this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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I can understand being unwilling to vote for Biden because he’s supporting genocide. That, taken by itself, is perfectly reasonable.
Why aren’t those otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people looking at the bigger picture, though?
Don’t they understand that under Trump, things will be much worse? What’s their moral rationale for allowing fascism to take over America, and empowering untold numbers of reprehensible people? I’m trying to understand, but I just don’t get it.
If you want to understand, I can explain fairly simply.
Consider this thought experiment. We are getting $100 to split, but only if they can agree on how to split it: I get to make an offer, then you choose whether to accept. If you announce that you'll accept whatever deal so long as accepting is better than the alternative - that is, that you'll act "rationally" - then the rational thing for me to do is to offer you only $1, while I get $99. Researchers have actually tested this game in real life, however, and it generally doesn't play out that way. Why? Because the numbers don't tell the whole story of what you're giving up by accepting a bad deal. Once you've demonstrated that you'll accept a deal like that, then you're communicating something about your behavior for all future deals. It may be rational in the context of a closed experiment, but for the general case, our minds know better than what may appear "rational" at first glance. If you tell me, "I will refuse anything less than $30," then you are openly declaring that you intend to behave "irrationally" and trying to convince me that you will - and it would most likely produce better results than behaving "rationally."
The moment that you say, "My only condition for voting for the democrats is that they be better than the republicans, who are unimaginably horrible," you have sacrificed every ounce of bargaining power that you could've wielded. So the real calculation is not "Who's better between Trump and Biden," but rather, is the difference between Trump and Biden worth sacrificing all my bargaining power?" And for me, the fact that Biden is supporting genocide makes that decision very easy and straightforward. I'd rather at least try to leverage what power I have against genocide altogether, rather than supporting the "lesser genocide." If I cannot set even something like genocide as a red line, then I am very clearly communicating to politicians that they can count on my vote no matter what they do, and they have no reason to ever consider my political priorities.
And yet your actions will lead to "more genocide" while you go and jerk off in the mirror with your newly gained bargaining power! Good job!
Thank you!