this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Asklemmy

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As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.

Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.

I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.

Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.

Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.

Edit 2: This blew up, it’s a little overwhelming right now but I do intent on replying to everybody that took the time to comment. Just need to get in the right headspace.

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[–] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 35 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

Good point. Although, I would question whether Lemmy is such a place as we really don’t have the numbers to warrant the effort, imo.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 52 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

We get drug spam and stock spam, no reason to expect that political spam is any less likely.

Lemmy has a huge amount of hardcore lefty's. If you can get them to not vote, and especially if you can get them to tell their friends not to vote, that is a big win.

Astroturfing/sockpuppeting is dirty cheap to do, so no reason not to try.

You do see some users here that will post continously on about a certain topic repeatedly, with no other opinions. They might be legit, but I have my suspicions.

[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 24 points 4 weeks ago

"Hardcore lefties" have a very different understanding of the value of their vote, which is to say, it means very little.

Have you deigned to ask them questions?

[–] Tiltinyall 4 points 4 weeks ago

That is a very balanced take and I've come to the same conclusion. Time is money and when you see an abundance of time being spent like this you could readily assume that the time is possibly compensated for.

[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 27 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I disagree - it feels like Lemmy is seeing the same kind of shills that 4chan saw in the last several elections. These bad actors are trying to sway dems to vote third party or not vote at all "in protest" across many small and large online spaces.

[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 24 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Are the shills in the room with us right now?

[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 21 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Interesting. What am I shilling for? What are my real opinions? What are the fake ones I'm presenting?

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 17 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Your real opinions are the ones I like, and your fake opinions are the ones I don’t. It’s not rocket surgery.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 24 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It is not currently such a place. I’ve yet to hear a Lemmy admin say otherwise.

Edit to add: Russiagate conspiracy theorists want it to be true so they can simply dismiss voices that contradict their beliefs.

[–] Zpiritual@lemm.ee 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I've seen cryptospam, drugspam, generic adspam on here. Why would a political astroturfspam be a conspiracy theory?

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago

It does exist. It just doesn’t currently exist here, and Russian/Chinese/Iranian bots 1) hardly exist at all and 2) so far have had virtually no effect.

The reason people are seeing $evil_country bots everywhere is because our own government and our own corporate media tell us they are everywhere, not because they are everywhere. The propaganda is coming from inside the house. They’ve spent the last seven years and who knows how much money trying to convince us of. They’re trying to manufacture our consent to censorship.

They tell us what opinions are $evil_dictator talking points so we know what opinions to dismiss out of hand, and to see the people & organizations that express those opinions as malevolent foreign agents, so we never listen to them again. They’re training us to do some of the censoring for them.

The first step is to understand the media and propaganda.

I linked upthread about this specific propaganda campaign, but since people don’t click links, I’ll copypasta myself.

[–] coolusername@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago

takes no effort with modern technology