The Overton window can move in BOTH directions, you know? If you consistently vote for the lesser evil, then the evil you’re voting for will get less.
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How about:
Get off your ass and recognise that voting every couple of years is the absolute bare minimum level of political engagement required, and that a lot of the people pointing out that the Dems are also unacceptably vile have been fighting hard on these issues for decades.
Voting for the lesser evil is not enough, particularly when that evil is growing more serious over time. You also have to put in the work to fight the evil between your sham elections.
See this thread:
Also see here for a thread on vote-shaming. The author of that thread is also an Air Force veteran, BTW.
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If you want your name marked as someone that supported evil, even a lesser evil, then so let it be written.
Although it’s not exactly apropos, your comment reminds me of something Desmond Tutu said
So … sure. I’ll support the lesser evil by my action to reduce evil, while you support greater and increasing evil by your inaction.
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She’s got my vote.
More like Alejandro Iñárritu! That was the slickest political ad I’ve ever seen. It told a great story exceptionally well. I wish Heger well!
Sorry for the enthusiasm, but I just returned from a postcard writing session for a progressive candidate for the Georgia statehouse, and I’m so ready to see November 2018 kick the Trump era in the nuts. Let’s do this.
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Funny you should mention elephants… Very, very few of us can see the whole elephant.
Honest question. What exactly would have been better if Hillary had won? Would we still be fighting in Afganistan? Would N. Korea be a nuke threat? Would Syria be solved? Would Yeman be a safe place? Would Palestinians have a homeland? Would she have given a rat’s ass about income inequality? Would a 1,000 people a day be trying to cross the border? Would she have curtailed the oil industry? Would she have made sure all kids had enough food? Would she have reigned in big pharma? Would she banned neonictinoid pesticides? Legalize dope?
Pbbbbttttt… She would have gotten zero done other than fatten her and
Willy’s bank account. I hate Trump, but I get the burn it all down meme. Congress is broken, the presidency is broken, the courts are broken. Government is the problem.
I may have just punched the air and shouted “yes, this” quite loudly just now.
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Didn’t she raise a ton of money for some sort of recount back in 2016?
Whatever happened to all of that?
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Pretty much everything, near as I can tell.
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No, government is not the problem. Corrupt assholes in positions of power is the problem. Remove Trump and you no longer have over 2,000 children stolen from their parents at the border. You no longer have the explosion in health insurance premiums that are resulting from the repeal of the individual mandate. You no longer have literally every organ of government being run by someone who was specifically selected because they want to tear it down. You don’t have enormous stupid fucking tax cuts for billionaires. You no longer have an administration that is actively hostile to LGBT+ individuals. You no longer have a department of justice refusing to defend the ACA in court. The EPA is no longer greenlighting dangerous pesticides and letting natural gas companies stop reporting how much methane they’re leaking into the atmosphere. We would still be in the Paris Accord instead of trying to send millions of dollars to Appalachia to prop up coal companies. We would still be party to the Iran nuclear deal, which would demonstrably reduce the risk of that nation developing nuclear weapons. The CFPB would not be on the brink of being dissolved by a deranged judge.
There is so fucking much awful shit going on because Trump is in charge. The fact that you refuse to see it is simply mind-boggling.
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He said that… to the wounded woman who hung off the landing skids of airborne helicopter to return enemy fire… that’s some serious cognitive dissonance, right there.
People who quibble about every single aspect of any proposed efforts and won’t be satisfied unless there’s a ‘perfect’ resolution to the plethora of immense problems facing our society are inadvertently part of those problems, IMO.
Taking imperfect actions to fix any dilemma is better than doing nothing at all.
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Clinton would not have started a trade war with our allies. She would not have doubled-down on removing women’s right to abortion. She would not have created concentration camps for babies.
I could probably go on here, but you get the point.
Obama betrayed us by not being anything like progressive enough. He continued drone strikes. He continued the war on terror. I could keep going on with this list, too. But he did a few good things and much, much less terrible things than some fuck like Trump. And though we will never know, I’m pretty sure Clinton would have about the same track record of not enough good things, but some good things and no really horrible things.
I’m sufficient pragmatic to take “no really horrible things” over “really horrible things” and call that a win.
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Roger that !
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But her emails…
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If shit does completely go off the rails and into Mad Max-like dystopia, that’s gonna end up being a rallying battle-cry, instead of “Who Killed the World?”
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I always feel you should vote because even if you lose, you have the justified right to complain, and if you win, and they weren’t what you wanted, you still have the right to complain. A politician rarely cares about a non-voter.
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ikr? 
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Instead of the trade war, you would have gotten the TPP. That one’s a toss-up. The trade war is worse in the short term, the TPP would probably have been worse in the long term.
Clinton is, without doubt, superior on reproductive rights. It is one of the very few issues on which she has been consistently reliable throughout her career…which is part of how she could get away with nominating Tim Kaine as VP.
The concentration camps for babies were already there. Yes, Trump is worse, and the automatic separation of children is a new policy. But the detention of children is not a new policy, and the abuse of children in that system was routine before the election of Trump.
The deportation and detention machinery was established by President Clinton, expanded and intensified by Presidents Bush and Obama, and vigorously endorsed by HRC.
.
He didn’t just continue them, BTW. Drone strikes expanded under Obama. And forty-one Democratic Senators just voted to give Trump the largest military budget in the history of the world.
Given her foreign policy statements and track record, it seems likely that there would have some chance of HRC getting into a shooting war with Russia over Syria. Personally, I’d rank that as a “really horrible thing”. And there are very many issues (most obviously, climate change) on which the continuation of the status quo is a “really horrible thing”.
But, yeah; HRC is vastly superior to Trump. She would probably have continued a similar decline to what was seen under Obama, rather than the current catastrophic charge into fascism.
Which is why I spent the election campaign advocating for a Clinton vote. But I can also see the validity of the perspective of those who did not.
All of this evil was already here; Trump just made it more visible. Very little about the Trump era is actually new; it’s just more. It’s spreading beyond the traditional classes of victims, and middle class white people are beginning to notice what has always been going on.
Given what Trump’s rise has exposed about America, can you really blame the victims of all this for refusing to endorse their own suffering?
From one perspective, it is pragmatism. From another, it is privilege. Both perspectives are defensible, but it’s a lot easier to accept an imperfect system when the imperfections are mainly focused on other people.
There are always alternatives to accepting the lesser evil. But you have to be willing to cease valuing stability over justice.
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A lot of the things you list there are things that are out of the hands of the US president, or which take years and years of work at best. But thinking about just the kind of things the president can do, Hillary would be immeasurably better than Trump.
For starters, she wouldn’t be alienating American allies everywhere, while courting the favor of corrupt authoritarian rulers. She wouldn’t be engaging in stupid and self-destructive trade war bullshit. She wouldn’t have ordered the ICE to strip children from their parents and throw them into cages, or tried to ban Muslims from entering the country. She wouldn’t have a climate change denier installed as the head of the EPA, and wouldn’t be trying to crash the federal government by replacing experts with reality-denying conservative morons. She wouldn’t have pulled the US out of the Iranian nuclear deal for no reason, and would have kept John Bolton the hell away from positions of power and influence. And she wouldn’t have appointed Gorsuch on the Supreme Court either.
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