Objection

Yeah pretty much. 2016 was crazier than this one for sure. This one didn't have a competitive primary on either side, and it was predicted as a toss-up whereas in 2016 every poll and media outlet was saying it was impossible for Trump to win, and there was no precedent to predict what would happen when he was in office. This is like, after people have had eight years to come to terms with Trump being a thing in whatever form that looks like. The general trend though is that things are getting crazier, and that trend is likely to continue.

Too late lmao

If I hate the game, and the players are the ones with the power to change the rules of the game and choose not to, where does that leave me?

If that's why Kamala lost, then explain why Tammy Baldwin is winning Wisconsin and Elissa Slotkin is winning in Michigan.

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.

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.