FAQ
Q: why not organize and stop treating the bus as a legitimate entity? why aren’t you working to stop the bus?
A: do both. cut the fuel line. break windows. put oatmeal in the gas tank. but maybe your efforts don’t succeed this election cycle. and if so don’t fucking throw away your vote if it can help your neighbors fucking survive. “harm reduction” is not a political strategy for action. it is a last minute, end of the line decision to save lives, after all other resources have been exhausted.
Have fun sailing off the cliff.
I'm German. I really hope you guys don't vote for the fascist this time, but seeing comments like yours make me extremely happy that my partner emigrated from the US instead of still being there.
The box is empty, isn't it?
Wouldn't expect a Trumper to. Did I say Trumper? I wanted to say 'fascist enabling fuckwit'.
I'm doing the moral calculations. Fuck Biden, but fuck Trump more. If I vote for Biden, millions suffer. If I vote for Trump (or waste my vote so he wins), even more suffer. Doesn't take too much evaluating to pick being slapped in the face vs bring punched in the face.
I absolutely support the undecided campaign in the primaries to put pressure on Biden, but putting pressure on him and the DNC by letting Trump be in charge for another 4 years is a terrible idea. Even without Trump in office the GOP is quickly eroding even the semblance of democracy we've had for a while, but with 4 years of Trump accelerating that I think this would be the last time my vote even slightly matters. Then I'd also need to evacuate from the country because I'm trans and don't want them ruining my life. I'm voting for Biden in the general to avoid that, and then afterwards I guess I have to figure out what I can even do about the still-evolving bad situation that I helped successfully slow.
If reducing suffering and not letting an impossible perfect be the enemy of the better is amoral, I don't understand your definition of moral. I'm a utilitarian if you couldn't tell.
> I’m a utilitarian if you couldn’t tell.
oh my. how do you deal with the fact that the future is unknowable, so the morality of all actions is also unknowable?
I account for that, obviously. Expected value is a good approximation.
to be clear, you acknowledge that you can't know which actions are moral under your system, but you still rely on it to make moral actions?
There's always uncertainty, yes. I suppose other moral systems claim they're infallible but those people are just kidding themselves.
a deontological system places the morality in the action itself, so you know before you do it whether its the right thing to do. ontological systems change the morality of the action depending on the results in the future.
what if we need trump to be elected in order to escape earth before the sun goes nova? it's an unknowable proposition, but are you willing to risk all of humanity on voting for biden?
If you can convince me voting for Trump will give greater expected value then I'll do it, but such absurd possibilities like you said usually come with an exact inverse that cancels out its expected value.
Should I let that butterfly flap its wings? What if it causes a tornado somewhere?! Or, what if it not flapping causes a tornado somewhere?! Both are equally plausible, so there's no point in choosing my actions based on them.
I think you understand the problem of the unknowableness of the effects of our actions, and subsequently how absurd it is to use that as a basis of our morality.
I'm not trying to get you to vote for trump, I'm trying to get you to choose a useful moral framework.
Says the person voting for Trump.
no one said they are voting for trump
They said they aren’t voting for Biden, and in a FPTP system that’s what it means.
I expect to have 4 names on my ballot.
And because of how FPTP works, they unfortunately translate to “Trump”, “Biden”, “Whatever” and “I don’t care”.
this is straight up election misinformation. a vote for any candidate may only be voted for that candidate, and it can't be discarded.
So you think Kennedy or the other candidates are likely to get more votes than Trump and Biden?
no, but that's not what i said, either.
…and you think in a FPTP system voting for someone who is very unlikely to win isn’t effectively the same as voting “whatever”? What’s the difference?
the difference is that voting "whatever" is the same as not voting. by contrast, voting for a candidate is voting... for that candidate.
So the difference is for one you have to waste your time to achieve the same result?
it's not the same result. in one scenario, the vote total doesn't change. in the other, a candidate gets one more vote.
So you don’t care who wins but want to increase voter turnout?
of course i care who wins. i want my candidate to win. that's why i vote for them.
And you already admitted it’s unlikely that’s going to happen.
I’d also like to become a millionaire, but that doesn’t mean spending all my money on slot machines makes sense.
You're not getting it, it doesn't matter who wins the next election because Trump and Biden are so very similar. So many of the things people are saying Trump will do is already happening under the Biden administration. If the Democrats saw that they lost the election bc 10-20% of voters issued a protest or third party vote, which actually happened during the primaries, it would make a huge impact.
…because of officials elected by Trump.
There’s a crapload of policies others already pointed out that make Biden extremely different from Trump, if you still think they’re “very similar” you’re just being willfully ignorant at this point.
Biden is definitely more palatable, but at the end of the day, either way we will have a president happy to fund genocide. Either way we waste billions on military, have a huge incarcerated prison population, deport immigrants, could go on. Biden was vice president during Obama's drone strikes.
That’s undeniably true. But to say they’re very similar is a huge exaggeration.
It’s the difference between drinking expired milk with or without cyanide inside. You’re still getting food poisoning but one is most definitely worse.
It's more like drinking expired milk and both have different quantities of cyanide, and both milks are funding genocide. You're dying either way. Strategic action could shift things, blindly voting for Democrats no matter what they do gives them no incentive to change their behavior.
No matter how much you want to make Biden look bad, the end results are not the same (unless you live in Gaza, but even then I highly doubt strategic actions matter unless you mean straight-up overthrowing the government).
The Democrats have been less terrible than the GOP for decades now. They need to actually start offering solutions and helping people though. The Democrats need to actually earn votes, not just shame you for voting for Republicans
Though I agree that would be ideal, it also takes more work than just saying "see those guys want to make your life worse, we might not do that openly, vote for us because there's no other choice"
Humans are lazy, and power hungry. Even Democrats.
The Democrats know who they need to vote for them, and those people have made it clear what they want. There are no "moderate" Republicans that are gonna vote Biden, so he needs to actually listen to the people who will vote for him and give them what they want. And they want it now because they aren't gonna fall for the the Democrat bait and switch anymore.
People can get as mad as they want about people using their vote to get what they want, but that's literally hiw the system is designed to work.
Why? It's more work. And who are you gonna vote for anyways? Someone else that will end up with Drumpf again?
Like I said, humans are lazy and power hungry.
I guarantee you that trump isn't going to save the brown people in the middle east. We don't have to compare it to ice cream then. How about voting between killing brown people vs killing brown people, subjugation women, and taking from the working class to give to our oligarchs. Does that help make it clearer?
The point is not voting helps the second result move along
And who are the Democrats and who are the GOP in your analogy? Because both do a fine job of checking off all of those boxes.
pretty sure biden was president when roe v wade was overturned, so i don't see how giving him power again would help the women you're mentioning. also pretty sure biden has been helping oversee the oppression of the working class from dc for about 50 years, so i am not exactly convinced he's going to do anything about it if he literally can't lose any more elections.
You do realize that trump put 3 Supreme Court justices and flipped the court right?? Do trump supporters just not understand cause and effect?
The depressing thing is that not only Trump supporters but most people in my experience do not have a firm grasp on cause and effect, especially politically and historically