As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.
Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.
I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.
Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.
Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.
Edit 2: This blew up, it’s a little overwhelming right now but I do intent on replying to everybody that took the time to comment. Just need to get in the right headspace.
Remember that in online spaces (and IRL in reality), there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts that will make claims to sway public opinions.
Good point. Although, I would question whether Lemmy is such a place as we really don’t have the numbers to warrant the effort, imo.
We get drug spam and stock spam, no reason to expect that political spam is any less likely.
Lemmy has a huge amount of hardcore lefty’s. If you can get them to not vote, and especially if you can get them to tell their friends not to vote, that is a big win.
Astroturfing/sockpuppeting is dirty cheap to do, so no reason not to try.
You do see some users here that will post continously on about a certain topic repeatedly, with no other opinions. They might be legit, but I have my suspicions.
“Hardcore lefties” have a very different understanding of the value of their vote, which is to say, it means very little.
Have you deigned to ask them questions?
It is not currently such a place. I’ve yet to hear a Lemmy admin say otherwise.
Edit to add: Russiagate conspiracy theorists want it to be true so they can simply dismiss voices that contradict their beliefs.
I’ve seen cryptospam, drugspam, generic adspam on here. Why would a political astroturfspam be a conspiracy theory?
It does exist. It just doesn’t currently exist here, and Russian/Chinese/Iranian bots 1) hardly exist at all and 2) so far have had virtually no effect.
The reason people are seeing
$evil_countrybots everywhere is because our own government and our own corporate media tell us they are everywhere, not because they are everywhere. The propaganda is coming from inside the house. They’ve spent the last seven years and who knows how much money trying to convince us of. They’re trying to manufacture our consent to censorship.They tell us what opinions are
$evil_dictatortalking points so we know what opinions to dismiss out of hand, and to see the people & organizations that express those opinions as malevolent foreign agents, so we never listen to them again. They’re training us to do some of the censoring for them.The first step is to understand the media and propaganda.
I linked upthread about this specific propaganda campaign, but since people don’t click links, I’ll copypasta myself.
I disagree - it feels like Lemmy is seeing the same kind of shills that 4chan saw in the last several elections. These bad actors are trying to sway dems to vote third party or not vote at all “in protest” across many small and large online spaces.
Are the shills in the room with us right now?
Yes, in fact I see one now.
Interesting. What am I shilling for? What are my real opinions? What are the fake ones I’m presenting?
Your real opinions are the ones I like, and your fake opinions are the ones I don’t. It’s not rocket surgery.
Obviously a huge genocide isn’t enough for you - you clearly want Every Palestinian to be killed or imprisoned when Trump is elected. And not just the ones in Gaza, if I were a Palestinian in the US, I’d be terrified of that madman winning, and I’d do everything I could to support Harris like my life depended on it (because it very well might)
More generally you are trying to convince us that the genocide is the only important issue in the world, and that it’s somehow worth not supporting someone who is in all ways (not just all other) the far better of the two electable candidates.
It’s literally the worst crime in the world.
Davidgro out here trying to minimize the literal worst crime in the world for political reasons.
I agree. Genocide is the worst crime in the world.
Which is why I voted for Kamala Harris, to help keep Donald Trump from winning.
Do you disagree with my choice? If so, how would you vote in the US presidential election of 2024 to minimize the genocide in Gaza?
Please do your best to act in good faith and not lie about me.
No, that is what you, a non-Palestinian, believe you get to decide for Palestinians, people who have lost half or more of their family in the last year. The Palestinian diaspira, generally speaking, rejects Biden and Harris.
However, you have not answered my questions.
Now you are downplaying the magnitude of genocide. Never again means never again for anyone, not just when it is politically convenient for you.
Welp, looks like you didn’t answer my questions. Maybe next time, right?
To be lies or even bad faith, I’d have to not actually believe what I wrote. And I very much believe what I wrote.
Do they now? (A small sample. Some of those are about the ones still in Gaza, but I don’t think that detracts from the point.)
Fine. Here are your questions and my genuine answers.
I think you are likely a shill for Donald Trump. I don’t assume it’s directly, as in I don’t assume you are being paid by the GOP or a super PAC, but wouldn’t be surprised if someone was paying you.
Hard to say. At best (unlikely) I think you have been very strongly misled into thinking that’s somehow what’s best for the country, or even the world. Otherwise I think you know fully what you are doing and the damage it may cause and you are fine with that. This is what I believe based on the comments I’ve seen from you.
That you care about the genocide. I think you are using it as a wedge to try to divide and mute the Democrat vote.
Not at all. That was the first thing I addressed: if Harris loses it will be so much worse in Gaza and elsewhere.
takes no effort with modern technology
yeah, mostly CIA and Israeli bots/paid posters. all of reddit is astroturfed. All social media is controlled by the feds as well. Look into the twitter leaks to see how they do it. Mintpressnews also has great articles about feds in censorship positions in all these social media companies ranging from Facebook to TikTok (100% CIA controlled btw).
Is there any evidence of these CIA/Israeli bots / paid posters?
If somebody makes a pro-Israel post, maybe they just genuinely support Israel (I wouldn’t say that’s my view currently - I think both Israel and Hamas are wrong because both have killed civilians).
Edit: your downvotes aren’t evidence.
Who has killed more civilians?
By multiple orders of magnitude?
This is like “Man, I don’t like the sun and light bulbs, they’re both so bright.”
Ideally I don’t think any civilian deaths should happen, so they’re both wrong. I’m not going to say Hamas is somehow better because they killed fewer people. To me that seems like saying “oh you didn’t kill too many people, that’s fine then”. Which would be completely wrong in my view.
They also don’t have systemized rape and torture camps paid for with your taxes.
By any quantitative value system, Hamas commits less evil than the state of Israel
Comparing them is as useful as comparing the relative brightness between the sun and a lightbulb. The two sides are not comparable. One is committing genocide. Trying to gloss over that fact is propaganda trying to cover up the fact that we’re paying for the weapons doing the killing.
Yeah I’m not into the whole “let’s excuse Hamas” thing. In my view killing civilians is bad, which is why I think both Hamas and the Israeli government are bad. Neither should kill civilians at all - not 1, not 100, not 1,000, etc.
Good job responding to something I didn’t say to try and discredit what I did.
Don’t think that goes unnoticed.
I’m not excusing Hamas. The fact that you read what I did says that you are either responding in bad faith, didn’t read my response very carefully, or are stupid. I’ll go with the middle one to be generous.
I don’t excuse Hamas. I don’t control Hamas, and much more importantly, I don’t pay for the weapons that Hamas use.
I pay, or rather my country pays, for the weapons that Israel uses to bomb apartment building, schools, and hospitals.
Hamas has killed somewhere between 1000-2000 civilians in this conflict, and that is being generous because we know that a large number of causalities were from Israel enacting the Hannibal directive and intentionally killing their own to keep them from being made prisoners (If Israel gets to grab 11,400 West Bank civilians without trial or due process and call them prisoners, then Hamas gets to do the same). Furthermore, if we count anyone who was in the IDF or the IDF’s military reserves as active military, then the number of civilians goes WAAAAY down. Remember that the IDF considers the trashmen, police, and hospital administrators as active combatants with Hamas affiliation. So, once again, if that is the standard that Israel is setting then it applies to all parties, including Israelis.
Israel, by all best estimates, has killed somewhere between 100,000-200,000 civilians. That is between 5% - 10% of the ENTIRE POPULATION OF GAZA. In all honesty, the number is probably higher.
That is completely ignoring the systemized rape and torture camps that Israel has set up, and the Israeli media discovered. Also, something that there is no evidence that Hamas has set up.
Acting like those two numbers are equivalent, or pointing out that Israel is quantitatively a minimum of 2 orders of magnitude worse, or that the two sides are the same is either stupidity, or evil. Take your pick.
None of this is justifying Hamas. It is pointing out how much more fantastically, cartoonishly fucking evil the Israeli government is.
You should ask yourself why you view the above as justifying Hamas. You might discover something.
The fact that you seem so upset with me saying that killing civilians is bad no matter who does it implies to me that you think it’s fine when some people do it. Or that it’s fine as long as they don’t kill too many people.
You’re extremely stupid.
Yeah like all of these people out here telling me to vote for genociders. There’s no way that real humans would think so little of Palestinian lives, right?
Right?
And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide? Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue. One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.
Suppose you have two buttons. If you press one, it kills someone. If you press the second, it kills two people. If you don’t press the first button, someone else is eagerly waiting who will press the second. Whoever has placed the buttons here, has enough power that neither the buttons nor the other person are within your personal ability to harm at the moment, and you have neither the time nor the popularity to amass enough people to change this before the other guy pushes the “kill two people” button. Your only options are to press one or press neither and allow the second be pressed. If your answer to this scenario is “I press neither button, because pressing the first kills someone, don’t you care about people’s lives!?”, then you are not choosing morality, you are choosing selfishness, because you care more about the notion that your hands will be clean than about the net life saved if you press the button that kills fewer people. In fact, the blood is as much on your hands by inaction if you decide to reject your choice, as it would be had you killed the additional victim yourself.
You know how you can trick a stupid fucking child into doing what you want by presenting them a false choice of two alternatives you’re happy with? “Do you want to go to bed now or after one more show?”
So what are the other choices?
Just because you can’t stop something doesn’t mean you have to participate in it. But if you wanted to do something about it: these weapons come from this country and they have to get there in trucks traveling on roads to ports that load them on ships. And it’s not like there’s not a value to making genocide come with electoral consequences…
We are discussing voting, though. That’s a bit tangential, because you can vote or not vote and still commit acts of… resistance…
If you otherwise would have voted Dem against the Republicans, who are as bad or worse when it comes to the specific issue you’re punishing the Dems for, you are hurting one group committing genocide by helping one who commits and wants to commit even more genocide.
All under the mistaken belief that by refusing to vote for the group you would otherwise vote for, you will get them to move Left. But if the Dems lose to the VERY right wing party, if the voting shows that Americans favor more right-leaning policies, they would move to gain the votes of the people who actually voted.
The reality is, refusing to vote is still a choice. As long as you are an adult who can legally vote in the US election, you are partly responsible for the results of the election. You don’t get to wash your hands of it. Choosing to abstain because you don’t want to partipate out of moral self-righteousness is saying your soapbox is more important than the lives affected by your choices, from the Palestinians to the Ukrainians, immigrants to LGBTQ. Nobody is more important than your ability to say “I didn’t vote for a party that commit genocide.”
Don’t project your dumb shit on me
wooooooooow no shiiiiiiiiiit
You mean I’m exercising agency right now? You don’t saaaaaaaayyyyyyy.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. “Virtue signalling” you say?
You’re a nazi. You’re giving material support to the perpetrators of a genocide. You’re trash. Diminishing basic morality as a vice just like any other fucking 8chan fascist. Trash.
Smirking fucking nazi invoking “the lives affected by your choices” and “washing your hands” like the worst crime in history isn’t hanging behind you as you say that shit.
You’re fucking trash.
[email protected] is not a Nazi, silly. They’re a liberal, and liberals are good, dontcha know?
Because morality is defined by what you believe, not your actions, so of course they’re good. Actively participating in a genocide doesn’t make them evil because they believe the right things.
Not voting is a choice. You can’t not participate in politics.
You can chose not to vote for a party actively committing the literal worst crime in the world.
No you can’t. Because we live under a system where one of them is going to be in power after the election, and every possible voter shares equal responsibility in the outcome.
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The difference is that there are real, material differences between the actions the candidates take. It’s not a fair choice, but it isn’t false either, and choosing not to go along won’t give you a better outcome
NO THERE FUCKING AREN’T. And if you believe that, you completely went to brunch when Trump left office and don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
I can say the same about you. Putting “no there aren’t” in all caps and adding profanity and personal insults doesn’t make it more true, but it does make people remember that a block button exists for the kind of person that uses things as disgusting as a genocide as an opportunity to troll. I do not think that anyone who both has paid any attention to the past 8 years and is arguing in good faith can possibly support that conclusion.
Deeply maddening watching people who materially support genocide complaining about people “playing the genocide card”
And you think there’s a difference between you and the fascist party?
You’re literally simping FOR THE WORST CRIME IT IS POSSIBLE TO COMMIT!
It’s not a card.
It’s obvious you would use the same style arguments as a Democrat in the 1880s.
I am not simping for anything. I firmly believe Trump would be far worse for genocide (he has literally said that he thinks Israel should “finish the job” with regards to the war in Palestine, and when he was president, he was incredibly supportive of Netanyahu, and proposed a “peace plan” that was actually just carving up Palestine into a bunch of little pieces that could never constitute a viable state and giving Israel control of the paths between, effectively wishing to formalize Israeli control of the entire region) The only reason anyone can suggest he wouldnt be without getting laughed out of the room is that he happened to get lucky enough to not have the current escalation of Israel’s genocide happen during the time when he was president. From my point of view, any action that brings him closer to getting back in power is asking to throw gasoline on a genocidal fire, and saying that one’s motive for doing so is being against genocide is sickening in the kind of way that it would be if you saw someone suggest that Hitler should have won ww2 because of all the evil stuff that Winston Churchill was responsible for. Consider for a second what people making your argument look like, from that lens.
What liberal brain rot is this?
Biden is fully engaging with his policy of genociding Palestinians. Harris has said that she will carry on with the policy with absolutely no change.
The fucking dissonance you people walk around with is astounding!
And before you come out with the usual other shit floating around your vacuous head, no, I’m not advocating voting for the shitty pants trust fund rapist.
You people cannot seem to grasp that what is being done in the Levant will be done to you. The DOD had just updated it’s rules so they can use lethal force against you.
It’s coming and you’ll are too fucking partisan to realise that you’re turkeys all voting for Christmas!
Current dead baby count would disagree
When you are offered two candidates and both support genocide, including one being an active part of the current one, you can say, “no, never again means never again” and work against both rather than pretending you now have to support genocide.
You should believe your lying eyes and see that Biden has gotten your consent for genocide, with Harris helping. The genocide has only ramped up as the election draws close.
There is not worse that can be done. It is full, unequivocal support for basically anything Israel wants for genocide including the weapons and supplies on which they depend to carry out this genocide. If anything, Dems are more effective at this kind of thing, as they secure European support and offer better stipulations to the Israelis around when to escalate and when to play it a little cooler.
Though your electoral logic is seld-defeating anyways. Your consent for the lesser evil keeps you politically anemic and unable to have solidarity with those who need it. You make yourself subservient.
This is a fantasy.
I am not interested in childish metaphors.
If you reject the lesser evil, and all options possible to you are evil, then you by inaction support the greater evil, which, by definition, makes you evil. “Working against both”, when evil is inherit in all means by which you might do that work, is a fantasy you tell yourself to justify sabotaging efforts to limit the damage by practicing and encouraging what effective amounts to surrendering one of the few levers of power that you have any limited ability to pull.
I already addressed your lesser evilism logic. If you want to continue this conversation you will need to respond to what I say and not dither and repeat yourself.
I am repeating myself because the notion that the least evil option available is the best one, that the lesser evil if you will is preferable to the more evil one, is axiomatic, that is, it’s a basis one takes when constructing a moral framework, not a consequence of one that can be reasoned through. If you do not agree with someone’s moral axioms, then there is simply nothing to debate, you and they are simply operating under mutually incompatible definitions for what is and is not the right thing to do. Restating that in a slightly different way is a way of testing if the axioms we are operating under are truly different, in which case further argument is pointless, or if we merely misunderstood eachother the first time around.
Your problem is one of timeframes.
You might, though I personally don’t think so, be right on a single election time frame.
They’re definitely right on a timescale spanning multiple elections.
Right now, you are forced to vote for someone committing genocide because people kept choosing the lesser evil in previous general elections, and the party cheats in the primaries.
The situation you’re in, right now, disproves your argument.
I await your response to what I said. I’m not interesting in watching you masturbate.
You came to the wrong thread then
You live in a fantasy and sabotage real effort to limit damage in the real world. You are responsible because you can’t swallow your pride. How incredibly selfish of you.
“You are responsible because you can’t swallow your pride. How incredibly selfish of you.”
you guys need to be a bit subtle in the gaslighting effort. where was all this anger for her supporting innocent kids being burned alive. go shout at her rallies to stop being a genocidal two faced hack. else you all are trolls trivialising an ongoing genocide and enabling future ones.
The effort to limit damage in the real world like advocating for a genocider?
Also, please do your best to act in good faith and not make things up about people.
Right now, you have 2 real choices. Every other choice is an effort to change your future choices. You want to push the democrats more left, and so do most of their voters… However your choices right now to effect the genocide are to either vote for someone that’s supporting the genocide or someone who cheers on and suggests more genocide faster. By abstaining, you’re putting yourself in the middle of the choice, which is potentially a worse outcome for Palestinians than making an upsetting choice.
That is the reality of the situation. By refusing to make an unpalatable choice, you’re helping to make a far worse outcome reality.
Show me any examples of them limiting damage
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If both of them support genocide, but one also supports banning abortion, the ethical choice is to vote for the one that won’t ban abortion.
If you’d rather wait until a candidate arrives that agrees with you on every issue, that’s fine, but you’ll probably never vote, and in the meantime, by not voting, supporting whichever candidate you like less.
While there’s no honor in the presidency, there is honor in doing what you can to reduce harm, and if you can’t reduce harm to the Palestinians, at least you can reduce harm to American women and girls.
Never again means never again for anyone.
Trying to lesser evil genocide makes you complicit.
Repeat after me: “I am against genocide and will not vote for genociders”.
So you hate women and don’t want them to have bodily autonomy? You see how that sounds? It’s the same logic as your argument.
In what way is that the same logic as my argument? I am not voting for misogynists.
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The comprador government of the West Bank is just that, compradors. You should care about the people who live under a comprador government, yes.
The government of Gaza is led by those taking direct militant action against their genocidal settler colonial invaders. They fight and die alongside their people.
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From Merriam Webster: “one” example: “you never know what will happen”
Hamas is a Palestinian resistance organization against apartheid settlers that routinely use and used extensive terrorism. While the Zionist entity bombs residential blocks, schools, and refugee camps, the axis of resistance, which includes Hamas, focus on military targets and building if leverage for their own liberation.
The term “terrorist” is used selectively and in a racist way. When the Western Imperialists like a resistance organization they call them freedom fighters. When they dislike them, they get called terrorists. The ANC, including Mandela, were similarly labelled terrorists in their own fight against apartheid. Similarly, the Americans supported apartheid in South Africa and its mainstream political adherents gladly adopted their white supremacist framing.
In conclusion, there are two terrorist groups fighting, and the civilians of both groups are suffering for it.
Sorry you’re afraid to engage with what I said. You’ll get the courage of your convictions someday. Might want to stop sharing your onions until then, sport.
Pray tell, which elected leaders?
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They’re both not elected anymore and a resistance organization. They were elected on a platform of not-exclusively-peaceful resistance (peaceful resistance inside Palestine and especially inside Gaza was render impossible by Israel by 2006-2007, so their resistance activities are now exclusively violent). Resistance activities are supported by the population of Gaza, even if many don’t support Hamas specifically. If your point is that October 7th implies they don’t care about Gazan lives, that’s patently false. If that’s not what you meant, then explain what you mean by “they don’t care about Gazan lives”.
There are, but not on Lemmy, because Lemmy is still much too small to bother with.
Funny, good one
Are you a Lemmy sock puppetry expert? Because I am.
Which Lemmy admins are saying there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts? Because I haven’t heard any.
There is the occasional spammer or corpo shill, who is quickly dealt with, and that’s about it.
Oh wow, a real sock puppetry expert! That’s so amazing, can I have your autograph to show to my children?
Buddy, I admin lemmy.ml. I do know a thing or two about the Lemmyverse.
Oh, that certainly explains your answers.
Spoken like someone that has never been an admin of anything.
There are ways to observe sock puppets solely from metadata that the admins have access to without even looking at the content of the posts.
The admins are literally one of the few groups that can actually, quantitatively, state that there are few sock puppets.
Go ask admins of other instances then.
Fucking brain broken if you think the bots are on the side opposite entrenched power