Objection

Meanwhile, you hand a couple more rounds to the sniper that caused the accident in the first place, who is actively and intentionally causing more accidents.

This website completely changed the way I thought about this stuff and I found it super helpful.

The line to walk, generally speaking, is, "When you do [specific behavior], it makes me feel [specific emotion]." So for example, "When you ask me if everything's ok, it makes me feel pressured/put on the spot."

Keeping it about your own feelings makes it less confrontational while still bringing attention to the problem - you don't wanna get drawn into a whole debate about whether there's anything wrong with asking if someone's ok, but you want him to understand how you feel and (hopefully) take that into account in the future. If he does get defensive, repeat the message once to make it clear you're standing your ground, but then drop it and move on. A lot of times it's just a matter of the other person not realizing how it affects you.

Having said that, speaking as someone who's very much had the same mentality in the past, there are a lot of advantages to having friends in the workplace. Something to understand about this approach is that it's actually good for building relationships because it allows you to confront the behaviors that bother you while openly communicating your feelings, and people may even respect you more for standing up for yourself. Just remember to walk a middle ground, you don't want to veer into aggression or passivity.

They may have meant conservative in an older sense of wanting to change things, but slowly. American "conservatives" are more properly called reactionaries because they neither want to keep things the way they are, nor incremental progress (both of which fall under conservativism), but rather want to actively roll back and take away rights that have already been won. Liberals are conservatives because they want gradual, incremental change while preserving the social order. Conservativism is still right-wing though so that part of their statement is incorrect.

Did they not confirm that because they’d immediately show themselves to be wrong?

Do democrats not view a hierarchical social order as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable? Capitalism is a hierarchical social orders and liberals definitionally support capitalism.

Could do worse tbh.

It doesn't make any sense in the world we live in, which is exactly why you can't defend your position. If there's no defensible reason to vote for someone, then I'm not going to vote for them, obviously.

You're not really being honest because you don't actually believe in lesser evilism. The reality is that you're voting for Kamala because you're perfectly fine with her, and the lesser evil line is something you use as a rationalization to explain away any cognitive dissonance. There's nothing honest about saying that choosing the lesser evil is the basis for how you act when it isn't.

OK, so you're just speaking complete nonsense that you can't defend at all.

This is how they support people like Hitler

Citation really fucking needed.

If for no other reason, then because the election gives an opportunity to advocate for a socialist platform and ideals. According to Lenin, socialists have a responsibility to participate in bourgeois elections until the people have given up on them and stopped paying attention to them.

Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.

Our culture considers how you vote to be the defining aspect of your political character. Voting for a specific candidate makes people feel more inclined to defend that candidate's actions. Not voting promotes disengagement from politics altogether. Moreover, a party like PSL can use the attention it gets from the election to promote itself which it can then use to organize in other ways beyond elections.

You're free to say that you're just voting for Kamala or Hitler or whoever because you want to, but if you try to justify it in terms of choosing the lesser evil then you need to show that the general reasoning of choosing the lesser evil is a valid line of thought. If you abandon it whenever it leads you to a conclusion that you don't like, then you don't really believe that it's valid, you're just doing whatever you feel like and using that as a rationalization.

It’s also a smart move to double down bets in specific situations in Vegas, but I’m not going to defend always doing that “in general”

If you follow some other principle or calculus to reach the conclusion that you should support someone who also happens to be a lesser evil candidate, then sure. But your calculus is just that you should vote for them because they're the lesser evil.

To continue your analogy, it's like if someone says, "I'm doubling down because doubling down is a good strategy," vs "Based on a separate cost benefit analysis, I should double down in this situation."

You haven't offered a reason other than lesser evilism, and you have also applied that logic not just to one specific situation, but also to a hypothetical of "Hitler vs Hitler+." It is therefore completely arbitrary to limit it when it leads to conclusions you don't like, and proves that you don't actually believe it.