• @lemonmelon
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    13 hours ago

    The confusion is that you, and others who are spouting off the same nonsense, really seem hellbent on ignoring that you’re getting one of them as your next president if you are a citizen of the US.

    “I’m not voting for either” gets you nowhere. Worse, it withholds a vote from a candidate who isn’t a full-blown, mask-off, dangerous fascist.

    This is the compass you have to work with:

    I presume you want to be somewhere around here:

    Or even here:

    But you can’t get there from where we are right now, and you sure as hell can’t do it if you end up with the red circle.

    The closest you can get to what you want in this election is the blue circle. So the logical thing to do in this election is to hold your nose, get over your “moral authority”, and vote for the one viable option that is even remotely close to your ideal candidate.

    Voting third party in FPTP doesn’t benefit any candidate except the viable candidate least aligned with your ideal. You are contributing to a possible Trump victory by refusing to vote for the only other candidate that can win this election.

    Everyone I’ve encountered who regurgitates the “Harris isn’t acceptable” line of thinking falls back to “voting for Harris makes you complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza” but refuses to acknowledge that, if we apply the same logic, voting for a non-viable candidate makes you complicit in the same genocide, along with every other shit thing that will happen in a second, more disastrous Trump term.

    “I didn’t vote for him though,” carries no water, because if you lean left of Harris and vote third party in this election you’ve taken support from the only viable candidate and in doing so made the shift towards fascism easier to enact.

    • @surph_ninja
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      -13 hours ago

      I’ve been holding my nose for decades now. Voting for the blue circle doesn’t get us any closer to the left. In fact, voting for the “lesser evil” is still getting us pulled farther right, to the point that both options openly support genocide.

      If luring Dems left is even possible, it has to be done by making them lose. Rewarding them with a win, after they go further right, just encourages them to keep moving right.

      • @lemonmelon
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        22 hours ago

        All you do by “making them lose” is make shit worse for everyone who isn’t a full-blown right-wing religious nutter.

        Voting for the blue circle helps ensure that you can ever have a choice again. Voting for anything else if you’re left of the blue circle provides succor to would-be tyrants.

        And that’s on you. That’s your failure of logic helping to pave the way for an even harder shift to the right.

        What’s the term for someone who helps fascists get their way?