plspls_pls_ stop calling each other fascists or astroturfers unless you have a thorough understanding of the uncommitted movement and what u.s. primaries are. there is so much blatant misunderstanding and misinfo going on it’s bad.
edit: if any loser dares call for an uncommitted vote in the general election? i will kick them in the balls (gender neutral) (in minecraft)
“An uncommitted movement will not be called for the general”
Okay, but what if I direct you to people calling for exactly that.
please do so and i’ll tell them to kick rocks.
(you can’t even vote uncommitted in the general afaik it’s not even an option)
one should direct criticism to those doing the bad thing, not the ones with vague aesthetics of the bad thing when viewed through a bad-faith lens.
please do so and i’ll tell them to kick rocks.
Unironically I’m happy to hear this.
(you can’t even vote uncommitted in the general afaik it’s not even an option)
Some states allow write-ins for the General.
yay!
and yeah, but write-ins are quite distinct from an uncommitted vote.
in an earlier thread someone compared the general to the trolley problem, with a vote for Biden being the lesser of two evils. at the same time, i view the uncommitted movement as a way of trying to get as many people untied from the Biden track as possible.
It is clear within the US that the uncommitted movement is grossly misunderstood outside of the people who care to engage with anti-genocide protest efforts. Because the main stream media did not cover it effectively up to the primary election and barely covered it after.
It is also clear that people from other countries do not understand the US primary system at all.
For Democrats, voter turn out is what matters. And that the “uncommitted” vote does not beat Biden. The uncommitted vote will not beat Biden since no news orgs covered it well so few know about it unless previously involved in anti-genocide efforts. Only Democrats can vote in the US Democrat primary, so high primary turnout shows how many democrats are willing to vote for Biden come election AND the uncommitted vote shows an easy tally of how many people were moved enough to discover the uncommitted vote movement and take part to support ending the genocide of the Palestinians.
If you see actual astroturfing, fascists-in-leftist-clothing calling for an uncommitted vote in the general, tell them to “fuck off tankie”.
In the US general election there will be no “uncommitted” option, showing that they are out-of-state fascists. Tell them to eat shit loudly and do not engage further with the fascies.
The US general election is serious as the republican challenger is the fascist bitch who tried to overthrow the government. But the genocide of the Palestinians is also serious, they’re actually dying by the thousands and after you die you’re dead it’s donezo, and anyone should be able to realize that that’s horrendous
Only Democrats can vote in the US Democrat primary,
This is not true. There are multiple states that allow voting in the primary of a party to which you are not registered. You just can’t vote in both primaries.
🤓🤓🤓 But in more seriousness, it is true for the majority - ok some states let independents vote in one party’s primary but they have to request it and it’s harder and I’m not gonna add that addendum to a long ass diatribe
About 24 states have some form of open primary. Most of them are entirely open. Some are independents/uncommited-only as you noted.
I received both parties ballots and I did not request it. We voted for that explicitly to be the case.
Fuggin states and their fuggin random ass rules for voting
Indeed.
i still don’t quite get how tankie ideology plays into this but past that, yes, i agree with everything you have said. :)
Ah I meant that a “fascist-in-leftist-clothing” is a tankie! (Edit: v big generalization of course)
Thanks for making the me-me!
no prob :) i still don’t quite think that’s what the definition of tankie is but imma let it slide since that is not the topic of this post.
fascists-in-leftist-clothing calling for an uncommitted vote in the general, tell them to “fuck off tankie”.
How is that person a tankie?
You may end up confronted with your ball-kicking obligation, especially if the GOP is consistent taking all opportunities to add more disinformation to the season. I’d guess whether such a disinformation program was successful might make the difference between a thousand scattered uncommitted write-in votes across the nation or 100,000 localized in battleground states.
The 2016 election remains fresh in my mind, in which Trump was so obviously a monster that we expected a landslide by Clinton. Yet somehow while everyone knew Trump was dangerous enough hated Clinton enough to take that risk that he won by the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, and boy, the US is jolly sorry we let that happen, but not sorry enough to change it, even though we were pretty jolly sorry for letting George W. Bush steal the election from Gore in 2000, via a SCOTUS ruling that even warns don’t use this to set future precedents ( NARRATOR: Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000) has been used to set precedent or justify opinions in later SCOTUS rulings. )
US voters are imbiciles. They’re ignorant. They can’t operate their voting materials correctly. They get confused and suppressed. And these factors can sometimes be used to change the course of elections.
In 2024, our election is about one thing:
- Vote RED if you are in favor of dissolving the government as it stands and erecting a one-party autocracy in which the Republican party rules the people of the US. (Elections will be neutered so they’re meaningless), as per Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation. If autocracy is your jam, vote in Republicans for office. (All Republicans, no matter how they campaign, are down with P’25, or will be if ever they are compelled to act to serve it.)
- Vote BLUE if you are against the dissolution of democracy (rather, our minimal democratic features). If you want to hold back the Republican autocracy for a few more years, vote for democrats in office (to vote against the Republican). That’s where the US is.
- Vote any other way to make no statement whatsoever. Any third-party vote, any write in an election where Republicans are running is a vote not to stop the Republican from taking office.
That’s where we are in the US. It’s our only choice. Trump may not invade Poland and France, but he will quit NATO, and he will start interning non-whites and sending ICE to lock people up in detention centers. Some people think it won’t be as bad as the German Reich. I think Germany is going to be holding the US’ beer.
It’s madness, but we really have no choice but to put Democrats in office. In the meantime, regarding the genocide in Palestine, by all means crab at your representatives and senators (state and US). Block traffic. Blow up pipelines. Tell young people the risks of joining military service. (Check your counter-recruitment groups for talking points and scary stories.) Join your local mutual aid organization. Raise all kinds of Hell.
But the election, despite what it is supposed to be, is not where members of the public gets to express itself…except for the one issue of whether or not we let the Republican party take over the US permanently.
So you have no choice for this election. It’s sad, but it seems to be what it is. But what then?
If Biden is elected again, what will happen next term? You hope trump will die or finally end in prison? How long will you keep fascism at bay like this? How is it that there is half a year left before the election and you’re already in this dire situation?
It’s a situation that sucks. Yes. The US is on the verge of falling apart. Paths of least resistance are towards either civil war or an autocratic state that will try to preserve popular loyalty by targeting marginalized groups. Fascists doing genocide.
Regarding your question How long will you keep fascism at bay like this? the answer is as long as we have to.
It’s not a hopeless cause. The Republican party is crumbling from within, is bleeding money and loyalists. The MAGA coalition is so focused on doing what Trump wants that it’s ignoring down-ballot elections. Then there are numerous efforts to interfere with or obstruct Republican efforts to pass hateful laws, even while we can’t really depend on the courts since so many benches have been filled with MAGA loyalists. But the failure of the courts to be either impartial or fair, favoring tough on crime justice over rehabilitation is an old one. But the Democratic party might just be able to outlast the Republican party, which will end with a second premature coup d’etat.
One of the advantages we have is the ubiquity of phone cameras and internet, which means the public gets to see more of what happens on the ground. This is impacting the situation in Palestine as well, as news is no longer controlled by a couple of agencies, but has plenty of independent leaks. I’m sure this informs the movements of the White House towards curbing Netanyahu and the IDF, supplying Gaza and moving towards a Palestinian state and an international coalition team to enforce terms. When gross images of atrocity go viral, whether that’s IDF prisoners being mistreated, or people getting gunned down by US law enforcement, it is a really bad look when officials ignore or dismiss such incidents.
That said, all the myths that allowed for two far-right political parties in the US to control state and federal governments have been debunked while their plutocratic overlords (campaign financial contributors) still are pushing for a neo-feudal state, and the recinding of civil rights. It mirrors the situation during the Great Depression, for which FDR’s New Deal was a stopgap and industrialists and Hoover were looking at Mussolini and Italy in admiration and envy. (All that got interrupted by WWII and the cold war).
So I can say with confidence I have no idea what will happen next, but doing anything to give the US to the Republicans or to incite civil war would make shit a lot worse for the common American, with very little chance we’d get any public-serving progress out of the outcome for a century or two.
So the first step is recognizing the degree to which the US has been destabilized and how much civil rights have been stripped from the public, despite what kids are being taught in public schools.
US elections are an unusually long process. They normally take about a year of actual voting because of the primaries.
And nothing good can happen during these primaries?
If you’re going to cast a protest vote during the presidential election, the primaries is the time to do it. You’re only voting for the presidential candidate that will represent your political party, so there’s less risk of getting someone you won’t like.
I don’t know if it’s official yet, but Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee for the election this November. The same can be said for Biden as the Democratic Nominee, as I don’t know if an incumbent president has ever lost their party’s nomination. So while we will nearly certainly have to pick between an old man with bombs and an old man with bombs who wants to tear down the government and rebuild it with himself at the helm, you can still show your disapproval at the ballots.
Trying to proofread this and it sounds like a fucking Trainwreck. I don’t know if that’s my fault or the government’s.
thank you for taking the time to write this summary /gen
i do not disagree.
The uncommitted movement will, in fact, be called for the general election - by assholes who just want Biden to lose.
You can ignore them. But they will be there. And the mouth noises they make will be based on sincere and reasonable criticism.
The thing about objecting ‘we can’t do [blank] because conservatives will abuse it in bad faith’ is, conservatives will absofuckinglutely abuse [blank] in bad faith. Probably whether or not we do it. That part of the objection is real - even if we should still do [blank]. We can only do [blank] in spite of them.
probably true, sadly. but it won’t be the same people group who is calling for it now.
that’s literally all i care about now with this post is we need to stop calling people who are using their civic rights to speak against genocide fascist.
tell them their strategy will backfire, fine, tell them it’s a miscalculation, fine. but don’t just plaster them with the fascism tag. it makes me sick how people trying to do the right thing are getting harrassed.
If people commit to it in the primaries then the demonization will carry to the general. But I suppose people aren’t familiar with voter apathy
If somebody commits to it in the primary, then their mind is already made up. It sounds like you’re putting the cart before the horse here. People are voting uncommitted because of how they feel about Biden; their feelings about Biden aren’t changing because they vote uncommitted.
This is actually good for Biden, because he can check the pulse of the electorate going into the general election. Polling data, as we know by now, is notoriously unreliable. This is a way to get a message to Biden about what’s important to his voter base. Without this information, people might not show up to vote, and he might have no idea why.
imho this is directly targeted to increase voter apathy.
The incumbent always sweeps
- tell that to trump.
thorough understanding of the uncommitted movement and what u.s. primaries are. there is so much blatant misunderstanding and misinfo going on it’s bad.
yeah I could see this EXCEPT the rhetoric used isn’t likely to be forgotten - labeling him Genocide Joe is just gonna evaporate huh?
This movement is bullshit FUD sprayed right out of the GOP, believe it at your peril. And note that these same fuckwits always attack Biden, but never seem to go after trump, even tho ‘it’s just the primaries bro’.
tell that to trump
the incumbent always sweeps in the primary. please fReaking learn to read and digest the post like the rest of us before you type your hate comment dawg please please please 🙏 😭
i could see this except…
i don’t stand by the genocide joe nickname. i do stand by those who do what they can to stop children from starving.
this movement is bullshit FUD
this “bullshit” is doing the bare minimum to get a fucking genocide to end. call it a mistake, fine, call it a miscalculation, fine. stop calling it fascism, FUD, or astroturfing and learn to think for just a half a second that someone might have empathy for human suffering.
learn to think for just a half a second that someone might have empathy for human suffering.
you really think your internet hissy fit blaming Biden for Israel’s genocide is doing more than the actual state department and government?
Damn son, you really don’t understand how the world works at all do you?
It’s FUD. Stop playing their game, or be recognized for doing their work.
Willing to bet money that nobody not any measurable amount, is flipping from Biden to trump over his Palestine stance. They are just not going to vote at most or vote PSL or Green
The problem is that Biden knows that all of these people will vote for him anyways in the general election, so he doesn’t care.
yeah :’(
This kind of post is exactly how Trump is going to be elected to the Supreme Court, so he can grant himself immunity. You should be ashamed of yourself.
top tier comment
Really just gonna tell on yourself like that, huh?
Haha un cum bent
i need a hit of what you’re having rn pls
Uh, I don’t take anything. I just don’t really care about elections and stuff. I just want there to be no war (and also that capitalism gets a redo)
wants large-scale change
refuses to care about politics
lmao
I know, makes sense. I’m just not from America. I do care about my local politics.
Oh ok, that’s fair
w opinion
Idk if it’s even possible to vote uncommitted in the general, but I’m voting psl.
i know you probably hear this a lot, but i encourage you not to do so. until we have ranked choice voting, voting for the democrat candidate in the general will always be a needed form of harm reduction, especially if you live in a swing state.
others are probably better at expressing this than i, so i’ll leave it at that. :)
No thanks.
They’re doing an awful job of harm reduction and I’m not waiting for fundamental systemic changes to the country’s election process to withhold support from the party that’s rug pulled me for 24 years.
The best time to stop supporting the democrats and put my energy elsewhere was 2000, the second best time is now.
I will also never vote for Joe Biden for any position again.
thanks for hearing me out, i see you definitely have thought this through so i won’t rag on you despite our disagreement.
No worries. You’re always welcome on the “democrats fuck off” side. There’s definitely somewhere here with your politics and idea of appropriate direct action.
don’t get me wrong, democrats can eat dirt the majority of the time 😭 bunch of war criminals and capitalist scum. but in the end, after doing organizing and grassroots stuff, when it comes down to the final say, i personally try to make the choice that will be the most pragmatically beneficial (or least harmful, as it tends to be) to my neighbors.
voting is not harm reduction.
i have heard this argument a couple times and honestly haven’t been swayed by it. let me know if i’ve been hearing the argument from the wrong sources but it’s such a tough position to defend when i know for a fact that each vote i make can have a direct influence on the livelihood of my neighbors.
harm reduction as a specific thing. The best example of it is needle exchanges and safe injection rooms for addicts. you recognize that the bad thing is happening, and you do what you can to mitigate the harm that comes from the bad thing. The bad thing is bad people being in power. what you can do to mitigate that is engaging in mutual aid and community organizing around issues that are affecting you locally. voting for a Democrat or Republican won’t stop the bad things from happening. The Democrats have brought us to the point where Trump is seen as reasonable by half the electorate. The Democrats have shared power with the Republicans for the past hundred years as fascism has taken over the government. voting for them doesn’t reduce the harm that they cause.
edit
voting for Democrats is like giving out free Suboxone and saying at least it’s not heroin. That’s not harm reduction. harm reduction is recognizing that the addicts are going to use the substance of their choice and making that as safe as possible.
harm reduction [is] a specific thing. The best example of it is needle exchanges and safe injection rooms for addicts. you recognize that the bad thing is happening, and you do what you can to mitigate the harm that comes from the bad thing. The bad thing is bad people being in power.
these first sentences of yours follow perfectly into the following thesis:
“What you can do to mitigate that is engaging in mutual aid and community organizing, and when the opportunity to do that ends, to also vote for the candidate which does the least harm.”
There is room to hold both truths at once. If Trump had not won in 2016, the supreme court would have an entirely different makeup, we’d still have Roe v Wade, and there would be fewer women and doctors fearing legal persecution for taking medically necessary action in cases like ectopic pregnancy.. You recognize that someone bad was going to get elected in 2016, but only one of those rolled back basic women’s rights. Harm reduction. And that’s just one example of many. There is nothing about voting a handful of times a year that precludes you from also also organizing and participating in mutual aid.
The candidate that does the least harm would probably be Cornell West or Jill Stein. voting for the senator who put in place the conditions for roe v Wade to be turned over, the senator who confirmed some of those very same justices, to be president does not reduce harm. if you won’t take it from me maybe it’ll take it from this guy
https://www.indigenousaction.org/voting-is-not-harm-reduction-an-indigenous-perspective/
sounds like you should vote for cornell west or jill stein then :)
i had already read this article long before today and it still doesn’t give a compelling argument that voting can’t reduce harm, sorry.
It’s so unfathomable to me to think you cannot send a message by having an opinion, only by using an indirect possible half message via an entirely different channel used for other things? It’s crazy talking to think political officers don’t understand or know what people ask for, but they will understand this? It’s coming from ignorance or do people actually not understand?
You keep posting these even though they’re getting removed by the mods every time.
none of my recent posts have been removed as far as i am aware. one has been locked because the comments were out of control.
it might be that your local instance is moderating some of my posts, i think that is a thing that can happen on lemmy.
Who is “calling” and “not calling” the uncommitted movement?
democrat pro-palestine groups.
here is one specific example: https://www.listentomichigan.com/
Nice, I do like it when useful idiots identifiy rhemselves upfront, instead of me having to dig, thanks!
Wow, the entire point of the post went over your head
It didn’t, I just disagree.
