Democrats aren’t attacking Jill Stein because they think she is taking votes from Kamala Harris. No one I know who’s voting Green would consider a vote for Harris at this point. They’re attacking Jill Stein because they don’t want voters to know that there can be a worker-centered party to the left of the Democrats that supports popular policies like Medicare for All, a $25 wage and federally guaranteed housing.
There are 80+ million eligible voters who don’t vote at all because they don’t see the point. Democrats are okay with this, in fact, they don’t want any candidate to their left to appeal to those voters with popular policies.
The fact that the Green Party exists shows that the Democrats aren’t pushing the most progressive policies. Jill Stein’s candidacy shows that it’s possible to support reproductive justice AND be against funding and arming a genocide. That we can end homelessness if we stopped funding endless wars around the globe.
Democrats don’t want anyone to the left of them to exist because it’s the only way they can convince Americans that Dem policies are “the best that we can do”. To Dems, anything else is just “asking for a pony”.
Don’t fall for it. Despite Dem’s desire to have you think otherwise, things don’t have to be this way.
Another world is possible.
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if you at all believe in a free Palestine, you will take action to vote for Harris
How? Harris isn’t even allowing Palestinian Americans to speak. She isn’t even trying to appeal to them or acknowledge them.
I was idealistic when I was young too
Thanks for the compliment but my bad back calls bullshit on me being young.
How?
Because Trump is firmly aligned with Netanyahu and opposed to the existence of Palestine.
And Biden and Harris aren’t? Harris even parrots the lies about mass rape by Hamas and that Israel is defending itself.
No. Not like Trump. Not by a long shot.
Trump openly told Netanyahu to eradicate the Palestinians. Trump has empowered Israel over and over again. if anyone gained anything during Trump’s presidency it was Israel.
Trump openly told Netanyahu to eradicate the Palestinians. Trump has empowered Israel over and over again.
Exclusive: US has sent Israel thousands of 2,000-pound bombs since Oct. 7
Pay attention to the news, please. Biden sent Israel thousands of 2000-pound bombs, he is helping Israel eradicate Palestinians.
Try reading more than a headline.
That’s better than what Trump has done and will do. It sucks but it’s the best option for the people in the area.
No it isn’t. You can’t explain our situation to us, you have zero clue.
LLM bot??
It’s absolutely incredible that people think this is an actual sound argument.
I implore you, if you at all believe in a free Palestine, you will take action to vote for Harris.
Voting for a candidate who has vowed to continue a genocide will not, in fact, stop the genocide.
You have to work with the tools we have.
Bourgeois democracy will never willingly hand you the tools to dismantle itself. Nothing other than revolution will ever dismantle this system of genocide and working class oppression.
Agreed 100%. I reached voting age in 2008 and I was one of those “both sides suck” idealistic young voters who voted third party. I did again in 2012 and again in 2016 thinking “Hillary’s already got this one, I can protest vote”. Nope, we ended up with Trump. Ever since that I will only vote blue no matter who, at least as long as the Democrats are the only viable party with some sense of normalcy. Third parties are completely unviable in the US election system. We need ranked choice for a third party vote to not be a throwaway vote. Until that happens, we can’t afford to pick “the best choice”, we have to pick “the best choice that actually has a chance”. Even if it’s not really the best choice. Very happy to have gone out and voted early last week. We need the blue wave. Once the Republican party is thoroughly stomped into the ground and made completely unviable can we focus on a truly liberal third party, but honestly we probably have a better chance of slowly moving the Dems left than we do a third party taking over. It may not happen in my lifespan but I’d rather see progress than regression.
Once the Republican party is thoroughly stomped into the ground
Okay, so we agree. You should not vote Democrats if you don’t like the Republican party, on account of them thinking a strong Republican party is necessary, them inviting Republicans to join their campaign, and promising a Republican in their cabinet.
LLM bot?
Fearmongering is the imaginary fence which keeps all Democrats locked where they are.
Once the dam breaks and the Green party has a winning chance voters will flock to Greens in droves.
They are definitely trying to censor Jill to keep the Greens from reaching the critical mass needed to have a chance at winning.
Oh that’s possible, but I think the number of votes that she’s likely to get is so low that there are much better ways to try to win the election than worrying about her antics. But if Harris were to lose, it sure would be convenient to have someone to blame, and Stein’s an excellent scapegoat.
This is an interesting perspective that I haven’t thought of or considered.
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The only tool here is you bud.
Everyone the establishment doesn’t like is a Russian troll these days. Coincidence, or propaganda?
You don’t have the moral high ground you think you have. You can’t scare me with Russia when the US and many Western countries are guilty of enabling a genocide.
Here’s what the Financial Times wrote a year ago:
“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
“What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility,” the senior G7 diplomat added. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”
Just four weeks before the Hamas assault on Israel, leaders from the US, EU and western allies attended the G20 summit in New Delhi and asked developing nations to condemn Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian civilians in order to uphold respect for the UN charter and international law. Many of those officials told the Financial Times they have had the same argument read back at them in demands for condemnation of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, and of its decision to restrict water, electricity and gas supplies there.
source: https://www.ft.com/content/e0b43918-7eaf-4a11-baaf-d6d7fb61a8a5
archive: https://archive.is/TxkRb
Democrats aren’t attacking Jill Stein because they think she is taking votes from Kamala Harris.
This is an incredibly dumb take.
This election is about triage. If you want elections to not be triage, you need to fix the conditions that make it triage before the elections ever happen.
What triage means:
Lets say you see a massive car accident at an intersection that’s known to be dangerous, and you have a medical kit in your car. (You have a medical kit in your car, right?) You have some basic trauma first aid experience. You have two tourniquets, two chest seals, a few packs of QuikClot z-fold gauze, and a combat bandage, along with EMS shears and a rescue hook. There are four people that have serious injuries. The first is conscious, has had both legs severed above the knees, and is blood is spurting from the severed limbs. The second is also conscious, and has a massive laceration on their left arm; a fractured bone is protruding from the laceration, and they are bleeding profusely. The third is not conscious; they have lost an arm and blood is spurting from the severed limb, have a penetrating chest wound, have a massive and profusely bleeding laceration on a leg, and significant head trauma. They are breathing in short, erratic breaths. The fourth person is conscious, and has a clearly broken lower leg with a laceration; they’re holding on to the laceration, and blood is seeping out between their fingers.
What do you do? Who do you help, in what order?
The person with the severed legs gets the tourniquets; they will bleed to death in less than two minutes without them. The person with the compound fracture gets the z-fold gauze and the combat bandage; unless the brachial artery is severed, they don’t need a tourniquet. You ignore the person with the head injury; you can’t treat the head injury, and the erratic breathing is likely agonal breathing from the head trauma. Using a tourniquet on them means that you won’t be able to use a tourniquet on the first person, which–in turn–means the first person dies from blood loss. Regardless of anything you do or don’t do, the third person will likely die. The fourth person does not need immediate care; their blood loss is not significant enough to kill them before paramedics arrive.
Triage is recognizing that you can’t help the third person–even though they will very likely die before paramedics arrive–and that the fourth person can wait until you’ve helped the first and second people.
The best you can do is help two people while a third dies. If you walk away, three people die. If you treat the person with the head wound, three people die. If you worry about the broken leg first, then three people die while you’re trying to help the one person that didn’t need emergency trauma care. Maybe you’ve been advocating for years to fix the intersection, while the city council has ignored you; that does nothing to address the immediate needs of the people in front of you.
This is where we are. There is no vote you can cast that is going to save everyone. No matter who you vote for, the genocide in Gaza isn’t going to stop. Stein won’t win, so she can’t stop it. Trump will accelerate it. Harris appears to mostly take the side of Israel. But by focusing on that, you fail to act in a way that can prevent other harms.
Most people don’t like how we’ve gotten to where we are now. But this is where we are, and railing against the system now doesn’t do anything to help the people that need help.
Meanwhile, you hand a couple more rounds to the sniper that caused the accident in the first place, who is actively and intentionally causing more accidents.
Lets say you see a massive car accident at an intersection that’s known to be dangerous,
The cause was already contained within the exercise.
You can either do what you can to help people now–knowing that there’s nothing you can say or do at this moment that will help the people of Gaza–or you can insist that you can help them and, in so doing, fail to save anyone at all. It’s your choice.
That is what triage is.
I’m going to be okay either way. I’m white, male, middle-aged, cis-, het-, and can pass as Christian and conservative if necessary. I own a home outright, have no significant debts other than student loans, and have sufficient savings and investments that I can survive the next four years regardless of who wins the election. Your choice to fuck everyone else over in this election won’t directly hurt me. It will hurt a lot of my friends, and I’m certain that at least a percentage of the LGBTQ+ people I know will die or be killed, I have no doubt that some of the undocumented people I know will be deported to countries they haven’t lived in for 30+ years, and I’m sure that my non-white friends will see a sharp uptick in violence directed at them. Meanwhile, the people in Gaza will still be murdered by Israel, because Trump and Netanyahu are both fascists.
You will accomplish nothing except causing more harm.
Tell your non-white friends, your LGBTQ+ friends, you female friends, that you didn’t care enough about their rights and their safety to help them. Say it to their faces. Tell them that it was more important for you to send a message than it was to prevent them from being harmed.
Good luck. You’ll need it. Hopefully we still get to vote in two years, and in four years.
Oh, I can say it to my own face, I’m trans. But I’ve also told all my trans friends that I’m not voting for Kamala, and have no difficulty doing so. There isn’t a single person in the world I wouldn’t look dead in the eye and say it to.
Your analogy fails to the account for the fact that you’re strengthening the very people who put you in that situation in the first place, so it is not a valid analogy (among many other reasons). You “accounted” for the cause in saying that the city council “failed to fix” the problem. In reality, they intentionally caused the problem, and doing your “triage” empowers them to cause it to happen more and more, neither of which you accounted for at all.
Today, Palestinians are the ones being “triaged.” Tomorrow, it could very well be us. By your calculus, if the democrats decide to throw us under the bus because they see us as too much of an electoral liability, you will still happily accept them as the “lesser evil” and all the arguments you’re using now to support killing Gazans, you will deploy then to support killing us. “The Democrats just want to sacrifice trans people, the Republicans want to go after trans people and gay people and…” Don’t try to pretend you wouldn’t, unless you’re prepared to explain why your “triage” analogy wouldn’t apply there too.
An injury to one is an injury to all. If we don’t stand up for Palestinians, if we allow minorities to be picked off one by one, then we are doomed because there will be no one left to stand up for us.
Oh, I can say it to my own face, I’m trans.
Good luck, because you’re going to need it if Trump wins. Being trans is difficult in deep blue areas now, and it’s going to be a lot harder if Trump wins. The very few labor protections that you have now are likely to evaporate under a Republican gov’t. And perhaps you’re okay with this, but how many of your friends are willing to be your sacrifice? I saw exactly what happened to the black transwomen in my area under Trump, and it was… Bad.
An injury to one is an injury to all. If we don’t stand up for Palestinians, if we allow minorities to be picked off one by one, then we are doomed because there will be no one left to stand up for us.
Minorities will be picked off in this election, whether you stand up or not. You can save some–specifically the ones that are in this country–or you can save none. That’s the reality we live in. This is the reality unless and until you can build a coalition that can win elections on it’s own, because that’s politics. This has always been the reality; disadvantaged people need to build political power by courting the people that have political power; women needed to convince men in order to get the right to vote, non-white people needed to convince white people to pass the various civil rights acts. If you take a no-compromises position, you will always lose.
That’s the “crabs-in-a-bucket” approach. We will never get anywhere if we’re willing to sell each other out and tear each other down to get ahead or protect ourselves. I’m never going to sacrifice solidarity with the oppressed in the hopes that our oppressors will be merciful. If I were that much of a coward, I wouldn’t have transitioned in the first place.
You say I will always lose with this path, but you don’t know that. What I do know is that I will always lose following your path. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only thing that’s guaranteed to fail. Solidarity is the only viable strategy and the only one that makes any logical sense at all. As well as being the only moral position. You wanted to play that card of “look them in the face,” well I could never look a Palestinian in the face and explain why I’m selling them out just to save my own skin. They will level all their slings and arrows against us, but it is still better to stand against them together than to fracture and join them and fight against each other for a momentary respite until they inevitably turn on us.
Claiming that every victory every marginalized group has ever won was just handed down from above by appeasing the rich and powerful is absurd, ahistorical, and offensive.
Claiming that every victory every marginalized group has ever won
My dude. That’s the absolute truth. All the marches and riots in the world don’t win minority groups power unless they can get members of the majority group–members that have political power–to agree with them. You can talk about ‘human rights’ until you’re blue in the face, but rights only exist so long as they can be enforced. A powerless minority group can’t expect to enforce the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed to them, unless they have people with power that are willing to step up.
But again - by failing to be strategic, you will probably lose, and not just for yourself, but for everyone that’s even slightly marginalized.
I’m not going to discuss how I feel about you doubling down on “minority rights have always been handed down from above” because I don’t want to get banned, suffice to say I have no interest in discussing anything further with you.
Bernie Sanders was that candidate. He supports the election of Harris because he recognizes that it is necessary.
