#conscience and politics

[biblepreacher]

Question: Who Should Christians Vote For?

Allow me to offer a simple take: Christians should vote our sincere conscience. With the election just eight days away as of this writing, we are being bombarded by people trying to tell you who you must vote for and support. Within Christian circles, pastors are telling their churches that they must vote for Trump, not only saying that “you can’t be Christian and vote for Kamala”, but also that…

[littlematchagirlll]

one of my friends (also a leftist) said that because we live in utah, it doesn't matter who he votes for, and there's no way he will vote for a "fucking cop who was complicit in genocide."

he is telling his friends in utah that they have zero say in who is president, so they shouldn't vote for harris.

and, i love him, but i think that line of thinking is really damaging.

if the stakes were lower for this election, then sure! i'm all in favor of third parties, and i do think that should be more normalized. it would be great to get to a point where we have more viable options than just democrats and republicans.

but this election is against trump. if trump wins, we get project 2025.

this isn't your father's republican party that just wanted to lower taxes and have more free trade. we are looking at rights being taken away for several marginalized communities. major changes that will set us back decades. there is too much on the line, and harris needs every single vote she can get.

saying you won't vote for harris because you live in a red state and don't think your vote will count... like a vote for a third party will??

you're really just saying that you don't mind trump winning, or if you do, you aren't willing to actually do what it takes to stop it.

as for being complicit with the genocide, aren't we all? our tax money is going to the genocide. we are complicit, whether we like it or not.

and harris has openly advocated for a ceasefire! also, do you think trump won't be complicit in the genocide? do you not think he would actively support israel? i'd rather have a president that calls for a ceasefire than one who doesn't. i'd rather have a president who is willing to push back on israel than one who be pushed around by israel.

there's more hope for a ceasefire with harris than there is with trump, and that's worth something.

my friend said "when people look back at your history, don't let them see your name next to a war criminal's."

honestly? in this election, i would rather have my name seen next to harris because that shows i understood that the future of our country and the safety of its citizens was more important than my personal moral superiority.

i don't just vote to make a fucking point. i vote because it impacts people's lives.

it seriously feels like some people are okay with watching the country burn, as long as they feel morally superior.

[is-the-fire-real]

Another bit on the pro-Pal fandom, this one axiomatic

Being a good person is not the same thing as pretending as though you believe you are a good person.

Being a good person takes work. You have to do stuff. Doing stuff is hard. Doing good stuff is harder, because you have to put thought into determining what you think is good beforehand. That requires self-reflection, honesty, a willingness to challenge oneself, and taking in information from other people to verify that your concept of "good" is, well, good.

The nice part is that once you evaluate what is good and start doing good things, it becomes easier. You gain inner calm, peace, and even joy.

("Good" is not always the same as "necessary". Necessary work can be a slog, or it can be horrific. But there can still be a calming satisfaction at the core, the security that this is necessary and therefore worthwhile.)

Pretending to believe you are a good person takes less immediate work. You don't have to do anything that positively impacts the real world, and you don't have to do any of that annoying, time-consuming self examination. But in the long run, it's more exhausting. By far.

You are insecure about whether or not you are a good person. You're pretending to believe you are good. You can't feel secure in something you pretend to believe. That insecurity gnaws at you, especially when you engage in bad behavior--harassment, doxxing, posting gore, swarming tags, encouraging and promoting suicide among your fellow "activists", telling your opponents to kill themselves, stalking, spamming unrelated content with literal Nazi propaganda.

None of those are good things good people do. And you understand that. You would think someone was bad if they did those things to you. The cognitive dissonance between who you want to be and who you really are, as determined by your actions, is scary. It's painful. It rears up every time someone you have labeled a Zio colonizer scumbag asks you to please just stop and you remember a time when you begged someone--an abuser, a troll online, a 4channer, your parents--to just stop please just leave me alone.

That must feel terrifying, and again, it makes you insecure. It makes you question if you're doing the right thing.

So you do the work to pretend to believe you are good. And that's far more work than goes into being good.

You recruit others, and all of you agree that you will pretend together. Tabletop gaming has taught us how powerful this imaginative play can be. You all reassure each other that you are good and you are right. But since you're all lying to each other, that means you must spend more, and more, and more time every day telling each other that you are good, chasing that high, that feeling that you are a good person and your actions are justified.

You tell each other that your "opponents" in this "battle" are not people, so anything you say or do to and about them is okay. You look at lists of "dehumanizing tactics" and instead of internalizing what those lists are teaching you, you go: "Ah, so if I don't use the word 'vermin', anything I say should be fine!" And then you say it.

You do not smile over good news. You only smile when one of your opponents logs off Tumblr because you made the site unusable and unsafe for them. (The expression you make there isn't really a smile, but we'll call it that, since the corners of your mouth do turn upward.) You tell yourself you're just attacking Zionists and pretend you do not see how you're really going after Jews.

No self-examination; that would mean admitting that you're lying to yourself and others. Instead, you traumatize and exhaust yourself until you're psychologically incapable of self-examination. You watch snuff films. You stare at mangled bodies until you're weeping and physically ill (certainly, you're too ill to check whether the video is real, or if it was taken from this conflict).

You force your beliefs into your fandom spaces so that others, the bad people, cannot escape their complicity in genocide.

But more importantly, you do that so you can't escape.

You cannot engage in any fandom but the pro-Pal fandom because that takes imaginative energy away from your biggest pretense--that you're a good person.

You are NOT hurting people because you are striking a blow for Palestinians. You are hurting people, including yourself, because you do not want to do the work of becoming a good person. You are afraid that self examination, at this point, will reveal to you that you are exactly the sort of person you believe you are fighting.

That fear, that insecurity, that dread, that restless sense that if you ever rest or stop or think for just a moment, you'll discover something awful? That's your conscience.

I do not ask you to change your mind about your political opponents. Your defenses are already on your lips and in your mind; a thousand How Dare Yous for me hinting that you look at other people as people. What I will ask you is to consider this.

I came to young adulthood just as Bush was elected, and the Iraq War post-9/11 was the first war I really followed as an adult. I did what you're doing now. I forced myself to look at photographs of destroyed bodies. I looked at photographs of torture perpetrated by US soldiers. I blogged about it obsessively.

I told myself that I was Doing My Part to end the war. But really, it's that the anxiety of being an American during the war made me insecure over whether or not I was responsible for all of this, and therefore, a bad person. If I pretended my looking at snuff photos was activism, and that it was good, then I could pretend to believe I was good and shout "Not in my name" at protests. I could deny my responsibility.

What I really did was traumatize myself. It's been almost twenty years. I can still see some of those torture pictures in my head. In the end, that is the extent of the impact of my online activism. The blogs are all long deleted, and nobody remembers them.

Only my trauma remains.

I do not want this for you. I want you to be wiser. There is still time. You can stop.

Stop hurting yourself and other people. Do the hard work. Examine yourself and your actions. Consider what your own heart is trying to tell you whenever you start to get the shakes and your throat gets tight. Do not take that feeling out on random people online because they have a Magen David in their pfp.

Once you have done the hard work, it gets easier. You will be able to advocate and work for whatever causes you believe in because you know they are good, not because you're joining your friends in cosplaying goodness. You will still be traumatized, and you will still be sad, and you'll definitely still get angry. You will have to face how you've acted exactly like your own past abusers, and that's a real tough row to hoe.

But at the end, you will be able to advocate and work because you want to, instead of feeling as though you must in order to keep up the masquerade.

[siniov]

might be time to throw the whole system out when your government is literally cheering on social murder

[a-very-sparkly-nerd]

man odysseus was already having auditory hallucinations of penelope in thunder bringer so polites ABSOLUTELY should've gotten ANOTHER open arms reprise bc we will scream and faint and die in pain every single time

[thealogie]

NYT is genuinely out there being like "is kamala harris too crazy liberal left wing socialist to win? i mean we want her to because we're democrats but if she could please be an incredibly right wing one we would love that." how out of touch can you be. all the momentum she has with young people (who are providing the free advertising and clout that is also getting everyone else on board) because she hasn't had a chance to adopt biden's most right wing policies as her own and people are marginally hopeful she can be convince to be a smidge to the left of him.

[hussyknee]

If anyone has a problem with saying "rest in power" to the white man that self-immolated himself and yelled "Free Palestine" till he burned to death then I want you to block me right the fuck now. You are so morally bankrupt and brainwashed by western neoliberal identity politics that you aren't worth spitting on. There's nobody resting in more power than that kid.

[thelifeofacactus]

I sincerely hope that those of you who chose not to vote are feeling the weight of your inaction and false activism now. Did you win? Do you feel good? Is your sense of self-righteousness going to protect you or the people you claim to fight for?

[eduobsessed]

maybe it's just me but i found the optics of "abled man tells disabled man he shouldn't try to overcome the difficulties put in his way by a deeply ableist context and should just 🌈love himself🌈 instead" a bit weird ngl ((and i say that as someone who enjoys viktor and jayce equally i'm not a jayce hater))

[weemietime]

Jews of Conscience having a normal one refusing to condemn Hamas as the war criminals they are when their "armed resistance for liberation" includes kidnapping babies, children and old people. Yeah, OK.

Your argument would hold a lot more weight if Hamas had targeted military personnel and installations. They didn't, they purposely, intentionally targeted peace festivals and farmers and pro-Palestinian activists who they had been embedded with over multiple generations pretending to be their friends.

Absolutely garbage fire take, no notes, go directly to the trash. There are people in the comments claiming that Israel actually orchestrated the massacre in order to further Netanyahu's career. Real "Bush did 9/11" vibes, alongside calling literal babies colonizers lol.

For all who want to say "but weemie, egypt and the USA and the female IDF soldiers warned them"

OK imagine I warned you that if you walk down the main street of your town you are going to get beaten up. Is it maybe a little bit on you that you didn't prepare? Yes. Maybe you walk down the street and ignore me, you don't prepare. When you get beaten up, are the people who beat you still fucking criminals? Yes.

"B-But if Hamas stopped murdering babies and old people, the evil IsrAhElL would obliterate them" is not the hot fucking take you think it is. You are gross terrorist simping traitors, and your "solidarity" with terrorists means less than nothing.

[fantasy-nerdddd]

I cannot understand some of you. You keep saying Sunrise On The Reaping is only made because we have fucked up something. I know we have fucked up, it's not rare. Can't you just leave me to enjoy one of the very few series that haven't been destroyed by Disney plssssss?

Also, I know that I shouldn't be focusing on Everlark, but can't you just let me enjoy their love without making me feel like I am a cruel Capitol citizen that supports Snow and Coin? Just because I want to see romance unravel in a book series sometimes doesn't mean I ignore the life messages, and the political undertones, and the tragedy of it all. It just means that I want to focus on the positive and, yes, silly parts of a YA book. No one is actually dying, it's not a real story.

[crimeronan]

i needed luz to overhear amity and odalia because i LOVE a contrived plot device that gives one party all the required info without me writing exposition. also it's delicious.

however. it is unbelievably funny to imagine a timeline where luz DOESN'T wake up when amity leaves, wherein amity comes back into the bedroom to sleep for like an hour or however long, and hunter is still awake like, "hey. you look like an insane person. something just went down and judging by your texts i don't think i like it. so, like. do you want me to kill her,"

[nando161mando]

“I meant your collective conscience. You know, the status quo.”

[blackpilljesus]

There's a strong link between the way moids treat cattle/animals and the way they treat women. Believing they're here for moids to use as they see fit, keeping them in enclosures to extract from them while claiming to protect them when they've forced them to be dependent on moids, forcing them to reproduce so they can have more fodder to exploit, and domesticating them.

Saw a video of torture devices that were used on women that were anything but quiet docile submissive slaves. Considering this and things like the witch trials, authorities turning a blind eye most times when moids kill women but imprisoning women who fight back against abusers, moids impregnating -raping- girls whose bodies hadn't developed yet (which could be a contributing factor to why we have a huge gap inbetween our physical strength) moids seeking younger women & girls to reproduce with because these women wont have reached a level of self actualisation to realise how pathetic the xy is, etc. I believe that moids have -attempted to- domesticate women through femicide as well as social punishments & torture.

Emphasis on "attempt" because I dont think women are naturally the empathetic emotionally observant yet mindless mommy bangmaids moids want them to be. There are a few far gone but most just act in a manner that pleases maIes to survive. The difference in womens behaviour when there's maIes around vs when there's not is the biggest telltale sign of this.

Women who weren't useful to maIe supremacy were killed off or brutalised into conforming. Women who conformed went on to reproduce.

This reddit post from the (rip) blackpillfeminism sub explains this concept so well:

This is all something that explains our environment. The war has been fought & the damage has been done. What we see/live today are consequences of the aforementioned. Moids have taken everything from women they are literal terrorists they wont change & cant be forgiven idgaf. Most we can do is save possible lives going through this by refusing to add to it.

Side note; I'm not saying this to absolve anybody of responsibility. In the end moids choose to be evil & women choose to love n worship them so long as other women to be shields are around. My point is about how maIe terrorism has shaped womens behaviour/being as a whole. Those who are separatists/blackpilled wouldn't reproduce so our ideologies & systems die when we die. Sure there's outliers of every batch so I dont think the concept entirely will die but it's maIe supremacy that has systems guaranteeing its ingrained continuation.

[vintageseawitch]

to those leftists who are "uncommitted" or will vote third party: what exactly is your alternative? you know goddamn well your "protest" vote isn't gonna change shit & may help trump win. you scoff & claim that "OBVIOUSLY i don't want trump to win 🙄" but you're working harder to make sure Harris loses than he does.

i can't get over how y'all know "so much" about far left theory... but you know jack shit about how the American government works. you already act like the president is a monarch. i NEVER hear y'all talk about how important local & state voting is because most of you spew the bullshit that is "my vote doesn't matter."

the extremist Republicans have been playing a long fucking game. a few genocides will happen on our own soil if they gain all the power they want - that of immigrants, specifically brown people, & LGBTQIA. they will destroy them & anyone who wants to help them. this has been a long game because they can count on their voters actually participating in every election & mostly old people are the ones doing the voting.

we all complain about old people being selfish, how "they had theirs & will work to make sure younger generations don't." young people however are NOTORIOUS for not showing up at the polls. where the fuck are you leftists complaining about all the horrible bad things? y'all almost act like shocked Pikachu faces when piece of shit politicians get power then do horrible things. WHY AREN'T YOU ADVOCATING FOR LOCAL POLITICIANS.

if anything, Republicans live more in the real world than leftists who want their precious, magical, instantly-fix-everything revolution. Republicans have been patiently playing a long game & it's been WORKING. leftists get mad that changes they want don't happen instantly so they just give up on the system altogether. y'all want politicians to check ALL of your goddamn boxes or they get no help from you.

your protest vote in this election is selfish. you're not being smart about this. for fuck's sake, you're not marrying Harris, you're thinking of the long game. we need to work hard to make sure trump loses. the likes of jill stein, who is also a traitor, will not save us. she will hand us over to Russia on a platter. you want the US to collapse? you are so fucking foolish that you not only remain ignorant of how our government works but also geopolitics & all the delicate nuance. YES, the United States is fucked up, but world leaders are more nervous about a trump second term than not. HE FREED THE FUCKING TALIBAN.

you think things will be the same as ever? you're as bad as MAGA. you want us all to fail & all it will cost is LGBTQIA folks, immigrants (including those who have been here for decades), any woman who needs some kind of abortion care to save her life, children as more get gunned down, the elderly & disabled & anyone else who qualifies for social security & Medicare, veterans, indigenous folks, the environment since they don't believe in climate change WHICH AFFECTS THE ENTIRE DAMN PLANET, etc. but at least you're conscience will be clear.

please be smarter than Republicans & think this through. in another election in 1995 in Isreal a protest vote occurred & as a result netanyahu won by LESS THAN A WHOLE PERCENT. they were protesting AGAINST him. your "principles" could aid in harming us all. "they should have chosen a better candidate" our system led us to either choosing Harris or trump. for now it sucks but one of them will govern us. if you're so unsure then you might as well look forward to trump winning. he's not long for this world so jd fucking vance will be president instead. he's much younger & more evil, horrible, & psychotic. THINK ABOUT THE LONG GAME. vote locally & at state level, not just during thr general election. y'all don't sound smart to me; you sound prideful & short-sighted.