As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.
Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.
I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.
Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.
Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.
Edit 2: This blew up, it’s a little overwhelming right now but I do intent on replying to everybody that took the time to comment. Just need to get in the right headspace.
Remember that in online spaces (and IRL in reality), there are astro-turf/sock puppet accounts that will make claims to sway public opinions.
Yeah like all of these people out here telling me to vote for genociders. There’s no way that real humans would think so little of Palestinian lives, right?
Right?
And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide? Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue. One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.
Suppose you have two buttons. If you press one, it kills someone. If you press the second, it kills two people. If you don’t press the first button, someone else is eagerly waiting who will press the second. Whoever has placed the buttons here, has enough power that neither the buttons nor the other person are within your personal ability to harm at the moment, and you have neither the time nor the popularity to amass enough people to change this before the other guy pushes the “kill two people” button. Your only options are to press one or press neither and allow the second be pressed. If your answer to this scenario is “I press neither button, because pressing the first kills someone, don’t you care about people’s lives!?”, then you are not choosing morality, you are choosing selfishness, because you care more about the notion that your hands will be clean than about the net life saved if you press the button that kills fewer people. In fact, the blood is as much on your hands by inaction if you decide to reject your choice, as it would be had you killed the additional victim yourself.
You know how you can trick a stupid fucking child into doing what you want by presenting them a false choice of two alternatives you’re happy with? “Do you want to go to bed now or after one more show?”
So what are the other choices?
Just because you can’t stop something doesn’t mean you have to participate in it. But if you wanted to do something about it: these weapons come from this country and they have to get there in trucks traveling on roads to ports that load them on ships. And it’s not like there’s not a value to making genocide come with electoral consequences…
Not voting is a choice. You can’t not participate in politics.
You can chose not to vote for a party actively committing the literal worst crime in the world.
Good point. Although, I would question whether Lemmy is such a place as we really don’t have the numbers to warrant the effort, imo.
It is not currently such a place. I’ve yet to hear a Lemmy admin say otherwise.
Edit to add: Russiagate conspiracy theorists want it to be true so they can simply dismiss voices that contradict their beliefs.
I’ve seen cryptospam, drugspam, generic adspam on here. Why would a political astroturfspam be a conspiracy theory?
It does exist. It just doesn’t currently exist here, and Russian/Chinese/Iranian bots 1) hardly exist at all and 2) so far have had virtually no effect.
The reason people are seeing
$evil_countrybots everywhere is because our own government and our own corporate media tell us they are everywhere, not because they are everywhere. The propaganda is coming from inside the house. They’ve spent the last seven years and who knows how much money trying to convince us of. They’re trying to manufacture our consent to censorship.They tell us what opinions are
$evil_dictatortalking points so we know what opinions to dismiss out of hand, and to see the people & organizations that express those opinions as malevolent foreign agents, so we never listen to them again. They’re training us to do some of the censoring for them.The first step is to understand the media and propaganda.
I linked upthread about this specific propaganda campaign, but since people don’t click links, I’ll copypasta myself.
We get drug spam and stock spam, no reason to expect that political spam is any less likely.
Lemmy has a huge amount of hardcore lefty’s. If you can get them to not vote, and especially if you can get them to tell their friends not to vote, that is a big win.
Astroturfing/sockpuppeting is dirty cheap to do, so no reason not to try.
You do see some users here that will post continously on about a certain topic repeatedly, with no other opinions. They might be legit, but I have my suspicions.
“Hardcore lefties” have a very different understanding of the value of their vote, which is to say, it means very little.
Have you deigned to ask them questions?
yeah, mostly CIA and Israeli bots/paid posters. all of reddit is astroturfed. All social media is controlled by the feds as well. Look into the twitter leaks to see how they do it. Mintpressnews also has great articles about feds in censorship positions in all these social media companies ranging from Facebook to TikTok (100% CIA controlled btw).
Is there any evidence of these CIA/Israeli bots / paid posters?
If somebody makes a pro-Israel post, maybe they just genuinely support Israel (I wouldn’t say that’s my view currently - I think both Israel and Hamas are wrong because both have killed civilians).
Edit: your downvotes aren’t evidence.
Who has killed more civilians?
By multiple orders of magnitude?
This is like “Man, I don’t like the sun and light bulbs, they’re both so bright.”
Ideally I don’t think any civilian deaths should happen, so they’re both wrong. I’m not going to say Hamas is somehow better because they killed fewer people. To me that seems like saying “oh you didn’t kill too many people, that’s fine then”. Which would be completely wrong in my view.
They also don’t have systemized rape and torture camps paid for with your taxes.
By any quantitative value system, Hamas commits less evil than the state of Israel
Comparing them is as useful as comparing the relative brightness between the sun and a lightbulb. The two sides are not comparable. One is committing genocide. Trying to gloss over that fact is propaganda trying to cover up the fact that we’re paying for the weapons doing the killing.
Yeah I’m not into the whole “let’s excuse Hamas” thing. In my view killing civilians is bad, which is why I think both Hamas and the Israeli government are bad. Neither should kill civilians at all - not 1, not 100, not 1,000, etc.
Good job responding to something I didn’t say to try and discredit what I did.
Don’t think that goes unnoticed.
I’m not excusing Hamas. The fact that you read what I did says that you are either responding in bad faith, didn’t read my response very carefully, or are stupid. I’ll go with the middle one to be generous.
I don’t excuse Hamas. I don’t control Hamas, and much more importantly, I don’t pay for the weapons that Hamas use.
I pay, or rather my country pays, for the weapons that Israel uses to bomb apartment building, schools, and hospitals.
Hamas has killed somewhere between 1000-2000 civilians in this conflict, and that is being generous because we know that a large number of causalities were from Israel enacting the Hannibal directive and intentionally killing their own to keep them from being made prisoners (If Israel gets to grab 11,400 West Bank civilians without trial or due process and call them prisoners, then Hamas gets to do the same). Furthermore, if we count anyone who was in the IDF or the IDF’s military reserves as active military, then the number of civilians goes WAAAAY down. Remember that the IDF considers the trashmen, police, and hospital administrators as active combatants with Hamas affiliation. So, once again, if that is the standard that Israel is setting then it applies to all parties, including Israelis.
Israel, by all best estimates, has killed somewhere between 100,000-200,000 civilians. That is between 5% - 10% of the ENTIRE POPULATION OF GAZA. In all honesty, the number is probably higher.
That is completely ignoring the systemized rape and torture camps that Israel has set up, and the Israeli media discovered. Also, something that there is no evidence that Hamas has set up.
Acting like those two numbers are equivalent, or pointing out that Israel is quantitatively a minimum of 2 orders of magnitude worse, or that the two sides are the same is either stupidity, or evil. Take your pick.
None of this is justifying Hamas. It is pointing out how much more fantastically, cartoonishly fucking evil the Israeli government is.
You should ask yourself why you view the above as justifying Hamas. You might discover something.
The fact that you seem so upset with me saying that killing civilians is bad no matter who does it implies to me that you think it’s fine when some people do it. Or that it’s fine as long as they don’t kill too many people.
You’re extremely stupid.