No Stupid Questions

Because if it wasn't Gaza, it would have been another excuse to not lift a lazy goddamned finger and still delude themselves into feeling "morally superior"while sitting on their fat mediocre asses at home.

Before Harris, they also leaned heavily on the "Sleepy Joe" bullshit and "two old white men up for election, who cares". Once the old "Sleepy Joe" element was removed from the equation, they had to find a way to keep their goddamned stubbornly lazy and ignorant narrative intact.

Now that the election is over, most of these "concerned and outraged" deadweight assholes will never think about Gaza and the plight of its' people again. And they will keep on feeling smug about themselves.

It's the trolley problem. You see a trolley about to kill 5 people. You can pull a lever (vote) and make the trolley only kill 1. In this case, that 1 person is also in the lineup of 5. This distinction makes it obvious the only option is to pull the lever (vote).

The arguments against voting in the USA sound similar to the trolley problem

Some people wouldnt choose to be the reason of the death of one person even if doing nothing causes the death of multiple people

I was born and raised Jewish, going to Hebrew school in addition to English school from preschool to 14. The horrors of the Holocaust and all it’s trauma was shoved down my throat at far too young of an age to be appropriate. Never again means so much to me, one of my deepest held beliefs. Never again isn’t just Jews but any group hunted down for their ethnicity (not to mention all the other undesirables murdered in the Holocaust, such as the disabled and queer).

What’s going on in Gaza is a Holocaust. I can’t live with myself and sleep at night if I vote for trump or Harris, because materially for Gaza they are the same. I voted third party. In 2020 I held my nose and voted for biden. I’m disgusted with myself for doing so. He managed to be worse than I could ever imagine. And the liberals were out to fucking brunch for the past four years.

I will drink liberal tears all damn day long. They can whine and cry and carry on like entitled spoiled rotten children all they want. They were warned that they would lose if they continued to pursue the path they were on and that’s exactly what happened and I have zero remorse for it. And for the record, I’m a visibly queer woman who’s experienced a lot of physical violence in my life for being queer.

It's simple, for a voter that doesn't have other important things or believes the candidates to be equal in other things, like the economy, it becomes a moral choice to not vote for genocide.

If they believe there will be human rights violations elsewhere, like in the US, but one candidate and not the other, then the moral choice becomes to limit harm.

Much of this argument stems from different base assumptions, as follows-

• Neither Trump nor Harris will commit other human rights violations, and they are materially the same to my family; staying home is the moral action.

• Trump will commit human rights violations, voting for Harris is the moral action.

• They will both commit more human rights violations; staying home is the moral action.

The people who were saying to stay home and not vote fell into camps 1 or 3. If you're unsure of why someone would believe in number 3 you should know we have illegal debtor's prisons that are ignored by the federal government, LGBTQ abuse that has gone unchecked by the federal government, illegal denial of asylum directly by the federal government, ... the list goes on. But rest assured there are reasons people would see them both as committing human rights violations in the US. This is not some Russian info op like the DNC fanboys would have you believe.

Think of voting this way:

Signing your name to a candidate/psrty and what they’ve done/signaled they will do.

A lot of people can’t stomach a candidate who has been courting the neocons and softening their previous mildly progressive stances from the last time dems had a primary and the progressives were showing up in numbers. Everyone got in line and the debates were about M4A, erasing federally held student debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. Sanders single handedly dragged the party to the center (technically more “left” than they were) in 2016/2020 and the dems responded by po’mouthing like they cared about those issues, but then circled the wagons and kicked those voters to the curb.

The party has shown over and over again that they don’t give a shit about working class people, those of us that want real change. They want to maintain the status quo. Which is progressively more hostile capitalism.

Signing your name to that constant move rightward is unthinkable for some. And understandably so.

And that’s before we even discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza funded and armed by the US. While this administrations representatives in the UN and in any official capacity constantly run defense for the genocide.

Plenty of people could not fathom putting their name on that tragedy.

None of this means that republicans aren’t fuckin neofascist shits. But…how many times have the voters left of the dems been told to eat shit and vote blue because the other guy is worse? WHILE CONSTANTLY COURTING THE RIGHTWING VOTERS WHO MAY HAVE FINALLY GOTTEN SICK OF IT?! Kamala literally said she would be different from Biden by having a Republican in her cabinet. WHAT.

With everything going on, this party said, “yeah, fuck all that. Let’s see if we can grab anyone to the right of us.”

I got sidetracked, but this is the thing. It’s not binary, because geopolitics isn’t binary. The worlds issues aren’t binary. But a binary choice is all we’re given to make.

Just…what. And neither of those two choices was actually going to solve the problems. One was maintaining the problems while one was the problems plus more problems. That’s not an attractive choice.

We all get that trump is much worse. But everyone else needs to understand how sickening that shitty choice was for anyone with a conscience about what’s going on in Gaza, what’s going on with their neighbors. Signing on for more of the same was completely unthinkable for some. That has to be understandable if we are ever going to change things.

We’ve been on the road we’re being forced down now as long as I’ve been around. And the road just keeps going forward. The dems’ proposal is “maintain the course.” The republicans’ was “mash the gas.”

Some people couldn’t stomach going any further down this road. That’s not making a choice to mash the gas. Because the world is not binary.

But you and everyone else posing similar questions is saying “how could you vote for mashing the gas by not wanting to continue down this road?? :(“

Intresting that we have 20+ different opinions and answers on this post alone, and many are subjectively right.

My answer would be that Kamala is just another pro-genocide lying ghoul who is bought by lobbyists from different sectors who don't represent the left or working class. Trump is at least honest about being a bought pro-genocide ghoul, and that you can look at in the eyes and fight and protest against unlike genocide joe who still until this morning supports Israel with every war crime imagineable while letting Blinken and miller play mental gymnastics in hypocracy in confrences that "they're trying their best" to end the "war" while sending $25+ billions in military weapons to an ethnostate genocidal aparthied.
With that given,

1- It's more exausting and fruitless to fight a murderous war criminal who keeps lying than one is honest about what they want. We just want a clear enemy and be aware of it because we have been fighting a hidden enemy all this time.

2- In short it's the "let it all burn down" logic. You saw that viral clip of Kamala voter shouting at a kid "I don't give a fuck about Gaza bitch!" ?
Emotions and psychology dictate that if I was unrepresented working class, or considered a single-issue voter because of genocide, or an Arab American whose family getting slaughtered by my government and with my tax money, then I wouldn't to want help other issues and would want to see everyone suffers more on all other issues because Kamala would not change anything and probably help improve all other issues other than mine which in my and every fair and just reality is more important than all others.
It's because the alternative is to suffer a slower and longer painful death while no one changing anything anyway.

I think people need to stop asking why didn’t people vote for Harris and as why DID people vote for Trump.

I think everyone on the whole, is completely underestimating the completely apathetic to politics voter. There is a TREMENDOUS section of the population that would sway from Trump if they felt energized to do so. Kamala was not it. Her policies were not it. Her stance alone on Gaza was not enough (but should not be dismissed).

People voted for trump because they: are a huge supporter, or they felt they had a fatter wallet during his administration. They feel burned by Biden and Kamala is more of the same. Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

Biden shouldn’t have even run, no one wanted it. He even said he’d be a transitional president. Then he backed out and Democrats held no primary. Why would any apathetic voter (especially the ones who were unaware Biden dropped out, check google trends) vote for the guy who made their bank accounts smaller if that’s all they care about?

I voted for Harris but not without reservations. The democrats do nothing to resonate with the left, and continue to distance themselves from leftist policies, which were popular on ballot measures this election.

They believe it because that’s what people have been told to believe.

It should be glaringly obvious that trump’s implied policy that he will let Israel “finish the job” is far worse than the dems poor attempts at negotiating cease-fires or any other moderation on Israel’s aggression.

All the propaganda has focused on the democrat (in)action regarding Israel. Zero on trump’s plans.

That’s what the propaganda machine has been pushing.

What's the counter-argument in favor of genocide?

More importantly the vast majority of votes don't matter because the system was created by slavers in order to guarantee their oppression never ends.

Non voters are just as responsible for the loss of democracy. They are not a single bit better than any MAGA even if they like to claim they are. They chose fascism over democracy

People are tired of voting for the lesser evil. So now big evil won, and the idea is that that will teach little evil to stop being at all evil.

On a more serious note, I think for a lot of people Gaza was the drop that spilled the glass rather than THE reason they didn't support Harris.