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.
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?
There are a good number right here on Lemmy.
Others who scrubbed months of their comments immediately after the election.
Lemmy users is really not a group that represents voters in any category other than lemmy users.
I mean, they didn’t sacrifice American LGBT folks for a chance to save Gaza. They sacrificed us for absolutely nothing.
Actually, they sacrificed us for an even faster genocide of Gaza. So now everyone loses!
But it’s not their fault, and even if it was, America deserves genocide. /s
If protest voters had voted for Harris, she still would have lost, because twenty million democrats stayed home. She didn’t lose because of protest votes, she lost because white middle class voters decided they didn’t want to bother, because the election won’t affect them anyway.
If 77 million people vote for Trump, and 75 million vote for Harris, that any single voter’s vote is only one vote does not mean that if they vote for Trump, it’s a morally neutral act. Not being the tipping point is not absolution for one’s actions or inaction. And doing mental backflips to justify a vote for Trump because they were ‘just one vote’ instead of taking some time to fucking reflect if Trump winning was the outcome they wanted to support would make them an utter cretin.
The core issue is that many Americans don’t seem to care if fascism comes to America. This includes protest voters, but yes, protest voters are only a small percentage of that much-larger category.
Your supposed to vote for the candidate that represents your views. Doing so should never be considered sacrificing anyone unless you candidate is the bad guy.
Decades of blaming third party voters is why we have two parties that don’t represent the people today.
There will be pain breaking that trend, but eventually it will pay off.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive, you’re not that stupid so why pretend?
“There weren’t enough of us to sway the election” and “had more people worked with us we would have one” are the same statement: both point out that not enough people did the thing you’re so pissed about
“There weren’t enough of us to sway the election” and “had more people worked with us we would have one”
“Had more people agreed with us, we would have had more people who agreed with us” is not anything but a statement of obvious, if wishful, fact, and is not what is being said; not in my summary nor in the arguments of the people I’m referring to. Nor does it make any sense as an argument, explanation, or point of any kind. Utterly vacuous.
The argument being put forth, and I suspect you’re well-aware of this, is that if the Dems had taken up whatever position these protest-voters wanted, that would have convinced enough people to vote Dem who otherwise would not have done so.
that if the Dems had taken up whatever position these protest-voters wanted, that would have convinced enough people to vote Dem who otherwise would not have done so.
Yes, that is your strawman of their arguments
We’re probably making the classic mistake of homogenizing a heterogeneous group.
I doubt any individual holds both opinions simultaneously.
I doubt any individual holds both opinions simultaneously.
They put forth both arguments simultaneously, regardless of whether they believe one or both. Or neither.
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.
Yes, and that is why you have to have a mechanism to trigger a national vote to cancel any new written law before it takes effect
It is called a referendum
As well as a way that anyone can issue a change of the constitution by triggering a so called initiative which than has to win vote to get through
And of course, make sure nothing disturbs separation of powers like a pardon law or president setting judges without a vote.
First pass the post suuuuucks. Literally anything else is at least slightly better.
Just one more time bro! Just vote for the Dems one more time bro, and they’ll definitely stop being a lesser evil. I know they’ve never done anything to actually obstruct America’s slide to fascism, but just vote blue no matter who one more time bro I’m sure this is the time!
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
Yea, maybe you should have pressured Kamala to flip on this like I was posting about for a fucking year before the election. Instead centrists told Arabs, Latinos, the poor, and other minorities to fuck off and this is the result. Now you’re here pathetically posting stuff like this almost daily to make yourself feel better, but its really transparent and gross.
Instead centrists told Arabs, Latinos, the poor, and other minorities to fuck off and this is the result.
Remember when you lot said “Fuck off, I don’t WANT the non-fascist candidate, let the fascist candidate who despises minorities and openly yearns for their death, win”?
Good times.
I’ll be sure to show up at your door vomiting blood when they strip Medicaid from the ‘unworthy’. Assuming that comes before the camps for those on psychiatric medication for ‘healing through labor’. And probably both of those will come before the Racial Hygiene laws, so I can’t do it after that.
And allowing Trump to return to power is stopping the genocide how exactly? Because at this point it’s getting worse
Uh… Big news, fella, there was a ceasefire. Kamala openly said during campaigning that under her rule America would always have “the most lethal armed forces in the world”.
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.
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:
- Protest voters have no idea what they’re talking about.
- Protest voters don’t understand the concept of hypocrisy.
- Protest voters have somehow learned to defy reality and become exempt from the concept of paradoxes, thus creating an entirely new study of theoretical science, known as Bulletproof Symbiotic Hypocrisy Theory, or BLsHt.
Something, something, something Ted Talk.
- Protest voters fell for a propaganda campaign (maybe by the republicans, maybe by Russia or China trying to destabilise the USA).
As both of these options cannot simultaneously be true
They absolutely can. Protest voters not voting don’t encompass every democrat vote lost, there are simply many unconvinced people who became apathetic and didn’t vote despite having nothing to do with protest voters, with the latter being a minority. Stop your logical fallacies based on false premises.
So, you’re claiming that the protest both worked to help elect trump, and simultaneously didn’t work to help elect trump……
Gotcha.
I’m claiming that protest voting wasn’t a significant factor in trump being elected, unlike democrats running on having the, I quote, “most lethal army in the world” during an ongoing genocide, bringing the Cheney, and a myriad of other problems. The dems only have themselves to blame for being incapable of offering a better, more desirable option than Donald J fucking Trump
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.
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?
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I don’t think third-party voters made the difference. I don’t even think protest voters and protest nonvoters made the difference. I think the civic education of the US electorate is worse than previously thought, and it was previously thought to be pretty damn bad.
Or blaming the party and candidate? If someone didn’t win the majority of the blame lies with the person running.
This is an election. The people - the electorate - make the choice. If faced with the most incompetent democratic candidate imaginable, and a literal Nazi, the electorate - the voters - should still be held responsible if they chose the literal Nazi, or decided it wasn’t worth bothering with which one won. Or, conversely, if the democratic candidate is the best damn campaigner anyone has ever seen, but loses to the literal Nazi, that does not mean that the blame lies with the democratic candidate.
Elections are not a race between two aristocrats trying to prove they’re better than the other - or at least, they should not be. Elections are a decision about what direction the country should take going forward, and the campaigning of candidates only important insofar they emphasize one aspect or another. And the country decided that it liked, or didn’t care about, the fascist platform put forward by Trump.
That’s on us. That’s on the country. No matter what incompetence, vanity, or venality Harris or the Dems have shown, no matter what condemnation they rightly deserve, the final choice, the ultimate sin, is on the nation’s soul. We were given the choice between fascism and avoiding fascism, and we chose fascism.
