SBatLevizan
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User ID: 2179
SBatLevizan
1mo 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.
Your remarks hit home, which for me used to be Philadelphia, where we once lived and encountered situations indistinguishable from what you're describing. Day after day, more directly threatening the longer they went on.
On one occasion the police actually did show up and take away the son of a bitch's gun, but they almost missed it because he had shoved it in the back of his pants--which I was able to see from my bedroom window and urgently call the cops about as they were detaining him.
But then he knew that I had called them. And because the gun belonged to his friend (the drug dealer who lived next door to us, who would blast gangster rap while getting a conspicuous blowjob in the front seat of his car outside our dining room window, and whose girlfriend would, when she had had just about enough of his shit, take after him with her own pistol and lodge bullets in our trees), pants boy was released within about 3 hours.
Our entire middle-class, thoroughly integrated community of teachers, veterans, social workers and public employees had been decimated over the previous decade by crack, weed and alcohol. The successful kids of successful black parents had moved away; the unsuccessful, mentally crippled and drug-addled kids of successful parents had stayed home and taken up preying on their own families and everyone else. There was also, in the mid '90s, essentially an undisclosed race war underway in Philly, which meant that efforts to control crime and help those inclined to commit it were both pilloried as illegitimate because they emerged from an external, fundamentally white, power structure. The police were understaffed, constrained by facilities overcrowding and regulations that made arresting and holding people impossible, and no doubt impeded by inadequate training and the usual tendency of cops to default to hyper authoritarianism.
Probably federal underfunding, too, but I guess that's what you get when you lie to the FBI about your crime statistics.
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.
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