cro-iba - Tumblr blog

cro-iba · 2 days ago

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Sorry for anon, I'm shy. I think I'm one of the liberals you're complaining about and I don't want to be. If (and only if) you have the time/energy, could you elaborate more on where the Harris campaign went wrong? I promise I don't mean this in a sealioning way - I genuinely want to understand and move towards a better perspective, but I don't even know what to Google to start.

it is extremely conventional political wisdom that running as the incumbent party during an unpopular administration is a gruelling uphill battle--harris was in this position, and i think going all-in on her continuity with biden, who is extremely disliked (for many reasons, ranging from his fervent passion for genocide to a vague sense that He Made The Ecnomy Bad And Woke) was a catastrophic error that any dickhead with a political science degree would have told her to avoid. unfortunatley she surrounded herself with biden's people who in the run-up to him stepping down had already proven themselves to be completely self-deluding and isolated from reality.

the absolute worst thing you can do in the electoral situation harris was in is go on television and say "i would do absolutely nothing differently to the current (unpopular) administration" and she did literally exactly that.

other facts are that the constituency her campaign decided to go all-in on, of, like, sensible moderate center-right republicans who value bipartisanship, basically hasn't existed since tea party birtherism became ascnedant in the republican party if it ever did at all. the idea that there was an election-winning segment of voeters who would vote for harris if she proved that she wasn't "too liberal" through serious policy commitments to right-wing positions was just not founded in reality--like it was a strategy that failed to grapple with the basic reality that the modern republican position on democrat politicians is that they're adrenochrome-chugging child rapists.

in a similar vein her hard pivot to border fascism was morally deplorable but also a total waste of time because donald "build the wall" trump has made his personal brand synonymous with anti-immigration politics and so she was simply never ever going to win anyone over from him on that ground. & finally of course there was the campaign;'s wholehearted and total contempt for her own potential voters, which manifseted most obviously and evilly in their treatment of anti-genocide protestors and their flying bill clinton out ot michigan to lecture arabs about how they deserved to be bombed but also seems responsible for their total lack of consideration of (again) conventional elecvtoral tactics 101 like "energizing the base" or "getting out the vote"

so tldr it was just a disastrous campaign that prioritized the egos of biden campaign staff and biden himself over winning or facing basic reality

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cro-iba · 4 days ago

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the thing that I've got to say is that it really is ethically straightforward that you should vote Harris.

it's not even a trolley problem, it's a trolley triviality. I don't want to use the meme because it seems disrespectful to use those specific images of MS paint people when these are real lives we're talking about.

The analogy itself is serious, though. it looks like this:

the track diverges at the lever; many people are on lower track, while no one is on the upper track. then: the tracks re-converge and continue, and there are people on the track after that convergence.

The point is that the lever—the vote—can be used to prevent those lives on the lower track from being lost, but cannot save the lives lost after the re-convergence.

it differs from the classic trolley problem in an extremely important way: there isn't anyone on the upper track. as such, it's not a question of "who do we save?"—it's only a question of "do we save the people we can?"

(I need to emphasize, because many on this site have long shed the shackles of reading comprehension, that this does not mean that no one dies as a consequence of U.S. or presidential policy choices in a vacuum. It means that your vote cannot prevent that, but your vote can prevent strictly more people from dying, with no trolley-problem type tradeoff of "who do we choose to die".)

~~~~~

you might think that this is abstracting away too much of the real situation—but it turns out it's ironclad.

to see that it is, and reconcile it with reality, we have to ask: what is not modeled by this analogy? where might it fail?

this amounts to asking the question: is there a benefit to killing the people on the lower track that makes doing so "worth it"?

that is: what justification might you have for saying "yes, we actually need to let those lives on the lower track, the ones we could save with the lever, be lost"?

and the answer—as you might have guessed—is that there is no such justification. no peculiar fact about voting means that you should let those people die.

~~~~~

so why do some people—very passionately—insist that not voting is right? I'll survey a few of the most common attempted justifications I've seen, such as:

"I'm not going to vote for less genocide." This is obviously equivalent to "I am totally fine with more genocide!", a truly horrific stance, and yet I have seen it nearly verbatim from so-called "leftists" a few times. My guess is that this usually stems from a kind of perceived moral contamination: a feeling that a "vote for" a candidate is a moral alignment. This is artificial; not real; not consequential. A vote only makes you responsible for the difference between the two tracks while they diverge. Touching the lever doesn't make you responsible for the track. Choosing between these two outcomes is all voting can do—and because voting for most is easy, and doesn't stop you from doing anything else, there are no trade-offs. No "I'm not at the lever, because I had to work on another way." (If your vote is suppressed, that's another story—but this doesn't imply a general anti-voting stance.)

Ironically, some who aren't voting feel they are "keeping their hands clean", when they are in fact actively increasing the chance of more death and suffering. This is kind of the definition of getting your hands "dirty"; it just doesn't feel like it because they're not touching a voting machine, which is kind of just magical thinking. it's not a point not made frequently enough, I think: what some think of as "doing the right thing" here is very much doing the wrong thing, with respect to their own underlying values of right and wrong, and with respect to what they say they care about. those who claim to have the moral high ground by not voting do not actually have it at all.

On that note, some people (fewer, though) seem to think that touching the lever does make you responsible for the track in a real outcome-based way. That somehow, voting lends "legitimacy" to the track, and that by not voting, we are maybe creating a future with no people on tracks. This is just not true; a dangerous fantasy that asks you to sit back and wait for a utopia that's not coming. There are enough voters in this upcoming election that that institution is not going anywhere anytime soon; you'd need a coordinated movement of not voting plus plans for what to do after the state has lost legitimacy, and that is just...obviously not here. To think otherwise is to live in that fantasy, and so to abandon ethical thinking at all, as ethics comes first from a confrontation with reality. you cannot act ethically without acting practically. However: the margins are thin enough that a few people deciding to vote (who wouldn't otherwise) could actually change the outcome. You can actually save the people on the lower track.

Some people think that the tracks never separate at all, or that the same people are on each, or that one way or another, Harris and Trump are "the same". If you think this, please look beyond tumblr "leftists" for facts here. You've been bombarded with all and only all the bad stuff about Harris (not arguing with most of that—though there are misconceptions, e.g. that Biden/Harris provided no protections for trans people); but you haven't seen how much worse Trump is on every single one of those cases, issue for issue, including Gaza. If you think Gaza can't get any worse, you've essentially written everyone still alive there off for dead. Likewise for any group who would suffer more under Trump. Needless to say—don't do that. The comparison—the difference between the diverging tracks—is all that ethically matters when deciding whether to flip the lever or leave it alone.

Some people think voting is primarily "speech", a means to communicate (or worse, merely express), and probably do not realize that this means they think the outcome of "sending a message" (which would do nearly nothing in real terms) is worth killing the people on the lower track.

Similarly, some people think that it's meaningful to "punish" Harris or the dems. (Truly, putting punishment over the cost in lives and suffering is the most horribly american thing to do here.) Some people just want the feeling of punishment, of blame; some people try to excuse their actions in advance ("well, if the dems lose, it will be their fault"), conveniently omitting their own agency in voting, and thus excusing them from the practice of acting ethically at all. Some people think that punishing the dems will actually push them left in the future, to which I say: you don't have a good reason to think this at all, based on history. Parties go where the winning is. And if you do still have a hunch to the contrary, I am sure you don't have a good reason to be reasonably certain of it. This means that you are paying for a gamble, a mere chance, one unsupported by fact, with the lives on the lower track. You can find another way.

~~~~~

Let's be concrete for a moment.

Since this is about difference, let me gesture to a few obvious differences between Trump and Harris: LGBTQ+ rights, Gaza, climate change, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, education, voting rights (and, yes, democracy), the economy, housing, the long-term future success of leftist movements and activism (much more difficult under Trump, who, no joke, has said neatly verbatim he wants to use the national guard and military to handle the leftist "enemy from within", and who can now do so thanks to the supreme court's ruling on presidential powers), everything Lina Khan and Deb Haaland are doing, etc.

And before you respond with something bad the dems or Harris are doing with respect to one of these—I know. Now compare it to Trump on the same issue. That is the only thing relevant to acting ethically in this brutal, tightly-constrained situation.

For example: Harris doesn't want to ban fracking or reduce oil consumption (bad), but wants to fund renewables, stay in the Paris agreement, strengthen climate initiatives in general.

Trump wants to completely gut funding for renewable energy, withdraw from the Paris accords, dramatically increase oil consumption, commercialize NOAA, weaken the EPA, and so on.

We don't get neither. A vote for none is a vote for "worse is fine by me". We are handed the terrible task of making one of these work, and any person actually, practically concerned with that would choose to try to make the Harris version work then spend precious resources fighting the overwhelming tide of the Trump version.

Only someone who does not actually care about these issues is okay with letting Trump in.

Unless you are capable only of black-and-white thinking, unless you can write off the lives in the difference and convince yourself this is ethical, you can see that letting Trump in only lets more lives be lost, and does not reduce anyone's suffering. No trolley "problem". No trade-off.

Voting Harris is not moral alignment. It's not unconditional support. It is maybe the most conditional action you can take: there are only two real outcomes. One not only has more people, as in a trolley problem, but also results in the death and suffering that would result otherwise.

~~~~~

So there it is, spelled out in the most painstaking detail I'm willing to give to a tumblr post: a few of the failure modes of reasoning that lead to not voting. Often simplicity is too simple, a meaningful departure from reality, but in this case the opposite is true: the simple argument

There are two possible outcomes: one of them eases no one's suffering and creates a great deal more. Therefore choose the other, instead of allowing the worse one to come to pass.

—stands up ethically in this case to every sublimation of righteous anger into misguided action.

And I am not using "righteous" sarcastically: it is right to denounce the Biden/Harris admin on Gaza, it is right to denounce the dems on not doing enough for climate change, etc. But that is not the question being asked by your vote. Do not give the right answer to the wrong question.

The question is only: Harris or Trump? Which outcome should happen, now, in the real world, when it's one of exactly two, when "neither" really, truly isn't an option?

If you do not vote, what will your answer be to the people on the lower track? I am sorry; I dreamt nobly, of no track, no lashings at all. No, I was not kept from the lever. It did not even compromise my dream to push it. Still, I just couldn't bear to touch it; still, you had to die, to save me this discomfort.

acting ethically does not always feel righteous. it is not always a release valve for righteous anger. it does not always feel like progress; sometimes it is only the prevention of catastrophe. it is still ethical. it is still necessary. vote Harris. vote to save the people you can.

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