5天前

Cognitive dissonance

A little dated, but the Dems are still banging that drum.

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Not voting is a vote for whoever won. That's not like a complicated concept. Ambivalence means you're cool with either result, and you've contributed to the end result by not contributing at all.
The problem is when people want to not vote and then complain about a result they don't like. If you really don't see a difference between Trump and Harris, but you're not happy about the pedophilia, the rape, the military garrison enacting martial law, the higher taxes, lower wages, losing healthcare, kidnappings, and paving the rose garden, then you should have voted for something else.
- But the moral prohibition on siding with any administration that endorses genocide will force a different flavor of the exact same logic that centrist liberalism has depended on for so long: hold your nose and align with the least worst thing. Only the least worst thing will no longer be the mild, ethics-agnostic emptiness of modern Western liberalism, nor will it be the multitude of barbaric authoritarians and their secret prisons. It will be communal solidarity, or else nothing, a walking away from all of this. Countless otherwise pragmatic people who would in any other circumstance choose liberalism by default will instead decide none of this is worth the damage to one’s soul. They will instead support no one, vote for no one, wash their hands of any ordering of the world that results in choices no better than this. And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.
  — Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Chapter 7, Lesser Evils; italic emphases his, bold emphasis mine.
- Oh no, not the rose garden!
  That’s not like a complicated concept.
  No, it's a completely inaccurate one though.
  
  Wait, I threw in the Rose Garden because it's a stupid example of a pointlessly shitty decision by the current president. Is that the one you want to defend? In that list? That's the paved hill you want to die on? Or are you just picking that one because you don't want to admit you're on board with the rest?
  Or should we just skip all that and jump to the part where you explain why you think it isn't accurate?
  
  Rose garden is equal to mass murder of brown people to liberals.

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