If you have to vote between a candidate who wants to build 5 concentration camps and another candidate who wants to build one. You vote for the candidate that only wants to build only one concentration camp. Sure, both candidates are really bad, but one is considerably worse.
Therefore, we must still vote for the lesser of two evils. Not voting at all because both sides bad is how democracy dies, especially when democracy itself is under attack right now.
If the system is demanding that you support concentration camps, your main concern should be the destruction of the system by any means necessary, not the reduction of harm within it, and any measure that could be directed to the former instead of the latter probably should be.
If, hypothetically, the government demands that you choose between Hitler and Mussolini, the correct measures to be taking are ones directed at toppling the government.
If you have to vote between a candidate who wants to build 5 concentration camps and another candidate who wants to build one. You vote for the candidate that only wants to build only one concentration camp.
Well it’s a good thing that we didn’t have that binary choice then. My ballot had a few options, some of them even opposing concentration camps, so I got to vote against them.
I would vote a third party if it doesn’t just help the right win. If only we had ranked choice voting instead of the electrol college, then we could crub the 2 party system. Unfortunately, in the US, it’s either red team or blue team because until you can change the hearts and minds of millions of people, then it’s always going to be one of them.
I mean, I believe nixus was talking about voting third party, which here in America is just another way of abstaining to vote. The concentration camp example was just to point out that to say one bad candidate against an objectively worse candidate doesn’t automatically mean they’re both equally as bad. I regret using concentration camps as an example though. Perhaps a better example would be if you had the choice of voting for either Benito Mussolini or Bill Clinton. Both candidates are bad, but if I vote for one of them, am I in the wrong to make sure Mussolini doesn’t win by voting for Bill Clinton?
The concentration camps are a perfect example. No one’s saying both sides are the exact same. They’re saying they both serve US imperialism. Case and point: one side wants 5 concentration camps, the other thinks that’s a little too much and we should settle for 1.
If you want to build concentration camps you’re a fascist. If you’re okay with a party wanting to build concentration camps or can look past it you’re a fascist. You wouldn’t accept someone in the 1930s saying “yeah what the nazis are doing with the Jews is bad but have you seen their treatment of animals? I’ll vote for them but I’m no Nazi.”
So, what do you suggest I do then as an alternative to voting in this scenario? I suppose I could spill the blood of the politicians that want to build concentration camps, but once again unless I change the minds of millions of people and start a full blown civil war, then the bloodshed will be pointless. I could also move away from America, but that’s assuming I could even afford to do that let alone be able to do it legally. The only power I have as an American citizen as of now is to vote. That’s the only power I have. Protesting will eventually just get me arrested or murdered once Trump completes his power grab.
You have more power than just voting every 4 years lmao. Get organised and start interacting with like minded people and get other people on your side. Every 4 years there’s 1540 days where you could be fighting fascism and you’re only doing it for 1.
I mean tbf, this is more personal rather than political but, if this comment section is any identification I doubt I should be the person who does organize a resistance. This is me with time to think about my replies too, imagine me with a real time debate with someone. I have a group of friends and a family with similar opinions to mine, but would that truly be enough to resist fascism or would we all be broken or annihilated with no impact at all?
If you have to vote between a candidate who wants to build 5 concentration camps and another candidate who wants to build one
So you support China in their liberation of Tibet from feudal serfdom? You support the Soviet Union destroying Nazism despite the excesses made in the gulag years? Or do you only extend this courtesy to capitalist imperialist regimes?
Obviously not. I don’t support building concentration camps in general, and China is a bad example since there’s no opposing party in Chinq. Admittedly, the example I gave was a bit on the extreme side. Regardless, I still disagree that if both sides are bad then they automatically are equalivent and thus voting is pointless as the meme seems to imply.
If Harris had won the 2024 election, do you honestly think she would be mass deporting immigrants without a trial, starting a trade war with China, attempt to cut funding for FEMA, etc? Sure, I’ll give you that she would have been content with the genocide in Gaza and would have been propping up the capitalist status quo. However, is that truly equilvent to what Trump has done in just his first year of his second term?
China is a bad example since there’s no opposing party in Chinq.
The historical example they were giving is of China invading and annexing Tibet, wherein the vast majority of the population was brutally enslaved and a small class of theocrats lived on top of a huge and ever-expanding mountain of corpses, upon which they sexually abused and murdered countless serfs besides the ones being tortured and killed by the basic mechanisms of the system under which they lived.
So the “opposing party” in this context is the other side of the war, the western-backed theocrats who wanted to perpetuate their slave state.
For the sake of not completely spamming your inbox, I’ll just reply to a few more things within this comment if that’s alright:
Huh, I actually didn’t know that, point taken. I didn’t know China had elections in general
It’s only maybe half-true to say China internally has opposing parties. There are other parties and many of them are dedicated entirely to pulling the government onto a different path from the current one, but those parties also are constitutionally barred from controlling high offices.
However, China does have elections and those elections are meaningful, because you don’t need separate parties to have meaningful elections. You believe that primaries are meaningful, right? In many places (e.g. NYC), they are much more meaningful than the general. Intra-party elections are meaningful in the same way and for the same reason that primaries are, because there are still differences within a party, even more so in a country where there is only one full party and party membership is massive and pretty accessible.
I think it’s perfectly fair to criticize various aspects about Chinese democracy, but neoliberals characterize it in a hopelessly slanted way.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the senate controlled by the right? Wasn’t it them that pushed for mass deportations?
You are wrong, deportations picked up immediately and were high for his entire Presidency, especially his first term. Dems lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.
Obama is significantly liable for those loses too, because he immediately revealed that he was a complete fucking liar and didn’t want to actually pursue a progressive agenda. Even if this scapegoating were true, I’d still blame Obama because he had every opportunity to keep control of Congress but didn’t, and then it’s not like he actually opposed mass deportations.
I suppose you do have a point though, Harris wouldn’t need to be the only one who wins to make an actual difference, even if she would have just upheld the status quo that led to the rise in fascism. Still would have preferred that over what Trump is doing atm
I would never vote for Trump and would strongly discourage others from doing so, but there’s a meaningful sense in which his winning is less bad. Bear with me for a second: If Trump loses, he’s not actually the anti-christ who is thwarted, banished to hell, and then the Unique Threat to Our Democracy is gone. There will be more reactionary leaders who are as bad and worse who will immediately take his place. Holding him off from reclaiming office for one more term on a platform of adopting his old policies is not the victory some people depict it as.
What we need if we are taking Trump-like threats seriously is not to bail water, but to smash the Republican Party to atoms and scatter it to the wind. The Democrats can never do this, and over and over again insist that the thing to do is to adopt further and further right positions, to the point that you had Kamala commending the idea of the border wall construction project, merely saying it was mismanaged but she believed we should do something like it. That’s not hard-nosed pragmatism, that’s throwing red meat to reactionaries and supporting the cult of xenophobia to try to be Republican-lite, or more accurately to compete with 2024 Trump by becoming 2016 Trump (in terms of actual policy).
Kamala winning would have been catastrophic, not because she would have implemented worse policies than Trump, but because it would be a complete defeat of even berniecrat left-opposition in favor of a race to the bottom with Republicans of who can be more bigoted, as they get worse and then Democrats move to take up their old positions. The canonical answer in American politics would be even more cemented as “We need to get Republicans to vote for us by being racist,” and freaks like Ezra Klein who say we need anti-abortion Democrats.
If this is what the Democratic Party is, then they need to be destroyed just as much as the Republicans, because all they do is redirect “resistance” to becoming Republican on a slightly slower timetable. We need an actual left opposition to destroy reaction and the Democrats would rather lose to Trump than be that opposition, so we should be allowing them to take us hostage like we could ever give into enough demands from them that they will release us.
Sadly, western genocide will happen REGARDLESS of who I vote for, yeah. So, what do you propose I do about it other than protest and likely get arrested by ICE in a couple years for it? Attempt to sail aid to the people in Gaza and die along with them? I suppose it would preferable than live in a fascist America, but I have people who need me alive as of now.
I suggest you don’t engage in lesser evilism with the west if you’re not willing to do with with geopolitics. Or if you’re willing to do it, then supoort China in the international geopolitics.
If Harris had won the 2024 election, do you honestly think she would be mass deporting immigrants without a trial, starting a trade war with China, attempt to cut funding for FEMA, etc?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the senate controlled by the right? Wasn’t it them that pushed for mass deportations?
I suppose you do have a point though, Harris wouldn’t need to be the only one who wins to make an actual difference, even if she would have just upheld the status quo that led to the rise in fascism. Still would have preferred that over what Trump is doing atm
More so pointing out how silly it is. If the US wasn’t a democracy, then why vote? If they’re referring to the electrol college or lobbying, then yeah, I don’t support those and think it’s anti-democratic. We’d be in agreement.
Even strict dictatorships have elections to gauge how much support they have. They’re limited in how far they can go before spawning a revolution. Just because votes aren’t capable of inacting actual change against the ruling class’s interests doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. By voting for a third party you’re showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system is a sham. By voting for the system you only legitimise it and give the rulers the excuse to say they’re acting legally and with the will of the people.
It’s wild how people can look at sham elections where both parties serve the same oligarchs in other countries, but then think the biggest oligarchy there is, America, is somehow built different.
But do you mean "then why do people vote, or why should people vote? Cause the answer varies
If you have to vote between a candidate who wants to build 5 concentration camps and another candidate who wants to build one. You vote for the candidate that only wants to build only one concentration camp. Sure, both candidates are really bad, but one is considerably worse.
Therefore, we must still vote for the lesser of two evils. Not voting at all because both sides bad is how democracy dies, especially when democracy itself is under attack right now.
If the system is demanding that you support concentration camps, your main concern should be the destruction of the system by any means necessary, not the reduction of harm within it, and any measure that could be directed to the former instead of the latter probably should be.
If, hypothetically, the government demands that you choose between Hitler and Mussolini, the correct measures to be taking are ones directed at toppling the government.
Well it’s a good thing that we didn’t have that binary choice then. My ballot had a few options, some of them even opposing concentration camps, so I got to vote against them.
I would vote a third party if it doesn’t just help the right win. If only we had ranked choice voting instead of the electrol college, then we could crub the 2 party system. Unfortunately, in the US, it’s either red team or blue team because until you can change the hearts and minds of millions of people, then it’s always going to be one of them.
You’re admitting to being one of the millions of people that votes and therefore legitimises the construction of concentration camps.
You’re a fascist.
I mean, I believe nixus was talking about voting third party, which here in America is just another way of abstaining to vote. The concentration camp example was just to point out that to say one bad candidate against an objectively worse candidate doesn’t automatically mean they’re both equally as bad. I regret using concentration camps as an example though. Perhaps a better example would be if you had the choice of voting for either Benito Mussolini or Bill Clinton. Both candidates are bad, but if I vote for one of them, am I in the wrong to make sure Mussolini doesn’t win by voting for Bill Clinton?
The concentration camps are a perfect example. No one’s saying both sides are the exact same. They’re saying they both serve US imperialism. Case and point: one side wants 5 concentration camps, the other thinks that’s a little too much and we should settle for 1.
If you want to build concentration camps you’re a fascist. If you’re okay with a party wanting to build concentration camps or can look past it you’re a fascist. You wouldn’t accept someone in the 1930s saying “yeah what the nazis are doing with the Jews is bad but have you seen their treatment of animals? I’ll vote for them but I’m no Nazi.”
So, what do you suggest I do then as an alternative to voting in this scenario? I suppose I could spill the blood of the politicians that want to build concentration camps, but once again unless I change the minds of millions of people and start a full blown civil war, then the bloodshed will be pointless. I could also move away from America, but that’s assuming I could even afford to do that let alone be able to do it legally. The only power I have as an American citizen as of now is to vote. That’s the only power I have. Protesting will eventually just get me arrested or murdered once Trump completes his power grab.
You have more power than just voting every 4 years lmao. Get organised and start interacting with like minded people and get other people on your side. Every 4 years there’s 1540 days where you could be fighting fascism and you’re only doing it for 1.
I mean tbf, this is more personal rather than political but, if this comment section is any identification I doubt I should be the person who does organize a resistance. This is me with time to think about my replies too, imagine me with a real time debate with someone. I have a group of friends and a family with similar opinions to mine, but would that truly be enough to resist fascism or would we all be broken or annihilated with no impact at all?
So you support China in their liberation of Tibet from feudal serfdom? You support the Soviet Union destroying Nazism despite the excesses made in the gulag years? Or do you only extend this courtesy to capitalist imperialist regimes?
Obviously not. I don’t support building concentration camps in general, and China is a bad example since there’s no opposing party in Chinq. Admittedly, the example I gave was a bit on the extreme side. Regardless, I still disagree that if both sides are bad then they automatically are equalivent and thus voting is pointless as the meme seems to imply.
If Harris had won the 2024 election, do you honestly think she would be mass deporting immigrants without a trial, starting a trade war with China, attempt to cut funding for FEMA, etc? Sure, I’ll give you that she would have been content with the genocide in Gaza and would have been propping up the capitalist status quo. However, is that truly equilvent to what Trump has done in just his first year of his second term?
The historical example they were giving is of China invading and annexing Tibet, wherein the vast majority of the population was brutally enslaved and a small class of theocrats lived on top of a huge and ever-expanding mountain of corpses, upon which they sexually abused and murdered countless serfs besides the ones being tortured and killed by the basic mechanisms of the system under which they lived.
So the “opposing party” in this context is the other side of the war, the western-backed theocrats who wanted to perpetuate their slave state.
For the sake of not completely spamming your inbox, I’ll just reply to a few more things within this comment if that’s alright:
It’s only maybe half-true to say China internally has opposing parties. There are other parties and many of them are dedicated entirely to pulling the government onto a different path from the current one, but those parties also are constitutionally barred from controlling high offices.
However, China does have elections and those elections are meaningful, because you don’t need separate parties to have meaningful elections. You believe that primaries are meaningful, right? In many places (e.g. NYC), they are much more meaningful than the general. Intra-party elections are meaningful in the same way and for the same reason that primaries are, because there are still differences within a party, even more so in a country where there is only one full party and party membership is massive and pretty accessible.
I think it’s perfectly fair to criticize various aspects about Chinese democracy, but neoliberals characterize it in a hopelessly slanted way.
You are wrong, deportations picked up immediately and were high for his entire Presidency, especially his first term. Dems lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.
Obama is significantly liable for those loses too, because he immediately revealed that he was a complete fucking liar and didn’t want to actually pursue a progressive agenda. Even if this scapegoating were true, I’d still blame Obama because he had every opportunity to keep control of Congress but didn’t, and then it’s not like he actually opposed mass deportations.
I would never vote for Trump and would strongly discourage others from doing so, but there’s a meaningful sense in which his winning is less bad. Bear with me for a second: If Trump loses, he’s not actually the anti-christ who is thwarted, banished to hell, and then the Unique Threat to Our Democracy is gone. There will be more reactionary leaders who are as bad and worse who will immediately take his place. Holding him off from reclaiming office for one more term on a platform of adopting his old policies is not the victory some people depict it as.
What we need if we are taking Trump-like threats seriously is not to bail water, but to smash the Republican Party to atoms and scatter it to the wind. The Democrats can never do this, and over and over again insist that the thing to do is to adopt further and further right positions, to the point that you had Kamala commending the idea of the border wall construction project, merely saying it was mismanaged but she believed we should do something like it. That’s not hard-nosed pragmatism, that’s throwing red meat to reactionaries and supporting the cult of xenophobia to try to be Republican-lite, or more accurately to compete with 2024 Trump by becoming 2016 Trump (in terms of actual policy).
Kamala winning would have been catastrophic, not because she would have implemented worse policies than Trump, but because it would be a complete defeat of even berniecrat left-opposition in favor of a race to the bottom with Republicans of who can be more bigoted, as they get worse and then Democrats move to take up their old positions. The canonical answer in American politics would be even more cemented as “We need to get Republicans to vote for us by being racist,” and freaks like Ezra Klein who say we need anti-abortion Democrats.
If this is what the Democratic Party is, then they need to be destroyed just as much as the Republicans, because all they do is redirect “resistance” to becoming Republican on a slightly slower timetable. We need an actual left opposition to destroy reaction and the Democrats would rather lose to Trump than be that opposition, so we should be allowing them to take us hostage like we could ever give into enough demands from them that they will release us.
Your willingness to only engage in lesser-evilism with western genocidal regimes is very telling.
I think that’s a very reductionist opinion that ignores @pirate2377@lemmy.zip trying to honestly interact with you.
Stop being a prick, it doesn’t get you anywhere.
Sadly, western genocide will happen REGARDLESS of who I vote for, yeah. So, what do you propose I do about it other than protest and likely get arrested by ICE in a couple years for it? Attempt to sail aid to the people in Gaza and die along with them? I suppose it would preferable than live in a fascist America, but I have people who need me alive as of now.
I suggest you don’t engage in lesser evilism with the west if you’re not willing to do with with geopolitics. Or if you’re willing to do it, then supoort China in the international geopolitics.
There are eight opposing parties in China
Huh, I actually didn’t know that, point taken. I didn’t know China had elections in general
No investigation, no right to speak.
Of course, look at her predecessor. Obama massively increased ICE, deportations, and did a pivot to asia.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the senate controlled by the right? Wasn’t it them that pushed for mass deportations?
I suppose you do have a point though, Harris wouldn’t need to be the only one who wins to make an actual difference, even if she would have just upheld the status quo that led to the rise in fascism. Still would have preferred that over what Trump is doing atm
The US is not and has never been a democracy
Oh, you’re right. My mistake. I guess I’ll just stop voting or even protesting then :/
Lol cry about it
You get told you’re wrong and immediately throw your toys out the pram
More so pointing out how silly it is. If the US wasn’t a democracy, then why vote? If they’re referring to the electrol college or lobbying, then yeah, I don’t support those and think it’s anti-democratic. We’d be in agreement.
Even strict dictatorships have elections to gauge how much support they have. They’re limited in how far they can go before spawning a revolution. Just because votes aren’t capable of inacting actual change against the ruling class’s interests doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. By voting for a third party you’re showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system is a sham. By voting for the system you only legitimise it and give the rulers the excuse to say they’re acting legally and with the will of the people.
It’s wild how people can look at sham elections where both parties serve the same oligarchs in other countries, but then think the biggest oligarchy there is, America, is somehow built different.
But do you mean "then why do people vote, or why should people vote? Cause the answer varies
Please do stop protesting. I don’t want white supremacists protesting against the destruction of the usa empire, I want them behind bars.
Protesting against the actions of Donald Trump makes me a white supremist? Sorry, I didn’t realize.