• GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
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    8 hours ago

    This is question-begging a number of critical elements, e.g. that the “rafts” cannot be influenced by “passenger” input, and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

    We can do it too:

    You’re in a runaway train accelerating toward a cliff and the break only really stops acceleration, it doesn’t decelerate. You can sit in the engine room and hold down the break, and you’ll live longer, but you aren’t changing the fundamental dynamic of the situation, which ends in your eventual death. Conversely, you can jump off the train, surely injuring yourself, possibly crippling yourself, maybe even killing yourself, but it’s the only potential way to change the dynamic of being doomed to fall off the cliff.

    Does this prove anything? No, it’s just a model of how some people think of the problem, not an argument. It would be really obnoxious and disingenuous to present it as an argument.

    • capital@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Maybe we should see if there’s any point of agreement, one step at a time.

      Do you agree that either the Dem or Rep nominee will be the next president?

      • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
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        8 hours ago

        When I said:

        and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

        This was me saying “It frames things as though losing the election means that all is lost and there won’t be future elections.”

        As I’m pretty sure I explained to you an hour ago in another thread, I think it’s an acceptable loss for the Democrats to lose an election to put pressure on them to change or else to establish that they are more loyal to the US project of Israel than they are to trying to win elections or do what voters want or anything like that.

        I don’t proactively want Trump to win, but I find it totally acceptable since what sets him apart from other Republicans is not that he is especially fascist in the substance of what he is likely to do. It might actually be possible to browbeat me if we had a Tom “throne of Chinese skulls” Cotton or someone as the nominee, he actually represents something that could be totalizing to me, but Trump is just kind of a deranged grifter and Vance is a more even-keel grifter.

        So to save us both time, no, I don’t think we agree on any points. I wasn’t commenting toward that end, I merely wanted to say that the comic is unhelpful.

          • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
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            7 hours ago

            Did you even read what I said? I directly acknowledged that the logical implication of my strategy is that Trump is more likely to win the upcoming election because I’m interested in how subsequent elections will be impacted. The calculus of “Always vote for the nearest viable candidate” is liberal dogma, yes, but it’s not the only strategy and I find it to be a bad long-term strategy, because it just incentivizes an accelerating rightward drift from the “left” candidate, leaving you with two right candidates.

            Despite needing to re-explain myself, I took what you said at face value and not as just being condescending wank, and now I guess I have egg on my face for my trouble.