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.
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.
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.
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.
If you spend time with real boots-on-the-ground activism to support and prop up legitimate leftist candidates, policies, and parties in advance of election years, then yeah fine I'll accept your righteous abstaining from voting the general election.
But if your "protest" begins and ends with choosing to not vote the lesser of two evils while you're not doing anything to actually upend the system, fuck you. Your ideological purity is causing real world harm while you pout and expect some other magical force to swoop in and save you.
Nobody is coming to save you.
Nobody.
Either put in the fucking work and put in the real effort to change things, or fall in line. As is, you're just in everyone's way.
Well put. Thing is, I don't see people who don't vote going around telling people not to vote. They usually want nothing to do with an election and don't like to hear about it either.
So I always assume that the people who are telling you not to vote are doing it specifically to discredit whoever runs against Trump. Which makes them either MAGA shills or russian trolls. Both equally bad.
To your first point, unsurprisingly, the boots on the ground folks typically are fans of damage control in the system as it stands in the first place. Turns out allowing the authoritarians to have their way is not the way to effect leftward change in the slightest.
Ultimately the problem is Biden choices on Palestine are reprehensible. He doesn't "deserve" to be president again on that alone. If he was running against someone like mitt Romney , he would be in deep shit, and this discussion would be a total nebulous cloud. (Edit I'm not pro mitt, I'm saying Biden only has a chance because trump is insane.)
Unfortunately, no new candidates are available for this upcoming election.
Trump has made clear his behavior on topics like Palestine, and there are strong inferences to be made.on his potential actions on Ukraine. This is corroborated by government leaders and experts who are already defensively preparing for trump to come fuck their shit up. So that's foreign policy.
Domestically, Biden is not as egregious a troublemaker. There are SERIOUS issues happening today in America, for which a Biden whitehouse should be doing more. But I think we can agree that trump has both demonstrated in the past, and spoken clearly in the future about the ways he would shift domestic issues for the worse.
So how one votes in the primary is fine, but come the general election, I have not been convinced how abstaining or voting for trump is an appropriate action.
Trump is either as bad, or worse on every topic of significance, and I personally believe America will be drastically worse off with him as president...both domestically and abroad.
Lastly, depending on where you live, abstaining from voting in the general can be very impactful, and may even assist a trump election. It is deeply unsatisfying voting for someone you dislike, with the sole purpose of avoiding someone you hate, but it must be acknowledged.
Someone misunderstood math and claimed that more people voted "uncommitted" than had voted for Biden in "last year's" election.
Someone else explained the misunderstanding, and the real explanation (that the "uncommitted" number was higher than Biden's margin over Trump, not Biden's total).
The mod of the liberty place replied "This is a false statement and reeks of debatebro. Please remove this from your comment."
I'll let the rest speak for itself; exactly what you think happened happened.
I kid. What you said sounded fine to me actually; you said something wrong, someone called you out, you said "okay you are right" but defended your overall point which I think was pretty legitimate, there was a little hostility from both sides, the end.
I had nothing to do with the conversation btw, I just observed it. But my comment here was more calling out the mod for telling people directly that they needed to revise their comments to be according to his liking, and deleting them when they weren't, peeking out from behind a fig-leaf of it being because of the hostility instead of the viewpoint that was being expressed.
Lmao, I had a chat with a couple of these folks. Keep taunting them and burying them when they step out of their echo chambers. The whole "both sides" and "I'm gonna piss away my vote on a 3rd party in 2 party system" schtick couldn't be any more hollow than it is this year.
Biden sucks. Trump is a blight on this earth. Like it or not, you get those two choices, and the literal fuckin Nazis and the scum that break bread with them are really motivated to get their dictator "for a day" back in.
Its a terrible tagline, "vote for the one that sucks bc anything else endangers democracy," and i understand that that makes it feel like nothing is changing, but something thats worth hammering home is, do u realize how nonexistent its been in our countrys history that everyone realizes how radical the change we need is?
The efforts to keep voters home/vote third party to spoil their vote are only this amplified bc thats how much it takes to try and keep the fascist party and their shrinking demographic in power. Theres a young generation rising to ascendency... 10 years from now the overton window is going to be remarkably shifted if the those in power hope to stay there. Of course that wont happen if we dont get to have any more free elections...
The sudden “don’t vote biden” push has always felt like astroturf to me. “Divide the opposition” is literally politics 101, but I guess some people really think doing nothing is going to somehow do something.
Oh, and voting third party counts as not voting. You know that, you’re not fucking stupid.
The system in the US necessitates one cast their vote tactically instead of emotionally to effect necessary change, and most of these changes bear out only in the long term by design. Because of this, capital interest toils to encourage voters into precisely the opposite behavior; a populace which is driven to make voting decisions by an atomic, emotionally-charged view of a singular candidate's actions, as opposed to a contextual view of the broader system which enables such actions to begin with, is a populace which is much easier to fragment—and much easier to control.
Meaningful change requires a path to follow, but results by a reformist method alone come painfully slow—again, by the system's very design. It's more comfortable to believe that rallying behind a third party advocating radical change is the better way, but power has been consolidated so heavily into the largest two parties that the effectiveness of any others (outside of very specific circumstances) is gutted almost entirely. It has been this way especially since the campaign finance mal-reforms that followed the Bush v Gore race. Abstaining from participation or jumping to a niche cause in protest of atrocities that are occurring now is an understandable sentiment, but in a system tuned to overlook and perpetuate said atrocities it's missing the bigger picture.
Try not to look at your vote as a wholesale endorsement; look at it instead as a carefully-considered stake in the ultimate goal to tear down the walls which have kept third parties unfairly irrelevant for decades—centuries, arguably. Stake it with the goal of working to reform or abolish unjust systems. Stake it with the goal of laying the groundwork for more radical progressive change in the future.
Despite all I've attempted to lay out, if you insist on voting third party anyways, I urge you to find someone to vote for and make that your movement to stand in contrast against reprehensible genocide-enabling. The time for such a nomination is long overdue, and as it stands a candidate does not seem to currently exist in a way capable of capturing the majority of Americans' votes—especially in time for election day. This means a lot of work needs to be done if that's your ultimatum to the current situation, I encourage you to start as soon as you are able. Please understand that the third party route is not only victory or bust, but a bust means the genocide gets considerably and immediately worse if you rally too many to your cause who would have cast their vote for Biden otherwise. This outcome has an extremely well-established historical precedent in the United States, having happened multiple times in elections past, and will continue to be a concern unless/until vote tally reforms are adopted. Such are the considerations in US electoral tactics.
(based on my observations) Hexbear users' typical response is absolutely authoritarian, just extreme left flavor of it.
You can't, however, build a reasonable discourse with an absolutist pro-authoritarian type, no matter how hard you try. And it's no wonder they are going for the authoritarian representative one way or another.
Id argue its not left at all. Simping for authoritarian regimes from the east that mask themselves behind pretty images/words of workers' governments doesnt hand the means of production to the working class, and it most certainly implies one is not so very keen on establishing a classless, cashless, stateless society. They call themselves a dictatorship of the proletariat, but all the emphasis goes on the first part.
What do you believe is the underlying set of values and principles guiding Hexbear?
What do you believe the goals of people on Hexbear are?
Is it possible to analyze the beliefs that lead them to the conclusions they have, so as to better argue against them, than to call them MAGA supporters?
I myself will probably be voting Biden, for transparency, but this meme is just a gross misunderstanding of how disaffected leftists, and Marxists in general, operate, and why.
Why do you say that? They oppose Capitalism, colonialism, Imperialism, and bigotry. They support Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism. They read Marx, Lenin, and Goldman, and share memes based on Marxist theory.
On what grounds do you decide that they aren't leftists? Is it because you disagree with their stances, as a presumed leftist, therefore anyone you disagree with cannot be a leftist? Is it because you think they are bad people, and bad people can't be leftists? Is it just vibes?
What is your coherent and useful definition of leftism? We can compare Hexbear's stated goals and see if it lines up better with leftism or rightism.
I remember meeting a man from Libya at an old job of mine. He was more supportive of Republicans which surprised me . (My initial thought was why would an Arab support Republicans.) He said that Democrats had a stronger tendency to invade other countries. He had a point in that Obama and Hilary absolutely brought upon a Libyan apocalypse but he totally ignored Reagan and both Bushes who are Republicans (who destroyed the Iraqi government).
Though I should stop before it sounds like I'm "both sidings" again.
That's the thing, democrats and republicans are the same when it comes to many critical problems, stemming from both of them being parties of the rich. Accusations of "both sides"ing is used to shut down any discussions of how the system itself is rotten to the core. Yes, both parties aren't the exact same but there are enough similarities to show that voting won't be the solution for a lot of key issues.
You’re not going to convince anyone to participate in your game by insulting them. Unfortunately as the party who wants someone else to change their behavior, you have to be the bigger person. If you actually care, ya know.
Sort of this, but also the person who is acting like a crazed extremist shilling for a genocidal maniac is accusing the peaceful abstainers of being MAGA.
Biden moving the Democrat party right and courting rightwing voters is what is disenfranchising liberals.
Kind of the irony of these situations. People saying “We all need to vote for Biden and if you don’t you’re a STUPID, CRYING BABY” don’t truly want to get people to vote for Biden. If they did they’d have some tact, maybe made their case and discuss the pros and cons of voting for him and hopefully actually get some conversions in rather than just looking down their nose at people.
It’s little different than the evangelical Christian’s who show up to events with big signs saying “GAYS will burn IN HELL!”. They don’t actually want to convert people. If they did they would be so alienating. They just want to scream their position to feel something.
I live in a swing state and I’m voting third party. It’s not great, but it’s the only thing I can bring myself to do. Between Gaza and Bidens commitment to pour billions of dollars into more cops and more surveillance, I just can’t do it.
If he stepped down or they put someone else up I’d probably be happily voting dem, but they didn’t. It’s a shame. They said themselves that they’re fine to lose some progressive votes if they scoop up 3 or 4 Nikki Haley voters for every progressive lost. I guess I’m one of those. I dunno. I wish it was a better circumstance.
Just say you're voting for Trump because that is what you're doing.
You're just giving yourself deniability to yourself, but no one else is fooled in the slightest. In the general election, a vote for anyone but Biden amounts to a vote for Trump.
Just say you prefer Trump's approach to Palestine, Ukraine, human rights, women's health, religious freedom, freedom of speech, gun rights, net neutrality, Healthcare, etc, etc, ect. Just say that.
I’ve frequently seen this claim, and similar ones, but it doesn’t really make sense. If not voting for Biden or not voting at all is actually a vote for Trump then his votes outnumber Biden’s by a landslide since ~80 million people don’t vote. So, by this logic, Trump should win and it shouldn’t even be close.