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I never thought that in my life me and James Carville would see exactly eye-to-eye on things, but there you go. IDK if talking this way is tactically productive, but he's not wrong. They should have this guy intervene in every newscast about how Trump's ahead 3:1 among first-time Wisconsin voters with odd numbered license plates or whatever, to yell "Fuck you!" at the anchors with little bits of spittle flecked around his mouth.
It's the candidate's job to serve the will of the people, not the other way around.
If you want people to vote for you, you have to do the things the people demand. Like, oh, say, not enabling and funding genocide.
If it's super mega omg important that people vote for you, then it's on you to you do those things really hard.
If you consider the principle of democracy valid, then whatever the voters choose is correct by definition.
And by the same token, if they don't vote for you, you have only yourself to blame.
That's the game. Don't like it, don't play.
This is just a weird paternalistic point of view to me.
It is absolutely true that rich abusive criminals are in charge of the country, doing all kinds of horrifying stuff. You can put Biden in that category if you want; at least as far as Gaza is concerned I won't really fight you on the classification.
Sitting back and waiting like "well it's on them to fix it, and until then I won't take steps that will change the outcome to one that's better" is absolutely guaranteed to fail. If you want things to be better, work for better outcomes. That is the only way it will ever happen.
You wanna work for better outcomes in Gaza? Fuckin a man that sounds great, tell me how. You wanna give Biden a hard time about Gaza? Fuckin a man sounds great.
You wanna commit to sitting out and not taking positive steps until something changes from above to make it worth your while? If that's your choice, then buckle the fuck up, because I think there's a definite possibility that you might get a chance to firsthand experience how much worse than present-day reality it can get if enough people do that.
You don't keep enabling an abuser in the hope they'll eventually reform.
You walk the fuck out, and if that means being homeless, that sucks balls but it still beats staying.
And if someone calls you a fucking idiot for not being grateful for a roof over your head, you spit right in their eye.
Again: You're using a model that doesn't translate into politics.
Leaving an abuser is a hard road to a better outcome. Working to end the genocide in Gaza is a hard road to a better outcome (and yes, absolutely if that includes affirmatively putting pressure on Biden in whatever way.) Categorically refusing to vote for the non-democracy-ending candidate until something changes by magic from above is not a hard road to anything. It's just more genocide (by quite a lot).
It's like trying to fistfight the police when they're going to arrest you. It's like getting abused by your abusive partner and so refusing to make a decision to leave because the shelter is behind on their taxes. It's like getting a cut that's infected and refusing to get it treated because you don't like the American medical system and think it needs to change. It doesn't make any fucking sense. It's just a non sequitur.
The problems are real, but refusing to engage with the system where the outcomes can be impacted, until they get better on their own, will in this case make those real problems absolutely catastrophically worse.
IDK how long I want to go back and forth about it, but that's my feeling on it.
If someone can be an evil piece of shit and still win elections, what's their incentive to not be an evil piece of shit?
One of the two is going to win the election. It's not like if you sit it out, nobody wins. At this point, all you can influence is which one. Trump is a far worse option in pretty much every category.
There's two conflicting metrics:
The fact that the dems are willing to play chicken with the entire country and would rather see it fall into the hands of MAGA than let go of their precious genocide says a whole lot about their motivation.
If that faction of the party is allowed to prevail, there won't be any point. They need to learn their lesson, fast. They can either cooperate now, or get their ass thrown out of power in november. Their choice.
I think you're misguided if you think Trump's damage would be limited to four years. How many years of damage will we suffer just from his current three supreme court pics?
Plus, you make it sound like Biden could wave a wand and change everything in Gaza. He is applying pressure, but the situation is more complicated than you imply.
It's really simple: demonstrate that he has some kind of moral principles. Some atrocity he refuses to countenance, some red line he will not cross. Some point at which he'll say "you know what, no, we're not going to be part of this, we're out."
It might not stop them, but it would show he wasn't an actual monster.
Which is a pretty low fucking bar, tbh.
Yes -- which is why people in-the-know who are training neural nets periodically get frustrated and say "You know what, this thing's not producing the results I want, it did something really wrong as a matter of fact. Fuck it, I'm going to stop applying a gradient in the direction of better results, until it gets its act together."
Oh and also the neural net is physically in charge of all of our lives in this example
I can give you a bunch of examples of Biden pushing domestic economics and climate change policy real real firmly back towards the center. But, on the broader point about the Democrats in general I actually agree with you. If anything I said sounded like "Let's stop working to make the Democrats better or else find a replacement," it wasn't intentional on my part. Both of those sound like great things to do. (And fixing FPTP to avoid this situation in general in the future)
In the meantime, I do think that voting for the non-apocalypse, and choosing the outcome of "needs some improvement and really should be replaced" over "will definitely try to end the world," are good things to do.
It's like if the neural net runs the life support on the spaceship, and it's clearly not doing a good job and we desperately need to find a better solution, and so one guy says hey it's been so long of this that let's just turn off the life support, what's the worst that could happen.