• Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    681·
    3 months ago

    The lesser evil is still evil

    And it’s debatable if they even are truely any less evil than the GOP. Both are bad and should be opposed, not compromised with. They have blood on their hands.

    • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      47·
      3 months ago

      The Democrat and the Republican both agree to the airstrike. The explosion kills innocent bystanders. The Republican gleefully says “fuck 'em.” The Democrat solemnly says “collateral damage was unavoidable.”

    • BobTheDestroyerEnglish
      13·
      3 months ago

      “Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.”

      ― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

    • AFineWayToDie [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      57·
      3 months ago

      I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

      • MLK, Letter from a Birmingham Jail
          • citrussy_capybara [ze/hir]@hexbear.netEnglish
            23·
            3 months ago

            mostly, he also had some bad takes

            I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.

            What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.

            • CaliforniaSpectre [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              He was literally a professional theologian and his beliefs were instrumental to his activist work. And when was this quote from? He became more and more fervently anti-capitalist as time went on and he realized that the United States was a “burning house” due to its broken economic system.

              He spoke a few times saying that Communist states hadn’t aligned themselves to the same freedoms as America is supposed to, etc. etc. It’s pretty bread and butter appealing to red scare America rhetoric, and it’s much less anti Communist than almost anything else that was remotely mainstream from the time. So I say he gets a pass.

      • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        24·
        3 months ago

        (CW gross shit) its Political Nice Guyism. They wanna pretend they care soo much, and things will be better under them I promise, and how could we not want to vote for such nice progressive people like them??

        But then when you tell them you won’t support genocide? They take the mask off. “That’s fine that you’re too stupid to know what’s good for you, I hope Trump throws you in a camp you ugly bitch”

        • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          9·
          3 months ago

          And when they do get in, they’re all jumping over themselves to libsplain to you why they’re doing Jack shit about those progressive noises they made during the campaign: “now is not the time”, “but the national credit card”, “but the terror threat”, “but their legitimate concerns” or they pull out some teeny-tiny little token improvement, the 1% that separates 99% Hitler from 100% Hitler, and want you to be impressed that they made a plan for making 20% of the food served to children in concentration camps organic by 2075.

    • D61 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      34·
      3 months ago

      The enemy that tells you to your face they want to kill you is better than the enemy that smiles at you while sliding a knife into your back.

    • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      25·
      3 months ago

      One is the obvious enemy, the other is cynically occupying the space of progressive. A parasite sucking up radical potential and dissipating it or redirecting it into nonthreatening outlets (like bourgeois electoralism)

  • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    43·
    3 months ago

    I mean, you can vote for a lesser evil and also work on changing the system entirely so that it’s not evil any more.

      • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        21·
        3 months ago

        the non libs should do whatever they do AND vote though. there’s no harm in voting for the lesser evil if you don’t use it as an excuse to not also do other things.

        • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          41·
          3 months ago

          there’s no harm in voting for the lesser evil

          The USian Dem party is not a lesser evil. It’s the same as the other part of your uniparty, except that it pretends to be different from its twin.

          Hell, Trump seems to be more senile and less capable of running your genocide machine than Harris. I don’t see you call everyone to vote for him for the sake of burying the settler-colonial project earlier and reducing harm this way.

        • m532 [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          421·
          3 months ago

          There is harm in voting it legitimizes the system. We want the evil empire to die, why should we bow to its customs?

        • lemmyseizethemeans@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          391·
          3 months ago

          There is harm in voting for the lesser evil. It’s called the ratchet effect, it pulls everything to the right.

          Vote third party.

          • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            14·
            3 months ago

            voting third party in the USA is kinda like not voting at all from what I’ve heard. the system is kinda fucked up like that. it’s a bit better over here in germany, there isn’t really a “third party”, just lots of parties of varying sizes. but yea ideally you would vote for a better party and that would actually lead to change. tho I doubt that voting for a third party does more good than voting for the lesser of the two big evils.

            • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              40·
              3 months ago

              voting third party in the USA is kinda like not voting at all

              Not exactly. Even within the mind prison of liberal electoralism, voting for a third party in a FPTP system is different from not voting at all.

              If the “lesser evil” becomes afraid that they are going to lose because of people voting for non-evil third parties, they will have an incentive to be less evil in order to convince those voters to come back.

              On the other hand, if the “lesser evil” feels safe that people are going to vote for them as long as they’re less evil than the other evil candidate there’s really nothing holding them back from being 99.9% as evil as the greater evil. In fact, becoming almost as evil as the other guy becomes the rational strategy for appealing to centrist voters who could opt for the greater evil if the lesser evil is not seen as being evil enough.

              This has the further effect of moving the Overton window to the right as you know have two very evil candidates taking up public space and attention, thereby normalising the greater evil access pushing public opinion towards more evil.

              Politicians might all be evil off-putting losers but they’re not idiots. They’re rational actors seeking to maximise personal gains. By declaring that you will vote for somebody no matter what they do you’re effectively telling them not to pay attention to you and to spend their efforts courting the right instead.

              On the other hand by being willing to withhold your vote, thereby causing the “lesser evil” to lose, you’re putting a price tag on your support, giving them an incentive to be less evil.

              Of course this effect is greatest the less safe the seat in question is. If either evil candidate has a safe seat and is expected to win with a huge majority, voting for either evil, voting third party or not voting at all becomes pointless as public input is no longera meaningful part of the political process.

            • hypercracker@hexbear.netEnglish
              39·
              3 months ago

              is literally german

              Ah okay. Your people just really love genocide so you can’t comprehend why someone wouldn’t want to vote for genocide.

            • Aria@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
              27·
              3 months ago

              Since voting for the non-Trump one is completely meaningless, voting third party actually has a greater real effect. It doesn’t get the third party elected this time, but the larger the percentage of third party is per election cycle, the more it might seem possible to get one elected, and that might in turn lead to real perceptible changes. It might lead to, eventually, 16 years down the line, to a critical mass where enough people will think it’s viable and get someone else elected. Or it might scare the existing power-monopoly into doing some democratic actions.

                • m532 [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  6·
                  3 months ago

                  Germany covered up the usa attack on its critical energy infrastructure. You think your vote matters in a vassal state as subservient as this?

                  Edit: Biden attacked your country! Destroyed your infrastructure! Made your people’s heating costs unaffordable!

            • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              20·
              3 months ago

              from what I’ve heard

              See you don’t even live here. You have no fuckin idea what you are talking about, and as others have already told you in detail it doesn’t matter anyway. Direct action is what we have.

        • D61 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          33·
          3 months ago

          One of the big “reasons to vote for Biden” was because he wasn’t Trump and it would be a return to “normal”.

          Then the 2024 election got closer and everybody forgot that Biden was just supposed to be a place holder and started crowing about how he’s the “greatest most progressivest president evah!” when he absolutely wasn’t. The Dems and their supporters decided that “no, because Biden won the 2020 election it was ACTUALLY because everybody was voting FOR Biden instead of AGAINST Trump” and got all butt hurt when people pointed out that “maybe the Dems should have spent 4 years getting a better candidate ready to run for President with a D by their name in 2024” because Biden kinda sucks.

          So, no, voting “just to vote” isn’t something that is a zero sum game. If you are voting for a candidate that you don’t want to win to try to keep some other candidate from winning, the only thing that the candidate sees is that somebody voted for them. Once they win, they don’t need to listen to you anymore.

        • SmokinStalin [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          281·
          3 months ago

          Spending 4 hours at a homeless shelter or comforting a random crackhead on the street will be a greater net good for the world than spending 4 hours in line to vote for my preffered genocidal maniac.

        • ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          24·
          3 months ago

          This argument is only somewhat valid if you agree that there is a lesser evil between the two, we don’t agree with that, that’s what you peoples don’t understand about our position.

          None of you have ever provided any evidences that the Democrats are less bad than the Republicans, not a single one of you ever did. You just accept it as true without questions.

        • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          20·
          3 months ago

          You stupid motherfuckers fucking giving legitimacy to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by participating in its elections, giving direct sanction to our ruling class, makes it almost impossible to fucking do anything, you dumb piece of shit

          You put us in a position where violent revolution is the only option to cause real change, but you’re the same dumb fucks who cheer and oink as the cops murder us, so thanks for nothing, fucker

      • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        21·
        3 months ago

        like I said in other comments, I’m not saying you should only try changing the system from within. voting doesn’t take a lot of time though, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t use the methods within the system to try to make it get shitty less quickly while ALSO trying to change the system in other ways. unless you’re an accelerationist I guess. I don’t see any harm in voting for the lesser evil as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to not also do other stuff. you can do both, and I’m worried that people that act like it’s either or might make things worse than they’re already going to be.

        • SmokinStalin [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          421·
          3 months ago

          “Voting doesnt take alot of time”

          cracker detected. Sure, white libs dont have barriers to voting like shutting down all but one polling location in their area.

        • mechwarrior2 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          301·
          3 months ago

          I don’t see any harm

          Did you see the part of the tweet where a whole extended family was killed? They’re doing a genocide

              • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                22·
                3 months ago

                it doesn’t change anything about those things, but it can change some other things. the only two viewpoints I can see from which voting is bad is either if you’re an accelerationist (in which case you should probably just vote for the side which you think is worse) or if you think that voting “legitimizes the system” and makes it stronger, somehow. though I’m not a fan of accelerationism and I don’t think that “the system” would care if all left leaning people just stopped voting. I definitely don’t think it would make anything better

                • m532 [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  23·
                  3 months ago

                  Let’s turn this around. There are two viewpoints from where voting is seen as good.

                  1: deccelerationists, they think their vote makes it less bad. Fools.

                  2: those who want to legitimize the system. Genocidal monsters.

                • SmokinStalin [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  21·
                  3 months ago

                  The time and energy spent on voting and campaigning would be better spent planting gardens and building community yes. Then , AFTER you have a strong community, you can making voting easy in you area and coordinate yourselves as a larger voting bloc.

                  Once a critical mass of communities is organized enough to change an election, both right wings will pull the accelerationism lever as a hail mary. All the while blaming the communities organized enough to attempt protecting themselves. At no point will the ruling class allow an election to change things.

              • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                1·
                3 months ago

                I do see harm in the system. I said I don’t see any harm in voting. you just conveniently took out the in voting part. not voting won’t make anything better.

    • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      42·
      3 months ago

      Anyone who is currently committing genocide is certainly not the lesser evil, so you must be suggesting we vote for Trump.

      This is a communist instance and I don’t think you’ll get much traction drumming up votes for him around here.

    • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      35·
      3 months ago

      Yeah libs ain’t doing that at all lol. They aren’t looking for the lesser evil, they’re looking for the person that hides US atrocities better so they can go back to brunch guilt free.

      • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        22·
        3 months ago

        well, do you think libs seeing tweets like this will go do stuff? or do you think they’ll just do even less and not even vote? I also dislike how this narrative discourages people that aren’t libs from voting. you can change the system and also go vote once every 4 years, they are not mutually exclusive. my comment was more aimed at the users of this community than the libs

        • m532 [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          24·
          3 months ago

          “You people who hate the evil empire should participate in the ritual that legitimizes the evil empire”

          Liberals, every time

        • nothx [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          22·
          3 months ago

          It’s funny when the vote shaming lib shows up and doesn’t even understand the local elections mean more than the presidential elections. At least my lib friends understand that aspect.

        • rogrodre [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          21·
          3 months ago

          Just change the system bro, it’s so easy bro. Use the paid time off and strong public transit that I as a German assume everybody has and cast a vote for 99% hitler, as long as you live in one of the 10 states where your vote actually matters of course.

        • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          18·
          3 months ago

          Lol idfc about Twitter libs, they don’t exist materially. These people don’t show up at rallies or mutual aid, none of them are in orgs. If anyone wanna argue about the virtues of voting for a blue or red fascist they can show up and talk while we do real work, otherwise they deserve less than mockery

    • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      3 months ago

      Yeah dude you can totally change the system that’s why everything has just gotten worse every year for the past fucking forever, all the good changing the system we’re doing voting for the lesser evil. Keep up the good work

      eat shit you dumb motherfucker

        • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          10·
          3 months ago

          Voting gives away the only actual legal leverage you have (outside of donations, which AIPAC can outspend you on seeing the U.S. literally ships the money that gets funded right back to them).

          If you vote for them while they are actively in the middle of commiting a genocide, then you have exactly zero principles outside of 'Well I’ve got mine." Well done, you’ve reinvented libertarianism.