and we should back the Democrats, Democrats win and do all the same policies and therefore normalize it, which then allows Republicans to go farther right.
while defending a party carrying out a modern day holocaust
Oof. You should really think twice before posting a comment this dumb. There’s a delete option. Do yourself a favor and use it.
holocaust deniers should not bother replying because they will just get the instant block
