And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?
A lot of people did in fact set aside Gaza until Trump was stopped. As for those that didn’t, they should have listened to Bernie Sanders. I did months ago and went all-in on Dem support. There were multiple times when I wrote up an angry post about US support of Israel and then didn’t post it because I didn’t want to turn a voter into a non-voter or worse a Trump supporter.
I understand their position of never rewarding ethnic cleansing and war crimes though. They chose to make sure the Dems know they would never “settle” for the illegal killing of civilians. The support for Israel made it especially hard for Arab Americans to vote Dem. It’s difficult to support a party that has been in power during the whole conflict yet gives unconditional support for the internationally condemned murder of Arabs.
I’m sure a lot also felt disenfranchised by the bipartisan protest suppression and condemnation. Even in Dem states peaceful protesters were punished, and sometimes pro-Israeli protesters who attacked got away with it. Then there was the whole “vote with us or else” pressure that went on for months. Dissenters like the “uncommitted” voters were insulted by the party that wanted their unconditional support.
So it’s not like it’s completely insane. But as Sanders points out that position only makes things worse and has done so.
It’s simple, for a voter that doesn’t have other important things or believes the candidates to be equal in other things, like the economy, it becomes a moral choice to not vote for genocide.
If they believe there will be human rights violations elsewhere, like in the US, but one candidate and not the other, then the moral choice becomes to limit harm.
Much of this argument stems from different base assumptions, as follows-
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Neither Trump nor Harris will commit other human rights violations, and they are materially the same to my family; staying home is the moral action.
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Trump will commit human rights violations, voting for Harris is the moral action.
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They will both commit more human rights violations; staying home is the moral action.
The people who were saying to stay home and not vote fell into camps 1 or 3. If you’re unsure of why someone would believe in number 3 you should know we have illegal debtor’s prisons that are ignored by the federal government, LGBTQ abuse that has gone unchecked by the federal government, illegal denial of asylum directly by the federal government, … the list goes on. But rest assured there are reasons people would see them both as committing human rights violations in the US. This is not some Russian info op like the DNC fanboys would have you believe.
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I know people who voted neither candidate because Trump was horrible and Harris was pro-choice. Single-issue voters are the death of democracy. Full stop.
Radicals ruin everything.
Only a radical speaks in absolutes
…is an absolute statement in itself.
Thing is you can actually be radical. In a healthy democracy you need some small fringes to exert pressure, e.g. civil right activist groups and so on so that the government isn’t able to just completely ignore portions of the population.
But to be effective as an activist you have to know when to put on pressure and when to unite. Malcolm X or Fred Hampton didn’t go vote for David Duke just because MLK was a pacifist.
This was the wrong time to pressure because as always activists dramatically misread the levels of actual support for their cause and dramatically underestimate how much support the general populace gives the opposition.
Most people don’t even agree on the very basic facts of reality or that such a thing can even exist and that for instance pretty certain observations made using the scientific method aren’t just equally weighed to someone’s opinion, how tf are you gonna expect to convince them of anything? What you gonna write some long post on it? Good luck - they literally cannot read.
Humanity is just a dogshit species. To even agree that we shouldn’t stab ourselves in our proverbial balls with a proverbial milwaukee power drill - it takes like generations and most people are always for the status quo and the worst possible version of everything is the default we have to work from and with, it’s just a cruel joke and it would be more existentially comforting if progress was outright impossible.
It was absolutely the correct time to pressure. Harris/dnc/biden miscalculated.
Huh? You really think that if they caved on Palestine they would’ve won? Most Americans support the guy who wants to impose Muslim travel bans
The numbers don’t lie.
I said months ago that we were going to “single issue” our way to Trump 2.0, and I’ve never ever wanted to be wrong more than when I said that.
Edit: Updated with receipts.
My punk rock lifetime bay area liberal 45 yr old friend voted Trump bc Israel.
I could say something witty or sarcastic, but you’ve probably already thought something along the same lines. I’ll just leave a facepalm emoji instead.
🤦🏻♂️
nearly all the single-issue voters on the right vote in lock-step unison, and have for decades.
democrats and progressives seem to just toss in the towel if they aren’t getting everything they want, right now.
it takes time to build something great, it takes but a moment to destroy it all. welcome to total destruction.
Yep, to all that, and I’ve often grumbled the same things.
“Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.”
Single-issue voters on the right, single-issue nonvoters on the left.
Everything being ‘dont genocide’ just so we’re clear here. I dont particularly think that was a huge ask. Nor do i think effective economic policies changes for the working class.
And we’ll get to see what the alternative provides. Yay, you won.
Nobody with a brain believes that. The major advocates of that ideology wanted Trump to win. It was even being propped up by foreign agents.
For me: Voting represents support for both the process and the government that results from that process. By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power. Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.
Some obvious problems with that: What if the process itself isn’t fair in the first place? We don’t really get to choose our leaders. We get presented with a set of options which are acceptable to capitalists and are asked our opinion on which we like more. You could write multiple books on the ways the US electoral process has been structured to disenfranchise people and reduce the impact they can have on their government, but fundamentally it comes down to the fact that the government doesn’t represent people and that’s a feature, not a bug.
So we end up with a pair of awful candidates who both have done and will do more awful shit. If the election randomly fell out of the sky without context, sure, you could argue about one being technically better than the other. But it didn’t. It’s this way for a reason. It’s this way because people are willing to cede their expression of political power to it despite the fact that it’s clearly unaccountable to them.
Voting is just supporting the system that’s deprived us of any real democracy while normalizing fascism to protect itself. Voting is a fairly low information form of political expression. You don’t get the choice to be like “Oh I’ll begrudgingly support this candidate, but this this and that are things I don’t like and want them to change.” You get two boxes. Each one represents EVERYTHING the candidate stands for plus the implicit choice of accepting the process in the first place.
If people want things to get better, they have to organize and take real, tangible actions rather than just begging capitalist politicians to do stuff for us every 2-4 years. People should be doing this regardless of who’s in office, but let’s put a fine point on it: People are worried that Trump is gonna be fascist, take away people’s rights, and end democracy. Are you just going to accept that because he won the election? Are the rules that bind the process more important to you than the results? If not, you should be willing to do what it takes to stop him instead of chastising that people didn’t show up to participate in a sham of an electoral system.
For what it’s worth, I actually did go to the polls to vote specifically on an equal rights ballot measure in NY. At least that has a semblance of direct democracy. There I’m explicitly saying “I support this policy specifically” instead of supporting a candidate who just says they support those things while also doing awful shit. It passed, so that’s nice. If anything I’m more pissed at Californians for voting against a measure to END SLAVERY than I am with people who didn’t want to vote for a person currently engaged in supporting a genocide.
I’m curious where this notion comes from:
By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power.
Do you? Does voting necessarily mean that you can’t also express political power in other ways? Sure, it’s true that most voters don’t really engage with politics outside of the major elections, but that’s got nothing to do with them being voters, many Americans don’t even engage with the elections at all. Why would it be the case that participating in voting means you submit to the electoral process as the sole means of exercising political power? In fact this seems easily disproven by the fact that most political power in this country is exercised by the capital class, but those people still vote.
Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.
Is this actually a condition of voting? What sets these conditions? Are you talking about the social notions of ‘civility politics’ or ‘decorum’ that liberals are so fond of? They’ll try to hold you to those standards regardless of whether or not you vote.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you broadly that there are serious problems with the electoral system, capitalism, the United States, whatever. I also agree that chastising nonvoters is also counter productive. I also agree that voting is probably not going to get us the broad systemic changes that we need. I just don’t really understand the argument that voting somehow precludes one from also doing the actual organizing and activism work we need.
There’s a philosophical and a practical side to this:
Philosophically, the core of a democratic system is the peaceful transition of power. The idea that you won’t just try to force your will over people with violence and will respect the will of the populace. This is a fine principle in a proper democracy with a fair process and political outcomes that fall within acceptable ranges. If you wanted more money for the trains and someone else wanted more money for the busses, that’s a disagreement you can live with. And if the voting system is set up so you had equal chances both to introduce topics/candidates and vote on them, then great. By accepting the election and not trying to go outside the system to get your way, you keep the peace and allow for that process to be a viable vehicle for change.
If this is a requirement for democracy, then the converse is that if a system isn’t fair and produces unacceptable results (eg, Nazis and genocide), participating in it merely legitimizes it. Obviously nothing physically stops you from organizing, but symbolically you’ve shown that you view the system as the sole legitimate way to exert political power and garner authority. And people will then turn around and say you should vote instead of doing xyz actions. “I don’t agree with your methods.”
On the practical side of this: people put a lot of time, energy, and political capital into supporting candidates in these elections. It eats up the public bandwidth, crowding out other forms of political participation. In addition, once someone works hard to get their candidate elected, there is an impulse, an incentive, to defend them. The people who said to suck it up, vote for Biden, then push him to the left turned around and chastised leftists for protesting over things like the continued anti-immigration policies or the support for Israel’s genocide. US electoral politics is a team sport. People get psychologically invested in their team. They don’t like it when you criticize their team. This makes them resistant to change even on policies they nominally support. I think encouraging people to maintain that emotional investment in elections is harmful. It hinders organizing efforts. It hurts attempts to build class consciousness because it gets people to think about their fellow workers as the enemy and capitalists as potential allies. And the corresponding obsession with 24 hour news cycles turns politics into a TV show. Trying to talk to libs about any history older than like a week ago or maybe at most a presidential term is impossible. If it wasn’t on their favorite TV show it doesn’t exist.
We need to be drawing people’s attention to actual types of political participation. Elections don’t just distract from that, they make people think they’re doing the right thing. It’s a release.
All that said, that’s not to say there’s never value in any part of the electoral system, it’s just very limited. Bernie’s attempts at running were part of what got me more engaged in politics and shifted me from being a progressive-ish lib to being more of a socialist. Important to that though was not just the policy platform, but the structure and messaging of the campaign promoted the importance of mass political participation. I ended up meeting some local socialist groups in the process of going to campaign volunteering. However, most of the time and energy still went into the election only for the system to block us at the end and Bernie to give in. Tons of hours of volunteer time went into doing little more than getting people to sign ballot petitions. We weren’t getting those people into a union or a mutual aid group or anything. We basically just tossed our energy into the void.
Maybe if they are young. Its comes up again and again. I voted for ross perot but was lucky it did not effect the election. I mean just the 50 cent gas tax would have been great for the environment given it would have gone into effect in the 90’s as a federal tax. Electronic direct democracy. Increase in education and infrastructure. It was hard not to like his proposals.
this was a Russian troll campaign, in every tankie on Twitter that fell for it is a moron
The more you delude yourself, the more you erode any chance of a DNC victory in 2028.
Because if it wasn’t Gaza, it would have been another excuse to not lift a lazy goddamned finger and still delude themselves into feeling "morally superior"while sitting on their fat mediocre asses at home.
Before Harris, they also leaned heavily on the “Sleepy Joe” bullshit and “two old white men up for election, who cares”. Once the old “Sleepy Joe” element was removed from the equation, they had to find a way to keep their goddamned stubbornly lazy and ignorant narrative intact.
Now that the election is over, most of these “concerned and outraged” deadweight assholes will never think about Gaza and the plight of its’ people again. And they will keep on feeling smug about themselves.
It is rich to criticize the Democrats for claiming moral superiority while doing nothing, as a justification for not voting for the candidate who would at least try to put a leash on what Israel is doing to Gaza.
If you want what’s best for a suffering people, you should vote for the candidate not trying to give their oppressors a blank check. All of America is responsible for what the president we chose does next.
I know one of those people. they are now angry the left lost… 🙄
This is all that needs to be said on the subject.
OP asked for a steelman but good try
I’m not American, and I don’t agree with these people either, but I don’t think that calling them lazy and ignorant makes any sense. In the fucked up democracy of the US it’s clear that the only way to get what you want for the coming 4 years is to vote for the least bad candidate. At the same time I can definitely understand that if you view both candidates was horrible, though one way more horrible than the other, you would feel conflicted about voting for either of them.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Assuming both candidates are still roughly equally “popular”. If both candidates wanted to start a genocide, but one would want to kill only 50% of the amount of innocents that the other would kill, how would you vote? Would you vote for the one who is overall the less bad option, which will in turn make you give your vote for something horrible. Or would you abstain and signal that the democracy as it currently stands has lost your confidence entirely, even if it means that on the short term the consequences might be way worse?
Not voting actually costs the democrats something, and should (if they want to win next time) force them to think how to better represent you next time.
It’s fucked up that your democracy came to this. It has become an annoying game theory dilemma instead of voting for the candidate that you actually believe in. Our system here in the Netherlands is certainly also not perfect, since we have too many parties and too long coalition negotiations, but at least I feel like it represents people way better. Anyone can start a party and capture seat if they represent a large enough niche.
I said the same thing about people like you before the election, and I’ll repeat it again. The laser focus on single issue voters was and will always be mostly an excuse to blame someone else.
To look at it another way, if this one issue actually decided the election, why didn’t Harris change her strategy two months ago? … Maybe it’s because this wasn’t the determining issue. Or it was, and her staff was incompetent. Take your pick.
You actively participate in the murder of people.
If enough people did not participate the murder would simply not happen.
You are still participating by choosing to be a bystander to injustice. Abstaining when you can support something less bad only says to others that you do not care how bad it gets.
So… Palestine is safe now? Not voting or voting Trump leads to people not being murdered?
I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going to happen, and I wish I was wrong.
Speaking as an engineer, I’ve contributed to the murder of more people than I can count.
Speaking as someone who has purchased goods on Amazon and at Walmart, I’ve contributed to the murder of more people than I can count.
We all kill people. Every single person in this thread has contributed to and benefited from death of another. You drive over a bridge, you benefit from the dead. You live in any extant country, you have benefited from murder. Our entire society is built on the lifelong suffering and deaths of millions, a tiny sliver of guilt at a time.
Electing Kamala is roughly the same level of moral failure.
Electing trump is giving an unlocked gun and 1000 rounds to a 7 year old with anger problems. The moral failure is several order of magnitude higher.
I think there are no right or wrong. It became clear that both Democrats and Republic pushing the same exact support for Israel. When it comes to Palestine there are no lesser Evil.
Leading to this election, Israel burned hospitals and people in tent alive in Jabalia, barely any internet access, no water or food enters for almost 50 days now.
They carpet bomb gaza, attack UN bases, and finally declare UNRAWA can no longer work, another UN agency.
This is under Democrats. They already finishing the job.
Now what exactly Trump or republic will do is going to be the same. nothing will change because we are at the worst and there is nothing more they can do to make the situation even worse.
So if they are the same, and the government is not listening then what is the point of participation in election?
R is pushing more support for Israel so D is the lesser evil. There’s a reason Netanyahu wanted Trump. If you think it couldn’t get worse than D level support, stay tuned
Obviously you can’t go back in time but you should of voted for the down ballot candidates that are pertinent to your day to day life where you live, and then voted third party or even left it blank for the president.
Your local candidates at the state and lower level have nothing to do with Gaza but do decide if your schools are properly staffed and if your potholes are filled, etc.
You are citing one subject here, Palestine. Yes, maybe under Harris nothing would have been different in regards to this. But it is pretty obvious, that under the orange shitstain’s regime, many people all over the world will suffer a lot. The point in participating in this election was to prevent that. You didn’t vote the special representativefor Palestine or some shit, but the president of the most influencial country in the world. Your actions have consequences. All Americans who voted for Trump or did not participate fucked not only themselves, but also so many millions of other people over, so I really thing, they should go fuck themselves.
The democrats’ hands are not clean. They didn’t fight for human rights even while red states and ICE were busy annihilating them. They had four years to do so, a trifecta in the start, and we watched as red state after red state made being trans illegal. They have been transparent about going after gay and inter racial marriage next. The democrats at the national level haven’t offered anything in response. We also still have illegal debtor’s prisons, child lunch debt, increasing rates of homelessness and abuse of homeless people.
The democrats can’t just sit there doing nothing and expect people to vote for them.
And your playing whataboutisms. Those other issues are directly related to gaza.
The military industrial complex loves israel/Palestine conflicts makes them oodles of money. Hence both parties support israel and killing Palestinians.
The capital class loves suppressing wages and benefits. Hence no pro labor policies from the dems/reps.
The MIC loves the Ukraine war, see israel above.
Capital loves monopolies, less competition for workers, easier to raise prices, etc. again reason behind no labor policies.
LGBT? Same deal. Corporate doesnt care, hence policies generally go through.
The only difference between dems and repubs is one are religious fanatics. People in currently blue states are safe from them, those who are not, are not.
All the issues you think just got fucked are going to be mostly unchanged regardless whom won this election. Shitty states going to get shittier. All the lesser evil people will be laser focused on trump now and as a result the representatives will have to do real work.
The genocide and everything else are one and the same. One is just easier to articulate to people who have some morals, though some will continue the lesser evil nonsense.
In the meantime find the real progressives in your area and encourage them to run
The *only* difference between dems and repubs is one are religious fanatics. People in currently blue states are safe from them, those who are not, are not.
This is definitely something serious that we shouldn’t downplay. I’m of the belief (in agreement with you) that the parties are mostly the same, and the dems just talk a whole lot of talk on domestic stuff and then do worse than nothing. But the christofascists backing trump are far more terrifying than trump himself and they’re not going anywhere, they vastly predate his political career. But in the past they were a weird loud minority, they still are but they’re not such a small minority anymore and THAT is fucking terrifying.
You still think there’s going to be another election, huh?
thats quitter talk soldier. =)
The best argument I came across went something like this: if we show the Democratic Party that we’ll accept something as horrible as genocide as long as the Republicans are worse, then we’ve completely surrendered our agency as voters.
Powerful statement. It was the most coherent, rational, well thought out explanation I’d seen. It didn’t come off as a condescending lecture on morality, either. I actually considered their argument for a couple days, but ultimately, I decided it wasn’t strong enough to risk another Trump administration.
It is a stupid fucking statement. “If you aren’t perfect on every single issue, then we won’t vote for you.”
- Step 1: take a conflict your nation did not start
- Step 2: tear your party apart over a conflict your nation did not start
- Step 3: lose the electoral fight in your nation to trump
- Step 4: ensure the war in that other nation is decided in the way your side did not want it to go
- Step 5: call Joe Biden a genocidal maniac
Maybe I don’t want the people who think this is a valid course of action on my side, since they will sabotage my side. If there is a next election, I want these folks ejected from the party and gone. They can vote for trump if they want, because that’s essentially what they did.
Israel is an arm of the US, Gaza is a proxy war. American presidents bear direct responsibility for the genocide
Only if you don’t recognize that Trump would be much, much, much worse. And what we see from the election, many can’t seem to see that (in any way).
Honestly for a portion of the ones here online, I don’t think they actually care that much about Gaza except as a convenient tool to attack Americans. It’s academic to them. I don’t expect it’ll stop once Trump is in, they’ll just switch to criticizing Americans overall. They’re mostly leftist agitators, and I honestly think they hate moderate progressives the most, since we’re trying to improve capitalism which makes it harder to undermine and destroy.
For people that actually do care, it’s a personal, emotional argument about not being able to feel good about it, which I understand. It’s a sort of trolley problem. If they don’t vote, they kinda just walk away and the trolley runs over a bunch of people, but they don’t have to watch and bear a sense of personal responsibility at that emotional level for being a part of it. It doesn’t actually benefit Gaza, but there’s only so much they could really do anyway.
deleted by creator
If Democrats knew they’d lose for supporting genocide,.they wouldn’t have done it. It’s precisely because blue-no-matter-who voters convinced them that they were invincible that they ended up losing. They thought they could bully the base into voting for them because enough of the base was willing to be bullied and proud of it.
On the other side, Trump is more likely to lose the war on Palestine.
They did know it had a serious impact on likely Dem voters, and likely Independent voters, in swing states, and they did it anyway.
… Unless you’re going to tell me her campaign was somehow unaware of this fairly widely published IMEU poll.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/kamala-harris-israel
From July 25 through August 9, pollsters asked voters if and how the Democratic nominee pledging “to withhold more weapons to Israel for committing human rights abuses against Palestinian civilians” would impact their vote. In Arizona, 35% said they would be more likely to vote for her, versus 5% who said they would be less likely. The figures were similar in Georgia (39% versus 5%) and Pennsylvania (34% versus 7%).
Even bigger shares of voters said they would be more likely to support her in November if President Joe Biden—who dropped out of the race and passed the torch to Harris last month—secured a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. In Arizona, 41% said they would be more likely to vote for her, versus 2% who said they would be less likely. In both Georgia and Pennsylvania, it was 44% versus 2%.
…
Biden dropping out and being replaced with Kamala was an opportunity for Kamala to change the Dem stance on this.
Kamala would have stood a much better chance at winning if she massively broke with Biden and did an about face on Gaza, and there is basically no way her campaign did not know this.
So how could she have broken with Biden as the current VP?
She sides with Palestine, so she supports Hamas? She doesn’t support Israel? She supports Iran too!?
That’s just the tip of the media iceberg that would have been thrown at her.
Let’s say she does that. Do you think with the numbers that DJT turned out that she’d have gained so much more than she would have lost that it would have made a difference?
Let’s further say that she did, and it was, and she won the election. She’s now thrown a long-term, strategic ally under the bus on the world stage. Not only that, she’ll have to forcibly disarm them, potentially feeding them to the wolves in the Middle East.
How does she politically recover from that? ALL of that?
And please don’t mention “genocide” in your reply. That’s already a know variable in play.
Can you (or anyone) provide a politically viable path through the above ‘top level’ landmines which would have gotten her into the White House and into a position where she could take direct action to stop the genocide?
So how could she have broken with Biden as the current VP?
If elected, I vow to cease all offensive arms and munitions shipments and funding for such to the State of Israel on day one.
What Hamas did on Oct 7th was an outrageous act of terrorism committed against a civilian population, but the response from the Netanyahu administration has caused orders of magnitude more death and destruction against innocent residents of Gaza, and this over zealous military response has enflamed tensions in the region and risks escalation into a much broader conflict.
I will still supply the Israelis with defensive funds for their Iron Dome, we will send them Patriot missile intercept systems, but we will no longer send artillery shells, bombs, ammunition, anything that can be used to further their wildly mismanaged offensive operations.
Further, I will actually commit to setting up and operating a temporary harbor for food and medical supplies to enter Gaza.
… Something like that, blah blah blah, make it clear that all sides in this have some level of culpability for wrong actions and that she will do what she can to minimize the harm the US is culpable for.
Let’s say she does that. Do you think with the numbers that DJT turned out that she’d have gained so much more than she would have lost that it would have made a difference?
IMEU polls in July and August showed roughly that 30% to 40% of likely Dem and Indp voters in multiple swing states would be more likely to vote for a Dem candidate if they did what they could to halt the Gaza genocide.
Would this turn off likely Republicans voters from her? Basically no more than they already were turned off from her. But she would have gained a whole bunch of Dem voters who specifically could not bring themselves to vote for a candidate complicit with genocide.
Let’s further say that she did, and it was, and she won the election. She’s now thrown a long-term, strategic ally under the bus on the world stage. Not only that, she’ll have to forcibly disarm them, potentially feeding them to the wolves in the Middle East.
Nope. You can stop enabling offensive action by ceasing to supply offensive systems and munitions, and still maintain your commitment to Israel’s defense by giving them defensive supplies.
You don’t need to totally disarm the IDF. That would involve going into a ground invasion war against our ally which is obviously insane.
This would not be throwing an ally under the bus. It would be stomping your foot down and reigning in an ally that’s gone on a mad rampage with bombs you have given them.
And please don’t mention “genocide” in your reply. That’s already a know variable in play.
Nah, I’ll use that word, because it is an accurate descriptor. I am not sorry at all if this somehow offends your sensibilities.
… Unless you’re going to tell me her campaign was somehow unaware of this fairly widely published IMEU poll.
They were in a bubble of other blue-no-matter-who media and were assured by the consultants from Clinton’s campaign and the Labour Party that they could ignore those polls.
So really, it would have taken a big enough push from the public that MSNBC became anti-genocide. Hypothetically it could have happened, but the Democratic base is too disorganized to pull that kind of bottom-up messaging coup off.
Nurse bursts in to OR
Doctor!
This new study show that there is a 30% chance the patient will die if you ignore this allergic reaction they may have if you keep pursuing your current treatment plan!
Doctor scoffs
It can’t be that big a deal, if this was serious, the patient’s family would have let me know by mailing me that study with appended handwritten notes from my favorite peer reviewers from JAMA, and a gold star sticker!
But Doctor! It’s not the job of the family to know how to practice medicine, that’s your job! And anyway, I have a copy of the study right here!
Pff, no appended notes, no gold star, ignored.
Patient dies.
Huh, damn, things might have been different if the family had told me how to do my job in the exact, precise manner in which I accept advice. Oh well! Maybe the next patient’s family will figure out the correct way to tell me how to do my job next time. After all, I can’t be held responsible for not accepting information readily available to me… without a gold star sticker!
