this post commits the cardinal internet sin of having nuance sorry :(

If you want to argue that the answer to Biden being too soft on Israel's crimes is to let the guy who handed them East Jerusalem, The West Bank, and The Golan Heights on a silver platter get back into power, you're either a covert Zionist agent, or an unwitting Zionist agent. Either way, you have no business lecturing about the moral course of action in this crisis.

Voting does make you complicit in the things the candidate has said they will do. For example, if the candidate says “I will get rid of abortion” then voting for them means you are partially responsible if they actually do get rid of abortion. Or if they say “I will kill all the gays” or “I will lock up all non-Christians” then don’t act all surprised pikachu face when it happens.

It’s not a blood pact, but it’s not a football game either where you’re just rooting for your team. You have to weigh the consequences of casting a vote for someone and decide if you can live with the possible outcomes and/or pick the lesser of two evils.

this person describes it better than me:

Voting does sort of make you complicit, honestly.

But guess what? Not voting also makes you complicit. So does voting in a way that has no chance of having an effect based on the current rules.

Basically, existing as an eligible voter, at least in a country where voting isn't rigged (so like, Russians are off the hook here, for example) makes you complicit in your government's actions.

That's kind of a big point of being in a democratic society - we are all, every one of us, responsible for the actions of our government.

And if you don't like that responsibility, I get it, I totally sympathize, because I agree. I hate that responsibility, especially cause I know damn well I'm not qualified to make those decisions. But I still am responsible, and pretending I'm not doesn't change that.

Whenever people express the sentiment that we need Biden to put his foot down on genocide I'm always for it.

But then when you ask them what they want to do it always becomes some nebulous Republican rhetoric about how Trump's not that bad.

Yes we need the genocide to stop, Trump will not accomplish that, he will make it worse.

We can pressure Congress and continue to protest because it needs to stop.

The past eight years have been such a strong argument for ranked choice voting.

I've finally trained my brain to jump to the bottom two panels of that format!

This reminds me of the trolley problem. One candidate wants to kill five people, the other "only" wants to kill one person. No matter what you do, it is guaranteed that one of them will get elected and kill at least one person - but if you try to use your vote to make the lesser evil slightly more probable - you are suddenly complicit.

Even worse - if the kill-one-person wins and kills that person, the kill-five-people candidate' supporters will be the ones to hold the kill-one-person voters accountable for it. Their candidate would have killed more people, but because he lost the elections he was not able to kill anyone, which somehow makes voting for him more ethical?

Who you vote for says a lot about what your priorities are and what your moral compass is willing to tolerate for what you see as the "greater good." When you vote for someone, you may not agree with everything they stand for but you absolutely do believe that overall what they stand for is more closely aligned with your political goals than the alternatives.

The amount of controversy is this thread is a dead giveaway that some fuckery is going down.

Luckily the amount of actual engagement shows its all just manufactured and there is no real consensus. Anyone forming an opinion based on discourse in this thread needs to step back and interface with real, actual, protesters.

That's why I always vote for Satan.

I have a feeling that the people who upvote this meme hate "trump voters" because of their complicity.

Fucking brilliant.

Nuance is about subtlety. Nothing here is subtle.

There are clear differences between destroying the planet by eating meat and driving a car and supporting the guy with Mein Kampf on his nightstand who publically Idealizes Dictators.

I'm shocked! Are you telling me there are people in real life with whom you can have nuanced conversation?!

Fundementally it's perfectly valid to take a position that a system is so irredeemable that you cannot participate, but instead believe it must be torn down instead of adding legitimatecy to it. Sometimes that protest achieves something and sometimes it doesn't. It is a kantian ethics stance that you'd have to work a lot harder to invalidate than the cursory anger that folks spew out on Lemmy.

If a vote acknowledges the legitimacy in someone's view of a genocidal government, I think it's fine for them to protest against it. I'm not personally of that stance, but I don't doubt many have sincerely held beliefs.

literally Labour and Liberal in Australia, people have such little critical thinking skills that almost everyone i know either votes for one of the two, either its for welfare or for "freedom!", nothing else ever. no wonder we have policies most genuinely disagree with...

Permanently Deleted

When the American Empire implodes (hopefully soon) and a thousand years pass and an enlightened civilization is looking back on us with all your "nuance" weathered down, I don't want my name to be thrown on a list of people who voted for genocide. No democracy worth saving would've ever had its most important vote of our lifetimes ever for the fate of the world come down to Vanilla or Orange Sherbet flavored fascism. We are at the logical end of the American Experiment.