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At least we kept bLuEmAGa from being in power! That would have been MUCH worse!/s
At least we kept bLuEmAGa from being in power! That would have been MUCH worse!/s
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253 comments
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More brilliant political analysts who still haven't managed to figure out the reason both parties near-unanimously support genocide. Have a downvote, on me.
Also, Dems lost, what was it, 10x as many votes as people who voted third party?
And notice where your outrage is actually directed here. Not at the people who actually VOTED for Trump. It's at the people who refused to compromise their morals AT ALL, unlike you all, who completely compromised your morals in a failing bid to elect Mrs. "Genocide With A Facelift".
Fuck Republicans, fuck Democrats. That moral superiority you so desperately want to claim, does not exist. You are the problem. You are the driving force behind the empire. You are responsible for their deaths. Take your attempt to blame actual activists and people actually struggling to make the world a better place, and shove it right up your ass.
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Fuck the Republicans and fuck the Democrats, sure. But voting is about politics, not making a personal moral statement. That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck and would have been self defeating in every election since George Washington. Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut. Effective activism is about winning what you can, taking the hits, and showing up to do it again and again.
Voters who had a choice between two candidates that both support a genocide are not responsible for that genocide. I know a few things about moral reasoning, and no moral system I'm aware of would ever come to such an insane conclusion.
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If our two options are genocide and genocide maybe it’s time for third party or not voting. Oh that’s throwing out my vote? CRY ABOUT IT LIBERAL CLEARLY ELECTORALISM DOESNT WORK AND THE UNITED STATES IS A FAILING EMPIRE GOING THROUGH ITS DEATH THROES
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We have a FPTP election system. Third parties aren't a real thing. In my 50+ years on this planet, third parties have only had a minor impact once, and it was deeply antithetical to their goal.
How the fuck is a third party strategy not "electoralism"? You must realize that both dominant parties encourage third parties when it benefits them. The greens are almost entirely funded by conservatives.
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50 years is, what, 12 major election cycles. So that's your sample size - twelve.
Here's a larger sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election#Popular_vote_results
Let's go back to even just 1900. 1912 our first major upset - 41.8%, 27%, 23.2%, and 6%. Looks nothing like a 50/50 split. 1920 had a huge landslide, 60%/34.2%, and 3.4% behind that. 1924? 54%, 28.8%, 16.6%. More landslides through FDR's term. Fast forward to 1968 - American Independent party with a staggering 13.5% of the vote. 6.6% in 1980. 18.9% in 1992. Only since then - namely, since Bush v. Gore, even though Bush pretty objectively lost the election both in EC and popular (besides Supreme Court intervention), have we really settled into the "lesser of two evils" mentality and been blaming third parties for any Republican victory, with the mindset we MUST vote for Democrats. And yet our methods of popular organization have become dramatically more sophisticated! We have instantaneous global communication, social networks, you name it. So what the fuck is going on? IT'S LITERALLY THE "LESSER OF TWO EVILS" MENTALITY ITSELF.
You are shooting yourselves in the foot, voting for Democrats and ruling out any real change, when the Democrats are so openly genocidal and corrupt. Even the Republicans, for their absolute lack of insight and vision and understanding, are able to perceive something's wrong with the Democrat politicians, and that's why Trump is able to sweep them all up into his camp. This has literally enabled the rise of fascism and the defeat of real populism (like your Eugene Debs figures back in the early 1900s). You run something absolutely uninspiring and awful and genocidal, among a voter base that's SUPPOSED to be the one that's more motivated by justice and equality, and they predictably lose. I don't particularly like Bernie Sanders, but the Dem party wouldn't even let him run, they ran Hillary instead, and bam, Trump won. How many times do you need to see this play out?
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The last time we got a shake up in the two party system was with the civil war. Even then, we didn't get three parties, we just replaced one party with another. 1912 was a notable but unrepeatable exception, but not an "upset". We still elected one of the two major parties, and four years later it was back to Republicans and Democrats. It's also notable that Taft and Roosevelt were both Republicans, so Roosevelt running as a Progressive meant that they split the vote and Democrats won with only 41.8% of the vote. Republicans were the left party at the time, so the left split the vote and got a conservative. Your exception shows exactly why third party runs are boneheaded.
Any third party that had the means to run a viable third party candidate would easily be capable of running an inside strategy to replace the Democratic establishment. Unlike the fantasy of a third party approach, that strategy has worked in the past. If there aren't enough Democratic voters who are pissed enough at the Democratic establishment to do a takeover of the party, then there definitely aren't enough to win a third party strategy.
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It’s a protest vote and not a serious one. Nobody is seriously voting for third parties. What a great democracy we have!
Fuck this country I hope it burns.
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You don't understand how the electoral college works.
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That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck
Your tired analysis fails to take into account the voting behavior of the ENTIRE POPULATION. You myopically focus on a prefabricated two choices available to each individual in the society, assuming the rest of the society is a GIVEN, and then it follows from that faulty premise that one of those two choices is strategic. But you fail to take into account that the entire society is free to vote for anyone. The fact that they can demonstrates the simple fact that IT'S A BAD IDEA TO VOTE FOR A BAD CANDIDATE.
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Well, you go ahead and convince the ENTIRE POPULATION to vote third party and I will absolutely eat my words.
I'm just curious though, what do you plan to do differently from previous elections to achieve that aim? It's not like this is a new argument, and it's never worked before. I've jumped on that wagon myself in my more naive days, and the ENTIRE POPULATION wasn't interested in playing along. What changed?
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Do you understand it's a cognitive bias that you expect a third party to fight to secure every single vote, but the two primary parties just get every other vote by default? Do you understand that that cognitive bias is the reason the population is voting for those two parties, out of the self-defeating mentality that no one else better can win? Do you understand that it's the people who have actually clearly understood this problem that refuse to keep reinforcing the problem by voting for them? Your message is basically, "we're all doing it wrong? fine, convince 330 million people that they're all doing it wrong." Are you planning on helping? Or are you just going to try to shut it down? All I can do is sit here and say that that millions of people are engaging in a demonstrably irrational behavior. The ten sane people in Nazi Germany couldn't stop the genocide, because of the millions of people who had their own stupid fucking arguments for going with the flow.
Your bipartisan support is of a genocidal empire with victims in the tens to hundreds of millions. Are the two main parties literally identical? No. Are they both so incredibly evil that you shouldn't vote for either? Yes. You want to call it a "wasted vote" not voting for a group of terrorists holding the world hostage with nuclear weapons, well, you're an idiot.
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it's a cognitive bias
No, it's game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it's not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.
Again, I point out that this isn't new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren't proposing anything new.
That's only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.
Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.
Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.
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It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory. As I already pointed out. That is why it's a cognitive bias, because you're, again, myopically focusing on choice given to individuals with the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise. You have an entire population of people MAKING this choice, MAKING these analyses, they are just doing it in an incomplete way. What happens when the population actually understands this fallacy and acts accordingly?
There are two paths long-term. You continue indefinitely with the self-defeating logic that never allows a third party to gain prominence or achieve power because the population collectively refuses to vote for them, or you teach the population to actually wield control of its own democracy rather than being dictated who they must vote for, by the corporate media, or the "lesser of two evils" mentality, or whatever else. It's not that there is no obstacle to achieving the latter. It's that it's a moral imperative and MUST be achieved.
Then there is the problem of corruption
Yes, that is a fundamental problem with "representative democracy". I would advocate even more extreme reforms to implement direct democracy. But what would you say to that? No doubt, more defeatist rhetoric that completely eliminates the possibility of constitutional reform - refusing to vote for candidates in Congress or state legislatures etc. that would actually vote for major constitutional reform, or especially not for any form of revolution. All you do is bitch and moan about every possible path to actual reform, then settle on the little 2% or 5% or whatever sliver of improvement that Democrats offer over Republicans, and then go on social media and gloat about your perceived moral superiority. This is the entire problem I'm complaining about. The population acting like YOU is what DESTROYS CHANGE. That IS the problem. You need to get up off your fucking asses and MAKE the change. You can sit here making arguments about why all change is impossible until you're blue in the face, but you're literally just proving my point, it is YOUR mentality across millions of people that MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE. IT'S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
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It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.
LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn't cherry picking. Sorry.
the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.
No, it's not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don't, because you can't.
I'm not being "defeatist", I'm saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it's a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.
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Then you cherry-pick "50 years". Completely ignoring the 18.9% the Independent party got in 1992 for some reason (which I already mentioned in this thread). Quit running victory laps and examine your faulty logic. What an asshole.
"Why next time will be different"? This isn't a predictive theory, it's a fact that whoever the population votes for will win, assuming you discount rigged election theories (and putting aside electoral college complexities). Let me repeat that for you. Whoever the population votes for, whatever logic they decide to use, particularly if they subscribe to "lesser of two evils" theory OR NOT, will dictate the outcome of the election. The behavior is a product of their logic. Your mentality, as I already spelled out in my last message, and you completely ignored, predisposes the outcome of a third party to failure. 90% of voters in a population religiously believing that they must vote for the Know-Nothing-Whig party or God will incinerate them, will result in 90% of an election going to the Know-Nothing-Whig party. 47% of voters religiously believing that they must vote for the "lesser of two evils", which in their mind is the Democrats, will result in a 47% outcome for the Democrats. Understand? They - like you! - don't yet comprehend that this is circular logic. When will that change? Whenever you all get that through your thick skulls - no sooner, no later. That's why I'm out here, saying it, over and over again.
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The independent party got 18.9% of the vote for one office in 1992, and then dropped to 8.4% in 1996, and then didn't even get a candidate on the ballot in 2000. That's hardly a record that's dispositive of anything I have said, and it's still focusing on just one office that can't do much of anything without legislative support. A progressive Democrat might get congressional Democrats to cooperate, but a third party president would face solid opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. If your plan doesn't include taking congress, then it will fail even if you do get a president.
This isn’t a predictive theory,
I'm not asking for a prediction, I'm asking for a strategy. What do you propose to do differently in the 2028 election from what has failed repeatedly? People aren't going to risk a third party vote en masse unless they think everyone else is going to do it. Also, up to this point we have been largely acting like most Democratic voters would rather be voting third party, but that's just not true. Democratic party favorability is at a low right now, but is still at 40% of the electorate. How are you going to convince voters who don't even desire a third party option to risk electing a Republican?
If the left had enough influence over voters to elect a third party candidate, then they could have nominated Bernie in 2020. The media called Bernie a fringe candidate, and voters became fearful that Bernie would lose. If voters wouldn't take that risk (imaginary as I personally think it was) they are never going to take the much bigger and more real risk of voting 3rd party in the general - not in the numbers you need.
That’s why I’m out here, saying it, over and over again.
Repeating bullshit over and over doesn't make it not-bullshit. If we had the influence required to pull off a 3rd party victory then we could just as easily take over the Democratic party with a hell of a lot less risk.
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What percentage did they get in 1996? 2000? Perot split the conservative vote with Bush and allowed Clinton to win the election with only 43% of the vote. That's not an outcome I want to replicate on the left.
Compare Perot with Trump who ran a very similar nationalist/populist strategy as a party outsider. Trump ripped the party out of the establishment's hands and won the Presidency. Perot would have been well advised to run as a Republican.
I didn't ignore 1996, I just don't see it as a counter example to what I said. Perot lost by a wide margin, split the vote with his next closest candidate, then dropped to half as many votes in the next election. And that was when third parties could get into the debates.
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I deleted the message by accident and reposted it. No idea why you decided to respond to it twice. Not even sure how it's possible for you to respond to a deleted message. Kind of annoying dude!
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This this this...omg thank you.
This is game theory people not emotional tiddly winks.
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Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut.
When was the last time Republicans compromised leftward in any meaningful way?
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The politicians? Top of my head, stimulus payments.
The voters? Trump's suckers agree with whatever Trump says, so their entire political view is compromise, if not complete capitulation. Traditional Republicans compromised left by voting for a populist candidate, though they probably understood he was full of shit.
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So Republicans moved to the left by... doing what Trump wanted?
God damn, just say you can't think of anything because it's clear you can't.
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Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.
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That's not a compromise leftward on the part of the Republican party.
Because Republicans don't need to compromise. They sit there and let Democrats move toward them, secure in the knowledge that Democrats will be like "Look at this glorious bipartisan compromise!"
When only one side is compromising it's called capitulation.
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Why ask for examples if your just going to reject them on principle?
On it's face, the idea that every Republican politician is right of every one of their voters on every issue is ridiculous. Republican voters, like all voters, compromise.
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You're talking about voters compromising. I'm talking about politicians compromising. Or capitulating as Democrats do.
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You got the downvotes but not from me! Fuck these people. They’re so fucking dumb it’s painful.
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This logic always leads to trump.
Funny how the fuck both parties ppl always end up supporting trump / gop
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No, it doesn't. It is literally a rejection of both Trump and Biden/Harris. And if you had bothered to read my message carefully you'd have noticed:
Also, Dems lost, what was it, 10x as many votes as people who voted third party?
That I explicitly pointed out that no, in fact, people voting third party did not even make up the difference Dems lost in votes (or lost the election by).
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Then run somebody people want to vote for instead of someone who’s slightly less despicable than the opposition.
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I hope you're happy with the Trump administration you helped elect. If you end up in a camp, you can impress everyone with your moral purity
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Oh look it’s a mask off liberal
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oh look, it's someone who uses liberal as a slur, much like the trump people you align with
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Gotta love people so politically uninformed they'd unironically say that and think they've made a good point
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Liberal is a slur to leftists. Liberals are in service to capitalism. Liberal supporters are high on their idiotic identity politics (that they throw right out the window when convenient to them) and completely lack class consciousness. Those who have a little bit of class consciousness still support liberals because one day they get to be on the top of the hierarchy if they grind hard enough.
It’s time to overthrow capitalism but that offends liberal sensibilities.
How’s that identity politics working out for you? Because we didn’t vote for your candidate you’ll be laughing when we’re all sent to camps?! Like I said, MASK OFF. fucking fake ass progressive. Go back to your anti racist brunching book club!
Liberals would rather lose to fascists than give an inch to leftists. And they’re ok with the leftists ending up in camps out of spite!
Fuck you!
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Triggered much?
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If you end up in a camp, you can impress everyone with your moral purity
No one's going to trust centrists with their escape plans.
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You are the one here who's concerned with imaginary moral purity. I am the one concerned with the actual consequences of this system. I will not take lessons in morality from somebody on the wrong side of a genocide.
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lol
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I agree with everything you wrote except having a problem with happenings in Gaza. Israel isn’t being aggressive enough
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Well, that is disgusting and shows the gaping hole where your conscience is supposed to be.
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It’s not just them. I feel the same way about every Church in America too and cheered when Canadians were burning them down and laughed when Notre Dame caught on fire.
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Start from scratch with your idea of how morality works, because what you're working with now is fucking awful.
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253 comments