this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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I actually think you're slightly wrong about this. She isn't the worse choice on this issue, because they are functionally identical on this issue. If we have 17,000 dead Palestinian children due to Biden-Harris foreign policy, does it really matter that Trump foreign policy might have led to 20,000+ dead Palestinian children? It's an unconscionable tragedy either way.
If you don't care about any dead child above 17,000, you've made a fine argument. But now you're saying more deaths is fine (and better than current policy) because you've reached some tipping point where more suffering and death is actually preferable to ... what? A Democrat in the White House? Your logic doesn't work within your own argument.
This is very common among single-issue voters. As another example: abortion. Plenty of people who think Trump is heinous vote for him based on that issue alone (something the GOP has been using to great effect for the past 30 years), and accept whatever else his cronies get him to enact because they perceive him as "wanting to get rid of abortion."
If your think the suffering of Palestinians is the greatest domestic issue facing the U.S., dwarfing all others combined, by all means let it guide your choice. But don't complain about the internment camps that start getting built if Trump wins when you found everything else in this election irrelevant.
Six hundred Nader votes in Florida going to Gore instead 24 years ago would have put this country on a very different trajectory, so it is not hyperbole that staying home or voting for the other guy can result in an even worse outcome.
I did not say this. I said that 20,000 deaths is "functionally equivalent" to 17,000, not "preferable". Big difference in meaning. My point is that the two candidates are identical on this specific issue.
Well it's a foreign issue, not a domestic one. But that aside, I am aware of and care about the other issues. It just strikes me as selfish to focus on what will happen to us if Trump wins when people elsewhere in the world are being slaughtered, and the "morally good" alternative supports that slaughter.
Look, I been around the block. I voted third party in 2016 and saw what came of that. I'm utilitarian about this at the end of the day, and I want to choose the candidate that will cause the least total suffering in the world as whole. I want the Overton Window in the US to shift left, and I think that happens through repeated Dem wins. But don't get it twisted: the Dems are still the party that will throw you a few social justice crumbs so you don't complain about being ground up by the gears of capitalism. They bypassed the primary process and stole your voice from you so they could choose the moderate candidate that they wanted.
And ultimately, I hate that the Dems have so successfully-whipped y'all into a panic about Trump that y'all won't even DISCUSS this genocide anymore for fear that it will lead to a second Trump presidency. Watch them do it again with a new bogeyman in 4 years.
To your last point, you're dead wrong. I'm not whipped into anything, but thanks for the personal attack (not just on me, but on the gestures broadly "y'all") with zero basis. That's not Beehaw etiquette.
I'm far to the left of the current U.S. Overton window, so being cast as aligned with neoliberalism is laughable. As far as I can tell, your argument is that everyone for whom Gaza isn't their only deciding factor in a U.S. election supports genocide. That's certainly an opinion.
I didn't think I was making a personal attack, but I'm sorry if it came off that way. In spaces like this, I'm usually trying to stick to only expressing my POV without saying anything specific about anyone that isn't a public figure. I know I can get a bit heated, tho. Sorry if I overstepped in my language, I have no bad blood for any Beeple.
Thanks for the explanation and apology. No harm done ... using the second person when talking about contentious issues can be pretty fraught, so I just wanted to let you know how I received it.