#i'm never gonna get on a social media platform and tell people not to vote

[merl-out]

unless ur a palestinian queer

I’ll say it again, please just grit your teeth and vote for Biden…

[qqueenofhades]

People are apparently saying "well I'm not gonna vote/vote for trump if tik tok is banned!"

I'm pretty sure they were already going to do that, this is just their excuse of the week

But more importantly, if a stupid app matters more to you than the actual lives trump and the republicans will deliberately destroy, well that says more about them don't it?

But wait... I thought they weren't going to vote because of Gaza/because Biden hasn't personally forgiven THEIR student loan/because something something corporate centrism/because something something garble garble??! Does this mean their excuses just change by the week according to whatever's in the headlines and have no actual logical coherence or adherence to a guiding principle? Surely you jest, good internet sir and/or madam. Shocking.

Anyway, also... they realize that this effort is being spearheaded by Republicans and is pretty transparently an attempt to get another huge social media platform (after the Bird App Formerly Known as Twitter) into the ownership of an ex-Trump Cabinet official and an investor group with Russian ties? And that voting for Trump would directly play into those people's hands? And that... wait, never mind. I still expect logic or reason to have any place in this discussion, and it doesn't. Just tell me Why They Aren't Voting For Biden!!! next week and maybe I can get ahead of the curve for once.

This, however, is likewise why I oppose this rushed and Republican-driven move to "ban TikTok!!" in a highly consequential election year and think somebody needs to talk some sense into Biden and/or the Senate that this is a stupid idea and should be shelved (or at the least, heavily revised or modified). Yes, TikTok being owned by a group with Chinese government ties isn't great, but there's no morally pure ultra-megacorp that's going to rush in to fill the void. Forcing the Chinese owners to divest will just create an opening for Trump's ex-Treasury Secretary and his Russian businessmen buddies to step in instead, and I don't know about you, but I don't think that's a net positive in terms of keeping Americans' personal data out of the hands of hostile foreign entities. We already have Musk shilling for the alt-right and the Russian government every chance he gets, using Twitter to prop up their narratives and their operations, and selling TikTok to a Trump/Russian-linked consortium in fucking 2024 would be an incredibly massive own goal and give MAGA and company virtually hegemonic control over American social media content. That is why I think this is a stupid idea and should be opposed, but also, I agree that people who are using this as their Excuse of the Week to not vote were deeply, deeply unlikely to vote in the first place.

This is also a perfect example of why "well now I won't vote >:[!!!!" as a threat/temper tantrum backfires every single time. If there are young people who are concerned about TikTok possibly being banned, and their response is to immediately throw temper tantrums about not voting, all that does is reinforce to elected officials that young people never vote, there is no need to make legislation that champions their interests, and they don't need to fear any electoral backlash because these people have already spent years announcing their intention to Not Vote at every opportunity and clearly aren't about to start now. They remove themselves further from the civic process at every turn, and they reinforce the narrative that young people as a group are not worth having their concerns or ideas prioritized, because even when politicians do other things that young people like and/or support, young people are poised to turn against them and urge No Vote!!! :( at the drop of a fucking hat. So, yeah. "Don't vote!" is always a stupid and self-defeating message, but I can't see how it's possibly supposed to convince politicians that a group of people already predisposed not to vote is going to make any difference from what they already do. So yeah. Like. Not that this surprises me, but it's literally the same threat they've echoed at every single turn, doesn't represent anything new, and will probably be changed 10 times before the election anyway.

[captainstoneybaloney]

I have got to the point where when someone makes an obviously bullshit accusation of someone being a russian misinfo bot if you say anything critical of biden, that's an automatic block.

You KNOW they're not a bot. You just refuse to engage in good faith with what they're saying. You know the things biden does are indefensible, so you don't defend them, instead you make up different stuff to pretend the commenter said, stuff that's a lot easier to argue against, and talk to them like they're a moron. "Oh, and trump's gonna be better how, exactly?" That would be an easy argument to win, if the other person had actually said that. But they didn't. You created a strawman to argue against instead, and are gonna be loud and aggressive about it so they'll just shut up, and you won't have to worry about the ethical implications of defending an evil status quo.

Biden lied, right from the beginning, about having personally seen the nonexistant photos of beheaded babies. He used that to try to trick us into consenting to help them bomb the bejesus out of a captive population.

Biden supports the ban on tiktok, which has been giving the american people a perspective not pre-filtered by major u.s. news sources and social media. If we don't hear those nasty facts, we might stop complaining about helping them do it.

He's also denying that it's a genocide and letting his press people get pissy at reporters when they press them about it.

Biden supports the suppression of the protesting students. Not a surprise, because the BLM protests and what led to them inspired him to tell us how much he loves the cops, and how the answer to police brutality is to just give them more and more money and support.

Let me emphasize this further: biden has access to more information on this situation than possibly any other. There is no question he knows what is actively going on. He is using his power as predident to make it easier for them to commit this genocide. His response to our backlash about this is suppression and punishment of dissent.

Biden campaigned on how fucked up the concentration camps for Mexicans at the border were, and then proceeded to not only do nothing to fix it, but to let it get even worse on his watch, and just never mention it again.

There's the health coverage crisis, that if you remember, when he was running in the primary against Sanders, his platform was to not help us because our ability to choose between insurance providers in the business of not helping us was more important than getting medical care. He said, out of his own mouth, that he was not a progressive.

If trump is standing there, and you draw a line in front of him, no, in fact, fuck no, biden is not nearly different enough from trump to be qualified to stand on the other side of that line and point at trump and call the kettle black.

I undersrand a lot of you are in vulnerable positions. You might say, "hey, i have to vote for him in self-preservation, because the other side are openly planning on criminalizing my existence." To that, I say "fair point." I'm not arguing against it. In fact, and I'll capitalize it for emphasis:

I AM NOT TELLING ANYONE NOT TO VOTE FOR BIDEN. I AM SURE AS FUCK NOT SUGGESTING ANYONE VOTE FOR TRUMP.

I would pay to see both of them fall into an active volcano like the Gollum.

What I am telling people they should do is stop perpetuating bullshit. Stop trying to get people to stop saying true things because it makes it harder to pretend the guy you want them to vote for isn't both stupidly evil and arrogantly obvious about it. Stop acting like it's our obligation to eat shit and pretend it's chocolate ice cream. Stop acting like voting for biden isn't something we're being made to do under the threat of trump. Stop acting like the democrat party isn't encouraging the republicans to get further out of control because it makes it easier for them to look good by comparison while steering, (I won't say "drifting" because that implies it could be accidental) further and further right every year.

Things are dire, but you don't have to be a useful idiot and give your fucking endorsement to things worsening. You don't have to volunteer to help them hold the gun they're pointing at us to coerce us into voting for them. You don't have to run into every post rightfully critcizing biden and accuse people of a psyop while making a show of how hard you can suck his fascist dick.