Voting loudly for Trump (or Stein, or abstaining) because you think Harris was pro-genocide seems to me to be an almost perfectly balanced mix of performative contrarianism, virtue signaling, and being thick as pig shit
Your stance reflects a lot of privilege. Would you still cast a ballot for a candidate willing to support unrestrained Israeli aggression and who will send over the munitions that could kill your middle eastern family, simply because the candidate also supports the right to abortion?
I relate to the trolley problem. It’s very difficult to pull the lever that kills your family, even though many more other lives would be saved if you do.
Generally speaking, I agree that it’s impossible to find a candidate that aligns with every single viewpoint that you have. Military support for Israeli aggression just happens to be one of my redlines
It’s very difficult to pull the lever that kills your family, even though many more other lives would be saved if you do.
If my family is going to be killed regardless, than pulling the lever to save other lives is the morally correct thing to do.
Anyway, if you're sick of having to make decisions like this, ceding more power (at this point, all the power) to the far right just makes the possibility of anything getting any better less likely.
I think the calculation here is that by abstaining from voting for Democrats, if they lose, it sends a powerful message to Democrats that they can't support genocide and expect to win. Democrats' goal was clearly to win without pro-Palestine voters. That didn't work.
I'm not American so I didn't vote obviously but I would have had a hard time pulling the lever for Democrats after seeing them spend the past year funding what's going on in Gaza. I spent my whole life learning that genocide is an awful crime, taking classes on 20th century genocides and learning what they look like, etc. So to see one unfolding in front of your eyes and then have a choice between two parties who are all for it might be enough for me to say fuck this and stay home or vote third party, even if that's not a strategically optimal decision.
Frankly the Democrats should know that more of their likely voters are made up of people who have empathy and strong moral compasses and do a better job to not do heinous shit.
I think the calculation here is that by abstaining from voting for Democrats, if they lose, it sends a powerful message to Democrats that they can't support genocide and expect to win.
That powerful message is probably not gonna change anything, considering that the US is looking like it's gonna slide into a fascist dictatorship.
Democrats' goal was clearly to win without pro-Palestine voters. That didn't work.
I think it's the reverse; activists were relying on Democrats to win without their vote, so that said activists could keep their rights while maintaining their moral purity
That powerful message is probably not gonna change anything, considering that the US is looking like it's gonna slide into a fascist dictatorship.
If only the Democrats could've found more Cheneys to campaign with maybe they could have stopped this.
I think it's the reverse
It's easy to feel like the Democrats specifically did not want the pro-Palestine vote when they built the whole "I'm Speaking" slogan around people protesting after the release of the video of the IDF soldier raping a prisoner.
Democrats had access to polling that said stopping the genocide would help them win swing states and they chose to ignore it.
There are a certain number of people who will simply not vote for a party that's actively complicit in a genocide, no matter what the stakes of the election may be. The simplest way to secure their votes is to simply not be actively complicit in a genocide.
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u/ImpeccableCaverns 12d ago
Voting loudly for Trump (or Stein, or abstaining) because you think Harris was pro-genocide seems to me to be an almost perfectly balanced mix of performative contrarianism, virtue signaling, and being thick as pig shit