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So you don’t like Trump or Harris – here’s why it’s still best to vote for one of them
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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politics
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I've had many conversations with "third party voters" here on lemmy. Haven't found any, at all, not one, who can talk about the faults of the republicans in anything like the length and passion that they can talk about the faults of the democrats, and the national polling says that real third party voters are very rare, so a little bit of Bayes' theorem says that the "third party voters" talking so loudly and long about why I shouldn't vote for Harris are far, far, far more likely to be republicans pretending to be left wing or neutral, hoping desperately that they can convince enough potential democratic voters to stay home to swing the election for their favourite - stupid evil country-betraying Trump.
There's more discourse about the Democrats because there's less disagreement about Republicans being bad. I wrote up a post about Trump's foreign policy doublespeak a while back where I called out anyone who might support Trump from an isolationist standpoint. It didn't get much engagement, but that's not my fault. Most of my comments are responding to things other people say and there are more Harris supporters than Trump supporters.
I might remind you that Lemmy was developed by communists, so an alternative explanation is that communists are more likely to both vote third party and use Lemmy.
The idea that we're secret conservatives is so absurd that I doubt you actually believe it, and are just using the accusation as a talking point to discredit the other side. Conservatives are awful at impersonating communists, they don't read or understand leftist theory and typically can only make it a few hours at most before breaking character and shouting slurs. You're vastly overestimating their intelligence and creativity. To say that Bayes' theorem supports your accusation is patently absurd.
At some point, claiming that communists are just conservatives in disguise means claiming that conservatives read more leftist political theory than liberals do. As entertaining as it may be to imagine a bunch of good ol' boys getting together and starting a book club where they discuss, like, the finer points of Simone de Beauvoir, I think if you're doing Bayesian analysis you should probably assign that a pretty low probability. They don't even read their own theory, much less ours.
Except you don't need to read a lot of theory to endlessly repeat Conservative talking points whilst advocating voter behaviour likely to lead the world's most powerful military to be controlled by fascists. You must have come across "communists" who just spout putin's talking points?
Like I said, and you seem to have missed it, not everyone supporting Trump is American, and not everyone supporting Trump is stupid.
Trump himself is really very stupid but he's worked with some less stupid people who know what lines will track well with different voter bases, and lemmy.ml has swallowed the third party guilt-free-complicity line really enthusiastically, but not as wholesale as it swallowed the push America right to push it left line.
So no, sorry, just as it's really hard to tell sarcasm about Trump from support, and just as it's really hard to tell satire about Trump from actual things trump said, it's almost impossible to tell sincere leftists who were duped into parrotting rightwing talking points about the election from trump supporters busy doing the duping.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I find it hard to believe that it's a swan. After all, if you're pissing in the petrol tank, don't ask me to spend a long time listening to why it's good for the engine.
Oh, so now it's that you're surrounded by secret agents from foreign countries, and that's the only reason people disagree with you. I'm assuming that there's no possible evidence that would falsify this conspiracy theory, right?
Superb straw man there.
Some people are spouting these right wing talking points about voting because they're left wing and have been duped.
Some people are spouting these right wing talking points about voting because they're right wing and doing the duping.
Some people who are spouting these right wing talking points about voting are Americans.
Some people who are spouting these right wing talking points about voting are not Americans.
Some people who are spouting these right wing talking points about voting are not very clever.
Some people who are spouting these right wing talking points about voting are clever.
You claim that half of these couldn't possibly exist, because for some reason you think that only Americans approve of Trump, you believe that only Americans want to influence the American election and you characterise all Trump supporters as dumb rednecks or something more offensive, then I point out the even ones exist and you claim I'm a conspiracy theorist. Wow.
Nowhere did I claim this. Kind of funny that you strawman me right after accusing me of strawmanning you.
A conspiracy theory is not something that is impossible to be true, it's just implausible. It could be that the checkout clerk at my local grocery is an undercover FBI agent, why couldn't it? It's just that there's no evidence for it and it would be pretty unreasonable to assert that, especially if there was no possible way to falsify it.
I could just as easily claim that you're working for US intelligence, I'd have just as much basis. But I'm not a paranoid conspiracy theorist, so I don't. By Occam's razor and the principle of charity, I assume that you simply believe other things than me. That concept of people having different beliefs and values seems to be something that liberals simply cannot grasp - as if there's one obviously correct position and everyone else is either stupid or being deceived by bad actors. It's quite silly.
I don't espouse any "right wing" positions, and I don't generally see other people on here doing the same. My criticism of liberals is from a leftist perspective, grounded in leftist values and theory, and drawing from leftist intellectual traditions. It's just that liberals want to lump anyone who disagrees with them on anything for any reason as right wing in order to discredit and dismiss them.