this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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No one minds you voting for Biden believe it or not. We do mind being demonized and straw-personed for not voting for him.
Do you understand why you are being demonized though? You're making a choice that is purely symbolic just so you feel better, but real and vulnerable people across the country have to deal with the fallout.
You want to make a difference? Great! There's a lot of ways to do that. Campaign and fundraise at the local and state level. Push for election reform, ranked choice voting, end to gerrymandering, term limits, electoral college reform, curtail lobbying... any number of things, and push for them more often than once every four years. Voting third party in a presidential election does NOT help.
If you want my respect, acknowledge the reality of the situation and vote for the best option (or the least bad option) among the viable candidates and then work for change within the system. It sucks that we are in this situation, but make a choice grounded in the real world, not a fake ideal world.
I don't.
Voting for the stunt double from weekend at Bernie's does not grant you superiority.
Most of us have been voting in the primaries and are involved in local politics. It didn't matter. The R/D machine drowns out all opposition to its duopoly.
Biden will not win this election. Democracy died while he confusedly stared into the camera for 6 seconds. Beyond that, he fumbled his closing statement which should disqualify from any public speaking position.
Trump is inevitable. We did all we could to get an alternative to Biden, but his hubris will destroy us.
So your solution is to give up and throw your vote away? I'm glad you didn't want my respect because you didn't get it.
A literal corpse being paraded around for four years like Weekend at Bernie's would still be a better choice than Trump. He attempted a coup to invalidate the will of the people and maintain power, sent a mob to attack the Capitol building, and has been charged with 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions just for stuff he did while in office and as a candidate (convicted of 34 and counting).
But democracy died when an old man showed signs of being old? Not all that other stuff? Yeah, I'm voting for Biden. Easiest decision of my life. You should too.
You can argue until you're blue in the face over there. Biden lost the election with that debate. He didn't do anything he needed to do this term to protect democracy as we know it and the Supreme Court sealed the R's final solution today.
It's over man...game over. Congratulations...your support of the status quo ended Democracy.
In short, yea, I'm perfectly fine not having your respect.
If voting third-party were purely symbolic, there wouldn't be this many people on Lemmy trying to persuade us to not do it.
I think Biden does want our vote. And we're telling him that if he wants our vote, he has to stop the genocide. That's how we can use our vote to influence the government. That's how democracy is supposed to work.
There are real and vulnerable people dying in Gaza right now because of what Biden is doing.
This is a logical fallacy. If lighting myself on fire as protest were purely symbolic, then why are all of my friends persuading me to not do it?
Sometimes people trying to convince/persuade you against something isn't because you actually have a point -- but because your ideas will lead to harm.
You’re gonna need a better example, because people lighting themselves on fire played a tremendous role in ending popular support for America’s occupation of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
It’s the last thing I would describe as “symbolic”.
Did it? My understanding is that the draft and footage of their children dying in war is what reshaped the public opinion.
Genuinely asking though, it was before my time.
There were self-immolations in Vietnam that were protests against the US-backed puppet government in Vietnam.
It wasn’t the only thing that shaped public opinion about the war, but it did have a big impact.
You can read a bit about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thích_Quảng_Đức
Thanks!
and that stops when trump wins because you voted for some 3rd party nobody.......... right?
Is that supposed to persuade me to vote for Biden? "But Trump will do genocide too."
Yeah, and that's why I'm not supporting Trump either.
I am a single issue voter, and that issue is genocide. And frankly, I'm disappointed that more people aren't single issue voters when it comes to genocide.
You are supporting Trump by wasting your vote.
but you are, because you're not voting biden in a two horse race.
They call it first past the post for a reason. you're voting for some cunt still in the stable
Genocides happening either way. you sitting home and sulking about it wont make it better.
Life is too complex to be a single issue. There is more than a single issue facing the world
Be this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/11rrvt/be_this_guy/
Good for that guy. His beliefs were just and moral. He didn't have any options though. Hitler and the Nazis were already in power.
You have an option. You're acting like you're brave just like this guy but I bet he wished more people voted for the candidate that wasn't Hitler.
In our case, Biden and Trump are both Hitler because they’re both supporting a genocide. The crowd in that photo are a mix of Democrats and Republicans, and that guy is the people saying “I won’t support either of you”.
They aren't both Hitler though. One is unquestionably worse than the other even if you only look at that single issue. One of them WILL be the next president whether you like it or not. You can have a say in who that will be, or you can go with righteous indignation and let the worse option win by default.
It’s not righteous indignation. It’s making difficult moral decisions according to one’s conscience.
I’m aware there could be consequences if Trump wins. But I will not let fear for my own safety steer me towards supporting a genocide.
Like that guy. Who, according to reports, was punished for his failure to salute by being put into penal military service, where he was killed.
Be that guy means be that guy.
It absolutely is righteous indignation. You aren't in the same situation as that guy and you aren't being brave. Palestinians in Gaza will not be thanking you if Trump becomes president.
I’m not in the same situation as that guy. I am not claiming to be brave. I’m a little worried (like we all are), but my life is not in imminent danger.
But I am trying to do the right thing, and I hope that if things get worse and I do end up in a situation like that man that I will be brave and continue to do the right thing. That’s the lesson I’m taking from him.
Here's a puzzle for you. A group of three men go to a hotel, and they each pay $10 for a room, for a total of $30. Afterwards, the manager remembers that there's a deal where you can get 3 rooms for $25, so he gives $5 to the bellboy and tells the bellboy to return it to the men. But the bellboy returns just $1 to each of the men, and pockets the remaining $2.
So the men each paid $9, for a total of $27. The bellboy pocketed $2. Where did the other dollar go?
It’s an informal fallacy.
And the answer is that "Where did the other dollar go?" is a nonsensical question when you understand the situation correctly. But a lot of people who first hear it don't understand the situation correctly.
Likewise, "You're helping Trump by voting third-party" is a nonsensical when you understand the situation correctly, but many people don't at first understand the situation correctly.
Are you sure we don't understand it correctly? Trump won in 2016 in part due to the righteous indignation of people that refused to vote for Clinton. Third party spoiler candidates are not a new phenomenon.
And would those people have suddenly switched to Clinton if no third-party candidate was available?
Most probably wouldn't have voted at all but that doesn't change the math. In a US presidential election, voting third party and not voting at all are equivalent in every practical sense.
Right. So, part of the problem with “Voting third-party means supporting Trump” is that it presumes I would have otherwise voted for Biden.
And I wouldn’t have. Because he’s committing genocide.
Also, when third-party candidates start to get traction, they can pull votes away from Trump as well as Biden.
And if enough people vote third-party, we can start to defeat both Trump and Biden. Even small amounts of support for third-party candidates can lead to a third-party winning seats in congress if that support is concentrated in particular districts, like college towns. And in an evenly divided congress, a few seats can control the balance of power and have a big impact.
If there were a "no genocide" candidate that could win, making that a single issue would matter. Biden supports Israel despite their actions in Gaza... which he has publicly stated he doesn't agree with and has taken concrete, if underwhelming, steps to try and stop. Trump has shown us during his previous administration and told us recently that he will support Israel harder and will likely take steps to decrease the resistance to the Palestinian genocide if not outright accelerate it. He'll also accelerate Russian aggression in Ukraine and likely would ignore our Article 5 responsibilities when Putin advances farther into Europe. I'll assume you're familiar with the policy differences on climate and how climate change impacts poor regions (like Gaza) more than it impacts affluent ones like the US (and even we're getting our asses kicked by climate change this year). You can vote to take a moral stand, or you can vote for desired outcomes. The people trying to convince you not to vote 3rd party are trying to convince you to vote for a desired outcome. There is presently no likely outcome that gives us a non-Biden, non-Trump administration for the next 4 years. Based on that fact, we want to maximize the likelihood of the best availa le outcome. That's what we're asking...to think about what the world looks like for the people you care about under Biden and compare those outcomes to what it will look like under Trump and vote based on those outcomes. The time to find the ideal candidate is at the beginning of a presidential term, not the end of one.
You can bet your ass most of us are including the ongoing genocide in our voting decision, we've just thought about it enough to know our options aren't between "stopping genocide" and "continuing genocide", the choice is between "resisting" (aka, the status quo) or "accelerating".
But voting is valuable even if your candidate doesn't win. It's about having your desires counted on the public record.
If politicians see that they're losing votes to anti-genocide third-party candidates, they'll take notice.
Get your desires on the public record in local and state elections and primaries where it might actually matter. For a US presidential election it's an entirely empty gesture that makes you and only you feel better. No policies will change. No causes will be advanced. History will not remember you. It is very likely, however, that will make the lives of vulnerable people inside and outside of this country worse by giving trump a second term.
Or, maybe politicians will see that they’re losing votes to anti-genocide third-party candidates, and their policies will change.
And if not, then we don’t have a democracy anyway. If it’s not possible for the USA to cease its support for genocide, then this is not a liberal democracy, and this is certainly not the leader of the free world.
What happened to “never again”? Never again is now and all I’m hearing is “eh, what can you do?”.
If you care so much for palestine you vote Biden. Its either Biden or Trump and Trump would flatten gaza to get even more settlements named after him.
Well said, „Radio Free Arabia“ 😂
Sure, if you are comfortable with the moral liability of fascism them we probably don't get along.
I'm fine with the moral liability of supporting genocide. That's why I'm voting for Biden.
So, speaking from a purely pragmatic perspective, voting for Biden is better than other US electoral choices for the purpose of trying to help Palestinians.
I understand your reticence and moral indignation, I largely feel the same.
But the biggest reason Trump won in 2016 is because voters were not particularly enthused with their choices, and a great many decided not voting at all (or voting for Trump as a protest against the establishment) was preferable to voting for HRC.
I have to imagine that we both believe that Trump is worse than Biden when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Given that we're already in election year, it's down to Biden and Trump. One of them is going to be president come January next year.
Taking all that together, if we want things to get better for Palestine, we should vote for Biden because the alternatives are much worse.
Granted there is a lot you can do outside of elections to help, and I wouldn't recommend ignoring those. But given that voting for the US president takes a few hours out of one day every four years, it's not a good idea to ignore that either.
I hope this helps you understand those of us who don't really like Biden but will vote for him regardless.
You vote for fascism if you dont vote for him so you deserve it.