These people sound like exact copies of the people saying voting in 2000 didn't matter, and that turned out to be the most politically consequential of my lifetime. Gore was imperfect as they all are, but holy fuck did Dubya fuck up literally everything he touched.
Among many, many, many things, Dubya started forever wars killing untold hundreds of thousands of people. He accelerated oil and gas production, absolutely setting the Climate Change world on a pace for disaster. He seated Alito, unquestionably the biggest monster currently on the Supreme Court. And he passed a monster tax cut for the rich that set us on this path of unrestrained deficit spending.
And that's just the headlines. Remember when he tried to put his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court? lol
Gen X already tried this 25 years ago and it fucked the world up so badly that we need to be saved by the future generations. Imagine not learning that lesson and doing it again.
There are legitimate criticisms to be had of Biden, but in every case, Trump is unambiguously worse. If Trump were pro-Palestine, I could maybe understand single-issue voters preferring him to Biden...but he's not.
To be honest, I have little hope for 2024. Genuine fake news is rampant, and in pretty much every case it hurts Biden (misinformation about the economy, etc.). I'll be voting a straight Dem ticket in my very red state, and hoping against all hope that uninformed voters somehow do the right thing.
A critical refinement of this point: By all means, please do vote for whichever actual progressive candidate you favor in your state's Democratic primary. This is not sarcasm; do it. But when the general election comes around Biden is inevitably the candidate anyway, do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of office.
Don't forget the Deportation Force that's going to round up 11 million people and deport them. I wish I was joking.
You guys wouldn't have this clusterfuck if you just had a parliamentary system. Don't like the non-reactionary liberal candidate? Great, just vote for whoever else you like, and even if they don't win, they can still join efforts with the lesser evil to make sure the far right doesn't return to power. It also has the added benefit that it doesn't force the whole right wing of the country to cater to the rabid reactionaries on the rise, because those just make a different party that has to balance the distribution of their power with their less mad allies.
I feel like posts like these always fail to realize how fucked of a situation US 'democracy' is in where you must vote for one shitty candidate because the other is literally a fascist.
Like no actually some people have decided that the entire system is untenable - they no there's a lesser of two evils, but they refuse to partake of an illegitimate system.
I try to think that hopefully Trump would get stonewalled enough that he wouldn’t be able to get any of this done.
Then I realize that he seriously does not care. He doesn’t give a shit about Congress, or checks and balances. He and his party have clearly demonstrated that they have no interest in the system of “law and order” that they cling so close to.
Who’s gonna stop him? His courts? An impeachment? Antifa gonna go out and storm Pennsylvania Ave and live up to their damn name, which somehow became an insult?
The fact that this man is on a ballot in any state is shameful. The GOP of just a dozen fucking years ago would have tossed him out on his ass in a second. Somehow since then, Romney, McCain, and Liz Cheney have become the sole voices of reason within the party. One got blackballed, one got censured, and the other one died.
I’d love to make a glib analogy like ‘my toast got burnt so I burned my house down and most of the neighbourhood’ but the literal fact that so many people are suffering makes that sort of thing rather tasteless.
I don’t think Biden is “Genocide Joe”. That’s ridiculous hyperbole which doesn’t help. We (the public) don’t know what kind of pressure is being levered in the background to end all the horrors of this situation.
People not voting Dem merely because of difficult historical relationships with Israel are dangerously deluded.
If we don't at least pretend to be willing to wield our voting power to influence our govt, we might as well give up and accept we live in an oligarchy.
Sometimes just the threat of violence is enough to get people to act. Biden has already changed his administrations public stance and rhetoric towards Israel at merely the risk of losing votes. Ideally it would have been because of the loss of human lives, but beggars can't be choosers.
it's not the responsibility of voters to vote for certain politicians, it's the responsibility of the politicians to represent people so they vote for them.
if you think joe biden is gonna lose then you gotta force joe biden to take more popular positions (he is literally running right now it's the time you make up your platform), not yell at people "refusing" to vote for him as if they are just petulant children refusing to eat their veggies and act like the most logical and rational option is locking your vote for joe biden and whoever disagrees just cannot understand the correctness of your reasoning.
(to be clear i'm not american but it's just ridiculous how many times i have heard this exact song and dance)
That's a current picture, not a future picture.
Our first amendment rights are only exercisable with the permission of the government, preferably in silence tucked away where no one can see us.
Our third amendment rights are non-existent because SCOTUS draws a line between the police and soldiers. (Never mind the British soldiers were here to police the colonies)
Our Fourth amendment rights exist only notionally. If officers get a dog to jump at your car or have a "good faith belief" that they're within their rights to search.
Fifth is almost just gone. Civil Asset Forfeiture means only the rich can afford to keep the state from taking their stuff at any time. States routinely re-run criminal trials by deliberately getting a mistrial declared if they're losing.
The sixth is a joke. Public defenders in some places have as little as 7 minutes to look at your case. And if you're accused of a misdemeanor you probably won't have a jury at all. But you will lose your job, your house, and everything else in a chain reaction as you have to figure out how to pay hefty fines with no job. Also you'll probably end up in prison for contempt of court when you have trouble paying.
The eighth amendment is likewise a joke. Instead of protecting poor people in the system, it's used as a cudgel to force confessions.
And this is all on top of decades of wealth transfer out of the working class to the point that it's getting hard to buy food for half the country.
Oh yeah, Trump would be horrible. But he's the guy we've been getting set up for, not the guy the establishment is trying to avoid. I'll probably vote for Biden but I'm not going to be surprised when the "status quo genocide" guy gets his ass handed to him. Democrats needed to fight for this and they just aren't.
Edit to add - Y'all know the second the GOP puts up a reasonable sounding asshole we're fucked right? Like if Nikki Haley got the nomination? All that pressure drops away and she'd still institute project 2025 just like Trump.
Palestine will be even more fucked under Trump, he's firmly on Israel's side and would probably increase aid or give them carte blanche to just exterminate Palestine completely. While Biden hasn't been much better, there's at least signs that his administration is trying to reign in the Israelis, though for whatever reason they haven't been terribly serious about it. I'm assuming it's because Israel is a client state that for the most part cooperates with the US and buys our weapons, they can help further whatever policy goals we might have in the region. IMO they seem like they're more trouble than they're worth, whatever we might gain from Israel is ruined by Israel's own conduct, they're dragging us down with them as they act belligerently to everyone around them. Maybe being surrounded by hostile nations on all sides does that, but from the outside looking in it doesn't look like they've seriously sought peace.
If anything, we should be withholding aid from them to get them to show a bit more humility and willingness to work towards peace, but I'm guessing they'd just turn to Russia or China instead and continue being belligerent. If that happened though, then Palestinians are just as fucked as before, if not more so. It's crazy how fickle we can be with any other nation that needs our help and have left plenty of other allies to die, but for whatever reason, we just can't quit Israel. Given all of the alternatives, Palestinians face a slow death unless some sort of two-state solution can be found (or if they could be integrated better into Israel instead of being dead-set on their own independent state), but from what I can see, the least-worst option is for the US to try to be a moderating influence on Israel like what Biden has been halfheartedly doing. It's not great, but the alternatives are worse.
Yes, am agreeing that must not vote for Biden Genocide Joe. American President must be strong defender of freedoms like Trump, or like great president Putin.
Also, I am liberal sexually fluid college student who eats of many avocado toasts and demands money. Not voting Biden is shared by my many many friends of all races and economic class.
I'm convinced if it wasn't the conflict in Palestine it would be some other issue that would prevent them from being able to "morally" support Biden.
Yes the conflict in Palestine is terrible, yes there are atrocities occuring, no I don't have any of the solutions.
There seem to be a subset of people that only want to see the negative in every aspect of life and this carries over to politicians/politics in general. The grass is forever more green elsewhere.
I recently asked a friend trapped in this bubble if they had seen the new Mario movie, as I attempt to avoid politics with them at this point in time, and I received the answer, "No, fuck Chris Pratt." I didn't bother asking why, but it seems that nearly ever aspect of life, except the ones they choose to conveniently ignore is reason for social outrage and some how it is "Biden's Fault," with complete disregard to what the alternative looks like.
But 3rd parties!!! Oh yes, because statistically splitting your vote between the only two groups with a chance of being elected to office is the "moral solution."
I don't ever want to hear about "harm reduction" from them again, when their "moral" decision results in women's healthcare being a literal afterthought and rights for a variety of marginalized communities being stripped away. 1,500 people a week are still dying from COVID in the U.S., but hey, let's help elect the party that wants to continue erroding any remaining social safety nets, because you know, people who get sick don't matter as much as this months zeitgeist of social outrage.
Mf-ers out here acting allergic to periods.
There is Taiwan also
"We did Patrick! We saved nothing."
First of all, your system is broken. Second, what is a Palestinian American supposed to do? Biden is literally providing the ammunition to kill their families. Trump isn’t any better, but that doesn’t mean voting for another genocidal maniac is a viable option.
You asking Palestinian/Muslim Americans to simply look past that is a very self centered perspective. You say then people will be deported and thrown into camps. That’s what Palestinians were fleeing from in the first place. They fled before, they’ll do it again if they have to. They’re living in diaspora anyway. So do the millions of other Muslim Americans who are here because of Western geopolitics.
You on the other hand who try to bully them into voting for Biden because it serves your purpose, have nowhere to go. If you want progress for your country and you consider Biden only the lesser evil. Instead of bullying fellow Americans into serving your purpose, why don’t you focus on your common goal instead? Respect their opinion, support their cause.
Join their protests against Biden, pressurize him into stopping the genocide, pressurize the DNC into sending someone else as their presidential candidate.
As someone who is struggling to find a reason to vote for biden for who he is, rather than vote for him for what he is not, its so disheartening to see the only valid reason to vote for him is just that he isn’t trump.
And I hate that discussion about this is always so black and white about this, and just sneering at people who have no policy reason to vote for biden, throwing shade at people who genuinely hate biden’s neoliberal platform for criticizing because trump is the opponent.
Voting for someone because they aren’t trump didn’t work in 2016, and Im worried it isn’t going to work in 2024. And I’m starting to see why people are feeling so hopeless when it comes to electoralism
And what did Marx think about voting for the lesser evil:
Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.
The fact that those are your choices should be enough to alert you to the reality - that voting is a charade to make you feel "heard" and to keep you from turning on your overlords, who will continue to wage war for profit (be it on Palestine or on their own poor and marginalised) no matter what.
Sadly the propaganda is so strong that most people can't see beyond the pretend field laid out in front of them and the "blue vs red" mentality that is enforced along with it, so focused on this artificial division that they don't see that the real "teams" are society and those who exploit it for profit and power (and who control the media and the education system, ensuring you're indoctrinated this way from birth).
By all means, vote for the lesser (but still) evil (I'm in the UK, we are able to vote "none" which I will be doing if there is no one on the ballot who represents me), but you don't get to pat yourself on the back for it as if you've just stormed the beach on D day and singlehandedly defeated fascism, because that's nowhere near the truth, which is that you've just participated in a bit of theatre where you were given an illusion of choice. You being uncomfortable doesn't change that.
It could change you, if you decide to engage the discomfort instead of ignoring it, you can start here:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
I am not american so I don't vote, but if I were, as a leftist, I would likely very begrudgingly vote Biden, however I find that this entitlement to leftists votes that liberals have is only gonna make leftists less willing to vote for Biden tbh. In fact I'd much rather vote a third party already your shitflinging isn't gonna make me any more willing tonsupport your shitlib.
If you got to the point where every election is "vote us or the fascist republicans win" maybe it's time to analyze and rethink your tactics and system instead of demanding leftists simply vote for you because a shitlib is somewhat less bad than a fashit. Maybe even do some leftist things, gasps, so they may actually want to vote for you. And you also might want to revisit this system that is so weak and vulnerable to democratic backsliding that every election is a threat to it.
Or you could wait for the leftists to bring out the guillotines and solve the issue for you, tho you're probably going to be on the chopping block after so many years of moving to the right and blaming leftists every time you lose, and maybe also cause your party is still ok with letting businesses do their thing including union busting or the genocide mentioned in the meme.
Huh, this is the most convincing vote blue no matter who argument I've seen. I'm in Canada so it's not up to me, but damn, this SpongeBob meme is poignant.
We did it reddit!
Question for the libs who are flailing, trying and failing to understand how their country is backsliding into genocidal fascism (and taking shots to the left):
The deluge of Biden admins who have resigned because of the war - are they now supporting Trump since they are withholding their support for the Biden campaign?
You can look at it that way or you can look at it where Biden won't listen to the people who would elect him and decides to support genocide knowing it will probably mean he won't get re-elected. Why would you blame the voters when it's clearly one person who is making the wrong decision. Edit: it's crazy people are defending Biden while he's supporting genocide and blaming the people who refuse to support it and don't attack the president that doesn't listen to 70% of his own party. If he doesn't listen here why would he listen to us anywhere else.
As much as I despise Trump, I disagree with this dangerous rhetoric. Biden seems the only person capable of inflecting the dire fate of gazans and he does not. Worse, he funnels money and military equipment to support this. Trump may wreak havoc in the US if reelected, but if Biden is fine with genocide elsewhere, he should be fine to let America fall
those things are bound to happen anyway regardless of the clown you guys elected.
ukraine is already abandoned, too, under the flag of a democrat you voted in.
voting doesnt work because we vote then go right back to doing absolutely nothing
they don't give a shit if it makes any sense, they're all running from reality
I'm getting so many messages from people about how immature and impractical it is to be wary of voting for Biden just because he isn't trump, it's absurd.
Biden is probably as bad as trump in very different ways, but dipshit liberals would have you believe that it is your patriotic duty to vote with them, otherwise you give a vote to trump when you refuse to vote.
With that being said, please vote in your local elections and for pretty much everything else. As liberals seem to forget, the president is mostly just a figurehead, but your senators, representatives, congressmen, etc mean much more and affect your life more significantly.
Okay, you're willfully obtuse or have no reading comprehension. McConnell's position was discussed in the article as well. I thought Graham 's position statement was a better articulation of the point.
If you really need an article explaining this more clearly, you're lost.
Americans have some serious Stockholm syndrome if they believe voting for any of these candidates makes a meaningful difference when they are both war mongering fascists. The status quo can not be changed by voting but by anti-government protests forcing the current system to collapse.
Besides Roe ended under Biden, not Trump. There have also been more deportations under Biden than under Trump so this vote Biden or else blackmail isn't even based on facts. It's like choosing between Himmler and Hitler.
Everyone told you last time that voting in biden would make Trump inevitable next time around and now that's playing out for you. Meanwhile your response is to bully women, muslims, and black people into voting for a guy who is openly against their fundamental human dignities? get over yourselves.
He did nothing to stop Roe v Wade overturning. He did nothing to stop Palestine being massacred. He did nothing to stop the insane levels of transphobia in red states. He did nothing to address basic economic hardships. He did nothing to stop kids being killed at the southern border. Anyone who wants to be complicit in that (like the dozen or so people who consistently spam lemmy with this virtue signalling BS) can go right ahead and watch as their golden boy gets throttled by a fascist populist just as people fucking warned you about.
Whenever we see this same old point being made and think "yes, how stupid are people," remember that being shamed in to voting doesn't work and this even helped get Trump elected in 2016. The only thing that happens with this is a sense of self-validation.
If the Democrats really didn't want Trump, someone would deal with him how they deal with other existential threats. He's great for fundraising though, and most big donors support both parties.
All he's got to do is say he wants affordable housing. Otherwise yeah I'll let it burn.
I never get tired of these kinds of low effort posts.
Trump is actually not much worse than Biden on foreign policy. Bypassing congress to supply ammo for a genocide is something I would have literally only seen Trump do until three months ago. Then I found out the israeli lobbies supplied Biden with three times as much funds as Trump.
While Trump is pretty shit on American domestic policy, he doens't seem to be much worse for the Palestinians.
Vote third party.
Sorry but trump is way funnier than Biden. I don't make the rules.
Fuck American liberals you people are disgusting. Support your genocidal president who does fuck all for you anyway because you're stupid enough to fall for the good cop bad cop routine of the US government. If you vote for Joe Biden you are voting for genocide. The fact that the other option is just as genocidal does not absolve you of culpability for your complicity.
The final verdict is that you are human garbage.
Edit: Biden just halted all funding for UNRWA to prevent it from providing aid to Palestinians as much as possible. This is exactly the kind of unhinged policy decision that liberals would make a fuss about trump taking. Trump or Biden it makes no difference and you must be extremely propagandized to think it does.
Is this anyone's position? Calling him Genocide Joe, protesting at his campaign events, is about holding his feet to the fire. I don't think I've ever heard anyone saying they won't vote for Joe Biden because of it. Cause a vote for Joe isn't a vote for Joe, it's a vote against fascism.
Just because there's opposition, doesn't mean that not supporting someone means supporting the opposition.
I'm going to vote for RFK. I think he has a couple of good points about looking at source code, rather than banning apps made in China. The whole TikTok ban was just stupid. Google, Microsoft, and other corporate companies already do so much shady stuff; why the hell are we banning businesses from other countries when all we need is the source code? Also, he is against government surveillance, which I think is a really good thing that can really restore our democracy. I've felt as if we've lost so much of our freedoms just from all this mass surveillance. People cannot look for information freely, which is a very important part of our democracy.
