SBatLevizan
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User ID: 2179
SBatLevizan
7mo ago
Okay, now I've watched your video and see that your intended audience is young progressives, socialists, oppressor-oppressed ideologues etc. for whom Kamala is too centrist and therefore not pure enough.
Your reasoning might land pretty well if the people you're trying to reach are only social justice oriented 18-year-olds, especially if they're not very bright. But this is not the only cohort whose political consciousness has been manufactured over the past decade. Potential voters who don't concur with your assumptions and priorities will simply be offended by the obvious biases in your argument.
SBatLevizan
7mo ago
I have yet to view your video, but wonder if choosing the lesser of evils is necessarily one's only option.
For instance, in the upcoming election I will go to the polls, but unless something happens between now and election day to change my mind, I intend to write in for President and Vice President the names of Israeli hostages held or murdered by Hamas.
I have the leeway to do that because I live in a blue state where I know the effective absence of my vote will have no impact: my state is going for Harris. If I lived in a red state I would probably vote Democrat in the knowledge that my vote also would not affect the outcome of the election, but that voting "against" Trump would be a way to send a message to analysts about trends and preferences on the hard right's own turf. Then again, I might make the same calculation I do in my blue state: if my vote itself will have no impact, I might still be able to convey information about what matters to voters like me via my write-in.
Only if I lived in one of the seven swing states would I be up against the lesser of evils problem. In that case I would probably be influenced to choose based on the behavior of people around me. IOW, the more hostile, power-hungry, irrational, conspiratorial, antisemitic, otherwise hateful, entrenched or illiberal the progressive left or nativist right was in my state, the more likely I would be to vote against that intolerable contingent.
An even more important factor in my decision would be my calculation of the odds of the country surviving and ultimately recovering from one bad Presidential choice versus the other. Yet if on balance I still felt compelled not to vote for the least-bad candidate, I would consider myself disenfranchised and vote for neither of them.
So "otherwise peaceful" but now unemployable Baathist graphic designers, accountants and intelligence analysts just naturally sign up with ISIS because, well, what else would they do?
Shouldn't we be thinking of people like this in similar terms as we might view southern Confederate sympathizers during and after the American Civil War?
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