I feel left out, not even a spam bot wants me :(

This is so relatable that it hurts, actually.

I can read about 80% of the words in this if I’m honest, and had to fill in the rest with a best guess.

I honestly don’t know if they’re a bot or not, but that came out of left field so hard that I couldn’t help but laugh. I have no idea what they are talking about. “Blame everyone else for your own actions” ???

Huh? What? I’m not who you were responding to, but this is… not sane.

Everyone knew that one of those two people would be president. It’s not like we get a do-over with new candidates if enough people stay home.

Yeah, that is fair.

So deciding to stay home or vote third party means they are ok with this outcome rather than having Harris in office right now.

That does not follow. If they voted for a third party, it’s because they wanted the outcome in which that party won. Call it unrealistic, but it’s not the voters’ fault that democracy is broken, that elections in the US are effectively a two-party system (even when there are others on the ballot), and that there is no system of proportional representation.

As for the staying home case, it does not at all imply that they are OK with Trump winning – just that they refused to play the game altogether. I understand that your point is that the outcome is the same and therefore that the means do not justify the ends.

As you say, if more people voted Harris rather than stayed home, she could be president right now. What I don’t agree on is that that is where the blame lies; there are a million good reasons to be disgruntled with the institution and not keep playing their game of “who’s less awful?”. Trump is president because of his MAGA cult/voters who put him there. If they didn’t vote for him, he wouldn’t be president. Blaming anyone else is not constructive, although ultimately, this is a philosophical difference, not a political one.

Suppose in the next election, Trump was up against someone who is somehow worse. I could not in good faith vote for either. There comes a point where picking the lesser of 2 evils is just falling for the trap, and you’re not really picking anything. There not being any candidate to win over a significant portion of the population is a sign that democracy is compromised. That is deserving of anger and blame. You’re supposed to vote for who you want, not vote tactically against who you don’t want more. That can get old pretty fast.

Obligatory “I am not American and do not live in the USA”; just an observer from outside. If I were, I think that I would have voted Harris, albeit begrudgingly. I just don’t expect everyone else on the fence to make that same choice.

I do not think it is fair to equate someone who abstained from voting due to dissatisfaction with both candidates to a literal MAGA who voted Trump. The latter are the ones who directly led to this outcome; the former just didn’t help it.

Rioting, instead of voting for one of both agents planted by the oligarchs. The illusion of democracy really isn’t worth defending to the death like this.

Why are you so angry at another leftist? Save some of that for the literal MAGAs.

to suppress the vote among those incapable of making nuanced decisions. And it worked here in the UK just as well as it did in the US.

Except that we currently have a Labour Government? Did you also miss the part where I said I voted anyway?

I don’t have to vote for anyone I don’t agree with. I also don’t have to pick “the lesser of 2/3/4/whatever evils” because, to me, that is falling for the oligarchs’ trap. If you want to get mad at somebody, get mad at those who voted for the Tories here, or the Republicans in the US. They’re to blame, not the left who are divided by the fact that nobody in politics wants to represent their collective interests.

Frankly, if you think that I am morally compelled to vote for Labour, even when I disagree with their fascist rhetoric, then you are licking the boots of a broken institution.

I am not American or in the USA, so no.

But we have had a pretty similar experience with the 2 dominant political parties here in the UK, albeit to a smaller extent. I cancelled my Labour Party membership back in 2019, when I realised they’d rebranded from actually representing working people, to just being the Tories sugarcoated in red. They are not a viable alternative to the Tories, and neither offer the much-needed change our declining society needs.

Thankfully, we do have other parties on our ballots, so I didn’t have to abstain, and voted Lib Dem last year. But if we did have a strict two-party system, and that was the state of it, you can bet that I wouldn’t bother with the ballot and would be out demonstrating on the streets.

Nope. There was no genocide-free option. The Democratic Party failed catastrophically; it’s on them, not those who abstained from voting for garbage vs garbage.

Expecting voters to just pick the lesser of two evils forever is how we allow the rich and those with a big platform to slowly shift both parties’ politics in their favour. Some people see this zero-sum game for what it is and refuse to partake (vote). The only way to fix this at this point is by revolting.

I was living pretty much entirely anger-free until 2 things happened:

• I started working at my job, where I was hired for my expertise and yet I am frequently interrupted mid-sentence, disrespected, or told to do things in ways that defy the foundations of my entire discipline (before anyone tells me to quit, I can’t, because of immigration-related reasons)
• One of my friends has fallen down the alt-right/X/Musk fanboyism pipeline and just about everything he rants is uninformed, reactionary, and rage-inducing. He spends too much of his time being angry about problems that don’t exist and spreads that anger everywhere

Saying that, I am autistic and often struggle to distinguish between anger, frustration, feeling hurt, and even sadness. I can isolate depression as a feeling fairly reliably though, because that is more numb and less passionate.

Neck tie, if it were a bit bigger.

Yes, this. This particular comment best summarises how I feel about the topic.

Agreeing with your summary of his actions and calling him cringey are not mutually exclusive

Good god, I am so tired of hearing about this cringey edge lord.

You already know this, but I’ll reiterate it in case it helps you get over whatever guilt you might be feeling about it: you can’t. If you have already offered them a non-judgemental space to vent and have expressed that you’re there for them, then you have already done more than any friend should be expected to.

You say “it doesn’t rest in [your] hands alone”; it doesn’t rest in your hands at all! Your desire to save your friend is very admirable but it also sounds like it could be self-sabotaging to some extent.

“Rehab doesn’t work” is a blanket and not entirely true statement. There are a million different pathways to recovery; not every programme works for every person. Maybe try to explain this to them.

Beyond that, the best thing you can do for them right now is to disengage and remain distant. You don’t deserve to have their pains inflicted on you too.

P.S. I am speaking as a recovering addict. One of the things my recovery has taught me is how much of a burden being an addict is to other people. The thought of a relapse hurting my friends disturbs me. Your friend might resent you for turning them away, but when they do start recovery, they will not only understand why; they’ll appreciate it too.

That is how I confirmed that every single one of them was, yeah! It’s also possible to check by just going to reddit.com/user/UsernameHere in an incognito window (or any browser that isn’t logged in). If shadowbanned, the page shows “This account has been suspended.”

Hard agree.

Reddit has been shadow banning every single account I touch; it’s incredible. I burned through 3 accounts in the past month and got fed up, just haven’t bothered since. I seem to be incapable of not getting shadow banned lol, when at least 30% of the activity on that site is bots arguing amongst themselves and reposts of content that did well. I even tried setting a “snoo” (yuck) and a bio on my last account, but it made no difference.

Not OP, but there are at least 2 things going on here:

The first part is that the Jewish person is effectively treating this like an inside joke, where someone might not find it funny unless they were present in the situation that the joke references.

The second part to the ‘God not being there’ bit (which is what actually makes it funny imho) is basically saying that the holocaust was so horrible that God was clearly someplace else/asleep/absent to allow something like that to happen under his watch.