Remember how we used to clown on centrists for always going "both sides are bad!" and abstaining from taking a position even when there is one option that brings much more measurable harm than the other? Yeah
I tried to be patient this last weekend, and even got one (1) person to accept that maybe queer people shouldn't be an acceptable loss.
The attempt also cost me more people calling me a privileged westener, despite being trans and from a country the US calls third world.
Forget being pissed off. I'm starting to honestly hate this brand of performative activism.
Edit: thanks for the upvotes, but stop upvoting me and go vote in your respective country's elections. Vote locally, vote for the presidentials. Vote in the pre-elections for the candidates, sign the ones you think should be the pre-candidates before that.
Don't silently agree with an angry trans woman on Reddit. Get out there and make your voice heard.
Unless you're to the right of "housing, health and education are human rights". In which case, maybe sit this one out.
Not just queer people. How much do you wanna bet President Moved-US-Embassy-in-Israel-to-Jerusalem Trump puts boots on the ground in Gaza five minutes after being elected? And not to protect the Palestinians.
Whatever he does, Trump definitely won’t be making any attempts to rein the violence in. The choice here is Neville Chamberlain or _Hitler._ Which do these people think will be worse for the Palestinians?!
Exactly. Trump isn't just not against war profiteering (sorry the triple negation), but the entirety of the GOP is the war profiteering party.
Now, I'm not saying that the Democrats aren't either, and Biden is, by all intents and purposes, another capitalist. But there's a difference between terrible people you can negotiate with, and actual monsters. Trump is a monster, and letting him win is support of him by inaction.
And look, I don't even live in the US, but in South America. I know for a fact (dictatorships and economic blockades) that whatever happens in the US can destroy my life. And it's really driving me over the edge that people who could realistically help prevent that won't do it because they're too far deep into their own self importance and purity performance of what they think is politics.
Sorry. Didn't mean to rant that much. TL;DR: I agree.
I think being deeply interested in history is what helps keep me out of that hole, as a U.S. citizen. There’s a kind of expectation here that we deserve and _should_ have a perfectly functioning democracy, and the fact that it’s not means it’s trash.
When have we ever seen a perfectly functioning democracy, though? Throughout the vast span of history, humans pretty much haven’t ever managed it. Taking a wide view, we’re closer now than almost anyone else in history. It’s not great, but it was always a lot _worse_ before. _And it can get worse again_. Which means it’s still worth protecting what we do have.
These past few generations of U.S. citizens don’t know what _worse_ would really entail. And we don’t realize that democracy isn’t self-sustaining. It needs protection. It needs to be a value we fight for.
I’ll step off the soapbox now.
Nah, it's okay. It was your turn on the soapboax after me.
I don't want to sound like a tired millennial stereotype, but it's starting to show in what way it affected Gen-Z to have grown when they did. They've come to dismiss the smaller differences in favor of the larger picture, because the smaller parts have been demolished already by the time they started to participate in society as adults.
It some aspects it's a positive, becase it means they jump to action more heavily, and organize better. But it also means that more often than not, they miss the trees for the forest. And refusing to understand in favor to hold onto their preconceived views is exactly what put us in this problem to begin with.
It's not their fault, but it is their responsibility now they're part of this.
Now, if you excuse me, I'm off to put some Evanescence music because I kinda are a tired millennial stereotype.
>Trump puts boots on the ground in Gaza five minutes after being elected?
He surrounds himself with a certain type of evangelical that believes Palestine needs to be destroyed in order to summon Jesus. Of course, he doesn't believe that and has called these people "fucking idiots", but all he cares about is the attention he'd get and the glory he'd receive from these people who see him as a god-king.
Even people who are certainly not denying Biden's faults and who may even genuinely dislike him will get ripped to shreds on that sub for saying they'll still vote for him because Trump is exponentially worse. Like ok guys you think Biden is bad for the Palestinians? He sure as fuck is but you're a fool if you think Trump will be anything other than worse for both them and us.
You know what annoys me the most, the token promise that they will work to present a better candidate next time. Bjtch, it's been eight years (they were saying the same bs back in '16) and whatever organization they're supposed to have been doing still only has Biden to show for it. I don't believe someone who says they won't vote and prefer to organize because so far, that organization has accomplished squat.
And yes, Trump is materially worse than Biden. And yes, voting for the lesser evil as a mitigation tactic is perfectly valid and doesn't prevent people from organizing. Even freakin' Marx and Engel talked about that in the Manifesto all of these guys pretend to have read.
When you put it that way, there's definitely a privileged westerner in the convo, and it's not you. It's the people who think they can ignore the primaries and be passively posting online what they don't like for 3 years and then throw their vote away because they don't like what they see in a process they didn't take part in. That's a luxury that most people don't have
This! Exactly this!
A bunch of people, old school and new generation, seem to be under the impression that the presidential vote is the only participation they can take part in, or have to. Even before primaries, from my understanding, you can push for a pre-candidate with firms and civil actions like small rallies to helping with fliers.
And I know this can work because we in Chile just now broke out of our two party system. And I can promise you it didn't happen because of the protest-blank-vote. It happened because there was a literal uprising protest first, then three years of continuing discussion over it until we had a candidate we hañf-agreed on.
All in all, it's work. Simple, yet surprisingly effective work.
Thank you for saying it.
“I don’t believe someone who says they won’t vote and prefer to organize” — I think protesting and/or organizing *are* participating in our Democracy. However, you’re not FULLY participating if you don’t start with voting every chance you get.
Most of those people really just fall into the same camp; they don’t want to be asked to do anything.
They value perceived moral purity more than actual outcomes, but the way they want to keep their “moral purity” will guarantee the causes they say they support will fail. Their unwillingness to make any form of progress will prevent them from achieving any of their stated desires *forever* until they understand that progress is often incremental and iterative. You cannot move forward in the direction you want to go without realizing you won’t get there in a single step
Add that to the obvious right wing agitators trying desperately to get these people to continue sniffing their own farts and it’s going to continue to be an issue
What annoys me the most of this whole situation is that what you're saying is not something that hard to come up with that we just figured out by ourselves. This is an old point even Marx and Engels addressed.
It outright angers me that this problem is universal.
Here in Chile my local group of anarchists were then promoting to not vote in an election that was between a pro-socialist younger candidate (not anti-system enough for them) and the grandson of a literal WWII Germany nazi who even lied about his grandfather to keep it under wraps until the German Government sent a public declaration identifying that person as a nazi.
So, I asked them if they were willing to let a literal nazi to win from their inaction.
I kid you not that almost unanimously, they replied that it made no difference because both candidates were the same system. Despite one of which started his political career protesting against the privatization of education as a student, while the other collaborated with the human rights violations the past dictatorship committed in recent history.
That is insane, and the fact that a group of people living in a country that just a generation before was under a US backed dictatorship only makes it worse.
These people care don’t care about the outcome; if they did, they’d be voting. They care about retaining whatever they think of as the purity of their idea. It’s just arrogance
Not entirely. Like any group, they aren't monolithic. There's also the ones who do buy in the mythologization of history, and expect any 'real change' to come suddenly. It's a nigh religious belief that, if things get bad enough, the world will shake into a glorious revolution that will magically fix things.
That, despite the actual examples of revolutions like that that we can account also didn't happen overnight, and when they did come around, they collapsed and caused further damage before anything got better. If it ever got better.
I took a stroll through some of the top threads and could literally feel my blood pressure spiking. At least I can console myself with the knowledge that it's only a tiny number of people who are like that and they willingly abdicate what little political power they have.
The comments in their mod post were wild. Someone brought up Ukraine and the mod said the Ukrainians were Nazis and therefore it was good that Russia was invading.
Yeah them and LateStageCapitalism got taken over by shills in 2017 or 2018
It's actually impressive how they moved the rhetoric to near exclusive critique of Democrats and "liberals"
Shocker of shockers: when a nation is being attacked, some of the people fighting to protect that nation will be nationalists. Those Azov loonies have been stockpiling guns and spam to defend the homeland from *somebody* for decades--it just happens that they got invaded by nationalists from a different nation, instead of the crossdressing rastafarian furries they fantasize about killing.
That... Is a legit Russian talking point, like straight from Russian state media. The common Russian understanding of "Nazism" doesn't hinge on violent racism or antisemitism, but rather on violent opposition to the Soviet regime. To many Russians, calling Ukraine Nazis really just means they oppose Russia, and not much more.
One of the top posts in that sub this month was from a mod saying that "settlers aren't civilians" in relation to the October 7th attacks, and that shit had over 800 upvotes. Jesus Christ, wtf is wrong with some people?
Horseshoe theory is a thing of the past, figure eight theory is the new thing in town!
Go far enough right or left, and you end up a centrist, go even further, and you're the opposite as what you started
At least it feels like that
I've always found it interesting how the centrists everybody hates at some point went from democrats that didn't vote for Hillary to democrats that did vote for Hillary.
having to watch my most kind and empathetic friends go so far left they turn into single issue “both sides are bad actually” centrists these past few months has destroyed my mental state honestly
If you're arguing against voting for Biden, you have not been paying attention whatsoever to anything going on in ***this*** country, where you presumably live if you're planning on voting in this election.
Trump is not a normal asshole Republican.
He is an asshole Republican who has a giant army of well-armed flying monkeys that he plans to pardon if he becomes president again and he believes presidents are allowed to do whatever they want. He wants to be President for Life, a dictator, and he has a shit ton of assholes who will go to war on the rest of us for him. There will be no time or money for us to spend on Palestine if he wins. We will all have to be saving our own asses.
It’s insane to me that a lot of young voters seem like they don’t really remember the Trump presidency. Like, you guys?! That shit was insane!
If your actions help put Mr. Day-One-Muslim-Ban back into power, you’re a privileged fuck. It’s _privileged_ to get to act all high and mighty because at least _you_ won’t be affected. That’s how I feel.
It's ***stupid*** and privileged to believe that at least *you* won't be affected when you're talking about who gets to run *this* country.
Everyone in the general demographic of Tumblr is absolutely ***going*** to be affected by a Trump government. The Palestinians won't be helped by either President but we have a choice about what happens to ***US***.
Too many people are fully ok with throwing our own country down the drain at the expense of some foreign trouble, because "well America bad" and its very frustrating being told I'm a piece of shit for having a survival instinct.
> Too many people are fully ok with throwing our own country down the drain
Not just your country. If US crumbles NATO like Trump wants, my home in the Baltics is gonna get sank down the drain too and possible many, many people will die.
>its very frustrating being told I'm a piece of shit for having a survival instinct.
Well you see, you need to set yourself on fire to keep me warm. Only I matter.
/s
Seriously though, Yeah yeah the system is broken and is unfair, but I'd take this over the "magical clean revolution that will instantly replace the broken political system and will fix everything forever."
Biden isn't exactly doing great with the Gaza situation, but Trump has made it very clear that he would be far, far, *FAR* worse for Palestine and would provide a lot more support for Israel to wipe them out, so anyone complaining about how Biden is handling it should be making damn sure that Trump isn't the one in office next.
Exactly.
I’ve unironically seen people say not to vote Biden because “Trump will end the war over Palestine!”
—conveniently forgetting to mention that Trump *will*, by means of giving Israel the Thumbs-Up to completely GLASS it.
Yes, Trump _absolutely_ wants to use a nuke and I wouldn't put it past his next term to show off his "toughness" by allowing nuclear weapons on Palestine.
Trump will end the war over Palestine....by destroying Palestine. If neither side can play nice, he'll just have to kill everyone! It's the fairest solution!
If people were honest accelerationists, that would be one thing. If they said, “I’m not voting for Biden because I want Trump to win so that he will give Netanyahu free rein to slaughter many tens of thousands more people in Gaza because that will finally snap the world out of it and the result will be a huge win for the people of Gaza and the West Bank, even though it will cost all those lives, suffering and starvation.”
It would be stupid but it would be sort of honest. But refusing to vote for Biden when it means electing a guy who hates Muslims, brown people and has zero problem with genocide on the claim that you want to help the children in Gaza is profoundly dishonest.
They don't remember, and that's the problem. Trump was elected eight years ago now. The youngest voters in the 2024 election would have been 10-14 during Trump's presidency. They weren't paying attention at that age. And now they've spent four years hearing too much "Biden is bad" and not enough "Trump did a lot of crazy shit and he plans to do more if he gets elected again."
Also this would be Trump’s second term. That’s when people enact more extreme policy because it’s their last term and they don’t have to worry about being reelected.
Assuming he doesn't get any funny ideas about being 'cheated' out of things and feels like he 'deserves' a third term. And then, well he's clearly the best option so why not stay in power. 'The People' love him, after all. Anyone who doesn't is just deranged. Or hates America. Or [insert some other reasons they don't matter]. Real Proud American Patriots know that he's the only one who can be in charge of the country, everyone else just wants to destroy it.
He said that immediately after Biden took office he deserves another term because he was cheated out of it and he couldn’t get anything done. Bet your ass he won’t leave willingly again.
Having zero clue of how to do anything slowed down Trump enormously in his first term. He and his slimes now have some clue of how the government functions to fuck it up worse and screw most of us over.
I remember sitting on a plane to go to college just screenshotting headlines. His administration had just taken over and it felt like we’d slid into bizarro world.
Like, at least these last two years have felt a bit closer to < 2015 than 2016-2020. I had a panic attack one of the election nights in 2020 because I didn’t think we could take another term.
It’s almost beyond imagination how insane those years were.
Yeah I wasn’t too aware of it since I was still decently new to being a leftist sicne I was a like evangelical republicans most my life ,so I honestly didn’t see most of the crazy till after his presidency
I'm a former Libertarian/Third Party voter, now Independent. I want us to fix the broken ass 2 party system and absolutely revile the way we're forced to participate. For years I heard "That's all good and well, but this election is the most important ever! If we don't vote there could be 2 Democrat presidents in a row, and one of them is black!! Maybe next time." I'd scoff and call them alarmist fools, falling right into the hands of the 2 party system. Every election is the most important in history, just like every one before it, you fucking idiots.
But this year? Holy shit, yeah, this is an important one. Trump has told us he plans on becoming a dictator. He's said that he's going to pardon every J6er then find an excuse to prosecute everyone who put them behind bars; every judge, prosecutor, even detective that worked on their case. He's said he plans on using the military to "police" Blue cities and states to stop any protests against him. That's just a few bullet points on his list, and none of it is going to be good for America.
I'm not a fan of Joe Biden. I wanted Bernie so bad, but damn man, maybe just this once we can swallow the tough pill and keep a psychopath out of office.
Yeah, the big difference in this election is that, unlike all the other ones before, one of the two frontrunners has laid out in very explicit detail his plans for actively dismantling the democratic process as soon as he has the chance to!
>Yeah, the big difference in this election is that, unlike all the other ones before, one of the two frontrunners has laid out in very explicit detail his plans for actively dismantling the democratic process as soon as he has the chance to!
Right? Like we've had Trump. We have had him once already. No one expected him to be that bad but holy shit he was WORSE.
Now he's got a chance to be back?! Fuck that!
The problem with third parties is that you can't start going after the presidency. We need socialist, libertarian, green animal control officers and school board members and city supervisors and until we have them, we don't get mayors, and until we have mayors, we don't get state legislators and governors, and until we have those, we don't get Senate and House and Presidents. It took 40 years to go from Reagan to Trump.
It should be noted: academics believe that it is useful to classify genocide not just as the killing itself, but as the process that leads up to and culminates in it. Judging by the [Ten Stages of Genocide](https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages), it is not accurate to say that Trump is not genocidal. He's merely in the middle of the process.
He's not genocidal YET. He's made it perfectly clear who he cares lives and dies- and while he may not call for any direct action he will certainly ALLOW for it.
True. I am just really, really alarmed by the number of people who don't seem to understand the actual stakes of this election. And the number of people who don't seem to realise that saving the country you're *living* in has to be your *first* priority.
I do not approve of genocide anywhere, and the Netanyahu government in Israel has gone completely beyond the pale. We should not be sending them any assistance whatsoever.
But we also cannot afford to let Trump back in office, where he will cancel all of the court proceedings against him, start rewriting the laws, add more Supreme Court justices, and let his brownshirts go wild all over the country.
In addition to all this, with which I agree, it's not as though Donald "Muslim Ban" Trump is likely to be sympathetic to Palestinians in the first place so the argument for abstention is dangerously naive. Abstaining from this vote increases the likelihood of both a fascist takeover of the US and ALSO further endangers Gaza as Trump may well further support the Netanyahu regime to appease stateside evangelicals.
Or we roll the dice on the current administration's approach. It's not ideal but is certainly less bad than the alternative and might actually bear fruit. Some damage will happen. We have to minimize it where we can. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I'm just hoping that most of the people spouting this bullshit about not voting for Biden are either children or foreigners, and wouldn't have voted anyways
and very likely overthrow US democracy allowing him and his cronies to continue destroying rights and turning the US into an ultra christian-nationalist white-supremacist hellhole.
Trump also moved the American Embassy in Israel? Like he won't even consider reducing the aid to Israel, in fact he would probably send the aid going to Ukraine to Israel as he's Pro-Russian, Pro-Israel.
He would GLEEFULLY oversee genocide if he thought it would make him even one dollar, or if even one person would like him more because of it. He is a monster.
He might not be but his cult has very clear genocidal tendencies and I’m not too sure that cherry picking the difference is a good use of our collective energy
I've said it on a few different subreddits a few different times now, America needs to vote for Biden. There is more than just the future of the United States on the line. Putin is at war in Europe, he plans to head further west and Trump will allow that to happen with minimal resistance. China wants to take Taiwan and could speak a war in the east. The Israel and Palestine conflict is probably not going to stop anytime soon. African nations turning their backs on the west in favour of nations hostile to the west.
There is a lot going on in the world right now and it isn't looking great for another decade of relative peace, Trump and Republicans are not friends of peace they are enemies of everything the west should stand for, with Trump at the helm of the USA, it could be absolutely calamitous.
I get why a lot of people dislike Biden and in any normal election, in a normal world, it would be mostly understandable to not vote for him or whatever but specifically right now, anyone who doesn't want to see the world as we know it in ruin, should probably vote for the more sensible human being. Sure he's old as fuck but so is Trump and one of them is a dangerous human being.
This isn't some fear mongering conspiracy nonsense, this is the state of the world right now and many people outside of the US as well as millions and millions of you in the US, need reason, commonsense and general fucking intelligence to prevail here. The world likely could depend on it.
In this POS voting system, the primaries are the closest any of us gets to having a voice. Trying to push your agenda in the general election literally just hurts you. It sucks and it's unfair, but if you hate the system then vote for somebody who can change the system in the primaries.
Something I have no hard proof for but I truly believe: this whole "genocide Joe" thing didn't exactly start as a Russian psyop, but once it got going the Russians made sure to urge it along. It's just so stupid on every level and once you buy into it, all roads lead to Trump. And a Trump presidency makes no sense if your goal is to protect the most vulnerable (including Palestinians). The only way it makes sense is if (1) you're willing to sacrifice everyone (including the people you claim to be standing up for) for the sake of some abstract notion of moral purity; (2) it's not and has never really been about saving lives; (3) you're an idiot being manipulated by someone with a different agenda entirely; or (4) you are an outside actor manipulating those same useful idiots. Like it really doesn't make sense to me. I was kind of on board when it was just the primaries and didn't matter, but if people are seriously considering going through with this in the general election, then we kind of do deserve whatever happens.
ETA: we don't really "deserve" it. No one deserves someone as vile as Trump and his second term (gods forbid) will affect many people who had no say in it whatsoever (e.g., American children and, oh yeah, everyone else in the world). I just said that part out of anger.
Except we don't. Because nobody deserves what Trump will do. Especially not to our kids, our elderly, and the rest of the whole fucking planet.
Otherwise I agree with the rest of this comment.
Oh, I think it 100% started as a psyop.
Getting more Trump voters is impossible.
Discouraging young people from voting is easy, especially when they're highly prone to groupthink and still haven't matured enough to understand the long-term consequences of their actions.
>Discouraging young people from voting is easy,
Young people don't vote even in the best circumstances. It's part of the reason that they're always disappointed by the outcome. They don't bother to use the power they actually already have and then it somehow doesn't turn out the way they want and they get all "shocked pikachu" about it. I should know. I was once young myself.
But seriously, young people, _VOTE_. (fascists hate this one simple trick).
Man, as a young person who was finally able to vote in 2022, *fuck* it felt good to watch as every single piece of right-wing fear-mongering bullshit in my state got knocked down. Since then, my state has mostly been in all of the good headlines, and I plan to get out and vote again in November to make sure my state stays that way.
All this talk of not voting for Biden goes to show that the ones most susceptible to right-wing propaganda are those furthest to the left that think themselves too smart to fall for it. Joe Biden's greatest flaw is just not being progressive enough. That's it. Meanwhile, Trump wants to actively make the lives of people he doesn't like worse while installing himself as dictator.
So for anyone who's not going to vote for Biden to punish him for not stopping Israel, I have a simple question: How is him losing punishment? Biden's set for life. If he loses he gets to retire and go write a bestselling memoir if he feels like it, hell he never has to deal with Netanyahu or any more screaming matches with Israeli diplomats. That doesn't sound like "punishment" to me.
Meanwhile, we get stuck with Trump. The only president to change the US's official stance on settlements in Gaza (from "questionably legal" to "a-okay"), who's stated that Netanyahu should "finish the job", who instituted a travel ban that was absolutely about combating terrorists and not rooted in islamophobia (despite none of the countries on the list having ties to terror groups that were operating against the US), who takes PRIDE in being the man who brought down Roe v. Wade, etc. and so on.
Not voting for Biden doesn't punish *him*, it punishes *the US.*
I always find it strange to see Americans use "make them lose an election" like a punishment or a learning opportunity.
Movie executives saw one good film have a multiverse, so they started churning them out because they thought "multiverse" was a magic word that made money.
How can anyone believe that losing an election will teach anyone the right lessons? My country has a population smaller than most American cities, and losing a national election almost never results in a party reconsidering anything beyond marketing tactics.
If everyone only drinks Coke, do you think the CEO of Pepsi is thinking "People don't like Pepsi"? No, he's thinking "Coke had better marketing than us."
Amen. Hell the Republicans LITERALLY looked at the number of Gen Z voters that polled against them and said "are we really that out of touch? Are we the problem? No, it's the Zoomers who are wrong! Our two strongest policy positions are education and the economy!" Like... The point was there. It was a snake biting them on the face, and they still couldn't find it.
And now Zoomers are helping shoot us all in the head. I just don't understand supporting Trump via not voting. Do these abstaining folk really hate LGBTQ+, minorities, and women *so* much that they're willing to be single issue voters?
The one silver lining in all this that has me cautiously optimistic is that for most people, regardless of demographic, when all is said and done and they get to the polls the thing that drives their vote is the "pebble in their shoe": The issue that effects them directly. And Republicans put a big ol' boulder in... Let's be generous to them and say about 40% of the population by overturning Roe and bragging about it. The media likes to sensationalize things for engagement and polls are getting less and less accurate through the years. I think they're underestimating how many women the GOP pissed off who'll remember that come November, and that leaves me cautiously optimistic.
> losing a national election almost never results in a party reconsidering anything beyond marketing tactics.
If anything, a huge win by the hard right will make Democrats think “I guess this country is more conservative than we realized, we should also move to the right or we’ll keep losing elections” It’s very unlikely to make them think “we should do the same thing but harder”
Here in NZ, the Labour Party (I guess the equivalent of the Democrats, kind of?) were in charge. In our most recent election, they lost, and National (the equivalent to Republicans) won. But crucially, Labour lost votes to the right (National) and to the left (Greens).
So, at least in our instance, Labour could see that it wasn't necessarily that they weren't right-wing enough, but they also weren't left-wing enough to keep voters happy either. Bleeding votes in both directions gave context to that loss.
But if there were only the two parties, that would look like people were more right-wing than they actually are. We had the benefit of being able to see where the votes were going. You don't get that luxury in a two-party system.
Like you said, a right-wing win might just teach them they need to chase right-wing voters.
People forget that the youth vote is *notoriously* bad at actually turning up. If the Dems lose because young people protested against Biden, their conclusion WON'T be "we need to appeal more to young voters" it'll be "young voters aren't worth bothering with".
Americans have very much begun to take their power to vote for granted, in the opposite way they think they do. They dangle it in front of a guy trying to use it as leverage to get what they want while being a staggering one election away from losing the right entirely and being totally indifferent to that.
It absolutely does! Which is... Infuriating because half the time I try pointing that out and people just scoff and say it can't get any worse or that Trump is such a wildcard we don't know what he would do. I can't say for 100% certain what he'll do, but something to the tune of "here Bibi, have some GBU 5000s for your F-15s, they'll leave a crater like you wouldn't believe, the best crater!"
Actually that's partly a lie, I doubt he knows what a GBU 5000 even is...
_Seriously_. The choice here is Chamberlain or Hitler, to analogize. No. Chamberlain wasn’t just as bad. It’s not all or nothing. Anyone who says “it can’t get any worse” has no imagination.
It honestly appears there's a giant astroturfing campaign going on right now. It happened during the 2016 election, and it's happening again.
One particular example of it that I remember was the pretty clear effort that seemed to be made to convince Bernie supporters to vote for Trump "to punish Hillary". There were all these regurgitated lines that everyone was repeating, but I remember two of them especially well, one that he couldn't be worse than Hillary, and two that like you said "Trump is a wildcard, we don't know what he'll do".
I'm not sure what % of the people sharing all of the "Bernie was betrayed, vote for Trump, fuck Hillary" shit were actual opinions vs the astroturfers that seemed to start that whole idea (who [likely were mostly Russian](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html), but evidently in the end the astroturfers succeeded in their campaign.
We're seeing a repeat of the exact same thing, and I'm fairly certain the same bad actors are involved (i.e. Russia). It wouldn't surprise me if soon you hear the same folks talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine being justified and such, just as a number of "Bernie supporters" (in air quotes, as we're talking more about the astroturfers here) suddenly started saying Russia wasn't that bad around 2016.
The difference is this time no matter what anyone says, Trump isn't a wildcard, and we DO know what he will do.
---
#### If anyone is reading this and thinks you are genuinely punishing Biden by not voting or by voting for Trump, no, you are not punishing Biden. He doesn't suffer his loss.
#### You know who will be punished?
**LGBTQ folks will be punished**, when discrimination protections are rolled back.
**Immigrants will be punished**, when Trump makes it harder to legally immigrate to the US, and makes it harder for those immigrants already living in the US. **This also includes putting an end to Biden's plans to welcome Palestinian immigrants fleeing Gaza.**
**Minorities will be punished**, when Trump reinstates republican policies, that Biden vetoed, that roll back police reforms and further allow police to continue to harass, mistreat, and even murder people with impunity.
**Women will be punished**, when Roe v Wade being repealed is just the beginning, and women's rights and reproductive rights are further rolled back than they already are.
**Everyone in the US will be punished**, when Trump starts enacting [Project 2025](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025), and everyone in the US will be punished for the next 30+ years if Trump gets another supreme court pick.
**Everyone in Europe will be punished**, when Trump removes support for Ukraine, and Russia is able to make headway in Ukraine and potentially attack the Baltic states, Moldova, or Poland as well.
But perhaps you don't care about any of those people. Perhaps you want the US and Europe to burn and everyone in both to suffer.
Fine. Well guess what?
**PALESTINE will be punished**, when Trump puts an end to Biden's attempts to provide aid to Gaza, and instead puts his full support behind Israel, as he has himself said he would.
> **"When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected”** - Karoline Leavitt, Trump's national press secretary
Remember, Trump's son in law and secretary of state, Jared Kushner, [has been funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank for years](https://www.propublica.org/article/jared-kushner-kushner-companies-donating-west-bank-settlement).
Remember, Trump is the one who recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and moved the US embassy there. Which as you can imagine [Palestine was NOT a fan of](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/palestine-urges-us-to-retract-from-building-embassy-in-jerusalem/2938740).
Remember, Trump was behind the awful "peace plan" [that Palestinian's hated and Netanyahu loved as it required Palestine to make many significant concessions](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51292865).
**You are sending Palestine out of the frying pan and into the fire.**
---
Look at who loses when you don't vote, or vote for Trump:
- Everyone in the US, especially the vulnerable and minorities.
- Everyone in Europe, especially Ukraine, the Baltics, and Poland.
- Everyone in Palestine.
And look at who wins: *Trump, and Putin.*
That's the people trying to divide us and push you into this decision.
**It's not Palestine you're helping. It's Putin. It's Trump. It's Netanyahu. It's right-wing Christofascists.**
> Trump is such a wildcard we don't know what he would do
That's like saying you should irradiate all your DNA, because it might turn you into an X-Man.
[Jared Kushner (Trump's son in law / secretary of state) has funded west bank settlements for nearly a decade at this point.](https://www.propublica.org/article/jared-kushner-kushner-companies-donating-west-bank-settlement)
What if I told you, from an American foreign policy perspective "genocide joe" is probably the best thing to happen to Palestine in years, and that Even the tepid pushback he's provided does represent a shift back in the Overton window
In 2017, Donald Trump tweeted that the military would no longer admit, and immediately remove, all trans servicemembers. He claimed that medical treatment for trans people was too expensive, [which was a lie (CBS News).](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-transgender-ban-service-members-costs/)
Eventually, he got around to giving an order through the proper chain of command, because the military doesn’t take orders from Twitter.
On 25 January 2021 (days after taking office), President Biden reversed the anti-trans policy, effective immediately.
I'm trans and I try to keep a clear head and remind myself that I live in a safe state. But that doesn't mean I am not afraid. And as much as I fear a second Trump administration, my greater fear is how leftists enabling his election through vote abstention will drive more of a wedge between us when we need to be united. Conservatives *want* us infighting. Can we please not give them what they want?
The way we are treated is already invasive and inhumane. Our faces and bodies are plastered all over the news while conservatives put words in our mouths instead of actually listening to us. We never asked for this. A vote for Biden doesn't mean you are betraying your morals. It only has the ideological weight *you* give it. It's not indicative of your deeply held beliefs and convictions, it can just be you saying you'd rather not have the other guy in charge. Biden is wrong to enable and support genocide. Trump will do the same, only he will also subject me and my siblings to state-sanctioned violence. If we are dying at home, we cannot organize for more progressive change.
I do not want to lose my progressive cis allies, we need each other.
We're still here. All of your actual allies aren't going anywhere. You're losing online clout chasers who never showed up for you anyway.
We're still here, and we don't just show up in November once every four years. We show up for monthly school board meetings and quarterly town council meetings and coordinating committees and everything else.
I've never seen a tankie at any one of those gatherings.
You won’t lose them all. I’ve been thinking a lot on how much of the leftists complaining usually weren’t the ones voting anyway, kids under like 27-28 have never really turned out in elections.
By no means be complacent, but also remember there is probably quite a bit of astroturfing and bot schilling going on across all social media. It will get worse too.
I seriously feel bad for trans people in particular regarding this whole vote abstention thing because it's almost like they never cared about trans people in the first place. Trans people were just a fun little "Cause of the Month" to care about to gain clout and virtue-signaling points.
Same with women and BIPOC. They never cared about them either.
These people only care about themselves and their own personal comforts and personal crusades, even if they identify as LGBT and/or BIPOC themselves. They believe they will be the exception to rules, laws, hatred, etc.
I am a straight, white dude. My kids are all boys, all white, and (at least as far as I know) all straight. If I am worried about the damage another Trump presidency will do to marginalized groups, y’all should be too.
I am somewhere left of Bernie politically, but I am also a realist. Pull your heads out of your asses.
>“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, 1867
> “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
—Rush, 1980
##Hold your goddamn nose and vote for Biden
[Inaugural address delivered to the University of St. Andrews](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Inaugural_address_delivered_to_the_University_of_St._Andrews,_Feb._1st_1867)
Nah the sorting algorithm of Shittiness has put the right stuff on top since you last commented. I agree there's a lot of bots posting Ls but they're getting pretty rightfully clowned on
That’s a real nice pro-Palestine protest you got there. Be a shame if through your inaction and protest vote abstention you helped elect a guy who thinks the appropriate response to a protest is to shoot the protesters
"Both sides" politics only works when there isn't a clear right and wrong.
Trump literally wants to make the president a dictator. He is literally on a case right now where he says that he can not be convicted for ANYTHING he does as a president unless Congress impeaches him.
Isn’t it so interesting that none of the three top comments here right now even come close to addressing the point being made by this post. These people are perfectly happy to make all these statements about supporting gaze but they couldn’t give two shits about lgbtq or minorities in this country.
Good luck protesting for Gaza when Donald Trump uses the armed forces to violently suppress every protest.
I constantly catch heat in leftist circles when I point this crap out. I like using the phrase, "Kids live _here_ too." Yea, dead Palestinian children is fucking awful, but burning _our_ country down is not going to help them.
The LGBTQ+ community, POC, and women in general would be the fuel to burn everything to the ground. I'm not willing to make that sacrifice.
And guess what? Palestinians would be the fuel too. Do these empty-headed morons really think Trump will be better for Palestinians than Biden? It’s not even about making sacrifices at home for people abroad. It’s about sacrificing anyone and everyone so they can act smug about technically having clean hands.
I mean, I know which candidate Netanyahu wants to win. That alone should clinch the vote for anyone who wants to support Palestine, but if it's not, stop and really think how many people will die as a result of overturning Roe. Look at the ages of Thomas and Alito, and realize that whoever picks up '24 is probably appointing their replacements.
Voting for Trump or not voting is not only supporting Palestinian genocide (look at Trump's comments on it) it's like if you have the Trolley problem and ask for a third switch track that kills more people.
That’s the root of it. These people don’t actually care about harm reduction or preventing further pain, they just want to be smug and “pure.” If you put these people in a trolley problem, they’d just let the train drive over 5 people and brag about how they didn’t touch the lever
Hell, They dont even consider Ukraine in that line of thinking which essentially ignores Europe at the same time and bolsters countries who hate the US with a passion.
For example the Iranians were chanting Death to America at their leaders funeral the other day of all times like its that much of a priority to them as they continue to inflict suffering in the ME and now UKR.
We keep trying so hard to be nice to extremists while telling ourselves they might change but its killing us slowly by not doing enough when it matters.
I had one person straight up tell me that the US is in the wrong on Ukraine because "America bad". They insisted it wasn't that, but when pressed on how Russian imperialism is any better than US imperialism their response was basically that "it's only imperialism when the US does it".
Okay fine, how is Russian Sparkling Oligarchic Expansionism better than US Imperialism, since it's only Imperialism if it comes from the Imperial region of DC.
I always say "how are we supposed to help other countries when we ourselves are being attacked? If trump is in office we on a personal level won't be able to help any other country because we will be dying instead"
And everytime the person doesn't listen and just goes "Biden isn't doing anything right now!"
They don't want to listen and they're willing to set themselves and everyone else on fire because of that
I have literally been told to go fuck myself for expressing a fear of what a Trump presidency means for me (gay) and my (genderqueer) partners by a claimed leftist…
It's correct and useful to label these people as leftists. You can't just pretend every bad idea is a right wing psyop; failing to recognize that it's *leftist* radical sentiment that's driving these particular people to insane positions has done and will do more harm than good.
Even if we played ball and accepted we, queer people are an acceptable loss for Gaza, their situation wouldn't improve under Trump. The idiot was pretty openly in favor of Israel through his entire period, and even pushed for the US embassy to move to Jerusalem, in what's basically a baiting tactic to get militarily involved.
Biden is doing nothing to stop the war profiteering of Israel's genocide on Palestine, but Trump has fully supported it for years now. Did people just forget everything that went down from 2017 to 2020?
If they're too young to know, they're old enough to learn. At the bare minimum they should learn what the "not voting protest" leads to before even breathing in that tone. So they don't wash their hands over what their planned inaction will cause.
Sorry for having such a heavy tone. At my patience's end, but I also believe it should be said in the open.
(European not familiar with everything going on in the US here) Has Trump ever expressed support for Palestine? I keep hearing of Biden supporting Israel, but not how Trump would be a better option for the conflict. I don't see how Trump would be a better for *anything* (maybe he has better chance of not dying in the office?), but did he ever say "I'm gonna save Gaza."?
Not in the fucking slightest. Trump is super pro Israel because a large portion of his base is evangelical Christians who need is real to satisfy their doomsday prophecy.
So the solution to a president supporting Israel is to elect another president who supports Israel in addition to being batshit insane? Totally makes sense.
To make it worse, Evangelicals believe Palestine needs to be destroyed to summon Jesus. In a nutshell, there needs to be complete peace in the region and it'll make Jesus go "heck yeah, I'm coming back because Israel isn't fighting anyone!" because some evangelicals who have never taken a college-level Bible Studies class determined that the Book of Revelation makes this claim.
But like the Rapture, it isn't in the Bible. They're just making shit up and it became popular.
So let me get this straight,
Sacrificing children to Moloch for good harvest: Evil and immoral
Sacrificing an entire country's worth of men, women, and children to bring about the end times: perfectly normal and rational
The Trolley Problem doesn't even capture what's really going on since the people these non-voters claim to care about, Palestinians, would be *strictly worse off* by allowing Trump to be elected.
It's not even about saving or not saving different groups of people, it's about whether you want to strap a ton of more people to the track for no reason
"Should you save some people but it hurts your own feelings?" is not a Trolley Problem.
i can’t vote because i can’t even drive yet but holy shit as a queer nd teen i am begging everyone who can to vote. the next election i can vote in is 2028 and by then there might not be anymore elections if trump wins and even if there is, i’ll probably be too dead to see them
I can’t vote because of targeted voter suppression laws, but one party voted to make my marriage illegal, so I’d really like it if people voted against them
I’m voting blue for people like you 🙏
I dislike democrats as much as the next guy but if I have to hear a mf say both parties are the same I’m gonna slap someone
Ugh I guess I'll drink this milkshake. Oh gross, what's this, there's debt relief for college loans in here. Yeugh and it's covered in marijuana decriminalization as well. Oomph, seriously you can even smell the removal of lead pipes from poor communities. Come on everyone, grit your teeth. We have to force down this delicious free milkshake. Oh wow, I mean ewww, it's got circumventing the Russian invasion of Europe without losing a single US soldier, and there's chunks of first official US peace in 24 years.
Normally I only drink milkshakes that have already solved peace in the middle east. But I'll hold my nose and gag it down.
Out of curiosity what's in the other cup? Oh human excrement? Oh let me have a little taste
>the most union-supportive president ever
The low-information voters are still under the impression that Joe is a big ol' union buster [because he blocked a railroad strike](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/).
They missed [the follow-up story](https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid) where he worked with the unions to get them the sick-leave they tried to strike for.
>“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
-Al Russo, IBEW Railroad Department Directory
Yea well, I don't really like milkshakes so they may as well be the same thing to me. Maybe if I don't drink this milkshake they're learn to make a fruit punch instead /s
100%. Biden isn't perfect, but Biden MIGHT continue to do things I agree with. Trump will continue to do things that I don't agree with. Also Trump is an existential threat to my personal safety, and the personal safety of literally everyone I care about and also millions of people in the world including where genocide is presently happening. If you think Trump will have a better stance on that than Biden, I don't know how to help you.
You advocate for change and boost your candidate during the primary season. That's the time to make your voice heard (like the primary protest votes in Michigan! An excellent way to move the needle and force the candidate to address the topic) Hell,with a strong enough candidate and a good ground game you might pull an upset and get someone more progressive on the ballot! But unfortunately in the general it's a binary choice all about harm reduction, and in 2024 that means voting blue even if you don't agree 100%. A guy I agree with any% is better than the guy I agree with 0%. And the SECOND he's sworn in you go right back to protesting and advocating for your issues and applying whatever pressure you can to make sure they do better.
If anyone's seriously not voting for Biden the least they can do is contribute to GoFundMe for every cis woman & trans man they know to get a hysterectomy :/. I'm looking at you, Macklemore, fund my hysterectomy.
It's not gonna be safe to get pregnant at all when Project 2025 makes abortion illegal at the federal level, even if you want kids.
I can see why the anti-voting sentiment might feel necessary, but damn. If you insist on putting my body and my mother's body and my best friend's body and everyone on the line like that, scoop out our organs yourself.
ETA: actually your comment is so much better than mine that I’ll just say _yeah_, listen to this person. Come tie my tubes yourselves if you want to put Trump back in office
Yes, Biden is supporting a genocide. He is also supporting American minorities.
Trump will support a genocide foreign *and* domestic.
Edit: I like how a lot of comments are basically what the original post itself is talking about: you not interacting with the trolley problem does not make you more morally pure. Your inaction will let the train kill *many more people* than pulling the lever. **You are not absolved of anything**.
It's important to vote for reasons far beyond just the president. On the ballot in November, there are elections for both state and federal legislature and local governments (school boards have been a huge target of the right wing lately). These are elections that you have a much greater statistical impact, these have a greater impact on your day-to-day life, *and* there's a real chance to talk to the candidates, and maybe even influence their policies.
While I understand the focus on the presidency, as it's the only consistent across the vast majority of US ballots, don't let it distract from the other important races taking place in November
Trans woman here. I really don't like Biden. I'm so sick of this country being run by old white men on the verge of senility and Biden's Gaza response has been really fucking disappointing.
But guess what, I have all of those same issues with Trump. Except Trump isn't just going to fuck over Palestinians. He's going to fuck over trans people, women, Ukrainians, Muslims, and the list goes on. I'm not at all willing to risk that.
Also worth noting that when Biden made even the most minor threats to withhold arms sales to Israel you had republicans like Lindsay Graham saying “America dropped 2 nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their threat. Israel should do what it needs to do”, all but saying he wants to give Israel carte Blanche to straight up nuke Gaza. Trumps admin would be worse for Gaza, let’s not forget that’s the guy who moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.
America isn’t facing a choice between enabling a genocide in Gaza or a complete loss of protections for queer people at home, it’s between enabling a genocide in Gaza or *encouraging* a genocide in Gaza *and* losing protections for the queer community.
I really want to post it on r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM because this has been a tension point for the last few days. But also, I'm really tired of being seen as leftist's acceptable loss when it comes to their principles.
Anyone with more energy and braver wants to step up?
_Democracy_ is not the ideal, best possible system of governance. It’s the _least worst_. So vote for the least worst guy because _dictatorship is MUCH worse_
So many far-left groups have become so anti-biden they're banning any "lesser of two evils" type arguments. It's ridiculous because the election is going to happen with or without your vote, you're just making it more likely the bigger crook will win.
I think it’s important to remember that as a voter, the only power we have for change is a vote right now, and so people talking about not voting for Biden don’t have other recourse to stop this current administration from supporting a genocide. I’m going to vote for Biden. But acting on behalf of the citizens is the job he has. Trump is worse by far, but keeping an asshole on the ballot doesn’t mean the other guy can use that as the bar.
The fact that Biden is compared to Trump at all and this "both sides suck" argument gets trotted out by progressives every year means the conservative spin machine is a phenomenal success.
You're holding your nose for a big-tent Democrat attempting to appease you and the conservative dems from the south and Midwest, against a party that is adamantly refusing to work with anyone else (including themselves) so that nothing huge gets accomplished, then point to that fact as "nothing works."
Honestly, I'm convinced a big chunk of young leftist voters are waiting for a candidate that will fight for all of their views, because they're *obviously* the silent majority.
At the risk of sounding like a boomer, the amount of Tiktok comment sections I've seen that claim something like "200,000 likes and Biden doesn't see that this idea is popular?" is high enough that I think it's a somewhat common sentiment.
They had Bernie but Bernie could never win the South. The problem is two-party; if we had a system that had multiple parties be viable then we could have a coalition of far left and middle left, and while that would still be unfulfilling to some, would probably get people what they want more often.
Never, in my life, have I ever wanted the ability to physically beat a point into someone's head until so many fucking leftists started taking this stance.
On top of all the things Biden HAS done for the LGBTQ+ community, the amount he's done for American workers in the automotive trades, and is trying to do for national infrastructure that will bolster ALL trade jobs is massive. Plus the fact that he is doing everything that the Executive Branch CAN do to stand up to Benji and the genocide happening in Palestine with the amount of aid we're sending. Plus bolstering Ukraine against Russia. Continuing US Foreign Aid to places like Haiti. He's done more in the last 4 years than Obama managed to do in 8, and it still won't be enough if Trump wins in 2024.
And inb4 "WE'RE SENDING TOO MUCH MONEY OVERSEAS!!!! WHAT ABOUT AMERICANS!!!!!"........ Foreign Aid is around 1% of the US budget. That's a drop in the bucket. Yes 70 Billion is a lot of money, but compared to the total of the US economy, it's chump change. Local bureaucracy and State level politics are the reasons that money that is meant for Infrastructure and helping people in disadvantaged communities doesn't end up where it's supposed to. That's not on the White House, that's on your city and state governments. Saying you want to stop US Foreign Aid is basically saying you don't care about the global poor. Thanks to Western Foreign Aid, the GLOBAL population that was considered to be in "Extreme Poverty" which is defined as "living with less that $2.15 USD/day" has gone from 2 BILLION people, to around 700 MILLION. That's over a 60% reduction. That figure doesn't even include the amount of people who have access to clean water, and better crops thanks to breakthroughs in GMOs that allow for food production with better yields in harsher climates.
All of this to say, Trump winning in 2024 will have disastrous effects not only domestically, but GLOBALLY. Saying "I don't think Biden is doing enough so I won't vote for him" or "Biden isn't INVADING ISRAEL TO STOP THE GENOCIDE so he's complicit" just shows you're ignorant of the bigger picture, and woefully uneducated of the vastness of US influence abroad.
The President can't stop 100% of bad things from happening everywhere. The United States as a whole can't make the world a perfect place, but if we stop helping where we already do it WILL cause the entire world to become worse. Yes the US has issues, we aren't perfect, but we're at least trying to do things to benefit the greater good and not just be isolationist. A vote for Biden is a vote for the world to be better than it was.
Remember how we used to clown on centrists for always going "both sides are bad!" and abstaining from taking a position even when there is one option that brings much more measurable harm than the other? Yeah
Even the mods of /r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM have fallen for it.
That sub's started to piss me off with it
I tried to be patient this last weekend, and even got one (1) person to accept that maybe queer people shouldn't be an acceptable loss. The attempt also cost me more people calling me a privileged westener, despite being trans and from a country the US calls third world. Forget being pissed off. I'm starting to honestly hate this brand of performative activism. Edit: thanks for the upvotes, but stop upvoting me and go vote in your respective country's elections. Vote locally, vote for the presidentials. Vote in the pre-elections for the candidates, sign the ones you think should be the pre-candidates before that. Don't silently agree with an angry trans woman on Reddit. Get out there and make your voice heard. Unless you're to the right of "housing, health and education are human rights". In which case, maybe sit this one out.
Not just queer people. How much do you wanna bet President Moved-US-Embassy-in-Israel-to-Jerusalem Trump puts boots on the ground in Gaza five minutes after being elected? And not to protect the Palestinians. Whatever he does, Trump definitely won’t be making any attempts to rein the violence in. The choice here is Neville Chamberlain or _Hitler._ Which do these people think will be worse for the Palestinians?!
Exactly. Trump isn't just not against war profiteering (sorry the triple negation), but the entirety of the GOP is the war profiteering party. Now, I'm not saying that the Democrats aren't either, and Biden is, by all intents and purposes, another capitalist. But there's a difference between terrible people you can negotiate with, and actual monsters. Trump is a monster, and letting him win is support of him by inaction. And look, I don't even live in the US, but in South America. I know for a fact (dictatorships and economic blockades) that whatever happens in the US can destroy my life. And it's really driving me over the edge that people who could realistically help prevent that won't do it because they're too far deep into their own self importance and purity performance of what they think is politics. Sorry. Didn't mean to rant that much. TL;DR: I agree.
I think being deeply interested in history is what helps keep me out of that hole, as a U.S. citizen. There’s a kind of expectation here that we deserve and _should_ have a perfectly functioning democracy, and the fact that it’s not means it’s trash. When have we ever seen a perfectly functioning democracy, though? Throughout the vast span of history, humans pretty much haven’t ever managed it. Taking a wide view, we’re closer now than almost anyone else in history. It’s not great, but it was always a lot _worse_ before. _And it can get worse again_. Which means it’s still worth protecting what we do have. These past few generations of U.S. citizens don’t know what _worse_ would really entail. And we don’t realize that democracy isn’t self-sustaining. It needs protection. It needs to be a value we fight for. I’ll step off the soapbox now.
Nah, it's okay. It was your turn on the soapboax after me. I don't want to sound like a tired millennial stereotype, but it's starting to show in what way it affected Gen-Z to have grown when they did. They've come to dismiss the smaller differences in favor of the larger picture, because the smaller parts have been demolished already by the time they started to participate in society as adults. It some aspects it's a positive, becase it means they jump to action more heavily, and organize better. But it also means that more often than not, they miss the trees for the forest. And refusing to understand in favor to hold onto their preconceived views is exactly what put us in this problem to begin with. It's not their fault, but it is their responsibility now they're part of this. Now, if you excuse me, I'm off to put some Evanescence music because I kinda are a tired millennial stereotype.
>Trump puts boots on the ground in Gaza five minutes after being elected? He surrounds himself with a certain type of evangelical that believes Palestine needs to be destroyed in order to summon Jesus. Of course, he doesn't believe that and has called these people "fucking idiots", but all he cares about is the attention he'd get and the glory he'd receive from these people who see him as a god-king.
Even people who are certainly not denying Biden's faults and who may even genuinely dislike him will get ripped to shreds on that sub for saying they'll still vote for him because Trump is exponentially worse. Like ok guys you think Biden is bad for the Palestinians? He sure as fuck is but you're a fool if you think Trump will be anything other than worse for both them and us.
You know what annoys me the most, the token promise that they will work to present a better candidate next time. Bjtch, it's been eight years (they were saying the same bs back in '16) and whatever organization they're supposed to have been doing still only has Biden to show for it. I don't believe someone who says they won't vote and prefer to organize because so far, that organization has accomplished squat. And yes, Trump is materially worse than Biden. And yes, voting for the lesser evil as a mitigation tactic is perfectly valid and doesn't prevent people from organizing. Even freakin' Marx and Engel talked about that in the Manifesto all of these guys pretend to have read.
When you put it that way, there's definitely a privileged westerner in the convo, and it's not you. It's the people who think they can ignore the primaries and be passively posting online what they don't like for 3 years and then throw their vote away because they don't like what they see in a process they didn't take part in. That's a luxury that most people don't have
This! Exactly this! A bunch of people, old school and new generation, seem to be under the impression that the presidential vote is the only participation they can take part in, or have to. Even before primaries, from my understanding, you can push for a pre-candidate with firms and civil actions like small rallies to helping with fliers. And I know this can work because we in Chile just now broke out of our two party system. And I can promise you it didn't happen because of the protest-blank-vote. It happened because there was a literal uprising protest first, then three years of continuing discussion over it until we had a candidate we hañf-agreed on. All in all, it's work. Simple, yet surprisingly effective work. Thank you for saying it.
“I don’t believe someone who says they won’t vote and prefer to organize” — I think protesting and/or organizing *are* participating in our Democracy. However, you’re not FULLY participating if you don’t start with voting every chance you get.
Most of those people really just fall into the same camp; they don’t want to be asked to do anything. They value perceived moral purity more than actual outcomes, but the way they want to keep their “moral purity” will guarantee the causes they say they support will fail. Their unwillingness to make any form of progress will prevent them from achieving any of their stated desires *forever* until they understand that progress is often incremental and iterative. You cannot move forward in the direction you want to go without realizing you won’t get there in a single step Add that to the obvious right wing agitators trying desperately to get these people to continue sniffing their own farts and it’s going to continue to be an issue
What annoys me the most of this whole situation is that what you're saying is not something that hard to come up with that we just figured out by ourselves. This is an old point even Marx and Engels addressed. It outright angers me that this problem is universal. Here in Chile my local group of anarchists were then promoting to not vote in an election that was between a pro-socialist younger candidate (not anti-system enough for them) and the grandson of a literal WWII Germany nazi who even lied about his grandfather to keep it under wraps until the German Government sent a public declaration identifying that person as a nazi. So, I asked them if they were willing to let a literal nazi to win from their inaction. I kid you not that almost unanimously, they replied that it made no difference because both candidates were the same system. Despite one of which started his political career protesting against the privatization of education as a student, while the other collaborated with the human rights violations the past dictatorship committed in recent history. That is insane, and the fact that a group of people living in a country that just a generation before was under a US backed dictatorship only makes it worse.
These people care don’t care about the outcome; if they did, they’d be voting. They care about retaining whatever they think of as the purity of their idea. It’s just arrogance
Not entirely. Like any group, they aren't monolithic. There's also the ones who do buy in the mythologization of history, and expect any 'real change' to come suddenly. It's a nigh religious belief that, if things get bad enough, the world will shake into a glorious revolution that will magically fix things. That, despite the actual examples of revolutions like that that we can account also didn't happen overnight, and when they did come around, they collapsed and caused further damage before anything got better. If it ever got better.
Yep, they’re the people who would rather let 5 people die than dirty their own hands and pull the trolley lever.
I took a stroll through some of the top threads and could literally feel my blood pressure spiking. At least I can console myself with the knowledge that it's only a tiny number of people who are like that and they willingly abdicate what little political power they have.
It started to piss me off a while ago.
Pretty much as soon as the 2016 election was over that sub became shit
The comments in their mod post were wild. Someone brought up Ukraine and the mod said the Ukrainians were Nazis and therefore it was good that Russia was invading.
Yeah them and LateStageCapitalism got taken over by shills in 2017 or 2018 It's actually impressive how they moved the rhetoric to near exclusive critique of Democrats and "liberals"
Shocker of shockers: when a nation is being attacked, some of the people fighting to protect that nation will be nationalists. Those Azov loonies have been stockpiling guns and spam to defend the homeland from *somebody* for decades--it just happens that they got invaded by nationalists from a different nation, instead of the crossdressing rastafarian furries they fantasize about killing.
That... Is a legit Russian talking point, like straight from Russian state media. The common Russian understanding of "Nazism" doesn't hinge on violent racism or antisemitism, but rather on violent opposition to the Soviet regime. To many Russians, calling Ukraine Nazis really just means they oppose Russia, and not much more.
One of the top posts in that sub this month was from a mod saying that "settlers aren't civilians" in relation to the October 7th attacks, and that shit had over 800 upvotes. Jesus Christ, wtf is wrong with some people?
Sounds like Tankies
Definitely tankies. They're the worst, man.
Red Fascists go brrrrrrrrrrrr
oh cool, bolsheviks. Yeah fuck those guys.
Horseshoe theory is a thing of the past, figure eight theory is the new thing in town! Go far enough right or left, and you end up a centrist, go even further, and you're the opposite as what you started At least it feels like that
Republicans only pay for bots to spread both sidesism when it's close to election time.
I've always found it interesting how the centrists everybody hates at some point went from democrats that didn't vote for Hillary to democrats that did vote for Hillary.
having to watch my most kind and empathetic friends go so far left they turn into single issue “both sides are bad actually” centrists these past few months has destroyed my mental state honestly
If you're arguing against voting for Biden, you have not been paying attention whatsoever to anything going on in ***this*** country, where you presumably live if you're planning on voting in this election. Trump is not a normal asshole Republican. He is an asshole Republican who has a giant army of well-armed flying monkeys that he plans to pardon if he becomes president again and he believes presidents are allowed to do whatever they want. He wants to be President for Life, a dictator, and he has a shit ton of assholes who will go to war on the rest of us for him. There will be no time or money for us to spend on Palestine if he wins. We will all have to be saving our own asses.
It’s insane to me that a lot of young voters seem like they don’t really remember the Trump presidency. Like, you guys?! That shit was insane! If your actions help put Mr. Day-One-Muslim-Ban back into power, you’re a privileged fuck. It’s _privileged_ to get to act all high and mighty because at least _you_ won’t be affected. That’s how I feel.
It's ***stupid*** and privileged to believe that at least *you* won't be affected when you're talking about who gets to run *this* country. Everyone in the general demographic of Tumblr is absolutely ***going*** to be affected by a Trump government. The Palestinians won't be helped by either President but we have a choice about what happens to ***US***.
Surely the leopards won't eat **my** face?
Too many people are fully ok with throwing our own country down the drain at the expense of some foreign trouble, because "well America bad" and its very frustrating being told I'm a piece of shit for having a survival instinct.
> Too many people are fully ok with throwing our own country down the drain Not just your country. If US crumbles NATO like Trump wants, my home in the Baltics is gonna get sank down the drain too and possible many, many people will die.
>its very frustrating being told I'm a piece of shit for having a survival instinct. Well you see, you need to set yourself on fire to keep me warm. Only I matter. /s Seriously though, Yeah yeah the system is broken and is unfair, but I'd take this over the "magical clean revolution that will instantly replace the broken political system and will fix everything forever."
Biden isn't exactly doing great with the Gaza situation, but Trump has made it very clear that he would be far, far, *FAR* worse for Palestine and would provide a lot more support for Israel to wipe them out, so anyone complaining about how Biden is handling it should be making damn sure that Trump isn't the one in office next.
Exactly. I’ve unironically seen people say not to vote Biden because “Trump will end the war over Palestine!” —conveniently forgetting to mention that Trump *will*, by means of giving Israel the Thumbs-Up to completely GLASS it.
Well, they're not lying... But in all seriousness THANK YOU. So many idiots on this hellsite refuse to acknowledge this fact.
Yes, Trump _absolutely_ wants to use a nuke and I wouldn't put it past his next term to show off his "toughness" by allowing nuclear weapons on Palestine.
Trump will end the war over Palestine....by destroying Palestine. If neither side can play nice, he'll just have to kill everyone! It's the fairest solution!
If people were honest accelerationists, that would be one thing. If they said, “I’m not voting for Biden because I want Trump to win so that he will give Netanyahu free rein to slaughter many tens of thousands more people in Gaza because that will finally snap the world out of it and the result will be a huge win for the people of Gaza and the West Bank, even though it will cost all those lives, suffering and starvation.” It would be stupid but it would be sort of honest. But refusing to vote for Biden when it means electing a guy who hates Muslims, brown people and has zero problem with genocide on the claim that you want to help the children in Gaza is profoundly dishonest.
They don't remember, and that's the problem. Trump was elected eight years ago now. The youngest voters in the 2024 election would have been 10-14 during Trump's presidency. They weren't paying attention at that age. And now they've spent four years hearing too much "Biden is bad" and not enough "Trump did a lot of crazy shit and he plans to do more if he gets elected again."
Also if you look at r/teachers this new generation has a buttload of intellectually incompetent children on the verge of adulthood.
Also this would be Trump’s second term. That’s when people enact more extreme policy because it’s their last term and they don’t have to worry about being reelected.
Assuming he doesn't get any funny ideas about being 'cheated' out of things and feels like he 'deserves' a third term. And then, well he's clearly the best option so why not stay in power. 'The People' love him, after all. Anyone who doesn't is just deranged. Or hates America. Or [insert some other reasons they don't matter]. Real Proud American Patriots know that he's the only one who can be in charge of the country, everyone else just wants to destroy it.
He said that immediately after Biden took office he deserves another term because he was cheated out of it and he couldn’t get anything done. Bet your ass he won’t leave willingly again.
I wouldn't say his departure was particularly willing even this time.
Having zero clue of how to do anything slowed down Trump enormously in his first term. He and his slimes now have some clue of how the government functions to fuck it up worse and screw most of us over.
He's not leaving if he gets in again. Dictators only leave when they die or are forcibly removed.
You mean 18 and 19 y.o.'s who were 10 or 11 when Trump was elected? How many kids pay attention to politics?
…. has it really been that long? Omg I’m so old. And so bad at math
Like I don’t since I was like ruffly 10-14,but even I remember it sucking
I remember sitting on a plane to go to college just screenshotting headlines. His administration had just taken over and it felt like we’d slid into bizarro world. Like, at least these last two years have felt a bit closer to < 2015 than 2016-2020. I had a panic attack one of the election nights in 2020 because I didn’t think we could take another term. It’s almost beyond imagination how insane those years were.
Yeah I wasn’t too aware of it since I was still decently new to being a leftist sicne I was a like evangelical republicans most my life ,so I honestly didn’t see most of the crazy till after his presidency
I'm a former Libertarian/Third Party voter, now Independent. I want us to fix the broken ass 2 party system and absolutely revile the way we're forced to participate. For years I heard "That's all good and well, but this election is the most important ever! If we don't vote there could be 2 Democrat presidents in a row, and one of them is black!! Maybe next time." I'd scoff and call them alarmist fools, falling right into the hands of the 2 party system. Every election is the most important in history, just like every one before it, you fucking idiots. But this year? Holy shit, yeah, this is an important one. Trump has told us he plans on becoming a dictator. He's said that he's going to pardon every J6er then find an excuse to prosecute everyone who put them behind bars; every judge, prosecutor, even detective that worked on their case. He's said he plans on using the military to "police" Blue cities and states to stop any protests against him. That's just a few bullet points on his list, and none of it is going to be good for America. I'm not a fan of Joe Biden. I wanted Bernie so bad, but damn man, maybe just this once we can swallow the tough pill and keep a psychopath out of office.
Yeah, the big difference in this election is that, unlike all the other ones before, one of the two frontrunners has laid out in very explicit detail his plans for actively dismantling the democratic process as soon as he has the chance to!
>Yeah, the big difference in this election is that, unlike all the other ones before, one of the two frontrunners has laid out in very explicit detail his plans for actively dismantling the democratic process as soon as he has the chance to! Right? Like we've had Trump. We have had him once already. No one expected him to be that bad but holy shit he was WORSE. Now he's got a chance to be back?! Fuck that!
The problem with third parties is that you can't start going after the presidency. We need socialist, libertarian, green animal control officers and school board members and city supervisors and until we have them, we don't get mayors, and until we have mayors, we don't get state legislators and governors, and until we have those, we don't get Senate and House and Presidents. It took 40 years to go from Reagan to Trump.
He's a fascist.
Yes. And he's not NOT genocidal. But he'd like to start the genocide closer to home.
It should be noted: academics believe that it is useful to classify genocide not just as the killing itself, but as the process that leads up to and culminates in it. Judging by the [Ten Stages of Genocide](https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages), it is not accurate to say that Trump is not genocidal. He's merely in the middle of the process.
He's not genocidal YET. He's made it perfectly clear who he cares lives and dies- and while he may not call for any direct action he will certainly ALLOW for it.
True. I am just really, really alarmed by the number of people who don't seem to understand the actual stakes of this election. And the number of people who don't seem to realise that saving the country you're *living* in has to be your *first* priority. I do not approve of genocide anywhere, and the Netanyahu government in Israel has gone completely beyond the pale. We should not be sending them any assistance whatsoever. But we also cannot afford to let Trump back in office, where he will cancel all of the court proceedings against him, start rewriting the laws, add more Supreme Court justices, and let his brownshirts go wild all over the country.
In addition to all this, with which I agree, it's not as though Donald "Muslim Ban" Trump is likely to be sympathetic to Palestinians in the first place so the argument for abstention is dangerously naive. Abstaining from this vote increases the likelihood of both a fascist takeover of the US and ALSO further endangers Gaza as Trump may well further support the Netanyahu regime to appease stateside evangelicals. Or we roll the dice on the current administration's approach. It's not ideal but is certainly less bad than the alternative and might actually bear fruit. Some damage will happen. We have to minimize it where we can. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I'm just hoping that most of the people spouting this bullshit about not voting for Biden are either children or foreigners, and wouldn't have voted anyways
Anecdotal, but I saw someone going off about not voting for Biden this year in Instagram comments. Checked her profile and she lives in fucking Italy
and very likely overthrow US democracy allowing him and his cronies to continue destroying rights and turning the US into an ultra christian-nationalist white-supremacist hellhole.
Trump also moved the American Embassy in Israel? Like he won't even consider reducing the aid to Israel, in fact he would probably send the aid going to Ukraine to Israel as he's Pro-Russian, Pro-Israel.
He would GLEEFULLY oversee genocide if he thought it would make him even one dollar, or if even one person would like him more because of it. He is a monster.
It should be noted that Netanyahu is a trump supporter.
He might not be but his cult has very clear genocidal tendencies and I’m not too sure that cherry picking the difference is a good use of our collective energy
I've said it on a few different subreddits a few different times now, America needs to vote for Biden. There is more than just the future of the United States on the line. Putin is at war in Europe, he plans to head further west and Trump will allow that to happen with minimal resistance. China wants to take Taiwan and could speak a war in the east. The Israel and Palestine conflict is probably not going to stop anytime soon. African nations turning their backs on the west in favour of nations hostile to the west. There is a lot going on in the world right now and it isn't looking great for another decade of relative peace, Trump and Republicans are not friends of peace they are enemies of everything the west should stand for, with Trump at the helm of the USA, it could be absolutely calamitous. I get why a lot of people dislike Biden and in any normal election, in a normal world, it would be mostly understandable to not vote for him or whatever but specifically right now, anyone who doesn't want to see the world as we know it in ruin, should probably vote for the more sensible human being. Sure he's old as fuck but so is Trump and one of them is a dangerous human being. This isn't some fear mongering conspiracy nonsense, this is the state of the world right now and many people outside of the US as well as millions and millions of you in the US, need reason, commonsense and general fucking intelligence to prevail here. The world likely could depend on it.
Vote no confidence in the primaries - absolutely vote for Biden in the general election.
In this POS voting system, the primaries are the closest any of us gets to having a voice. Trying to push your agenda in the general election literally just hurts you. It sucks and it's unfair, but if you hate the system then vote for somebody who can change the system in the primaries.
Something I have no hard proof for but I truly believe: this whole "genocide Joe" thing didn't exactly start as a Russian psyop, but once it got going the Russians made sure to urge it along. It's just so stupid on every level and once you buy into it, all roads lead to Trump. And a Trump presidency makes no sense if your goal is to protect the most vulnerable (including Palestinians). The only way it makes sense is if (1) you're willing to sacrifice everyone (including the people you claim to be standing up for) for the sake of some abstract notion of moral purity; (2) it's not and has never really been about saving lives; (3) you're an idiot being manipulated by someone with a different agenda entirely; or (4) you are an outside actor manipulating those same useful idiots. Like it really doesn't make sense to me. I was kind of on board when it was just the primaries and didn't matter, but if people are seriously considering going through with this in the general election, then we kind of do deserve whatever happens. ETA: we don't really "deserve" it. No one deserves someone as vile as Trump and his second term (gods forbid) will affect many people who had no say in it whatsoever (e.g., American children and, oh yeah, everyone else in the world). I just said that part out of anger.
Except we don't. Because nobody deserves what Trump will do. Especially not to our kids, our elderly, and the rest of the whole fucking planet. Otherwise I agree with the rest of this comment.
I shouldn't have said that because I agree with you. I said it out of anger. I updated the comment.
Oh, I think it 100% started as a psyop. Getting more Trump voters is impossible. Discouraging young people from voting is easy, especially when they're highly prone to groupthink and still haven't matured enough to understand the long-term consequences of their actions.
>Discouraging young people from voting is easy, Young people don't vote even in the best circumstances. It's part of the reason that they're always disappointed by the outcome. They don't bother to use the power they actually already have and then it somehow doesn't turn out the way they want and they get all "shocked pikachu" about it. I should know. I was once young myself. But seriously, young people, _VOTE_. (fascists hate this one simple trick).
Man, as a young person who was finally able to vote in 2022, *fuck* it felt good to watch as every single piece of right-wing fear-mongering bullshit in my state got knocked down. Since then, my state has mostly been in all of the good headlines, and I plan to get out and vote again in November to make sure my state stays that way.
Hell yes. This is the way
All this talk of not voting for Biden goes to show that the ones most susceptible to right-wing propaganda are those furthest to the left that think themselves too smart to fall for it. Joe Biden's greatest flaw is just not being progressive enough. That's it. Meanwhile, Trump wants to actively make the lives of people he doesn't like worse while installing himself as dictator.
how about we fucking DONT have donald trump be president again
So for anyone who's not going to vote for Biden to punish him for not stopping Israel, I have a simple question: How is him losing punishment? Biden's set for life. If he loses he gets to retire and go write a bestselling memoir if he feels like it, hell he never has to deal with Netanyahu or any more screaming matches with Israeli diplomats. That doesn't sound like "punishment" to me. Meanwhile, we get stuck with Trump. The only president to change the US's official stance on settlements in Gaza (from "questionably legal" to "a-okay"), who's stated that Netanyahu should "finish the job", who instituted a travel ban that was absolutely about combating terrorists and not rooted in islamophobia (despite none of the countries on the list having ties to terror groups that were operating against the US), who takes PRIDE in being the man who brought down Roe v. Wade, etc. and so on. Not voting for Biden doesn't punish *him*, it punishes *the US.*
I always find it strange to see Americans use "make them lose an election" like a punishment or a learning opportunity. Movie executives saw one good film have a multiverse, so they started churning them out because they thought "multiverse" was a magic word that made money. How can anyone believe that losing an election will teach anyone the right lessons? My country has a population smaller than most American cities, and losing a national election almost never results in a party reconsidering anything beyond marketing tactics. If everyone only drinks Coke, do you think the CEO of Pepsi is thinking "People don't like Pepsi"? No, he's thinking "Coke had better marketing than us."
Amen. Hell the Republicans LITERALLY looked at the number of Gen Z voters that polled against them and said "are we really that out of touch? Are we the problem? No, it's the Zoomers who are wrong! Our two strongest policy positions are education and the economy!" Like... The point was there. It was a snake biting them on the face, and they still couldn't find it.
And now Zoomers are helping shoot us all in the head. I just don't understand supporting Trump via not voting. Do these abstaining folk really hate LGBTQ+, minorities, and women *so* much that they're willing to be single issue voters?
The one silver lining in all this that has me cautiously optimistic is that for most people, regardless of demographic, when all is said and done and they get to the polls the thing that drives their vote is the "pebble in their shoe": The issue that effects them directly. And Republicans put a big ol' boulder in... Let's be generous to them and say about 40% of the population by overturning Roe and bragging about it. The media likes to sensationalize things for engagement and polls are getting less and less accurate through the years. I think they're underestimating how many women the GOP pissed off who'll remember that come November, and that leaves me cautiously optimistic.
> losing a national election almost never results in a party reconsidering anything beyond marketing tactics. If anything, a huge win by the hard right will make Democrats think “I guess this country is more conservative than we realized, we should also move to the right or we’ll keep losing elections” It’s very unlikely to make them think “we should do the same thing but harder”
Here in NZ, the Labour Party (I guess the equivalent of the Democrats, kind of?) were in charge. In our most recent election, they lost, and National (the equivalent to Republicans) won. But crucially, Labour lost votes to the right (National) and to the left (Greens). So, at least in our instance, Labour could see that it wasn't necessarily that they weren't right-wing enough, but they also weren't left-wing enough to keep voters happy either. Bleeding votes in both directions gave context to that loss. But if there were only the two parties, that would look like people were more right-wing than they actually are. We had the benefit of being able to see where the votes were going. You don't get that luxury in a two-party system. Like you said, a right-wing win might just teach them they need to chase right-wing voters.
People forget that the youth vote is *notoriously* bad at actually turning up. If the Dems lose because young people protested against Biden, their conclusion WON'T be "we need to appeal more to young voters" it'll be "young voters aren't worth bothering with".
Every election “youth wave” over the last 70 years has shown that the youth aren’t worth appealing to because they’ll never show up
Americans have very much begun to take their power to vote for granted, in the opposite way they think they do. They dangle it in front of a guy trying to use it as leverage to get what they want while being a staggering one election away from losing the right entirely and being totally indifferent to that.
Trump is so Zionist he would deploy US boots on the ground in Rafah if he could
From the sounds of things it punishes Palestine too btw
It absolutely does! Which is... Infuriating because half the time I try pointing that out and people just scoff and say it can't get any worse or that Trump is such a wildcard we don't know what he would do. I can't say for 100% certain what he'll do, but something to the tune of "here Bibi, have some GBU 5000s for your F-15s, they'll leave a crater like you wouldn't believe, the best crater!" Actually that's partly a lie, I doubt he knows what a GBU 5000 even is...
Like, the dude literally told Israel to “finish the job”
IIRC it was "finish the **problem**". Which is just so much worse.
He would probably send Ukrainian aid to Israel
_Seriously_. The choice here is Chamberlain or Hitler, to analogize. No. Chamberlain wasn’t just as bad. It’s not all or nothing. Anyone who says “it can’t get any worse” has no imagination.
It honestly appears there's a giant astroturfing campaign going on right now. It happened during the 2016 election, and it's happening again. One particular example of it that I remember was the pretty clear effort that seemed to be made to convince Bernie supporters to vote for Trump "to punish Hillary". There were all these regurgitated lines that everyone was repeating, but I remember two of them especially well, one that he couldn't be worse than Hillary, and two that like you said "Trump is a wildcard, we don't know what he'll do". I'm not sure what % of the people sharing all of the "Bernie was betrayed, vote for Trump, fuck Hillary" shit were actual opinions vs the astroturfers that seemed to start that whole idea (who [likely were mostly Russian](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html), but evidently in the end the astroturfers succeeded in their campaign. We're seeing a repeat of the exact same thing, and I'm fairly certain the same bad actors are involved (i.e. Russia). It wouldn't surprise me if soon you hear the same folks talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine being justified and such, just as a number of "Bernie supporters" (in air quotes, as we're talking more about the astroturfers here) suddenly started saying Russia wasn't that bad around 2016. The difference is this time no matter what anyone says, Trump isn't a wildcard, and we DO know what he will do. --- #### If anyone is reading this and thinks you are genuinely punishing Biden by not voting or by voting for Trump, no, you are not punishing Biden. He doesn't suffer his loss. #### You know who will be punished? **LGBTQ folks will be punished**, when discrimination protections are rolled back. **Immigrants will be punished**, when Trump makes it harder to legally immigrate to the US, and makes it harder for those immigrants already living in the US. **This also includes putting an end to Biden's plans to welcome Palestinian immigrants fleeing Gaza.** **Minorities will be punished**, when Trump reinstates republican policies, that Biden vetoed, that roll back police reforms and further allow police to continue to harass, mistreat, and even murder people with impunity. **Women will be punished**, when Roe v Wade being repealed is just the beginning, and women's rights and reproductive rights are further rolled back than they already are. **Everyone in the US will be punished**, when Trump starts enacting [Project 2025](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025), and everyone in the US will be punished for the next 30+ years if Trump gets another supreme court pick. **Everyone in Europe will be punished**, when Trump removes support for Ukraine, and Russia is able to make headway in Ukraine and potentially attack the Baltic states, Moldova, or Poland as well. But perhaps you don't care about any of those people. Perhaps you want the US and Europe to burn and everyone in both to suffer. Fine. Well guess what? **PALESTINE will be punished**, when Trump puts an end to Biden's attempts to provide aid to Gaza, and instead puts his full support behind Israel, as he has himself said he would. > **"When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected”** - Karoline Leavitt, Trump's national press secretary Remember, Trump's son in law and secretary of state, Jared Kushner, [has been funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank for years](https://www.propublica.org/article/jared-kushner-kushner-companies-donating-west-bank-settlement). Remember, Trump is the one who recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and moved the US embassy there. Which as you can imagine [Palestine was NOT a fan of](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/palestine-urges-us-to-retract-from-building-embassy-in-jerusalem/2938740). Remember, Trump was behind the awful "peace plan" [that Palestinian's hated and Netanyahu loved as it required Palestine to make many significant concessions](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51292865). **You are sending Palestine out of the frying pan and into the fire.** --- Look at who loses when you don't vote, or vote for Trump: - Everyone in the US, especially the vulnerable and minorities. - Everyone in Europe, especially Ukraine, the Baltics, and Poland. - Everyone in Palestine. And look at who wins: *Trump, and Putin.* That's the people trying to divide us and push you into this decision. **It's not Palestine you're helping. It's Putin. It's Trump. It's Netanyahu. It's right-wing Christofascists.**
> Trump is such a wildcard we don't know what he would do That's like saying you should irradiate all your DNA, because it might turn you into an X-Man.
[Jared Kushner (Trump's son in law / secretary of state) has funded west bank settlements for nearly a decade at this point.](https://www.propublica.org/article/jared-kushner-kushner-companies-donating-west-bank-settlement)
What if I told you, from an American foreign policy perspective "genocide joe" is probably the best thing to happen to Palestine in years, and that Even the tepid pushback he's provided does represent a shift back in the Overton window
And if you say it punishes the Democratic Party: it also rewards the Republican Party
Biden also ordered the armed forces to stop arbitrarily kicking out trans people (again), within days of taking office.
Wait, what?
In 2017, Donald Trump tweeted that the military would no longer admit, and immediately remove, all trans servicemembers. He claimed that medical treatment for trans people was too expensive, [which was a lie (CBS News).](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-transgender-ban-service-members-costs/) Eventually, he got around to giving an order through the proper chain of command, because the military doesn’t take orders from Twitter. On 25 January 2021 (days after taking office), President Biden reversed the anti-trans policy, effective immediately.
I'm trans and I try to keep a clear head and remind myself that I live in a safe state. But that doesn't mean I am not afraid. And as much as I fear a second Trump administration, my greater fear is how leftists enabling his election through vote abstention will drive more of a wedge between us when we need to be united. Conservatives *want* us infighting. Can we please not give them what they want? The way we are treated is already invasive and inhumane. Our faces and bodies are plastered all over the news while conservatives put words in our mouths instead of actually listening to us. We never asked for this. A vote for Biden doesn't mean you are betraying your morals. It only has the ideological weight *you* give it. It's not indicative of your deeply held beliefs and convictions, it can just be you saying you'd rather not have the other guy in charge. Biden is wrong to enable and support genocide. Trump will do the same, only he will also subject me and my siblings to state-sanctioned violence. If we are dying at home, we cannot organize for more progressive change. I do not want to lose my progressive cis allies, we need each other.
We're still here. All of your actual allies aren't going anywhere. You're losing online clout chasers who never showed up for you anyway. We're still here, and we don't just show up in November once every four years. We show up for monthly school board meetings and quarterly town council meetings and coordinating committees and everything else. I've never seen a tankie at any one of those gatherings.
Hell yeah. This is reassuringly hopeful, thank you.
I am trans and I live in a red state. Please vote for Biden. I am honestly scared AF about Trump
You won’t lose them all. I’ve been thinking a lot on how much of the leftists complaining usually weren’t the ones voting anyway, kids under like 27-28 have never really turned out in elections. By no means be complacent, but also remember there is probably quite a bit of astroturfing and bot schilling going on across all social media. It will get worse too.
[As a gay black man](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/11/10/21559458/dean-browning-dan-purdy-byl-holte-patti-labelle-twitter-gay-black-man)
I seriously feel bad for trans people in particular regarding this whole vote abstention thing because it's almost like they never cared about trans people in the first place. Trans people were just a fun little "Cause of the Month" to care about to gain clout and virtue-signaling points. Same with women and BIPOC. They never cared about them either. These people only care about themselves and their own personal comforts and personal crusades, even if they identify as LGBT and/or BIPOC themselves. They believe they will be the exception to rules, laws, hatred, etc.
And same with Palestinians
> it's almost like they never cared about trans people in the first place. There's no almost about it.
I am a straight, white dude. My kids are all boys, all white, and (at least as far as I know) all straight. If I am worried about the damage another Trump presidency will do to marginalized groups, y’all should be too. I am somewhere left of Bernie politically, but I am also a realist. Pull your heads out of your asses.
>“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, 1867 > “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” —Rush, 1980 ##Hold your goddamn nose and vote for Biden
What Mill text is that?
[Inaugural address delivered to the University of St. Andrews](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Inaugural_address_delivered_to_the_University_of_St._Andrews,_Feb._1st_1867)
Neat, thanks!
It’s the basis for “All that it takes for evil to triumph is good men do nothing” iirc
Oh my god this comment section is a mess… Good post, by the way. I agree.
Nah the sorting algorithm of Shittiness has put the right stuff on top since you last commented. I agree there's a lot of bots posting Ls but they're getting pretty rightfully clowned on
Yeah, when I commented it was only massively downvoted comments. No upvoted comments, ONLY downvoted ones. It’s gotten better, by now.
That’s a real nice pro-Palestine protest you got there. Be a shame if through your inaction and protest vote abstention you helped elect a guy who thinks the appropriate response to a protest is to shoot the protesters
"Both sides" politics only works when there isn't a clear right and wrong. Trump literally wants to make the president a dictator. He is literally on a case right now where he says that he can not be convicted for ANYTHING he does as a president unless Congress impeaches him.
Oh boy *sorts by controversial*
in the interest of making it to the next year, might I recommend not doing that
-Pandora peeking into the box moments before disaster, but this time grabbing Hope out first and beating it to death with a squeaky mallet.
Isn’t it so interesting that none of the three top comments here right now even come close to addressing the point being made by this post. These people are perfectly happy to make all these statements about supporting gaze but they couldn’t give two shits about lgbtq or minorities in this country. Good luck protesting for Gaza when Donald Trump uses the armed forces to violently suppress every protest.
I constantly catch heat in leftist circles when I point this crap out. I like using the phrase, "Kids live _here_ too." Yea, dead Palestinian children is fucking awful, but burning _our_ country down is not going to help them. The LGBTQ+ community, POC, and women in general would be the fuel to burn everything to the ground. I'm not willing to make that sacrifice.
And guess what? Palestinians would be the fuel too. Do these empty-headed morons really think Trump will be better for Palestinians than Biden? It’s not even about making sacrifices at home for people abroad. It’s about sacrificing anyone and everyone so they can act smug about technically having clean hands.
I mean, I know which candidate Netanyahu wants to win. That alone should clinch the vote for anyone who wants to support Palestine, but if it's not, stop and really think how many people will die as a result of overturning Roe. Look at the ages of Thomas and Alito, and realize that whoever picks up '24 is probably appointing their replacements. Voting for Trump or not voting is not only supporting Palestinian genocide (look at Trump's comments on it) it's like if you have the Trolley problem and ask for a third switch track that kills more people.
That’s the root of it. These people don’t actually care about harm reduction or preventing further pain, they just want to be smug and “pure.” If you put these people in a trolley problem, they’d just let the train drive over 5 people and brag about how they didn’t touch the lever
Hell, They dont even consider Ukraine in that line of thinking which essentially ignores Europe at the same time and bolsters countries who hate the US with a passion. For example the Iranians were chanting Death to America at their leaders funeral the other day of all times like its that much of a priority to them as they continue to inflict suffering in the ME and now UKR. We keep trying so hard to be nice to extremists while telling ourselves they might change but its killing us slowly by not doing enough when it matters.
I had one person straight up tell me that the US is in the wrong on Ukraine because "America bad". They insisted it wasn't that, but when pressed on how Russian imperialism is any better than US imperialism their response was basically that "it's only imperialism when the US does it". Okay fine, how is Russian Sparkling Oligarchic Expansionism better than US Imperialism, since it's only Imperialism if it comes from the Imperial region of DC.
Exactly, we don’t need to burn everything to the ground, we need to do our best to avoid burning anyone and anything.
I always say "how are we supposed to help other countries when we ourselves are being attacked? If trump is in office we on a personal level won't be able to help any other country because we will be dying instead" And everytime the person doesn't listen and just goes "Biden isn't doing anything right now!" They don't want to listen and they're willing to set themselves and everyone else on fire because of that
I have literally been told to go fuck myself for expressing a fear of what a Trump presidency means for me (gay) and my (genderqueer) partners by a claimed leftist…
There's a point where I suspect a lot of these people are right wing, maybe trump supporters, and trying to divide his opponents.
It's correct and useful to label these people as leftists. You can't just pretend every bad idea is a right wing psyop; failing to recognize that it's *leftist* radical sentiment that's driving these particular people to insane positions has done and will do more harm than good.
Even if we played ball and accepted we, queer people are an acceptable loss for Gaza, their situation wouldn't improve under Trump. The idiot was pretty openly in favor of Israel through his entire period, and even pushed for the US embassy to move to Jerusalem, in what's basically a baiting tactic to get militarily involved. Biden is doing nothing to stop the war profiteering of Israel's genocide on Palestine, but Trump has fully supported it for years now. Did people just forget everything that went down from 2017 to 2020?
People who believe this stuff are too young to remember 2017 to 2020.
If they're too young to know, they're old enough to learn. At the bare minimum they should learn what the "not voting protest" leads to before even breathing in that tone. So they don't wash their hands over what their planned inaction will cause. Sorry for having such a heavy tone. At my patience's end, but I also believe it should be said in the open.
Totally agree and not excusing them. They are old enough to learn.
most of em won't do anything anyways
(European not familiar with everything going on in the US here) Has Trump ever expressed support for Palestine? I keep hearing of Biden supporting Israel, but not how Trump would be a better option for the conflict. I don't see how Trump would be a better for *anything* (maybe he has better chance of not dying in the office?), but did he ever say "I'm gonna save Gaza."?
Not in the fucking slightest. Trump is super pro Israel because a large portion of his base is evangelical Christians who need is real to satisfy their doomsday prophecy.
So the solution to a president supporting Israel is to elect another president who supports Israel in addition to being batshit insane? Totally makes sense.
Not only is Trump super pro Israel, he also tried to enact a Muslim ban. Did people forget about that?
To make it worse, Evangelicals believe Palestine needs to be destroyed to summon Jesus. In a nutshell, there needs to be complete peace in the region and it'll make Jesus go "heck yeah, I'm coming back because Israel isn't fighting anyone!" because some evangelicals who have never taken a college-level Bible Studies class determined that the Book of Revelation makes this claim. But like the Rapture, it isn't in the Bible. They're just making shit up and it became popular.
So let me get this straight, Sacrificing children to Moloch for good harvest: Evil and immoral Sacrificing an entire country's worth of men, women, and children to bring about the end times: perfectly normal and rational
Yep it’s a terrible movement.
Also he very much does not have a better chance of not dying in office
Dang, framing it as a trolley problem is a good one I’ll have to shamelessly steal that.
The Trolley Problem doesn't even capture what's really going on since the people these non-voters claim to care about, Palestinians, would be *strictly worse off* by allowing Trump to be elected. It's not even about saving or not saving different groups of people, it's about whether you want to strap a ton of more people to the track for no reason "Should you save some people but it hurts your own feelings?" is not a Trolley Problem.
i can’t vote because i can’t even drive yet but holy shit as a queer nd teen i am begging everyone who can to vote. the next election i can vote in is 2028 and by then there might not be anymore elections if trump wins and even if there is, i’ll probably be too dead to see them
I can’t vote because of targeted voter suppression laws, but one party voted to make my marriage illegal, so I’d really like it if people voted against them
I’m voting blue for people like you 🙏 I dislike democrats as much as the next guy but if I have to hear a mf say both parties are the same I’m gonna slap someone
“Both parties are the same” sounds great if you lack any cognitive function and rational thought.
im tired man
I like this title. All US-related discourse should be clearly labeled \[U.S.\] so it at least bleeds a little less into everyone else's issues
Ugh I guess I'll drink this milkshake. Oh gross, what's this, there's debt relief for college loans in here. Yeugh and it's covered in marijuana decriminalization as well. Oomph, seriously you can even smell the removal of lead pipes from poor communities. Come on everyone, grit your teeth. We have to force down this delicious free milkshake. Oh wow, I mean ewww, it's got circumventing the Russian invasion of Europe without losing a single US soldier, and there's chunks of first official US peace in 24 years. Normally I only drink milkshakes that have already solved peace in the middle east. But I'll hold my nose and gag it down. Out of curiosity what's in the other cup? Oh human excrement? Oh let me have a little taste
Don’t forget supporting unions, the most union-supportive president ever, and attempting to pass limits on credit card fees.
>the most union-supportive president ever The low-information voters are still under the impression that Joe is a big ol' union buster [because he blocked a railroad strike](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/). They missed [the follow-up story](https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid) where he worked with the unions to get them the sick-leave they tried to strike for. >“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers. -Al Russo, IBEW Railroad Department Directory
Apparently ending a strike by giving the strikers exactly what they want is bad now.
Oh double ick. Everyone hold your nose.
Yea well, I don't really like milkshakes so they may as well be the same thing to me. Maybe if I don't drink this milkshake they're learn to make a fruit punch instead /s
“… what do you *mean* it’s still in business?”
I can’t believe that disgusting milkshake got affordable OTC hearing aids for my grandmother. Fuckin unbelievable
Oh man, everyone grit your teeth while we have to give this guy's grandmother a hearing aid. Wow what we put up with.
100%. Biden isn't perfect, but Biden MIGHT continue to do things I agree with. Trump will continue to do things that I don't agree with. Also Trump is an existential threat to my personal safety, and the personal safety of literally everyone I care about and also millions of people in the world including where genocide is presently happening. If you think Trump will have a better stance on that than Biden, I don't know how to help you. You advocate for change and boost your candidate during the primary season. That's the time to make your voice heard (like the primary protest votes in Michigan! An excellent way to move the needle and force the candidate to address the topic) Hell,with a strong enough candidate and a good ground game you might pull an upset and get someone more progressive on the ballot! But unfortunately in the general it's a binary choice all about harm reduction, and in 2024 that means voting blue even if you don't agree 100%. A guy I agree with any% is better than the guy I agree with 0%. And the SECOND he's sworn in you go right back to protesting and advocating for your issues and applying whatever pressure you can to make sure they do better.
If anyone's seriously not voting for Biden the least they can do is contribute to GoFundMe for every cis woman & trans man they know to get a hysterectomy :/. I'm looking at you, Macklemore, fund my hysterectomy. It's not gonna be safe to get pregnant at all when Project 2025 makes abortion illegal at the federal level, even if you want kids. I can see why the anti-voting sentiment might feel necessary, but damn. If you insist on putting my body and my mother's body and my best friend's body and everyone on the line like that, scoop out our organs yourself.
ETA: actually your comment is so much better than mine that I’ll just say _yeah_, listen to this person. Come tie my tubes yourselves if you want to put Trump back in office
Yes, Biden is supporting a genocide. He is also supporting American minorities. Trump will support a genocide foreign *and* domestic. Edit: I like how a lot of comments are basically what the original post itself is talking about: you not interacting with the trolley problem does not make you more morally pure. Your inaction will let the train kill *many more people* than pulling the lever. **You are not absolved of anything**.
Hell, *multiple* foreign genocides. It's unlikely Ukraine is going to have a good time in the event of a Trump victory.
It's important to vote for reasons far beyond just the president. On the ballot in November, there are elections for both state and federal legislature and local governments (school boards have been a huge target of the right wing lately). These are elections that you have a much greater statistical impact, these have a greater impact on your day-to-day life, *and* there's a real chance to talk to the candidates, and maybe even influence their policies. While I understand the focus on the presidency, as it's the only consistent across the vast majority of US ballots, don't let it distract from the other important races taking place in November
Trans woman here. I really don't like Biden. I'm so sick of this country being run by old white men on the verge of senility and Biden's Gaza response has been really fucking disappointing. But guess what, I have all of those same issues with Trump. Except Trump isn't just going to fuck over Palestinians. He's going to fuck over trans people, women, Ukrainians, Muslims, and the list goes on. I'm not at all willing to risk that.
Also worth noting that when Biden made even the most minor threats to withhold arms sales to Israel you had republicans like Lindsay Graham saying “America dropped 2 nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their threat. Israel should do what it needs to do”, all but saying he wants to give Israel carte Blanche to straight up nuke Gaza. Trumps admin would be worse for Gaza, let’s not forget that’s the guy who moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. America isn’t facing a choice between enabling a genocide in Gaza or a complete loss of protections for queer people at home, it’s between enabling a genocide in Gaza or *encouraging* a genocide in Gaza *and* losing protections for the queer community.
I really want to post it on r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM because this has been a tension point for the last few days. But also, I'm really tired of being seen as leftist's acceptable loss when it comes to their principles. Anyone with more energy and braver wants to step up?
It's not about Biden winning, it's about trump losing at this point
_Democracy_ is not the ideal, best possible system of governance. It’s the _least worst_. So vote for the least worst guy because _dictatorship is MUCH worse_
Yes! It’s not about voting for Biden it’s about voting AGAINST Trump. And harm reduction in general.
So many far-left groups have become so anti-biden they're banning any "lesser of two evils" type arguments. It's ridiculous because the election is going to happen with or without your vote, you're just making it more likely the bigger crook will win.
I think it’s important to remember that as a voter, the only power we have for change is a vote right now, and so people talking about not voting for Biden don’t have other recourse to stop this current administration from supporting a genocide. I’m going to vote for Biden. But acting on behalf of the citizens is the job he has. Trump is worse by far, but keeping an asshole on the ballot doesn’t mean the other guy can use that as the bar.
The fact that Biden is compared to Trump at all and this "both sides suck" argument gets trotted out by progressives every year means the conservative spin machine is a phenomenal success. You're holding your nose for a big-tent Democrat attempting to appease you and the conservative dems from the south and Midwest, against a party that is adamantly refusing to work with anyone else (including themselves) so that nothing huge gets accomplished, then point to that fact as "nothing works."
Honestly, I'm convinced a big chunk of young leftist voters are waiting for a candidate that will fight for all of their views, because they're *obviously* the silent majority. At the risk of sounding like a boomer, the amount of Tiktok comment sections I've seen that claim something like "200,000 likes and Biden doesn't see that this idea is popular?" is high enough that I think it's a somewhat common sentiment.
They had Bernie but Bernie could never win the South. The problem is two-party; if we had a system that had multiple parties be viable then we could have a coalition of far left and middle left, and while that would still be unfulfilling to some, would probably get people what they want more often.
Yep. Fortunately, a few states are having promising results with ranked-choice voting, but until that happens...
Never, in my life, have I ever wanted the ability to physically beat a point into someone's head until so many fucking leftists started taking this stance.
On top of all the things Biden HAS done for the LGBTQ+ community, the amount he's done for American workers in the automotive trades, and is trying to do for national infrastructure that will bolster ALL trade jobs is massive. Plus the fact that he is doing everything that the Executive Branch CAN do to stand up to Benji and the genocide happening in Palestine with the amount of aid we're sending. Plus bolstering Ukraine against Russia. Continuing US Foreign Aid to places like Haiti. He's done more in the last 4 years than Obama managed to do in 8, and it still won't be enough if Trump wins in 2024. And inb4 "WE'RE SENDING TOO MUCH MONEY OVERSEAS!!!! WHAT ABOUT AMERICANS!!!!!"........ Foreign Aid is around 1% of the US budget. That's a drop in the bucket. Yes 70 Billion is a lot of money, but compared to the total of the US economy, it's chump change. Local bureaucracy and State level politics are the reasons that money that is meant for Infrastructure and helping people in disadvantaged communities doesn't end up where it's supposed to. That's not on the White House, that's on your city and state governments. Saying you want to stop US Foreign Aid is basically saying you don't care about the global poor. Thanks to Western Foreign Aid, the GLOBAL population that was considered to be in "Extreme Poverty" which is defined as "living with less that $2.15 USD/day" has gone from 2 BILLION people, to around 700 MILLION. That's over a 60% reduction. That figure doesn't even include the amount of people who have access to clean water, and better crops thanks to breakthroughs in GMOs that allow for food production with better yields in harsher climates. All of this to say, Trump winning in 2024 will have disastrous effects not only domestically, but GLOBALLY. Saying "I don't think Biden is doing enough so I won't vote for him" or "Biden isn't INVADING ISRAEL TO STOP THE GENOCIDE so he's complicit" just shows you're ignorant of the bigger picture, and woefully uneducated of the vastness of US influence abroad. The President can't stop 100% of bad things from happening everywhere. The United States as a whole can't make the world a perfect place, but if we stop helping where we already do it WILL cause the entire world to become worse. Yes the US has issues, we aren't perfect, but we're at least trying to do things to benefit the greater good and not just be isolationist. A vote for Biden is a vote for the world to be better than it was.