1321
Punish the Democrats, she says (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world
1084 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 95 points 6 months ago (85 children)

Ok, but you see how massively demoralizing this conversation is, right?

Making logical points weighing up two distinct yet similar stances on genocide is only going to suppress voter turnout.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 85 child comments
    •
  • [–] 76 points 6 months ago* (53 children)

    It shouldn't. It's basic harm reduction.

    One side probably won't stop it, but they're on our side so there's a sliver of a cintilla of a chance we could pressure them into it.

    The other side absolutely would not, vocally stated he would help accelerate it, and would laugh in our faces and do even more to accelerate it for no other reason than it made us mad.

    The choice should have been obvious, even if I and everyone else would have preferred better options.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 53 child comments
    •
  • [–] 54 points 6 months ago (24 children)

    See people aren't exclusively machines.

    I know people who felt that both sides at least tacitly supporting the genocide was so depressing that for their mental health they basically checked out of politics.

    No, that response isn't helpful, but it's a very real thing that happens to real people. They needed a candidate that cared that people's lives were ending across the sea, and neither side offered that.

    That hurt Kamala's chances in a very real way, and might even be the deciding factor for Trump's second term.

    While you and I can look at this and go "Wow, that's not logical, she's way better than Trump", the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would've cost money.

    So while it's true that the choice was still objectively obvious, it's also completely true that the Democratic campaign absolutely mishandled it, because this isn't some new phenomenon, and group human psychology isn't unpredictable. It's also not the fault of those who didn't vote because of that.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 24 child comments
    •
  • [–] 33 points 6 months ago* (5 children)

    While you and I can look at this and go “Wow, that’s not logical, she’s way better than Trump”, the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would’ve cost money.

    D and R parties both need independent voters to win any election. For example, even if every D voted for a D, they would lose without independents voting for them in significant numbers. This has been a political fact for many years.

    So... why did the Harris campaign target REPUBLICAN voters (instead of Ds and independents)? They wasted a lot of vital time on that ("He doesn't need to know who you voted for" etc), and they knew that they would lose if they did so.

    She knew it too, Harris isn't stupid. She took a knee.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    I'm not fully convinced the conspiracy is that deep, but also if hard evidence came out saying so, I wouldn't be surprised.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    I’m not fully convinced the conspiracy is that deep, but also if hard evidence came out saying so, I wouldn’t be surprised.

    You don't have to believe my word, but answer this question. You are a Democratic veteran. You KNOW for a FACT that you need Democratic and Independent voters to win. Simple mathematics demands that you do so to win.

    Why, oh why, would you pursue the Republican vote? They've never done this before in a Presidential election. It can't work. It's never worked before, anyway.

    This was discussed openly during the campaign, tons of Republican outreach and advertising with the Harris run... why?

    I cannot think of any other reason, I would actually feel a lot better if there was a logical reason, somebody help my troubled mind

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
    load more comments (3 replies)
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    But we've got a bunch of supposed leftists in this very thread talking about how they wouldn't vote for these types of democrats. These are people that obsensibly are self aware enough not to let their supposedly so well informed morality be determined by feeling bummed out about their options.

    I don't expect miracles from the average, barely informed voter. I do fucking expect supposed informed leftists to not actively campaign against voting. I expect them to fucking understand this "obvious" situation. THAT is my main sticking point.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Yes, and white people get depressed about racism, so they just ignore what bums them out. Insane that a defense of online leftists amounts to "they just such smol bean, they too bummed for voting sad face".

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • load more comments (14 replies)
  • [–] 30 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    We don't live in a world of "should", in the real world of course it is demoralizing and affects the vote turnout.

    We all know the US government will back Israel no matter what... and the voters can only punish the incumbent party for doing so.

    65% of Democrats don't want to finance Israel. Two thirds of their own party, that's massive!

    Voter turnout will continue to fall; D and R parties will continue to lose voters (now down to 30% registered voters each) and the Independents will continue to grow (now up to 40% of voters).

    Why? Because our major parties ignore what their constituents actually want, and we can only punish one party every term.

    It shouldn't be that way, but it is.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    The same people in this thread blaming voters for how Kamala Harris ran their campaign were the same ones insisting we had to run Biden as the incumbent, and calling you a bit or a school if you said they needed to be replaced.

    We wouldn't have this outcome if the people who've made it their entire identity to blame voters had placed their frustrations with the party and demanded better, sooner, when it could have made a material difference.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • load more comments (6 replies)
  • [–] 22 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    The very fact that the Trolley Problem exists as a thought experiment and there is still active discourse over the correct solution should tell you why people didn't all feel that they had a responsibility to vote for harm reduction. You can't expect an election that resembles a famously divisive philosophical thought experiment to turn out with everyone arriving at the same conclusion, and it's pointless to dwell on the fact that everyone didn't fall in line with what you think is obvious rather than adjusting to the reality and acting accordingly. That means getting candidates elected in primaries that aren't going to put us in the same trolley problem come time for the general.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago

    That means getting candidates elected in primaries that aren’t going to put us in the same trolley problem

    You can also put pressure on candidates mid-campaign to change posture.

    I can tell you this, the Venn Diagram of the people itt blaming voters for the Democrats supporting a genocide in 2024, and the people who didn't want Biden to step down is basically a perfect circle. Its also the same circle which shielded Harris from any critiques on her support for genocide.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 22 points 6 months ago* (4 children)

    If every election is a decision between the lesser of two evils and both evils become more evil over time then harm isn't actually reduced in the long run. This is why harm reduction is a failing long term electoral strategy.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
    • load more comments (3 replies)
  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    It shouldn’t.

    Perhaps. But that's not the world we live in. Demanding an electorate to suddenly change in a way it never has and start behaving like Homo economicus is only going to lead to further loses.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    Honestly, people behaving like Homo economicus is how you get MAGA.

    Think about it. Isn't Trump's pitch to voters ultimately an argument in rational self-interest? It's all "I'll make an in group and an out group. You'll be in the in group. I'll pull up the in group while pushing down the out group."

    Racism and sexism are rational. Or at least they are rational from those that benefit from them. Think about a white male living in the Jim Crows South. Your life was made soooo much easier by racism and sexism. There were whole career fields where they were the only quarter of the population that were eligible for them. They were automatically in the top quarter of society, simply by their race and sex.

    Anti-immigrant zealotry is rational. If you're a native-born US citizen working in the construction industry? Every legal or illegal immigrant being deported would cause your standard of living to soar. Economists would tell you that on net it will harm the economy. But if suddenly the pool of construction workers is cut in half, any US citizen who knows how to swing a hammer is now rolling in dough. That's the rational terror of fascism - every time another group in the "first they came for" poem is liquidated, someone ends up with their property, their jobs, their place in the social order, etc.

    You NEED to have a respect for persons built into your ethical framework, or else you can end up justifying evils of all sorts, all in the name of the greater good. Hell, Dr. Mengele slept well every night, content in the knowledge that he was doing the greatest good for the greatest number.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 37 points 6 months ago

    What is more the "Democrat are bad because Palestine" was the opposition's framing. The argumeny was pretty unanimous that the policy on Palestine was going to cost the Democrats the election. The Democrats were bad because they knew full well they were going to choose to lose over changing that policy.

    And that's just tunnel visioning at only the Israeli policy.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah, the choice was bad or worse, and people chose worse. Life sucks sometimes, they need to grow up.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    I don't want to cut off this gangrene foot because it will be unpleasant. Let's just wait it out and see what what happens.

    This was never a difficult decision and the ones that thought it was are fundamentally simple people.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    If genocide is bipartisan, then the less bad choice is whatever collapses the US the fastest. You wouldn't try to choose the leader of Nazi Germany based on who's going to run the holocaust most effectively

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago*

    But you can’t deny a progressive Führer wouldn’t be better for us.

    Sure the Jews, gays, and other undesirables may suffer but the far-right Führer made it bad for us as well and that’s unacceptable.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    Yes, I can see that it would be demoralizing, and it was demoralizing. The Schumer/Biden wing of the Democrats deserves to be cast into the bonfire of the vanities, they are completely useless. And while this might sound sarcastic, I truly believe they have ended their usefulness, if they ever had much.

    But we are talking about human beings and their lives. It may not make much of a philosophical difference to compare different stances on this senseless slaughter, but it makes eminently practical sense to save the lives you can. An American Presidential election was not going to produce much of a genocide-stopping president in 2024, and I hope 2028 does better, but there were distinct differences in approach and stance and collaboration with Bibi.

    Case in point, look up "Gaza floating pier," vs. "Trump Gaza resort." it's not about philosophical differences when you are starving.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago

    the floating pier from day one was to have israeli guards at the end of it. It was a pretend situation where Israel could have instead just opened one gate into gaza instead for the exact same effect. Its a transparent and idiotic PR game and always was, and evidently you fell for it. Or you're pushing the same braindead propoganda narrative with a straight face. How was the pier any different than a gate on land?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago

    If genocide is bipartisan, then the less bad choice is whatever collapses the US the fastest. You wouldn’t try to choose the leader of Nazi Germany based on who’s going to run the holocaust most effectively

    Case in point, look up “Gaza floating pier,” vs. “Trump Gaza resort.” it’s not about philosophical differences when you are starving.

    BlueMAGA is a parody of itself

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • load more comments (5 replies)
  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (12 children)

    Palestine is where Leopards Ate My Face meets Meanwhile On Grad. The two extremes have a common goal of destroying the country. MAGAts are shocked that Republicans are getting us into another war in the Middle East and the country is going hell. Gradbots are so pissed off with the the Democrat's ("blue maga") lack of spine against Israel that they want to burn the country to the ground in vengeance.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 12 child comments
    •
    • load more comments (9 replies)
    • load more comments (2 replies)