Some people out there seem to be confused, but I always vote in every local and every national election for every office and every ballot initiative since I was 18 years old. Some of my greatest civil rights heroes have fought and died so that we can all vote and I honor their memory in the ballot box every single time.
To some of us, especially those of us like myself who have been scheduling secretaries for US senators, it often seems like a morally reprehensible choice between compromised corporate Democrats and fascist-minded Republicans. Where I live in California, I have the luxury of voting my conscience for president for third-party candidates that better align with my ideas of justice and equality.
But in any and every contested race, as my mom Mary Morello always said, we have to fight the fascist every which way we can, recognizing that even if there’s but an inch of difference between two candidates, there are a lot of vulnerable people who could be greatly harmed in that inch. So vote your ass off, but don’t just exercise your right to vote. Exercise your right to fight for, organize for, struggle for, and manifest the kind of world you’d like to really see without compromise and without apologies before, during, and after election day. And let’s stop the fascists every which way we can. Power the people.
Those 2 or 3 DNC glazing posters on Lemmy: “sO yOuRe a FaScIsT tHeN.”
This is a pretty good response. I wish there was more focus on that ‘inch of space’ and who gets harmed, and less on the disappointing sock puppet figureheads.
I hate this title - it’s a bit misleading with respect to the point he’s making.
It’s like the exact opposite of the article content.
It honestly seems downright disingenuous, as though the author of the article wanted to make a “both sides” article but then realized Tom isn’t a fucking moron.
A bit? Fuckers.
Holy hell, misleading title, JFC.
Seems reasonable to me. God knows no one in Pennsylvania has been any better off for voting John Fetterman. Play the game as best you can with the cards you have, and fold when that’s the right choice, and then work to make the game function better through organizing and other means.
You think Dr. Oz would have been better? I have my doubts.
It’s a ridiculous assertion. Dr. Oz would obviously have been worse. As terrible as Fetterman is, Oz would have been in full lockstep with Trump and the Senate would be under even firmer control of the GOP right now. Trump could have been more successful legislatively if they had another Senator to make winning votes easier. If nothing else, it would have provided another seat they could use to let Senators like Collins and Murkowski do their performative BS on more votes so its easier for them to win re-election.
People don’t realize that Fetterman votes with Democrats 90% of the time. That’s a lot better than having a Trump sycophant in that seat.
This is the answer.
Fetterman makes me want to punch my walls. But still better than something like Oz.
It would not have made a difference. It’s like asking if you’d rather face the firing squad or face the wall and get shot in the back. Same outcome regardless of “choice”, but by choosing Fetterman, the whole democratic party is weakened by the exercise.
Fetterman votes with Democrats 90% of the time. Dr. Oz would have voted with Democrats 0% of the time. That’s a big difference.
The context here being that John fetterman votes against his party more often than any other senator, Democrat or Republican. And he breaks with them on larger issues. He breaks with the party pretty often in big ways when it comes to nominations too.
That 90% is including a lot of procedural votes. But still the point sorta stands and he voted in line with the Democrats more often than my gut reaction expected.
That’s also not to say that I think dr oz would be better than fetterman but the fact is fetterman being in office is a failure of the dnc.
Is it? Because they still haven’t passed or blocked anything meaningful. It’s really easy to “Vote with the party” when you know they’re going to lose regardless. Your metric may be true, but it’s ultimately meaningless.
You could say that about anyone in the minority party at any time. You’re assuming Fetterman would change his voting pattern with Democrats in the majority, with no data to back up that assertion.
I don’t like Fetterman either, but the time to fight him is in the primary. In the general election you pick the lesser evil, and the lesser evil is never the Republican.
There is no “folding” in life. There is no walking away. You can abstain from giving specific input, but you are still subject to and share responsibility for the results. What is needed is people that push to have the best possible choice for a given election and will vote for the best choice available. Doing only one is not enough.
There is a point at which the “best possible” is not sufficiently distinct from the worst possible that it becomes irrelevant for the individual in question. There was literally no benefit to Fetterman over Oz for most people. The only option was to work to make sure neither of them ever get another chance and to try to mitigate the harm that was going to be done when either one wins. I want to be clear, I don’t think this applies to the party as a whole but this is why (from the perspective of many) it does, because in their specific case the outcome is the same regardless. It’s a perfectly rational choice at the scale of the individual, because their interests, aren’t even on the ballot.
You and anyone else that doesn’t think Oz would have been significantly worse, or thinks it “doesn’t affect them”, is naive or arguing in bad faith. The better option can suck, but both-sidesing the situation to excuse not voting at all serves nobody but the worse option.
To pull from the quote from the OP:
But in any and every contested race, as my mom Mary Morello always said, we have to fight the fascist every which way we can, recognizing that even if there’s but an inch of difference between two candidates, there are a lot of vulnerable people who could be greatly harmed in that inch. So vote your ass off…
I’d expect nothing else from him.
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Where I live in California, I have the luxury of voting my conscience for president for third-party candidates that better align with my ideas of justice and equality.
Which 3rd party candidate is he talking about? Because if he’s talking about Jill Stein, then he may as well be voting Republican. 3rd party candidates are just another scam being run on the public. They’re nothing more than astroturf laid out by the opposition, intended to lead voters away from one of the two main parties.
