If these didnt upload correctly let me know I'll delete the post. Conversation I just had in a local discord where dude didn't even read my comment and attacked me for not being onboard with Harris and fed me a fearmonger. So over fucking dem voters man.
I just dont have any leftists in my life to gripe with, sorry. š¤£
EDIT: Ive always gotten on well with this dude and we agree on a lot, which really made it worse that he didnt bother reading what I wrote. I just deleted my comments and left the server (its just a small side server for our area anyway.)
I'm over a decade older than you, and it wasn't always like this, but it has been for too long now. Each election they've been ramping up that rhetoric.
With all do respect, I live somewhere where we actually have a viable 3rd and even fourth party candidate, who I'm happy to vote for. I've voted for the lesser evil in the past, and it always feels bad. I'm telling you this because I empathise with your position, and I agree that in theory to have viable 3rd parties, people like you do indeed need to vote for them.
What scares the shit out of me, though, is that Trump is backed into a corner. His only choice to guarantee he doesn't see the inside of a jail cell is to extend his term indefinitely. We all know he'd do it if he could, he's said so himself.
So the question, then, becomes: how much faith do you have in the guardrails of the system to stay a democracy? SCOTUS has already been stacked, and the recent presidential immunity scope increase is just waiting to be abused.
Never in my life has your democracy been in such real peril, and, disappointingly, there is only one person you can vote for to defend it. I hope your ideals are worth risking falling directly into totalitarianism over.
If you still can't understand why this one is actually different, I'm not sure there's much more I can say.
Some quick info on American duopoly, since you aren't here-
Voting Democrat isn't voting against Republican policies, it's voting against them NOW and getting them 5-10 years later once they've let the Overton window shift and Republicans are crazier. That's the cliffs notes of how we got here - Democrats have been arguing for at least 10, probably 20 years, that (however worded at the time) leftists are the problem and use that to move further right to court "centrists" who are just Republicans who don't want the social blowback, giving Republicans the room to pull further into the extreme right. Democrats of year X are basically just Republicans of year X-10.
"Well if you don't vote Dem you can't get change!" You already can't now. they're half of the two parties who move the goalposts anytime a third party looks like they'll meet the requirements for inclusion, and they (the DNC) went to court in 2016 to have it legally ruled that their charter is bullshit and as a private entity they can do what they want - voters and donors be damned.
Democrats pay lip service to Trump only because they don't have a platform without "we aren't them." Democrats spend more time and energy bullying leftists for not being onboard than they do trying to beat Republicans. For at least 10 years now, they love to blame us for all their woes, but instead of adjusting policy to capture those voters they move farther right because "it's the left's fault we lost." It's an intentional cycle to forever justify sprinting rightward and to always have a scapegoat instead of admitting they aren't in sync with voters.
TLDR: Everyone claims blue MAGA are the saviors and the only ones who can save us, but they don't do fuckshit to stop the rise of fascism because they're also fascist, just with a smile. A vote for Dems isn't a vote against fascism, it's a vote for fascism in 4-8 years when all the Dem voters will root for it and call anybody who disagrees the enemy (Like they're already doing now.)
Nobody who can imprison trump has the will to do so. He's not in any danger at all. In the words of George Carlin, "it's all a big club, and you ain't in it". Trump is in the club, and nobody is going to do anything of any significance to him. If they were going to do something, they would have already done something.
Iāve had to stop harping on the ā2 sides of the same coinā thing because itās tiresome for everyone. Fortunately, the liberal folks I know donāt particularly like Harris either, but they also donāt know what the alternative is in such a rigged system.
It took me years to finally get people to realize that itās all ratchet effect bullshit and both parties are complicit.
Hating liberals is the most liberal thing you can do. Congratulations. I have an ultra-leftist friend who annoys me to no end, and I'm left leaning myself. He just parrots the party line, and whatever the current fad is for any given topic under the sun. Then when I point out that he's just repeating stuff he's read, and not giving me his actual opinion or original thoughts, he calls me a libertarian and says I'm the most conservative person he knows. I voted for a socialist for my senator this election, to give you an idea of how conservative I am. Anyways, the rampant tribalism is out of control these days. Everyone's all or nothing, and democracy doesn't work that way, especially not in a blended country.