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The ice cream no longer exists. It hasn’t existed for a long time, and no amount of wishing will bring it back.
I want ice cream, too. But before we can have ice cream again, we need to not die.
That's QUITTER talk! I'm voting for Rocky Road.
So the cliff?
Brick on the pedal.
You're right - it's more like one group voting to drive off a cliff and the other voting to just drive really close to the cliff in case we decide to go off on some other vote, but so long as the cliff doesn't win now, we can focus on convincing people ice cream is the better option. We don't, and instead wait 4 more years to complain about the lack of ice cream, but that's a separate problem.
Some of the people refuse to believe that the accelerator and steering wheel do anything, even though the pro-cliff people are clearly steering and accelerating.
Some people think we've already gone over the cliff, and thus trying to drive the bus is meaningless.
They're wrong, but they believe it, and people's beliefs are sometimes too precious to let go.
And some people aren't on the bus, just on video chat, but for some reason are still arguing to drive off the cliff.
Honestly, seriously. Would harm reduction have happened if Kamala was elected. Yes. Did I personally core for her? Yes.
Did this get them elected? No? Shut the fuck up and stop blaming voters because the Democrats don't know how to do politics on purpose so they don't lose their bribes.
Want a better analogy? There's a bus driving for a cliff and one group votes to minimize the impact of driving off the cliff while another group says please please drive faster off the cliff and do a backflip. A third group says guys, can we perhaps maybe not drive off the cliffd? And the rest call them insane and drive off the cliff
I blame both. The Democratic Party and everybody who did not vote for them. My heart is big, there is enough room to hate everyone!
This is why I voted for Kamala, as it would've reduced harm for a little while...Long enough to figure out an effective counter. Right now, I am using my voice as best as possible to reduce further harm (with the Big Bad Bill coming into effect soon) I dread losing my insurance and wasting away because untreated it's a guarantee. Given that I live in a mostly Red State, I could be one of the 17 million affected, or spared because I work part-time... If there are elections in the future, I will be voting with harm reduction in mind every time. Unless America becomes a doomed Fascist Nation which devours itself from within.
Stay strong, talk to your neighbours if feasible where you live, work together locally. Every major catastrophe in my area of the world, even ones which totally upended my country (Romania) for a generation, my family survived via community and friend groups.
In a collapsed or collapsing state, mutual aid is mandatory for survival.
This one's much simpler than that; one party will throw people I love into a concentration camp in the next four years, one party will not. I will vote for those who will not. The rest is just bullshit.
You sound like one of those dangerous shitlibs, not wanting people to be thrown into concentration camps. Don't you know that the lives of the likes of you and me are acceptable sacrifices so that the wannabe revolutionaries can (checks notes) do nothing but feel really smug about how superior they are to The Establishment?
There's a part of me that thinks these people fell for very well crafted propaganda that kept them away from the voting booth and, like Magats, they keep doubling down instead of admitting they got duped and moving on.
In a binary system where my choices are Nazis or not Nazis, anyone who comes along and tells me not voting is the best option is my fucking enemy.
I had people unironically tell me that Kamala Harris was no better than Hitler, and that she & Trump were the same but just did the exact same harm in "different areas," which is why it looked like they were any different policy-wise. 💀
We need a "neither" option. If that one wins neither candiate gets to be president and the parties have to pick someone else. Not voting counts as neither.
If only.
Every time I see people complaining about 3rd party voters all I can picture is the "Am I so out of touch?" meme. Like, y'all already shot yourselves in the face 3 times in a row and it surprisingly didn't fail 1/3 times, but you'll blame literally anyone but yourselves. Run a candidate people want, run policies people want, and support that candidate and those policies instead of throwing everything you can against them because you like money, and we would not be anywhere near where we are now. People vote for trump because they don't want another fucking "nothing will fundamentally change" politician. The country is already shit. It needs to change. But dems are happy with it how it is. They don't care about immigrants, or poor people, or social security, or women's rights, or whatever. They just hold onto those as carrots on a stick. They just want to keep making millions, and would rather trump win so they don't have to actually embrace populist policy. That's why people don't vote. The choice isn't ice cream or drive off a cliff. Its do we drive into a wall and die now, or drive off a cliff so it takes slightly longer to die, the drive off a cliff people shot the 2 people who asked if they could vote for ice cream and that's why the others didn't vote.
Run a candidate people want, run policies people want, and support that candidate and those policies instead of throwing everything you can against them because you like money
Their absolutely pathetic response to Mamdani's victory in the primary was so flagrant, I'm not even sure how to react to the Democratic party going forward. Not only did they try to stack the deck in Cuomo's favor, but then they threw a fucking tantrum when Cuomo still lost despite their efforts. They just don't seem credible to me anymore.
Remember, no matter how beautiful, morally righteous, or gratifying your strategy is, you should really look at the results
This is kind of a good analogy for ranked choice voting, to be honest.
Also
I only voted to drive off of a cliff as a joke. I wanted to trigger those sweet tooth ice cream eaters. I didn't want to die.
Someone told me about people, who regretted eating ice cream. What if you are allergic to milk, amd die from eating ice cream? What if ice cream is a recent creation by to make children and adults addicted to ice cream, to the rest of their lives? Driving off from a cliff is therefore preferable to ice cream, and someone told me only ice cream eaters will die in a fire.
More like two options: one runs the bus off the cliff while the other sets it on fire. Sure, we'll live longer in the fire scenario. Maybe we can even put it out!
But I'm still looking for the fucking exit.
You're on a bus with 9 people. 1 guy takes up 2/3rds of the bus by himself. 3 people take up 90% of what remains, and the last 5 are stacked on top of each other on the last remaining seat.
The one guy with 2/3 of the bus says he wants to throw two of the other passengers off a cliff at random so he can have their seats. 2 of the 3 in the next segment think this is a terrible idea and say we should keep things as they are, with one voting for it because he thinks somehow everyone will benefit from the top guy having more space. The bottom segment votes 3-2 in favor of the idea, because they hate the people in the second group for taking up space they could use, and like the idea of possibly throwing them off a cliff.
The other four didn't vote because there wasn't a party against genocide.
Electoral puritanism like this is a big part of why we now have concentration camps in America.
Thanks for that.
If you don’t have ranked choice voting you do not live in a democracy
Fully agree with Nina Turner. If you don't wanna do politics, you blindly leave major decisions over your life to others, who - as we can see world-wide - don't necessarily have your interest at heart. Democracy, human rights, freedom or any other such ideas require a populace to vigilantly fight for them and not let those with opposed agendas undermine them.
But that analogy afterwards is simply dishonest on many levels.
Firstly, if you are talking about "harm reduction" or the "lesser of two evils", ice cream is hardly a fair representation of the lesser evil.
Secondly this mixes in non-political people, who do not participate in the democratic process with moral objectors and the duped.
Thirdly: It diverts equal blame (literally in the response) to those groups and to the voters, who actually want the bigger evil or the powerful actors enacting it. This presupposes some moral value on active vs. passive behavior, which can be argued.
And lastly: Even if we find a fitting ice-cream substitute like throwing one of the passengers under the still moving bus, or - how another user suggested - braking before driving off the same cliff: The two who voted for that lesser evil also fight the four voters who are against evil harder, than they are fighting the ones who want the bigger evil. Why? Because they'd rather still drive off the cliff than not. And then they turn around and dishonestly shame the anti-driving-off the-cliff crowd for wanting to speed up instead. That is not a very good strategy.
Are they the same? No. But please keep your arguments honest, or you might get the exact opposite reaction from people, than you are hoping.
FPTP is the real winner here. It's why we have Trump. Why can't we vote for proportional representatives or ranked choice?
I believe there are three reasons our broken two party system stagnates and rots:
Our slavery founders intended for our system to be a plutocratic republic that would resist change, not a democracy
The purpose of every state is to maintain order which requires preserving itself
Fixing our system would require our politicians to vote against their own interests, to risk their own power and status... This goes against every ideal that capitalists believe in. Capitalists believe that as long as they follow the rules, they are entitled to everything they can take. The fact that the rules were written by the rich to favor the rich is of no concern to them.
I bet a lot of people living in Germany in the '30s said "I don't do politics" too. Oops.
this sounds very utilitarian. you known who else was utilitarian? thanos!
Allowing the Democratic Party to keep fielding right-of-center neoliberals who've consistently and repeatedly made concessions to the far right over the last four decades without ever demanding anything back, and allowed them to shift the Overton Window way over to Nazi territory, is NOT harm reduction. If you hadn't been such cowards the last three elections, there could have been a credible opposition party by now, but no, you're just going to keep chickening out every single "most important election in history" (aka every election ever).
Being made aware I’m lashed to a bunch of psychotic apes is terrifying and makes me want to kill the rest of the people on the bus and take control myself.
People are the absolute worst.
Its more like 9 people on a bus, 3 vote to drive off a cliff, 2 vote for a break to get ice ream and then continue driving towards the edge of the cliff after, 2 scream why the fuck are we continuing to drive towards the edge of the cliff, the other two believe things will just be the same regardless if they vote or not. Meanwhile the people who want other people to vote for a pitstop on the way to impending doom and death are complaining that the people with the most realistic assessment of the situation are being unreasonable, unrealistic and and/ or unwilling to compromise and if we are going to die anyway we might as well have some icecream (delay the inevitable and hope we can fix things before we get to the edge of the cliff but at this rate it looks like it’ll only get worse because one side turns the mechanism as far as they can get away with and the other ratchets back into a convenient position for the other side to turn the mechanism to their advantage again) this is the more accurate assessment and it’s because education standards were destroyed and the ego’s of people who are too gullible for their own good and don't understand the scope of the corporate apparatus/ system where the ultra rich all collude and work together because they have like interests and the people who don't want to understand this, or can’t because they are naive just keep telling us we need to continue to participate in a system that disenfranchises us not because its been temporarily broken and needs fixing through participation but instead because the entire purpose of the system is to disenfranchise us and the only solution is to implement democratic representation that addresses the economic issues being manipulated without our input or consent. Any system of democratic representation that aims to exclude economically democratic governance is nothing but a class dictatorship.