There are always more choices.

I mean, if you truly have no other choice, what else can you do? Can it even be considered evil at that point or just “still painful”? If I have to chop off my/someone’s gangrenous leg to ensure survival, is that evil or just, you know, not ideal? It’s important not to get too lost in semantics…

It’s a great way to lose an election.

A friend of mine puts it this way: “I don’t vote for who’s turn it is to lead the KKK either.”

I was in a discussion a couple months ago with someone on here who told me “you have to vote for the lesser of two nazis.” That wasn’t hyperbole. We were literally discussing how you could vote in election where the two options were Nazis. Something about Elon musk’s new party I think I forget. But the guy thought that if there’s two Nazis running the responsible thing to do is to vote for the one you think is less bad. Which I don’t know how you make that decision but okay. By the way that discussions seemed a little more absurd a few months ago now it seems downright prescient.

That discussion kind of perfectly encapsulates my feelings on the subject of voting for the lesser of two evils. Now I get the Strategic reasoning of voting for the lesser of two evils. I get the logic. But my feeling is it always does eventually end in what we were talking about. Voting for the lesser of two evils eventually is going to get you the point where you’re voting for a literal Nazi. That’s where the road leads.

This question is redundant. Evil people choose the evil option, normal people choose the other.

Thats how it is in our grayscale world

I could do it once. When the “lesser evil” decides their whole strategy is being the lesser evil and blackmail me with “if you don’t vote us the big evil will come” then I grow tired and issue a big fuck you to the “lesser evil”.

There is something to risk reduction, but it’s more about voting strategically, if you have a chance to sway the election it makes sense to vote in arisk reductive manner from a practical standpoint, however, There’s also something to be said about voting for a marxist canidate not because they have a good chance of getting elected but to show support for a marxist party. To make it more clear people support them. The lesser evil concept in us democracy is stupid to begin with because a. in the presidential election the majority of the population has bascially no effect on the system if you live in california they are going to vote blue if you live in texas tehy are giong to vote red. As such ti doesnt’ really matter. It also assumes the reason for voting is to get people elected. Which as a revolutionary marxist it should be more a means to an end regardless. You vote to raise awareness of your cause and to create solidarity. If you are voting in an electino you mathematically have virtually zero chance of swaying it makes more sense to vote for a marxist canidate in the hopes that if enough people vote for it it might show up in statistics and introduce people to the cause.

It’s highly context dependent.

In medicine, you face this question all the time. Will a surgery do more harm than good. Can I just leave that person suffering, or should I roll the dice with this surgery? It’s a proper dilemma to ponder. How about this medication, that improves the patient’s quality of life in one area, but causes some side effects that are less horrifying than the underlying condition. Sounds like a win, but is it really?

In various technical contexts, you often find yourself comparing two bad options and pick the one that is “less bad”. Neither of them are evil, good, great or even acceptable. They’re both bad, and you have to pick one so that the machine can work for a while longer until you get the real spare parts and fix it properly. For example, you may end up running a water pump at lower speed for the time being. It wears down the bearing, moves less water, consumes too much energy etc, but it’s still better than shutting the pump down for two weeks.

IMO, developing conciousness of the society is far more important than choosing the lesser evil.

Also the bigger evil, is only evil in your view. And letting the course run, is one of the best ways for that big evil to show people why it is bigger evil.

When it comes to politics, it’s dangerous thinking that got us in this hellhole in the first place. It proved to anyone getting into politics that you can be a massive shit stain, but just be a slightly smaller shit stain than your opponent and people will support you to no end. Alternatively you can be the exact same level of shit stain as your opponent, but say things in a nicer way or just not at all and get the same results.

I personally have refused to accept this outcome since the only thing it leads us to is a slower death. I’d rather put my time and effort into supporting those that keep us alive even if most refuse to support that decision and call it idiotic.

gotta call their bluff eventually. otherwise you just end up with the “lesser evil” still being genocide.

It’s often used misleadingly. For example, in an election in a de facto two-party system, it’s often said that you should vote for ‘the lesser evil’, but this presumes that your vote will decide the result of the election, which it clearly won’t. Thinking e.g. “the Dems winning would be the lesser evil compared to the Republicans winning, and I’m voting third party (or spoiling or even abstaining)” is therefore entirely coherent imho.

I would like to see it used more to describe political situations outside of the West tbh. When we talk about x regime, it should always be ‘compared to what’. But of course, no-one cares about ‘lesser evils’ in this context, which I think says a lot.

The choice is rarely actually binary.