hobovision
Not voting is a choice. Not voting is saying you’re okay with either option. You’re OK with fascism because you can’t bear to have neoliberalism instead. Maybe you’d rather have genocide of both Arabs and Latin Americans? Maybe you’d rather have a president who has promised to make the genocide worse than one who might put some amount of pressure to make it less bad.
I imagine we can agree no American president has been ideal? Some of the presidents who have given us the most progress in important areas like welfare, civil rights, and environmental protections have also been war criminals. Roosevelt, Kennedy/LBJ, Obama, etc. Imagine where we’d be if no one voted for the lesser evil in those elections, held firm and didn’t vote for the president who would set up concentration camps, or keep us in wars in Asia and the middle east.
Throwing away your vote got us presidents like GWB and Trump. Stalled progress for decades. Evil supreme court justices. In fact, the most underrated job of the president is picking supreme court justices, since the court has made itself the single most powerful institution in the country.
How about you vote for the most potential for progress?
I think they mean the “superheavy” (somehow a more stupid name than starship) booster rocket is the most powerful. I’m pretty sure by thrust metrics it is. It’s just that the superheavy-starship system can’t put much up in LEO because the starship is huge and heavy on its own.
If you put an expendable second stage on top of the superheavy booster instead of a starship it could put a lot more up to LEO.
I agree with you, what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. Allowing Reagan and Bush and Bush and Trump to get elected hasn’t helped anyone. You could argue Nader got GWB elected but cheating and the Supreme Court were a big part of that too. How different would our current politics be if we had a term or two of Gore instead of Bush? Hard to say. Maybe primary voters wouldn’t have felt like they needed to pick a “safe” neolib over a demsoc in 2016 if they could believe he’d be viable.
Posting memes on lemmy won’t change Kamala’s positions or strategies, but convincing “both sides” lemmy users how important it is to pick the better of two options could change things. Every time the left-leaning party loses due to lack of turnout (aka punishing them for not being left enough) they move right instead of left. The only way to move the country left is to do whatever you can to get the most left-leaning viable candidate elected. Over time this pushes the whole electorate left.
I mostly agree with you, especially point (1), but what are you talking about with “Hamas did genocide on Isreal last year”? They did a terror attack for sure, but that’s not genocide. Wiping out significant percentage of a population because of their ethnicity or culture is genocide (see what Isreal is doing in Gaza) and it takes months to years.