If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
Evidence or GTFO.
Netanyahu is clearly just being blackmailed by Putin to intentionally make Israel look bad. Anyone who disagrees with you on the internet? Russian bot. A massive wave of protests across university campuses? Believe it or not, Russian bots.
Vietnam is changing on that. Hard to imagine anything that would change the minds of the other two.
Now, we will need you to include some of our messaging in your program
Oh, ok, you mean there’s gonna be a commercial sponsor or something?
No no no no! Nothing so tacky like that! We just want you to have some self destructive themes.
Genocide wasn’t on the ticket.
Who gets to decide what’s on the ticket and what’s not? The party?
I swear, I don’t understand at all why you people complain about one-party states. If the Democrats can simply decide that we don’t get to vote on whether or not to keep doing genocide, and, furthermore, that it is fundamentally impossible to change out that party for something better, then the thing that separates the US system from a one-party state is that we also have a brazenly fascist party looking to undermine democracy at every turn. Tell me, is the presence of the Republican party the thing that makes the US system more democratic?
Other issues were. If your deeply held conviction is that ICE and all this shit (including genocide) is better than the alternative, I think your priorities are fucked.
This is just once again asserting this ideological framework of lesser evilism that I reject.
buy time
God, I hate that phrase.
You’re “buying time” at the cost of directing frustrated energy and momentum straight back into the existing political framework. That’s completely counterproductive. You don’t even want people to voice their opposition to the existing parties, much less to the system in general, even in a presidential vote that, for the vast majority of Americans, not living in swing states, is a meaningless symbolic gesture anyway.
This “buying time” rhetoric is just about trying to appease dissatisfied people with the fantasy that people are going to spend that time organizing as opposed to going straight back to brunch. It’s nothing but procrastination.
Agreed, maybe you should have led with that instead.
I believe what I said was that voting for a lesser evil was not a historically effective way of keeping Hitler out of power. Because the lesser evil won and things still played out the way they did. I didn’t say anything about voting in general.
Doesn’t really sound like “absolute revisionism” to me. Was there a single thing I said that was factually inaccurate, or are you just throwing the term around meaninglessly?
The only point I see is about Germany having a coalition system, but I was referring to a presidential election, not a parliamentary one.
Since the Nazis did not have a majority, theoretically, a coalition could have been formed that did not include them. But, as you said, conservatives were more willing to work with Nazis than leftists. Which says to me, and this might be “absolute revisionism” again, that if you’re trying to stop fascists electorally, you should at least make sure that the person you’re electing isn’t just going to promote and work with the exact people you’re trying to stop.
I might mention here that the Democrats campaigned alongside Dick Cheney while refusing to allow even purely symbolic things like allowing a Palestinian speaker at their convention.
claims to have offended Israelis before with her past documentaries, so maaaaybe it’s not what it seems on the surface and that’s the intention?
Israelis get offended by anything short of dropping to your knees, handing them missiles, and telling them they can kill whoever they like, yourself included. I wouldn’t get my hopes up
If you can’t see the fact that the Democrats have also started wars in the Middle East, that’s probably a failing of your knowledge of history and current events and not of my logic.
I don’t subscribe to the ideology of lesser-evilism. I know that liberals, in their bubbles, don’t understand that their beliefs are an ideology, that they think it’s just obvious, objective, and self-evident, that anyone with a different ideology is just “stupid,” but none of that is actually true.
I’m not going to throw my weight behind someone who I know intends to perpetuate genocide, full stop. You can rant all you want about it, but no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to shame millions of people out of their deeply held convictions.
Just to be clear, how “early on” is “early on?” Twenty years? Fifty years? A hundred? I’ll give you a second to Google it so you can decide where the goalposts are.
They’ve settled into the two current parties because of one reason: a lack of will to change. There are other countries that have FPTP where the parties are not so static. Yes, it’s a barrier. No, it is not insurmountable.
Fundamentally, there is no political system that is impossible to change. Monarchies were extremely hard to change, and yet they did, once the will was there. Political systems are designed and maintained by human beings. Treating them as if they were some innate, unchanging law of the universe is as delusional as thinking that the Supreme Court could overturn the law of gravity by finding it unconstitutional.
And indeed, our current system is unsustainable. It is, objectively, going to run up against physical constraints. It will bend or break. Trump is already an example of that. It’s very simple: adapt, or die.
Kamala wanted a 2 state solution.
Also, I’m not the one who turned America into a fascist state
Neither am I.
because ISRAEL was bombing people.
With American bombs.
The liberal worldview is so wild because the US can hold up a paper mask in front of it’s face and that absolves it of all responsibility. Israel is a US proxy. If Biden wasn’t to the right of Reagan on this issue, he could’ve stopped everything with a phone call.
2013 international Gallup poll: “Which country is the biggest threat to world peace”
The word “quarantine” originates from a Venetian policy that every single ship had to wait outside of port for 40 days to ensure nobody had the plague. I’m sure the antivax people would have no problem with such measures?
And y’all were silent about genocide. If y’all had simply said that a genocidal candidate is fundamentally unacceptable, then you wouldn’t have undermined the message and split the anti-genocide vote.
Silence is approval, cupcake.
I take full responsibility for my actions. I have zero regrets about voting third party and I’ll do it again if faced with similar circumstances.
Keep making excuses for fascists while punching left, it’s what liberals are best at.
But this pretends that “not voting” is somehow a morally neutral inaction. It is a choice, the choice to support genocide EVEN HARDER.
I voted third party. Voting for someone who opposes genocide is not “supporting genocide eVeN hArDeR” than voting for someone who supports genocide.
This has very little to do with utilitarianism or deontology, and everything with retaining a feeling of moral superiority without having to actually do stuff.
I could just as easily say that your decision to vote for a genocidaire is just about retaining a feeling of moral superiority without having to do stuff. The difference is that I subscribe to a moral framework that says genocide is bad.
You want a deontological take? Start bombing bridges or other infrastructure. Stop paying taxes, go to jail.
The philosophy understander has logged on.
I’m not even a deontologist, dumbass. I literally just said that. Not that “bombing bridges” is remotely a “deontological take” to begin with.
The thing that really bugs me about y’all isn’t just the fact that you’re so ignorant, it’s that you’re so confident in your ignorance. You drop into intelligent conversations to not only spew a bunch of unexamined nonsense, but to tell everyone else how stupid and bad they are for not accepting your nonsense. It’s like talking to a MAGA person tuned down like 10%.
They were voted into a position where they were able to do that.
Paul von Hindenburg who got elected in 1932 after winning support from the social democrats as a “lesser evil.” Eight months later, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor. A month after that, Hitler issued the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended civil rights and allowed for detention without trial, which he turned on his political opponents.
And the lesson you want me to take from that is “voting for the lesser evil is effective at stopping fascism?”
Nobody does that.
People are pointing out the choices US-American voters have
- genocide and police violence
- the above, but also
That sounds a lot like, uh, doing that.
Oh, are you backtracking already? Before it was "worse than Trump supporters" now it’s “a fucking problem like MAGA is.” This is exactly what I mean. You just say shit.
You want to show that you don’t just say shit? Then explain how voting for Trump is less bad than staying home or voting third party. Maybe you should go around knocking on doors, finding former Republican voters who sat out because they refused to support Trump, and you should tell them they should’ve voted Trump because staying home was “worse.”
Absolutely wild how desperate you are to shift responsibility away from actual Trump voters, to blame anyone except those who directly brought him to power. Maybe you should examine what it is in your brain that causes you to do that.
Or maybe you should just keep saying shit with zero thought or examination whatsoever.
So in your mind, the thing that makes our system more democratic than a one party state is what would happen if the Republican party disappeared one day, but also, it’s also impossible to change from the current party system?
I have absolutely no idea how you got there, other than trying to read my position in the least charitable way possible. Humor me, why did you conclude it would be that rather than “I refrain because I can’t condemn one person to death?” My reasoning for not voting for Harris is that I refuse to enable one population to be genocided.
If you want to understand my moral framework, I’m a rule utilitarian. In fact, while I consider either position defensible, I would pull the lever in the trolley problem. However, that’s only because of the constraints of the hypothetical, constraints which make it not applicable to most real world situations, and particularly not this one.
This “trolley problem” situation did not come about accidentally. Democrats are partially responsible for upholding the system that forces us into this situation. What’s more, they have also funded far-right candidates (including Trump himself) because they believe they will be easier to beat - that they can essentially use them to force people to vote for them even if they offer nothing (the infamous “pied piper” strategy). This engineered, coercive element, and the element of rewarding the people who engineered the situation, and the element of the problem being repeated, none of those are present in the trolley problem, and they fundamentally change the question.
When Putin sent troops into Ukraine, the quickest path to peace, to minimize bloodshed, would have been to negotiate an agreement even if it meant territorial concessions. All the people who are constantly talking about voting for the lesser evil seem remarkably willing to accept an outcome where more people die. Why? Because, they argue, if we don’t fight him here, he’ll just keep pushing further and further. Because we have to make sure that he is punished, or at least not rewarded for engineering such a situation. Instead of just looking at “which option directly minimizes the loss of life,” you also look at what precedent you’re setting on a broader scope. Everyone has a hill they’ll die on.
Or if you’d prefer, there’s a relevant Star Trek episode that examines that sort of question.
I am simply applying the same framework domestically. If you try to force me into a situation where I have no choice but to support you and give you power, then I’m going to tell you to fuck off even if it means accepting a worse outcome in the short term. If they learn that they can get away with all this stuff, funding far-right candidates, maintaining an undemocratic system, literal genocide, and I’ll still fall in line, then what incentive would they ever have to refrain from such tactics? It is precisely because the left has historically been willing to accept lesser evil candidates that they thought they could push this far in the first place.
What an incredibly backwards criticism. My perspective is looking much more at the long term than yours is. You’re looking solely at the immediate outcome of the election, I’m looking at how to either force the Democrats to adopt better positions or how to build a new party capable of posing a realistic threat. I didn’t expect either of those effects to happen last election, I don’t really expect them next election either. But I’m in it for the long haul, I will keep voting third party unless and until they cave to my core demands (and if “no genocide” is not a reasonable core demand, then nothing is). They need our votes as much as we need them and I’m not going to be the one to flinch first in this game of chicken. Not when the stakes include genocide.
Are you not making a moral argument right now? Talking about “more important to have a pristine conscience” is meaningless then. If I didn’t care about having a clear conscience, then why would I vote democrat even if I accepted that that was the moral position? You vote democrat because it’s what you believe is right, what gives you a “pristine” conscience. Unless you’re going to start arguing based on nihilism or something, you can leave that nonsense at the door.
I don’t support inaction.
Please stop putting stances into my mouth that have nothing whatsoever to do with anything I’ve actually said. I am not an accelerationist, accelerationism is stupid and wrong. If I were an accelerationist, wouldn’t I be arguing for voting for the worst candidate instead of third party?