She does not exhibit leadership qualities. It's going to be preaching to the converted, because only the converted could be so blind to her failings.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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My favourite is telling a trumper I don’t fucking care what they think.
Letting the air out of their sails is more entertaining when it’s become obvious they are living for the drama of controversy and feeling their opinion matters so much to someone else than the message itself.
What if I told you: No Shit
Part of the fucking problem is that Dems seem to have kinda given up on ever getting anything nice. The only thing that matters is "BEAT TRUMP". Healthcare, civil/labor rights, debt relief, the anti-war movement, environmental protections, business regulation, green infrastructure development... none of that is even being offered up.
The only thing you hear is "Whatever position you have, know that Trump will be worse than Harris, so you have to vote Harris". How do you go up to someone's door and ask for their vote on those grounds? What do you say to someone who looks at Trump and Harris, shrugs, and says "They look the same to me"?
It isn't the MAGA voter that you have to worry about. It's the voter that's been getting burned election after election by disappointment and can't be bothered this time around.
What do you say to someone who looks at Trump and Harris, shrugs, and says “They look the same to me”?
What do you say? You say "are you suffering a stroke, would you like me to call you an ambulance?"
Americans aren't being given a real choice here, too bad, but that's how it is. Anyone who is eligible to vote but doesn't realise Trump is a genuine threat to democracy the world over maybe shouldn't be allowed to vote.
If you were caught in someplace where you didn't have access to water, and the only choices were a bottle of piss with blood in it (Trump, in this metaphor) and a warm, stale coke light (Harris, in this metaphor), which one would you choose? Neither of them are particularly enjoyable or healthy in the long run, but if you were in a place which had no access to fresh water (spelling out my metaphor here, but democracy), you would die without consuming liquids. Still, you probably wouldn't choose the pissy blood, because that'd actually be dangerous to drink no matter how dehydrated you were. A warm, stale coke light would still be a functional drink, no matter how much you'd never choose it if you had an option.
See where I'm going?
Chomsky did have a good point once about how there's a difference of the type of lack of democracy that you can see between America and Russia. (I'm Finnish, btw, fuck Putler.) He made the point that Americans tend to like to think they have a choice, whereas Russians are pretty openly certain they don't. As a heavy exaggeration, that is. I don't recall which book it was, but I think it was honestly one of his books from the 70's about linguistics, which made it weird, since it started with a chapter about CIA shenanigans and propaganda.
I'd never vote republican under any circumstance. ..But if I click "Harris" am I complicit with her clearly stated intentions to commit mass murder, when I also have a choice to not vote for either candidate? Whats the responsibility of individuals which comprise and propel groups which openly state they are about to commit that stuff? Does "Do the least harm" just not apply in some situations? I know that legally its not a defense. If you aided murder you are getting punished unless its self defense, which this is not.
If I travel to the edge of the middle east and someone wants to kill me for his murdered wife and children who died screaming, burning slowly in a israeli hellfire missile strike, do I have it coming? I honestly dont know. Part of me thinks yes, I have it coming if I voted for either Harris or Trump. Can someone more philosophically inclined than me help me with this?
Metaphor wise, it feels like l'm being told to shoot an innocent or maybe get shot myself.
Abstaining from voting makes you somewhat complicit in whoever wins. You have the ability to affect the outcome with whatever choice you make (Harris, Trump, neither). If you choose neither, it is partially your fault the winner won as you could have voted against them.
It can be boiled down to a classic trolley problem. A greater harm the trolley is hurling towards, a lesser harm you could divert the trolley to. You can choose inaction and let the greater harm happen or you can choose action and cause the lesser harm. Most people think the lesser harm, even if they enact it, is better. But it's a classic morality problem for a reason. Some people view the action to cause the lesser harm as less moral even if it prevents the greater harm.
In the classic trolley problem, if you do nothing then the murderer is the person who tied the people to the tracks. You are not using that analogy correctly.
Even if they did hit a switch, they bear no responsibility for who is murdered. Again thats to the person who created the situation.
Does “Do the least harm” just not apply in some situations?
I think its a fundamentally false choice. People get bound up in the moral weight of their vote, when they spend an hour or two making the decision every 2-4 years. Then they spend 2080 man hrs+ / year working for an employer and god knows how many hours engaging in consumerist behaviors which plays a drastically more meaningful impact on the political and social economy of their neighborhood than the weight of their votes.
A Harris guy working for Raytheon has more blood on their hands than a thousand Trump voters who work construction or do email jobs. A postal worker doing the yeoman's work of processing all those mail-in ballots has more consequence to their community than a dozen canvassers trying to GOTV. A gym teacher making off-color jokes about LGBTQ students in the locker room is going to weigh heavier on civil rights than a hundred ACT BLUE donators.
If I travel to the edge of the middle east and someone wants to kill me
After all the bombings and killings we've done in the Middle East, you're less likely to be murdered by an angry local dissident than to die of cholera or dysentery because the place you landed has no access to safe drinking water.
it feels like l’m being told to shoot an innocent or maybe get shot myself.
You're being told to feel complicit in a system that's totally outside your control, while being hoodwinked into participating in systems within your control without thinking about what you're really doing.
Moral weight isnt absolute. Just because you don't put much weight on what america and by extension its citizens is participating in, does not mean everyone else should. Its interesting you assume someone who's concerned about minimizing harm would even consider working for Raytheon to begin with.
You also described the palestinian genocide as a system outside our control, which you'd really need to elaborate on. Why are google employees quitting over their assistance of israel in genocide?
The argument that if a vote doesnt end up going to one of the two most likely candidates, that its the same as going to one of them anyways makes no sense. Why anyone would count votes they didnt get is beyond me.
Just because you don’t put much weight on what america and by extension its citizens is participating in
I do put weight on it. I simply ascribe that weight to their lifelong careers rather than their fleeting political selections.
The argument that if a vote doesnt end up going to one of the two most likely candidates, that its the same as going to one of them anyways makes no sense.
I agree. But then I'd argue individual votes, even whole elections, don't matter much in a heavily privatized economy.
What if I told you... return2ozma is part of the problem. They continuously post negative articles about Harris and very little negatives about Trump...
very little negatives about Trump…
The problem with lemmy.world is the lack of Trump-negative articles. There simply isn't enough of them.
Um, out of interest I went through their posts of the last week or so. Three were critical of trump, one was critical of biden
Perhaps a bit of cognitive bias going on there?
People had an utter panic attack about this a few months ago. It's just that they post so much stuff that their name becomes recognizable so people freaked out because they noticed some of it, a small percentile really, was critical of Joe Biden. They panicked and tried to ban the user from basically everything they could. Most of them never thought to look and see what you did which is this user basically posts ad nauseam everything they can find. Some of it critical of Biden some of it critical of trump most having nothing to do with politics at all.
I had thought that people calmed down and cooler heads had prevailed. I guess there's some weak-willed people still out there though.
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Fun Fact: Despite near unanimous claims by voters to the contrary, the data bears out that negative campaigning is far more productive than espousing the positives of your own candidate.
ok, can I see the data?
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-negative-campaigning-works-and-how-fight-it
Ledgerwood and her colleagues have also found that a negative frame is much more persistent, or “stickier,” than a positive one. If you come at an issue negatively, but are later reminded of the policy's positive aspects, you will still think it's a bust. And if you start out thinking favorably about the policy, but are reminded of its downsides, your positive perception will be swept away and a negative one will take its place.
The beauty of negative attacks — from a campaign standpoint — is that they influence everyone. Even a candidate’s supporters will be affected by negative attacks, Ledgerwood and her collaborators have found. Once a negative idea has been planted, it’s very hard to shake.
Looking at correlations between the volume of negative ads and the vote shares achieved by U.S. Senate candidates in 2010 and 2012, the researchers found that “while positive political advertising does not affect two-party vote share, negative political advertising has a significant positive effect on two-party vote shares.”
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/when-campaign-ads-go-low-it-often-works/
“Negative campaigning has been around as long as campaigning,” Lovett says. “It stays around because it works.”
https://www.cnn.com/2012/01/02/opinion/lariscy-negative-ads/index.html
So if we don’t like negative ads and even perhaps suspect they contribute to political malaise, why are they increasingly dominating candidates’ strategies?
The answer is simple: They work. And they work very well. Gingrich’s drop in polls in Iowa last month was no accident – it was choreographed by negative advertising. . . .
. . . Our brains process information both consciously and non-consciously. When we pay attention to a message we are engaged in active message processing. When we are distracted or not paying attention we may nonetheless passively receive information. There is some evidence that negative messages may be more likely than positive ones to passively register. They “stick” for several reasons.
First, one of the most important contributors to their success may be the negativity bias. Negative information is more memorable than positive – just think how clearly you remember an insult.
Second, negative ads are more complex than positive ones. A positive message that talks about the sponsoring candidate’s voting record, for example, is simple and straightforward. Every negative ad has at least an implied comparison. If Mitt Romney is “not a true conservative,” then by implication the candidate sponsoring the ad is saying he or she is a true conservative. This complexity can cause us to process the information more slowly and with somewhat more attentiveness.
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How dare you try to bring strategic decisions into this
Stop trying to bully me into voting against fascism
Trump is a miserable moron with terrible ideas. The only reason he wins is because of his negative campaigning. If he didn't do any negative campaigning, he would have no following whatsoever.
While we are busy demanding to know in detail exactly how Harris plans to solve every issue of this country, Trump is out there flat-out making up statistics and boogeymen, inventing conspiracy theories about birth certificates and sexual climbing in politics, and using hate and racism dog-whistles to rally the worst of us.
I hope those of you that hold Harris to the highest standards will remember what you did when we are living in the Trump sewer you helped elect.
hold Harris to the highest standards
What's the unreasonably high standard they're applying?
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