“Don’t bother asking for better policies!” is a great slogan for the party lol.

You seem to be saying that the voters are irrational. That may or not be the case, but it’s largely irrelevant to converting them.

Absolutely nobody considering a vote for Jill Stein thinks she is going to win. This is a slice of the electorate that the dems haven’t won over yet, but could.

Jill Stein is there so that people who want to vote, but are mad as fuck at the dems, have someone to vote for. Basically, she’s there to scare the dems (working, obviously). Will they be scared enough to adopt some better policies, and get those votes?

But you’d have to bribe a lot more to sway legislation, and nobody serves more than like a year or two so you can’t “buy for life”. Also, congress people are already shockingly cheap.

Greatly expand congress (like at least 10x), and have it work like jury duty.

🙄

How many times can I tell you that you’re missing the point. None of what you said matters! When Biden or Harris can barely even pretend to be against genocide, and continue to be responsible (via their current positions of power) for arming the Israelis, that is an acute emergency. The only reason that a potential dem voter is considering voting for Stein instead, is that, #1: she’s on the ballot, and #2: she’s against the genocide.

Any of your attacks or criticisms of her are irrelevant as long as those two things are true, or until Harris makes a drastic change to her policy.

You’re missing the point. Nobody has to trust her word. She doesn’t have to be right about everything, she just has to be correct on this particularly important issue. Nobody thinks Jill Stein is going to win. Nobody. So they don’t have to imagine how she would implement her platform. It is irrelevant.

The problem for the democrats is that they are so WRONG on this one thing (genocide), that a certain subset of their potential voters can’t bring themselves to vote dem. Some of those voters may be bluffing and some may not be. Dems will roll the dice and hope for the best, rather than come out against genocide (my prediction).

I don’t know how you can come to such a conclusion from my post history. I’m sure i would get a good laugh out of whatever example you “found”. I don’t hide the area I live in (Humboldt county, California). I was born and raised on the east coast. I’m not going to get much more detailed than that, but you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.

I lost that kind of optimism years ago.

You’re grasping for justifications where there are none. The US could very well guarantee Israel’s security from Iranian attack the way it is doing right now: by parking a carrier strike group nearby. Incidentally, we could use those same assets to simultaneously enforce a no-fly zone over Israel to prevent further bombing. Beyond that, Israel guarantees its own continued existence by way of a nuclear arsenal.

So might as well keep funding then? Lol

I don’t care what the dem leadership says about it, nearly as much as I care what they do about it. That the Biden admin and the rest of the dem leadership have real power to stop Israel, yet don’t do it is materially the same thing whether they wring their hands about it or not. Maybe the confusion is around the word “support”. I don’t mean it in the sense of like, thoughts and prayers. I mean “support” in the sense of send offensive weapons, block any hostile measures by the UN and run interference on public demonstrations against your genocide. Plenty of dems fit the second meaning. The first meaning is irrelevant.

Holy histrionics, Batman!

Edit: You should really examine how you can hold me responsible for what may possibly happen to all those people you listed, purely based on how I do or don’t vote… while at the same time categorically rejecting any responsibility of the democratic leadership for supporting the genocide in Palestine.

Some would, some wouldn’t.

Edit: This is especially true right now, since there is a huge group of (otherwise dem) voters for whom the genocide is a dealbreaker. See the ‘Undecided’ movement for a clear example.

If you don’t care about Palestinian children being slaughtered right now, by democratic action and inaction, why should I care about what might happen to your family? I have very little power about any of this. What I do have, is human empathy and some fundamental principles that I try very hard to never compromise. I don’t look forward to the future either, but I won’t be blackmailed into overlooking support of genocide.

None of what you are writing is particularly “clearly laid out and easy to digest… etc etc”. Doesn’t mean I don’t understand it, but hey, the author and the audience don’t always agree. For example, we would both likely say similarly about my writing and your reading.

Don’t think I’m not sympathetic to your fears and concerns. I am. I do worry about the future quite a bit. I worry for my own family, friends, community, country, planet… I also have a Palestinian friend. She has lost many friends and relatives to the bombs that we send to Israel. Every day she worries for the ones who yet remain alive. Knowing her, and hearing her stories helps me to empathize with Palestinian suffering, but even if I didn’t know her, I still would.

So yes, I do empathize with you and your fears, but I cannot trade what might happen to your family (or mine) for what is happening right now in Palestine.

Yours is the old, tired shit. I see you trying to shift the rhetorical focus. “Genocide is bad, so now shift to denying the genocide, or at least justifying it.” If Israel is justified, then this issue just evaporates! Right? Except the whole world knows that Israel is unjustified-- not just in this moment of slaughter, but for many years before as well. Peruse the decades of UN votes where only the US defended Israel’s crimes.

Yes, there are many Zionist Jews in the US, and there are also many Jews in the US that are horrified by Israel’s destruction of Gaza. I have marched with some in support of Palestinian lives. Are there more Zionist or non-zionist Jewish votes to be had in the US? I honestly do not know. On the one hand, that is a political consideration, but it is also a cynical one. People should look to their leaders to defend just principles.

Your fantasy of Russia moving to replace the US as Israel’s patron is… wild.

Politics works very differently in France. There, in a multiparty parliamentary system parties often make temporary alliances together in order to form a functioning legislature. This is great for the smaller parties because they get a chance at real political leverage for their constituents. “You want to block the Nazis’ legislative agenda? Fine, but you must agree to stop selling weapons to Israel.”

The closest thing we have to such leverage in the US, is the ‘threat’ of 3rd (or “spoiler” if you prefer) parties. Imagine the whole US electorate as a kind of “parliament”. You are the democrat party, and you’re worried you won’t have enough votes to win a majority outright over the republicans. Why not build support among smaller electoral groups by making some concessions to them?

In regards to your long copypasta: I do not give a shit who you or anyone else does or doesn’t vote for. That is, as ever, for the individual to decide. Read every comment I’ve ever made, and I promise you won’t find me telling anyone who to vote for or even who not to vote for.

What I cannot stand is when people pretend like there isn’t a choice, telling people how they “have to” vote, telling people that a vote for x is really a vote for y, or pretending that the only people who disagree must be shills/bots/Russians/tankys/etc. I’m just out here trying to explain how some of us genuinely see things.