Please relax. I don’t claim to have special moral purity or whatever. Opposing genocide just seems like an obvious baseline. Besides, from the perspective of the individual voter (or eligible non-voter) there were no options of statistical possibility. The election was going to go the way it did regardless of what you or I decided to do with our single ballots. The voters who compromised on genocide got nothing except self-imposed damage to their minds and souls. The only way it would have gone differently is if the Democrats ran a better campaign with a different platform and probably with a different candidate.

I’m not saying that in the US system, at the presidential level, the loss of one of the two main parties doesn’t ensure the victory of the other. I’m saying that that doesn’t matter to a regular individual who is eligible to vote. That person only gets one ballot and their choices are what is printed on the ballot as well as leaving some or all of it blank.

This one or the other correlative is actually the purview of the campaigns. They have the power to sway enough votes to matter by adjusting their messaging, strategy, and, for the incumbents, actual policy. Instead of looking at what they were up against and eschewing the status quo, the Democrats decided to make the following threat to voters: give us permission to keep exterminating Palestinians or the other guy might take away your various rights here at home. The continued massacre of Palestinians wasn’t their only demand, but I’m just trying to stay on-topic. It’s darkly humorous that the voters who made the choice to acquiesce to that threat ended up morally compromising on genocide for a candidate that apparently was going to lose anyway.

“I voted for the genocide lady in the hopes of rewarding her and her party with four more years in the White House and blocking anyone who hasn’t had a material role in the Palestinian genocide .” That’s what you sound like. You cannot morally justify voting for Harris unless you can justify her ongoing role in the genocide. No one else running for president came close to playing such a role and, of course, there’s nothing immoral about abstaining.

Anyway, I’m just answering the OP. One does not have to vote on the basis of morality. People make immoral decisions all the time. It’s just easily understandable why many people wouldn’t cross that line.

To an individual voter in a large electorate the idea that a Harris loss would ensure a Trump victory isn’t relevant except as an excuse to vote immorally for Harris, the genocide candidate. The only moral choices were to abstain or vote for an explicitly anti-genocide candidate.

The moral argument against voting for Harris doesn’t imply that one has to vote for Trump instead.

The moral argument that one should not vote for someone who has been and continues to provide massive material support to a genocide is as clear as day.

It’s probably better to use a space heater where and when you need the heat. That central heating kit is basically the same thing, but it’s using more electricity providing heat to the entire home, including the rooms you aren’t using. Just set the thermostat to a minimum temperature to keep the pipes from freezing.

What type of central unit do you have?

Meanwhile, with Harris’s enthusiastic acceptance of Dick Cheney’s endorsement, there’s a resurgent fascism within the Democrats that these normies are happily ignoring. That guy did more to expand American fascism than Trump even promises. Therefore, this election isn’t really about totalitarianism versus democracy. That’s another reason why the anticipatory obedience accusation isn’t relevant. It would have also been anticipatory obedience to endorse Harris.

WaPo could certainly have done worse. It’s not unreasonable to expect that a billionaire might look after a newspaper like a rare classic car or other vanity purchase, that he would be content to keep it running nicely even if it’s ostensibly a poor investment.

I just do not understand this worldview that the billionaires are supposed to have protected journalism, let alone served as an important bulwark against fascism. It was already game over if that’s the case.

Well, these and other injuries against journalists and journalism aren’t new, but the coverage and outrage that I would have expected these and other outlets to produce has been relatively weak. Doesn’t seem like there’s much left standing to collapse.

I just try to be concise when I can. Either these papers only just started serving their owners’ material interests a few days ago or the outrage over the non-endorsements is contrived, irrational, and/or self-important; an embarrassing freak-out.

These papers have been privately owned by billionaires for years.

When I think of journalism collapsing, I think of the persecution of Julian Assange or the targeting of journalists in Gaza. The blocking of editorial boards’ endorsements seems trivial in comparison.

Even with standard mirrors the Ford Super Duty pickups are wider than the H1 with its mirrors; 105.9" versus 101".

The girl who’s reading this.

Insane.

I was happy to share it with him. As long as he doesn’t make a mess he’s welcome back anytime.

What an incredibly deranged response. Over nine hundred families have officially been exterminated in Gaza. Realistic estimates put the death toll there over the past year well above 100,000. How many people were actually killed on January 6th?