this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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I'd argue a worse genocide.
Dems were stuck on "but but Israel is an ally" and tried to gently suggest that they stop. But Biden did take some action. The US even built a port to send in aid. Now obviously we had the power to stop sending Israel money and supporting them. That's where they failed.
Trump however just said good work and keep it up. He's encouraged Israel to go faster and joked about how great the strip will be once it's freely developed real estate.
So yeah, one of these is clearly a worse option
Following USA politics as an outsider, this has baffled me greatly the past year and more. Is harm reduction really such a difficult concept? It's like that damn bus scenario, just with only bad options.
Something like: There's five people on the bus, and the brakes stop working, so they vote for what they should do. Two say they should drive off a cliff, and one says they should just swerve and crash into the nearby ditch. Two people don't vote because they want neither. The bus drives off the cliff and everyone dies
Here's another hypothetical for you. Two people are given $100 to split, one person makes the offer on how to split it, and the other chooses to accept or decline. If they decline, nobody gets anything.
Rationally, the way this plays out is that the first person offers a $99-$1 split, and the other person accepts, because $1>$0. But when researchers have actually run this experiment, they've found that people tend to reject offers below $30-$40, and people tend to make offers accounting for that. Somehow, the "irrational" behavior results in a more optimal outcome.
Once upon a time, in the New Deal era, Democrats offered something closer to $30-$40. But somewhere along the line, people started employing this "lesser evil" nonsense, and the offers got worse and worse. Now, we're past the point where they even offer us $1. Now they offer us "We'll still commit genocide, but slightly less."
I'm completely baffled by how anyone can still be committed to this clearly failed and irrational strategy of "lesser evilism." Even if you personally think it's the right move, surely you must at least understand that this isn't how other people are going to behave.
If what you're seeing doesn't make sense, maybe the problem is in your interpretation?
It sounds like you see R promising "bad thing" and D promising "less-bad thing, but we will move right next time" and so you want to just give up because both options are bad.
But I think this involves viewing the parties as monolithic entities that you have no control over (as seen in "the Democratic Part Elite kept out Bernie") when they're actually just composed of people. An important factor is that the American people on average are much more conservative/authoritarian/pro-corporation than typical Europeans. Somewhat by history, somewhat by US-sourced indoctrination, somewhat by foreign-sourced indoctrination.
When I see real-life progressives, they're always taking the most-progressive available action of the moment. In the moment of a US presidential election in a swing state, that most-progressive action may be voting for the slightly-less-bad candidate. But voting for a candidate doesn't tie them to that candidate's policies and they can spend the majority of their time and effort focused on progress.
When I see online progressives(?), they're primarily concerned with giving up: tearing down other progressives' efforts because they're not progressive enough but not offering an alternative. The result of this, intended or not, is a populous who doesn't offer resistance to authoritarianism and probably welcomes it in the end.
There's nothing "progressive" about supporting genocide.
From the moment I reached the age of reason, I was outraged at the pointless wars of aggression being waged in the Middle East, wars that were supported by the vast majority of the Democratic party. Even when we got a supposedly "progressive" president, Obama, he doubled down on the killing and bloodshed. For twenty years I have been told this lesser evilist nonsense, as the bodies piled higher and higher. Then, almost as soon as the bipartisan forever wars came to a close, they merely shifted focus to killing other Middle Easterners in Palestine through the proxy of Israel, at an even greater intensity than before. Twenty years of patiently waiting, twenty years of no progress being made whatsoever, twenty years of killing for no benefit to anyone but arms manufactures and oil companies, twenty years of Americans never getting a real chance to vote on whether it should continue because both parties supported it, and you have the audacity to call yourself a progressive, and to attack me as not a real progressive, when you're the one that's perfectly fine with that?
Well your system clearly is completely fucked up, no denying that, you know and can clearly word it out waaayy better than some random internet person like I do. But the bus is still headed off the cliff, so what is the counter plan?
The bus was headed off a cliff regardless of who got elected.
There is no easy fix and no strategy that's actually likely to work. What we need is an actual left-wing party. We can either try to push the Democrats in that direction, which fundamentally requires holding them to some basic standard and disciplining them when they fail to live up to it, or we can form a new party from the ground up. Both of those strategies are furthered by voting third party. Of course, there are also strategies that don't rely on electoralism, such as a general strike, but this is also furthered by supporting a third party like PSL which engages in and promotes direct action.
You're fucking up your own metaphor now because the Dems would have been the ditch crash which is better than the total destruction of driving off the cliff. But it doesn't matter what anyone says you'll just both sides it.
Let me try again: Two people are running for the leadership position. The other one says they won't punch you, but you know they probably will. The other one says he'll shoot you and your whole family. You won't vote against the shooter because the puncher is bad and unreliable as well, so now you and your family get shot.
That demented clown was pretty openly saying he'll turn USA into fascist dictatorship if he's elected, and now he's doing it and apparently speedrunning towards ww3 because he didn't get the nobel peace price or some insane shit. And I still see people online arguing that voting against him didn't matter?
That's not the situation. One says that he'll shoot me and my whole family, the other says she'll shoot me and my whole family with a rainbow painted gun.
Frankly, I think every president since at least Bush has been a fascist dictator. Everything that Trump is able to do now is because of the massive expansion of executive power and the massive curtailing of civil rights that happened after 9/11 with full bipartisan support, and the democratic presidents since then have done nothing to rein in or revoke those powers.
Meanwhile, economic conditions have gotten worse and worse, leading to a rise in political extremism, which has no outlet except for the right. Maintaining the status quo is suicide, it guarantees that we will continue sliding into fascism.
The only option is to push for an alternative, no matter how desperate it is. Every political movement starts somewhere.
But you could have bought four more bad status quo years to build that political movement! Now you don't have even that, people there are getting murdered and dragged into concentration camps more and more openly since even us randos overseas are hearing about it, and you might never get to vote again
You mean that we could've stalled efforts to build a political movement until the situation was even worse.
The choice to vote Democrat is also a choice not to vote PSL. If it cost nothing, then I would've done it, give me ranked choice voting and I will put the Democrats above the Republicans. But I consider it more important to support people who would actually fix the situation if they got power.
Who was George Floyd?
Who built the camps?
All things being equal, it is better that they do it openly and that more people are aware of it.
This is nonsense. The US Presidential Election is the most popular reality TV show of all time.
Do you know history, have you read the stories of people living under true dictatorships? I truly hope I'm wrong, but even if it's been bad there so far, now you might be in for a ride
Yes. I'm also aware that virtually every country on earth has elections, including undemocratic ones. Our elections have been more about spectacle and entertainment since well before Trump. They're also a very useful tool. If you asked a person in a vacuum whether they support genocide, or any of the other awful stuff our politicians get up to, they'd say no. But once you introduce team sports into it, once you get everybody to make a choice, now they feel like they have to defend that choice and justify the horrible things their team does. And so at all times, about a third of the population become active advocates for the ruling class, justifying and explaining everything that they do. Because if I criticize the president, I'm also criticizing their decision to vote for that president, and how about I fuck off with that, bub?
It's all just fear mongering and performatively demonstrating how much faith you have in electoralism. And it's stupid because when the elections do happen, you'll have discredited yourself, looking like the boy who cried wolf. I don't think there's any way I'm going to break through this nonsense so we'll just have to wait a bit until I'm proven right, by which point of course everyone will have moved on to something else and won't care.
And the whole thing is especially stupid, because there are literally wolves right there! How about we focus on the tyranny and oppression that's actually, already happening? On the masked fascist thugs raiding workplaces and dragging people away to secret torture dungeons? Is that not bad enough that you need to conjure up some unlikely, imagined scenario to fret over? I stg.
And the wholesale destruction of USAID and PEPFAR means people are simultaneously starving to death in chunks of the world, not getting vaccines, and also not getting HIV prevention meds, which means long term, HIV infection is going to increase worldwide over time. That is going to be a massive, silent genocide that will be orders of magnitude worse, but largely undocumented.
That was a serious, serious fuckup on voters parts. Not to mention massive cuts to everyday things like critical medical R&D, science R&D, disaster preparedness, NASA, department of education, PBS and Corp for public broadcasting, department of health, FDA + food safety programs, and many other programs that people take for granted without thinking (housing grants for home buying, federal student loans, food stamps, weather prediction for natural disasters, Medicare/ACA/Medicaid, etc)
His cuts to the IRS are going to result in less money for shit like bridges, roads, and electrical grids too.
Doesn't matter.
The people who voted 3rd party or didn't vote because they were mad about Israel only ever cared about their own personal feelings. If they actually gave a shit about Palestine, they would have made the decision that hurt them the least. That's not what they did.
It was all about their own satisfaction.
Sounds like these disgruntled non-voters hold the real key to American political power as they apparently hold sway over who wins and looses these general elections. Maybe the Dems should be more left-wing so that they can coax them back so we can win again.
Nah they weren’t going to vote anyway. Probably don’t know how.
What are you smoking! Trump forced ceasefires purely for optics reasons and trying to get a Nobel peace prize, but has demonstrated that the US president could have reigned in Israel at any time if they wanted. And even though the aid is still being restricted and Israel is still killing, despite the "ceasefire", it is still literally less than if the ceasefire didn't happen. Israel is literally the only issue that Trump comes out on top on. So quit using that as an example, since that is the only way Trump is better despite being terrible. It is the perfect example of Trump being a terrible fascist, but the Democrats made sure the bar was on the floor!