Even worse are the people saying they won’t vote for Biden in 2024 because they don’t agree with him 100% on certain issues when Trump would be even worse on those issues.
I understand not liking a politician completely. Hillary wasn’t my first pick in 2016 and Biden wasn’t my first pick in 2020. However, when it became clear that they were the nominee, I backed them over Trump. I’m sure some of these people will back Biden if/when he’s the nominee, but a lot of them are declaring that they will sit out the elections if Biden is the nominee because they want things done differently. Meanwhile, if Trump is elected - say, because some left wing voters stay home - these issues will be treated a whole lot worse!
You can count in those who are angry about Palestine here. They are now anti-Biden but can’t seem to understand that Biden at his worst is still better than Trump at his best.
This drives me crazy. Having an essentially neutral stance on anything in the Middle East should be the preferred stance of any US President at this point. It is a no-win quagmire.
There are a few geopolitical aphorisms that Western empires have discovered the hard way and that the US should remember (but probably won’t because, you know, US exceptionalism):
Never invade Russia. Never invade Afghanistan. Never fight a land war in Asia. Add to that, never invest any political capital in the Middle East. There is just no winning these conflicts and it is delusional to try. The only way to win conflicts like that is the way Stalin and Mao did it, and that is not our way. These places are the very definition of quagmire for western powers.
Now, imagine if Trump managed to win the next election because young Democratic voters are mad about Biden’s stance on Israel/Palestine and decide to stay home on election day. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Why is it always progressives who have to hold their nose and “vote blue no matter who”? Centrist Democrats have been driving the car for decades. If you don’t let me pick even one stop in 30 years then eventually I’m going to jump out of the car and you’ll have to extort gas money from someone else when I do. What you keep asking us to do isn’t compromise, it’s to stay in an abusive relationship where you get to make all the rules and we deal with it in silence. That only works for so long.
It’s because there aren’t enough progressives. I vote as progressive as I can in primaries. For some races it has paid off, and for others, well maybe next time.
Try building an actual third party. Not by putting someone up for President every 4 years. That’s a waste of time, money, and effort. Get people into school boards, city councils, and county comptroller. Then aim for state congress and other positions at the state level. Now push for changing the voting system to something that doesn’t have a glaring problem like First Past the Post does.
A huge chunk of the changes progressives want are better done at the state and local level, anyway. Until then, we’ll keep getting what we get at the federal level.
And why the alternative voting systems that do pass are things like RCV that have the lowest likelihood of electing a third party and can still be gamed to spoil the Dems
IRV-RCV is the easiest to understand, but the one we know almost certainly will never make a third party relevant in the US. But it’s the only alternative anyone is willing to talk about. Then the GOP makes it illegal anyway.
Something actually effective will simply never pass.
Why is it always progressives who have to hold their nose and “vote blue no matter who”? Centrist Democrats have been driving the car for decades
Because we’re a minority and the options are the party that now gives us significant representation for our demographic (103 members of the House, and 1 (sadface) senator) or the party that thinks anyone left of “moderate-right” should be thrown out of a helecopter over the ocean.
The US is designed to change slowly, and even fixing that is designed to take time.
What you keep asking us to do isn’t compromise, it’s to stay in an abusive relationship where you get to make all the rules and we deal with it in silence
No. What we’re asking you to do is pick the loveless relationship where your party buys you supermarket flowers once a year over Jeffery Dahmer. The Dems don’t abuse us. We just don’t have the votes and constitutents to do something worthwhile. You do realize that if a moderate compromises too progressive, they get replaced with a Republican, right?
So why don’t we fight in-party for more representation and educate voters that we’re not the boogey man, instead of threatening to murder the whole country to get our way like the bloody Repubs do?
Because of the electoral college. That forces a two-party system. Which is why we’re in this terrible situation.
It also does nothing to stop a progressive from running as a democrat.
Stunt candidates like Jill Stein are grifters who do not give a single solitary fuck about the state of the world, and anyone considering a candidate like that is also extremely unlikely to run themselves.
I have friends who voted for Nader. They thought they were making a statement too. Then we got into Iraq II and they were very upset by it. We also got John “fuck voting righs” Roberts and Samuel “removed be hoes” Alito out of the deal. Don’t be stupid.
Watching a bunch of tiktok gronks give their brilliant hot takes on how they don’t have to vote for Biden is like watching a drunken fratboy who’s holding everyone’s phones dancing on a cliff rim because someone told them not to. Stupid fuck. It doesn’t work like that.
It’s plurality (a.k.a. FPTP) voting that forces a 2-party system. The main problem with the electoral college is that it gives a structural advantage to voters in low-population states, and those voters are overwhelmingly aligned with Republicans.
Funny how Biden turned out to be a lot less centrist than we were expecting. The pendulum is swinging left, and if we don’t keep pushing in the right direction the progress will stop. Just because we’re not getting everything we want right now doesn’t mean we’re not in the process of getting there. So stop removed about how you don’t have the perfect candidate right now. Vote in the primaries for the most progressive candidates you can find, and then in the general election vote for the best candidate, even if it’s not your preferred choice.
Adulthood is about dealing with the world as it is, not the world we insist we should have. We have to be the adults in the room when no one else is willing.
We have to be the adults in the room when no one else is willing.
And in case anybody is wondering about the Republicans not being held to the same standard, that’s a consequence of the fact that the changes progressives want require passing new legislation, whereas the changes Republicans want can be achieved through obstruction and sabotage.
Just to clarify, I do want to hold Republicans to the same standards. I want their accountability to be conducted through electoral defeats and removing them from power. As difficult as it is to reform the Democrats into the progressive party we need them to be, such a feat is impossible with modern Republicans.
Just to clarify, I do want to hold Republicans to the same standards.
Oh, sure, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My comment was more about the practical/structural circumstances that allow them to get away with acting the way they do rather than being about how people feel about it, though.
There’s some interesting pieces that I think have gone unnoticed where rank and file Republicans do want something, but nothing happens. They don’t seem to care.
For example, repealing the Hughes Amendment of 1986, which bans the registration of new machine guns for personal use. Lots of gun tote’n NRA members want that gone. Republicans could have easily done it after the 2016 election, where they had both houses of Congress and the White House.
IIRC, there were some bills submitted to committee, where they promptly died. That’s it. The only meaningful changes to gun rights under Trump was declaring bump stocks illegal (which lets a semi-auto rifle be fired like a full-auto rifle).
Yet, you don’t see any of those NRA members talking about this. They are still lockstep behind the Republican party. Take any equivalent issue on the left, and people want the Democratic party to burn down for not supporting it.
I think there’s deep lessons to be learned there about how the rank and file treat their respective standard bearer political party.
That’s a solid point. The GOP couldn’t get together to wipe out the ACA because many Republicans actually realized it would fuck them to do so. It was an absolute comical disaster.
They half-gutted it, but we still have enough of it to be far better off than pre-ACA days.
Yet, you don’t see any of those NRA members talking about this. They are still lockstep behind the Republican party. Take any equivalent issue on the left, and people want the Democratic party to burn down for not supporting it.
I think there’s deep lessons to be learned there about how the rank and file treat their respective standard bearer political party.
This Alt-Right Playbook video does an excellent job of explaining that, IMO. (I linked to the specific timestamp where the explanation starts, but I recommend watching from the beginning for context.)
Adulthood is about dealing with the world as it is, not the world we insist we should have.
Which is why centrist Democrats saw the polling data saying Bernie Sanders performed better against Trump than Clinton or Biden and decided to throw their support behind him in both elections rather than forcing us to stick with the candidate they wanted, right? Wait a minute…
The same Berniecrats who could have had a progressive in the General in 2020 if they’d been willing to go for Warren (who was outpolling Bernie in the Primaries AND comparable in the General until the shitshow that cost them both the primary)
The thing with Primaries is that they’re like RCV. The most votes wins the Primary. If your second choice isn’t “whoever won the Dem primary”, then you’re the problem, whether your first was Biden, Bernie, or Elmo.
You’re talking about polling conducted eleven months ahead of the general election. Whatever you think you’re doing, you’re not participating in an adult conversation.
Which is why centrist Democrats saw the polling data saying Bernie Sanders performed better against Trump than Clinton or Biden and decided to throw their support behind him in both elections rather than forcing us to stick with the candidate they wanted, right?
People don’t like Bernie Sanders, so they didn’t vote for him.
Some people you don’t like made a decision you disagreed with for reasons we aren’t privy to, and that’s somehow a rebuttal of needing to deal with the world as it is? Your comment is a demonstration of the problem.
I didn’t claim that. I voted for Biden, and I expect to do so again. I would very much like a better candidate. Tossing around logical fallacies isn’t a good look when you’re also jumping to conclusions.
That’s as silly as saying Ramaswamy is anti fascist because he supports Israel less than Trump. Or saying Trump is anti fascist because he supports Israel less than Pence.
Meanwhile in Israel:
"[Ben-Gvir] was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israel-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.
As a teenager, he adopted religious and radical right-wing views during the First Intifada. He first joined a right-wing youth movement affiliated with Moledet, a party which advocated transferring Arabs out of Israel, and then joined the youth movement of the even more radical Kach and Kahane Chai party, which was eventually designated as a terrorist organization and outlawed by the Israrli government. He became youth coordinator at Kach, and claimed that he was detained at age 14. When he came of age for conscription into the Israeli Defense Forces at 18, he was exempted from service by the IDF due to his extreme-right political background.
In a November 2015 interview, he claimed to have been indicted 53 times.
Ben-Gvir has been convicted of incitement to racism, destroying property, possessing a terror organization’s propaganda material and supporting a terror organisation.
In December 2021, Ben-Gvir was investigated after a video surfaced of him pulling a handgun on Arab security guards during a parking dispute in the underground garage of the Expo Tel Aviv conference center. The guards asked Ben-Gvir to move his vehicle as he was parked in a prohibited space. He then drew a pistol and brandished it at the guards. The guards were unarmed.
His most recent outrage-inducing comments came last week [Aug 27 2023] when he admitted that his right to move around unimpeded is superior to the freedom of movement for Palestinians in the West Bank. ‘My right, the right of my wife and children to move around Judea and Samaria is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs,’ he said in an interview, using the biblical term for the occupied territory.
Ben-Gvir also wants to expel ‘disloyal’ Palestinian citizens of Israel. In August, a local radio station’s online poll found that nearly two-thirds of Israelis support the proposal.
In 1995, at the height of the Oslo Peace Accords, when he was 19, Ben-Gvir showed TV cameras the bonnet ornament from then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car, declaring: ‘We got to his car. We’ll get to him, too.’ A few weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultranationalist at a rally in support of the peace agreement and the planned withdrawal from Palestinian territory.
Ehud Barak, a former Labour party prime minister, prophesied ‘dark days’ if Ben-Gvir entered government, while left-wing leader Zehava Galon said the elections would ‘determine whether there will be a free country here or a Jewish theocracy.’ "
Yeah, anybody who supports this guy and arms him with all the weapons he wants is a fascist piece of shit, no matter which side of the aisle.
Even worse are the people saying they won’t vote for Biden in 2024 because they don’t agree with him 100% on certain issues when Trump would be even worse on those issues.
I understand not liking a politician completely. Hillary wasn’t my first pick in 2016 and Biden wasn’t my first pick in 2020. However, when it became clear that they were the nominee, I backed them over Trump. I’m sure some of these people will back Biden if/when he’s the nominee, but a lot of them are declaring that they will sit out the elections if Biden is the nominee because they want things done differently. Meanwhile, if Trump is elected - say, because some left wing voters stay home - these issues will be treated a whole lot worse!
You can count in those who are angry about Palestine here. They are now anti-Biden but can’t seem to understand that Biden at his worst is still better than Trump at his best.
This drives me crazy. Having an essentially neutral stance on anything in the Middle East should be the preferred stance of any US President at this point. It is a no-win quagmire.
There are a few geopolitical aphorisms that Western empires have discovered the hard way and that the US should remember (but probably won’t because, you know, US exceptionalism):
Never invade Russia. Never invade Afghanistan. Never fight a land war in Asia. Add to that, never invest any political capital in the Middle East. There is just no winning these conflicts and it is delusional to try. The only way to win conflicts like that is the way Stalin and Mao did it, and that is not our way. These places are the very definition of quagmire for western powers.
Now, imagine if Trump managed to win the next election because young Democratic voters are mad about Biden’s stance on Israel/Palestine and decide to stay home on election day. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Why is it always progressives who have to hold their nose and “vote blue no matter who”? Centrist Democrats have been driving the car for decades. If you don’t let me pick even one stop in 30 years then eventually I’m going to jump out of the car and you’ll have to extort gas money from someone else when I do. What you keep asking us to do isn’t compromise, it’s to stay in an abusive relationship where you get to make all the rules and we deal with it in silence. That only works for so long.
It’s because there aren’t enough progressives. I vote as progressive as I can in primaries. For some races it has paid off, and for others, well maybe next time.
Try building an actual third party. Not by putting someone up for President every 4 years. That’s a waste of time, money, and effort. Get people into school boards, city councils, and county comptroller. Then aim for state congress and other positions at the state level. Now push for changing the voting system to something that doesn’t have a glaring problem like First Past the Post does.
A huge chunk of the changes progressives want are better done at the state and local level, anyway. Until then, we’ll keep getting what we get at the federal level.
There is a reason the #GOP is making #RCV illegal where they can.
And why the alternative voting systems that do pass are things like RCV that have the lowest likelihood of electing a third party and can still be gamed to spoil the Dems
IRV-RCV is the easiest to understand, but the one we know almost certainly will never make a third party relevant in the US. But it’s the only alternative anyone is willing to talk about. Then the GOP makes it illegal anyway.
Something actually effective will simply never pass.
Just an aside, Massachusetts voted ‘no’ for RCV a few years ago. I was surprised.
Because we’re a minority and the options are the party that now gives us significant representation for our demographic (103 members of the House, and 1 (sadface) senator) or the party that thinks anyone left of “moderate-right” should be thrown out of a helecopter over the ocean.
The US is designed to change slowly, and even fixing that is designed to take time.
No. What we’re asking you to do is pick the loveless relationship where your party buys you supermarket flowers once a year over Jeffery Dahmer. The Dems don’t abuse us. We just don’t have the votes and constitutents to do something worthwhile. You do realize that if a moderate compromises too progressive, they get replaced with a Republican, right?
So why don’t we fight in-party for more representation and educate voters that we’re not the boogey man, instead of threatening to murder the whole country to get our way like the bloody Repubs do?
Because of the electoral college. That forces a two-party system. Which is why we’re in this terrible situation.
It also does nothing to stop a progressive from running as a democrat.
Stunt candidates like Jill Stein are grifters who do not give a single solitary fuck about the state of the world, and anyone considering a candidate like that is also extremely unlikely to run themselves.
I have friends who voted for Nader. They thought they were making a statement too. Then we got into Iraq II and they were very upset by it. We also got John “fuck voting righs” Roberts and Samuel “removed be hoes” Alito out of the deal. Don’t be stupid.
Watching a bunch of tiktok gronks give their brilliant hot takes on how they don’t have to vote for Biden is like watching a drunken fratboy who’s holding everyone’s phones dancing on a cliff rim because someone told them not to. Stupid fuck. It doesn’t work like that.
It’s plurality (a.k.a. FPTP) voting that forces a 2-party system. The main problem with the electoral college is that it gives a structural advantage to voters in low-population states, and those voters are overwhelmingly aligned with Republicans.
Funny how Biden turned out to be a lot less centrist than we were expecting. The pendulum is swinging left, and if we don’t keep pushing in the right direction the progress will stop. Just because we’re not getting everything we want right now doesn’t mean we’re not in the process of getting there. So stop removed about how you don’t have the perfect candidate right now. Vote in the primaries for the most progressive candidates you can find, and then in the general election vote for the best candidate, even if it’s not your preferred choice.
Adulthood is about dealing with the world as it is, not the world we insist we should have. We have to be the adults in the room when no one else is willing.
And in case anybody is wondering about the Republicans not being held to the same standard, that’s a consequence of the fact that the changes progressives want require passing new legislation, whereas the changes Republicans want can be achieved through obstruction and sabotage.
Just to clarify, I do want to hold Republicans to the same standards. I want their accountability to be conducted through electoral defeats and removing them from power. As difficult as it is to reform the Democrats into the progressive party we need them to be, such a feat is impossible with modern Republicans.
Oh, sure, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My comment was more about the practical/structural circumstances that allow them to get away with acting the way they do rather than being about how people feel about it, though.
I wasn’t assuming you were criticizing anything but Republican behavior. I merely wanted to add on to your comment.
There’s some interesting pieces that I think have gone unnoticed where rank and file Republicans do want something, but nothing happens. They don’t seem to care.
For example, repealing the Hughes Amendment of 1986, which bans the registration of new machine guns for personal use. Lots of gun tote’n NRA members want that gone. Republicans could have easily done it after the 2016 election, where they had both houses of Congress and the White House.
IIRC, there were some bills submitted to committee, where they promptly died. That’s it. The only meaningful changes to gun rights under Trump was declaring bump stocks illegal (which lets a semi-auto rifle be fired like a full-auto rifle).
Yet, you don’t see any of those NRA members talking about this. They are still lockstep behind the Republican party. Take any equivalent issue on the left, and people want the Democratic party to burn down for not supporting it.
I think there’s deep lessons to be learned there about how the rank and file treat their respective standard bearer political party.
That’s a solid point. The GOP couldn’t get together to wipe out the ACA because many Republicans actually realized it would fuck them to do so. It was an absolute comical disaster.
They half-gutted it, but we still have enough of it to be far better off than pre-ACA days.
This Alt-Right Playbook video does an excellent job of explaining that, IMO. (I linked to the specific timestamp where the explanation starts, but I recommend watching from the beginning for context.)
Which is why centrist Democrats saw the polling data saying Bernie Sanders performed better against Trump than Clinton or Biden and decided to throw their support behind him in both elections rather than forcing us to stick with the candidate they wanted, right? Wait a minute…
The same Berniecrats who could have had a progressive in the General in 2020 if they’d been willing to go for Warren (who was outpolling Bernie in the Primaries AND comparable in the General until the shitshow that cost them both the primary)
The thing with Primaries is that they’re like RCV. The most votes wins the Primary. If your second choice isn’t “whoever won the Dem primary”, then you’re the problem, whether your first was Biden, Bernie, or Elmo.
You’re talking about polling conducted eleven months ahead of the general election. Whatever you think you’re doing, you’re not participating in an adult conversation.
Goodbye.
Okay well whatever you think you’re doing, you’re coming off as a chode.
lol OK then
People don’t like Bernie Sanders, so they didn’t vote for him.
As a Sanders voter & 4 figure donator, I’m glad Biden was in the White House when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Some people you don’t like made a decision you disagreed with for reasons we aren’t privy to, and that’s somehow a rebuttal of needing to deal with the world as it is? Your comment is a demonstration of the problem.
More to the left than expected, but I wasn’t expecting much. That’s not a win.
It’s not perfect, therefore it’s not enough? Seriously?
You should read this: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Nirvana-Fallacy
I didn’t claim that. I voted for Biden, and I expect to do so again. I would very much like a better candidate. Tossing around logical fallacies isn’t a good look when you’re also jumping to conclusions.
Because you already provided the context needed to make a positive contribution to the discussion and avoid misunderstandings, right?
Right?
Yes.
Oh look, a different thread! That sure clarifies things
Idk unlimited sales of arms to fascists like Itamar Ben-Gvir seems pretty far right to me
And enabling Trump to sell more arms to more fascists is better how?
I’d argue that Biden is the one enabling Trump here
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That’s as silly as saying Ramaswamy is anti fascist because he supports Israel less than Trump. Or saying Trump is anti fascist because he supports Israel less than Pence.
Meanwhile in Israel:
"[Ben-Gvir] was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israel-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.
As a teenager, he adopted religious and radical right-wing views during the First Intifada. He first joined a right-wing youth movement affiliated with Moledet, a party which advocated transferring Arabs out of Israel, and then joined the youth movement of the even more radical Kach and Kahane Chai party, which was eventually designated as a terrorist organization and outlawed by the Israrli government. He became youth coordinator at Kach, and claimed that he was detained at age 14. When he came of age for conscription into the Israeli Defense Forces at 18, he was exempted from service by the IDF due to his extreme-right political background.
In a November 2015 interview, he claimed to have been indicted 53 times.
Ben-Gvir has been convicted of incitement to racism, destroying property, possessing a terror organization’s propaganda material and supporting a terror organisation.
In December 2021, Ben-Gvir was investigated after a video surfaced of him pulling a handgun on Arab security guards during a parking dispute in the underground garage of the Expo Tel Aviv conference center. The guards asked Ben-Gvir to move his vehicle as he was parked in a prohibited space. He then drew a pistol and brandished it at the guards. The guards were unarmed.
His most recent outrage-inducing comments came last week [Aug 27 2023] when he admitted that his right to move around unimpeded is superior to the freedom of movement for Palestinians in the West Bank. ‘My right, the right of my wife and children to move around Judea and Samaria is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs,’ he said in an interview, using the biblical term for the occupied territory.
Ben-Gvir also wants to expel ‘disloyal’ Palestinian citizens of Israel. In August, a local radio station’s online poll found that nearly two-thirds of Israelis support the proposal.
In 1995, at the height of the Oslo Peace Accords, when he was 19, Ben-Gvir showed TV cameras the bonnet ornament from then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car, declaring: ‘We got to his car. We’ll get to him, too.’ A few weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultranationalist at a rally in support of the peace agreement and the planned withdrawal from Palestinian territory.
Ehud Barak, a former Labour party prime minister, prophesied ‘dark days’ if Ben-Gvir entered government, while left-wing leader Zehava Galon said the elections would ‘determine whether there will be a free country here or a Jewish theocracy.’ "
Yeah, anybody who supports this guy and arms him with all the weapons he wants is a fascist piece of shit, no matter which side of the aisle.
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Sure is. And Hitler is worse than Trump. Would you vote for Trump if he were running against Hitler? I wouldn’t.
I’ll be using this. thank you
Tell me you don’t understand math & game theory without telling me you don’t understand math & game theory.
What is the viable option, then?
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Because there are millions more normal people than extremists.