No, this is peak human. If someone were to make me choose between my wife dying and someone else’s wife dying in [insert state or country I’ve never been to], someone else’s wife is going to die. If I get those two choices individually, I choose to save both. Where are the Jews who see Netanyahu as the Fascist aggressor with no regard for human life or territorial sovereignty and cast him out for a pacifist leader. Where are the Palestinians who want a joint government and will cast out Hamas? They both exist, but the leadership is out of their control. As individual humans We. Don’t. Get. That. Choice.

That’s the complication of (in this meme) electing a single person who will influence 1000 decisions. No matter how I choose, some of those 1000 will hurt someone. It’s a guarantee. No matter how empathetic I am, I cannot correct a century of political meddling (in Latin America or in the Middle East) no can I correct two thousand years of religious hatred. And those are just two of a hundred active problems.

I Think your meme offers a rational perspective and is excellent satire about people who just want to protect their families from harm. Please don’t call me inhuman for recognizing I cannot meaningfully change political conditions in the world which are the result of centuries of conflict.

This seems like a very bad faith take on what they said.

They said they are their daughter and more important to themselves. That’s not dehumanization. That’s pretty normal. For most people, they, and their family and friends are more important to themselves than others.

what is even the point of this comic?

This is a comic opposed to those who claim that The Best System in The World™ is that we must perpetually vote for the lesser of two evils, when both choices are still unacceptably and horrifically evil. Maybe your party and your system … kinda suck? Dontcha think?

It’s also a comic opposed to centrist and conservative Democrats and other status quo warriors who rail against leftists and progressives while silencing us and calling us russian bots and trolls, instead of actually listening to what we have to say. I’ve talked to a lot of other anarchists and socialists on a regular basis, and we’re fucking sick of it. If we’re not even allowed to pressure the sitting president to do better, then what even is the point? You centrists kept repeating the lie that you’re not as cultlike as Republicans in 2020 to get our votes – and then every time a post like this is made or an issue is raised, you get defensive of your genocidal maniac and come out with guns blazing. Many of you even reported me to my moderator/instance admin. Thankfully, this is a leftist instance where your shit isn’t tolerated, unlike right-wing neoliberal instances like lemm.ee or lemmy.world.

The tap contest is like the US election because, as you argue, they both have no bearing on outcomes in the middle east. Therefore, they’re irrelevant. If a tap contest won’t change the situation in the middle east, don’t make comics complaining about the tap contest’s effect on the middle east. If an election won’t change the situation in the middle east, don’t make comics complaining about the election’s effect on the middle east. It’s not relevant to the discussion. It should be relevant, I agree with you there, but as you point out, this election it simply isn’t. If we want to improve the situation in the middle east, we need to do more direct action ourselves, not vote for it. So stop bringing voting into the conversation about the middle east.

Unfortunately, the only US president who tried to do something half-decent, JFK for wanting to abolish the CIA and giving an anti-imperialist speech titled “Imperialism: the Enemy of Freedom” to seemingly curtail the US’s invasions in foreign countries, made himself an enemy of both the political parties, and was thus assassinated by the CIA.

Like I said, political systems in the imperial core, specially in the US, only really exist to protect capital, while giving a thin veneer of “democracy”.

Seeing how the US gov has gone so far that it’s committing a(nother) genocide, I personally expect any actual change to come from mass organization, pressure and agitation from organizations outside it forcing change, perhaps aided by existing ones like the FRSO or PSL. Ideally they’d overthrow this imperialist government altogether but hoping for that in the imperial core is probably being too wishful.