“Yes don’t vote at all to get rid of fascism”
There’s two sides to this argument, and one is wrong and the other is right.
One says “Both sides do it, so it’s okay that my side does it.”
The other says “Your side does it. A few on my side do it, too. But it doesn’t matter, we should stop both sides from doing it.”
Nah, delete this
Both sides’d themselves into proto-fascism. And taking us along for the ride.
Fucking morons.
Absolutely. Trump only goes more insane. At least with Kamala we would have had a chance to push left policies, and they wouldn’t be going directly to fucking fascism, unlike t-Rump.
Difficult to vote between genocide and genocide. At least with one you punished the other candidate for it.
Not this shit again lol Every single time
How dare I point out that Biden committed genocide. Have you no shame in yourself? Does it feel good to turn a blind eye to a modern day holocaust and pretend like nothing is happening?
Complete with the signature hysterical accusations and the misconstruing of the facts. 👏 Well done, you’ve become the meme of the post by thinking you’re doing something constructive but only shrieking nonsense and alienating people instead of making an resonating and true statement that we can rally behind.
Please don’t forget to also accuse me of contributing to genocide when I tell you that your shit stinks and is unhelpful and unproductive. Go ahead, say the line, Bart.
Does third party count then? One bar is a bar
“both sides”= a disengenious comment by conservative mainly also uses the same thing to say thier not as bad.
“Both sides” also used by liberals to tell you it doesn’t matter they voted for genocide because trump will do the same
Maybe there would be more than Side A and Side B if we had voting reform and Democrats didn’t systematically sue third-parties off the ballot.
People (not just authoritarians) criticize Side A because they have way more tallies than most have been led to believe. Everybody who pays any amount of attention knows that Side B has a lot of tallies. What good comes out of specifically pointing out the tallies of Side B when literally everybody on non-conservative social media is blasted with the knowledge of those tallies? If you want somebody to preach to the choir or inform you about Side B’s tallies, just ask. If you think people paying attention to or being informed about Side A’s tallies is dangerous and harmful, just say so.
Side A tolerates third-world exploitation (labor, resources, goods) that the US economy still relies on, they tolerate the US economy still relying on slavery and child slavery, they tolerate or support US imperialism and regime change, they refuse to address or come up with solutions for the fresh water crisis (by 2030, demand will exceed supply by 40%), they refuse to properly address many issues that the US people face (the economy, the housing crisis, the health care crisis, etc.), they support harmful policies like fracking, they have allowed corporations/et. al to go out of control under their power, and they generally have not advocated for strong regulation and protections for the American people. Yes, Side B is undesirable, but Side A is insufficient.
If Side A’s hands are always tied in a two-party system, then they should impeach the bad actor, push voting/election reform and term limits, and hold fair and democratic primaries and elections. Side A not propping up extreme right-wing candidates (like Trump) and telling the media to take them seriously would be nice, too.
1/3 of Americans don’t vote and plenty of people only voted Kamala because they didn’t want Trump (and there are other factors than Gaza, misogyny, and Jill Stein voters at play to explain why people didn’t come out to vote for her). Plenty of people probably don’t want Trump (or anybody like him) if they’ve been paying any attention and didn’t fall for the propaganda.
Side A would get bonus points for not alienating progressives, for supporting the loosening of requirements for ballot access (and stop engaging in lawfare to restrict ballot access), and for supporting fair and inclusive debates on public property where they would have to address perspectives and topics that are potentially uncomfortable or inconvenient for them.
I realize there are plenty of unserious actors who run for president (like Kayne West) who would try their best to poison open debates and abuse expanded ballot access, but there has to be some fair mechanism to filter (openly racist and insane) people like him out. Perhaps a competency test of sorts with independent observation would be appropriate.
And I realize a lot of people find Jill Stein to be harmful (and individuals like her), but maybe we shouldn’t arrest her (or any other presidential candidate) and put her in a black site, shackling her to a chair for 8 hours, because she wanted to be present at the presidential debate?
This is an unprecedented time for the American people, with human rights and due process in jeopardy. We are facing multiple serious crises with no solutions or progress in sight - voting and election reform, in addition to term limits, are all urgent and necessary.
I don’t care if you want to vote for Side A no matter what — we can only suppress criticism and stay in denial of major issues for so long before (e.g.) the fresh water crisis hits us and humanity is completely and utterly unprepared.
Republicans also use 3rd party as a spoiler and to siphon off D voters too.
There were a bunch of stories of Republicans helping Cornel West’s campaign last year to act as a spoiler.
Whether they use them intentionally or not, we need voting reform. In the 2024 election, third-parties barely made a dent — they weren’t a spoiler.
FPTP is exactly why third-parties can be a “spoiler”. There are plenty of valid alternative voting systems to explore that are way more fair and democratic.
And it doesn’t sound very democratic of the Democratic Party to repeatedly and systematically restrict ballot access through lawsuits. Ballot access is hard enough for third-parties to achieve in most states.
I appreciate the depth of your response. You’re right, critiquing Side A doesn’t mean endorsing Side B. It means demanding better from those who claim to represent us. The meme calls out false equivalency, but that shouldn’t silence legitimate concerns about the system itself.
It’s like this: if the house is on fire, I’ll vote to put out the biggest flame, but I’m also going to ask why the fire keeps spreading, and who’s refusing to fix the wiring. Reform isn’t a distraction; it’s how we stop the next blaze before it starts.
Thanks for adding a more nuanced layer to the conversation.
There’s also the fact that both sides support capitalism, which is an evil ideology that has killed more people than communism ever did. Like for real, capitalism kills 10 million people every year just through starvation and withholding lifesaving medication. That means that every decade capitalism kills more than even the highest estimates of communism’s total headcount over the last 100 years (which, btw, those estimates include Nazis killed in WW2).
Hey cockhead, look up the fucking holodomor, and don’t just read the denialist BS.
Or the Katyn Massacre.
Or the Blagoveshchensk Massacre.
Or the Kyiv Massacre.
Or the Amur River Massacre.
I can go on, if you’d like?
There’s those who commit unintended mistakes, then there’s those who give in to the temptation of behaving badly in their moments of weakness, and then there’s those who can’t wait for any given opportunity to behave maliciously and justify it by saying they aren’t the only ones doing it.
Hey, don’t judge me for commiting ethnic cleansing! Hitler did it as well, after all! And that one single bad apple in your group is mildly racist as well, so you’re no better!
Man fascists are delusional , scratch a liberal and all that…
Another classic:
Me: gives my definition of tankie Tankie: so <name of leftist who doesnt match the given definition> is a tankie too?
And ofc: Shunning a dictatorship and pointing out their horrible doing, means you obviousely cant be left, nooo you must be a libertarian or fascist.
And one of my favorit tankie talking points: "Democracy is when you have to be approved by the government in order to even get on a list. That you can either vote for the state party or “no”, like it was in east germany, and 99.4% voted for the state party but then suddenly after the dictatorship fell, 4 years later they dropped down to 16.4 %. aah yes seems legit. Truely a grand democracy.
Wait I’m lost, are we talking foreign invasions done by the US vs foreign invasions done by China? Or the number of victims of Hamas vs the victims of the IDF? What are we counting here? Military bases abroad?
Talking about how some people deny or justify the horrendous things done by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim Dynastie, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Honecker, Guevara, Ho Chi Min, and so on and all their helpers, because others also did horrendous things and both have to be called out for it. Justification of unneccesary murdering shows you are in favor for that which is unacceptable
Are the people justifying these things in the room with us?
If the room is .ml, yes.
What are we counting here?
Evil policies supported by democrats vs evil policies supported by republicans
what evil polices do dems support that the republicans don’t?
There have been many at various times, and it also depends on your values, obviously. It also depends on whether you’re looking at things in specific times as opposed to generally.
There have been many times when many mainstream Democrats were pro-censorship but most Republicans were not.
Then there are other situations that I think are edge cases and therefore interesting. For example, Obamacare did make life better for real numbers of Americans, but it also guaranteed that we wouldn’t be looking at universal healthcare for a few more decades, if ever. And that was a law pushed for and passed by Democrats. Of course you could argue that it’s better than nothing, maybe it was, but medical debt is far worse now than it ever has been, and predictably so. So then you wonder why Democrats pushed for it, and we all know the answer to that, corruption. Of course they would say that it’s the best they could do, but is that even true? We’ll never find out, cuz they didn’t try.
So how do you rate rate these gray area situations? Things that are better than nothing but worse than a lot, but the politicians are only voting for them because they are corrupt.
So can you name a few?
Policies can be checked on both sides
Sure, but on average when some self proclaimed leftist’s opening is “Democrats did a bad thing” in a vacuum my immediate assumption is they’re a campist/tankie, accelerationist, or a rightwing psyop and my instinct is to immediately challenge them (most of the time… sometimes its me critiquing the dems)
Sometimes it turns out they’re giving an earnest critique but usually not.
Who made you the arbiter of another person’s earnestness? Can you read minds? And if you’re the one criticizing the Dems, does someone else take over?
I’m the arbiter of who I trust is arguing coherently or in good faith and I am ultimately not trusting of the average internet poster by default.
I’ve been arguing on dedicated internet debate spaces for a very very large portion of my life and I have a good eye for when someone isn’t worth being taken seriously.
I’ll take your word for it.
What in the word salad are you talking about.
Leftists say funding Israel’s war crimes is bad. Check mark in both columns.
That’s not a critique of democrats, that’s a critique of a portion of democrats and all of republicans.
It’s a critique of the democrats that were in the running for president
Drone strike deaths under Obama vs under Trump?
Who killed more Asians: US or Mao?
Hamas are arguably a gift for Israel.
If we take “kill” to mean like manslaughter through poor policy and famine, probably Mao, by an order of magnitude. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’re thinking about, because that’s kind of a silly comparison. It’s like asking “who killed more Americans, Mao or the US”, to which the answer is both obvious and completely uninteresting.
So I’m gonna take it to mean “murder”, like the killing of landlords during the cultural revolution. And then it’s actually kind of close, and I’m not sure who’s killed more Asians. So the most liberal estimates for Mao there are 7 million, but the range is pretty big. The most conservative estimates put him at 2 million.
Let’s look at the US’ kill count. I know of bombing campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Respectively, the ranges here are 300k-2M, 1.5M-3.1M, 80k-350k, 50k-150k. So that’s a range of 1.9M-5.6M. Then there’s the suppression of the movement for independence in colonized phillipines, which adds 200k, and Afghanistan, 250k. So that puts us at 2.5M-6M for the US to 2-7 for Mao.
It should be noted that I’m not counting indirect deaths via training and arming dictatorships (if someone hands an assassin a gun, and the assassin kills your mother, the first person is not a murderer, but they are culpable in some way. If we add these, you get Timor, and the murder of leftists in Indonesia in the 60s, among others, which adds another 1-1.5M to the US count.
So I guess it’s kind of close. I gotta say, I’m a little surprised, I always thought Mao was much worse, but the US is a strong contender.
Woah! We skipped over the Pacific theater of WWII entirely it looks like.
Also skipping all MidEast action, but that can be considered a different tally for purposes of this exercise.
But realistically we should also have approximately similar timeframes for both- otherwise we just inflate US counts artificially.
You’re welcome to include Iraq, Iran, South America, Africa, Gaza, Turkish Kurds, and so on. You’re welcome to restrict to some arbitrary timeframe, you’re welcome to exclude indirect fatalities. Ultimately it’s a fairly futile exercise. But I do know that if we restrict to the period including the invasion of Vietnam by China and onward, the US “wins” very, very comfortably.
And I object to your use of the word artificial. These are human lives that were snuffed out for the sake of greed. These were people, like your father, your mother, your friends. There’s nothing artificial about these numbers.
That’s a good reply. 😁
Thank you. 🙂
It’s only a gift if you get it for free. Israel funded Hamas to make themselves look more sympathetic.
Israel got a good R.O.I.
Hard disagree.
People who refuse to vote when there is a clearly superior option deserve whatever the greater evil brings forth when they win.
Even when there isn’t a clearly superior option; there’s no excuse to not vote in the U. S. when the right to vote is such a pivotable portion of your history. We are barely over a half century away; only a mere 60 years. Unconscionable.
If voting is a right, then surely not voting is also a right. You seem to be confusing it with the word “responsibility.”
Considering I never said that one doesn’t have the right to not vote, I don’t believe I am; but you are correct that I consider it a responsibility.
Non-voters are beneath Trump supporters in my opinion. They’re the lowest of the low. A complete failure to understand their civic duty that a ton of people died to allow them to have. At least Trump supporters get involved. In the worst, dumbest possible way, but involved nonetheless.
On the one hand, corporatist party, on the other, literal fascists. Yes, clearly there is no superior option.
You seem to be deriving meaning unstated in my comment.
Then maybe vote for a third party.
I simply cannot grasp why some people believe voting 3rd party in a presidential election isn’t one of the dumbest possible things you can do in life.
Like, beyond the fact that the 3rd party candidate with the most votes in 2024 got a whopping HALF OF A SINGLE PERCENT of the total votes cast, meaning a 3rd party literally cannot win, there’s still the reality that even if they did win, no 3rd party has A SINGLE MEMBER IN CONGRESS, so if a 3rd party presidential candidate actually won, they wouldn’t be able to do shit, because they’d have literally ZERO allies in Congress.
I’m pretty sure anyone voting 3rd party for president has absolutely no clue how our government works. They have no concept of the reality they live in.
A vote for a third party in presidential is not a vote.
It is a vote, and over 1.5 million Americans (excluding those for RFK) made such votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election#Results
IMO, progressives (who’s not too bothered by Stein’s cozying up to Russia a bit) from California, most of New England, DC, Maryland, Hawaii, or Washington (state), and yet yammer on about how bad third parties are because they split the Democrat vote, are probably stupid, or at least ignorant, and should give some of the time they spend watching CNN or Vaush to reading election stats.
Election stats? You ever hear the phrase “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”
Stats on their own given a poor analysis of an average joe/jane can mislead just as much if not more than a talking head can.
The core fact remains that voting for a third party under a first past the post system is risking permitting the greater evil to win.
how bad third parties are because they split the Democrat vote, are probably stupid, or at least ignorant, and should give some of the time they spend watching CNN or Vaush to reading election stats.
Hey, I don’t need to comment because you said it all for me.
Aka “have the day you voted for”.
People who voted for the lesser evil is still voting for evil
“I would proudly vote for Hitler if slightly to the right of Hitler was on the ballot”. Good fucking job, you’re voting for Hitler. If you vote for Hitler you also deserve slightly to the right of Hitler.
Exactly
And people who didn’t vote for the lesser evil could have helped avoid the greater evil, but chose not to.
Lol. You sweet summer child.
And not voting is the greatest evil.
Given that you can act (in this case vote), your hands are more dirty permitting the worse evil to win through inaction.
You don’t get to clean your hands of things when you have the power to act to effect the outcome.
So saying “People voted for evil” is a selective self-benefiting myopia. Vote abstainers are not virtuous, they are a narcissists.
Can we just rename this instance from politicalmemes to tankierants
In Sweden the far-right tried to play this game. They started chirping about the social democrats being rasist and made a list on like an A4 with names and events. Then the same was done to them, matching the font, their list was taken up a skylift and holding one end they folded it out to the ground in a television program.
In the US, the ‘left’ would just amplify the voice of the far-right.
Good on Swedish voters for being less stupid than we are.
Well, I would not give them that much credit. The majority governing coallition is with the far-right. They were clear before the election they were going to work with the far-right. They have a common platform with the far right which has a large overlap with e.g. Trumps; mass deportation of immigrants (like for reasons like being a victim of a crime), slashing government agencies, extreme restrictions on free speech, and so on. It is just a bit slower here when it comes to reaching their goals.
Based
“Perfect is, in fact, the enemy of good, and if we can’t have perfect then we shouldn’t settle for good!”
I do so wish their fucking around would limit the finding out to just them, but alas.
No, flipflops don’t work at all. My uncle’s neighbors former roommate only has 1 toe, so they solve nothing.
Am I correctly interpreting this to mean you think tankies threw the US presidential election? If so, do you have evidence that this is the case?
Ugh. Such a tired, stupid argument.
It doesn’t matter whether tankies actually threw the election to Trump.
THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHETHER THEIR ACTIONS WOULD CAUSE THAT TO HAPPEN WHEN THEY CHOSE TO DO SO.
your bait is rotten and stinks, you know how to read. “Interpreting” = strawmanning/otherwise putting words in my mouth. Do I think they contributed? Absolutely. Dipshits are everywhere and many of them happen to reside here, and I read many comments from the usual tankie trolls doing nothing but shit-talk Harris as often as they could on Lemmy in the leadup to the election, which probably influenced a nonzero number of peoples opinions (again, dipshits everywhere). Does that in any way imply I think they’re solely responsible?
please take your chum elsewhere, thank you. I hear 4chan is back up these days, now you run along.
Friend, I’m sorry you read my comment as being an attack or an attempt to lure you out. It’s miscommunications like this that make me want to clarify things, which is why I asked instead of assuming. Another misunderstanding: By “throwing the election”, I didn’t mean being solely responsible for the electoral loss. What I mean by that is if you removed the tankie factor from the election, it could have gone the other way. Elections are won and lost on very fine margins. There may be 100 other things that had a similar impact which you could also say threw the election; none of them are solely responsible for it.
If you aren’t saying that they influenced the election to a degree that might have flipped it, then what is it we are “finding out” from their “fucking around”? And, do you consider having read many comments on lemmy as sufficient evidence to think that might be the case?
I don’t think that is what OP is referring to. I interpreted it as the strange measuring stick tankies use to compare the democrats and the republicans. Even accelerationists agree that the Republicans are way worse than the democrats.
100%, republicans are way worse than democrats. To be clear I’m not an accelerationist, I find it repugnant.
Prior to the second election of trump. I would wholeheartedly agree with you.
But as time goes on, it’s looking like we don’t have a democracy but a fascist dictatorship or oligarchy. In which case accelerationism may actually be the lesser evil.
Even if OP isn’t advocating thta, I am.
Tankues hve advocated to not vote democrat over gaza and less people voted for hillary than for biden.
Of course there’s no way proving this is true (and it shouldn’t, since voting should be nonymous) and it certainly was until a certain part also racism and sexism, but the intensity of the calls to boycott dems and Harris having way less votes than Biden is suspicious.
the intensity of the calls to boycott dems and Harris having way less votes than Biden is suspicious
There’s nothing suspicious about it. Voters have spent the last eight years watching their bills for food, health care, child care, and everything else spiral out of control without any meaningful help from Republicans or Democrats.
These millions opted not to miss work to vote because they know definitively that the two choices they had wouldn’t do anything to change how hard their lives have become.
It’s that simple.
Why would you have to miss work to vote?
Because elections occur on a weekday.
Do people only work every hour of a weekday in America? Plus don’t they have a system for voting ahead of time via post too, which you could sort out on a weekend leading up as well?
Do people only work every hour of a weekday in America?
Many do, yes. The majority of our population is so vastly underpaid that they work upwards of 100 hours a week at multiple jobs. (Which, as you can imagine, might inspire them to see a sort of futility in voting to begin with.) Also elections can entail hours-long waiting in line.
Plus don’t they have a system for voting ahead of time via post too
It depends on your state and local jurisdiction. Your right to vote by mail (or to vote conveniently) depends on where you live.
