Donald Trump is Genocide at home and abroad.

Joe Biden is "only" Genocide abroad, and probably less of it.

Therefore, a vote for Joe Biden is a Vote against genocide.

No, it doesn't matter that he's an active participant in the apparatus that's creating the genocide, because if he's in office there's less genocide. Which is the important part, and pretending otherwise is sophistry. If you abstain from voting, you are increasing the likelihood of more genocide and if you discourage others from voting, you are an active participant in the overall social apparatus that is probabilistically increasing the amount of genocide.

The utility calculation is dead simple: more votes for Biden in key states makes more genocide less likely, and discouraging people from voting for Biden makes more genocide more likely. Therefore, discouraging people from voting for Biden is a pro-genocide strategy and voting for Biden in battleground states is an anti-genocide strategy. You should vote for Biden unless you live in a solid blue state, and even then it's not a bad idea.

TLDR: if you encourage people to not vote for Biden, that's supporting genocide. Accelerationism never works for us.

I'm just to figure out why the Hexbear communities are even federated into some Lemmy instances. They are blatantly racist to users.

If you spend time with real boots-on-the-ground activism to support and prop up legitimate leftist candidates, policies, and parties in advance of election years, then yeah fine I'll accept your righteous abstaining from voting the general election.

But if your "protest" begins and ends with choosing to not vote the lesser of two evils while you're not doing anything to actually upend the system, fuck you. Your ideological purity is causing real world harm while you pout and expect some other magical force to swoop in and save you.

Nobody is coming to save you.

Nobody.

Either put in the fucking work and put in the real effort to change things, or fall in line. As is, you're just in everyone's way.

Ultimately the problem is Biden choices on Palestine are reprehensible. He doesn't "deserve" to be president again on that alone. If he was running against someone like mitt Romney , he would be in deep shit, and this discussion would be a total nebulous cloud. (Edit I'm not pro mitt, I'm saying Biden only has a chance because trump is insane.)

Unfortunately, no new candidates are available for this upcoming election.

Trump has made clear his behavior on topics like Palestine, and there are strong inferences to be made.on his potential actions on Ukraine. This is corroborated by government leaders and experts who are already defensively preparing for trump to come fuck their shit up. So that's foreign policy.

Domestically, Biden is not as egregious a troublemaker. There are SERIOUS issues happening today in America, for which a Biden whitehouse should be doing more. But I think we can agree that trump has both demonstrated in the past, and spoken clearly in the future about the ways he would shift domestic issues for the worse.

So how one votes in the primary is fine, but come the general election, I have not been convinced how abstaining or voting for trump is an appropriate action.

Trump is either as bad, or worse on every topic of significance, and I personally believe America will be drastically worse off with him as president...both domestically and abroad.

Lastly, depending on where you live, abstaining from voting in the general can be very impactful, and may even assist a trump election. It is deeply unsatisfying voting for someone you dislike, with the sole purpose of avoiding someone you hate, but it must be acknowledged.

There was an entertaining little exchange here.

Someone misunderstood math and claimed that more people voted "uncommitted" than had voted for Biden in "last year's" election.

Someone else explained the misunderstanding, and the real explanation (that the "uncommitted" number was higher than Biden's margin over Trump, not Biden's total).

The mod of the liberty place replied "This is a false statement and reeks of debatebro. Please remove this from your comment."

I'll let the rest speak for itself; exactly what you think happened happened.

Lmao, I had a chat with a couple of these folks. Keep taunting them and burying them when they step out of their echo chambers. The whole "both sides" and "I'm gonna piss away my vote on a 3rd party in 2 party system" schtick couldn't be any more hollow than it is this year.

Biden sucks. Trump is a blight on this earth. Like it or not, you get those two choices, and the literal fuckin Nazis and the scum that break bread with them are really motivated to get their dictator "for a day" back in.

The sudden “don’t vote biden” push has always felt like astroturf to me. “Divide the opposition” is literally politics 101, but I guess some people really think doing nothing is going to somehow do something.

Oh, and voting third party counts as not voting. You know that, you’re not fucking stupid.

(based on my observations) Hexbear users' typical response is absolutely authoritarian, just extreme left flavor of it.

You can't, however, build a reasonable discourse with an absolutist pro-authoritarian type, no matter how hard you try. And it's no wonder they are going for the authoritarian representative one way or another.

The system in the US necessitates one cast their vote tactically instead of emotionally to effect necessary change, and most of these changes bear out only in the long term by design. Because of this, capital interest toils to encourage voters into precisely the opposite behavior; a populace which is driven to make voting decisions by an atomic, emotionally-charged view of a singular candidate's actions, as opposed to a contextual view of the broader system which enables such actions to begin with, is a populace which is much easier to fragment—and much easier to control.

Meaningful change requires a path to follow, but results by a reformist method alone come painfully slow—again, by the system's very design. It's more comfortable to believe that rallying behind a third party advocating radical change is the better way, but power has been consolidated so heavily into the largest two parties that the effectiveness of any others (outside of very specific circumstances) is gutted almost entirely. It has been this way especially since the campaign finance mal-reforms that followed the Bush v Gore race. Abstaining from participation or jumping to a niche cause in protest of atrocities that are occurring now is an understandable sentiment, but in a system tuned to overlook and perpetuate said atrocities it's missing the bigger picture.

Try not to look at your vote as a wholesale endorsement; look at it instead as a carefully-considered stake in the ultimate goal to tear down the walls which have kept third parties unfairly irrelevant for decades—centuries, arguably. Stake it with the goal of working to reform or abolish unjust systems. Stake it with the goal of laying the groundwork for more radical progressive change in the future.

Despite all I've attempted to lay out, if you insist on voting third party anyways, I urge you to find someone to vote for and make that your movement to stand in contrast against reprehensible genocide-enabling. The time for such a nomination is long overdue, and as it stands a candidate does not seem to currently exist in a way capable of capturing the majority of Americans' votes—especially in time for election day. This means a lot of work needs to be done if that's your ultimatum to the current situation, I encourage you to start as soon as you are able. Please understand that the third party route is not only victory or bust, but a bust means the genocide gets considerably and immediately worse if you rally too many to your cause who would have cast their vote for Biden otherwise. This outcome has an extremely well-established historical precedent in the United States, having happened multiple times in elections past, and will continue to be a concern unless/until vote tally reforms are adopted. Such are the considerations in US electoral tactics.