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Speaking personally as a brit i'm not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election but in the case of britain at least im absolutely not going to be voting for Keir Starmer since most of the left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for the most right wing and second worst (to his "credit", unlike Tony Blair, he doesnt have the blood of a million iraqis on his hands, only 30,000 palestinians) party leader labour's had in recent memory were the exact same people 5 years ago saying they couldnt in good faith vote for the most far left, trans positive labour leader in decades because he criticised Israel which led to the largest conservative majority in years.
Under Sir Kid Starver, Labour stopped members from voting for a ceasefire right at the start of the Palestinian genocide, members have repeatedly been expelled over bogus antisemitism charges, starmerite labour's trying to push to have the NHS privatised, the party has pivoted so far to the right that you have promiment members saying “Margaret Thatcher was a visionary leader for the U.K; no doubt about it", they've proposed policies to segregate trans people out of single sex NHS hospital wards and those are just the things from the last few months or so that i remember off the top of my head.
I'm going to vote for the Greens instead.
- I'm not even from the US: Check
- Claim of LGBTQ identity: Check
- Lots of the content posted by the user is just generically-relatable memes: Check
- Account was recently created: Check
- Emotional framing ("left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for"): Check
I actually guessed that most of those would be true, and the point of view that the message would express, the instant I read "Speaking personally as a brit" and before I expanded the message.
I didn't know the US had a monopoly on democracy.
Also saying they 'claim' lgbtq identity is inherently dehumanizing. Fuck you.
How about you reply to the actual comment instead of attacking the posters character.
Also your account is only 3 months old and you're complaining that their account is newly created? Fuck offffff
I'm saying that they check a bunch of the boxes of a shill account.
Okay though, sure. My response to the content is contained in the OP meme: Even if we posit that Gaza is 100% Biden's doing and he's a lesser evil, which I don't agree with, but even positing that, this "oh boo hoo I have to swallow my pride and vote for the person who doesn't want to impose 30% inflation on Iran for no fucking reason and 'finish the job' in Gaza and separate Hispanic kids from their families and do mass deportations, I don't want to, that would mean swallowing my pride, so I won't and you shouldn't either" viewpoint is childish, incredibly destructive, and probably not a sincere point of view, but instead a deliberate deception to produce an incredibly destructive result in US politics that may do quite a lot of harm to quite a lot of people.
It's born -- if it is sincere -- out of an incredibly selfish and entitled mindset. There are people in the world who don't have the luxury of deciding to do things they do or don't want to; there are hungry families in Iran, dead Kurds, dead Ukrainians, Honduran kids who will never see their families again, who absolutely don't give the slightest shit what you do or don't feel like voting for, or whether you're emotionally motivated to take a single trivial action that you can do that might help keep their families alive. They don't have the luxury of looking at things that way.
That's as it's applied to the US. I'm not really familiar enough with UK politics to say the details of how it applies in the UK -- but the logic is universally bad. For example if someone was saying not to vote against Boris Johnson for the same absolutely bad-faith and horrifyingly wrong reasons, I would feel free to disagree with them firmly in exactly the same way.
I’m saying that they check a bunch of the boxes of a shill account.
one of our accounts is 8 months old and talks about a variety of other general interests and things that arent just to do with politics as well as modding several of the queer comms in lemmy.blahaj.zone; the other is a three month old account that exclusively posts about politics and martialling people to vote for the democrats and stuff, there's far more grounds to call you a "shill" for the democrats than to call me a "shill" for the british Green Party or Jeremy Corbyn or whatever.
and one of the points i made was literally that the people now who are saying to vote for Keir Starmer against Rishi Sunak now are literally the same people who voted for Boris Johnson to stop Jeremy Corbyn coming into power because he was "too left wing" just five years ago but now i have to fall in line behind them when they utterly tanked the labour party and refused to fall in line just a few years ago unless we let them be in charge and push their transphobic neoliberal zionist ideology instead, one of the old mainstays of this group, David Mencer, the former director of Labour Friends of Israel, is now literally working for the Israeli government as an official spokesperson
i have to fall in line behind them
This is another of the talking points / common misleading framings I see a lot
Just wanted to highlight it -- I feel pretty comfortable with what I already laid out otherwise
Hey you can fuck off.
This person has an older account than you and seems less like a shill from their post history than you. Calling someone’s identity into question because they oppose your political views is also a trash move.
Stop trying to bad jacket people and be normal.
- At no point was in weighing on talking about the US, I was talking about the UK. I even said "as a brit i’m not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election"
- I'm not "claiming" my queerness or some shit, i live it and i face the consequences of living it
- yes, most of my posts are in the garfieldist subreddit which i made because i like garfield and the femcel_posting sub for transfems because I'm a transfem and i find the memes funny, sorry that i have a personality and other interests that arent just politics
- my account is literally almost three times older than yours
- the thing you posted was far more emotive than mine and literally accuses anyone who doesnt want to vote for an accomplice to genocide of saying "vulnerable people should die for my ideology" (frankly i dont care which people vote for but to say anyone protesting bidens complicity in the bombing of gaza just want to kill gay people or whatever while the democratic party tells them they just have to accept that "palestinians should die for our ideology" so that biden can win the election is disgusting), but because i very briefly expressed in just one sentence a fraction of the anger i feel at the (entirely cis) starmerite talking head harpies in this country who supported the tory majority into power so that we've had five years of uncontested rule by them and who arent affected in the slightest by the institutionialised transphobia of the conservative and labour parties yet expect me to come happily to vote for the man who entirely bulldosed the most progressive party britain has ever had and is directly calling for me and people like me to be segregated out of our crumbling healthcare service suddenly im the one being emotional or whatever?
im not even refusing to vote, im just voting for a different party which isnt actively trying to screw me over, why would i ever vote for Sir Keir "trans rights can’t override women’s rights" Starmer?
Makes some amount of sense. And sure, I have no idea if you're telling the God's honest truth about all this stuff or if you're exactly what I'm accusing you of being. (My server for some reason showed the wrong age for your account, so strike that one.)
But, the fact remains -- I am not lying when I tell you I predicted exactly a bunch of the features of your account, and more or less what you were going to say in the post (the talking point that people are trying to pressure you into voting for the less-harmful candidate when you emotionally don't want to, and that you're taking a principled stand against it by refusing and voting for a third party instead, which is an incredibly common shill talking point) just from reading the few words. If it's pure coincidence and you just happen to hit all those shill boxes by accident then I apologize, but honestly, I doubt it.
my vote for the Green party isn't an emotional "I cant bring myself to vote for this piece of shit" thing, its entirely a strategic vote - it signals to the Labour party that there are people willing to vote for them if they were to move back to the left rather than constantly chasing the votes of the mytholigised moderate conservatives who are finally too disgusted with the rampant corruption and infighting of the current conservative to keep voting for them, it helps the green party gain more ground that labour wont get a >51% majority in the houses of parliament so they'll have to coalition build with the green party and listen to some of their demands if they want to get stuff done (after all, they're not going to be coalition building with the Workers Party of Britain since its basically just one guy who hates the modern labour party with a burning passion and gives a speech at the house of commons every now and again about how the county of Rochdale needs more NHS funding and also how Starmer and Sunak will be seeing the fires of hell for their crimes), and there's not much risk of the conservative party winning now after the last decade of corruption stories and infighting (the funniest of which was the exposé of david cameron's pig fucking ritual about a decade ago imo), the splintering of the far right of the party to join with the remnants of the Brexit Party (which was formed of the remnants of UKIP and the overtly fascist British National Party) and form into the Reform Party and the split off of some of the left of the party into the Liberal Democrats Party and, in a few cases, into the starmerite Labour Party.
Before the genocide in gaza i was still considering holding my nose and falling in line just in case, but seeing the rabid zionism of the Labour Party in action as loads of MPs have either been forced out for alleged antisemitism for criticising Israel or left in protest over the culture that Starmer's forced onto the party from the top down gave me a realisation that it was necessary to actually vote for people who will oppose them in parliament rather than just hope that someday they'll change and get better
Don't you have proportional representation over there and then the House decides the PM? Voting for a third party has a non-zero chance of being useful. Go for it, why not?
Americans voting for a third party under FPTP may as well just throw their ballot in the trash. Same difference.