As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.
Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.
I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.
Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.
Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.
Never try and figure out single issue voters, they tend to be dumb as fuck
i wonder how much of a single issue a genocide is
Upvoted for proving the point.
I think something that contributes to people talking past each other here is a difference in belief in how necessary/desirable revolution/overthrow of the U.S government is. Like many of the people who I’ve talked to online, who advocate not voting and are also highly engaged, believe in revolution as the necessary alternative. Which does make sense. It’s hard to believe that the system is fundamentally genocidal and not worth working within (by voting for the lesser evil) without also believing that the solution is to overthrow that system.
And in that case, we’re discussing the wrong thing. Like the question isn’t whether you should vote or not . it’s whether the system is worth preserving (and of course what do you do to change it. How much violence in a revolution is necessary/acceptable). Like if you believe it is worth preserving, then clearly you should vote. And if you believe it isn’t, there’s stronger case for not voting and instead working on a revolution.
Does anyone here believe that revolution isn’t necessary and also that voting for the lesser isn’t necessary?
The opposite is more plausible to me: believing in the necessity of revolution while also voting
Personally I believe that revolution or its attempt is unlikely to effective and voting+activism is more effective, and also requires agreement from fewer people in order to progress on its goals. Tragically, this likely means that thousands more people will be murdered, but I don’t know what can actually be effective at stopping that.
I think it’s because of stuff like this:
I’m not a U.S.A-ian. From my view(might be too critical), I don’t think the foreign policy would be greatly affected by the President or party, unless there’s some massive movement and notion of losing resources like during the invasion of Vietnam.
Lol, living in a world where “anti-genocide” is actually a thing people say is messed up.
Sometimes, I see a quality discussion between principled people who care deeply about the issues. They both want to do what’s best, but simply disagree on what “best” is.
Their opinions can be so far apart, though, that they’re unable to even comprehend the other position.
They believe that taking a moral stand against the Democrats, who are supporting Israeli genocide, is worth it even if that means that Trump, who even more fervently supports Israeli genocide, becomes president.
Even calling it “Israeli genocide” is transferring responsibility. “Supporting” is an understatement. The democrats ARE THE ONES DOING THE GENOCIDE. Biden can stop it with a single phone call. Israel is not an independent state; it is a subordinate of the US.
Telling people to vote for your party, a nazi party, at the absolute peak of your depraved inhuman bloodthirst, because the other side might be worse, is the most cynical fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
I honestly appreciate the downvotes as a counter of angry people shamed into silence
Good. You should be fucking ashamed.
Yeah the “democrats are the REAL nazis” is tiring when you get comments from the republican hero agent Orange: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/
Shut the fuck up. I never said the republicans weren’t nazis. I’m just fucking sick of you being an out and open nazi and acting like you fucking aren’t.
Remember that in online spaces (and IRL in reality), there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts that will make claims to sway public opinions.
Fucking brain broken if you think the bots are on the side opposite entrenched power
Good point. Although, I would question whether Lemmy is such a place as we really don’t have the numbers to warrant the effort, imo.
It is not currently such a place. I’ve yet to hear a Lemmy admin say otherwise.
Edit to add: Russiagate conspiracy theorists want it to be true so they can simply dismiss voices that contradict their beliefs.
We get drug spam and stock spam, no reason to expect that political spam is any less likely.
Lemmy has a huge amount of hardcore lefty’s. If you can get them to not vote, and especially if you can get them to tell their friends not to vote, that is a big win.
Astroturfing/sockpuppeting is dirty cheap to do, so no reason not to try.
You do see some users here that will post continously on about a certain topic repeatedly, with no other opinions. They might be legit, but I have my suspicions.
“Hardcore lefties” have a very different understanding of the value of their vote, which is to say, it means very little.
Have you deigned to ask them questions?
I disagree - it feels like Lemmy is seeing the same kind of shills that 4chan saw in the last several elections. These bad actors are trying to sway dems to vote third party or not vote at all “in protest” across many small and large online spaces.
Are the shills in the room with us right now?
Yes, in fact I see one now.
Interesting. What am I shilling for? What are my real opinions? What are the fake ones I’m presenting?
Your real opinions are the ones I like, and your fake opinions are the ones I don’t. It’s not rocket surgery.
There are, but not on Lemmy, because Lemmy is still much too small to bother with.
Funny, good one
Are you a Lemmy sock puppetry expert? Because I am.
Which Lemmy admins are saying there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts? Because I haven’t heard any.
There is the occasional spammer or corpo shill, who is quickly dealt with, and that’s about it.
Are you a Lemmy sock puppetry expert? Because I am.
Oh wow, a real sock puppetry expert! That’s so amazing, can I have your autograph to show to my children?
Buddy, I admin lemmy.ml. I do know a thing or two about the Lemmyverse.
Lemmy being small makes astroturfers seem like an actual minority even when they aren’t. It’s actually way worse here than on Reddit.
Yeah like all of these people out here telling me to vote for genociders. There’s no way that real humans would think so little of Palestinian lives, right?
Right?
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And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide? Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue. One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.
Suppose you have two buttons. If you press one, it kills someone. If you press the second, it kills two people. If you don’t press the first button, someone else is eagerly waiting who will press the second. Whoever has placed the buttons here, has enough power that neither the buttons nor the other person are within your personal ability to harm at the moment, and you have neither the time nor the popularity to amass enough people to change this before the other guy pushes the “kill two people” button. Your only options are to press one or press neither and allow the second be pressed. If your answer to this scenario is “I press neither button, because pressing the first kills someone, don’t you care about people’s lives!?”, then you are not choosing morality, you are choosing selfishness, because you care more about the notion that your hands will be clean than about the net life saved if you press the button that kills fewer people. In fact, the blood is as much on your hands by inaction if you decide to reject your choice, as it would be had you killed the additional victim yourself.
You know how you can trick a stupid fucking child into doing what you want by presenting them a false choice of two alternatives you’re happy with? “Do you want to go to bed now or after one more show?”
And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide?
When you are offered two candidates and both support genocide, including one being an active part of the current one, you can say, “no, never again means never again” and work against both rather than pretending you now have to support genocide.
Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue.
You should believe your lying eyes and see that Biden has gotten your consent for genocide, with Harris helping. The genocide has only ramped up as the election draws close.
There is not worse that can be done. It is full, unequivocal support for basically anything Israel wants for genocide including the weapons and supplies on which they depend to carry out this genocide. If anything, Dems are more effective at this kind of thing, as they secure European support and offer better stipulations to the Israelis around when to escalate and when to play it a little cooler.
Though your electoral logic is seld-defeating anyways. Your consent for the lesser evil keeps you politically anemic and unable to have solidarity with those who need it. You make yourself subservient.
One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.
This is a fantasy.
Suppose you have two buttons.
I am not interested in childish metaphors.
If you reject the lesser evil, and all options possible to you are evil, then you by inaction support the greater evil, which, by definition, makes you evil. “Working against both”, when evil is inherit in all means by which you might do that work, is a fantasy you tell yourself to justify sabotaging efforts to limit the damage by practicing and encouraging what effective amounts to surrendering one of the few levers of power that you have any limited ability to pull.
I already addressed your lesser evilism logic. If you want to continue this conversation you will need to respond to what I say and not dither and repeat yourself.
You live in a fantasy and sabotage real effort to limit damage in the real world. You are responsible because you can’t swallow your pride. How incredibly selfish of you.
The effort to limit damage in the real world like advocating for a genocider?
Also, please do your best to act in good faith and not make things up about people.
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I am repeating myself because the notion that the least evil option available is the best one, that the lesser evil if you will is preferable to the more evil one, is axiomatic, that is, it’s a basis one takes when constructing a moral framework, not a consequence of one that can be reasoned through. If you do not agree with someone’s moral axioms, then there is simply nothing to debate, you and they are simply operating under mutually incompatible definitions for what is and is not the right thing to do. Restating that in a slightly different way is a way of testing if the axioms we are operating under are truly different, in which case further argument is pointless, or if we merely misunderstood eachother the first time around.
I await your response to what I said. I’m not interesting in watching you masturbate.
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Pray tell, which elected leaders?
They elected Hamas. Granted it was in 2005. I suppose I should have said the dictator leaders.
They’re both not elected anymore and a resistance organization. They were elected on a platform of not-exclusively-peaceful resistance (peaceful resistance inside Palestine and especially inside Gaza was render impossible by Israel by 2006-2007, so their resistance activities are now exclusively violent). Resistance activities are supported by the population of Gaza, even if many don’t support Hamas specifically. If your point is that October 7th implies they don’t care about Gazan lives, that’s patently false. If that’s not what you meant, then explain what you mean by “they don’t care about Gazan lives”.
The comprador government of the West Bank is just that, compradors. You should care about the people who live under a comprador government, yes.
The government of Gaza is led by those taking direct militant action against their genocidal settler colonial invaders. They fight and die alongside their people.
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I never said I didn’t care. In fact I care very much.
From Merriam Webster: “one” example: “you never know what will happen”
Hamas is a terrorist organization. Lets not pretend that they’re some force of good.
Hamas is a Palestinian resistance organization against apartheid settlers that routinely use and used extensive terrorism. While the Zionist entity bombs residential blocks, schools, and refugee camps, the axis of resistance, which includes Hamas, focus on military targets and building if leverage for their own liberation.
The term “terrorist” is used selectively and in a racist way. When the Western Imperialists like a resistance organization they call them freedom fighters. When they dislike them, they get called terrorists. The ANC, including Mandela, were similarly labelled terrorists in their own fight against apartheid. Similarly, the Americans supported apartheid in South Africa and its mainstream political adherents gladly adopted their white supremacist framing.
Why in the world would you make this thread? Almost every single day for at least the last month (and still often beforehand) there have been threads where the liberals and the leftists aggressively talk in circles on this issue. The odds of you hearing anything new are incredibly low, and you might as well just go back to .ml’s c/news threads for the same material.
I just can’t keep having people yell the same nonsense at me over and over. If you’re really badly in need of leftist takes, I’ll DM you on request, but I don’t really want to talk about it publicly anymore except in more convincingly leftist spaces than .ml has been rendered by its federation.
Majority of the people who are saying this are Arab-Americans. They know how bad Trump will be, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of Biden back in 2020. Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring. There have been repeated instsnces of Democrats actually silencing them from speaking up as well. They’ve adopted a scorched earth mentality and are deciding to send a giant “fuck you” to Harris and the entire Democratic party.
And the Democrats are also allowing Israel to do whatever they want. There’s not much of a difference between the two on this topic.
There is a difference between them on this topic.
If Trump were in office now, every liberal here would be screaming for the genocide to end and trying to understand how anyone could let this happen.
With Biden in office and his VP as candidate, they are trying to sell you on their candidate rather than working against the genocide.
Hes gonna genocide better than harris, he guarantees it
There is nothing more you can do to a people beyond killing and expelling nearly all of them.
I’ve actually seen some Muslim American leader (not sure who, maybe the mayor of Dearborn?) saying something like this. At least with Republicans in charge democrats would need to oppose them instead of gleefully supporting the genocide. Not sure how much this logic checks out, but it’s a thing I guess.
The logic definitely checks out. It was far easier to mobilize and educate mainstream liberals under Trump. They have gone to sleep under Biden and become fully accepting of what the administration does. They might say they don’t approve in a poll or something, but get them to leave the house? Only the college students can be mobilized at this time.
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Asking this question on the tankie/bootlicker instance… That’s brave.
Being against nazis doing a genocide makes you a bootlicker according to the pro nazi doing genocide instance
I’m going to tell you a secret.
The people who say this, the leftists that threaten to withhold their votes, tend to vote strategically anyways. But threatening to withhold votes is one way to apply pressure to politicians to do things like, say, stop promoting a fucking genocide. And then liberals lose their minds for some reason and make it totally irrelevant. And then we have a genocide that lasts for 75 years and starts world war 3.
You got many answers, but part of it is because of shit like this.
The vote should be for someone who can get enough electoral college votes to win in the first place, and from there the one who is more likely to listen to public pressure, as well as the same for any congressional seats on the ballot. And probably not vote for the one who is threatening to send the military after those who disagree with them.
Which as a non-American seems to be Harris, right?
Yes, Harris is the only realistic option. Anyone voting for Trump is a Nazi in the most literal sense of the word.
If the people voting for Trump in the most literal sense of the word then they wouldn’t support Israel.
They aren’t supporting Israel because they care about the Israeli or Jewish people. They’re supporting Israel because they love blowing up brown people, with an unhealthy dollop of trying to bring about the apocalypse
For a vote, yes. I can’t even imagine what Trump would do with the situation given another chance. Some may say the same thing as the US has always done, which is one of the problems that will need to be addressed regardless of who wins, but Trump also likes dictators, so support would probably be bumped up even more for Netanyahu.
Losing the election is the only kind of accountability Harris and the Democrats are likely to face for their part in the genocide. Otherwise, what incentive is there for either party to ever oppose it? What message would Americans be sending to the world that we would keep in office someone who’s been actively supporting a genocide?
What message would we be sending if our replacement for them is a guy that wants Isreal to “finish the job” with it? Killing fewer people matters more than accountability
There is not a big difference between one who say finish the job and one who doesn’t say it but give every resources for Israel to finish the job
The message would be that voting Americans are not okay with genocide. Harris is actually culpable, while the idea that Trump would be significantly worse for the Palestinians and Lebanese is just hypothetical. Trump is actually the lesser of two evils this time. The allegations against him don’t amount to genocide by a long shot.
The message will be that Americans chose the guy who is complaining that the massacres are going too slowly
Remember that he was ardently supportive of the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen when he was president. We have seen how he handles this situation. He is absolutely not a lesser evil here.
He’s got a ways to go to prove himself more evil than Harris.
