• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldOP
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    4 months ago

    Do you know what sea lioning is?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

    Its a fundamental form of trolling that OP is engaging in, and that apparently, you think I should engage with.

    Think about it as a metaphor. I come to you with the information that your house is on fire. OP is basically making a rhetorical argument that if I can’t provide them with a house they’ll find suitable, we shouldnt leave the burning house we’re currently in.

    The information about the state of the house (candidate in our case) is independent from there being another house that isn’t on fire.

    You should never, ever engage with people like them. They are not having this discussion in good faith. If its important to them they should suggest a candidate. There are plenty to suggest. But that is a fundamentally separate discussion.

    • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      One problem with this analogy is that if you’re in a burning house, you literally don’t have time to have a conversation while you’re in it. But in fact we could spend the entire weekend discussing viable candidates and it wouldn’t become too late to then decide to support the idea.

      Another problem is that you’re presupposing that the course of action is obvious, as it is in a house fire. In a house fire, it doesn’t matter what can be done about the stuff or where you’re going to live if you lose your home, because if you don’t get out of the house ASAP then you will die, based on thousands upon thousands of previous house fires. In the case of this election, nothing like this has ever happened and staying with Biden does not actually mean guaranteed loss. Perhaps continuing the public call for Biden to step down is the thing that hurts us the most. In any case, the only thing that would mean a literal guaranteed loss would be withdrawing Biden and not replacing him with someone.

      So, coming up with suitable people who could take the helm and do better (as well as figuring out a viable way to make this happen democratically) is necessary to this process actually succeeding. We actually do have the luxury of time to spend all day discussing it right now. And if good ideas for candidates can actually win over more people to the idea, then it might in some way be helpful to the success of it.

      I would say I’m a person who both feels like things have reached a point where Biden should ideally be replaced, but I’m very worried by the fact that I haven’t yet heard someone else who we could theoretically rally behind, and haven’t heard how this could even be accomplished legally and politically at this late stage. I feel the worst thing we can do is to just repeatedly say it’s a fire and not actually figure out steps to fix it.