If I was a much better writer, I could have written this. Which is to say, I too regret voting for Nader in that election and will never make that mistake again. My only redeeming thought is that while my state was close, it did go for Gore.
I guarantee there were enough voters in Florida with the same regrets to easily have put Gore in office if they could redo it. Do you think there are any who wish they could have voted Green instead?
SCOTUS: Yeah… the votes mattered there!
Hell, I never vote for. Only against.
– W. C. Fields
I too voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 but for different reasons. I too regretted it. If you are waiting for the ideal candidate that 100% aligns with your beliefs you’re going to be waiting a long time.
I wasn’t paying attention back then so much-- what was Nader offering as a green that gore wasn’t? Didn’t gore make environmental policies part of his campaign? He just didn’t go far enough or something?
For the record it was before Gore’s Inconvenient Truth book and not much was being said about global warming. The reason I voted for Nader was a last minute decision out of frustration. My wife and I both registered Democrats went to our polling place where we had voted in every election only to find out we were no longer on the registered voters list. We were eventually given provisional ballots and because I was frustrated voted for Nader. I mistakenly thought the federal government ran the elections. Later after the shenanigans in Florida I found out the states ran their own for the most part. The economy was so good at the time I didn’t think there was a chance Bush would ever get elected
In many ways, the Clinton Administration is when Democrats started giving up the Overton Window to Republicans. The trend of “self-regulating industries” went into full swing with things like the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Not Reagan or the first Bush. Clinton.
FISA, the court that rubber stamps warrents for wire tapping, became a rubber stamping operation under Clinton. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s actually an ancient freerepublic.org thread where they hope Bush undoes this. Instead, Bush ignored it completely while freerepublic.org cheered him on.
This is all to say that when Nader said both sides are the same, there were a lot of people on the left who agreed.
Bush then takes less then a year to show how utterly wrong that was, and it didn’t even start with 9/11.
Tale as old as time.
Democrat makes moves to the center.
Leftists become disillusioned
Say both parties are the same
Republican gets elected
Leftists learn that what they though was “right wing” was only the tip of the iceberg
when put in power, actual Republicans do things far worse things than Leftists even imagined were possible
This was really well written but I fear the people it needs to reach aren’t going to read far enough to get the point.
It misses the part where Jill Stein is completely full of shit. She’s in bed with Trump and Putin.
At least Nader was genuine.
This was really well written but I fear the people it needs to reach aren’t going to read
far enough to get the point.That too
Nah, they were never interested in being convinced otherwise in the first place. Feeling smug and superior because their hands are clean (or so they delusionally believe) is far more important than facing the harsh reality that their third party vote is doing more harm than good and that a perfect candidate has not and will never exist.
Very well said.
I don’t think they even open images, they just reply to inbox messages
this was my experience voting for jill stein in 2016
never. again.
Johnson in 2016 for me (I regarded it as a protest vote, not an affirmation of any supposed libertarian principles; I was a Berniecrat). Election night of 2016 is seared into my fucking head, and will be for the rest of my life.
My vote wasn’t the difference between victory and defeat. I lived in one of the safest of safe states. But I realized then that such performative moral objection necessarily includes moral acceptance of the end result. I didn’t do the literal least thing I could have done to prevent Trump. And I had to live with that as he took the oath of office.
The practical end of preventing fascism, not only for one’s own good but for the good of the country and the world, is more important by an order of magnitude. But the moral and personal element is not inconsiderable. It weighs on you.
Election night of 2016 is seared into my fucking head, and will be for the rest of my life.
fucking SAME
i was watching the webcasts. i refused to accept it until the announcer declared that michigan fell. even then, before he ever even stepped foot in any official office, i knew how fucked we were
I remember I was playing The Forest late at night with my friends. I was utterly unconcerned - America surely wasn’t stupid enough to elect Donald fucking Trump. And the polls were clear.
And then one of my friends, knowing that I’m the more politically oriented one in the group, asked, with a bit of concern in his voice, “We just lost Pennsylvania. Is that serious?”
I alt-tabbed out and checked the maps at like 3 AM. And kept checking the maps for two hours, in utter horror and disbelief. Over and over again. Clearly Hillary was winning the popular vote. How could the electoral college fuck us? It had only happened a handful of times in US history? And then I passed out, because ‘went to sleep’ implies some sort of restfulness. I remember waking up afternoon the next day with an immense, crushing weight on my chest and feeling utterly exhausted, wishing it was a nightmare and knowing it wasn’t.
Jesus Christ.
I for one was not surprised at all when Hillary lost in 2016.
she engaged her pied piper strategy, held that rotten rat bastard plutocrat irredeemable orange scumbag to America’s head like a gun, said “vote for me or else,” and smugly thought to herself “well now they have no choice but to vote for me.”
from where i stood, i fully expected that America very well could have been petty enough that it would cut off its own nose to spite its face. or in this case, reach up and pull the trigger on that gun itself.
America said “else,” and proceeded to pay dearly for responding to an act of out-of-touch party aristocrat hubris with careless lackadaisical contempt.
my father is dead because America didn’t have appropriate healthcare or effective pandemic response frameworks in place. it has robbed me of a significant chunk of my humanity and empathy. a good man died because of this comedy of errors, and anyone less of a worthwhile person than my father had been who yet lives will never again be seen as a human being in these eyes of mine.
I’d like to believe this country has learnt its very painful lesson.
but if it hasn’t, it can drown in the bed it will have shat. i shall squander no loyalty or kindness upon anyone who “left on the table” the most accessible possible measure within their grasp to ensure trump never defiles public office again. for those Innocents who may yet be caught in the crossfire of “protest voter” manic delusions of self-righteousness, I’m ready to assist in helping people escape this shithole nation with all the resources a working class household with four walls and a roof can spare. it would sure be nice if it didn’t come to that, though.
This is why I have such a problem with the single-issue “but genocide” voters. They’re so blinded by a decades-long conflict across the ocean that is far more complex than they could possibly fathom, that they’re willing to sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at home. How priveleged must one be to think Trump’s policies won’t affect them, their families or friends? How many American lives are they willing to put on the line so they can feel good about themselves for “not engaging in genocide” while ignoring the very real one about to happen on American soil?
We’ve seen how destructive Trump’s last term was, especially regarding Covid. Why the hell would they risk another four years of that, on top of the worse things Trump promises to do to anyone who protests or disagrees with? Do the lives of women, people of colour, LGBTQ, veterans and the elderly not matter to these people? How many American lives are they willing to sacrifice to feel better about themselves?
I’m so tired of people being so short sighted that they’re willing to throw everybody under the bus over a single issue. Yeah, genocide is horrible. But it isn’t going to end on Tuesday, nor will it end years from now no matter who you vote for. The least one can do is prevent the literal fucking fascist from taking office who would guarantee that not only Palestinian lives will be lost, but so many Americans as well.
i’m an election worker on tuesday, so i’ll be doing that from 5am until who knows when, and sure as shit not going to look at the news before going to bed for “regular” work the next day. i go back and forth between confident hope and pure gut-wrenching dread about the results. trying not to even think about it at all-- i voted; i did all that’s in my power to do
How’s the Forest game? I have it in my Steam library but haven’t booted it up yet (busy having “fun” with Dwarf Fortress)
The Forest is fun with friends, choppin’ up cannibals and setting their mangled bodies aflame. Wholesome community stuff!
Singleplayer, it’s more directly horror-oriented, but also a bit grindy. If you like survival/exploration/base-building type first-person games, though, you’ll probably like it.
Probably one of the most fun games to co-op I’ve ever played. Love The Forrest.
Wasn’t that the guy who didn’t know where Aleppo was?
He wasted a perfectly ideal opportunity to say fuck that noise, or more diplomatically: “i don’t care about something that concerns America so little when we have such serious issues to deal with right here at home. it’s like a plane that has lost cabin pressure; we need to secure our own oxygen mask before we can help anyone else.”
predictably, nobody talks about Aleppo or the things that happened there now.
i probably wasn’t going to vote for him no matter what but his failure to leverage that opportunity still disappointed me and what IS still happening to this day is my disdain for people who still identify with his organization. they did not eat; they got cooked. they need to read the goddamn room and go home.
Dare you to post this on lemmy.ml
“Removed: misinformation, imperialism, racism”
“removed: rule 1”
Well it likely wouldn’t have changed anything on stem cell research. Induced stem cells are a thing and despite plenty of research we’re still quite far away from really being able to grow them into whatever we want.
And yet research was blocked for quite a few years for religious reasons. You may be comfortable with where we are now but what if we were ten years ahead of that
And from what I understand, the methods had to work around the ban. We’d still prefer to use the more straightforward methods if there was federal funding for it.
Me being comfortable with the state of research and the fact that having more cell lines would’ve likely done nothing for our current understanding are two different things. The frank truth is, we’re far from even understanding how epigenetics factor in differentiation between induced pluripotent stem cells and embryonic ones and which one is better for getting the results you want. The expense of the medium to grow the cells and the fact that it takes a month to see results of what you’re doing, the economics, is far more impactful on why we haven’t seen progress than the availability of cell lines.
Oh, so this is the person who paid the Supreme Court to give the Presidency to the losing candidate in 2000! At last we have the culprit!
The system sucks
QFT
Quantum field theory?
Old internet lingo for “quoted for truth”
Florida was a super close call. Most states won’t miss a few votes, or even a lot of votes in some cases. I’m not advising anyone anything, but I know some people will be making this calculation, and I think it may be the only way to get some new cards on the table.
Are we just supposed to ignore how the Supreme Court handed Bush the victory when Gore won the election anyway?
Reality often proves liberals wrong but this is just getting ridiculous.
