All good. I am chuffed that you were good-natured about it.

Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

I had not anticipated “Oh shit that’s a good point I should apply for a job with McKinsey” to be a takeaway that anyone would have to this post, let alone the assumed main takeaway from it.

I had this exact same question and it led to me starting !inperson@slrpnk.net / !inperson@slrpnk.net as an attempt at a solution. It’s already pointed me to a few good ones.

There are also some pretty fantastic ideas in this thread, which I plan to post as new threads there.

:-D

I expected Biden to be pretty bad, just because he’s a rich white guy who’s been in politics all his life and the Democrats are usually pretty bad. I voted for him originally mainly just because he wouldn’t try to kill all the Mexicans or re-invade Vietnam or put trans people in prison or whatever like Trump would, basically your point of view in this message.

He surprised me. I couldn’t see Hilary Clinton forgiving student loan debt or pausing LNG exports or making these pitifully small sanctions on a pitifully small number of Israelis which is still better than most US presidents’ “here’s some more patriot missiles and rockets God bless your killing” approach to Israel. He’s still pretty far from what I would like to have, but I expected pure bullshit and he’s better than average. You’re not required to agree, but that’s how I see it.

Fun stuff.

Yes, Trump will absolutely threaten trans people’s safety in addition to being far more encouraging than Biden is with massacring Arabs. That’s not “using as a shield,” that’s just what’s up. Of course you already know this.

What if Bernie Sanders might get elected in the primary, but I decide there’s an element of his platform that I don’t like, and I stay home in protest instead of voting, and Biden wins the primary instead? Am I, then, a selfish piece of shit?

I feel like I just asked you this: Are you under the impression that I somehow have the ability to choose who wins the primaries?

I have one vote and you have one vote. My ability to affect the primaries is equal to yours. There are systems of media that conspire to make it tough for a person other than pro-corporate trash to win the primaries, but why are you talking to me like that’s my fault? And why are you saying that if the wrong person wins, then staying home to put in office an even worse person is going to help solve the problem?

I appreciate it. You are welcome to reuse it, if you like it. I’m just pissed off at the absolute self-defeating absurdity of these arguments and how self-righteously these people are screeching them. Welcome to the internet, I guess.

Stop electing pro-corporate trash in the primaries.

Are you under the impression that somehow I have the ability to elect different people in the primaries, and I’m just choosing not to?

The motive is unclear

Not to me it isn’t.

I agree with a lot of this, yes. DC is a very weird place and most of our politicians are old as hell. I think a lot of them remember the lessons of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter a lot more clearly than they remember the lessons of Bernie Sanders. Plus, a lot of them are corrupted by the lure of corporate cash, and they turned their backs on the American people. It’s a hell of a shame. I agree.

Letting Trump get elected and pour gasoline all over the whole edifice and throw anyone who’s left of Ronald Reagan in a detention center won’t help any of that. That example of how much damage Trump was able to do to abortion rights and immigration because people couldn’t stand to vote for Hilary Clinton, just because she was objectively awful, is pretty illustrative of the calculus that should go into this election.

This logic of “the building we all live in needs major repairs and has for years, so there’s no need to put out the fire in the attic until we can address that” winds me up, yes. That’s absolutely true.

I know! He came into office with strong sanctions being applied to Israel for their massacre policies, a decades-long established ban on the construction of new settlements, and an agreement which was undoing illegally constructed settlements and resettling Palestinian families back into their homes. Biden broke with all of that, gave Netanyahu a green light to start their apartheid policies again, and personally visited the West Bank and shot a few Gazans himself with a sniper rifle, just to emphasize the point.

In contrast, Trump is famous for protecting the rights of Arabs. Just like he is Hispanics and Chinese people. Why, the strong protections that all Palestinians enjoyed were partly his doing. They were part of the Iran / Muslim immigrant / asylum seeker reforms he enacted. Although, the main work was started by other Western politicians. I can’t wait for Trump to get elected, and undo all the harm Biden’s been doing, and finally set us on the road to lasting peace in the Middle East, and a world where the rights of vulnerable non-white people will finally be strongly protected in the halls of power.

Or…

Whoa, can I do that too? I’m just going to just start saying out of nowhere that the other person proved that I’m right, whenever I’m promoting a dogshit line of reasoning and someone asks questions I don’t want to answer.

Can I have your phone number to give to the loved ones of anyone who dies in a Trump-promoted genocide, or gets imprisoned within the US for the crime of being trans, or whatever he does? You can talk to that person about how you’re tending to yourself and your chosen community.

You’re like the partner who, when their partner is in a fight, keeps grabbing their arm and saying STOP STOP STOP FIGHTING IS WRONG and ensuring that they’ll get the shit kicked out of them.

Biden’s fighting against the Republicans in Texas to improve our immigration policy, and it’s not to your liking how he’s doing it or how effective he’s being, so you’re going to give things over to the Republicans instead. Even if that means, yes, literal land mines and concentrations camps, or no election at all in 2028.

If it was just you being victimized by your dogshit logic, I wouldn’t care, but I have to live in this country too.

I am saying that there’s very serious material harm done to the country because of Donald Trump’s first term, which for as horrible as she was, wouldn’t have happened or anywhere close to, if it had been Hilary Clinton. Abortion and immigration are two very clear demonstrations, yes.

You’re blaming the harm that he did on the Democrats somehow, and then threatening to do the exact same thing to Biden that, when it happened to Clinton, opened the door for him to do it in the first place. And this time, the harm he does will be infinitely worse.

2016: “I can’t vote for Hilary Clinton. You must be joking.”

2024: “Look at how must worse the democrats have gotten on immigration and abortion. What significant thing could have happened in the last few years that might have changed the landscape so significantly?”

!inperson@slrpnk.net might be a good place to start.

I have no idea how you somehow got the impression that I posted this to complain about Biden. But yes, voting and advocating for better candidates in the future is incredibly important. We got into this mess because of the wrong people winning power, but we still have quite a few tools to get better people in power, it’s just not easy or automatic.

Your impression is that Biden and Trump are roughly equivalent, in terms of their friendship to state corruption?

Or you hate state corruption, but not enough that you’d be willing to vote for the clearly less corrupt of two candidates, even if it had about 10 other major implications in terms of press freedom, your personal safety, geopolitical stability…

Seems like you just did. I haven’t seen any Trump-induced shortage of people protesting her reprehensible stance on Gaza, either.