this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Socialism
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I think, as more and more information on US' involvement in the Israeli genocide come to light, we have to face the fact that American voters simply don't care. Both major parties enthusiastically participate in funneling US taxpayers' money to Israel, and watching them bomb children, hospitals, and innocent people day after day for an entire year hasn't changed public sentiment on that.
If anyone really cared about the genocide, they wouldn't vote Democrat or Republican. On this issue the parties are in complete agreement.
There is no will for the 3rd party.
I know.
But at the same time, we can't really pretend we give a shit about genocide and then vote Democrat or Republican, both of whom are a-okay with sending more WMD's to Israel while they're committing one.
In plurality voting, those who are interested in decreasing the severity of genocide ought to vote for the candidate less likely to make the genocide worse.
In the US, it's pretty clear which candidate is more aligned with the current genocidal Israeli regime.
I think you have to seriously interrogate the extent to which the difference matters, though. If it's not a meaningful difference, it's not actually helping. I'd be very interested to see any actual evidence that Harris will reign in Netanyahu any more or less (even if she wanted to) than Trump will enable him. Without that, it's just making an excuse for yourself.
If you got dragged in front of a war crimes tribunal for participating in a genocide, a hypothetical argument that someone else would have done even worse wouldn't actually excuse you, same as it wouldn't for any other crime.
Your argument basically sets up a justification for voting for any evil- kill LGBTQ people, kill Socialists, kill disabled people, etc- so long as you can argue that someone else would have been worse.
The reason why I think Harris is better is mostly that the people commiting the genocide prefer Republicans. You can also look at differences in their rhetoric.
But I disagree that you need reasonable evidence of a meaningful difference. If you have a binary chose in a situation like this, you ought to pick the one that you believe to be better, no matter how unsure you are.
This analogy does not work because someone participating in a genocide does not just have a binary option. If they refuse to act, the genocide will slow down. This is not true of an American voter. Refusing to engage in the binary chose only helps the worse of 2 evils.
I disagree. The argument needs to be that voting for anyone else would have been worse.
If course, all of these arguments only apply to voters in one of the 12 battleground states. Other voters do not decide who is elected, so they ought to vote 3rd party to attempt to change the policies of one of the major parties.
We absolutely can in fact vote for people who won't give Israel weapons. Your entire comment is a paradox of voting not having any ability to impede the genocide, but voting also being able to enable it. That you treat some level of genocide complicity as an inevitable and unsolvable reality, is either sad defeatism, or feigned concern to avoid admitting indifference. We can absolutely choose something other than "will vociferously back genocide", or "will pay lip service to the genocidees, while backing the genocide". There is no binary except that which your projection of that as the reality reifies.
I was absolutely ecstatic when Biden stepped aside, because Harris had a laid-bare path to distance herself from Biden's support of Israel, win back those voters, and get on the right side of history. She has elected not to take that path. I still hope she wins over Trump, but I've now got multiple friends with family who our complicity with Israel has put in direct harm, and they are not wrong or short-sighted, if they choose not to back her when she's shown every indication that she will send the weapons that Israel may use to kill their families and friends.
People on here act like this is an issue that affects people elsewhere, and not Americans, and it's not.
Less than a month before election day, we have enough data to know that either Trump or Harris will win. Voting for someone is not an endorsement or showing support for them. A vote ought to be a strategic action, optimizing for outcomes you would like to see.
For me, this means voting for Jill Stein, because I live in Oregon. But if I lived in Michigan, I would vote for Harris with a clear conscious. If you live in a battle ground state, voting is too important to be used as an expression of values.