this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025

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At least we kept bLuEmAGa from being in power! That would have been MUCH worse!/s (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world

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[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Missed the point again award. If people want to vote for conservatives, they're going to vote for conservatives, not conservatives lite. If people want to vote for leftists, they're going to vote third party, vote for the dipshit threatening to tear it all down, or stay home, not vote for conservatives lite. If you'd take a few seconds to really use your noggin, you'd understand that people are fucking drowning and desperate for a change. Not "lol the guys at the Goldman Sachs fundraiser said we should think about a 1% COLA for social security", I'm talking burn the house down and start over change. There's a reason why there's the phenomenon of the Obama-Bernie-Trump voter or Bernie-Trump voter. It's not the sexism, it's the promise of change. Obama failed to deliver, and Bernie didn't happen, which just leaves us with that fucking guy. The democrats miscalculated twice and thought that voters surely wouldn't vote for that fucking guy over their promise of change so mild that even fox news would get bored. It's not the voter's fault that the democrats failed to put forward a good platform. To the Democratic party and the people towing this line, I say: voters don't owe you victory. In fact, voters don't owe you a goddamn thing. Stop blaming them and get your shit together or get out of the way.

[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

When Democrats move to the right in order to capture conservative votes, conservatives don't believe they're sincere. But the left does.

[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Probably still would've been less bad if people voted for the lesser of two evils though

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Maybe. There's an argument for accelerationism. I'm not convinced of it yet, but clearly the system has entrenched interests that benefit from things being awful for everyone else, and the majority power in the Democratic party has showed that it's all too willing to roll up its sleeves and make minor adjustments. Most folks don't have 3000 years to wait for the democrats to finally adjust things to where they need to be, and in the case of climate change, we certainly don't have that time. Yes, pushing the system to collapse is going to be fucking awful, but I actually wonder if the net suffering will be less than waiting however long it takes for the lesser evil to turn good.

[–] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The argument against is that people like me need healthcare and are about to get fucked.

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[–] absentbird@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Biden did more to battle climate change than any president in living memory. Trump has done the opposite, we don't have another four years of runway to speed the collapse, the time for revolution was when Bush stole the election.

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[–] hark@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

*ignores voters*

*loses election*

"heh, stupid voters"

[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

At least centrists didn't have to move left.

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[–] dx1@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

More brilliant political analysts who still haven't managed to figure out the reason both parties near-unanimously support genocide. Have a downvote, on me.

Also, Dems lost, what was it, 10x as many votes as people who voted third party?

And notice where your outrage is actually directed here. Not at the people who actually VOTED for Trump. It's at the people who refused to compromise their morals AT ALL, unlike you all, who completely compromised your morals in a failing bid to elect Mrs. "Genocide With A Facelift".

Fuck Republicans, fuck Democrats. That moral superiority you so desperately want to claim, does not exist. You are the problem. You are the driving force behind the empire. You are responsible for their deaths. Take your attempt to blame actual activists and people actually struggling to make the world a better place, and shove it right up your ass.

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Fuck the Republicans and fuck the Democrats, sure. But voting is about politics, not making a personal moral statement. That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck and would have been self defeating in every election since George Washington. Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut. Effective activism is about winning what you can, taking the hits, and showing up to do it again and again.

Voters who had a choice between two candidates that both support a genocide are not responsible for that genocide. I know a few things about moral reasoning, and no moral system I'm aware of would ever come to such an insane conclusion.

[–] dx1@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck

Your tired analysis fails to take into account the voting behavior of the ENTIRE POPULATION. You myopically focus on a prefabricated two choices available to each individual in the society, assuming the rest of the society is a GIVEN, and then it follows from that faulty premise that one of those two choices is strategic. But you fail to take into account that the entire society is free to vote for anyone. The fact that they can demonstrates the simple fact that IT'S A BAD IDEA TO VOTE FOR A BAD CANDIDATE.

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Well, you go ahead and convince the ENTIRE POPULATION to vote third party and I will absolutely eat my words.

I'm just curious though, what do you plan to do differently from previous elections to achieve that aim? It's not like this is a new argument, and it's never worked before. I've jumped on that wagon myself in my more naive days, and the ENTIRE POPULATION wasn't interested in playing along. What changed?

[–] dx1@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Do you understand it's a cognitive bias that you expect a third party to fight to secure every single vote, but the two primary parties just get every other vote by default? Do you understand that that cognitive bias is the reason the population is voting for those two parties, out of the self-defeating mentality that no one else better can win? Do you understand that it's the people who have actually clearly understood this problem that refuse to keep reinforcing the problem by voting for them? Your message is basically, "we're all doing it wrong? fine, convince 330 million people that they're all doing it wrong." Are you planning on helping? Or are you just going to try to shut it down? All I can do is sit here and say that that millions of people are engaging in a demonstrably irrational behavior. The ten sane people in Nazi Germany couldn't stop the genocide, because of the millions of people who had their own stupid fucking arguments for going with the flow.

Your bipartisan support is of a genocidal empire with victims in the tens to hundreds of millions. Are the two main parties literally identical? No. Are they both so incredibly evil that you shouldn't vote for either? Yes. You want to call it a "wasted vote" not voting for a group of terrorists holding the world hostage with nuclear weapons, well, you're an idiot.

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

it's a cognitive bias

No, it's game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it's not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.

Again, I point out that this isn't new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren't proposing anything new.

That's only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.

Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.

Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.

[–] dx1@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory. As I already pointed out. That is why it's a cognitive bias, because you're, again, myopically focusing on choice given to individuals with the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise. You have an entire population of people MAKING this choice, MAKING these analyses, they are just doing it in an incomplete way. What happens when the population actually understands this fallacy and acts accordingly?

There are two paths long-term. You continue indefinitely with the self-defeating logic that never allows a third party to gain prominence or achieve power because the population collectively refuses to vote for them, or you teach the population to actually wield control of its own democracy rather than being dictated who they must vote for, by the corporate media, or the "lesser of two evils" mentality, or whatever else. It's not that there is no obstacle to achieving the latter. It's that it's a moral imperative and MUST be achieved.

Then there is the problem of corruption

Yes, that is a fundamental problem with "representative democracy". I would advocate even more extreme reforms to implement direct democracy. But what would you say to that? No doubt, more defeatist rhetoric that completely eliminates the possibility of constitutional reform - refusing to vote for candidates in Congress or state legislatures etc. that would actually vote for major constitutional reform, or especially not for any form of revolution. All you do is bitch and moan about every possible path to actual reform, then settle on the little 2% or 5% or whatever sliver of improvement that Democrats offer over Republicans, and then go on social media and gloat about your perceived moral superiority. This is the entire problem I'm complaining about. The population acting like YOU is what DESTROYS CHANGE. That IS the problem. You need to get up off your fucking asses and MAKE the change. You can sit here making arguments about why all change is impossible until you're blue in the face, but you're literally just proving my point, it is YOUR mentality across millions of people that MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE. IT'S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 1 points 7 months ago (9 children)

It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.

LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn't cherry picking. Sorry.

the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.

No, it's not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don't, because you can't.

I'm not being "defeatist", I'm saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it's a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.

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[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut.

When was the last time Republicans compromised leftward in any meaningful way?

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The politicians? Top of my head, stimulus payments.

The voters? Trump's suckers agree with whatever Trump says, so their entire political view is compromise, if not complete capitulation. Traditional Republicans compromised left by voting for a populist candidate, though they probably understood he was full of shit.

[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So Republicans moved to the left by... doing what Trump wanted?

God damn, just say you can't think of anything because it's clear you can't.

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 0 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.

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