The more important thing is to never pretend your vote is a valuable political action.
If you think there’s a point to voting and picking a lesser evil, go ahead, but at the end of the day you must admit that no viable candidate is adequate. Both major parties are the playthings of the owner class, not representatives of the population. The last 4 years have demonstrated that clearly; the house always wins because the game is rigged. The point being, voting cannot and will not solve these systematic problems.
If you want to stop the descent into hell, you have to actually participate in political organization beyond the electoral circus.
Your ability to participate in political organization and not immediately be killed or thrown in jail depends on the people who are in power. The United States isn’t immune to regressing to that society, and it’s very clear the Republicans are doing what they can to move in that direction.
Voting for the Democrats and doing nothing else is far from ideal and won’t fix the institutional problems, but it will help prevent new major problems, like mass murder for criticizing the government, from popping up.
Voting for the Democrats so you can continue activism is step one, and is an important step. It’s also a trivially easy step with no downside. It’s just not the only step.
Vote for whoever, but remember only one of the candidates is backed by the he richest person on the planet
I mean, one of the two sides is putting forward the poster boy for rich people as a candidate and is largely bankrolled by the richest person on Earth.
So… “vote for whoever” seems like it implies forgetting who the real enemy is by definition.
I’m going to believe BlackRock CEO here who openly says that it doesn’t matter who wins US election; Trump & Kamala benefit Wall Street.
Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.
That’s the argument.
That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.
Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.
It would be just the same with Jill Stein or Chase Oliver as leader, Wall Street will benefit. There is obviously outsized influence of rich people in government, but big money makes money with money, doesn’t matter what the politics are.
It’s more important that A. The US doesn’t put a leader who has real plans to become dictator and the Project2025 yes-men lined up behind it, and B. The US chooses a leader who better represents the national interests of common people, which will not happen if too many would-be Harris voters choose 3rd party or abstains.
That’s why PSL exists.
Don’t vote “for/against whoever”. Vote against trump like an adult - that means voting democrat.
Sure, picking between two options that you don’t want is legitimately hard for human brains to do. But republicans have promised and begun to brutalize minorities at ever larger scales, and are objectively worse than democrats on everything that matters.
Handing the reins of state power to fascists has never improved life for leftists or humanity.
Democrats are conducting a literal genocide as we speak. I guess as long as the people are being murdered on an industrial scale are far away libs don’t care about them.
Pretty classic trolley problem here. One track has genocide. The other side has larger scale and more effective genocide, along with a pile of other issues. Nobody’s saying genocide is good, but they’re saying 50,000 dead in a year is better than millions dead in a year alongside widespread escalation of genocide elsewhere, higher international tensions with a more significant chance of a nuclear incident, and more crackdowns on dissent just like yours and mine.
Nah, it’s the same kind of genocide on both tracks, but one track allows liberals to pretend to have morals.
Trump’s likely to win, so we might find out just how bad it gets. I’m betting it’s a literal completed genocide within his term - no Palestinian survivors in the now-official-Israeli-territories. I doubt that would change your mind though, since it’s easy to just say Harris would have done it too.
Yeah, that makes it very hard to vote for them, I feel that. But that’s a problem that gets worse by not voting for a democrat.
Republicans have promised to genocide harder and trump has already been coordinating with netanyahu to counter anything that might reduce palestinans deaths.
I don’t like it either but it’s time to be an adult, do the unpleasant thing, and vote for a democrat.
We already have empirical evidence from Trump and Biden admins to show that exact same things happen under democrats in practice. The only difference is that libs go to sleep and start making excuses. If you’re voting for either party you’re voting for genocide plain and simple. At least have the honesty to say that you don’t care that your state is involved in a genocide because you think the party that will be presiding over it will benefit you personally.
If you honestly believed that democracts and republicans are identical on israel and you care about human suffering you’d look at all the other ways that trump and his fascists have promised to brutalize everyone who’s not them and minimize human suffering by voting for a democrat.
Trump killing trans people, immigrants and palestinans is not a moral victory for opponents of our genocide in gaza.
The fact that you don’t understand how utterly imbecilic this argument is means there’s no point having a discussion with you.
It’s more so that they can FEEL like they did the right thing. Not that they did the right thing.
It’s all about optics. If they vote for a Democrat and post a picture with their “I Voted” sticker, then they get internet points! Then they don’t have to be worried about getting canceled by their peers who they swear up and down don’t cancel people because that goes against their fake “live and let live” ideology.
Sure I voted for genocide, by I did it the way all of Hollywood did, so I’m cool and part of the club! It’s the acceptable form of genocide support!
That’s right, liberals just want a genocide to be done with a certain level of decorum that allows them to ignore what’s actually happening.
I’m not in USA but if there are 2 movie style bad guys and 1 says pick me I’ll kill strangers, and 2 says pick me I’ll kill strangers and your friends and family, maybe you as well, and then some random 3rd guy says, pick me or no one and I won’t kill anyone, but one of those 2 bad guys will be picked for you via a coin flip, but at least you get to feel good that you didn’t personally pick the death of people, it’s not illogical to pick the first one.
Maybe you have such good morals you can pick the 3rd or refuse to pick at the expense of possibly additional people you care about, or maybe you don’t personally have anyone in your life that would be affected by the 2nd bad guy so it doesn’t matter to you, but if that’s the case, you’re equally guilty of choosing the choice that makes you feel good just because you don’t have to deal with the consequences of your choice and can ignore what’s actually happening.
The argument basically comes down to you being fine with genocide as long as it doesn’t affect you personally.
Okay, and so did and would Republicans. On a much larger scale and they would also ruin the lives of thousands of minorities in the US, such as LGBTQ+ people and immigrants
Like I said, as long as people being genocided are far away it’s fine. As long as you don’t have to look at the horrors, or be personally affected by them. Shallow self interest doesn’t impress me.
Genocide is not fine in any case, no matter how far away, but voting for Kamala is still way better than voting for trump, who would make the genocide worse. When the elections end, and if kamala wins, then we can critique the fuck out of her for not stopping the genocide, but right now, there is no better option than voting for her.
Voting for Kamala is a vote for genocide plain and simple. You can do as much sophistry here as you want, but it’s not going to change that simple fact. A better option is obviously to vote for a party like PSL that is not supporting genocide, but again you don’t actually care. You’re fine with genocide being conducted in your name as long as you’re not affected. That’s the truth. You know it and I know it.
Voting for 3rd party is quite literally throwing your vote away. They don’t stand a chance to win, and voting for them would effectively be the same as not voting, because of America’s shit FPTP voting system. And therefore, you’d give Trump a higher chance to win, because your vote wouldn’t help Kamala. And if Trump wins, the genocide will get worse. Much worse.
That’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Your whole argument would be like a German in 1930s saying they just have to vote for the nazis because that’s the only option on the table. If you don’t see the absurdity of that then you’re beyond all hope.
Us being monkeys sure explains the amount of shit throwing on lemmy.
