And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?
A lot of people did in fact set aside Gaza until Trump was stopped. As for those that didn’t, they should have listened to Bernie Sanders. I did months ago and went all-in on Dem support. There were multiple times when I wrote up an angry post about US support of Israel and then didn’t post it because I didn’t want to turn a voter into a non-voter or worse a Trump supporter.
I understand their position of never rewarding ethnic cleansing and war crimes though. They chose to make sure the Dems know they would never “settle” for the illegal killing of civilians. The support for Israel made it especially hard for Arab Americans to vote Dem. It’s difficult to support a party that has been in power during the whole conflict yet gives unconditional support for the internationally condemned murder of Arabs.
I’m sure a lot also felt disenfranchised by the bipartisan protest suppression and condemnation. Even in Dem states peaceful protesters were punished, and sometimes pro-Israeli protesters who attacked got away with it. Then there was the whole “vote with us or else” pressure that went on for months. Dissenters like the “uncommitted” voters were insulted by the party that wanted their unconditional support.
So it’s not like it’s completely insane. But as Sanders points out that position only makes things worse and has done so.
It’s simple, for a voter that doesn’t have other important things or believes the candidates to be equal in other things, like the economy, it becomes a moral choice to not vote for genocide.
If they believe there will be human rights violations elsewhere, like in the US, but one candidate and not the other, then the moral choice becomes to limit harm.
Much of this argument stems from different base assumptions, as follows-
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Neither Trump nor Harris will commit other human rights violations, and they are materially the same to my family; staying home is the moral action.
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Trump will commit human rights violations, voting for Harris is the moral action.
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They will both commit more human rights violations; staying home is the moral action.
The people who were saying to stay home and not vote fell into camps 1 or 3. If you’re unsure of why someone would believe in number 3 you should know we have illegal debtor’s prisons that are ignored by the federal government, LGBTQ abuse that has gone unchecked by the federal government, illegal denial of asylum directly by the federal government, … the list goes on. But rest assured there are reasons people would see them both as committing human rights violations in the US. This is not some Russian info op like the DNC fanboys would have you believe.
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The arguments are as stupid as you guessed.
These are naive emotional people who are dumb as fuck. I know so many in my life and it’s like arguying with a brick wall.
Children still believe we live in a black and white world, democrats are in power now, genocide is happening, they will not vote for them. The concept that both will finance the genocide but another will be much worse is not something they can understand.
You have others that want to intentionally punish democrats for not doing anything. Great in the meantime, Trump will provide a full carte blanche to Nettanyahu in the middle east, he will continue what he’s doing, annex everything without any limits. They were partying in Israel after Trump won.
A third group wants the system to break down because they think if you’re a post collapse society, they will be able to build their utopia.
Yes as dumb idiots living in la la land.
They would rather accelerate genocide than admit they’re wrong. It’s disgusting
Nobody with a brain believes that. The major advocates of that ideology wanted Trump to win. It was even being propped up by foreign agents.
You actively participate in the murder of people.
If enough people did not participate the murder would simply not happen.
You are still participating by choosing to be a bystander to injustice. Abstaining when you can support something less bad only says to others that you do not care how bad it gets.
So… Palestine is safe now? Not voting or voting Trump leads to people not being murdered?
I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going to happen, and I wish I was wrong.
Speaking as an engineer, I’ve contributed to the murder of more people than I can count.
Speaking as someone who has purchased goods on Amazon and at Walmart, I’ve contributed to the murder of more people than I can count.
We all kill people. Every single person in this thread has contributed to and benefited from death of another. You drive over a bridge, you benefit from the dead. You live in any extant country, you have benefited from murder. Our entire society is built on the lifelong suffering and deaths of millions, a tiny sliver of guilt at a time.
Electing Kamala is roughly the same level of moral failure.
Electing trump is giving an unlocked gun and 1000 rounds to a 7 year old with anger problems. The moral failure is several order of magnitude higher.
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Because if it wasn’t Gaza, it would have been another excuse to not lift a lazy goddamned finger and still delude themselves into feeling "morally superior"while sitting on their fat mediocre asses at home.
Before Harris, they also leaned heavily on the “Sleepy Joe” bullshit and “two old white men up for election, who cares”. Once the old “Sleepy Joe” element was removed from the equation, they had to find a way to keep their goddamned stubbornly lazy and ignorant narrative intact.
Now that the election is over, most of these “concerned and outraged” deadweight assholes will never think about Gaza and the plight of its’ people again. And they will keep on feeling smug about themselves.
It is rich to criticize the Democrats for claiming moral superiority while doing nothing, as a justification for not voting for the candidate who would at least try to put a leash on what Israel is doing to Gaza.
If you want what’s best for a suffering people, you should vote for the candidate not trying to give their oppressors a blank check. All of America is responsible for what the president we chose does next.
This is all that needs to be said on the subject.
I know one of those people. they are now angry the left lost… 🙄
OP asked for a steelman but good try
I’m not American, and I don’t agree with these people either, but I don’t think that calling them lazy and ignorant makes any sense. In the fucked up democracy of the US it’s clear that the only way to get what you want for the coming 4 years is to vote for the least bad candidate. At the same time I can definitely understand that if you view both candidates was horrible, though one way more horrible than the other, you would feel conflicted about voting for either of them.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Assuming both candidates are still roughly equally “popular”. If both candidates wanted to start a genocide, but one would want to kill only 50% of the amount of innocents that the other would kill, how would you vote? Would you vote for the one who is overall the less bad option, which will in turn make you give your vote for something horrible. Or would you abstain and signal that the democracy as it currently stands has lost your confidence entirely, even if it means that on the short term the consequences might be way worse?
Not voting actually costs the democrats something, and should (if they want to win next time) force them to think how to better represent you next time.
It’s fucked up that your democracy came to this. It has become an annoying game theory dilemma instead of voting for the candidate that you actually believe in. Our system here in the Netherlands is certainly also not perfect, since we have too many parties and too long coalition negotiations, but at least I feel like it represents people way better. Anyone can start a party and capture seat if they represent a large enough niche.
I said the same thing about people like you before the election, and I’ll repeat it again. The laser focus on single issue voters was and will always be mostly an excuse to blame someone else.
To look at it another way, if this one issue actually decided the election, why didn’t Harris change her strategy two months ago? … Maybe it’s because this wasn’t the determining issue. Or it was, and her staff was incompetent. Take your pick.
Only if you don’t recognize that Trump would be much, much, much worse. And what we see from the election, many can’t seem to see that (in any way).
You see, IQ is on a bell curve and 100 is the median. That means half of people must have an IQ below 100. At some number, the exact number is debatable, higher reasoning ability diminishes.
The second factor is education/knowledge. Having none, partial, or incorrect information can lead even rational people down the wrong path.
If you combine these, you get what you are observing.
I’ll leave you a quote from Deming… “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it does.” I say this because we need to change something if we want a different result.
“Remember, I’m pullin for ya. We’re all in this together.”
Red GreenActually several percent of people have 100, so higher and lower are each less than 50%. Not to mention there isn’t a huge difference from 90-110 and that range covers a huge chunk of the population.
Carlin was exaggerating for comedic effect.
Consider how you’d go about exploiting the opposite case.
If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there’s just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it’s an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.
Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.
They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn’t bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you’re getting kicked out for real.
The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.
There’s this huge narrative that’s been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it’s meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.
You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We’ll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don’t like it, that’s literally your problem.
Oh no, you can’t hold us accountable now, it’s the worst possible time. It’s too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can’t you see there’s a highschool full of dead kids?
Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.
- An overly simplistic/naive view of the world. (Not sure what they expect here? Stopping weapons and technology transfer? Maybe the US going to war with Israel to stop the Gaza atrocities? Or are they just expecting something symbolic? If Harris publicly denounced Israel’s actions, would that be enough?)
- Thinking that the US President has more power than they do in reality (Congress and the Courts, checks and balances)
- Some logical fallacies they’ve convinced themselves into believing. False Dilemma Fallacy maybe? https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/common-logical-fallacies
Only a Sith deals in absolutes
What Harris could have done is besides the point. What she did and didn’t do is a matter of record.
But look, focus on what I wrote. If it’s your friend or family member then of course you are going to have a simple and strong reaction. It’s fine to try to explain away the badness, and there is some truth to what you wrote, but if someone just lost their cousin, or their daughter’s house was just bombed, they aren’t going to listen to you. That’s natural; that’s reality.
Maybe if they are young. Its comes up again and again. I voted for ross perot but was lucky it did not effect the election. I mean just the 50 cent gas tax would have been great for the environment given it would have gone into effect in the 90’s as a federal tax. Electronic direct democracy. Increase in education and infrastructure. It was hard not to like his proposals.
its funny, because literally the next post after yours was this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/07/trump-blank-check-netanyahu-war-iran-panetta
I know people who voted neither candidate because Trump was horrible and Harris was pro-choice. Single-issue voters are the death of democracy. Full stop.
Sometimes being a single issue voter happens because people just care that much about that one issue. But there’s a natural tendency for anyone’s decision to come down to one thing. Complex issues are complex, most people don’t know what’s right. But then they do have ONE thing that they consider black-and-white, so that influences their choice. It gives them something they feel they can say to others “I just can’t bring myself to vote for someone who XYZ…”
Because let’s face it: no one wants to hear your entire list of political calculations. People’s choices are absolutely influenced by thoughts of how they’ll justify themselves to the people they know. And having one big pithy thing to say is more convenient than a subtle position based on a score of factors.
Humans are social, emotional, idiosyncratic shortcut machines, not logic engines.
Radicals ruin everything.
Only a radical speaks in absolutes
…is an absolute statement in itself.
Thing is you can actually be radical. In a healthy democracy you need some small fringes to exert pressure, e.g. civil right activist groups and so on so that the government isn’t able to just completely ignore portions of the population.
But to be effective as an activist you have to know when to put on pressure and when to unite. Malcolm X or Fred Hampton didn’t go vote for David Duke just because MLK was a pacifist.
This was the wrong time to pressure because as always activists dramatically misread the levels of actual support for their cause and dramatically underestimate how much support the general populace gives the opposition.
Most people don’t even agree on the very basic facts of reality or that such a thing can even exist and that for instance pretty certain observations made using the scientific method aren’t just equally weighed to someone’s opinion, how tf are you gonna expect to convince them of anything? What you gonna write some long post on it? Good luck - they literally cannot read.
Humanity is just a dogshit species. To even agree that we shouldn’t stab ourselves in our proverbial balls with a proverbial milwaukee power drill - it takes like generations and most people are always for the status quo and the worst possible version of everything is the default we have to work from and with, it’s just a cruel joke and it would be more existentially comforting if progress was outright impossible.
It was absolutely the correct time to pressure. Harris/dnc/biden miscalculated.
Huh? You really think that if they caved on Palestine they would’ve won? Most Americans support the guy who wants to impose Muslim travel bans
The numbers don’t lie.
The Muslim vote in the end stayed literally the same, so did the Jewish vote. Most Americans prolly haven’t even heard of all this shit lol
Imagine thinking someone needs to cave on not being genocidal. Jesus fucking christ.
- students were arrested under their watch, a key demographic for them in a tight race. Students are often motivated canvassers. Their response to the outcry? There must be order. Get bent biden/harris.
- they lost 25 electoral points in two fucking swing states directly related to this. In literal numbers codified in the outcome.
- they completely fucking ignored the economic issues caused by corporate greed. Fun fact kellogs is charging over 100% more for fucking corn flakes than the store brand. CORN FLAKES.
Most Americans support the guy who wants to impose Muslim travel bans.
Sigh. You didnt do well in math did you? Tell me where did the 20 million votes for biden last time go? Trumps numbers are unchanged. Oh right, they didnt show up. 🤔
Never mind the fucking fact most adults dont vote. So no most Americans dont support trump. They just dont think either party is worth their emotional energy. Good job democrats! 🤔
And token handle the rest of your nonsense with the polling numbers.
students were arrested under their watch, a key demographic for them in a tight race. Students are often motivated canvassers. Their response to the outcry? There must be order. Get bent biden/harris.
Yes and most people support that. They see you as more unhinged than the anti-police protestors and think Trump must be onto something with demolishing the DoE if the nation students are protesting for who they see as Islamist terrorists.
they lost 25 electoral points in two fucking swing states directly related to this. In literal numbers codified in the outcome.
Source?
they completely fucking ignored the economic issues caused by corporate greed
Yeah that’s socialism. They already lost the Latino vote by being too socialist. The electorate wants tax breaks for Kelogg’s CEO.
Sigh. You didnt do well in math did you? Tell me where did the 20 million votes for biden last time go?
Some of them probably to Trump.
Trumps numbers are unchanged.
Are you an idiot? You’re implying that these are the exact same people just because the numbers are roughly the same?
Biden convinced a lot of swing voters due to COVID.
Never mind the fucking fact most adults dont vote.
Source?
And token handle the rest of your nonsense with the polling numbers.
Token handle? Like JRR Tolkien? Did you have a stroke?
source
Please see yourself to any election results site for Wisconsin and Michigan, look at the results differential, look at the 3rd party votes, then go back the the primaries and look at the uncommited numbers from the primary.
Source? (Most dont vote)
See yourself to any american census page, find the adult population numbers, then look at the gross voters for this election. Do some basic math and you’ll end up with 25-30% of the voting population voted.
Are you an idiot?
Possibly but you most definitely are. You dont know basic well known facts about demographics of Michigan and Wisconsin, you ask for sources for literally common knowledge facts that are both widely reported and easily confirmed.
And no i didnt claim they were the exact same people you twit. I was pointing out he had relatively similar levels of total support in fucking aggregate. ~72mill.
Biden convinced a lot of swing voters due to COVID.
No, 20 million voters didnt show up this cycle because harris brought nothing to the tablento motivate them. In fact she mainly brought dismotivation via a genocide and lack of economic policies.
Token handle? Like JRR Tolkien? Did you have a stroke?
No, its the other person who responded to your absolutely trash of a post with a link to some polls.
Okay we’re done here. Nothing productive will be had with furthering a conversation with someone as uninformed, and in lacking basic reasoning skills as yourself.
Only in a two-party system. Locked in a two party system is the death of it. At least introduce multiple rounds, to democratically elect the 2 contestants for the final round…
I said months ago that we were going to “single issue” our way to Trump 2.0, and I’ve never ever wanted to be wrong more than when I said that.
Edit: Updated with receipts.
My punk rock lifetime bay area liberal 45 yr old friend voted Trump bc Israel.
I could say something witty or sarcastic, but you’ve probably already thought something along the same lines. I’ll just leave a facepalm emoji instead.
🤦🏻♂️
nearly all the single-issue voters on the right vote in lock-step unison, and have for decades.
democrats and progressives seem to just toss in the towel if they aren’t getting everything they want, right now.
it takes time to build something great, it takes but a moment to destroy it all. welcome to total destruction.
Yep, to all that, and I’ve often grumbled the same things.
“Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.”
Single-issue voters on the right, single-issue nonvoters on the left.
Everything being ‘dont genocide’ just so we’re clear here. I dont particularly think that was a huge ask. Nor do i think effective economic policies changes for the working class.
And we’ll get to see what the alternative provides. Yay, you won.
No I didnt we lost. We lost our humanity, we’ve lost our shared communities. The fact i had to spend the last year arguing with people that genocide is not fucking okay is evidence of that.
In no fucking way do I consider this outcome a win. There was no winning this election unfortunately and thats precisely the fucking problem. But alas democrats decided committing genocide, arresting their enthusiastic base for protesting, fucking over the working class, and shitting on the people warning them about these issues come voting are winning strategies.
😮💨🤷
And you decided lesser evil wasn’t lesser enough? Now we get greater evil.
Your words not mine. You failed to convince 20 million people with that argument, harris failed to convince 20 million people to show up using it after blowing a billion dollars.
Harris lost 25 electoral points in two states out of the fucking gate using it.
Harris lost more for completely fucking ignoring the problems working Americans are feeling at home. A minor tax break after food has shot up 20-30% in four years? Fuck off.
She fucking managed to lose every swing state using it.
At what point do you fucking realize how absolutely fucking stupid of a play that reasoning is?
I dont need to argue this point anymore. You want answers look internally. Not to me, Ive spent the last year trying to get you deeebs to course correct. You failed to do so and as result you’ve earned trump.
Insanity:
- you
- Harris
- biden
- dnc
- doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
