There is no binary except that which your projection of that as the reality reifies.

Less than a month before election day, we have enough data to know that either Trump or Harris will win. Voting for someone is not an endorsement or showing support for them. A vote ought to be a strategic action, optimizing for outcomes you would like to see.

For me, this means voting for Jill Stein, because I live in Oregon. But if I lived in Michigan, I would vote for Harris with a clear conscious. If you live in a battle ground state, voting is too important to be used as an expression of values.

actual evidence

The reason why I think Harris is better is mostly that the people commiting the genocide prefer Republicans. You can also look at differences in their rhetoric.

But I disagree that you need reasonable evidence of a meaningful difference. If you have a binary chose in a situation like this, you ought to pick the one that you believe to be better, no matter how unsure you are.

If you got dragged in front of a war crimes tribunal for participating in a genocide, a hypothetical argument that someone else would have done even worse wouldn’t actually excuse you, same as it wouldn’t for any other crime.

This analogy does not work because someone participating in a genocide does not just have a binary option. If they refuse to act, the genocide will slow down. This is not true of an American voter. Refusing to engage in the binary chose only helps the worse of 2 evils.

Your argument basically sets up a justification for voting for any evil- kill LGBTQ people, kill Socialists, kill disabled people, etc- so long as you can argue that someone else would have been worse.

I disagree. The argument needs to be that voting for anyone else would have been worse.

If course, all of these arguments only apply to voters in one of the 12 battleground states. Other voters do not decide who is elected, so they ought to vote 3rd party to attempt to change the policies of one of the major parties.

we can’t really pretend we give a shit about genocide and then vote Democrat or Republican

In plurality voting, those who are interested in decreasing the severity of genocide ought to vote for the candidate less likely to make the genocide worse.

In the US, it’s pretty clear which candidate is more aligned with the current genocidal Israeli regime.

I see, my favorite podcast (“A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”)[https://500songs.com/] has no ads. I’d strongly recommend if your interested in that kind of music

I don’t understand what you mean. I just skip the ads with my skip 30 seconds button.

If you’re doing it over an app, without the chance for the person you’re dumping to respond, I see no risk of things turning nasty

In the US you sometimes hear that phones in class are necessary to see if your kids are OK in a school shooting scenario.

I think this isn’t a good argument, since school shootings are rare, and it’s unclear if each student having a phone would do more harm than good in that kind of situation.

I don’t see the connection between neurodivergence and phones

Short haul flights should probably be high speed train rides anyway

I think OP believes every town in the US has twice as many homeless people as churches, it doesnt need to be exactly 1 church and 2 homeless people.

But either way, that’s probably not true. Since homeless people tend to be in larger cities.

But then again, lots of people become homless in the suburbs and then move to the city to get the social services. If churches in the suburbs housed a few people as they become homeless, it would probably help. It’s better to keep people in their communities so they have a better chance of returning to housefullness.

But probably not that much, since homelessness rates are strongly correlated with housing prices, so expensive cities create more homelessness than cheap suburbs.

I’m not sure planting forests instead of housing is always a win for the environment. If the land is in a place where people can take sustainable transportation to their jobs, you should put dense housing there. Or else people will have to drive around your suburban forest.

But in the Brain May case, I have no clue where the forest is

I just donate to GiveWell. They treat charity as an optimization problem for minimize dollars spent per human life saved.

Recently, this effective altruism philosophy has gotten a bad reputation because of the support techbro grifters, and wacky long-termism. But GiveWell seems to be distributing the money to reasonable causes: mosquito nets, maleria medication, vitamin a, cash for vaccines

Unfortunately, Tina Kotek would rather allow citys to annex farmland to build more suburbs, defeating our urban growth boundary laws, which are a big part of what makes Oregon great.

My comments are being pushed fine, but maybe not everything is being pulled

I have the highest salary possible on that contract. This year, I’m only getting a 10% raise after 0% raise for a couple of years. The new contract will still put me more than 4k below the living wage.