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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Literally from your link they quote him saying.

    …but it does not have the right to use US dollars to kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza.

    But Oh No he didn’t say the Magic Word to the press 2 months in when we still have 0 idea what internal discussions were happening. Can’t give the guy with probably the longest track record of being on the right side of pretty much every issue any benefit of the doubt. Especially not when he has before been very vocal about Palestinian rights. Couldn’t possibly be any good reason he didn’t use the Magic Purity Word.




  • My Sibling in Satan, how do you think making these demands work? This is an asymmetrical fight. Most of the time you won’t get a direct answer because the politicians are playing a different game. By and large they won’t commit to anything before the election that might alienate large sections of voters one way or the other.

    Electoral politics is about choosing your battlefield for the action to come. In a presidential election it is a mathematical fact that there are only two viable options. Yes, they’re both captured to varying degrees by capital. But you can get a sense of who is more likely to accept the things you want.

    There was 0 chance of the Republicans stopping what’s happening in Gaza for example. Clearly the chance was at least close to 0 with the Democrats but they were more vulnerable on that front and almost certainly they at least wouldn’t be trying to send pro-Palestinian activists to a gulag in El Salvador. So given this context which is the more advantageous battlefield you try to advocate on? There is a correct answer here and it’s the Democrats.

    Is it fair? Absolutely not. Are you running the risk of getting them elected and still not doing what you want? Yep. But a risk they won’t listen is objectively better than a guarantee the Republicans won’t listen. This is why electoral politics cannot be the only arena where we’re fighting, but it’s an arena we still have to fight on because it determines the battlefield other action takes place on.





  • Missed the entire point huh? If people not voting lowers the required counts to achieve a plurality, then mathematically speaking it is functionally equivalent to voting for the candidate furthest away from that non-voter’s preference.

    The only way a non-voter does not work in the favor of in this case Trump would be if there was some absolute share of eligible voters he had to reach. But since only a plurality is needed every non-vote and every third-party vote lowers the amount of votes he needs to achieve that plurality.

    This is literally a studied and documented mathematical phenomenon related to first past the post systems.



  • See the thing is that a candidate only needs a plurality of cast votes. So every vote that doesn’t get cast makes that plurality easier to achieve. If there are 100 people that can vote and all of them do you need 51 for a majority. If 10 of them don’t vote at all and there’s only 90 left you now only need 46 for that same majority. If another 10 of them vote for some third party that person now only needs 41 votes to have the largest plurality. Every person that doesn’t vote lowers the threshold for victory.

    It’s tempting to think that this benefits both remaining candidates equally since both can benefit from that lowered margin. But in reality it gets skewed based on who stayed home/voted third party and who didn’t. This is the spoiler effect.


  • Yes, we already covered Democrats Bad. I agree. I hate them with a passion. Doesn’t change that in a national electoral sense they are the only viable party at this moment to enact any kind of positive change. They are not and should never be the only option. But all people who talk like you do ever seem to offer as a solution is the “Glorious Revolution™” that hundreds of thousands if not millions of vulnerable people WILL die in because they never think about how those people are going to survive when food or medicine supply lines get disputed by fighting for the most fucking basic of examples.

    They engage in this rhetoric because it’s Magical Thinking that absolves them of having to do something they feel is icky and stains their ideological purity. It’ll all be fixed when the Oppressed finally throw off their chains and eat the rich or whatever.



  • Both MAGA and these so-called “allies” want me dead at the end of the day. We’re just expected to starve to death when Amerikkka collapses or the people finally rise up.

    I know full well how horrific what Israel is doing is. But there was no anti-genocide option on the ballot in 2024. There was no way that Jill Stein or whoever was going to get enough votes to win. Hell, most of Stein’s supporters I talked to their best case scenario was getting to 5% for debate access and federal funds next go round. Any that I confronted about Gaza not having 4 years just shrugged and said some variation of “better than voting for a genocide” How exactly? Because they didn’t have to sacrifice their ideological purity?