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If you want to argue that the answer to Biden being too soft on Israel's crimes is to let the guy who handed them East Jerusalem, The West Bank, and The Golan Heights on a silver platter get back into power, you're either a covert Zionist agent, or an unwitting Zionist agent. Either way, you have no business lecturing about the moral course of action in this crisis.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
Jokes aside I unironically agree with everything you just said.
I’ve seen this sentiment expressed but I thought you expressed it super well, fwiw
Voting does make you complicit in the things the candidate has said they will do. For example, if the candidate says “I will get rid of abortion” then voting for them means you are partially responsible if they actually do get rid of abortion. Or if they say “I will kill all the gays” or “I will lock up all non-Christians” then don’t act all surprised pikachu face when it happens.
It’s not a blood pact, but it’s not a football game either where you’re just rooting for your team. You have to weigh the consequences of casting a vote for someone and decide if you can live with the possible outcomes and/or pick the lesser of two evils.
If you don't pick the lesser of two evils, you're saying you're okay with the greater.
Man, the famed revolutionary Robespierre once said, "To rule innocently is insanity." He was wrong about numerous other things, but he fucking nailed that on the head. There are no good decisions in positions of power. If you fail oh-so-nobly, the nobility of your fall and refusal to compromise with your ideals isn't going to save a single goddamn person, and there's a good goddamn chance it'll kill many, many more. Every decision has costs in the lives of innocent people, and there is no abstention from that that is anything more than giving license to the currently-occurring trends happening.
In a democracy, we share power. The more democratic the society, the more power is shared - and the power that is shared also comes with responsibility for what that power does. The modern US is less democratic than it should be, but it's much more democratic than pre-Enlightenment societies - or prior incarnations of the US, for that matter. We all have blood on our hands, because we all have a share of the decision-making power.
We must choose the option that improves things to most - or damages things the least - to the best of our ability, whether in voting, organizing, protesting; all of it. And abrogation of that decision-making responsibility in any area is not abrogation of guilt; it is acceptance of the worse of the results.
I think the best analogy I've heard had compared voting to transportation. If you're at the office and want to go home, there probably isn't a train that goes directly to your front door. So you get on the train heading in the right direction, and maybe at the end of that line you still need to take a bus and walk a couple blocks, but that's how you ultimately get where you want to go. Otherwise you're going to be in the same spot waiting for a perfect train that's not coming.
this person describes it better than me:
Goddamn, that last paragraph speaks to me. I grew up in a little purple oasis surrounded by a desert of deep, deep red, and the idea that there are all these people just WAITING for a REAL LEFTIST to come along, whose ideas they'd all agree with and overwhelmingly vote for, because they only vote GOP because they don't believe Dems are GENUINE about SUPPORTING THE WORKERS is just...
... neither my experience nor supported by polling, nor supported by electoral results.
A lot of people have dogshit beliefs. A lot of work has to be done before they'd even consider voting for someone other than the fucking fascist party.
Voting does sort of make you complicit, honestly.
But guess what? Not voting also makes you complicit. So does voting in a way that has no chance of having an effect based on the current rules.
Basically, existing as an eligible voter, at least in a country where voting isn't rigged (so like, Russians are off the hook here, for example) makes you complicit in your government's actions.
That's kind of a big point of being in a democratic society - we are all, every one of us, responsible for the actions of our government.
And if you don't like that responsibility, I get it, I totally sympathize, because I agree. I hate that responsibility, especially cause I know damn well I'm not qualified to make those decisions. But I still am responsible, and pretending I'm not doesn't change that.
eh, im with you but i dont really like the overapplication of the word complicit.
i much prefer the model that we are a bunch of individuals doing our best to organize against systematic murder. but yes thank you for your corroborating comment :)
Whenever people express the sentiment that we need Biden to put his foot down on genocide I'm always for it.
But then when you ask them what they want to do it always becomes some nebulous Republican rhetoric about how Trump's not that bad.
Yes we need the genocide to stop, Trump will not accomplish that, he will make it worse.
We can pressure Congress and continue to protest because it needs to stop.
The past eight years have been such a strong argument for ranked choice voting.
yep. either the nebulous version or its evil unveiled sibling “well maybe leftists will mobilize more if we let another maga win happen/voting is about holding them accountable so let’s fire brandon 🤓”
mfs out here acting like the overton window doesn’t exist
What the actual fuck? They are pretty clear what they want. ONE we stop giving weapons to isreal. TWO we stop getting in the way of a cease fire. THREE we start giving humanitarian aid to trapped Palestinians. FOUR we cooperate with The Hague on what evidence we have on isreal war crimes.
These are things we could do without much effort that would have immediate impact on both stopping the genocide and boosting his numbers.
I get we want “our strategic ally in the Middle East” but maybe if we stop doing all the war crimes and genocide we wouldn’t need to write a blank check to Israel every-time they run out of genocide juice. If our status as an ally to isreal is contingent on what we are doing, we are not an ally we are being used.
It seems this thread pops up every time Fox News talks about Biden’s slipping numbers. The disillusionment of the left is real. And calling them out and saying “but trump!” Is not going to convince them, it’s not like they forgot.
If they complain about Biden being complicit in genocide. Now the time to do it. And it’s up to them if they follow through with their threat, and it’s up to Biden if he’s willing to risk it
I'm not asking what Biden could do, I'm very clear on what he could do.
What I'm saying is what we as individuals could do to pressure them realistically.
You're failing to recognize the inherent biases of the voting system, we all know that our system favors a two party outcome. Which is to say it's a statistical improbability for anyone except for the two most popular parties to win.
This isn't just my opinion this is well known statistical fact with many years to back it up.
This puts us in the awkward place of choosing the least bad candidate, Obviously pressuring Biden isn't working and I'm not happy about it.
But when we consider our vote we have to consider more than just the situation in the middle East, something that the Republicans don't even want to fix.
That's why I think it would be better to pressure Congress and to push for ranked choice voting and to continue to protest.
Because at least rank choice voting would allow us to vote for a better option rather than the least bad option.
You fell into the same trap, no actionable advice to the individual.
I've finally trained my brain to jump to the bottom two panels of that format!
This reminds me of the trolley problem. One candidate wants to kill five people, the other "only" wants to kill one person. No matter what you do, it is guaranteed that one of them will get elected and kill at least one person - but if you try to use your vote to make the lesser evil slightly more probable - you are suddenly complicit.
Even worse - if the kill-one-person wins and kills that person, the kill-five-people candidate' supporters will be the ones to hold the kill-one-person voters accountable for it. Their candidate would have killed more people, but because he lost the elections he was not able to kill anyone, which somehow makes voting for him more ethical?
