No Stupid Questions

Honestly for a portion of the ones here online, I don't think they actually care that much about Gaza except as a convenient tool to attack Americans. It's academic to them. I don't expect it'll stop once Trump is in, they'll just switch to criticizing Americans overall. They're mostly leftist agitators, and I honestly think they hate moderate progressives the most, since we're trying to improve capitalism which makes it harder to undermine and destroy.

For people that actually do care, it's a personal, emotional argument about not being able to feel good about it, which I understand. It's a sort of trolley problem. If they don't vote, they kinda just walk away and the trolley runs over a bunch of people, but they don't have to watch and bear a sense of personal responsibility at that emotional level for being a part of it. It doesn't actually benefit Gaza, but there's only so much they could really do anyway.

1. Due to the failings of the electoral college system, my state was almost guarenteed to vote the same way as it has for the last 30 years
2. I did not strongly agree with either party/candidate
3. I dispise the current two party system that both major parties are incentivized to maintain
4. Voting for a third party who is incentivised to push for change via ranked voting and other methods does aid them even if they don't win

If my state was likely to be contested, I may have voted differently. Voting for a third party in my case however had a greater impact than fighting or joining the tide of my state

If you have a particular ideological hang up revolving around the difference between explicit and implicit consent to be governed...

You can view yourself as morally correct for not voting for anyone whom you do not fully support.

Thus you have not given explicit consent to either candidate, or the voting system itself.

Its basically 'Don't blame me, I didn't vote, therefore I am not responsible.'

Its the trolley problem, but you just walk away from both tracks and the lever, and then claim that you did not consciously act to cause any harm, therefore you are guiltless.

...

Unfortunately by this logic it does also mean that you give implicit consent to literally everything your government does if you do not speak out against everything it does that you don't like, or take some explicit action to countermand.

...

It's an extremely sophomoric, cowardly and irresponsible stance to take in a situation like this, but there is an underlying logic to it... its just that this logic is ridiculous and absurd.

The best argument I came across went something like this: if we show the Democratic Party that we’ll accept something as horrible as genocide as long as the Republicans are worse, then we’ve completely surrendered our agency as voters.

Powerful statement. It was the most coherent, rational, well thought out explanation I’d seen. It didn’t come off as a condescending lecture on morality, either. I actually considered their argument for a couple days, but ultimately, I decided it wasn’t strong enough to risk another Trump administration.

If Democrats knew they'd lose for supporting genocide,.they wouldn't have done it. It's precisely because blue-no-matter-who voters convinced them that they were invincible that they ended up losing. They thought they could bully the base into voting for them because enough of the base was willing to be bullied and proud of it.

On the other side, Trump is more likely to lose the war on Palestine.

Only if you don't recognize that Trump would be much, much, much worse. And what we see from the election, many can't seem to see that (in any way).

You actively participate in the murder of people.

If enough people did not participate the murder would simply not happen.

• An overly simplistic/naive view of the world. (Not sure what they expect here? Stopping weapons and technology transfer? Maybe the US going to war with Israel to stop the Gaza atrocities? Or are they just expecting something symbolic? If Harris publicly denounced Israel's actions, would that be enough?)
• Thinking that the US President has more power than they do in reality (Congress and the Courts, checks and balances)
• Some logical fallacies they've convinced themselves into believing. False Dilemma Fallacy maybe? https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/common-logical-fallacies

Only a Sith deals in absolutes

Consider how you'd go about exploiting the opposite case.

If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there's just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it's an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.

Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.

They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn't bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you're getting kicked out for real.

The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.

There's this huge narrative that's been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it's meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.

You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We'll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don't like it, that's literally your problem.

Oh no, you can't hold us accountable now, it's the worst possible time. It's too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can't you see there's a highschool full of dead kids?

Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.

this was a Russian troll campaign, in every tankie on Twitter that fell for it is a moron

Maybe if they are young. Its comes up again and again. I voted for ross perot but was lucky it did not effect the election. I mean just the 50 cent gas tax would have been great for the environment given it would have gone into effect in the 90's as a federal tax. Electronic direct democracy. Increase in education and infrastructure. It was hard not to like his proposals.