this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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No such thing. Ask away!

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And I'm being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don't understand it. Can someone please "steelman" that argument for me?

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[–] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

Consider how you'd go about exploiting the opposite case.

If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there's just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it's an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.

Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.

They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn't bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you're getting kicked out for real.

The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.

There's this huge narrative that's been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it's meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.

You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We'll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don't like it, that's literally your problem.

Oh no, you can't hold us accountable now, it's the worst possible time. It's too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can't you see there's a highschool full of dead kids?

Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.