They still put forth the mutually exclusive arguments, simultaneously. "Our protest couldn't have had an effect, so we totally didn't sacrifice American LGBT folk for a chance at saving Gaza" + "If the Dems had just given in to our protest, we would've voted for them and they would have won"
Both arguments are stupid on their own merits, but together, they paint a picture of intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
I mean, they didn't sacrifice American LGBT folks for a chance to save Gaza. They sacrificed us for absolutely nothing.
Based on news of Elon setting up fake pro-Trump liberal advocacy groups before the election do we know how much of these arguments are coming from legit leftists IRL vs manufactured consent? Just curious, when you say ‘they’ are these people you’ve talked to IRL or online?
I am so tired of strategic voting
Unfortunately, that's the only kind of voting there is, so long as there are factions and negotiations (ie always, realistically speaking).
People think of voting at the polls like an opinion poll, but it's not, or shouldn't be treated as such. We are the equivalent of electors in a college or legislators in a parliament. What we wield is not our opinion, it is our political power, what little sliver of it we have in the great mass of the electorate. If Senator John Q. RealtivelyLeft abstained on a bill for universal healthcare tomorrow because the wording displeased him, we wouldn't say "Well, that's just his opinion", we'd lambast him for forsaking a chance to make this fucking country a little less miserable for his own petty partiality. Same with voting.
Look to your left and to your right. Your fellow voters are there, and it's only by majority vote that anything gets passed.
Be strategic. And also, be loud and unafraid of your own position; it's the only way the calculus on strategies changes.
First pass the post suuuuucks. Literally anything else is at least slightly better.
I've been loudly and proudly critical of the democrats while also voting for Harris and urging others to do so. The democratic presidential campaign in 16 and 24 amounted to: you should vote for us because the other guy sucks. We can get into a lot more details than that, particularly on the shortcomings of the policy plank and messaging, but that's the gist. It didn't work in '16, there was ZERO reason to think it would work in '24, but fuck it, we can always blame the voters.
Unrelated story time, after I got my driver's license, my alcoholic dad would get hammered and then demand that I drive him to the liquor store to buy more liquor, and if I didn't, then I would be responsible when he crashed into someone and killed them while trying to drive himself. It was just a strategy to get me somewhere where I had to listen to him tell me what a piece of shit I was for about an hour, of course, but before I knew any better, I would comply. Eventually I just told him that he was welcome to drive himself, but I'd be letting the state patrol know how to find him.
Dunno why I remembered that story just now. Huh.
and this is just week 1 of episode 2. it's gonna get a lot worse and they won't waste any time. they have to shovel all the shit they have planned before midterms while they still have congress.
if congress doesn't flip and flip hard--like impeachment-ready and veto-proof hard, it's 'game over'. instead of a few decades to fix episode 1, it will take generations, if it is even possible to recover completely at all.
As I said in another thread elsewhere on the same subject:
The Protest Vote Paradox™
As we’ve all read time after time in the months leading up to the election, the Protest Vote™ simply states states that:
“We refuse to vote against a Tyrant-Felon in order to send a clear and concise message that we will not stand for [roll D20 for random popular single issue], and alongside our refusal to vote against the Tyrant-Felon, is a collective hope that the aforementioned clear and concise message- if ignored, is received under unmitigated duress!”
-Cut to Tyrant-Felon’s win, and the aftermath:
Whether observed or not, the behavior of the Protest Voter will attempt to achieve the following:
• Obnoxiously tell everyone: “We told you all what would happen!”
• Onnoxiously claim there is: “No way protest voting could cause trump to win.”
As both of these options cannot simultaneously be true in the same reality without breaking important time-space things that we would probably prefer not be broken- we are left with only a few logical conclusions:
Something, something, something Ted Talk.
Still thinking the people to blame are the DNC elites that went on to run on a right platform, even inviting fucking war criminal mass murderer Dick Cheney to advocate for them.
Also Trump is not something that just happened. The US is an empire in decline and Trump is a symptom of that. The conditions of decline are maintained by the Republicans and Democrats and voting either won't be enough to turn things around.
Its been time to fundamentally reform the political system at the very least since 2016.
I see the people who insisted that they had to keep doing the genocide for the election are still trying to blame everyone else
And allowing Trump to return to power is stopping the genocide how exactly?
Because at this point it's getting worse and there's soon to be a second genocide going on here in the US.
Soo much better!/s
I see the people who obnoxiously shouted at everyone that bOtH SiDeS aRe tHe sAmE for months before the election are beginning to see that they’re not.
It’s too bad they have that commonality with MAGA in their shared lack of shame to admit it.
Now it’s OUR turn to tell you we told you so, only we’re far less smug about it.
I see democrats are already doing their best to blame everyone but themselves. Can’t wait to see who you run against him for his third term. I’m sure whoever they are, they’ll be a carbon copy of Obama, like the last three elections you ran against Trump.
You guys just really fucking love losing.
Translation: "I did everything I could to usher the fat orange fascist into power, but the DEMOCRATS are the ones to blame!!!"
Seeing how Democrats keep gnawing on this bone really lets me know the Democrats are never going to ever win another election. Anything in the world to avoid having to change their failed strategy. They ran the Hillary Clinton campaign and lost again, but God forbid they changed that no it's the voters who are wrong. Should we appeal to voters who care more about the working class than the business class? Nah fuck that. Should we appeal to people who don't like people like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney? Nah fuck that. Keep fucking that chicken.
You can understand that Harris would have been undeniably less awful than trump but also still terrible and basically offered trump-lite policies. This means that people who actually want fascism are just going to vote for trump and many of the people who want progressive policies are going to be apathetic and stay home. This isn’t about all the tankies protest voting, it’s about all the normies who already don’t vote not caring because she ran a dogshit campaign.
but also still terrible and basically offered trump-lite policies.
Harris didn't say she was going to deport millions of working Americans for being the wrong colored skin.
Harris didn't say she was going to weaponize the entire political machine against people who passed some off-hand sleight that offended her.
Harris didn't say she was going to actively dehumanize and torture the entire LGBT community for existing.
Harris didn't say she was going to actively remove every protection from working class people.
She said none of this. The other guy said it multiple times, and now he's following through on it! Big fucking shocker!
Seriously. The "both sides" arugment has been so tired out for so long that you cannot legitimately believe that it means anything. Believing the silence said by one side and giving that more weight than what is being actively repeated by the other side is short sighted at best, and intentionally malicious at worst. We're on the worst side now, and I will treat people who repeat it as the worst side.
Protest voters bLuEmAgA screeching didn't happen in a vacuum
And those uncommitted/undecided voters change their minds easily. What if for every protest voter screecher posting their "bOtH SiDeS" BS there were 5 uncommitted voter lurkers saw it and just went "Eh fuck it, I'm busy with work anyways" they're not protest voting, those are just uncommitteds doing what uncommitteds do.
Scale that up to nationwide and on major social media platforms that totally would have promoted it thanks to those wonderful algorithms and you can see what it's a problem
THIRD-PARTY CAN WINNN!!
Show me the comments that said a third party could win the 2024 presidential election. Literally no one was saying that.
If I show you comments that say exactly that, will you eat your words, or deny it like you deny the Tiananmen Square massacre?
They might be wrong that no one was saying that, but there definitely wasn't a significant voting block who thought a third party candidate had a shot at winning.
Blaming third party voters is a loser mentality. 77 million voted trump, 75 million Harris, and 101 million didn't vote at all. How about blaming those people? Or blaming the party and candidate? If someone didn't win the majority of the blame lies with the person running.
This comment section gave me acute radiation syndrome.
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