I'm told that this is a real picture.
I'm told that this is a real picture.
"Every previous president would have ended it by now."
"Biden literally couldn't do worse."
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Donald Trump is Genocide at home and abroad.
Joe Biden is "only" Genocide abroad, and probably less of it.
Therefore, a vote for Joe Biden is a Vote against genocide.
No, it doesn't matter that he's an active participant in the apparatus that's creating the genocide, because if he's in office there's less genocide. Which is the important part, and pretending otherwise is sophistry. If you abstain from voting, you are increasing the likelihood of more genocide and if you discourage others from voting, you are an active participant in the overall social apparatus that is probabilistically increasing the amount of genocide.
The utility calculation is dead simple: more votes for Biden in key states makes more genocide less likely, and discouraging people from voting for Biden makes more genocide more likely. Therefore, discouraging people from voting for Biden is a pro-genocide strategy and voting for Biden in battleground states is an anti-genocide strategy. You should vote for Biden unless you live in a solid blue state, and even then it's not a bad idea.
TLDR: if you encourage people to not vote for Biden, that's supporting genocide. Accelerationism never works for us.
Basically just the trolley problem, but the tracks are already aligned to killing fewer people. There is a vote on whether to divert the trolley to the track which would kill more people or stay the course. Is there blood on your hands if you abstained and convinced others to abstain which resulted in a win for changing tracks?
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.
-- John Stuart Mill
He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.
Wow this part is great
When granted the option between 2 fascist regimes, a man has no choice but to pledge fealty to the fascist regime that targets the population that he like less.
-MrVilliam
Do you have trouble with reading comprehension or are you intentionally misrepresenting what I said? Because it's one or the other, and I try not to make assumptions. I wouldn't want to tease you over a disability like the 45th president would, but I'll laugh at you til I'm blue in the face if it's just that you're trying your best to be some kind of enlightened "debate me, bro" asshole who knows they're full of shit but thinks they can sway readers with such a lazy attempt at "owning" me.
Not working on dark mode :'( is it false equivalence?
Straw man, but I suppose that would apply as well.
Be careful, you might have the 5 real users of Lemmy.ml use their 500 accounts to harass you for posting this.
I just blocked the whole instance when they removed my comment pointing out that Al Jazeera might not be unbiased in the matters of Hamas vs Israel, because they are funded by Qatar who also shelter Hamas leaders.
And even Al Jazeera think Trump would be an even bigger fucking disaster for Palestine.
Wait, we can block whole instances ourselves? I think that might be my vest option.
Yeah, as long as you're on 0.19 I think, which most instances will be by now.
Thank you for this!
I use Sync, and I can but I don't know if it's a function of the app or of the Lemmy platform.
I use voyager. I will be looking more into this function. My original thinking was that I would have to switch over to an instance already blocking .ml or start my own.
I am just tired of people getting away with being explicitly pro-terrorism just because they tell other users they are trans, as if that made sociopathy and psychopathy OK.
It is indeed a feature on Voyager (hello fellow Voyager user!) and you can find it in the filter settings near the bottom.
Thanks for this! Just blocked them! I think I just solved 100% of the harassment issue I have been having with that instance.
Trust me, Lemmy is far more usable and tolerable with them blocked. I think you'll be much better off from now own, heh.
Idk how much i want to do this... ive been followed around by trolls for being vocal, but i wonder if it's not a good idea to know what their talking points are. Not to mention the possibility of good daith youngins being attracted to their stink needing to hear something not advantageous to hostile foreign powers.
Also i like linux memes. Lots of linux shit is on .ml bc of it supposedly being sooper extra privacy oriented.
Don't be thinking you can change them. Post something against groupthink and it just gets silently removed. There's no discussions to be had.
And I don't think any amount of blocking can get you away from Linux memes without just leaving Lemmy completely.
Haha u speak truth! I was blocked from world news.ml right quick. First day or two on lemmy. I was calling out shills for spreading russian/chinese talking points. Shame on me, i suppose!
To think i jumped ship from reddit to escape the bans from the same following the api changes and thought id find refuge here.
They go after leftist spaces in particular with the shit u have seen. They know what theyre doing. That's why i think the pushback is so necessary. SY what they will, truth is truth, even in the post-truth era. It must be echoed, bans and whines from shills and tankies be damned.
You think that hasn't already happened? 😂
....what?
Do you work for the onion?
Yeah I dunno, I’m still not going to vote for him. Just goes against my conscious
Cool I’ll tell that to my trans friends when Trump tried to pass Floridas laws federally
At least your “conscious” is clear
They can take it up with the DNC. I have no guilt
Nah we can take it up with you, because the choice is Biden or Trump, not Biden, Trump, or time travel. Pull your head out of your ass - your little protest vote doesn’t matter now, but your ACTUAL vote does.
Go ahead. Take it up with me then. Hope it helps. I doubt it will.
Same strategy as you take towards social good, then: being fucking worthless
Is this helping your trans friends yet?
Is your protest vote saving Palestinians? At least my vote conceivably could have an impact
With one term, Trump stacked the federal judiciary for a generation and eroded the administrative state. If he gets another terms he’ll use his stacked bench to pass his agenda and uphold it when it’s inevitably challenged. How do you think progressive causes will fare then? At least you’ll have your protest vote to soothe your conscience as Trump enacts a little genocide on immigrants, trans people, and anyone else he decides isn’t pure enough.
In 2016 people like you were smugly announcing that nothing bad would happen, like Roe being repealed, and everyone was being dramatic, because Clinton was “just as bad” as Trump. So fascinated to hear what your excuses will be this time around.
I can’t bring myself to vote for someone like Joe Biden. Without getting too in depth on my life story, I’ve been falsely arrested before. Hell, I’ve basically paid the price for a crime I didn’t commit. So when someone like Joe Biden promises police reform and then turns around and immediately pours $34 billion dollars into 100,000 more cops and more surveillance, I just genuinely cannot bring myself to vote for him any more than you could bring yourself to vote for your abuser.
At the same time, I have great sympathy for Palestinians. Here in the US and abroad. And I also cannot expect them to vote for someone assisting in the genocide of their friends and family, even if some political arithmetic says they should.
I don’t bemoan you for voting for Joe Biden. But I’m voting third party this time around. Maybe it’ll send a message to the DNC, maybe it won’t. It’s the only voice I got as a singular voter to cast my vote in a democratic process towards what I believe in the most.
Cool, when you and your friends band together and vote for someone who's not apart of the war machine, then you can ride your high horses
We did. They lost the primary in 2020 and now we have Biden. Any other fundamental misunderstandings of American politics or are you done being stupid?
Your solution to losing is to now bandwagon with "the lesser of two evils"? Why wouldn't you abandon that party entirely? There's more than two choices.
They'll kill and take away the rights of people who aren't you though...yay...
To top it off, you go on to bash those who think that's not a good choice
The irony.
But don't listen to me, I'm the stupid one.
At least you recognize it.
There’s two choices. Protests votes in the general election in the system we have today are at best no votes, but are often just votes for the other candidate. Your moral high ground is nothing and smugly voting third party doesn’t actually DO anything right now.
How else would you go about removing the two parties from power?
I don't think continuing to support the party with a vote is really the answer here.
Easy. By eliminating the worse party and transforming the existing one. Parties have already vanished in our system in the past; see the Whigs.If you're older than 22-years-old you recognize just how much progress Dems have made in the past 15 or so years. So continue promoting progressive candidates in Dems while ensuring GOP go the way of the Whigs. Start advocating for campaign finance / election reform as your primary voting concern and that you'll donate to anyone who pushes this.
Things take time but a protest vote inevitably leads to the worst evil prevailing.
If you think that "protest votes" have any chance of removing the two parties from power, you're naive. If it were that easy, it would have already happened as people have been voting and advocating for third party votes for generations. The way to actually affect change is to engage vociferously in primaries and lower level offices to get outside voices in at a level to actually change things - specifically abandoning FPTP voting and getting third party candidates in local offices (and eventually ditch the electoral college). Even if you somehow magically convinced everyone that "would like to vote for someone other than D's and R's" to actually do so in a national election, having a candidate that adequately represented enough people's beliefs to win is a statistical impossibility.
The fascists/Christian Nationalists have been methodically working towards their goals for decades; to think that you have any chance of overthrowing the Democratic or Republican party in this election is beyond laughable.
There's more than two choices the same way there's more than two choices for calling a coin. You can call a side. You can call for the edges. You can call that it balances diagonally. You can even call for a unicorn to magically appear over one of the sides. The chances are so slim that you might as well have chosen no side at all, but it could happen, and it is a choice.
Personally, anyone that says there are more than two parties has no idea how statistics and/or voting works, or they don't really care about the outcome.
Your conscience can be a good indicator that something immoral is happening, but it's certainly not infallible. While I think abstaining is a worse choice, the most egregious course of action being discussed is actively arguing against voting, which is actively harmful and supports multiple genocides including the one ostensibly being denounced by the people who act as such.
I think everyone should vote. I’m just voting third party in this case
I voted third party too once. I couldn’t in good conscience vote for either major party. I was living in Florida, and voted for Nader in 2000.
I’ve not been so naive since.
Did I not vote for the killing of children in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did I not vote for the curtailing of medical research? Did I not vote for the hundreds of millions that will die due to climate change?
Learn from my mistake. Because the lessons you learn from yours may not be applicable given what will be lost by the time you realize what you’ve done.
I hear you. And I appreciate your candor and politeness, which can be hard to ask for sometimes.
I’m still planning on voting third party. I’ve voted dem every time since I could vote, I feel like I gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere. But! By golly, if he says he’s going to cut some of the money out of the police, and maybe tighten some things up in the Middle East, he’ll have me again. And he’s got months to do that! And I’m hoping. But if that effort isn’t made and he focuses on the center-right… I just can’t do it.
The far right gets a lot of attention politically because they show up and vote Republican consistently.
Progressives are generally ignored because they always have some reason their conscience won't allow them to vote Democratic.
If you aren't a reliable voting block you can't expect your platform to be given priority.
Well, hopefully that works out for them
You want very reasonable things in a unreasonable system.
Youll either get the status quo as it stands, or you'll get Dr. Fascismo doing away with free elections on top of an Eastern European genocide courtesy of trumps master, minorities being actively persecuted for just existing, and saying the things youre saying being documented and held against you as thoughtcrimes.
The US is on the cusp of moving past the stain that is rhe baby boomer voting block that insists on unfettered neoliberalism and conservative social policy by and large. Thisd be the time to ensure we dont double down on it.
This is the only sane answer in here
I'd love to see your solution to the trolley problem 🤣
RIP those track-people.
No it isn't. Duverger's Law isn't a particularly difficult concept to grasp.
Cool I’ll tell that to my trans friends when Trump tried to pass Floridas laws federally
At least your “conscious” is clear
Of all of the self diluted mental gymnastics...
it's literally double speak: war is peace, voting for genocide is antigenocide.
There are two options: 'some genocide', and 'a lot more genocide'. The race is close, so if not enough people vote for 'some genocide', 'a lot more genocide' will win. 'No genocide' is not one of the options. Do you vote for 'some genocide', or do you assent to letting 'a lot more genocide' win?
I'm going to vote for a candidate that wants no genocide.
Will that actually help reduce genocide or just satisfy your need to be self righteous?
I don't believe any vote will reduce genocide. ballots don't stop bullets.
As I said, 'No genocide' is not one of the two options that's going to win. The race is close, not voting for 'less genocide' only helps 'lots of genocide'. So you're helping 'lots of genocide' beat 'less genocide', congrats.
voting against genocide doesn't help genocide. this is pure doublespeak.
Voting against genocide doesn't reduce genocide. In American elections, the only votes that have an effect are those for one of the two front-runners. Any other vote is an admission of equivocation of the two front-runners. The two front-runners are 'some genocide' and 'lots of genocide'. Equivocating the two means you think 'some genocide' and 'lots of genocide' are equally acceptable. Q.E.D. you accept lots of genocide.
Equivocating the two means you think ‘some genocide’ and ‘lots of genocide’ are equally acceptable.
no. i don't find either of those acceptable. that doesn't make them the same. it just means that neither of them meets the bar of acceptability.
Unfortunately the American electoral system is not ranked choice, so "bar of acceptability" isn't a functionally meaningful concept. In American elections, the situation is as I've described above. Refusing to choose one of the two primary options functionally means you find both primary options equally acceptable.