Hi! I think this info is likely personally identifying, at least to an extent. Based on it I can determine the district in which you are registered to vote, basically. If you decide to take down the post, please let me know so I can delete my comment as well.

Here are my takes on these options.

PSL: A Marxist-Leninist party that does good and coherent work. I think their presidential campaigns are an ineffucient use of resources but that is neither here nor there. PSL organized much of the initial Palestinian solidarity protests via its associated group, the ANSWER Coalition. This is, in my opinion, the one to choose.

Vote Better: I had not heard of this party. It does not appear to be socialist based on their main candidate this year. It has a section about decreasing regulatory barriers because small businesses “create jobs”.

C4C 2024: I can’t find very much info. Statements from a few years ago indicate that she is anti-capitalist. You may want to look into this candidate more to see if they have any meaningful local momentum or cache (and good politics) because if she checks out you might want to help build that local org. I think it is more likely that this is a very small party centered on this one candidate, though.

Socialist Equality: toxic Trots that run WSWS, which regularly has horrible takes. Avoid and denounce.

All of Us: The candidate has almost zero presence or positions stated and I can’t find a party website. Not a serious campaign regardless of their politics.

SWP: More toxic trots. Avoid and denounce.

While it’s good to become familiar with the specifics so that you can process the allegations correctly, it boils down to something very simple: the Israeli state and their Zionist backers gladly lie to justify every bit of violence they do to Palestinians. Accuracy does not matter to them, only consent for apartheid, occupation, genocide. When you contradict them in-person they become outraged and start hurling baseless accusations (e.g. antisemitism) for the simple reason that they have no basis other than ethnic supremacy and a desire to punch down, but they know they cannot actually say this.

Treat such people like you would Neo-Nazis. You will not convince them, they don’t care about what is true or right, only the elevation of their own status. Instead, you must out-organize them. Join and build organizations that are coherently against the occupation and treat it as an ontological evil like apartheid in South Africa. Do not let yourself be coopted by the people supplying the weapons and diplomatic cover to carry out this racist project.

This article almost exclusively cites untrustworthy sources affiliated with or otherwise funded by Israeli or US state apparatuses. It presents a narrative and zero questioning of its sources’ claims.

As a reminder, Israel’s allegedly sophisticated penetration and assassination was to (1) do supply chain terrorism on pagers, hitting a huge number of people, including physicians, and (2) use US-supplied bunker busters to destroy swathes of a residential neighborhood, including its inhabitants.

Both acts are the exact opposite of precision or sophistication. They are simply more depraved than most people normally consider acceptable.

Oh I’m engaging.

No, you are ignoring 90% of what I say so that I have to repeat myself because you say things I’ve already contradicted. I assume this is a defensive reaction to having your genocide support called out.

You are fucking stupid. You are wrong. You are arguing in bad faith

If I was any of those things you could run circles around me and tackle my arguments. Instead you are avoiding and ignoring nearly everything I say. In contrast, I have addressed basically everything you have said, despite those behaviors.

You are now defensively lashing out rather than address what I said.

I fully expect that you’re a foreign actor or influenced by them. How’s that for engaging.

It’s the opposite if engaging, it is playing with imaginary BS to continue lashing out rather than address what was said.

Your support for genociders is not strategic and you do not sound like someone that is actually doing anything else. You sound like someone that really wants to vote for those genociders and then stop thinking about it.

You will start from square zero either way. They don’t care about you or listen to you. One of the reasons they don’t need to is that there is no organized, disciplined opposition. Dems expect vaguely left people to fall in line, they don’t even pander most of the time. Look at the DNC where they brought in an Israeli to speak, denied a Palestinian, and brought in the daughter of a Contra to lie about Sandinistas. They didn’t even try pandering. They could have picked a comprador Palestinian to say some both sides BS but instead gave you the middle finger and lied about a ceasefire.

Square zero is organizing. You will have to organize just as much in 4 years. Dems will not slow or stop the degradation of conditions, their neoliberal policies are driving that process. And if there is no left, this only fuels an ascendant right. Every election is going to be “the most important one of your life” for the foreseeable future and Dems will be complicit in this. Our only hope is to organize a left opposition as quickly as possible. Part of that requires shedding the false idea that telling people to vote for genociders is helping. It isn’t. It just normalizes genocide.

I was assuming they meant that all mainstream US politicians were on board with the genocide of Gaza. But maybe I was being too generous.

Your approach is not pragmatic, it is just what you have been told to do by your masters. It does nothing but entrench the genocuders and ensure that they will never have to think about you electorally. It’s a self-defeat.

I speak in terms of building leverage and organizations.

Though really, the issue here seems to be that you refuse to engage with what I say.

There’s no mental gymnastics

You’re using a strained trolley problem analogy.

then fighting the real fight.

Anyone fighting the real fight has already been fighting and knows that your vote shaming for genociders is counterproductive.

It’s you who’s doing gymnastics trying to wrongly convince folks not to.

How am I wrong?

The length of your post alone proves the gymnastics.

My post was not long lol. Though most of it was me repeating myself because your response didn’t address what I said. Same for this last response, too!

You are right that developing and practicing a script is a good idea! If you can practice with a comrade that is even better and may also help with anxiety.

Generally speaking, I would recommend having a clear objective of what you want people to do when they read your zine and have a conversation with you. For example, maybe you are hosting a reading group or mutual aid action and want people to join. In addition to being good organizing, this can also help your conversations because you will have that goal in mind: (1) is this someone you want to attend that event and if so, (2) how will you convince them to join?

I’ll also mention some elements of a good organizing conversation. This isn’t exhaustive but I hope it is helpful. An introduction is facilitated by a friendly question like, “have you heard about [this upcoming event]?” or, “Hi! Could I talk to you for 3 minutes about this upcoming [X]?” A smile and greeting, almost as if you already know them, is very effective at getting past the “oh no another rando talking to me” barrier. Then have your single-sentence pitch for why it is important to go t o this event and how valuable it would be for them to attend. If you can ask an open ended question about the topic before this, even better, but if you think they may not stand around very long go straight to the pitch. Importantly, have a direct ask and make it multiple times if they don’t say yes the first time. Direct asks are very powerful. They are the difference between a canvasser bringing in $0/day vs. $1000/day when doing a donation drive.

I also recommend avoiding terms that have specific meanings within your political groups but may not be understood by the general public. These are things people will learn if they come to your event or read your zone, but they will only think, “what were they talking about!?” if you use them during a first conversation. Order without authority and hierarchy are those kinds of terms. Instead think of how you would explain those concepts to sell someone on their validity and relevance to everyone’s lives, then use those more accessible explanatory terms instead. Why should someone care about unjust hierarchy and domination? Are there any salient issues you are organizing around that are about these things? Tie them together! “How Israel leverages unjust hierarchy to oppress Palestinians”, that kind of thing.

Herman Melville on avocado toast griping:

The rules-based order is just US-dominated liberalism.

Uh, duh? So start replacing them at the base levels and change our foundation? I didn’t say to keep voting for them locally?

Right that’s not going to work. But if you are wed to a failing electoralist strategy that will fail it is better to commit to it so that you can observe that failure sooner.

Do what work?

The work of building socialist organizations.

What’s the plan??

To build the size and quality of socialist organizations until they reach a large enough size to make demands that require real responses. Escalation. And to then depose the capitalist system via the means available to us. And before that, to survive the violence coming for us as conditions degrade and we are not yet big enough.

Are you running for local government where you are?

Why would I?

ALL CAREER POLITICIANS ARE “GENOCIDERS” from what I have seen so far in my life on this planet.

That’s right.

This is why normally I will not vote for a major 2 party candidate. I want to be able to vote again in the future, so I’m willing to do my best to try and make that happen.

What’s the point of your vote if you use it to support genocide? When politicians aren’t really answerable to their voters in the first place? When you have always voted third party, i.e. made your vote into a statement? Instead, just actually be against genocide. Tell others to not support genocide. Do actually helpful political work.

What are you actually saying and doing?

Building socialist and anti-imperialist organizations that are in solidarity with Palestinians. Educating the public. Running BDS campaigns. Materially contributing directly to Gazans.

No where have i found a coherent cohesive plan for us citizens to unite and change this major issue.

The vast majority of people are not organized and are not politically educated. They can’t demand anything because they don’t know what to demand nor do they have discipline to shed the propaganda handed to them by the two major parties. This “left” won’t even withold their votes! Why would anyone ever take them seriously? You must build leverage and make credible threats to have political power.

This starts with the basics of organizing and of political education.

What’s our truly viable recourse here?

The most viable course to stop genocide in Palestine will come from overseas by people actually fighting Israel or undermining its sponsor’s (America’s) ability to isolate and weaken resistance actors. Multipolarity and a decline of the US itself that this would necessarily entail due to the economic system it has maintained. We can help this by helping those doing resistance work and by educating each other. We can minimize the harms of a declining empire by building against militarism locally. Don’t support weapons manufacturers, picket them and make life more expensive for them. Kick their unions out of labor orgs. Fight against the racism and xenophobia that liberals will be embracing evet more in order to justify their warhawk policies.

With organization, you will see escalations and overreactions that build organizations. The Biden admin wanted to ban TikTok because they did not hide the genocidal violence. We should be able to build from these kinds of reactions, all it will take is repeated attempts until it snowballs. Build, act, receive reaction, build from the reaction, act, etc etc.

Please explain like I am 5.

I can’t sorry but please don’t hesitate to ask questions.

Backseat cheerleading genociders, and telling other people to do so, is not helping. It makes you complicit and spreads a false and anemic idea of how political power works. You should be fighting them, not doing mental gymnastics for how you can still justify supporting genociders.

There is nothing strategic in what you are describing, it is actually self-defeating and this is why you are told this logic from on high.

As I originally said, join an org and fo actual work against genociders. Be part of the solution, not part of the genocide-excusing problem.

Do you see how you must dodge and weave to avoid addressing what I say? And now namecalling. Just accidentally reconfirming everything I said.

No, you shouldn’t, because this is the real world and not a trolley problem. Providing electoral support to genociders helps to entrench them and these discussions have the wrong framing when it comes to how political power works. I already mentioned this. Did you read my comment?

The tank man video has been available for a very long time, liberals just never actually watched it. They just got shown short clips and then got told a narrative about how he was fighting a tank and lost.

This is how capitalist propaganda works. The propagandized don’t even realize it’s happening. They just hear a narrative and internalize it, with the propagandists knowing the targets will never actually investigate the veracity. He’ll, they know that a ton of their targets will even reflexively defend the propaganda line and attack those who did end up questioning it and investigating!

Every person you see calling someone else a Russian not is doing this, for example.

That video and its title are both correct and it is historical revisionism to say otherwise.

Fascists took their cues from liberal projects. The non-mythological components of the times they were pining for were just liberalism 30-80 years prior, before advances in imperialism and the rise of socialists. The things they actually planned and attempted were to cut a larger piece of imperislist pie for themselves using the same basic mechanisms of the dominant imperial powers.

Both Italian fascists and Mazis took inspiration from the British Empire and its colonies, particularly settler colonies. Concentration camps developed by the Brits were the inspiration for those used by the Nazis, as were apartheid systems. The Nazis took further inspiration from the United States in its settler colonial genocide of indigenous Americans, using this to form Generalplan Ost, to largely depopulate Slavic states and turn them into apartheid settler colonies for German “Aryans”. They also used America’s anti-black racism as inspiration for their own apartheid plans, though they rapidly gave up on having a “one-drop rule” for Jewish people because so many Germans would have been in violation of it.

By this I mean that liberalism is, itself, a horrific thing and should have enough negative weight on its own. Fascists tried to copy liberals and do a superfast version of it centered on their nationalism. It’s not that liberals are fascists. They are who fascists wish they were, just swapping ethnicities and nationalities and some aesthetics. The higher crimes have been done by liberalism.

This is an important concept because fascism, generally speaking, no longer exists. Neonazis exist. Reactionary governments exist. But fascism essentially died in WWII. What we see today is just the return to liberalism and the reaction it creates and supports. Liberals gladly incorporated fascists back into their formations, especially the anticommunist ones. Stable liberalism is an ideology of genocide, ethnic supremacy, deprivation, conquering. All of these horrors we want to call modern fascism are liberal ideologically.

Germany is being consistent in its support for a diaspora of European Jewish people forming a settler-colonial apartheid ethnostate. The Nazis tried to do that very thing themselves (against Jewush people and slavs, of course) and even worked with Zionists to get Jewish people to “self-deport”, providing substantial financial assistance for this early part of the Holocaust. They even used the same forms of self-serving rationalizations for genocide, simultaneously portraying themselves as a victim and ethnically superior.

There is nothing inherently correct or false when it comes to black and white vs. gray. These are not real moral or epistemological quantities. Sometimes there are salient and clear-cut characterizations and this is the better way to think of a topic. Sometimes it is better to adopt multiple angles because no single view is usefully capturing a topic.

Instead of being indirect and appealing to false logic, why not just say what you actually find objectionable?