Support from some Pennsylvania Muslim leaders for Josh Shapiro has revealed rifts within the community and highlighted Muslim and Arab-American voters’ desire to center Palestinian rights this election.
I mean at this point Shapiro isn’t even a presumptive nominee, he’s just one of the possible candidates. I think the only reason he’s even being considered is because he might bring in some extra votes in a large swing State.
It’s odd to me that so many Arab voters are leaning towards Stein. As much as we hate it, this is still a two-party nation, and in an election where the votes might be close why would you take any chances in basically throwing away your vote? Personally I would still cast my ballot for the candidate who hasn’t directly threatened my family. Then again polls are not ballots, and as we get closer to November a lot of people’s opinions could still change.
True enough, but how you are going to convince enough people to change a lifetime of voting habits? I mean I voted 3rd-party in 2016 because it literally doesn’t matter in my district – we vote more than 80% Democrat so a few people changing their vote wasn’t going to matter. However after losing in 2016 to that shitstain I’m simply not willing to take that chance again. I know my one vote still wouldn’t make a difference, but for me the principle this time is voting directly against Trump by voting Dem. And hoping that Conservatives finally realize Trump isn’t a “radical change”, he is just outright insane and doesn’t give a rats ass about anyone who is worth less than tens of millions of dollars, and that the next election provides candidates who aren’t treating people’s lives like a stupid reality show.
If only people would take the Arabs as example and start endorsing a third party instead of pushing back on it. Somewhere a line must be drawn. If not here where?
Sure, lines must be drawn. The problem is that one of the candidates is openly friendly with white-supremists and likes to encourage them to take action without getting his own hands dirty. If this election opens the doors for openly killing anyone of color (you know, even more so than it is now), then we’re really taking a big step backwards and have no hope at all of pressuring our government to start making things right in other countries too. From my perspective, both parties are going to continue this genocide in Pakistan for as long as they can, and if we open the doors to domestic terrorism then none of us have any hope of trying to encourage foreign policy changes.
What’s your solution for the problem? Voting for someone who doesn’t have any chance of getting elected? Or would you rather vote for Trump, who is encouraging complete annihilation of the Gaza strip by Israel to end the conflict overnight, while also vowing to end all support for Ukraine and back Russia in a second genocide? Personally I’m going to cast my vote for a candidate who can prevent Trump from getting back in office again, where there might be a slight chance of pressuring some change in Israeli policy. Unless you can somehow convince 300million Americans to vote 3rd party in the next three months, no other choice has any possibility of helping anyone, and fewer votes against Trump risks a much larger number of people being killed directly by US policy.
Where do YOU draw the line when there’s no way to win no matter how you vote? I draw the line at trying to reduce the number of casualties first through my vote, and then seeing if there’s any way to move forward to make things better.
The only thing that matters this election is how many votes Harris gets vs. how many votes Trump gets. You either vote for Harris or against Harris. It’s a sucky reality, but it is reality.
Sorry, not voting for your genocider-of-choice. She can still win over other Arabs and Muslims IF she chooses her VP wisely. She lost me a long time ago.
So you’re a Trump supporter. We know you’re out there, so nothing shocking. The question is whether you can legally vote at all and whether that will stop you.
You’re so right homie, Arab Americans just need to suck it up and vote for genocide and 99% fascism, or else it’ll be entirely their fault when we end up with genocide and 100% fascism. They wouldn’t want that on their conscience, would they? So true!
It’s worth considering that maybe Arab and Muslim voters aren’t stupid and they have a point. If we assume that both parties really want to win (and with Dems that is definitely an if), then the worst thing you can do to persuade them to listen to you is to vow to vote for them unconditionally. If the constituency keeps approving a genocide and the genocide remains profitable, why ever would the Dems offer an anti-genocide candidate? Conversely, if hardline opposition to the genocide loses the Dems an election, suddenly next time around their pro-genocide ghouls aren’t “electable” and they need to actually pick someone who will give the people some of what they want, almost like there’s a popular mandate or something!
All of this is giving a thousand times more credence to liberal democracy in general and America’s in particular than I actually have, but there are many ways of thinking beyond “Well, what are you going to do about the two party monopoly?”, most of which involve thinking past a single election cycle.
Oh I don’t fault anyone for trying to make a point. My biggest concern is what’s on the line for this election. When you have half of America being stupid enough to think that voting for Trump somehow gives them more freedom, when in fact he already has a history of taking away the rights of over half the population and documented plans to do even more damage, something is seriously wrong. We simply can’t afford to give him another term in charge. The only way we’ll ever change the system is by demanding some sort of ranked-choice voting where our votes actually count for something, and fortunately there are already efforts underway to bring that in to several states.
People like to be alarmist about Trump, and he was certainly doing bad things in office, but he was in no way a uniquely bad president, and all the bad things he did were continued or even expanded by Biden. There simply is no basis for this totalizing narrative about how the country will end if the Dems lose the election. It’s given every damn election and it’s never true, it’s just a psychological abuse tactic to convince you not to evaluate this rationally. Try to step back and consider, do you really think the next Republican frontrunner will be less fascist than Trump? Because Trump is okay with fascists, but he is not committed to the ideology or strategy of fascism in any way. If you give in to the Dems fearmongering, they will never stop using it. I don’t think I will convince you here, but I want you to seriously make note of the alarmist stance you’re taking and, if Trump wins, reflect in 2028 on how you were wrong and the country kept going.
Furthermore, I’m not claiming Arab and Muslim voters are withholding their votes “to make a point”; I am saying, from a liberal democratic perspective, they are doing the only rational thing to create change by establishing bargaining power, something that is impossible if you support the Dems unconditionally.
Ranked choice voting does, on paper, have the ability to create a basis for fixing the system, and that’s exactly why it will never be allowed through. Why would the rich and powerful allow their domination to be voted away? It’s absurd. They will just find excuse after excuse, like how ranked choice got shot down in MA for being “too confusing”, and so on. They’ve played this game for decades with healthcare, surely you aren’t that credulous to think some radically progressive measure they don’t even feign support for is going to be allowed to take hold?
I agree that it’s an alarmist stance, and no I don’t really believe democracy will end if Trump gets elected, but consider this… In 2016 we were all saying we’re sick of the same old shit so let’s just burn it all down and let Trump win, what’s the worst he can do? And here we are eight years later and we’re STILL finding out just how badly he fucked us. Even without Biden continuing some of Trump’s polices, look what SCOTUS has done to this country. We’ve all seen Project 2025 by now, and we all know Trump and his cronies are behind it despite his attempts to distance himself from the project, but I have honest concerns that Trump isn’t fully in control of himself any longer and could easily be manipulated into thinking he thought of this plan himself, and then tries to push it forward. It has been a long time since he had any rational ability to step back and look at what he’s doing, and that does scare me. I’m not so much worried about Trump in the next term, but rather the people he surrounds himself with. However if Trump is soundly beaten in this election, it might just make Conservatives realize that nobody is willing to put up with this extremist reality-tv style showmanship that they’ve been cultivating over the last eight years, and perhaps they will consider putting up a more rational candidate for the next election.
OK, I understand the goal of bargaining power, and maybe it might work, I’m just worried that this isn’t the election to try making a power move when the alternative could literally see harm coming to their families. Do you remember after 9/11 when everyone was ready to round up and shoot anyone that appeared middle-eastern even if they were generational American citizens? Trump’s style of encouraging the skinheads to take matters into their own hands means anyone who isn’t pale white could see even more harassment than today, and that worries me. And for the record, I am a white guy, but I’m really tired of all the brutality that POC suffer and Trump’s term really did make things worse.
Have you seen that a few states are working out the details to implement RCV? I live in Colorado, one of the places which are trying to evaluate it. Yes it’s going slow, but our government is actually taking it seriously with plans to try and have it in place by the 2028 election, so I do have some hope. We all know the government moves at the speed of a slug in a salt mine but this seems at least somewhat encouraging. And hey, they said marijuana would never be accepted either, but look at us now. Still not universally legal but progress is being made.
In 2016 we were all saying we’re sick of the same old shit so let’s just burn it all down and let Trump win, what’s the worst he can do?
That’s really not what happened, it wasn’t Bernie Bros who caused Trump to win, no matter what centrists try to tell you.
Moreover, you’re missing that I’m talking about a specific and highly actionable demand, not nihilism.
However if Trump is soundly beaten in this election, it might just make Conservatives realize that nobody is willing to put up with this extremist reality-tv style showmanship that they’ve been cultivating over the last eight years, and perhaps they will consider putting up a more rational candidate for the next election.
This is absurd, straight up. They’ll change rhetorical tact as needed, but you are completely misunderstanding what the Republican Party is even for if you think them losing two elections will get them to unify behind the three #NeverTrump Republicans who actually exist. You are genuinely mistaking Sorkin slop for reality. They aren’t good guys with different values, they aren’t robots trying to hone in on a center-right consensus, they are a trust of capitalists and their ghouls seeking to crush the power of working people and maximize the profit that can be extracted from them.
More to the point, rather like the fundraising attempts of the Dems, the Republicans still win even when they lose the Presidency, because the Dems are completely unwilling to fight Republicans when they even partially control congress. The Republicans have been doing great these four years. They don’t need to come to a realization, they know exactly what they are doing.
OK, I understand the goal of bargaining power, and maybe it might work, I’m just worried that this isn’t the election to try making a power move when the alternative could literally see harm coming to their families.
It’s never “the right time”. There’s always some excuse to put off actual progress. That’s how this shit works; that’s how it has always worked. That’s how Democrats talk someone who thinks of himself as progressively-minded into considering genocide to be a negotiable issue.
I am a white guy, but
I have something for you to read.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection
– some Bernie Bro, I think
Have you seen that a few states are working out the details to implement RCV? I live in Colorado, one of the places which are trying to evaluate it. Yes it’s going slow, but our government is actually taking it seriously with plans to try and have it in place by the 2028 election
There’s a saying in Germany, don’t celebrate a baby before it is born. If you haven’t seen the classic Democratic practice of slow-rolling something into oblivion, I guess now you can. Just make sure to remember it so you recognize it next time.
And hey, they said marijuana would never be accepted either, but look at us now.
No one who knows what they are talking about would say that about pot. It’s clearly more useful to the bourgeoisie as a balm, they can prosecute the war on drugs targeting other substances just fine.
This is another place where I’m sure you can think through it just by realizing there is something to think through: Is pot really the same as voting reform that would surely topple the two-party system? Do they really not have any sort of structural factors differentiating them?
I feel like you’re misunderstanding my view here. What I’m trying to say is that I believe if Trump gets the position then we’ll be so busy fighting things at home that we won’t have time to think about foreign affairs. If anybody else gets into the white house then we at least have a chance that further protests could make an impact on Washington. This isn’t a both-sides thing, I really feel there could be a real difference to what happens in Palestine depending on who gets elected. Plus we already know that Trump has pledged support to Russia and vowed to immediately stop all aid to Ukraine, so supporting him just means double the genocide. Somebody is losing no matter how we vote, I’m just hoping we can make it so fewer people lose. Hoping for anything more at this point just feels unrealistic?
Is pot really the same as voting reform
Dude, it was just a casual observation that sometimes things can change even when the whole government seems to be working against you. I’m not saying we’re going to topple the two-party chokehold easily, but every little bit that we can chip away at it is a win. Colorado is probably the exception to the rule, we have enough influential people here who actually care about these things, and our state constitution demands that anything voted for on a ballot must be put into law. We had a right-leaning governor when the marijuana vote came through, he was hard against this but he didn’t have a choice and had to find a way to legalize it. The RCV option is another thing that was solidly voted for recently, so they have to implement it. And yes, the current governor is slow-walking it but he does have some good reasons – there are a lot of eyes on this and if we do it wrong then everyone else will just point at us and say it can’t possibly work anywhere else either. Case in point – we recently tried to have a vote on state-sponsored medical coverage, and all the objections against it were that another state tried this (poorly) and it failed. As I said, there are some influential people here keeping an eye on things, they won’t let anyone just forget about the RCV mandate, and I’m happy to wait a few years if they can make sure we don’t just become another bad example of a failed experiment. When something gets done right, people in other states put pressure on their officials, which comes back to my MJ example again, and now we have at least 29 states with some form of acceptance even while most people in politics are still fighting against it.
I guess my point here is that the government in general likes to steamroll citizens with slow, incremental changes so we hardly notice. Some of our issues (like telling Israel to fuck off) require immediate action, even if it’s just picking the lesser of two evils so we can keep some doors open that might allow us to demand a change in policies. However other issues, like the way we vote, can be changed incrementally. Yes they’re going to notice that they are starting to lose power, but once that ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it (although they could do something drastic like inciting a civil war and declaring martial law). It might happen, it might not, but the ball has at least started rolling in the right direction.
I feel like you’re misunderstanding my view here. What I’m trying to say is that I believe if Trump gets the position then we’ll be so busy fighting things at home that we won’t have time to think about foreign affairs. If anybody else gets into the white house then we at least have a chance that further protests could make an impact on Washington. This isn’t a both-sides thing, I really feel there could be a real difference to what happens in Palestine depending on who gets elected
This is ridiculous. You have a Democrat in charge right now! You see the nothing that protests are doing! Kamala is the current President’s VP and has come out swinging declaring such protests antisemitic and supportive of terrorism! You’ve let people talk you into a position that would only make sense speculatively, but we have the concrete reality right now and for the past nine months and it tells us that things don’t work like that!
Plus we already know that Trump has pledged support to Russia and vowed to immediately stop all aid to Ukraine, so supporting him just means double the genocide
It’s arguably a mistake on my part to respond to this at all, but I still will: Russia is not committing genocide and has no intention to do so. Ukrainian nationalists love to cry genocide, but it’s nonsense. It’s part of a cottage industry of hysterical headlines made to drum up support for the militarization of Europe and, in some cases, the direct arming of neo-nazis.
This is something that really disgusts me because of all of the brutality the US inflicts on the world, and the disproportionate reaction from white audiences to a white country getting invaded for the first time in a couple of decades.
Somebody is losing no matter how we vote, I’m just hoping we can make it so fewer people lose. Hoping for anything more at this point just feels unrealistic?
Some people might conclude that if you’ve talked yourself into supporting an open genocider on the basis that anyone else is “unrealistic”, the more appropriate action instead of hemming and hawing about who to vote for is to work to do whatever is necessary to smash the system, something that is not a question of voting. Just worth thinking about.
However other issues, like the way we vote, can be changed incrementally. Yes they’re going to notice that they are starting to lose power, but once that ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it (although they could do something drastic like inciting a civil war and declaring martial law). It might happen, it might not, but the ball has at least started rolling in the right direction.
This is just you imagining a path to victory in which the opponent is functionally helpless to stop you, like playing chess against yourself, despite that power historically and currently being in a position of monstrous dominance. You sidestepped my counter here while trying to use it as evidence. This is the whole game, this isn’t just some concession that those old farts are unhappy about giving, this is turning over and surrendering their belly for the people to tear into. Are you not familiar with what the US has done abroad to depose democratically elected leaders? Do you think that if a movement gained traction here that they somehow couldn’t ratfuck like Bernie, that they would so much as hesitate to pull the trigger?
One thing I gotta say… here we are, two people of different backgrounds and very different opinions, but we’re still both interested in finding the best way to help people we probably don’t even know, while arguing the topic in a civilized manner. Imagine what could be done if the corrupt politicians in DC started acting more like adults and less like petulant children… Ah well, it was a nice thought anyway.
I will get to your other comment before too long, hopefully, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say that this is exactly what I meant when I said that your perspective was distorted by Sorkin-ism. In the ways that really matter, the political class are nothing like “petulant children” and nothing in DC would be solved by people just “hashing their problems out.” They are, as you say, corrupt, and they are both largely getting their money from the same sources, resulting in their goals being mostly the same, whatever their professed positions are.
Paraphrasing from a source you rightly don’t care about, people talk about “diverse interests”, but generally what do those “diverse interests” look like? Typically it’s not something indifferent like “I like spaghetti” vs “I like hamburgers”, typically it’s something more like “I own this copper refinery and want to dump industrial waste into this river” vs “we live downstream of that refinery and don’t want to be poisoned” and typically, assuming that action isn’t already illegal (and sometimes even when it is), the Republican position is siding with the factory owner and the Democrat position is pretending to side with the people but really doing nothing. If you think that’s an exaggeration, remember they promised that they fixed the pipes in Flint but plainly did not.
You’re getting hung up on kabuki theater, a good cop/bad cop routine, rather than looking at how the system demands the oppression of working people and the ruling class is united on that front.
Anyway, if you want to have conversations with communists, Hexbear is good for that (see the askchapo comm), you just need to signal that you’re being sincere and unassuming. Most of them are better at being nice than I am, though in all respects there is a variance in quality.
I really hope not, there are certainly better candidates on her short-list… but unfortunately we don’t really have a say in that part. Guess we’ll find out in a couple of weeks, at least she’s announced her candidates early enough that the shit can hit the fan on the internet and give her a heads-up about certain choices being wildly unpopular.
I will never understand people who vote third party. It’s absolutely not a viable option if you actually care about reforming voting laws (or, you know, stopping fucking fascists from taking over, as the case is in this election)
For me personally it is about dignity. I am not voting for someone who as VP -stood silent- cheered on while their boss enabled the worst genocide of our lifetime and whose likely VP pick volunteered to kill Palestinians and called Palestinians savages. Is this not fascism? Or is fascism is only when bad things happen to white people?
This is not fascism. It’s vile, but a different type of vileness.
People are in a difficult place right now; the options are: vote for the guy who will make life demonstrably worse for everyone and has a chance of winning, for the woman who doesn’t appear to care about the genocide and has a chance of winning, or voting any other way and effectively wasting your vote because it won’t even make it past the post.
If you saw the images I saw you probably would have developed a whole different perspective. I am not in any way shape or form better than the little girl that got her jaw blown up by a bomb Biden sent Israel. What used to scare me or matter to me has changed significantly.
Heck if Trump throws me in an internment camp at least I will have the excuse of being in an internment camp for not doing anything about the genocide. And if he drops a bomb on my house even better, one less bomb dropped on Palestine. I will gladly send Trump my home address. It won’t be the first time.
I get the fury. I really do. But consider that, pragmatically, voting 3rd party just increases the chance Trump gets in. And if you don’t think Trump would sortie a squadron or three of B-52s to “help” bibi and carpet bomb Gaza, coincidentally clearing the way for the new Trump Gaza Tower within a week of taking office, you’re honestly kidding yourself.
TL;DR: don’t let emotion blind you. Vote tactically, in a way that offers the most utility, and allows the least harm. And try to look beyond the first-order effects.
The Democratic Party ignoring legitimate grievances increases the chance Trump gets in.
You fear Trump more than we do. Biden is already sending Israel thousands of bombs that have killed over 40,000 people. Over 70% of Gaza is already destroyed. Universities destroyed, hospitals destroyed, water wells and treatment destroyed, polio is epidemic, … You really can’t scare us with Trump being worse. No one is voting for him, but we don’t fear him.
TL;DR: You fear Trump, if you want Arab and Muslim Americans to care like we did in 2020 you have to do much more than Trump will be worse. When we cared and volunteered and donated in 2020 we were rewarded with a genocide.
This response makes me strongly suspect you are not an Arab-American. You’d trade a candidate with an admittedly unclear stance towards the Middle East (context: in an election where AIPAC will absolutely firehose money at anyone who is even slightly critical of Israel, so to me, this stance is the obvious pragmatic - if unfortunately opaque - move in a system woefully corrupted by money) for a guy who checks noteswants to ban muslims from entering the country…?
You can’t really threaten Arab voters with a Muslim ban when someone currently in office is enabling a genocide against their family members. Literally everything else falls by the wayside. That’s the top tier war crime. It’s like being stabbed and someone says watch out, that other guy wants to shoot you. You’re not going to net support for the guy stabbing you that way.
Now saying that, I’m voting for Harris, but I get why Arab American and other voters wouldn’t, but… only if she picked Shapiro or someone like that (like Fetterman but he’s not on the list lol). Otherwise, Harris seems to be better on the issue than Biden, as VP’s don’t have a lot of say in policy unless they’re Dick Cheney and she can easily separate herself from Biden’s policies. And we know Trump will be bad on the issue, he’s also a known quantity. Hopefully Kamala can thread the needle of being a “new” quality on this issue. Although AIPAC probably won’t have that lol.
It is strange that you think a ban on Muslims entering the US is worse than a genocide.
It is also weak that you would resort to an ad hominem attack. Usually I would just block someone who does but for some reason [sleep depravation?] I am in a generous mood, so I will refute THEN block. Now everyone will see my lousy handwriting :(
I mean at this point Shapiro isn’t even a presumptive nominee, he’s just one of the possible candidates. I think the only reason he’s even being considered is because he might bring in some extra votes in a large swing State.
It’s odd to me that so many Arab voters are leaning towards Stein. As much as we hate it, this is still a two-party nation, and in an election where the votes might be close why would you take any chances in basically throwing away your vote? Personally I would still cast my ballot for the candidate who hasn’t directly threatened my family. Then again polls are not ballots, and as we get closer to November a lot of people’s opinions could still change.
If all other people joined the Arabs there would be no more two party system.
True enough, but how you are going to convince enough people to change a lifetime of voting habits? I mean I voted 3rd-party in 2016 because it literally doesn’t matter in my district – we vote more than 80% Democrat so a few people changing their vote wasn’t going to matter. However after losing in 2016 to that shitstain I’m simply not willing to take that chance again. I know my one vote still wouldn’t make a difference, but for me the principle this time is voting directly against Trump by voting Dem. And hoping that Conservatives finally realize Trump isn’t a “radical change”, he is just outright insane and doesn’t give a rats ass about anyone who is worth less than tens of millions of dollars, and that the next election provides candidates who aren’t treating people’s lives like a stupid reality show.
If only people would take the Arabs as example and start endorsing a third party instead of pushing back on it. Somewhere a line must be drawn. If not here where?
Sure, lines must be drawn. The problem is that one of the candidates is openly friendly with white-supremists and likes to encourage them to take action without getting his own hands dirty. If this election opens the doors for openly killing anyone of color (you know, even more so than it is now), then we’re really taking a big step backwards and have no hope at all of pressuring our government to start making things right in other countries too. From my perspective, both parties are going to continue this genocide in Pakistan for as long as they can, and if we open the doors to domestic terrorism then none of us have any hope of trying to encourage foreign policy changes.
So if genocide is not the red line, at what point would you stop voting Democrat?
What’s your solution for the problem? Voting for someone who doesn’t have any chance of getting elected? Or would you rather vote for Trump, who is encouraging complete annihilation of the Gaza strip by Israel to end the conflict overnight, while also vowing to end all support for Ukraine and back Russia in a second genocide? Personally I’m going to cast my vote for a candidate who can prevent Trump from getting back in office again, where there might be a slight chance of pressuring some change in Israeli policy. Unless you can somehow convince 300million Americans to vote 3rd party in the next three months, no other choice has any possibility of helping anyone, and fewer votes against Trump risks a much larger number of people being killed directly by US policy.
Where do YOU draw the line when there’s no way to win no matter how you vote? I draw the line at trying to reduce the number of casualties first through my vote, and then seeing if there’s any way to move forward to make things better.
People need to draw a line somewhere at which point the scale tips over because people refuse to vote for any of the two parties.
My previous question is the answer to your current question. If Kamala Harris promises to nuke Gaza would that prevent you from voting for her?
The fact that he is even likely is insulting.
If Democrats want Arab and Muslim votes maybe they shouldn’t even consider someone who volunteers to kill Palestinians and calls them savages as VP?
You’re right… they should vote for Trump. How stupid…
You need glasses
The only thing that matters this election is how many votes Harris gets vs. how many votes Trump gets. You either vote for Harris or against Harris. It’s a sucky reality, but it is reality.
Sorry, not voting for your genocider-of-choice. She can still win over other Arabs and Muslims IF she chooses her VP wisely. She lost me a long time ago.
So you’re a Trump supporter. We know you’re out there, so nothing shocking. The question is whether you can legally vote at all and whether that will stop you.
Not voting for Trump. Chill, voting isn’t the radical act you think it is. It is certainly not worth breaking any laws for.
You’re so right homie, Arab Americans just need to suck it up and vote for genocide and 99% fascism, or else it’ll be entirely their fault when we end up with genocide and 100% fascism. They wouldn’t want that on their conscience, would they? So true!
Die.
It’s worth considering that maybe Arab and Muslim voters aren’t stupid and they have a point. If we assume that both parties really want to win (and with Dems that is definitely an if), then the worst thing you can do to persuade them to listen to you is to vow to vote for them unconditionally. If the constituency keeps approving a genocide and the genocide remains profitable, why ever would the Dems offer an anti-genocide candidate? Conversely, if hardline opposition to the genocide loses the Dems an election, suddenly next time around their pro-genocide ghouls aren’t “electable” and they need to actually pick someone who will give the people some of what they want, almost like there’s a popular mandate or something!
All of this is giving a thousand times more credence to liberal democracy in general and America’s in particular than I actually have, but there are many ways of thinking beyond “Well, what are you going to do about the two party monopoly?”, most of which involve thinking past a single election cycle.
Oh I don’t fault anyone for trying to make a point. My biggest concern is what’s on the line for this election. When you have half of America being stupid enough to think that voting for Trump somehow gives them more freedom, when in fact he already has a history of taking away the rights of over half the population and documented plans to do even more damage, something is seriously wrong. We simply can’t afford to give him another term in charge. The only way we’ll ever change the system is by demanding some sort of ranked-choice voting where our votes actually count for something, and fortunately there are already efforts underway to bring that in to several states.
People like to be alarmist about Trump, and he was certainly doing bad things in office, but he was in no way a uniquely bad president, and all the bad things he did were continued or even expanded by Biden. There simply is no basis for this totalizing narrative about how the country will end if the Dems lose the election. It’s given every damn election and it’s never true, it’s just a psychological abuse tactic to convince you not to evaluate this rationally. Try to step back and consider, do you really think the next Republican frontrunner will be less fascist than Trump? Because Trump is okay with fascists, but he is not committed to the ideology or strategy of fascism in any way. If you give in to the Dems fearmongering, they will never stop using it. I don’t think I will convince you here, but I want you to seriously make note of the alarmist stance you’re taking and, if Trump wins, reflect in 2028 on how you were wrong and the country kept going.
Furthermore, I’m not claiming Arab and Muslim voters are withholding their votes “to make a point”; I am saying, from a liberal democratic perspective, they are doing the only rational thing to create change by establishing bargaining power, something that is impossible if you support the Dems unconditionally.
Ranked choice voting does, on paper, have the ability to create a basis for fixing the system, and that’s exactly why it will never be allowed through. Why would the rich and powerful allow their domination to be voted away? It’s absurd. They will just find excuse after excuse, like how ranked choice got shot down in MA for being “too confusing”, and so on. They’ve played this game for decades with healthcare, surely you aren’t that credulous to think some radically progressive measure they don’t even feign support for is going to be allowed to take hold?
I agree that it’s an alarmist stance, and no I don’t really believe democracy will end if Trump gets elected, but consider this… In 2016 we were all saying we’re sick of the same old shit so let’s just burn it all down and let Trump win, what’s the worst he can do? And here we are eight years later and we’re STILL finding out just how badly he fucked us. Even without Biden continuing some of Trump’s polices, look what SCOTUS has done to this country. We’ve all seen Project 2025 by now, and we all know Trump and his cronies are behind it despite his attempts to distance himself from the project, but I have honest concerns that Trump isn’t fully in control of himself any longer and could easily be manipulated into thinking he thought of this plan himself, and then tries to push it forward. It has been a long time since he had any rational ability to step back and look at what he’s doing, and that does scare me. I’m not so much worried about Trump in the next term, but rather the people he surrounds himself with. However if Trump is soundly beaten in this election, it might just make Conservatives realize that nobody is willing to put up with this extremist reality-tv style showmanship that they’ve been cultivating over the last eight years, and perhaps they will consider putting up a more rational candidate for the next election.
OK, I understand the goal of bargaining power, and maybe it might work, I’m just worried that this isn’t the election to try making a power move when the alternative could literally see harm coming to their families. Do you remember after 9/11 when everyone was ready to round up and shoot anyone that appeared middle-eastern even if they were generational American citizens? Trump’s style of encouraging the skinheads to take matters into their own hands means anyone who isn’t pale white could see even more harassment than today, and that worries me. And for the record, I am a white guy, but I’m really tired of all the brutality that POC suffer and Trump’s term really did make things worse.
Have you seen that a few states are working out the details to implement RCV? I live in Colorado, one of the places which are trying to evaluate it. Yes it’s going slow, but our government is actually taking it seriously with plans to try and have it in place by the 2028 election, so I do have some hope. We all know the government moves at the speed of a slug in a salt mine but this seems at least somewhat encouraging. And hey, they said marijuana would never be accepted either, but look at us now. Still not universally legal but progress is being made.
That’s really not what happened, it wasn’t Bernie Bros who caused Trump to win, no matter what centrists try to tell you.
Moreover, you’re missing that I’m talking about a specific and highly actionable demand, not nihilism.
This is absurd, straight up. They’ll change rhetorical tact as needed, but you are completely misunderstanding what the Republican Party is even for if you think them losing two elections will get them to unify behind the three #NeverTrump Republicans who actually exist. You are genuinely mistaking Sorkin slop for reality. They aren’t good guys with different values, they aren’t robots trying to hone in on a center-right consensus, they are a trust of capitalists and their ghouls seeking to crush the power of working people and maximize the profit that can be extracted from them.
More to the point, rather like the fundraising attempts of the Dems, the Republicans still win even when they lose the Presidency, because the Dems are completely unwilling to fight Republicans when they even partially control congress. The Republicans have been doing great these four years. They don’t need to come to a realization, they know exactly what they are doing.
It’s never “the right time”. There’s always some excuse to put off actual progress. That’s how this shit works; that’s how it has always worked. That’s how Democrats talk someone who thinks of himself as progressively-minded into considering genocide to be a negotiable issue.
I have something for you to read.
– some Bernie Bro, I think
There’s a saying in Germany, don’t celebrate a baby before it is born. If you haven’t seen the classic Democratic practice of slow-rolling something into oblivion, I guess now you can. Just make sure to remember it so you recognize it next time.
No one who knows what they are talking about would say that about pot. It’s clearly more useful to the bourgeoisie as a balm, they can prosecute the war on drugs targeting other substances just fine.
This is another place where I’m sure you can think through it just by realizing there is something to think through: Is pot really the same as voting reform that would surely topple the two-party system? Do they really not have any sort of structural factors differentiating them?
I feel like you’re misunderstanding my view here. What I’m trying to say is that I believe if Trump gets the position then we’ll be so busy fighting things at home that we won’t have time to think about foreign affairs. If anybody else gets into the white house then we at least have a chance that further protests could make an impact on Washington. This isn’t a both-sides thing, I really feel there could be a real difference to what happens in Palestine depending on who gets elected. Plus we already know that Trump has pledged support to Russia and vowed to immediately stop all aid to Ukraine, so supporting him just means double the genocide. Somebody is losing no matter how we vote, I’m just hoping we can make it so fewer people lose. Hoping for anything more at this point just feels unrealistic?
Dude, it was just a casual observation that sometimes things can change even when the whole government seems to be working against you. I’m not saying we’re going to topple the two-party chokehold easily, but every little bit that we can chip away at it is a win. Colorado is probably the exception to the rule, we have enough influential people here who actually care about these things, and our state constitution demands that anything voted for on a ballot must be put into law. We had a right-leaning governor when the marijuana vote came through, he was hard against this but he didn’t have a choice and had to find a way to legalize it. The RCV option is another thing that was solidly voted for recently, so they have to implement it. And yes, the current governor is slow-walking it but he does have some good reasons – there are a lot of eyes on this and if we do it wrong then everyone else will just point at us and say it can’t possibly work anywhere else either. Case in point – we recently tried to have a vote on state-sponsored medical coverage, and all the objections against it were that another state tried this (poorly) and it failed. As I said, there are some influential people here keeping an eye on things, they won’t let anyone just forget about the RCV mandate, and I’m happy to wait a few years if they can make sure we don’t just become another bad example of a failed experiment. When something gets done right, people in other states put pressure on their officials, which comes back to my MJ example again, and now we have at least 29 states with some form of acceptance even while most people in politics are still fighting against it.
I guess my point here is that the government in general likes to steamroll citizens with slow, incremental changes so we hardly notice. Some of our issues (like telling Israel to fuck off) require immediate action, even if it’s just picking the lesser of two evils so we can keep some doors open that might allow us to demand a change in policies. However other issues, like the way we vote, can be changed incrementally. Yes they’re going to notice that they are starting to lose power, but once that ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it (although they could do something drastic like inciting a civil war and declaring martial law). It might happen, it might not, but the ball has at least started rolling in the right direction.
Man, I really thought things were going okay.
This is ridiculous. You have a Democrat in charge right now! You see the nothing that protests are doing! Kamala is the current President’s VP and has come out swinging declaring such protests antisemitic and supportive of terrorism! You’ve let people talk you into a position that would only make sense speculatively, but we have the concrete reality right now and for the past nine months and it tells us that things don’t work like that!
It’s arguably a mistake on my part to respond to this at all, but I still will: Russia is not committing genocide and has no intention to do so. Ukrainian nationalists love to cry genocide, but it’s nonsense. It’s part of a cottage industry of hysterical headlines made to drum up support for the militarization of Europe and, in some cases, the direct arming of neo-nazis.
This is something that really disgusts me because of all of the brutality the US inflicts on the world, and the disproportionate reaction from white audiences to a white country getting invaded for the first time in a couple of decades.
Some people might conclude that if you’ve talked yourself into supporting an open genocider on the basis that anyone else is “unrealistic”, the more appropriate action instead of hemming and hawing about who to vote for is to work to do whatever is necessary to smash the system, something that is not a question of voting. Just worth thinking about.
This is just you imagining a path to victory in which the opponent is functionally helpless to stop you, like playing chess against yourself, despite that power historically and currently being in a position of monstrous dominance. You sidestepped my counter here while trying to use it as evidence. This is the whole game, this isn’t just some concession that those old farts are unhappy about giving, this is turning over and surrendering their belly for the people to tear into. Are you not familiar with what the US has done abroad to depose democratically elected leaders? Do you think that if a movement gained traction here that they somehow couldn’t ratfuck like Bernie, that they would so much as hesitate to pull the trigger?
They wouldn’t.
One thing I gotta say… here we are, two people of different backgrounds and very different opinions, but we’re still both interested in finding the best way to help people we probably don’t even know, while arguing the topic in a civilized manner. Imagine what could be done if the corrupt politicians in DC started acting more like adults and less like petulant children… Ah well, it was a nice thought anyway.
I will get to your other comment before too long, hopefully, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say that this is exactly what I meant when I said that your perspective was distorted by Sorkin-ism. In the ways that really matter, the political class are nothing like “petulant children” and nothing in DC would be solved by people just “hashing their problems out.” They are, as you say, corrupt, and they are both largely getting their money from the same sources, resulting in their goals being mostly the same, whatever their professed positions are.
Paraphrasing from a source you rightly don’t care about, people talk about “diverse interests”, but generally what do those “diverse interests” look like? Typically it’s not something indifferent like “I like spaghetti” vs “I like hamburgers”, typically it’s something more like “I own this copper refinery and want to dump industrial waste into this river” vs “we live downstream of that refinery and don’t want to be poisoned” and typically, assuming that action isn’t already illegal (and sometimes even when it is), the Republican position is siding with the factory owner and the Democrat position is pretending to side with the people but really doing nothing. If you think that’s an exaggeration, remember they promised that they fixed the pipes in Flint but plainly did not.
You’re getting hung up on kabuki theater, a good cop/bad cop routine, rather than looking at how the system demands the oppression of working people and the ruling class is united on that front.
Anyway, if you want to have conversations with communists, Hexbear is good for that (see the askchapo comm), you just need to signal that you’re being sincere and unassuming. Most of them are better at being nice than I am, though in all respects there is a variance in quality.
He is absolutely going to be the nominee.
I really hope not, there are certainly better candidates on her short-list… but unfortunately we don’t really have a say in that part. Guess we’ll find out in a couple of weeks, at least she’s announced her candidates early enough that the shit can hit the fan on the internet and give her a heads-up about certain choices being wildly unpopular.
Oh I hope not too. But Netanyahu talks and the Democratic party listens.
I will never understand people who vote third party. It’s absolutely not a viable option if you actually care about reforming voting laws (or, you know, stopping fucking fascists from taking over, as the case is in this election)
For me personally it is about dignity. I am not voting for someone who as VP
-stood silent-cheered on while their boss enabled the worst genocide of our lifetime and whose likely VP pick volunteered to kill Palestinians and called Palestinians savages. Is this not fascism? Or is fascism is only when bad things happen to white people?Goes without saying not voting for Trump either.
If you’re not voting for Harris, then you’re voting for Trump.
Voting 3rd party nets you 3 votes apparently:
This is not fascism. It’s vile, but a different type of vileness.
People are in a difficult place right now; the options are: vote for the guy who will make life demonstrably worse for everyone and has a chance of winning, for the woman who doesn’t appear to care about the genocide and has a chance of winning, or voting any other way and effectively wasting your vote because it won’t even make it past the post.
If you saw the images I saw you probably would have developed a whole different perspective. I am not in any way shape or form better than the little girl that got her jaw blown up by a bomb Biden sent Israel. What used to scare me or matter to me has changed significantly.
Heck if Trump throws me in an internment camp at least I will have the excuse of being in an internment camp for not doing anything about the genocide. And if he drops a bomb on my house even better, one less bomb dropped on Palestine. I will gladly send Trump my home address. It won’t be the first time.
I get the fury. I really do. But consider that, pragmatically, voting 3rd party just increases the chance Trump gets in. And if you don’t think Trump would sortie a squadron or three of B-52s to “help” bibi and carpet bomb Gaza, coincidentally clearing the way for the new Trump Gaza Tower within a week of taking office, you’re honestly kidding yourself.
TL;DR: don’t let emotion blind you. Vote tactically, in a way that offers the most utility, and allows the least harm. And try to look beyond the first-order effects.
The Democratic Party ignoring legitimate grievances increases the chance Trump gets in.
You fear Trump more than we do. Biden is already sending Israel thousands of bombs that have killed over 40,000 people. Over 70% of Gaza is already destroyed. Universities destroyed, hospitals destroyed, water wells and treatment destroyed, polio is epidemic, … You really can’t scare us with Trump being worse. No one is voting for him, but we don’t fear him.
TL;DR: You fear Trump, if you want Arab and Muslim Americans to care like we did in 2020 you have to do much more than Trump will be worse. When we cared and volunteered and donated in 2020 we were rewarded with a genocide.
This response makes me strongly suspect you are not an Arab-American. You’d trade a candidate with an admittedly unclear stance towards the Middle East (context: in an election where AIPAC will absolutely firehose money at anyone who is even slightly critical of Israel, so to me, this stance is the obvious pragmatic - if unfortunately opaque - move in a system woefully corrupted by money) for a guy who checks notes wants to ban muslims from entering the country…?
I call bullshit.
You can’t really threaten Arab voters with a Muslim ban when someone currently in office is enabling a genocide against their family members. Literally everything else falls by the wayside. That’s the top tier war crime. It’s like being stabbed and someone says watch out, that other guy wants to shoot you. You’re not going to net support for the guy stabbing you that way.
Now saying that, I’m voting for Harris, but I get why Arab American and other voters wouldn’t, but… only if she picked Shapiro or someone like that (like Fetterman but he’s not on the list lol). Otherwise, Harris seems to be better on the issue than Biden, as VP’s don’t have a lot of say in policy unless they’re Dick Cheney and she can easily separate herself from Biden’s policies. And we know Trump will be bad on the issue, he’s also a known quantity. Hopefully Kamala can thread the needle of being a “new” quality on this issue. Although AIPAC probably won’t have that lol.
It is strange that you think a ban on Muslims entering the US is worse than a genocide.
It is also weak that you would resort to an ad hominem attack. Usually I would just block someone who does but for some reason [sleep depravation?] I am in a generous mood, so I will refute THEN block. Now everyone will see my lousy handwriting :(
Small brain take. Piss ant energy.