You’re in this picture whether you like it or not.
you’re going to be in this photo, you just don’t know it yet.
What a reasonable and not at all unhinged reply!
Don’t worry, as an actual lefty I already know. You’re the one who’d push me into the cart.
How can I push you when I’m in the cart with you?
“Get out of the way! Truck! Truck behind you! Run, it’s not slowing down!! For the love of god, move!”
“I think this guy wants to hit me with a truck” *wet crunching*
Give and Take. It doesn’t matter. You aren’t selling shit if you aren’t offering what the people want. They wanted a rock to throw in a glass house and Trump promised to be that rock, not the Democrats. Yet, they will never learn this lesson.
lets teach through parable.
A drifter has been walking through a desert for five days without water. if he doesn’t get water in the next hour he will die. he happens upon a small oasis.
the drifter rushes to find water and all he sees is:
- a small murky puddle covered in muck and grime
- a bucket of watery shit
- a camel
- a dried out corpse
he looks at his options and is debating which would be better. he starts to move towards the puddle to drink from it when suddenly the camel begins to relieve itself.
he stops to consider drinking the urine.
you are the drifter. the shit bucket is trump. the puddle is kamala. the piss is stein. the corpse is the abstained voter.
which would you have chosen?
The choice is obvious, we eat the sand in hopes it will quench our thirst. Thats basically what we did.
welcome to corpse town!
population, 20 million.
You’ll jump through any hoop to say the voters should have drank more piss instead of saying the piss should have cleaned itself up
I don’t just mean Gaza, I mean democratic candidates need to find a way to excite rural voters by giving them an actual path to financial stability
Your parable doesn’t even make sense, the election wasn’t lost by educated people refusing to drink piss, it was won by republicans by getting uneducated voters to happily eat shit thinking it’ll give them super powers. (I mean educated on the issues like “what is a tarrif”)
Don’t get pissed dude.
you’re not supposed to drink the camel piss. Hell, you weren’t even supposed to drink the bucket of shit!
You should have drank the pond scum. Would have at least bought you a few days until you get some help for dysentery.
But you decided to eat the sand. You poor dumb bastard, now you’re drier than turkey jerky.
Sorry I didn’t really read your story
You should ask the pond to be less scummier
Also I’m not American, and if I was you don’t know who I would have voted for
You poor dumb bastard
Cringe. There’s no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It’s cringe worthy.
Your own metaphor is a hopeless quagmire.
You DON’T drink the scum. You purify it by pulling only the essential water from the filth, leaving the filth behind.
So even in this mess of a parable, of your own concoction, you’re getting it wrong. The key was for the Harris admin aka the puddle, to understand that humans cannot survive on toxic water. The only way to survive is to remove the pathogens.
A murky pond of still water might not be a good choice no matter how thirsty you are. The bacteria in it could kill you. If you’re thirsty and lost at sea, I hope you won’t drink the salt water. That’s the issue with the insistance that people should vote for Harris “to stop trump”. It’s short sighted and does nothing to address the long-term problem of, election after election, being presented two shitty options and told it’s critical that you eat shit instead of voting for the person that will actually fight for your values. Sorry the Democrats keep refusing to learn this lesson, but they are just as much to blame for Trump’s victory as the people who voted for him.
Out of your options above, the camel might actually be the safest option. You’ll at least get some hydration out of it if you don’t cook it to shit.
If you’re an hour away from dying from thirst, then a murky pond of water filled with bacteria, is better than a bucket of shit or camel piss.
bacteria may kill you in days. But you will die of thirst in one hour.
You completely missed the entire point of the exercise. If I make it any dumber, I’ll have to write it in crayon.
You were so close though. Go enjoy your cup of sand.
Lol, yeah, you’re right. My bad for assuming we would have to make the decision with information that a person would likely have in that scenario, like one has to do in real life… I think you’re still wrong, both in the example you attempted and the point you’re trying to make.
Democrats will need to work on offering people something more than murky water that might kill you if they want to get people to come out and vote for them. And why would I risk a deadly bacterial infection when I have piss available that I am reasonably certain is sterile? I’m honestly not sure why you think that’s not a good course of action, though I’ll admit I’m not a scientist and would be interested to hear a scientist/doctor’s take on this survival scenario.Piss is not sterile.
That’s exactly the reason that people didn’t vote.
There’s no civilization in sight.
Your options are
-
drink the pond water and get dysentery. Struggle to find help while you are slowed down by your illness and shit yourself to death.
-
drink the bucket of shit. Same problem just much quicker
-
drink the camel piss.
It’s sterile,(edit: I stand corrected) and provides some hydration -
just fucking give up because all these choices are dire and no matter what you’re probably going to die because there is no sign of civilization or rescue, or another clean source of water, or things getting remotely better for you.
And you’re yelling at people for not happily slurping up the pond water and subjecting themselves to dysentery. Some people are going to have the fortitude to do whatever it takes for survival. And some people in that situation just give up.
People didn’t vote because of apathy, and no hope that things will get better in the future. Yes Harris is better than Trump. But she’s still a step in the wrong direction. Just because it wasn’t a running long jump towards doom doesn’t mean it’s not making progress in the same direction. You want people to vote for you? Inspire your fucking voter base. Give them something to rally behind. Make them excited. Give them hope. Give them a reason to stand in line for hours to vote after working an 8 hour day. Have strong policies that inspire confidence in your capabilities. Don’t make a large part of your campaign ‘at least I’m better than the other person’. That’s your selling point? Not how good you are. Just how less bad you are.
Piss is not sterile.
Analogy is not good, either. But kudos to anyone still trying to make it work.
Piss is also chock full of concentrated salts and metabolic waste that hasten dehydration. Drinking piss is definitely not an option.
Now you can take the piss and use evaporative distillation to extract the water from the mess, but that takes time and skill and know-how. It’s not as easy as, ya know, drinking piss.
-
“Permanently installed”?
“I can’t just run on not being the other guy? I actually have to articulate a platform and get people to like me???”
Add the /s
The left: Infighting is why Kamala lost!
Also the left: In this essay I will detail every faction of the left that is guilty of infighting, and why they are wrong…
If your candidate loses, its the voters fault. If my candidate loses, its the candidates fault.
if orange is black and black is spaghetti, Halloween is 16 inches away.
see, I can make nonsensical arguments too.
What is important is the next steps. It is obvious that the left will not win unless we are unified. Go volunteer, use these next four years to try to create the Democratic party you want to see. Make them reliant on your help and use that to push the items you are passionate about. Or you can sit on the outside and watch this country fall while complaining that the people who are actually doing something aren’t doing enough.
You do, of course, understand that presenting this as a trolley problem implies not voting is a justifiable choice?
Yep, if you don’t have the courage to sacrifice something for a cause bigger than yourself, that is your choice. Just don’t shit on the people who are trying to push the USA in a better direction.
Unsurprisingly, no, that’s not what the trolley problem is about.
Yep, if you don’t have the courage to sacrifice something for a cause bigger than yourself
For example, this is fascist retoric. If you understood the trolley problem, you might realise why.
You’re asking a fish for the best way to climb a tree
I know. I normally wouldn’t, but it keeps trying to lecture others on tree climbing, so I thought I could at least try and help it get the basics right.
I would hope with all that big talk about morals, you two go out and do something to help the USA from it’s slide into facism in real life. Otherwise, you are morally worse than the people who try to affect change.
That is, if you are US citizens.
I hope you have a better plan for pushing the Palestine Movement than sitting on the sidelines and saying your hands are clean.
Palestine? I’m talking about philosophy of ethics.
Ah, my bad I was thinking of world issues and how to slow the crawl of Facism in real life.
I wish y’all luck. I’ll be way on the outside of this country watching it fall.
Understandable, tbh. It is very hard to have hope after watching so many people vote against their own interests or stand by and watch this happen. I am hoping this presidency opens the eyes of Americans to how life changing voting can be.
It is both.
A LOT of the US voters want exactly what Trump is saying. 77 million adults heard all of his fascist rants, and said “That’s my guy!” Also the majority of people who voted Biden, then sat out this one, are older, white, men.
The DNC also aren’t messaging to the people who don’t like the GOP, they are messaging towards those who are statistically most likely to have voted for them in the past, and are most likely to vote in general. They also are watching what the GOP is saying, seeing the rabid fervor their bigotry elicits, and work elements of that into their messaging, because it’s working for the GOP, thus it’s working.
I voted for Kamala…
It’s the Democrats fault.
Harris ran a perfect campaign. If she was running as a (pre-Trump) republican. However, we know that:
- She isn’t a Republican
- She banked on pulling in republican voters, instead of rallying her base
- Republicans will almost always vote for the R instead of policy
- She backed off of every single progressive idea she started with
- She trotted out establishment Democrats to lecture the electorate instead of inspire them
- Tlaib pulled twice the numbers as Harris as the only anti-genocide Palestinian in Congress
It’s Harris and the Democrats. Should people have voted? Yes. Is it understandable why people didn’t want to vote for the person telling them that she’ll be a good republican and support a genocide? Also yes.
You’re only providing half of the argument. The other half of the argument is the fact that if you didn’t support her, then you supported a fascist dictatorship.
And what happened? We got a fascist dictatorship!
That’s because fascism has never and will never be beaten at the ballot box.
Let’s preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you’re coming from with lesser evil voting.
But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.
But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.
By sitting at home happy that you did your job and ‘defeated’ fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?
As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you’ll vote for them because “at least we’re not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?” Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.
I think you’re wrong about how the party sees non voters. When you don’t vote, the party treats you like a non voter and moves their platform to the right to appeal to the voters. When you sit home in an election the party doesn’t go “how do we get these votes of people that only vote when the stars align perfectly”, they go, “how do we get these votes of people that always vote”. Every far left person mad about the country moving right can blame themselves just as much as the party. People who consistently participate shape the future.
Source: I’ve worked for the Democratic party and have a pretty good idea how they interpret voter turnout data.
Out of curiosity, how do they interpret 3rd party left-leaning votes, particularly in swing states? Obviously those wouldn’t have decided this election, just curious since you seem to be in the know.
If I understand their outlook, first job is getting people who consistently vote for Dems to be reminded and motivated to go to the polls. 2nd is convincing consistent voters to vote for you (that includes Republicans and third party), a distant last is convincing non-voters or occasional voters. I think the problem with trying to get 3rd party voters to vote for Dems is that the type of person that votes 3rd party is very difficult to convince that you’re an ally.
They could completely realign the party platform to fit with 3rd party and non voters biggest issues and most won’t shift their vote for many reasons. Disgust for the 2 party system, distrust that the party will follow a more left wing agenda, conspiracy theories, the needs to be contrarian or protect their sense of moral purity, etc.
While I’m not sure I agree with the parties approach to disaffected voters. I do think the amount of investment needed to get those voters is possibly outweighed by the amount of voters you may lose in the process. And that sense of inherent risk is stopping the party from taking a chance. Maybe we get lucky and they no longer see an alternative, but I doubt it.
I didn’t realize a wealth tax, 25k credit for first time home buyers, support for legalized cannabis, support for trans people, etc were Republican policies.
Are there more things on my progressive checklist? Yes, definitely. Universal healthcare, for one.
Part of being an adult is not being able to get everything you want when you want it.
Part of politics in the US is understanding that some of those things that Harris supported which resulted in a candidate that was not far left enough to get progressives off the couch, are too far left for other voters.
I don’t envy whoever is picking up the pieces at the DNC and trying to determine what the precise amount of leftism is that will get those 10-15 million leftists off the couch without alienating the 60-70 million that did show up.
This is especially true for the Palestine issue. How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate? Even if it was 10 million, there would still have been more who would sit this one out or vote Trump, because they’d believe the bullshit that the Palestinians are all terrorists. I truly wish it wasn’t the case, but I fear the post-911 Islamophobia and the imperialist attitudes about support for Israel would have cost a pro-Palestine candidate more votes than they would have gained.
a wealth tax
Did she actually campaign on this, or was it just some white paper she had on her website? There’s a difference between having a policy that you are campaigning on and actually intend to carry out and some vague policy paper a staffer wrote.
25k credit for first time home buyers This was an absolute embarrassment of a policy. Did you see the requirements on it? They presented it as a typical neoliberal bullshit policy. It was filled with so many specific requirements that almost no one would qualify for it. And it was bad economic policy too, as it would simply serve to further inflate the overheated housing bubble.
support for legalized cannabis
You cannot run on something that is one of your severe policy failures. Democrats have been running on the cannabis issue for multiple cycles at this point. They’ve all dragged their feet and slow-walked it for cheap political points.
support for trans people
She’s objectively better on this than Trump, but trying to Third Way it, she screwed herself over. Democrats were vocally supportive of trans rights before any kind of major backlash emerged, but their support was only ever skin-deep. Trans issues were largely absent from the recent DNC.
The Republicans latched onto anti-trans bigotry as one of their major campaign planks, and the Democrats responded by just trying to ignore trans people entirely. They avoided discussing trans people whenever possible, and they never came up with effective responses to Republicans’ main attack points. If you actually believe in trans rights, the correct response to the charge of “you want men in women sports!” is to say, “well trans women aren’t men, and you shouldn’t moronically assume trans women have the same athletic advantages as cis men.” If you actually believe in trans rights and equality, you would say, “the differences between men and women sports performance is almost entirely due to testosterone. Any minor differences that remain are not worth discriminating against people over.” Etc. You know, actually RESPONDING TO and REBUTTING the attacks Republicans make against trans people.
Centrist democrats showed conclusively that their support for trans people was nothing more than shallow political pandering. The Biden administration hasn’t been using all the levers of federal power to protect trans kids from their state governments.
This kind of mealy-mouthed centrism is what cost Kamala the election. She isn’t an enemy of trans people, but she’s also not a real ally. She doesn’t want to actively harm trans people, but she doesn’t have some fundamental belief in the worth of trans rights. It’s just another political football to her. It was beneficial to seem extremely pro-trans in 2020, and now that the conservatives have rallied against trans people, now she’s not so eager to defend trans people. It seems disingenuous and it made her look like someone who would say anything just to win the election.
How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate?
No one was expecting her to become a rabidly pro-Palestinian protester. No one expected her to get up at the podium and say, “actually, Hamas did nothing wrong, and the Israelis should be relocated out of Palestine.” People wanted her to make US military aid contingent on Israel meeting human rights guidelines. Israel, despite all the precision weaponry we give them, has a worse civilian:military kill ratio than Hamas. They kill more civilians for every soldier they kill than radical terrorists. Despite all their high-tech weaponry, THAT is how unconcerned Israel has been about civilian casualties. Hamas has done a better job of avoiding civilian casualties than Israel.
Anyway, the polling showed that calling for a cease-fire and other measures would have been immensely popular. This was a completely unforced error on her part. She threw away votes for nothing.
I’m not saying that she didn’t have any liberal centrist ideas like what you listed, but that doesn’t mean she was progressive either. A lot of the policy ideas that were actually good were once on the Republican platform before Reagan.
Don’t forget about how popular Bernie was in 2016 before he was forcibly removed from the democratic nomination by the party establishment or how popular Tlaib, AOC, and Omar have been. Don’t forget about how down-ballot races in this cycle, while brutal to Democrats, didn’t push out many progressives. Progressivism is far more popular than the democratic party is willing to admit or fight on, because the party is owned and controlled by the same class currently oppressing us; the billionaires. If a candidate like Bernie presents a real path, they will force the person out. It’s not strictly an issue with the Overton window.
Here’s the thing about the choice facing people in the election: it doesn’t matter anymore as a matter of the current political reality, because Harris gambled hard on the “good cop, bad cop” aspect of “he’s worse” and lost hard. That statement is 110% true, but it’s horribly ineffective as we saw in 2016 and again in this election. Islamophobia will absolutely increase, and Trump will fund the genocide until all of Palestine is settled by colonists. But once again, don’t forget about how successful Tlaib was in comparison to Harris. We no longer have the opportunity to find out if it would or wouldn’t have affected the campaign, but the indication is there that at least 1 swing state would have gone to Harris with an anti-genocide stance.
I’m actually getting a bit upset at these idealists. They have this childish notion that democracy works in this tit for tat way where politicians “earn” your vote by instating policies that benefit you and that you believe in. Like grow the fuck up already.
False choice fallacy. Both can be the problem.
Voters voted a fascist ‘as a punishment’ knowing full well what was going to happen?
That’s akin to blaming your significant other for your decision to cheat on them.
Dear voters who pulled this shit: Go get some big pants on and wear some blame. While you’re at it grow the fuck up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsAVupx6gOI
The democrats are now throwing trans people under the bus!
Yeah, it’s advised to vote for the lesser evil, unless you’re literally choosing between Mussolini and Hitler, but you need to provide even more than being better on social issues than Trump. I cannot vote in the US, but saw many of those who could begging the democrats to put a weapons trade embargo on Israel. They were already being called “too antisemitic” even by dumping all the weapons into Israel anyways.
Way more than two options here.
I voted for Harris, and I encouraged others to as well. And I think the Democratic leadership royally fucked up here.
The polls kinda sucked in the end, and I think one reason is that folks were embarrassed to admit they were voting for Trump. That to me says that they voted for him not because he’s a racist sexist pig, but in spite of this.
But the polls did afaik get that the economy was hugely important. And the Democrats failed here both in current policy (groceries got more expensive over the course of Biden’s term), and in proposed policy messaging. No one cares about home buyer credits if you can’t afford groceries. (And no, I don’t think Trump has a plan to lower prices aside from shady back room deals that will ultimately cost us big — but voters want something new…)
To be clear, I voted for Biden, I voted for Harris, and I’m pretty scared about the future. But the Democrats need to learn something from this or it’s same story in four years. Maybe the lesson is “we can’t count on the left in this country to vote for us by default,” and maybe the lesson is, “for the love of God raise hell if the cost of living goes up, and do it in a way that appeals to the lowest common denominator.”
I agree, the Democrats should learn something. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to do anything about it again considering Trump won’t never leave office as long as he lives.
They’re screwed either way the Supreme Court is going to be so stacked on the republican side. They well control everything even if the dems have a president in.
If those 20 million voters actually voted I have the distinct feeling that we would have had a very weak, but still there, blue wave.
But we’ll never know now.
I keep hearing about grocery prices, but no one has any explanation of what Biden was supposed to do about it that he wasn’t already doing, or how Trump will handle it better.
If putting a Republican administration in place that will bend over for corporations causes lower grocery prices, doesn’t that just prove that corporate greed was the main driver all along? Why can’t people who voted Trump for these reasons understand that?
If voters keep voting like this, corporations are just going to purposely raise prices whenever someone they don’t like is in power, and the sheep will just fall for it and we’ll never be able to hold these corporations accountable.
I keep hearing about grocery prices, but no one has any explanation of what Biden was supposed to do about it that he wasn’t already doing, or how Trump will handle it better.
Completely agree. I think it’s a “you break it you buy it” situation with voters.
And it’s not based in reason — Biden’s administration was staring down the barrel of a recession, and yet here we are, having completely avoided it. That’s a pretty successful navigation of the economic hand that Biden was dealt, if you ask me. But at the end of the day “groceries more expensive” = “we need someone else in the white house” for a lot of voters, I guess.
I was a naysayer in 2020, I thought the DNC was repeating the mistakes of 2016 by putting up a moderate but I was wrong.
I was practically giddy when I heard that the FTC was finally going after these corporations.
I was thinking that there’s no way they can blame the Dems for what happens in the next two years, but I’m guessing the post-reality anti-facts crew will find a way.
they were wrong in 2020. there is a reason biden ‘promised to be a single term president’ initially and then immediately retracted once he won.
The problem wasnt biden’s economic policies during his term. its that he (and harris) demonstrated an profound lack of understanding of the daily experience of working americans. those 20 million people are likely individuals who have mentally checked out from politics because its not worth their time anymore due to the parties being essentially identical economically. As I’m going to do outside of my local elections going forward. its just not worth it anymore to try and support the dems.
The DNC has run the exact same playbook for 3 elections in a row. If you still think they’re coming to save us, you have more processing yet to do.
Harris was literally campaigning with the Cheney and Clinton families. She made herself the center of a Venn diagram of two of the most politically reviled characters in modern American history. A politically savvy leadership doesn’t make a shit sandwich and then expect people to want to take a bite.
