It was only supposed to be a little instability Donald! Give us a little dip that we could use to buy up another chunk of the pie. NOT BLOW UP THE ENTIRE FOUNDATION OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE DONALD!

• The Cato Institute, probably?

Literally from your link they quote him saying.

…but it does not have the right to use US dollars to kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza.

But Oh No he didn’t say the Magic Word to the press 2 months in when we still have 0 idea what internal discussions were happening. Can’t give the guy with probably the longest track record of being on the right side of pretty much every issue any benefit of the doubt. Especially not when he has before been very vocal about Palestinian rights. Couldn’t possibly be any good reason he didn’t use the Magic Purity Word.

Color me surprised. A video with a hostile interviewer trying to bait him into making statements that paint pro-Palestinian sentiment as pro-Hamas and him predictably navigating the “do you condemn Hamas?” traps.

Of course that outweighs him using the power he has to try to block 20 billion dollars worth of weapons. Heaven forbid he try to be an effective advocate and not demonstrate perfect ideological purity in every interview and talk no matter how it might impede him actually trying to fucking do something about it.

More entirely missing the point. He was literally one of the only voices trying to block weapons to Israel. But no, he didn’t stop them entirely on his own or call Biden “Genocide Joe” so that must mean he supports the genocide.

It’s really starting to sound like there’s literally nothing he could have done that would have been good enough for you.

My Sibling in Satan, how do you think making these demands work? This is an asymmetrical fight. Most of the time you won’t get a direct answer because the politicians are playing a different game. By and large they won’t commit to anything before the election that might alienate large sections of voters one way or the other.

Electoral politics is about choosing your battlefield for the action to come. In a presidential election it is a mathematical fact that there are only two viable options. Yes, they’re both captured to varying degrees by capital. But you can get a sense of who is more likely to accept the things you want.

There was 0 chance of the Republicans stopping what’s happening in Gaza for example. Clearly the chance was at least close to 0 with the Democrats but they were more vulnerable on that front and almost certainly they at least wouldn’t be trying to send pro-Palestinian activists to a gulag in El Salvador. So given this context which is the more advantageous battlefield you try to advocate on? There is a correct answer here and it’s the Democrats.

Is it fair? Absolutely not. Are you running the risk of getting them elected and still not doing what you want? Yep. But a risk they won’t listen is objectively better than a guarantee the Republicans won’t listen. This is why electoral politics cannot be the only arena where we’re fighting, but it’s an arena we still have to fight on because it determines the battlefield other action takes place on.

A bunch of comments going for the “why would you buy toilet paper that already has shit on it” route, but I can’t believe nobody went for calling this a shit(tickets) post.

You mean things like Single-Payer Healthcare, Housing as a Human Right, increasing the minimum wage, or any of the myriad of other policy positions that he talks about every time he talks basically anywhere? That thing he already does?

Because it’s the only legal thing he can tell them to do.

You can argue with the math all you like. It won’t change.

Missed the entire point huh? If people not voting lowers the required counts to achieve a plurality, then mathematically speaking it is functionally equivalent to voting for the candidate furthest away from that non-voter’s preference.

The only way a non-voter does not work in the favor of in this case Trump would be if there was some absolute share of eligible voters he had to reach. But since only a plurality is needed every non-vote and every third-party vote lowers the amount of votes he needs to achieve that plurality.

This is literally a studied and documented mathematical phenomenon related to first past the post systems.

There’s enough blame to go around my love

See the thing is that a candidate only needs a plurality of cast votes. So every vote that doesn’t get cast makes that plurality easier to achieve. If there are 100 people that can vote and all of them do you need 51 for a majority. If 10 of them don’t vote at all and there’s only 90 left you now only need 46 for that same majority. If another 10 of them vote for some third party that person now only needs 41 votes to have the largest plurality. Every person that doesn’t vote lowers the threshold for victory.

It’s tempting to think that this benefits both remaining candidates equally since both can benefit from that lowered margin. But in reality it gets skewed based on who stayed home/voted third party and who didn’t. This is the spoiler effect.

Yes, we already covered Democrats Bad. I agree. I hate them with a passion. Doesn’t change that in a national electoral sense they are the only viable party at this moment to enact any kind of positive change. They are not and should never be the only option. But all people who talk like you do ever seem to offer as a solution is the “Glorious Revolution™” that hundreds of thousands if not millions of vulnerable people WILL die in because they never think about how those people are going to survive when food or medicine supply lines get disputed by fighting for the most fucking basic of examples.

They engage in this rhetoric because it’s Magical Thinking that absolves them of having to do something they feel is icky and stains their ideological purity. It’ll all be fixed when the Oppressed finally throw off their chains and eat the rich or whatever.

The first past the post argument is anti-3rd-party-voting rhetoric? The long studied mathematical tendency of first past the post systems to consolidate towards two party rule through among other factors strategic voting and the spoiler effect? Yeah okay Buddy. You’re definitely the best leftist here. You win.

Both MAGA and these so-called “allies” want me dead at the end of the day. We’re just expected to starve to death when Amerikkka collapses or the people finally rise up.

I know full well how horrific what Israel is doing is. But there was no anti-genocide option on the ballot in 2024. There was no way that Jill Stein or whoever was going to get enough votes to win. Hell, most of Stein’s supporters I talked to their best case scenario was getting to 5% for debate access and federal funds next go round. Any that I confronted about Gaza not having 4 years just shrugged and said some variation of “better than voting for a genocide” How exactly? Because they didn’t have to sacrifice their ideological purity?

the yougov polls shows that your fellow democrats didn’t vote because they didn’t want to be complicit in a genocide that the democrats openly enabled; not because they wanted to punish the democrats and this is going to happen again and again because even the likes of bernie sanders are a zionists.

Yeah, but what lesson did leadership take from this whole thing? That they were too far left on trans issues. But yeah Bernie is the Zionist when he was pushing for blocking weapons to Israel.

that poverty you’re living through comes as the hands of democrats and republicans alike. sure, it’s slower with the democrats, but you’re still going to live with it nonethless.

I know exactly who is responsible for the merciless regime of means testing that makes escaping poverty such a Sisyphean task because they’d rather 100 deserving people get nothing if it prevents a single undeserving person from benefiting. I have no love for the Democrats. I simply understand that First Past the Post has my well being held hostage and a win outside the duopoly on a national scale is mathematically impossible.

and there will be no glorious revolution; just a natural decay of the system we’re in and a natural response from the people like us once things get bad enough, while we watch people in other places have it much better.

There it is. Pray tell, what is this “natural response” you speak of? Cuz I might be wrong, but it sounds to me like myself and millions like me are still expected to be sacrificed upon the altar of ideological purity so they don’t have to do something icky like vote for a Democrat.

Yes, Democrats bad. We get it. What’s your solution for that other than the Glorious Revolution™ that most of us disabled and/or living in poverty won’t survive.

Not voting for the Democrats really showed them for supporting the genocide. Bet they reversed course on tha- Oh… You mean they decided that Gaza wasn’t the problem and instead it was their support of trans people like me? Damn…

If that’s his intention then whoever came up with the plan is stupid beyond all imagining

Ding ding ding!

Their plan literally involves devaluing the dollar. They don’t want the dollar as the global reserve currency. They have no idea how it’ll all actually shake out but they’re confident that they’ll end up proportionately richer than everyone else. Sure the absolute amount of their wealth might decrease, but the real amount relative to the “serfs” will skyrocket.

They basically want their own little technofeudalist fiefdoms where everyone unfortunate enough to live in them is basically their property.

No, that’s the point. They’re literally trying to devalue the dollar so their billionaire buddies can consolidate wealth at fire sale prices.

I doubt Musk’s salute was that deep. He’s not some slick political operative. He’s a 4chan dipshit who thought he’d be edgy and cool and tiptoe up to the line. He thought it would be much more ambiguous what he did and he’d “own the libs” by making them look like fools to the normies who genuinely wouldn’t see it for what it actually was. He clearly was not expecting basically no one but the cultists on his side to not see what he did.