It is true that people who are apathetic towards voting because they will be treated the same either way COULD be very privileged. Alternatively, they’re people who are already treated as second class citizens and see no help or hope from biden or trump, so their livelihoods will be consistently bad (like starving to death on the street, suicide from not wanting to burden your family over a medical bill, or watching all your friends and family get bombed to death by your tax dollar bad). It’s mainly people in the middle who are affected by the presidential winner and those in the middle desperately don’t want to be pushed towards being second class citizens- it’s a plea for status quo to be maintained. Thinking that everyone who isn’t focusing on the election are people who own two yachts is a bit foolish. I’d argue that you should probably treat the yacht bro and the hopeless citizen differently.
Jentu
Biden has called himself a Zionist…
If the majority of this country leans fascist and supports genocide (so long as they are sufficiently convinced the people we bomb or help bomb are evil enough), we will end up with fascism even if it isn’t trump. If genocide is the popular opinion and Biden risks losing the election if he reversed course, we have bigger issues in this country than president. A president might sign fascist laws, but local fascists enact them, and I know which one of them is more likely to kill me. Hell, local fascists might kill me even if biden wins. We have a fascism problem in this country and a huge group of voters being willing to overlook genocide is just a symptom.
Bad cop vs Good cop vs burn the precinct down and protect your own neighborhood.
Too bad I gave direct responses to you which has been largely ignored throughout this entire conversation. 👋
What leverage do you hope to impart on democratic leadership if you say “okay okay fine, do a genocide as long as trump isn’t president! I’ll vote for you!” If they know they have your vote, why would they change course?
I have so much more to lose should trump become president than biden. Of course I would be better off if biden was president since I’m queer in a ruby red state. But my comfort and safety isn’t remotely comparable to genocide. If all this is on the line- if trump brings about unfathomable human suffering, if the fate of the country and the entire world is at stake, why isn’t Biden trying harder to win? Why is he doubling and tripling down on this extremely unpopular move?
You might think that it’s propaganda fueled, and you’re right, but I don’t think you’re seeing the entire picture. Of course propagandists will try to inflame existing issues (though I’d argue that genocide in itself is an issue worthy of ire). But if a propagandist decided to deride and chastise those who are against genocide, that is more likely to cause those people to stay home since “it’s essentially giving a vote to trump”. But if they vote for Cornell west or Claudia de la Cruz, they will still likely vote for progressives or even democrats down the ballot. Leftists staying home due to negative discourse around protests and anger against Biden’s actions will cement Republican control not only federally, but locally as well. Both of us likely have an army of propagandists fighting on our sides, so it’d be best to keep that in mind when in these discussions. Biden is likely to lose since this democracy isn’t strong enough to keep trump off the ballot while biden is not trying hard enough to win, but the degree of his loss is what’s to be determined.
The primary fact in this discussion isn’t that trump would be worse- of course he would be. The primary fact is that continuing down this road where one party is always a bit more fascist and huge groups of democrats are now ratcheted so far to the right, they’re being stripped of a moral code and being too afraid to fight injustices that are signed off by their hands, it WILL eventually give us fascism in our lifetime whether it is trump or someone else.
Do I feel superior to someone who thinks genocide isn’t a non-negotiable? Sure. But the issue here is that biden would rather lose to trump than change course and do the right (and also popular) thing. He might take down the entire Democratic Party with him as well, and then we’re stuck with a single party with trump at the head. Biden’s team knows how unpopular this all is. And with the general theme of elections being “republicans fall in line, democrats fall in love”, biden having a lower approval rating than trump is such a wild warning sign. If Biden loses, the blame will be his own.
If genocide isn’t a single issue that’s worth being a line in the sand for you, what is? Am I speaking to someone without a spine or without a heart?
That’s essentially what happened with the Whigs. The leadership decided that they weren’t going to decide one way or another on a strong stance for/against slavery, ignoring the pleading of their own constituents. So the anti slavery ex-Whigs made Lincoln’s Republican Party and the Whigs never recovered.
So not only is biden likely handing the election to trump, the moral outcry that is being ignored might kill the Democratic Party for good.
The whole point of this imperialist project is to take something valuable from someone else. Why the hell would trump nuke the valuable waterfront property which Jared Kushner (and honestly probably trump himself) wants to buy as well as negatively impact the entire region for the rest of human life on earth? Do you have to escalate to near impossibilities to seem worse than what biden is currently doing? Half a million Palestinians are starving due to manufactured famine and you’d want that trajectory to continue because in a future they won’t be alive for, you would speculate they have it worse. Do you honestly care about their lives or are you using them for political leverage for your own sake?
If you don’t want the threat of another trump presidency, it’s time for you to start joining others to urge biden to reverse course, because you won’t be able to convince me that supporting genocide is a single issue that can be overlooked.
Biden better stop fucking around and fueling fires then.
Oh, so you didn't catch that I was comparing your justified terror with republicans' unjustified terror and how easily you can both be convinced to do terrible things.
This is definitely AI. And kinda old AI at that. The backgrounds are nondescript, the facial hair is ambiguous, the face looks like one of those "upload a photo to see it realistically move with the magic of AI", the shirt looks airbrushed and ambiguous, he has dark eyes instead of very blue eyes like in real life, and if you try to look up pictures of any interviews of him in those particular years, he usually has facial hair and a button down, sometimes with a jacket.
Compare the upper right and lower left picture on this post with this similar meme. Film grain is missing (possibly due to AI "beauty filters"?) and how the upper right image, his eyes are way more blue. I think the original meme creator probably wanted to make it look like all 4 pictures were the same gray shirt rather than 4 different gray shirts since the bottom left shirt in the picture I posted is heathered gray instead of flat gray.