Seriously, my fellow lefties...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What makes the refusal to vote for Hillary Clinton even worse, is that the people who refuse to vote for her can't comprehend the idea that, yes, this country and, more broadly, the world could easily become a toxic heap of radioactive sludge that would be deadly to all, regardless of one's skin color or one's religious preference or one's sexual orientation. Ultimately, our continued existence as a species is what is at stake in this election: we have a candidate who is mentally unstable and one who is not. We have one who believes that climate change is a hoax and one who acknowledges that is real. We have a candidate who believes that the Geneva Convention's binding rules of war ought to be shredded and we have a candidate who pledges to respect the Geneva Convention. I could go on and on and on like this but you get my point: we are standing on a precipice right now. There's a clear choice between someone who embodies evil in every possible way and someone who is totally palatable. Make the right choice and feel proud about this. Own your decision to vote for Hillary Clinton and feel proud about it: you are doing your part to save the world and you will be pumping the breaks on the doomsday train.

I don't think I'm exaggerating about this: over the past few years, the world has become increasingly dangerous, increasingly intolerant, increasingly militaristic and increasingly Evil. No more. I'm not willing to put up with this anymore and my vote for Clinton has symbolic value as a vote against the monsters who thrive on bigotry and hatred and Know-Nothingism and militarism and racism and ignorance. Make it stop: vote for Clinton.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

If I do decide to cast a completely supererogatory vote for Clinton, it certainly won't be because people I sort-of-know on the internet guilt-tripped me into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv2idE5Aa3Q

Vote against Hitler, you delicate flower and feel good about. What is so difficult about this decision? What's worse about this whole thing is that you're proud to be a Christian. Trump is an abomination. He's arguably one of the most ungodly men to ever walk the Earth. He's basically an Antichrist, a false prophet and you can't vote against that?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

By the way Nathan, no one is trying to "guilt trip" you. We're all trying to make you see reason. Each and every one of us have had our own personal moments where the election become "real" and the stakes became apparent. It's not as if BK, oakvale and I have always felt this way about this contest. BK considered voting for Stein, so did I and oakvale once expressed ironic support for Trump. We all came to see the light and realized the stakes and adjusted our perception of this election accordingly; you should as well, I think. Think about this. Ponder upon it.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

If I do decide to cast a completely supererogatory vote for Clinton, it certainly won't be because people I sort-of-know on the internet guilt-tripped me into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv2idE5Aa3Q

Vote against Hitler, you delicate flower and feel good about. What is so difficult about this decision? What's worse about this whole thing is that you're proud to be a Christian. Trump is an abomination. He's arguably one of the most ungodly men to ever walk the Earth. He's basically an Antichrist, a false prophet and you can't vote against that?

He lives in MA. It is one of the most certain states in this election. What better place to make a statement about other choices than in a state like MA?

You are a state legislator and you've endorsed Donald Trump: why should anyone respect anything that you have to say about this election? You are a coward. Thanks for being part of the movement to destroy our global economic system and our standard of living.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

This is how I feel right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE

why are we discussing this as if it's a difficult choice? jesus christ people, we know the stakes and this isn't normal, it's anything but normal. so, yes, "i want you to get mad" and "i don't know what to do" about any of these dark winds and dark forces but "first you've got to get mad" and then take a stand against the doom spiral into hatred, intolerance, bigotry and the devaluing of human life that we've witnessed over the past two years. this isn't normal folks. get mad. do something about it. my personal stand is voting for hillary rodham clinton. there are other valid forms of personal stands but i think we all have to work to strangle the trump movement in its crib because it's toxic stuff. a refusal to do something is self-immolation at this point.

that's that i have to say.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What makes the refusal to vote for Hillary Clinton even worse, is that the people who refuse to vote for her can't comprehend the idea that, yes, this country and, more broadly, the world could easily become a toxic heap of radioactive sludge that would be deadly to all, regardless of one's skin color or one's religious preference or one's sexual orientation. Ultimately, our continued existence as a species is what is at stake in this election: we have a candidate who is mentally unstable and one who is not. We have one who believes that climate change is a hoax and one who acknowledges that is real. We have a candidate who believes that the Geneva Convention's binding rules of war ought to be shredded and we have a candidate who pledges to respect the Geneva Convention. I could go on and on and on like this but you get my point: we are standing on a precipice right now. There's a clear choice between someone who embodies evil in every possible way and someone who is totally palatable. Make the right choice and feel proud about this. Own your decision to vote for Hillary Clinton and feel proud about it: you are doing your part to save the world and you will be pumping the breaks on the doomsday train.

I don't think I'm exaggerating about this: over the past few years, the world has become increasingly dangerous, increasingly intolerant, increasingly militaristic and increasingly Evil. No more. I'm not willing to put up with this anymore and my vote for Clinton has symbolic value as a vote against the monsters who thrive on bigotry and hatred and Know-Nothingism and militarism and racism and ignorance. Make it stop: vote for Clinton.

A vote for Clinton has symbolic value against militarism?  Good grief.

Of course it does; being a hawk is not the same as being a militarist. The idea that there's a comparison between LBJ and, say, Hideki Tojo is insane. There is no comparison. Hawks don't glorify war. Militarists believe that war is morally good, worth pursuing. Make no mistake, Trump is a militarist and his fanboys would love to annihilate civilians. They must be stopped.

edit: more generally, Trump has consistently undermined the idea that human life has value throughout his campaign by bullying, harassing and trashing entire groups of people and engaging in vicious character assassinations of "little people" like Alicia Machado for no apparent reason and his supporters love it. These sentiments lay the foundations for militarism.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

my personal stand is voting for hillary rodham clinton. there are other valid forms of personal stands

Did it not occur to you that I might be engaging in some of them, or are you implying that there are things one can do on top of voting for Clinton but that it's unacceptable to do them instead of it? I don't have any agenda in asking this question, I'm genuinely unsure what you mean.

No, I think that anything anyone can do to stop Trumpism from destroying our body politic and our global economic system is good and I don't care what people decide to do. I'm mostly lashing at out at the braindead apathy of my peers right now, who can't seem to fathom that, yes, something terrifying is happening and that the proper response is to get active instead of retreating into PokemonGo and memes and cynicism.

I respect averroes because, even though he won't vote for Clinton, he's hated Trump from the beginning and does his own thing to stand up to these forces. Anyone who acts is good, I think. Voting for Clinton simply happens to be the easiest/most accessible way of confronting the forces that are assailing everything that we hold dear.

I see voting as a symbolic act. It's a way of transmitting information and preferences to politicians and, also, your peers; it's a kind of statement that has more meaning than its role as a mechanism for allocating power. It's more powerful than that. It's pretty easy also.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What makes the refusal to vote for Hillary Clinton even worse, is that the people who refuse to vote for her can't comprehend the idea that, yes, this country and, more broadly, the world could easily become a toxic heap of radioactive sludge that would be deadly to all, regardless of one's skin color or one's religious preference or one's sexual orientation. Ultimately, our continued existence as a species is what is at stake in this election: we have a candidate who is mentally unstable and one who is not. We have one who believes that climate change is a hoax and one who acknowledges that is real. We have a candidate who believes that the Geneva Convention's binding rules of war ought to be shredded and we have a candidate who pledges to respect the Geneva Convention. I could go on and on and on like this but you get my point: we are standing on a precipice right now. There's a clear choice between someone who embodies evil in every possible way and someone who is totally palatable. Make the right choice and feel proud about this. Own your decision to vote for Hillary Clinton and feel proud about it: you are doing your part to save the world and you will be pumping the breaks on the doomsday train.

I don't think I'm exaggerating about this: over the past few years, the world has become increasingly dangerous, increasingly intolerant, increasingly militaristic and increasingly Evil. No more. I'm not willing to put up with this anymore and my vote for Clinton has symbolic value as a vote against the monsters who thrive on bigotry and hatred and Know-Nothingism and militarism and racism and ignorance. Make it stop: vote for Clinton.

A vote for Clinton has symbolic value against militarism?  Good grief.

Of course it does; being a hawk is not the same as being a militarist. The idea that there's a comparison between LBJ and, say, Hideki Tojo is insane. There is no comparison. Hawks don't glorify war. Militarists believe that war is morally good, worth pursuing. Make no mistake, Trump is a militarist and his fanboys would love to annihilate civilians. They must be stopped.

edit: more generally, Trump has consistently undermined the idea that human life has value throughout his campaign by bullying, harassing and trashing entire groups of people and engaging in vicious character assassinations of "little people" like Alicia Machado for no apparent reason and his supporters love it. These sentiments lay the foundations for militarism.

One of the reasons Clinton is seeking out and getting hawkish support is because Trump is supposed to not believe America has a "role in the world."  I doubt many complained that of Tojo.  Trump represents an amoral foreign policy, which might be called "realist" if it were more grounded in reality. Clinton is the one who has more explicitly championed bellicosity as serving a grand moral purpose.  She'll leave her trail of dead, combatant and civilian, in the far corners of the world. Granted she may feel bad about it being necessary.

Who cares about what the Clinton campaign has to say about this election? We have explicit statements from the Trump campaign where he clearly has no desire to "retreat from our role in the world" because his plans to make Mexico "pay for the wall" involve saber-rattling and the use of hard power; he plans on unilaterally making life difficult for Mexicans to extract a demand. How is this not a marker of militarism?

Anyways, I'm not surprised that you, a member of the forced birth movement, would think that fetuses are more important than living undocumented immigrants or Muslims. This is all very banal to me.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What makes the refusal to vote for Hillary Clinton even worse, is that the people who refuse to vote for her can't comprehend the idea that, yes, this country and, more broadly, the world could easily become a toxic heap of radioactive sludge that would be deadly to all, regardless of one's skin color or one's religious preference or one's sexual orientation. Ultimately, our continued existence as a species is what is at stake in this election: we have a candidate who is mentally unstable and one who is not. We have one who believes that climate change is a hoax and one who acknowledges that is real. We have a candidate who believes that the Geneva Convention's binding rules of war ought to be shredded and we have a candidate who pledges to respect the Geneva Convention. I could go on and on and on like this but you get my point: we are standing on a precipice right now. There's a clear choice between someone who embodies evil in every possible way and someone who is totally palatable. Make the right choice and feel proud about this. Own your decision to vote for Hillary Clinton and feel proud about it: you are doing your part to save the world and you will be pumping the breaks on the doomsday train.

I don't think I'm exaggerating about this: over the past few years, the world has become increasingly dangerous, increasingly intolerant, increasingly militaristic and increasingly Evil. No more. I'm not willing to put up with this anymore and my vote for Clinton has symbolic value as a vote against the monsters who thrive on bigotry and hatred and Know-Nothingism and militarism and racism and ignorance. Make it stop: vote for Clinton.

A vote for Clinton has symbolic value against militarism?  Good grief.

Of course it does; being a hawk is not the same as being a militarist. The idea that there's a comparison between LBJ and, say, Hideki Tojo is insane. There is no comparison. Hawks don't glorify war. Militarists believe that war is morally good, worth pursuing. Make no mistake, Trump is a militarist and his fanboys would love to annihilate civilians. They must be stopped.

edit: more generally, Trump has consistently undermined the idea that human life has value throughout his campaign by bullying, harassing and trashing entire groups of people and engaging in vicious character assassinations of "little people" like Alicia Machado for no apparent reason and his supporters love it. These sentiments lay the foundations for militarism.

One of the reasons Clinton is seeking out and getting hawkish support is because Trump is supposed to not believe America has a "role in the world."  I doubt many complained that of Tojo.  Trump represents an amoral foreign policy, which might be called "realist" if it were more grounded in reality. Clinton is the one who has more explicitly championed bellicosity as serving a grand moral purpose.  She'll leave her trail of dead, combatant and civilian, in the far corners of the world. Granted she may feel bad about it being necessary.

Who cares about what the Clinton campaign has to say about this election? We have explicit statements from the Trump campaign where he clearly has no desire to "retreat from our role in the world" because his plans to make Mexico "pay for the wall" involve saber-rattling and the use of hard power; he plans on unilaterally making life difficult for Mexicans to extract a demand. How is this not a marker of militarism?

I'm not following your definition of militarism, as this sort of willingness to enact economic retaliation for what is believed to be in the nation's self-interest seems to me a different sort of thing than what you were describing before and not within the normal definition of the term.

If you are hoping that your vote is going to symbolize something, the campaign of the candidate you are voting for is entirely relevant to whether it is reasonable for it to be interpreted as such.

It's rather obvious how "the willingness to enact economic retaliation" is related to the militarism that I've described: it flagrantly flaunts diplomatic norms in favor of exercising blunt unilateral mechanisms that effectively operate as tools to bludgeon opponents. It is the type of behavior that, most assuredly is part of the militarist's state of mind. Besides, there's plenty of evidence that Trump is a militarist. He's said so himself.

"I love war." - Donald Trump

"I know more about fighting ISIS than the generals." - Donald Trump

there's also every quote averroes shared..

He went to a "military school" and his father's terms for the "genetically best" people was "killers". If you can't see any of this, you are blind to reality. Your willingness to shield yourself from the damning reality of the Trump campaign so that you can sit back and argue that both candidates are equally bad is tantamount to cowardice.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

To the white, middle-class liberals with the savior complex in this thread, are your self-righteous, sanctimonious cries about others having a different voting preference supposed to ENHANCE support for Clinton??? HOLY SH*T are you people insufferable.

lmao i'm mexican son. half of my family lives in mexico. if i'm trying to cajole people to vote for clinton, it's for this reason.

worth noting that xahar is muslim and his parents are from bangladesh.

don't make stupid assumptions!