Political Memes

These people sound like exact copies of the people saying voting in 2000 didn't matter, and that turned out to be the most politically consequential of my lifetime. Gore was imperfect as they all are, but holy fuck did Dubya fuck up literally everything he touched.

Among many, many, many things, Dubya started forever wars killing untold hundreds of thousands of people. He accelerated oil and gas production, absolutely setting the Climate Change world on a pace for disaster. He seated Alito, unquestionably the biggest monster currently on the Supreme Court. And he passed a monster tax cut for the rich that set us on this path of unrestrained deficit spending.

And that's just the headlines. Remember when he tried to put his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court? lol

Gen X already tried this 25 years ago and it fucked the world up so badly that we need to be saved by the future generations. Imagine not learning that lesson and doing it again.

There are legitimate criticisms to be had of Biden, but in every case, Trump is unambiguously worse. If Trump were pro-Palestine, I could maybe understand single-issue voters preferring him to Biden...but he's not.

To be honest, I have little hope for 2024. Genuine fake news is rampant, and in pretty much every case it hurts Biden (misinformation about the economy, etc.). I'll be voting a straight Dem ticket in my very red state, and hoping against all hope that uninformed voters somehow do the right thing.

A critical refinement of this point: By all means, please do vote for whichever actual progressive candidate you favor in your state's Democratic primary. This is not sarcasm; do it. But when the general election comes around Biden is inevitably the candidate anyway, do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of office.

I just can't wait for those of us in the queer community to either be thrown in camps or flee the company, all so that the people who didn't vote can tell me it's actually because of Biden.

Reading these comments, it feels people are having a giant trolley problem moment. Do I vote for Biden and throw the switch so fewer people die, or do I not do it and let more people die, but at least I'm not complicit then?

You're right but a bunch of people just don't care anymore and I can't totally blame them. I'll be voting biden because I always vote, but this is on democrats 100% if they can't motivate their base.

Did people forget that Trump was up Netanyahu's ass during his presidency?

Don't forget the Deportation Force that's going to round up 11 million people and deport them. I wish I was joking.

You guys wouldn't have this clusterfuck if you just had a parliamentary system. Don't like the non-reactionary liberal candidate? Great, just vote for whoever else you like, and even if they don't win, they can still join efforts with the lesser evil to make sure the far right doesn't return to power. It also has the added benefit that it doesn't force the whole right wing of the country to cater to the rabid reactionaries on the rise, because those just make a different party that has to balance the distribution of their power with their less mad allies.

This should be a lovely comment section... I'll have to return with some nice warm dinner and a drink later.

I try to think that hopefully Trump would get stonewalled enough that he wouldn’t be able to get any of this done.

Then I realize that he seriously does not care. He doesn’t give a shit about Congress, or checks and balances. He and his party have clearly demonstrated that they have no interest in the system of “law and order” that they cling so close to.

Who’s gonna stop him? His courts? An impeachment? Antifa gonna go out and storm Pennsylvania Ave and live up to their damn name, which somehow became an insult?

The fact that this man is on a ballot in any state is shameful. The GOP of just a dozen fucking years ago would have tossed him out on his ass in a second. Somehow since then, Romney, McCain, and Liz Cheney have become the sole voices of reason within the party. One got blackballed, one got censured, and the other one died.

So maybe we need a third option. I don't know, maybe a candidate that isn't an evil geriatric white man that can barely finish a sentence?

I’d love to make a glib analogy like ‘my toast got burnt so I burned my house down and most of the neighbourhood’ but the literal fact that so many people are suffering makes that sort of thing rather tasteless.

I don’t think Biden is “Genocide Joe”. That’s ridiculous hyperbole which doesn’t help. We (the public) don’t know what kind of pressure is being levered in the background to end all the horrors of this situation.

People not voting Dem merely because of difficult historical relationships with Israel are dangerously deluded.

I feel like posts like these always fail to realize how fucked of a situation US 'democracy' is in where you must vote for one shitty candidate because the other is literally a fascist.

Like no actually some people have decided that the entire system is untenable - they no there's a lesser of two evils, but they refuse to partake of an illegitimate system.

ITT: Right wing trolls pretend to be leftists.

If we don't at least pretend to be willing to wield our voting power to influence our govt, we might as well give up and accept we live in an oligarchy.

Sometimes just the threat of violence is enough to get people to act. Biden has already changed his administrations public stance and rhetoric towards Israel at merely the risk of losing votes. Ideally it would have been because of the loss of human lives, but beggars can't be choosers.

Seriously. I have a hunch that if Trump were president this would be happening regardless except he would be saying how people should be assaulting Palestinians or something like that.

Instead Palestinians have huge support from U.S. citizens, the non/anti-Zionist ones anyway.

Are you telling me your democracy is held together with tape and needles ?

it's not the responsibility of voters to vote for certain politicians, it's the responsibility of the politicians to represent people so they vote for them.

if you think joe biden is gonna lose then you gotta force joe biden to take more popular positions (he is literally running right now it's the time you make up your platform), not yell at people "refusing" to vote for him as if they are just petulant children refusing to eat their veggies and act like the most logical and rational option is locking your vote for joe biden and whoever disagrees just cannot understand the correctness of your reasoning.

(to be clear i'm not american but it's just ridiculous how many times i have heard this exact song and dance)

This feel like a shocked Pikachu meme where Biden is surprised the left despised him when the Democratic party does nothing at all progressive.

If only there were more candidates to choose from than these two genocide lovers.

Palestine will be even more fucked under Trump, he's firmly on Israel's side and would probably increase aid or give them carte blanche to just exterminate Palestine completely. While Biden hasn't been much better, there's at least signs that his administration is trying to reign in the Israelis, though for whatever reason they haven't been terribly serious about it. I'm assuming it's because Israel is a client state that for the most part cooperates with the US and buys our weapons, they can help further whatever policy goals we might have in the region. IMO they seem like they're more trouble than they're worth, whatever we might gain from Israel is ruined by Israel's own conduct, they're dragging us down with them as they act belligerently to everyone around them. Maybe being surrounded by hostile nations on all sides does that, but from the outside looking in it doesn't look like they've seriously sought peace.

If anything, we should be withholding aid from them to get them to show a bit more humility and willingness to work towards peace, but I'm guessing they'd just turn to Russia or China instead and continue being belligerent. If that happened though, then Palestinians are just as fucked as before, if not more so. It's crazy how fickle we can be with any other nation that needs our help and have left plenty of other allies to die, but for whatever reason, we just can't quit Israel. Given all of the alternatives, Palestinians face a slow death unless some sort of two-state solution can be found (or if they could be integrated better into Israel instead of being dead-set on their own independent state), but from what I can see, the least-worst option is for the US to try to be a moderating influence on Israel like what Biden has been halfheartedly doing. It's not great, but the alternatives are worse.

That's a current picture, not a future picture.

Our first amendment rights are only exercisable with the permission of the government, preferably in silence tucked away where no one can see us.

Our third amendment rights are non-existent because SCOTUS draws a line between the police and soldiers. (Never mind the British soldiers were here to police the colonies)

Our Fourth amendment rights exist only notionally. If officers get a dog to jump at your car or have a "good faith belief" that they're within their rights to search.

Fifth is almost just gone. Civil Asset Forfeiture means only the rich can afford to keep the state from taking their stuff at any time. States routinely re-run criminal trials by deliberately getting a mistrial declared if they're losing.

The sixth is a joke. Public defenders in some places have as little as 7 minutes to look at your case. And if you're accused of a misdemeanor you probably won't have a jury at all. But you will lose your job, your house, and everything else in a chain reaction as you have to figure out how to pay hefty fines with no job. Also you'll probably end up in prison for contempt of court when you have trouble paying.

The eighth amendment is likewise a joke. Instead of protecting poor people in the system, it's used as a cudgel to force confessions.

And this is all on top of decades of wealth transfer out of the working class to the point that it's getting hard to buy food for half the country.

Oh yeah, Trump would be horrible. But he's the guy we've been getting set up for, not the guy the establishment is trying to avoid. I'll probably vote for Biden but I'm not going to be surprised when the "status quo genocide" guy gets his ass handed to him. Democrats needed to fight for this and they just aren't.

Edit to add - Y'all know the second the GOP puts up a reasonable sounding asshole we're fucked right? Like if Nikki Haley got the nomination? All that pressure drops away and she'd still institute project 2025 just like Trump.