• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    58
    arrow-down
    16
    ·
    4 months ago
    • Leftists are abandoning Joe Biden and this will ensure Donald Trump’s victory

    • Actually, Joe Biden is very popular and he’s going to win in a landslide. Anyone who says otherwise is a Russian shill.

    Rolling these two ideas in my brain like a pair of baoding balls

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    52
    arrow-down
    21
    ·
    4 months ago

    Having standards is a bad thing, just vote for your team even if you’d hate what they do.

    Republicans did that decades ago, and now have trump.

    The only thing stupider than them doing it, is all the “moderates” saying it’s easier to convince millions of people to follow them off the cliff than convince the DNC to start running candidates that Dem voters want to vote for…

    The fact that trump has won 50% of his elections and looks to be 2/3 in a few months should make everyone reconsider the quality of candidates we’re running against him.

    Not getting mad at the people honest about the situation while there’s still time to do literally anything to prevent trump.

    • Skua@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      29
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      4 months ago

      The fact that trump has won 50% of his elections and looks to be 2/3 in a few months should make everyone reconsider the quality of candidates we’re running against him.

      After the Dems last lost an election, you got Biden as your next candidate. Why are you expecting this approach to suddenly produce a candidate you would like?

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        27
        arrow-down
        15
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        I don’t, that’s my point.

        “Blue no matter who” always ends up with candidates more conservative than we want.

        So even like in 2020 where we all and together and get a Dem president, House, and Senate, nothing gets done.

        Because too many Dem incumbents just don’t agree with the party platform.

        The only time the party pushes is when progressives try to have standards.

        The only result is the party keeps getting more and more conservative. It’s not a valid long term strategy

        • Skua@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          24
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          4 months ago

          I think you’ve misunderstood me. Last time the Democrats lost an election, you got Joe Biden as the next candidate. Why would making the Dems lose this election produce a more progressive candidate?

          • audiomodder@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            11
            arrow-down
            10
            ·
            4 months ago

            Because, they’re saying, WINNING sure didn’t do progressives any favors.

            FWIW, we ran Hillary Clinton as a moderate candidate and lost.

            • Skua@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              22
              arrow-down
              5
              ·
              4 months ago

              If neither winning nor losing does progressives any favours, then there’s no issue with trying to make the least bad realistic option win

              • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                11
                arrow-down
                11
                ·
                4 months ago

                Only if you never think more than an election ahead.

                If you don’t, and always blindly vote D just because it’s not R…

                How is that different than what lead the Republican party to trump?

                Why do you think it’ll be different this time?

                • Skua@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  14
                  arrow-down
                  5
                  ·
                  4 months ago

                  Only if you never think more than an election ahead.

                  So how many elections are you expecting that the Dems must lose in order to start fielding candidates you like, or for another party that does so to take their place? It doesn’t matter how many they lose if it never moves the needle your way, so you’ll have to be quite persuasive that this will achieve something that’s worth capitulating to the American right for a decade or longer.

                  How is that different than what lead the Republican party to trump?

                  Because of the actual outcomes during the four years between each election and the fact that you can protest and write and whatever else you want for improvement during that time. Your vote does have to be your entire political engagement.

                  Does this suck? Yes. Does the Republicans winning do literally anything to fix any of it? No. For that you need the Overton window to shift so far that the Republican party dies and the new two-party system has the Dems on the right, or you need a new electoral system. Neither of these is accomplished by the Dems losing.

                  Why do you think it’ll be different this time?

                  I don’t think it’ll be different this time because the candidates have already been picked. We already both know what the options are. Unfortunately, “no different” is a lot better than the other option. That’s why I’m advocating voting for damage control on the day. Vote against the worst option, because that’s how FPTP works.

            • TacticsConsort@yiffit.net
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              10
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              4 months ago

              I’m gonna say (as someone that was sucked into the psychological torture machine that was the conservative media loop in 2016) that Hillary didn’t lose for being a moderate. Trump was by far at his strongest in 2016; his insanity was a basically unknown factor and he did a legitimately great job seeming to flip the bird at ‘the system’, and the conservative propaganda machine had a LOT of points to attack Hillary with that had nothing to do with her moderate politics. Trump promised the world and had all the charisma to sell the world too, and Hillary… I honestly can’t remember anything about her platform at all.

              In my personal opinion, Hillary could absolutely have won that election if the Democrats hadn’t been complacent about it. Maybe not a landslide victory, but I think it would have been a very solid win.

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            arrow-down
            7
            ·
            edit-2
            4 months ago

            I just assumed you didn’t think a single voter could influence an election…

            For my vote to matter for president, we need a charismatic progressive, it’s the only thing that can flip my state from red.

            Even if Biden pull it out and wins, there is literally zero chance Biden wins my state.

            That’s just reality.

            You don’t flip red states by being diet republican. Everyone that wants that is already voting R, and they’ll never vote D.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      31
      arrow-down
      8
      ·
      4 months ago

      Republicans did that decades ago, and now have trump.

      I might argue that Republicans didn’t do that decades ago, and that’s how they got two Bushes, a McCain, and a Romney. It wasn’t until they abandoned the “electable” moderate Republican and embraced their ideological id that they got to their political messiah.

      The fact that trump has won 50% of his elections and looks to be 2/3 in a few months should make everyone reconsider the quality of candidates we’re running against him.

      I gotta say, I noticed the folks running in the GOP field and they all sucked hard. Trump was the raw meat candidate, but he wasn’t even the most fascist asshole on the ballot. DeSantis was the guy who got off waterboarding people at Gitmo for a living. Hailey couldn’t name a country she didn’t want to bomb. Hutchinson’s fundie base would have him rounding up the cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race and marching them to the gas chambers. Only Ramaswamy is the kind of sociopath business conservative more fixated on looting the country than mutilating its residents.

      Trump’s given them license to go full mask-off, but he’s not uniquely bad. He’s emblematic of a party that’s also frothed with bigotry, and just found a PC way of displaying it right up until a black man got into the White House.

      Not getting mad at the people honest about the situation while there’s still time to do literally anything to prevent trump.

      Biden won 2020 by 40,000 votes across three major swing states. He’s losing all three - PA, GA, and AZ - by two to three times that under current polling. The theory that we can just Tinkerbell him back into a second term is simple cope. Biden’s goose was cooked as soon as he fumbled the bag in his first 100 days.

      Blaming 20-something tech savvy voters on Lemmy for hating the man over his genocidal support of Israel won’t shift any of the critical swing-state 40-something blue collar voters angry at him over sun-setting all the COVID era public spending measures.

  • Gabe Bell@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    22
    ·
    4 months ago

    I know I have no way of convincing anyone of this, but I am not a Russian bot (living in the UK and not being able to vote in the US election).

    But these are exactly the points of view I have been expressing over here about the Tory and Labour parties. Maybe not so much the “not voting at all” one but the other three? Yeah – that sounds a lot like me right now.

    (I think you should vote for someone you believe in, rather than voting for someone who is not someone else, if that makes sense)

    But definitely not a Russian bot :)

    • Skua@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      53
      arrow-down
      9
      ·
      4 months ago

      I think you should vote for someone you believe in, rather than voting for someone who is not someone else

      This would be the ideal situation, but for so long as we have first-past-the-post it’s a fundamentally ineffective way to vote. Thanks to Duverger’s law, unless one of the two big parties just so happens to coincide with your views then the best you can do is to vote against whichever of the big two you dislike most. “Big two” here depends on your constituency - it may not be Labour and the Conservatives locally, but it is true that virtually every constituency has at most two realistic options. Labour may not be very good, but if they’re in power it’s probably at minimum going to make this a better place for asylum seekers and trans people (or whoever the Tories would go after next), and Labour’s voting record on the environment really is far better than the Conservatives’ too.

      • Skua@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        The UK is having a general election in a little over a month, and we have a similar electoral system and a similarly miserable political landscape. It’s fairly applicable here too.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          10
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          4 months ago

          Well the part about “not voting will support the least democratic party” would work, if there is any significant support for those parties (which there is), but the choices are far from being as clear as in the US, especially because they’ve had several presidents who lost the popular vote but still got elected. Meaning that the smaller tje discrepancy, the easier it is for the corrupt electoral college to go against the popular vote.

          Refraining from voting can be used to reform a system, but if people don’t honestly see that voting Biden is the only reasonable action to take against Trump, then we’re frighteningly close to pretty literally repeating history. Hell, even if Trump loses and even if he goes to prison, the US pretty much on track to repeat the exact history of Germany 100 years ago.

          https://time.com/4192760/hitler-munich-excerpt/

          • Skua@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            4 months ago

            Did you reply to the comment that you intended to here? I’m not sure I understand why you’ve said what you said. If that’s just me being thick then please clarify for me, I’m lost

            • Dasus@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              8
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              4 months ago

              The point is that not-voting can be a tool for reform, and can be a reasonable choice. CAN be. But it definitely is NOT in the US presidential election, where not voting is pretty much direct support for Trump, one of the most psychotic world leaders in the last decades.

              Without significant cooperation and a very specific situation though, refraining from voting should not be practiced, and currently a vast majority of the people advocating for it are Russian trolls trying to help Putler’s bitch Trump win the election.

              • Skua@kbin.social
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                4 months ago

                Right, but I agree with you about that. I’m just saying the meme also applies well to the upcoming UK election.

                • Dasus@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  6
                  ·
                  4 months ago

                  Insofar that apathy is the greatest tool of oppressor, yes, I would have to agree.

          • Skua@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            4 months ago

            Both are first past the post, which is creates a two-party system. There are a lot of other differences, yes, but for the purposes of the post it’s close enough where it counts

    • Zorque@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      8
      ·
      4 months ago

      Well as long as you have your pride as the world burns down around you :)

  • Coasting0942@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    4 months ago

    Can’t believe it took this long for me to see this meme. Plenty of photos of internet soldiers, but haven’t seen it memes till now.

  • AhismaMiasma@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    23
    arrow-down
    39
    ·
    4 months ago

    This is a cool post.

    Still won’t make me vote for genocide. Please give me a candidate to vote for.

      • AhismaMiasma@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        Wow, ending qualified immunity?

        Didn’t think I’d ever see a candidate with that stance!

        Spez: I’ve finished reading all of Chase Oliver’s platform. As a card carrying libleft, this guy’s got my vote. Personal rights, tuition reform, easier adoption, firearms rights, drug decriminalization, streamlined immigration, and against the death penalty? Nearly perfect! Gimme strong support of nuclear and single payer healthcare and my family would be canvasing today.

        • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          4 months ago

          I like a lot of his positions, but the isolationism, especially in regards to Ukraine is a no-go to me

          • AhismaMiasma@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            4 months ago

            That’s a fair point, I don’t like him lumping support for Ukraine in with support for Israel.

            He does go on to state that he seeks peace without rewarding the “aggressing party”. Idk exactly what that means, so he gets a C- from me on foreign policy for the time being.