Don't vote for president if you don't want to, I get it. It's stupid we only have 2 options, especially when both are in mental decline and show little to no ambition to reduce needless deaths and suffering. Both want to move this country towards fascism, and both are creating a worse world they won't have to live in for much longer.
To those who see this and think I'm saying both sides are the same, I'm not. I'll probably vote for Biden in November because he's driving towards the cliff at a slower speed and at least does the bare minimum for marginalized in this country. Also Trump said some pretty racist shit last night. Still, to those who don't want to support either candidate for the reasons above, that's valid.
The point I'm getting to is VOTE DOWN BALLOT. Vote for your congress person and your senator, both federal and state. Vote for your city council and your sheriff and whatever bills there are and everything else. That's where the fight still matters. That's where you can make the most difference. The social justice you want to see won't get near the white house until it's represented in the lower offices. It doesn't matter who the president is if you get enough decent people in a position to stand in their way.
unnecessary addendum
That's the important bit but here's a some sort messages to a few blocks of voters. To Republicans and right wingers, you should reevaluate your positions because what you're supporting is stupid and selfish and often inhumane. To Democrats, if you get enough control over the house and senate it doesn't really matter if Trump is president, also recognize and correct the failures of your party please. To the leftists, please run for office and bring those ideas into the mainstream discussion, try to reach out to your community and to share rather than driving them away with self righteousness. Also, don't be bigoted, that goes for everyone.
Edit: I even said I was voting for Biden and the libs are still mad I think he sucks. Again, the point of this post is to get people to pay attention to the other things on their ballot. The president isn't as important or as powerful as we act like it is. And if you want better options, you have to support better options in races where they actually have a chance.
Massive support for war and policing. Crack down on protesters. Etc.
So Palestine. We're doing the Palestine argument again. What if I told you that support for Israel has been so baked into our foreign policy since its inception that no president alone can go against it without incurring the wrath of a neoliberal horde? Is Palestine suddenly the one issue that's worth committing political suicide over, just to make way for a worse, actual fascist autocrat who would be bff with Netanyahu while he erases the Palestinian people? I think Biden is shitty on Palestine, but I also think he's in a terrible spot and he's doing what he thinks he can against decades of foreign policy. The other guy would be shitposting on Truth Social about sending bombs to Palestinian children for Christmas.
That's included but not the only thing I'm talking about. Also the real point I'm trying to make is if we're able to elect better people to congress and make those voices unignoreable, then it doesn't matter who the president is.
I promise you that in this election, it does.
If we keep focusing solely on the president we'll never get better options.
100% agree
I think your copy of Umberto Eco is a preproduction copy or something
It’s actually not accurate that Biden has instigated any crackdown on protestors, as far as I know; he’s spoken at plenty of events with protestors without having them beaten or anything. There are police agencies in the US (quite a lot of them) that don’t give a shit what a Democratic president does or doesn’t want them to do.
Trump, on the other hand by way of example of what it would mean, tried to get the National Guard to shoot protestors with live ammunition, and actually was able to mobilize some federal police to snatch protestors off the street and drive away with them without ever even identifying what agency they were with or where the people were going (it turned out they were CBP).
But that’s besides the point - even if what you were saying was entirely true, it wouldn’t mean Biden’s trying to resurrect fascism for real in its real unfettered form. If fascism meant war, and police abuses, there would be quite a lot of fascist countries in the world today and we’d need to invent some new word for the very specific and very dangerous thing which is actual fascism.
You're so right, because we are not currently living under a full extreme fascist state, that totally means the US isn't moving in that direction. /s
Yeah, when Biden invested two trillion dollars in climate change and unions, and increased corporate taxes to spend on working people, Mussolini
(I took out a dick joke that followed after that because the mods are sometimes sensitive in my experience)
(You're gonna have to use your imagination for what Mussolini might have done in his grave to indicate how excited he got about Biden's final realization of his lifelong dream of staffing the NLRB with labor people and pausing weapons shipments to a war criminal ally because they were committing human rights violations)
We still have snow sometimes that means there's no global warming.
If we had two trillion snowstorms one recent winter, when every other winter since like 1980 had been more or less 0 except for some healthcare that fell once from the sky during winter 2010, I actually think that would represent a factor that someone could bring up to say bro at least in the last couple of years it seems like it’s been getting colder
And then on top of that if someone else said naw man it’s all global warming anyway so ergo I don’t mind if we bring back the guy who owns his own personal methane factory staffed by like 30% of the country at this point and has promised to turn it on and produce nothing but methane all the time and also kill anyone with an electric car, because it’s all pretty much the same, I think that would represent a factor that would make me question that person’s motivations in saying that
That was pretty weird. You're also misrepresenting my argument. As far as my motivations for posting, they are 1, get people to vote even if it's not for president and 2, steer more conversation towards local politicians.