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What constitutes power to you, exactly?
A voting block big enough to spoil a victory is power: that's what makes organizing of all types valuable to begin with.
Nobody, not even Jill Stein, believes she has a chance of winning against Harris and Trump. The reason why it's still important for her to run is because she represents a dissenting group of voters who find something unacceptable about Harris and Trump, and if that group is enough of a threat then Harris will be forced to address it else risk loosing her campaign.
Liberals are mad because that threat is potentially big enough to spoil their victory, and that's reason enough to be happy she's around. Harris needs to cut her support of Israel, otherwise Green and PSL voters (and uncommitted voters) will remain a threat to her campaign. That's reason enough for me to cheer them on.
Nope. Stein voters are lost voters. The Harris campaign will ignore them and move on. There is no message being broadcast or received during this election. Voting for a party that can only help install the worse of two evils is 100% a move of immense privilege, not a moral high ground.
They have the power to put a dictator in place by leveraging people who don't understand the primaries are for your ideals and the main election is for strategy. Until we get ranked-choice voting (and we won't) your moral posturing does the opposite of what you think. In reality anyway.
That's power, bud, but it's misplaced. It's Harris that has the power to respond to those voters, or to ignore them. As you mentioned, the cost of ignoring them could put a dictator in place.
Their vote puts a dictator in place and Harris is the bad guy for not stroking their egos enough? Gotcha.
Giving voters what they want and winning them over is "stroking their egos" now? That's such a cynical way to look at your fellow voting Americans. They are not your enemy.
Come on man... they got us pumping anti-democratic sentiment like it's the divine right of kings... no fucking wonder the democrats don't ever feel the need to run on actually popular policies and at least keep things centered. We're more than happy to deep throat the boot either way.
Candidates get themselves elected by pledging to address voters' concerns - if anyone has an ego here it's Harris and liberals like yourself who think they are owed votes they haven't made any effort to get.
Then how is she stealing votes?
Tell that to Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman. AIPAC money bombed them out of their seats by way of primary.
Who are their voters supposed to endorse in the general, now that they've been replaced by genocidal apartheidists?
If Stein was not in the running, some of her voters may have settled for Harris. As it is, she's muddying the water. It's not Harris's fault a bunch of people are going to ignore the money trail and vote Stein. Harris is going to focus on the people who might be swayed.
As for Bush and Bowman, no argument. That was rotten & PACs need to die. Those two were doing something right for AIPAC to go after them.
If Stein is forced off the ballot by partisan officials and heckled in the media as an antisemite, you're going to scare away far more Harris-curious progressives than you attract hard-Green Jill fans.
All true, but now who do their base voters turn out for in the General? They same AIPAC swine that ousted them? Just because they have Ds after their names?
Or do they protest vote third party, to prove they still exist and don't approve of either mainstream candidate?
If they're "lost voters" as you say, then how is she muddying the water? You said it yourself that they weren't going to be convinced to vote harris anyways.
The only reason Jill Stein has a chance to spoil this election is because we've got a large and rabid minority of voters who actually like what Trump is serving. If Trump were down 10 points in the Swing State polls, Jill Stein's 1% wouldn't matter. If Harris had 270 EVs worth of locked in states, Stein could take double digit vote counts in places like Oklahoma and California and still be a non-factor. But in this closely divided of an election, with the political system the USA has, your purity crusade will result in possibly the last election you ever get to vote in, and at minimum, 4 years of policy that will utterly destroy every priority you have.
And do you really think cutting support for Israel will gain more votes for Harris than it loses from people who happen to think Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend itself? Here's a hint. It won't. First, we are certain you'll just find some other reason not to vote for Harris, and second, it'll piss off moderate and conservative Jews and run them straight into the Republican's arms. According to this article, there are somewhere around 3.6 million Jews nation-wide who vote for Democrats. In 2016, only 1.4 million people nation-wide voted for Jill Stein. If you only turned off half the Jewish vote while capturing every Stein voter there is, you'd still have a net negative, and I'm absolutely sure AIPAC would go apeshit over this (and they support Republicans too), and Stein voters would just find another reason they couldn't possibly vote for the Democrats.
So, if you are really dumb enough to think a protest vote is a good idea, know that your meaningless protest will cost LGBTQ and minorities and non-Christians and women HERE in this country dearly, while doing absolutely nothing to help the Palestinians. It'll also fuck the Ukrainians over, and maybe even the Taiwanese, as I can see the Shitgibbon leaving them to China's tender mercies. Muslim voters who back Stein over Harris will own-goal themselves as they'll be the first to be attacked by Project 2025 and Trumps Mass Deportation/"Remigration" plans. LGBTQ, Minority, and women Third Party voters will also bring their doom, while White, Male, and passable-as-Christian Third Party voters will benefit from their privilege but best get down to being Good Americans because the Trump Goon Squads will be set loose looking for Leftist rabble to round up.
And that means Harris must campaign to those voters and affirm their most wildly fascist opinions about minorities and immigrants?
What kills me is that I would be happy to discuss the ways in which MAGA actually does pose a danger to the republic, if not for the fact that Liberals will use it as a point of comparison for just how fascist of a candidate they themselves would still be willing to vote for, as if the act of voting is some twisted real-life game of "would you rather".
A majority of americans support halting arms shipments to Israel. Harris would lose a lot fewer votes than you're suggesting (especially while Trump is currently torpedoing his own campaign with antisemetic ramblings and accosiating himself with known neo-nazis), and would gain more than the Green votes you're suggesting (because a lot of people will simply stay home rather than vote green because they feel completely disenfranchised by both parties). But setting the electoral math aside for a second: eligibility odds aren't a valid defense of being complicit in the most public international genocide in recent memory.
The democrats are already ceding ground to anti-LGBTQ and minority movements. Harris is already running on anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policy, she is already turning away from protecting LGBTQ rights in red states across the country, she is already fanning the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment. In pursuit of defeating a loud and obnoxious fascist, Liberals are actively affirming those fascist fears while abandoning minority and working class protections. They are proudly advertising themselves as the more pleasant fascists, the steady hand that will provide order to those who are afraid that immigrants are bringing drugs and weapons across the boarder to kill their children.
No, I do not believe that any of the groups you mentioned would be 'safe' with Harris in the white house, and I don't think those fascist fears and violence will suddenly go away if we lightly affirm their legitimacy.
This poster wants you to believe that what Harris is doing to cater to the middle makes her equivalent to Trump. It does not. She's trying to bring everyone to the table, and believes that not screaming to the high hills how Left she is is the best way to make Trump fail again in 2024. I do think she should go more like "Hey, Moderate Republicans. Thanks for your vote. Please, stay during this election, but after the Election is over, go back and fix your party. We're not going to become Republican Lite over here for you. You need to fix your party so America can have two choices again," but I won't hold it against her if she doesn't do that. I certainly don't buy the notion that Harris is catering to Fascists, though...
This poster could go far by discussing how much MAGA poses a danger to the republic. Hell, it could also promise to hold Democrats accountable, by threatening primary opponents and reminding Dems that the only reason it voted Democrat this election was how dangerous MAGA is, but it doesn't seem this poster wants to talk about that at all...
I can't have a conversation with anyone who spouts this level of bullshit. Attention: Mods. I am specifically calling the above paragraph as bullshit, not the poster, so please don't ban me under Rule 3. I won't address what I think the poster is because of course, Rule 3 only allows me to call ideas and subjects of articles {expletive}, and while I do think some pointed expletives aimed at this poster and others is more than warranted, I'll stick with pointing out the flaws in this poster's reasoning.
This above paragraph is utter and complete bullshit. It is so far opposed to reality that I just can't have a discussion with this poster if it believes this nonsense. This both-siders-bullshit is exactly the kind of Russian Propaganda that was peddled in 2016 to convince people to throw their votes to third parties. This included the IRA spreading propaganda to convince African Americans not to vote, creating 10 Youtube Channels, multiple Facebook channels, 571 videos, and more than 1.2 million followers in their attack on Black voters. I brought all the receipts for this, just check the hyperlinks above.
If this poster truly believes this, there's no common ground for discussion here. Dear reader, keep in mind that this poster was preceded by posters just like it in 2016 confirmed to be IRA agents, who pushed very similar bullshit about Hillary Clinton that this poster and others like it are pushing today. If you don't want to read the link, here's some key numbers: 1017 videos posted over 17 channels, 3840 twitter accounts with 72 MILLION engagements across 1.4 million people, and 44 fake news Twitter accounts with 660k followers between them, peddling disinformation.
If you think this poster is on the right course, you're as lost as it is, and you're doing Putin's dirty work for him. We can and do criticize Team Blue here, but there's a difference between saying Dems aren't liberal enough for some of our tastes and saying Dems are just as Fascist as the Republicans. I call that bullshit out here, and invite you to reconsider if you buy this bullshit or not.
PS: I'm glad to see that it seems like /r/politics on Reddit and most other forums on the Internet, save for the fever swamp of conspiracy theories, aren't being filled with bullshit like this. I guess the moderators of most mainstream forums see this bullshit as Russian Propaganda and shut it down. So maybe I'm overestimating how much impact this bullshit has. Still, I want it to have ZERO impact, so a-countering I go. As much as the mods here will let me go, at least.
My pronouns are very publicly displayed in my displayname, you can fuck off with your intentional dehumanization. It seems like you're going out of your way to not accuse me of illegitimacy directly, but you sure as hell seem content to imply I'm a russian asset, a bot, or both. While I appreciate your intentional avoidance of accusing me of those things to my face (not for a lack of clearly wishing you could without getting moderated), I'd appreciate it even more if you could resist the urge to speak to me/about me in the third person and refer to me as 'it'.
There's a lot of accusations in this response, and I'm not willing to sift through them all individually, but I think I can easily address this one.
I'm not accusing the democrats of being 'the same' or 'as bad' as republicans. I'm not even accusing them of being fascist generally. What I am accusing them of is entertaining the fascistic and xenophobic fears of fascists in order to appease them. Of course this is a campaign strategy to beat Trump - that is not my objection. My point is that Trump is simply a symptom of a far deeper fascistic impulse that is growing within the American electorate, and affirming those anxieties (while abandoning any defense of minorities actively under threat, including Trans and Muslim Americans in order to 'not alienate' ""moderate"" voters (i feel gross even writing that in double scarequotes)) only fans those flames of fascism.
If you're only concern is winning a single election against a loud and obnoxious fascist bafoon, go ahead and turn a blind-eye to the rhetoric the democrats are using in order to appease those """""moderate""""" voters. But if you're at all concerned about the growing fascist movement in the US, you would be wise to acknowledge concerning trend of democrats ceding political and rhetorical ground to the right. Legitimizing fascist fears and welcoming them into the democratic party isn't going to help drive them away, and only a fool would think so.
Huh, what a strange place/moment to drop an advertisement for reddit. If you're not a fan of federated social media, then you are more than welcome to fuck off back to Reddit.
edit: is this the reddit you think is so much better moderated and free from bots lol?
This poster is demanding I show respect, here on the internet, where the Men are Men, the Women are Women, and the Children are FBI agents, while it and its ilk treat the rest of us like children at best and shit at worst. This poster bitches about the fact that I don't see fit to refer to it as a person. Well, I've been told in no uncertain terms I can't call these posters out as the way I want to, so this is the best they're going to get. If they got their druthers, I'd only be able to refer to them in the most glowing of terms, enforced by mods picked by them to stifle my dissent to their bullshit that Dems are in any way endorsing Fascism, and that the answer is to let an actual Fascist in by voting third party. I'll be damned if I give them any more respect than referring to them in this disconnected sense. And that they're leveraging a tool designed to let people be who they want to be gender-wise makes it worse.
This poster splits hairs trying to claim that it didn't call Democrats Fascist when it most clearly did:
I'm fucking DONE with this bullshit. I'm not going to let these claims stand unchallenged.
And I'm not going to just simply give up pointing out the stupidity expressed in these posters' positions either.
...except it didn't. It said 52% +/- 3.5%, based on a survey of 1000 people, support halting arms shipments to Israel until attacks on Gaza stop. That is within the margin of error, and could be as low at 49%. And a whole 21%, again +/- 3.5%, aren't sure if we should halt weapons shipments to Gaza and 27%, again +/- 3.5%, suggest we should maintain support for Israel. What happens if Iran or Syria or the rest of the Middle East jump Israel's case while we're withholding weapons? Note that the article ALSO doesn't address demographics in this 1000 person poll. If you poll 1000 people of Arabic decent, I'm sure you'll get a different result than if you poll 1000 Jews or 1000 Christians or 1000 Republicans. The poll itself makes clear Republicans have a much more militant view on this!
Since my point was that we'd only need to turn off 50% of Jews to lose far more votes than we gain from this poster and its ilk, it dishonestly blows this bullshit in our face, ignoring my point altogether, and then gets all offended and shit over pronouns. I stand by what I said. There are no heroes over in Gaza, just villains and victims. And how many of these people saying they want to stop arms shipments are part of the 'vote blue no matter who', given the OTHER guy who has any chance of winning has said he's going to ship MORE guns and bombs to Israel! Meanwhile, closer to home...
Oh right. This poster has a line for that too.
You kind of need to worry about your own home before you start worrying about the homes across the street, unfortunately. Doubly so when the choice is between a woman who may not be doing enough to placate all the posters coming out of the woodwork shitting on the Democrats and only passively mentioning how horrible the Republicans are, and the Republicans who are gonna do everything these people and the CONFIRMED bots from Russia say the Dems are gonna do, dialled up to 11, not only to the people these people are 'concerned' about, and a whole bunch of extra people, right here.
I'm just done with the nonsense being spewed on Lemmy by people who seem to be all to eager to do the same kind of 'blow up every molehill into a mountain' that confirmed Russian Troll Farms did with Clinton in 2016 and end us up with another 4 years of Trump. At least in 2016, Hillary DID have that stench of Third-Way Corrupt Democrat and we didn't know what Trump would do versus what he said, but it's 2024, people. We know Trump is going to do what he says he's going to do, and Harris is light-years better than Clinton.
PS: I find it amusing that what was a claim that Lemmy lets stand Russian propaganda got turned around into an endorsement of Reddit. And this poster wonders why I don't consider it worthy of directly endorsing. I may not be allowed here on Lemmy to directly say any given poster is a Russian Propagandist, Bot, or Useful Idiot, but Lemmy can't stop me from having those thoughts and choosing how I'm going to interact with these people. Maybe if this poster wants me to treat it was respect, this poster can start treating us with respect and stop accusing us of being blind to Fascism.
Lmao, idk what to tell you that's a majority, according to the poll. Margins of error and samples or respondents are... well that's just how polls work. If you're simply worried about losing votes, then you could even include those that are 'unsure', or some portion thereof, since if the democrats actually made the case against continuing to support an active genocide, a good portion of those 'unsure' would likely see reason.
And my point is that it isn't just Stein voters (which very well may outnumber registration numbers and previous election numbers given the intense dissatisfaction with the democratic gaza policy, among others) democrats need to worry about - there are also Undecided voters and voters who will decide not to vote at all. That, and you're assuming that Jewish Americans will decide that Trump is better, not just that they disagree with that particular policy.
And, again, all of this is a digression over whether continued support for Israel's genocide is even defensible, a perspective with which I very much disagree with. Electoralist rhetoric has this unfortunate tendency to deflect debate away from actual policy decisions and supplant it with whatever policies win you the election. I think you know continued unconditioned military aid to Israel is indefensible, but it's far easier to 'whatabout' the other guy.
This you?
The people you call "Moderate Republicans" - the ones that you say Harris is 'reaching out to' - I consider to be fascistic. They're the ones who think immigrants are jumping the boarder and bringing drugs and weapons, and they're the ones who Harris is appealing to by supporting greater asylum restrictions and funding for more border agents. They're the ones who think sexuality is binary and that gender should be enforced in public, the ones who might get spooked if Harris publically defended trans rights.
What you call 'screaming to the hills about how Left she is', I think is basic humanitarianism. Avoiding the defense of trans rights is conceding that they are even up for debate to begin with.
Why am I not surprised to see this conservative idiom in your comment?
Lmao, Clinton lost because she arrogantly believed she didn't need to address progressive concerns, just like Harris is doing now. She and her supporters derided them as "Bernie Bros". She didn't lose because of russian interference, she lost because she was a fundamentally bad candidate.
I happen to be tired of the liberal bullshit being spewed here, personally. I think there's precious little pushback, in part because .world has actively defederated from everyone to the left of them. If you find .world's politics intolerable, you should really try spending time in an instance that hasn't gone as far out of their way to avoid leftist perspectives.
Lmao, is this, like, a copypasta? I mean I would be more upset by this, if it weren't for the fact that you've had other comments removed that start almost word-for-word like this.... The lady doth protest too much, methinks
You actually remind me of another user here that was repeatedly banned for constantly accusing other users of being russian trolls, even going so far as to follow them around and link them into unrelated threads to pester them for proof they weren't trolls. I would never say you were that user's soc account, but holy fuck do you share a similar fervor for that obsession. It might be time to log off and touch some grass, bud.
And I call bullshit on this entire line of reasoning. Everyone right of you is not Fascist, and calling everyone who is right of you a Fascist is a really shitty thing to do to people, and is a good part of why this country is so paralysed.
Bullshit equating Clinton with Harris but par for the course for these people.
Well, here's this poster's problem in a nutshell. If we don't give these particular type of posters EXACTLY what they want, they're gonna lump us in with the Christofascists that are currently taking over the GOP.
Why would I subject myself to such a bullshit factory. Little echo-chambers where nonsense like "Kamala Harris is a Fascist that murders Palestinian babies" is the same kind of bullshit factory that produces nonsense like "Kamala Harris is a Far-Leftist that murders and fucks babies for her Master, Satan," just on the Left instead of the right.
And no. I don't find .world's politics intolerable. If I did, I wouldn't be here. I find the brigade from .ml and other instances, coming here to push their bullshit that Harris is a secret Fascist who is just going to implement Project 2025 for Trump, to be intolerable, as much as the shitheads from the other side that pop in to say Harris is going to sell us off to the Mexicans and the Muslims, while being a baby-eating, baby-fucking Satan worshipper that plans global domination from the basement of a pizza parlour that doesn't have a basement...
I'd suggest this poster and its fellow spreaders of left-wing conspiracy theory bullshit might fuck off back to a "Leftist" instance of Lemmy and circlejerk with each other about how EVIL the Democratic Party is and how UNLEFT it is, but that would be mean and censoring their opinion as another purveyor of this kind of bullshit I'm calling out here put it. So, instead, I'll just call out the bullshit as I can, and call this stupidity that Harris is a secret Fascist as exactly what it is...stupid bullshit.
Well, this is the Internet, but I'll say I've only had comments banned. That's why I am not engaging with this ... person directly, because if I said what I want to say to this person, it would get removed, and I might get banned. I'd also point out that if you keep acting like "russian" trolls, you'll keep getting called Russian trolls, just not by me, because we're not allowed to do that here, DESPITE the fact that there was a troll operation discovered and exposed doing the exact same things that are being done here, today. That's my only beef with the mods. But since I can't call a spade a spade, I'll just keep debunking the bullshit being pushed by.... people I disagree with (see, I didn't call 'em Russian Trolls, mods! I are good catboy!) This isn't a fight we can give up because Russia DEFINITELY wants Trump running the show here regardless of the motivations of a given poster.
For a member of a faction who really screams loudly about being censored by other factions on the Left side of the spectrum here in the USA, this poster really likes to try to censor those other factions.
That's OK. I'm touched that this poster is concerned about my health. I had a nice relaxing bike ride, that included lots of grassy areas. My health's good. But I think I'll stick around and keep pushing against this frankly offensive bullshit being pushed that Harris is somehow Fascist. I don't care if this particular poster is motivated by a paycheque from Putin, one from Trump (but I repeat myself), one from Stein (but I repeat myself), or because it's a True Believer (tm), this bullshit serves Putin's and Trump's purpose, so I'm not gonna stop calling it out. I hope that doesn't inconvenience this poster too much! :)