Just a reminder

What if you really want a warm hug but you only have the choice between a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and not a poke in the eye?

You still choose "not a poke in the eye", dumbo.

What if the options are sharp stick or dull stick?
- Do you really want me to answer that for you? Is it really that hard to think for yourself?
  Alright then... You get either one or the other, there's no way out of that whether you make a choice or not. Wouldn't you still want to influence the choice so you get the one that hurts a lot less?
- I mean at that point you struggle to escape, but assuming that's definitely not possible, then sharp sticks hurt less. 🤷‍♂️ "Optimal" does not necessarily mean "good" or "desirable".
  
  Sharp sticks hurt less...
  What?
  
  Yeah, equally deep and long injuries with a sharper implement destroy fewer cells (since they have a smaller cross-section), cause less trauma, and are less disruptive to the surrounding tissues. I know it's unintuitive, but it's true.
  
  Thank you. That's what I was trying to say.
  
  The dull stick is going to gouge your eye out entirely. I have no frame of reference of what would hurt more, but I guess that would be it.
  
  No a dull stick would probably fuck your eye up, a sharp stick will absolutely destroy your eye.
  
  That entirely depends on how deep the stick goes into your eye - though at some point it won't matter anyway.
  
  Yes if fired the dull stick out of a fucking cannon it would destroy the eye, how many bits of criteria are we going to add to this (what should be anyway) very straightforward analogy?
  
  There are times when a clean cut hurts less than a crude one. We're not talking about actual damage done, which wasn't part of the analogy to begin with.
  
  Dude you're talking about shoving a stick into your eye. What part of a stick will provide a clean cut?
How about the people who keep voting against the warm hug in the primaries get some of these lectures? Is that an option at some point?
- Yes, during the primaries.
  
  Well they didn't listen. What happens afterwards is on them.
- David Attenborough voice: "We see here an 'internet troll' employing a strategy known as 'whataboutism'. It shows that it's desperate, and feels threatened by a stronger opponent."
  
  What stronger opponent? You and Biden want me to vote for him again. I'm not going to.
  
  Refusing to make the optimal play when lives are on the line isn't brave, good, or noble. If you increase the danger of others to preserve your sense of pride, innocence, or purity then you commit a deep evil.
  
  I don’t want Biden to be president. So I’m not going to vote for him. It really is that simple. If the Democrats want my vote, they need to earn it by running a worthy candidate. My vote shouldn’t be taken for granted.
  
  I don’t want Biden to be president.
  Hey me too.
  So I’m not going to vote for him.
  Anti-fascism means doing everything we're able to stop fascism Being against genocide means doing what we can to shift the probability of genocide increasing as low as possible. If you can't put your petty feelings aside for long enough to push a few buttons, you shouldn't call yourself either. It's not about you.
  
  Wait which one is the genocidal maniac? I can't keep up
  What happened to Lemmy being a leftie safehaven?
  
  which one is the genocidal maniac
  If we need to pick exactly one, that'd be Trump, the only one of the two who actively attempted to prosecute a genocide.
  What happened to Lemmy being a leftie safehaven?
  It never was; tankies started the platform, and tankies are anti-leftists.
  
  which one is the genocidal maniac
  If we need to pick exactly one, that’d be Trump, the only one of the two who actively attempted to prosecute a genocide.
  Wut? Did you mean "promote"?
  
  Refusing to make the optimal play when lives are on the line isn’t brave, good, or noble.
  I never claimed to be brave, good or noble. Personally I think we're all pigs in the mud at this point.
  But frankly it's irrelevant. I'm not voting for Biden again. Find some other way to elect your geriatric procorporate genocide supporting trash candidate.
  
  Thinking that all information has been revealed, and therefore that anyone who plays a different move must have deliberately avoided the optimal one, is called “totalitarianism”.
  One of the important pieces of information that should not be ignored about the universe is that there is more information than can be process by the available information processing mechanisms.
  Also, there is no logical way to prioritize information for processing (at least in part because logic requires complete information).
  To deal with the fact that life is not even qualitatively like a textbook optimization problem, and cannot ever be due to limitations in how information works, we have developed cultural heuristics that ensure relevant information is not lost.
  One of those heuristics is having respect for others’ opinions, even when you think they’re wrong.
  The opposite of the totalitarian viewpoint is the humble viewpoint. That’s the one that says “I know I don’t understand this completely” and behaves accordingly.
  Tic tac toe is a good scenario to behave in a totalitarian way. It’s damned easy to see if a move is optimal or non-optimal in tic tac toe, because the number of possible permutations is pretty small.
  If an ongoing game of Tic Tac Toe were somehow linked to whether people lived or died, and I saw someone was about to make an un-optimal move on behalf of the rest of us, I’d say tie that idiot up and override his rights because he was about to kill us all.
  But games more complex than tic tac toe are harder to commit. Tic Tac Toe has nine spaces, so you have like 9! paths the game can take. But reality’s bigger than that. Hundreds of orders of magnitude bigger. I can’t be computed or grokked or boiled down to the point where you know what optimal is.
  Even deterministic small game like systems get hard to optimize quickly.
  It’s hard to get total knowledge of real life, so behaving in a totalitarian way is wrong, in real life. If real life were just one game of tic tac toe, maybe totalitarian attitude would be correct: “You are making a bad move, it’s going to cost us everything, it’s worth it to violate your rights because your rights are worthless when we’re all dead anyway”.
  
  I'm a mathematician; I too am aware of game theory and the principles of logic. Furthermore, you've made several mistakes.
  is called “totalitarianism”
  Bullshit. This is a common tankie word game.
  there is no logical way to prioritize information for processing
  This is wrong
  logic requires complete information
  Partially because this is wrong. Logic can operate with incomplete information. Heuristics and the standard of "cogency" exist for this very purpose.
  Furthermore, this criticism entirely ignores the context of:
  Potential optimal play provided
  "No I don't wanna"
  Which is a blatantly immoral thing to do, regardless of how much information is available because they have decided not to regardless of available information.
  Furthermore, this is an internet argument; I'm not threatening violence, and so it's absolutely asinine of you to act like I'm "violating [somone else's] rights". I'm making a argument online about the morality of someone else's choices. Your entire argument is sophistry.

Then go run for office and be better. Until then, unfortunately, pick the FAR lesser evil

Millions are unsatisfied. Should everyone run for office?
- Yes
  
  A ballot sheet with thousands of names is not the answer
- Yes
  
  A ballot sheet with thousands of names is not the answer
  
  Nothing is ever "the answer"
  All yall want to do is complain
  
  Get more involved in local politics is a sensible answer.
  Telling everyone to run for office is idiotic.
  
  I'm telling everyone to run cause I know we're all some lazy fucks and no one is going to
  Yall just won't stop complaining about everything
  
  Supporting someone who is running is 10x more useful than running against them.
  
  So we agree to vote for Biden?
  
  If you are in a swing state, yes.
  Solid blue state voters have more flexibility.
I did. Marianne Williamson was shut out of the conversation and smeared by the media. Not my fault the left cannibalizes itself every election cycle. Biden might as well be a Republican
So allowing babies to be bombed is not that evil got it
- Nice leap there
- Give it a rest.
No.
- Yes.
  
  You're trying to tell someone what to do in order to defend democracy?

Voting for someone in an election in the US is not an endorsement of that person. You have effectively two choices in many of the elections due to how the system is designed. You vote for the best choice of those two.

Not voting, or voting for a non viable candidate, is a signal that you Do Not Care who is in power.

Voting is a tool, and a civic duty. It's one of the few ways US society allows direct input from citizens.

If you actually are against facism, don't use misguided idealism to encourage people to throw away the little political power they have.

It’s one of the few ways US society allows direct input from citizens.
Okay here's my input: I don't vote for people who support genocides or block strikes.
If you want my vote work for it.
- That's your prerogative, just recognize that if both options support genocide and block strikes, so you chose to vote for a non viable candidate, or to not vote, you're effectively disenfranchising yourself.
  Your last point is very valid though. The DNC is very good at shooting themselves in the foot because they should know very well that people do get demotivated and just stop voting, yet continue to distance themselves from their voter base, resting on their laurels as "the only sane choice out of the two".
  Supporting local candidates, where your vote also is more heavily weighted, is one of the ways to shift policy - the US govt isnt just the president, it's representatives and senators and state governments.
Boycotting is also very patriotic

Right now the Democratic Party's convention and local election Primaries haven't happened. Best that can be done is to influence the party platform through this primary season to influence or change what a 'typical' Democrat may be.

There's a massive influx of money right now going towards keeping typical Democrats in line with Israel. So it appears that will predictably be a prevailing issue one way or another.

So like: most of my local elections usually feature Democrats v Democrats so I'll likely opt for the non-Zionist or at least the less Zionist of the two. That may send a message for the winner of the Presidential ticket, if anything.