Here’s the thing. I’m trans. On our own, we represent a tiny sliver of the voting public, not worth considering from a strategic standpoint. But there are plenty of other groups of people in the same boat. Together, we are worth considering - but only together. “What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?” If we try to build a coalition in which we abandon any group that the democratic politicians deem too much of a liability to be worth protecting, that is no coalition at all, and I well understand that after Palestinians, I will be next. The very same logic that these people were willing to deploy against them can and will be deployed to justify abandoning me and mine.

What advantage do I gain from joining together in a “coalition” in “solidarity” with these fair-weather friends who will drop us at the first sign of trouble? Honestly, they are more of a liability than an asset, because if I’m buddying up with them, it damages my credibility among potentially more reliable people who have good reason not to trust them. I would rather do it the right way and build trust even if it means building from the ground up.

I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but these disagreements are meaningful and important. This election may be over, but the question remains of what the appropriate strategy is going forward, whether to build a coalition that will treat an offense against one as an offense against all, and ensure that anyone who comes for any part of it is unelectable, or whether to “vote blue no matter who” as we are picked off one-by-one, in exchange for temporary, short term security for some.

I voted for PSL, personally.

The funniest thing about is like, I live in fucking Illinois. And I voted for the Dems downballot where it actually matters. All the words spilled, all the hate and anger that’s been directed at me, has been over a single third party vote in one of the safest states in the country. The vast majority of Americans live in safe states too.

In reality it’s just about enforcing the social norms of the tribe.

If I have a choice between bad and worse, I’m taking bad, what kind of lunatic would intentionally choose worse?

The vast majority of people would choose worse, at least in some situations.

Philosopher Bernard Williams proposed this thought experiment: suppose someone has rounded up a group of 20 innocent people, and says that he will kill all of them, unless you agree to kill one, in which case he’ll let the rest go. Act Utilitarianism would suggest that it is not only morally permissible, but morally obligatory to comply, which Williams saw as absurd. As an addendum, suppose the person then orders you to round up another 20 people so he can repeat the experiment with someone else, and if you don’t, he’ll have his men kill 40 instead. Congratulations, your “lesser-evilist” ideology now has you working for a psychopath and recruiting more people to work for him too.

Even the trolley problem, which liberals love to trot out to justify their positions, is not nearly as clear cut as they try to pretend it is. A follow up to the trolley problem is, is it ethical to kill an innocent person in order to harvest their organs in order to give five people lifesaving transplants? The overwhelming majority of people say no.

Act Utilitarianism is something that seems intuitive at first glance, but is very difficult to actually defend under scrutiny, and there are many, many alternative moral frameworks that reject its assumptions and conclusions. Liberals don’t seem to realize that this framework they treat as absolute and objective - that you would have to be a “lunatic” to reject - is actually a specific ideology, and one that’s not particularly popular or robust.

Oh, don’t worry, the conspiracy theory is capable of making sense of any incongruities like that, just like OP can explain away the fact that we didn’t actually disappear as predicted. You see, this is where the Russian bots practice their techniques and try out different lines before deploying them on a larger scale.

It’s not based on evidence or reason so the believers will never be convinced based on evidence or reason, same as any other conspiracy theory.

I don’t care about solidarity anymore

Never did. Solidarity means you aren’t willing to sacrifice marginalized groups to get ahead or save your own skin. If you accept sacrificing Palestinians, you’d accept sacrificing any other group by the exact same “lesser-evilist” logic. What value does that kind of “solidarity” have?

Yes. This but unironically.

Tell me, throughout history, how often have atrocities, mass slaughter, and genocide been claimed at the time to be justified on the basis of self-preservation? Say, “securing a future for our white children,” for example. Out of those, how many times have the people saying, “better them than us” actually been on the right side of history?

It blows my mind how genuinely prone to evil Americans are, as a culture. There are people who have actually experienced the horrors of war, watched their houses burned down, watched their loved ones die, who still refuse to turn to something as evil as genocide as a solution. But liberals sitting comfortably on their couches worried that they might have to deal with a shitty politician for the next four years will immediately jump on board with being Hitlerites if it means they can go back to brunch instead of doomscrolling. Like, y’all don’t even consider Trump bad enough to actually start opposing the US government and treating it as an enemy. I can only imagine what horrors and atrocities you’d resort to if you were ever actually faced with bombs dropping outside your homes.

I’ll go to my grave before I vote for genocide, and nothing anyone says or does will ever make me budge, and you’d best remember that because if you wanna blame me for Kamala losing, know that I’ll fucking do it again.

I’m also a realist, and know that biden bragging about hindering bibi wouldn’t have helped anything.

Yeah? How about not unconditionally sending Bibi a bunch of weapons and money that he used to commit genocide, you think that might have helped anything?

both sides want to fight for their invisible friends more

Ah, of course, the height of liberal analysis of the situation. I’m sure Israel being a settler-colonizer apartheid ethnostate making shit tons of money through exploitation and keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of helplessness, poverty, and oppression has nothing whatsoever with why the Palestinians are fighting them, no, it’s all because those backwards savages aren’t as smart and rational as you are.

This is what happens when you perform absolutely zero material analysis of anything. You’re completely oblivious and ignorant of both what’s happening and why.

Nothing clownish about me acknowledging the objective reality of an active genocide which you deny being conducted by the “people” you support.

Which one??

60% of the buildings in Gaza have already been destroyed, with Biden’s unconditional support. Stop doing genocide denial and pretending that your preferred psychopaths aren’t bathing themselves in the blood of Palestinian children every night.

I thought you blocked me, lol.

I hope one day you get to directly experience the things you vote for.

If “growing up” entails supporting genocide, then rest assured that I will never “grow up.”

God, I hope so.

If our reach is wide enough that the democrats lost because of us, then it means they have no choice but to win us over if they want to win.

I fully understand why you see it that way. To you, Palestinians do not register as human beings, and so from your perspective I’m throwing a fit because my parents won’t rescue a puppy, or perhaps buy me a new doll. Only through the complete othering and dehumanization of foreigners is it possible for you to describe opposition to genocide as a “personal sensibility” or my “exact desires” or compare it to throwing a fit because I don’t get ice cream. You people are constantly telling on yourself that you do not recognize people born on the other side of an imaginary line with the wrong skin color as human beings. You don’t see it as being about them, rather you think this is all about my feelings, about “oh no I saw something on TV that made me feel sad, somebody do something about my feelings,” because you are unable to recognize them as human, and that is how you are able to absurdly call it “selfish” and “egotistical” for me to care about them.

If it’s truely the case that my only option within the system is to vote in favor of genocide, then yes, obviously, “burning down the grocery store” would be an extremely reasonable and proportionate response to that situation, you know, like, if the grocery store was actively butchering up human beings and serving their meat in the deli aisle. But since these people have the same moral worth to you as animals, that’s why to you it seems like burning down a grocery store just because they serve beef.

What’s incredible about this though is that you have the audacity and lack of self awareness to describe my position as the privileged one. As if you don’t get to live your whole life safely behind the walls of the garden, beyond which people are getting massacred in your name, but which you have the ability to simply ignore and shut out, out of sight and out of mind. You and I have the privilege of being born in a first world country, but I have my perspective precisely because I have had the misfortune of getting a glimpse of what things are like beyond that wall, and recognizing from that that the status quo cannot continue.

Whether for good or ill and whether sooner or later, the wall is coming down. Someday you’ll get a taste of the horrors beyond, of your own medicine that you’ve been dishing out, and the karma of your actions will find it’s way back home to you.

Because Gaza’s been doing so well right now.

Behind door #1: Isn’t as one-sided as you regarding a war in another country that involves your religion.

They’re way more one-sided about the “war” (genocide) than I imagine the vast majority of Muslim and pro-Palestinian voters are, just in the wrong direction. What part of unconditionally supplying weapons to a country that is indiscriminately slaughtering civilians is “not one sided,” oh “rational_lib?”

What a fascinating standard.

I’m curious, does this mean that you would consider China to be absolved of responsibility for arming Pol Pot, who used their weapons to murder millions of innocent people, on the basis that they never expressly told him to do it, and “merely” kept arming him while it was clear that that was what he was doing? Because I’m pretty sure that kind of apologia would catch you a ban even in the tankiest of tankie spaces, and rightly so. But switch out China and Pol Pot for the US and Netanyahu, and dronies consider not taking that position to be “misinformation.”

Why are americans so fuckin dumb? Instead of pointing their fingers at millions of trump voters, they are pointing it at people with empathy for having anti-genocider stance.

It’s because of do-gooder derogotation, and generally not caring about winning or learning from mistakes so long as they can save face and protect their egos.

Do-gooder derogation is a phenomenon where a person’s morally motivated behavior leads to them being perceived negatively by others.

One possible reason for do-gooder derogation is ‘anticipated moral reproach’. This describes a threat to one’s moral standing and to their sense of self-worth.

Research suggests that since people are highly sensitive to any criticism or challenge to their morals, they are more likely to put down the source of this ‘threat’.

What restrictions?