|
How do I weight my individual moral vote against the millions of dollars spent on lobbying, and the words and promises exchanged with lobbyists that I’ll never be party to? Is it possible to know the moral weight of a vote when so much of the action of policy being put into place is hidden from the public view?
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2024 16:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 16:33 |
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:Yeah but all those “semi-good” things do actually matter here within the US where the election is taking place. Bar is this an unironic “but at least the trains run on time” argument about funding a genocide or am I reading it wrong?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2024 01:03
|
|
|
Kith posted:since it tends to come up a lot, an answer to "would trump really be worse than biden on palestine": The thing I’m curious about is what Democratic opposition to Trump on Israel would look like. It’s a real rock and a hard place when Trump is saying genocidal poo poo openly (rather than just enabling a genocide quietly) and the Dem base naturally opposes whatever it is he’s for, because that’s about what our politics look like nowadays, and the Dem AIPAC donation manager is screaming down the phone to shut up because Trump is right, and that they have to go along with it or face a primary challenger, did you see what we did to Cori Bush? What does managing that tension for a middle of the road Dem look like? We might find out.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2024 19:08
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:Can someone offer a single, coherent, reality based argument that not voting for Biden is better than voting for Biden? I'm in a red state that Biden's not going to win. I oppose the genocide. So if he's not going to win anyway, why bother throwing away a vote on him? If enough people in locked red states did this, to create a collapse in his vote totals there, I think it might impact at least the next generation of Democratic aspirants to cool their jets on supporting an apartheid state. I consider this a pretty practical argument that allows Dems in red states to think about their vote strategically. I'm not saying not vote at all, and also don't personalize it down to catastrophization fantasies about being the one vote Biden needed to flip your state blue--that's silly. But if he's going to lose your state, and most states are pretty predetermined, then withhold your vote, and send the message that way. I wouldn't have voted for him anyway, and didn't in '20, but that was for my own reasons. This is the practical argument I make to the handwringing liberals, which in the little blue dot of a college town in the otherwise largely red state I live in, is something I run into a lot. Terrified of Trump, but too surrounded by young people to be able to pretend they don't know what's going on in Gaza. Most people just get angry and refuse to engage, even some of them being people who agree with the premise--that our electoral votes are pretty much in the bag for Trump. selec fucked around with this message at 05:26 on May 8, 2024 |
|
#
¿
May 8, 2024 05:24
|
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:As others pointed out this one is pretty incoherent. It actively argues against itself. If the baseline assumption "Your vote does not carry any inherent information" is true, then "you should withhold your vote to convey they need to change" doesn't really follow, and it has big gaps - in order for not voting for Biden to be the better option, it needs to argue the resulting change would be for the better, which it doesn't do. Which is understandable, since you don't support the argument yourself, maybe someone who does can resolve the inconsistency and fill out the rest. It's an argument I make to liberals who are not leftists. If I talk about the things that animate me personally, it's stuff like the drug war that Biden cheered on for decades, and in many cases championed the specific policies that then filter down to states and cities, which then I see in my own life and the lives of those around me. And that's just one facet; look at his support for stripping student loans of bankruptcy protection. His entire political career he was making choices, deliberately championing policies that hosed over me and people I knew. Not just being a part of that, but being a leader, getting out there and fighting for tougher drug laws that led to a friend of mine being harassed by cops for weed so consistently he left town for a decade and didn't come back until he'd learned the cops that had a vendetta against him (basically for being easy pickings) had retired. Biden fought his entire career for this kind of poo poo. So that's my personal reasons for saying gently caress him; it's not that he was a neutral or even positive influence on the politics of this country before he became president. He was a champion for directly loving up the lives of the people I love and care about. The argument about electoral votes I described is intended specifically to go after the genocide support, though. That's incredibly salient right now, and it highlights the contradictions of what the Dems (and specifically Biden) try to get away with while mouthing the right words. I do not see the modern Democratic party as one prepared to meet this moment, not to mention the moments to come, which will ramp up the contradictions they're seeking to tamp down. We're not going to see climate migration slow down. So what's their plan besides militarizing the border and convincing their base that indifference and cruelty, even violent repression of migrants is justified if it keeps them out of our country? There are a lot of issues where you can see increasing urgency being required, an urgency that ideally would place the human dignity and ability to have a functioning society above the need to preserve the indecent, repugnant economic status quo in this country. But I have no faith in the party to be able to handle that kind of pivot. So the genocide is a great entry point for getting liberals to see they're not going to have it both ways: you can't vote for a genocide and look yourself in the eye. You will feel even worse if you vote for a genocide, in a state that your vote doesn't even matter in due to demographics and the locked-in status of our political polarization. How are you gonna feel if you voted to continue sending bombs to a genocidal country, in a state where your vote didn't even matter, and then how are you gonna feel even moreso if Biden loses anyway? Was that vote, which didn't, and couldn't meaningfully contribute to the outcome, worth selling a little piece of your soul that you will never be able to reclaim? How do you come back from that? That's my pitch.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2024 14:53
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 16:33 |
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:Ah, the spite argument. Now, a spite argument, an argument from personal animosity and emotional satisfaction in response to past offenses, that I can understand, especially one that is coherent and based in the reality of past actions as yours seems to be. That's a perfectly good argument, and can understand why it would be motivating. Also, you don't mention it, but spite is a useful heuristic for power acquisition in many situations, so even if the emotional satisfaction isn't a primary value, it can be effectively argued for to support many different primary values. See, this surprises me right back! Because leftists aren't robots. That spite isn't just "I hate Joe Biden specifically," it's more "I hate the tendency Joe Biden represents, the neoliberal third way triangulation that cut genuine values or meaningful progressive ideology out of the party's calculations". Leftists understand that politics as people experience them is the cops showing up at your door to harass you because you're poor and they have a fun game they play to see if they can't gently caress with you more, for fun. Politics as people experience them is finding out that your student loan debts can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Politics isn't just stuff that happens in newspapers: spite, or as I'd describe it, dissatisfaction with a party that is not responsive to what you feel like you and your cohort of working friends feel like it should be is just politics, to me. The material experience of life in this society is politics, and if it makes you feel angry or spiteful, that's a genuine political reaction. Leftists are pissed at the degraded, inhumane state of this country, and I think rightly they understand a lot of that blame is to be placed at the feet of people like Biden, and the tendencies he represents within the party. It is not shocking that other leftists hear stories like the ones I have, and that those stories resonate, because everybody knows someone who's gone through the same, if they know any working class people in more than just a superficial sense. quote:Do you have much luck with it? The reality-based disconnect I mentioned before seems like it would pretty strongly contradict the liberal mindset, to the point they'd reject it even if you *did* have strong evidence in your favour (which you don't seem to). Not with liberals--no. Like I said before, even if they agree with the underlying analysis--that the state is lost to Dems at least on the national level this cycle, and predictably so, there's this emotional underlying sense of loyalty and disbelief that any other political option can or even should exist. It's frustrating but not new to me. It's funny though because you can walk somebody right up through the whole frame and they'll nod along but the moment you get to "And so it doesn't really matter if you vote for Joe Biden, in terms of him winning the election, does it?" and you can see the reasoning exit and the tribalism step in. quote:Do you believe that withholding votes will somehow remedy or improve this situation? It doesn't seem like it would matter whether you voted or not if that is the case. The idea here is that Dems will look at the dramatic underperformance of the presidential candidate in states where they see otherwise-predictable levels of downticket voting for their candidate, and see that something about this presidential candidate has made him repugnant in a way that is clearly represented within voter data. Now, do I have faith that the national Democratic party will interpret these results in the way I want? No, they're a bunch of frauds and liars IMO, and would try and claim that it's because they didn't ban TikTok sooner, or didn't offer enough means-tested access to health care partners or whatever. But I'm not invested in the Democratic party as an ongoing entity. I think they've outlived their usefulness w/r/t creating a functioning, decent society to live in. I am fine with them trying to spin it any way they can, as long as they're forced to go out there and defend a genocide and pound the table and blame people who didn't want to vote for that, or try and make mealy-mouthed excuses for why it wasn't that issue. I am not in any way interested in helping those people, who I see as the first impediment to fixing our nation, because if the party you're supposed to vote for isn't even coherent or meaningfully able to stand up for what you believe in, how are they equipped to deal with the GOP? quote:This seems like a transition to an entirely different argument - one based on personal disgust or shame - that is not tied to anything you mentioned previously in any way I can determine, and I'm a bit confused by the jump. You go to war with what works. That's the thing--a lot of liberals can be swayed by emotional arguments, despite the appeal to rationality, the Party of Science, all that stuff. That's why the electoral vote argument is a fun one to proffer, because it offers all the stuff you'd think good reality-based liberals would like: an acknowledgment that the electoral college is how this works, a realistic assessment of the electoral college as it's currently locked in, and a plan that in no way harms Biden's potential path to victory. But that's not enough, because really it's more about insisting the seeming "smart, rational" decision people made to "become" a democrat are right, and that the vote they cast for Biden in a state where it statistically doesn't matter to do so is something they're entitled to, that the party is entitled to, in their hearts. Politics for a lot of people has no meaningful connection to values as we think of them, something you decide to really analyze and cook up for yourself and then see how you can apply them in your life. Very few people operate that way; most folks have never reflected on if their politics reflect their actual values, don't even see the connection. It's all over the place: it's why supposed Christians are voting in droves for poo poo that Jesus would never support, and why supposed progressives get frothing in the mouth angry about college protestors, and why we see top-to-bottom oppression in blue cities/blue states of peaceful protest movements. Most folks assume that must be ok, because otherwise why would their Democratic city/state/national party approve of it?
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2024 15:46
|
|