Objection
First of all I live in Illinois, so my vote doesn't matter at all. Second, Harris would've needed a lot more that 0.3% to win, she lost PA by a solid 2.0%. Even if you do the unrealistic thing y'all do of adding third party votes to your candidate's total, you're not going to have enough to win.
But none of that is really relevant. The people who helped Trump win were the people who voted for him. I didn't help either candidate win because I didn't vote for either candidate. I helped Kamala exactly as much as I helped Trump.
I don't really have an interest in continuing this purely semantic argument where I consider myself to be objectively correct about the meaning of terminology.
There's definitely some truth to that. The media gave Kamala front-runner status in the 2020 primary and she blew it so hard she dropped out before a single vote was cast. If we're being as generous as possible, we might describe her as, "unproven." There was never any real indication she had decent political instincts or could draw people in, and it's unlikely that she would have won in a competitive primary. Internal criticism is necessary to root out ineffective strategies (and candidates), but there was never a time when that was really permissible in this cycle.
Tammy Baldwin is looking set to win Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin is ahead by a hair in Michigan, so no, that narrative is dead in the water.
It's not really all that complicated. The Democrats represent the status quo. The status quo sucks. The Republicans present themselves as an alternative to the status quo. So, people vote Republican.
All the centrist messaging just makes it worse. The Republicans can explain why things suck by scapegoating the poor and marginalized. But the Democrats won't call out the rich and powerful who are the actual reason things suck, so instead they just try to tell people that things don't suck at all. They "reach across the aisle" to people like Dick Cheney who are clearly part of the political establishment which only serves to help Trump present himself as an outsider. They adopt all these right-wing positions on immigration, the military, etc, but the people that appeals to already have a party waiting on them hand and foot, giving them exactly what they want. And all the bad shit he does doesn't matter to them because they believe in lesser evilism and hate the establishment.
Of course, Trump is part of the billionaire class and isn't any sort of real alternative to the existing system, but as long as Republicans are able to paint themselves that way, and are the only "alternative" game in town, people are going to turn to them when they dislike the way things are going, no matter how shitty they are.
I felt surprised and confused in 2016 when Trump won, but it's been 8 years. It's long past time to start figuring out where the Trump phenomenon came from.
So we're back to this idea that there is fundamentally no way for me to hold my position or defend it without you calling it bad faith and accusing me of being a secret Republican, regardless of anything I say or don't say. Any disagreement, any criticism of Harris or Biden whatsoever, is a "Republican talking point," and I'm expected to craft this completely delusional worldview where I ignore all their faults rather than acknowledging reality.
Completely ridiculous.
"Insane leaps of mental gymnasics," like, "Doing nothing has no impact on the election."
As opposed to "logic," like, "Doing nothing is a +0 which is neither an increase nor a decrease except also it is a decrease because it's not an increase and not increasing is the same as decreasing because zero doesn't exist."
Tell you what, if doing nothing counts as helping someone, then rest assured that I'll give Kamala my "help."
Could've said that from the start! You didn't have to die on this hill.
I don't especially want to continue the conversation into that with you after it took 20 comments of you slinging insults and shit over something that you now say doesn't matter to get here. If I have to pull teeth over something so simple, obvious, and relatively unimportant then I see no sense in discussing other stuff.
It's not as if the terms I was insisting on would make it impossible to criticize my position. There's no reason you couldn't have accepted those terms to start and continued the debate.
It doesn't matter how many times you repeat it, you'll still be as wrong as saying that I'm draining a pool by standing next to it with an empty hose. It's simply not how language works and you can twist words around and tell me otherwise a thousand times, and it just means you'll be dead wrong a thousand times.
"At fault for not fighting something" you can argue that, sure. "Benefiting," or "helping" you cannot. There is no argument, it's just definitionally false.
Letting the water evaporate is not the same as causing the water to evaporate. Letting Trump win (if he will) is not the same as causing Trump to win or helping him win. The baseline is doing nothing. If I did not exist, then the odds would be the same. Therefore I cannot be said to be helping Trump. That's just not how language works. Otherwise you could just as easily say that I'm helping Kamala by not voting for Trump, at which is a clear contradiction.
"You're helping Trump compared to if you had voted Kamala?" Fine. "You're helping Trump?" False. That is how it is and no amount of saying otherwise or trying to play games with language is going to change it.
Rank them by which benefits trump the most, and you discover that +1 for kamala is better for kamala and worse for trump.
The fact that you cannot understand this is insane.
I understand this perfectly and I have never disputed it. In fact I've said it myself.
Your inaction is still a choice that benefits the party you least support, because if you had voted for the party you don’t least support, you’d be benefitting the party you support.
Compared to voting for Kamala, yes, voting third party benefits Trump. But it is not correct to say that it benefits Trump without that qualification.
Even by your own example, not turning the water on will cause the pool to evaporate, which is not as bad as directly draining it, but still causing it to drain more than if you had done something to benefit it.
Lmao. I am not "causing" the water to evaporate. If I gather a bunch of people together to stand next to a pool of water, will each of us "cause" it to disappear faster? Am I causing every puddle in the world to evaporate right now as we speak? This is so ridiculous I can't even be frustrated or annoyed by your nonsense anymore, you're just doubling down on absurdity into full clown shit.
Really? Do Republicans talk about rejecting the ideology of lesser-evilism? Pretty sure they rely on it the same way the Demorcrats do to make people fall in line with their shitty candidate. I don't see why they'd want to undercut their support and lose every hesitant Trump voter. Pretty sure you've just decided that any and all criticism that can ever be applied to Biden or Harris is a "Republican talking point" but that doesn't make it at all true.