Biden shares many of my values and goals, but because he isn’t perfectly aligned with my values and goals, I’m voting Trump, a man that shares NONE of my values and goals, as a protest. What could go wrong?
Democracy works by criticizing your elected officials until they make necessary changes. People NEED to be putting Biden’s feet to the fire to end the genocide in Palestine. Just because Trump would be worse doesn’t make what Biden is doing ok. Criticism of one isn’t an endorsement of the other. And Biden NEEDS the votes of everyone criticizing his response to the genocide. Instead of harassing people trying to end genocide, you should be asking why Biden supports genocide more than the young voters who he needs to win in November.
The meme implies protest at the polls. Their comment is reflective of that sentiment. Criticize and protest US support of Israel independent of casting your vote in rebellion. The point stands that Trump encourages eradication of the Palestinians and Ukrainians, while oppressing working class Americans and repealing climate change progress.
Biden does not share my view that genocide is bad. If you want to vote for genocide guy because orange man bad, you are devoid of morals. You are a spineless worm, deserving only scorn and derision.
You somehow think “orange man” would be less into genocide? Genuinely? How???
Obviously Trump won’t be any better than Biden, but if Biden wants people to vote for him rather than sit home and vote for nobody, he should consider not doing genocide. You know, an elected politician trying to represent their voters? The thing democracies are nominally for?
The choices as they stand right now are:
- Vote for genocide
- Vote for genocide
- Don’t vote
This sucks.
Trump derangement syndrome really is real if you think there exists a worse possibility than the maximalist position already held by the biggest zionist politician America has had in the last 70 years. You think ‘orange man’ is going to be worse just because ‘orange man bad’?
Genocide is a deal breaker. Unless democrats create an arms embargo on Israel, zero chance I vote for them
It’s a really lazy reduction, too. Biden doesn’t spend his days just looking for ways to support genocide. Even if Trump and Biden are “essentially the same” with regard to genocide (they’re not), you can treat that as a logically moot issue. Therefore, you have to look at their other points, and in no way is Trump a better option than Biden in that regard, unless you’re personally getting kickbacks from the Trump grift mill.
Biden does not share my view that genocide is bad
And Trump does?
lol
lmao
my genocider is better than
yourthe other genocider, so much so that I’ll give my active and explicit support to my genocider
k
Realistically what do you hope to accomplish by voting for someone else or not voting?
Goddammit I never said not to vote. What do you hope to accomplish by only voting?
It’s sarcasm. And voting for a minor party candidate is a vote for Republicans.
voting for a minor party candidate is, quite literally, not a vote for republicans.
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What values and goals does Biden share with Leftists, other than not being as far-right as the Republicans?
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Who said anything about voting for Trump? I myself am voting Biden most likely because he isn’t as bad as Trump, but I share practically nothing with his views.
What person is criticizing Biden from the left but actually voting for Trump, other than the strawman you created?
Supporting of unions is a pretty big thing biden supports that leftists also support, nevermind his views and actions on climate change and bodily autonomy.
Your comment is wildly reductionist and supremely ignorant.
Biden has given concessions to Unions, that does not make him pro-Union. He has fallen excessively short on Climate goals and has done little to expand abortion protections.
Being less right wing for a liberal does not make Biden a Leftist, it just makes him less of a bad thing.
Your comment is wildly reductionist and supremely ignorant.
So supportive of unions, thats why he adopted Ronald Reagans policy of making it illegal to strike . All hail the Union loving strike breaker. Couldnt even get em sick days give me a break.
Edit: yes they eventually got sick days, only one of these things was passed via law/ executive order, guess which one? The intervention was a huge step backwards for labor rights
I mean, if you’re going to pretend this is the first election of all time and the last election ever, sure. or you could take history into account and make a longer term plan so that you don’t have to keep making choices about who the “lesser evil” is. if you abdicate any possible collective power, the ratchet will keep turning the dial further and further towards fascism.
He’s in charge of the weapon hose and has been cranking that shit further open for 7 months when he could have shut it off with a single phone call.
Or shit, here’s a rogue world leader doing a genocide. Isn’t that the kind of thing the US is supposed to extrajudicially coup and kill people for in the name of democracy? Nope, all of the sudden the world empire is helpless to stop a tiny fake country that literally depends on it to exist.
he approved a lot of money to go there
and he did absolutely nothing to stop it
He passed the IRA, rejoined the Paris Agreement, repealed the transgender ban in the military, restored net neutrality, defended the use of mifepristone, supported Ukraine, and relieved some student debt. That’s enough to earn my vote.
Right, but when your beliefs involve the dissolution of capitalism, these are more like perpetuating the system.
same. Biden has never stood for anything but the worst possible things atcany point in time. Pro segregation, pro imperialism, extreme zionist, architect of the modern Jim Crow, major facilitator of the Iraq War, bagman for the banking industry. And the extreme sexism with which he treated Anita Hill is just icing on the cake for what a shitbag Biden has always been. I can’t imagine thinking “he shares some of my values and goals.” He’s literally one of the worst, and certainly one of the individuals most responsible for how bad the world is
(as much as an individual can be responsible obviously another ghoul would have done the same things etc.)
Correction: “I’m voting for Biden to make sure the things that are happening right now continue to get slowly better, instead of getting immediately and significantly worse.”
Can’t recall there being an active genocide going on with the full throated support of the US government when Biden got into office.
Don’t you remember when Trump imposed sanctions against China because of the Uyghur genocide?
No?
Me neither.
continue to get slowly better
lol looking at the last couple weeks all I see is a crackdown on supposed “open society” in order to combat anti-zionism while the war machine rattles on abroad.
This is like claiming global warming isn’t real because it still snows sometimes.
It’s more like saying global warming isn’t real because a new ice age just started. Biden is leading the greatest attack on civil liberty seen since the fucking Patriot Act, and his warmonger inclinations in Ukraine and Israel aren’t counterbalanced by fleeing from the fiefdom of Kabul, and if we take a broader look at how he’s handled policy, we see the continued escalation of the war on immigrants (not that he hasn’t pursued that lately too) and him basically shrugging at Roe being struck down.
Not whataboutism and also it is Biden sending cops to break peaceful protests so…
The things that are happening right now are happening under biden though… why do you think it would get better when he has initiated the worsening?
I guess I should clarify that I’m not naive enough to think that this all started under Biden because history has inertia. Biden, having been VP before president and a Senator for many years before that certainly had an outsized contribution to the things that are happening now. The things that are in motion now are not going to be solved by Biden or Trump or really any of the entrenched political class in the west and pretending they are is just fooling yourself. They are too ideologically poisoned and are busy self destructing.
Show these people a picture of border patrol on horseback whipping black migrants and 99% they’ll tell you it was under trump
There’s no way to hold their beliefs without being divorced from reality
This is potentially one of the greatest exaggerations of all time.
Please explore places other than your little conservative bubble, you might actually find the real world out there somewhere.
The choice ultimately comes down to Trump or Biden, it’s not a great set of choices, but RFK Jr isn’t any better than those two and he’s not going to get enough votes to win anyway. Jill Stein, Marianne Williamson, Cornel West, don’t have the numbers either. There aren’t viable candidates that can challenge the front runners at this point when we talk about the POTUS, so you vote for the least harm and try again next time while focusing on pushing Congress, state and local representatives further left.
You sure as shit don’t have the numbers for a revolution either.
Biden is slowly worse, Trump is quickly worse. Liberalism is not about moving leftward, it’s about continuing Capitalist hedgemony.
Slowly worse is still better than quickly worse, as that means there’s more time to find a better solution.
That’s what they said back in '96 when I voted for Ralph Nader. Now we’re on the precipice of American democracy falling to fascism, if not now, then very likely in 2028. That doesn’t look to me anything like slowly getting better.
Some things have definitely improved in that time, e.g. the recognition of same-sex marriage, or the nascent resurgence of labor unions. Those things have been the result of slow, tough, hard work by the grassroots.
In that same time, though, the Democrats have been slowly helping to put the mechanisms of a fascist state in place, like the PATRIOT ACT, FISA, neutering the 4th Amendment, bolstering the Espionage Act, and setting up collaborative efforts between state police, Federal agencies, and the corporate sector to crush protest movements.
That said, the world is indeed shades of grey, and I voted for Biden in 2020 to stay fascism, if only for a little bit. It’s better to vote for the right-wing candidate versus the fascist candidate. I want to vote for him again, but there are some lines that must never be crossed, and I can’t in good conscience vote for a President enabling genocide. (The fact that both candidates do is madness.)
Maybe my calculus would be different if there were a reasonable chance that Democrats would do the things that are within their power to do to check the rise of fascism, but I have no confidence of that, as the track record shows otherwise.
Edit: Auto-correct damage.
Hey! So I know you are getting people being snarky and whatnot, but I have a legitimate question.
Could you address the question regarding how the Democrats are at least the party that are at least making slow progress, as opposed to not voting against the party that will turn the country into a Christian theocracy if given the chance?
Like I understand that you don’t like either candidate - neither do we - but realistically, we know the winner will be either a Republican or a Democrat. Why not support the one that at least won’t regress the country 500 years?
Because incrementalism is how we got to this situation in the first place.
I’ve covered a lot of it in other replies, so to keep it brief by analogy: It’s like a survivor from a foundered ship clinging to a bit of flotsam (assuming there’s no chance of timely rescue) rather than swimming for land in the distance. The flotsam keeps him safe from drowning for the moment, but thirst or hypothermia will do him in within days at the outside. His only chance to survive long-term is to abandon it and set to swimming.
The Democrats in this analogy are the flotsam, if it wasn’t obvious. Bill Clinton got into office in 1992, after 12 years of Republican Presidents, and quickly made it clear that he represented the status quo, clinging-to-flotsam choice, rather than making things better. I believed that the long-term health of democracy required making the hard choice to swim for it. I wasn’t smart enough to predict the exact shape of the future back then, but here we are, on the edge of slipping below the waves. That’s the opposite outcome of making things better.
The Democrats don’t even understand the threat of right-wing populism, so they can’t counter it. (It’s not even clear that they would, if they did.) The way to save our democracy, therefore, is to fight for something better.
So why hasn’t he made anything get better during the three years he’s been in office so far? If anything things have gotten worse.
Do you actually have anything to contribute to this conversation or are you just here to piss your pants because people you disagree with are making their voices heard?
The IRA act turbocharged private renewable energy investment. I saw multiple local projects that were already underway expand their scope immediately after the legislation was passed because the legislation made renewable energy far cheaper to build.
The new SAVE repayment plan for student loans allows families to pay significantly less on their student loans (I currently have a $0 payment with no interest gain on my 8k of student debt thanks to this plan, plus after 10 years of making my $0 payments any remaining balance will be forgiven)
Lol things have not gotten slowly better through voting ever or have you somehow missed the last 100 years?
End of segregation. Interracial marriage legalized. Voting rights for native americans. LGBT rights…
Nope, no progress there.
I seem to remember those things happening because of protest and struggle.
Did those happen because people voted, or was it because of large-scale protests and pressure?
I’m voting for Biden because I don’t want Trump picking the next couple Supreme Court justices.
Not only could he pick the next ones, he would have the power to expand the Supreme Court. Imagine a SCOTUS that isn’t just filled with Federalist Society goons but his own special brand of Conservative from places like the Fifth Circuit in Texas.
Instead, we’re going to elect democrats who won’t do anything for however many decades it takes for the current conservative justices to get old and then, when the time is right, they’ll show their cunning strategy for saving the court: Putting forward a slightly less conservative justice that they won’t even fight for enough to push past republican objections.
Meanwhile: We’re drowning!
True, but those are our two choices. Status quo or hard Conservative Authoritarianism. There is no third option, no matter how much wishing, whinging, or opining people engage in.
If we want a third option, we’ll have to start working towards that possibility the very second Biden gets reelected. If Trump wins, then we’re fucked for the next 40 years, at least.
Also, we have the chance to take back the House and keep the Senate. Republicans may be irrelevant in the decision to choose the next justices, should Biden win. There’s a lot at stake in this next election.
So do you like not know anything about the court? Sotomayor and Kagan? Those two are fucking rock stars. The best legal minds of the last 30 years. The fuck are you even talking about?
Pardon my ignorance as a non-American, but weren’t there rumblings of Biden being able to do the same, back around the time of the RBG debacle?
Yep, and he didn’t out of some misguided belief that Republicans would behave with some amount of human decency. Unfortunately, the Republicans he knew from his time as a Congressman had given up decorum and bipartisanship for their personal ideologies and fealty to a fraudster.
It would have been and still is the sensible thing to do, because the highest judiciary should be the least partisan, and it’s a progressive move Biden really should make in an effort to maintain that balance.
this vould almost be a valid single issue to single-issue-vote at this point. the supreme court has been aging incredibly poorly and the republican candidate is running a platform to make it worse.
but im seeing so many comments (edit: including OP and the admin of a very popular instance?) who are down to abstain the vote, ignoring this AND all the other oppression that another maga win would be about, because we have let the “both sides are bad and voting is a blood pact” propoganda take over for the past decade.
both sides are not equally bad and voting is not a blood pact.
He’s desperately trying to stop things, but he is completely powerless and that’s not his fault, but also he has actually gotten tons of great stuff done and you’re just ignoring it, and you should ignore the bad stuff he’s done because his opponent will do worse, but most importantly any good stuff he hasn’t done was impossible for him to get done, and that’s why you should vote for him
Joe Biden, the most powerful person in the world, is completely powerless and it’s not his fault. Meanwhile if Trump is elected it’s the end of American democracy.
He’s desperately trying to stop things
he’s literally sending israel more bombs for their genocide
you should ignore the bad stuff he’s done
you absolutely should not write him a blank check to commit more atrocities
his opponent will do worse
and you and your fellow democratic voters will continue to stand by and watch it happen, right?
I’m pretty sure @aberrate_junior_beatnik@midwest.social was being ironic there
Personally, I hear you, but his denial about the campus protests is definitely gonna make things worse for garnering the young vote.
No, you don’t hear them. They, and OP are mocking libs telling people to vote for a candidate who demonstrates over and over that they do not want the things we want, and will either not stop or help republicans do the things they want.
It’s kind of sad, they understand the democrats do not want the things they want, so they cannot influence them into doing the things that will win the election, so all they can do is tell people not to believe their lying eyes.
What’s the alternative, give the country over to Trump and his sycophants? No one likes what’s happening but as much as I want a change in the current trajectory everything would just be worse under Trump, not just Palestinian conflict.
It’s not funny anymore. Stop voting for Trump ironically.
Just… Stop. Please.
There were people when Trump was running who told me they would vote for Trump strictly because fuck the system
Don’t forget the ones that did it for lols. Some just want to see the world burn. It’s like vaccines, they weren’t around when we didn’t have them, so they never saw the awful things that happened without them. Just like they’ve never lived under the horrors of authoritarian tyrants. They don’t know the horrors that can happen. Or they just assume they’ll be spared all the consequences.