2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision for America.
My point is that looking back on it, in the end the only real difference I made was at the ballet box. This year I’m going for the Head-in-the-Sand approach. I’m done with the political memes. Done with the Twitter screenshots. It just riles me up and this year I’m gonna do my best to fight that.
Fuck everyone in the US Government except Rashida Motherfucking Tlaib.
I’m going to write in Rashida Tlaib. It’s all bullshit. What is happening right now proves it. Even fucking Bernie Sanders sounds like a Warhawk right now.
Ps. You’re all a bunch of lesser evil voting shitlibs. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
What did your harm reduction get us when we put Biden in office:
- genocide with our tax money
- cop city
- stoking the Cold War and enthusiastically sending our tax money to interfere in another country’s business BECAUSE IT’S WHITE PEOPLE to enrich the Military Industrial Complex rather than helping US citizens
- overturned Roe vs. Wade
- no marijuana legalization (mark my words: until the primaries or GE next year when it will help Biden in the election)
- Medicare for those who can afford it
- austerity
- austerity
- more austerity
I understand your frustration, but unless the voting system is modified to approval or ranked choice you are probably not acting in your best interest voting for a third party. I hate that fact as much as you and I want to see it changed, but that’s the reality of the system we’re in.
Literally ranked choice voting will never ever happen. We will always have First Past the Post and it will never change. This country is a sham democracy and I refuse to participate.
That’s the great part, by not participating you help the worst of them!
Please explain to me what Biden and Trump would have done differently in the context of sending our tax money to turn Muslim people into hamburger.
You can have a choice, where one outcome is significantly better than the other. It’s that simple.
One fash
Two fash
Red fash
Blue fash
“Vote early, and often.”
😉
Cry most likely. Voting doesn’t seem very effective and it’s less so when the choices are conservative extremist or conservative light.
Don’t vote for a perfect choice; vote for the best choice, and keep doing it. You’re not going to get ‘perfect’ right now, but excising actual cancer will improve the long-term health of the beast and enable even better choices in a few iterations.
There are more then two choices on the ballot.
Support ranked choice voting first. Once we have that, a huge portion of the power the two parties have will fall away
And that is exactly why ranked choice voting will never happen along with universal healthcare, or not funding endless war and genocide.
Right now, the choices are between boring corporatists and 100% concentrated evil. It’s not that hard a choice.
Frankly I don’t think there much boring about the genocide the corporatist is enabling.
If you avoid everyone who supports Israel in this fight you won’t have anyone to vote for. I swear Israel is part of the national narrative on both sides and I don’t understand why.
Volunteer and try to primary those old bastards out of office. The Squad is getting bigger every election.
If you avoid everyone who supports Israel in this fight you won’t have anyone to vote for.
Yea I’m aware that’s why I’m writing in hunter Biden.
After voting for people who explicitly said they dont care about my support only to be blamed for their failures I’m putting my foot down and not voting for anybody enabling a genocide.
Don’t worry I live in upstate new york so unless I literally wad up my ballot and throw it at Biden so hard he dies my vote will have literally zero effect on the presidential race and I’m aware this is a very privellaged position to have.
I’m also voting straight working families party in local elections which usually get about 80 votes and the working families party candidate is the same as the dems.
Well my choices are backslide slowly by voting dem, maybe buying enough time to get out of the country safely in the next few years, or risk being federally persecuted for being trans. So I’m going to dissociate through the whole thing and hopefully won’t be able to remember voting for fucking Biden. Outside the election I do what I can to support actual leftist movements but until any of them have a chance to win against the fascists on ballots I’m team ‘slightly better of two shitty choices’. I just want to be left alone to garden I hate all of this
Come on out down voters, I’d love to hear you attempt to explain why I’m making a bad decision
Didn’t downvote you but the only difference I’ve seen and heard about as far as how things are going for minorities is when there’s a dem president libs tell minorities to stfu because they’re making them look bad.
When there’s a republican president libs pretend to support blm, when there’s a dem president libs tell them they’re secretly republican russians.
Try telling a lib the concentration camps on the border are still a problem and you’ll get a lecture about how it’s a way more compassionate concentration camp now.
I ended up writing a way bigger response than I set out to, politics…
So my minority view is only from being trans I don’t fall into other categories, I’m only talking from that view and obviously can’t speak for other groups. From my end of things Biden has undone a lot of the particularly wild stuff Trump did and is even throwing us the occasional scrap of protection. It isn’t great but I can’t say nothing has gotten better. I will say most of the stuff that has gone well is on pretty shaky ground and the next repub we get will gut all of it in a second.
Yeah Biden and dems in general are just so bad. Liberals are frustrating and definitely think the scraps I’ve gotten have solved everything and I should stop complaining. I hate it, I wish we had another choice. But that just isn’t where we are at so between Trump or every dem I’ve seen I’m going for the dems. They only have my back so far as will poll well with libs but that’s better than Trump who is actively attacking me and empowering others to do the same.
I don’t think this system can be fixed by voting for third party at this time. All that does is light a vote on fire that could have gone toward the less bad of two bad options. I do think it can be fixed or improved, slowly, by building a movement for a third party with enough traction to start getting into local offices. My hope is from there those people can push for local change that makes it easier to vote outside dem/repub which sets the scene for doing it on the big scale. That’s only possible given time and repubs are clear they’re done fucking around and we will not be given a chance for that under their rule.
Yea I’m in a small town so I’m aware how rabid and bloodthirsty the chuds are.
I’m not voting for Biden but I also live in New York so I’m privellaged to have the option to do that meaningless protest.
I thunk your spot on with thenlocala support, generally just vote for whoever the working families party candidate is even though 90% of the time it’s the same person as the dem candidate but it’s a good way to weed out the chuds that just run as dems because this is new york.
I’m not voting for Genocide Joe unless the US forces Israel to end its genocide of Palestinians.
Since 3rd party votes and not voting have exactly the same effect, which method do you plan to accomplish literally nothing with?
Agreed, voting is the least you can do, so why support Genocide with it?
A lot of trolling about voting green party, not voting, not voting Biden. Any of these positions is pro Trump, and that’s the simple truth.
So admit that at least, you WANT a dictatorship.
Eh I understand the long term apathy and eventual giving up.
They cant keep winning votes by just not being republicans. They will always not be republicans and eventually people are going to want more out of them.
I don’t understand accepting tyranny. The two party system kind of sucks and we can work on it, but once you accept the tyranny of an authoritarian, you’re fucked. Oh boohoo Biden is old and centrist, the option is a dumpster fire that is infinitely worse.
old and centrist
You forgot to put “and genocidal”. Which I guess is centrist in Amerikkka these days.
Unfortunately he’s still the better choice. There is a sum to this comparison. Do we think Trump would not be genocidal in the ways you’re referencing?
Let’s assume you’re right. Why would anyone vote for anyone committing genocide? Voting third party or abstaining would be your only moral option in this scenario, otherwise you’re complicit. At this point the number of dead Palestinian children is conservatively 4000. If you contribute to reelecting a leader enabling that, their blood is on your hands.
I do want a dictatorship…of the proletariat
Oh you’ll get what you deserve then
🤞
Thinking Green party this year or whoever isn’t trying to fuck us over
A vote for green is a vote for the popular party in your district.
Or, and hear me out on this, it’s a vote for the green party.
Tell liberals they have to vote for Stein because it’s her turn.
Definitely voting for someone who doesn’t support genocide for president. Down ballot I’ll likely vote 3rd party as well, but I haven’t decided for sure.
Congrats on helping to ensure you’ll never again have the right to vote during traitor trump’s fascist dictatorship that you’ll be enabling.
Congrats on saying “genocide is an acceptable price” out loud
You act like Republicans don’t have stronger ties to Israel and haven’t discriminated against Muslims. Either you’re naive or acting in bad faith.
The largest benefactors of AIPAC and Israel in the house and senate are fucking democrats you dunce.
Blue no matter who. Nothing has changed about that.
I think leftists ranting about not voting for Biden in the general election at the moment are just blowing off steam, and when election day comes, everyone on the left will remember 2016 and vote blue.
I absolutely will not. Vote blue no matter who is why we have the situation we have. 2016 did not give us trump. Generations of shitty corporate politicians on both sides of the aisle gave us Donald Trump. Populists win because they’re popular, and trump got popular by pointing out the factual information that the house, the Senate, and the oval office are filled with corporate skills and corrupt puppets. Sadly, it was the fascist who got popular pointing it out, but it doesn’t make that part of what he says untrue.
I live in a red state where my vote for federal office does not count. So I will cast my pointless protest vote for the green party in the hopes that one day they’ll get their 5%, and maybe something can change. Down ballot I’ll hold my nose and vote for the Democrat in most offices, and if I ever move to a competitive state, I’ll do the same for federal, because I’m being held hostage by the corporate shills, and I’d rather my family not die in concentration camps that are inevitably coming if/when the fascists fully take power.
But no. Fuck blue no matter who. Who. Fucking. Matters. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Have some standards.
But what are we supposed to do? We can vote for Trump instead or no-one instead. How does that make anything better? We agree there needs to be change, but we still have no real option here.
Hilary Clinton in the 2016 election had supported Trump in the primaries because she thought noone would vote for that idiot. The Democrat Party apparatus will support worse than Trump in the future if they think it will help their chances of winning. You don’t want to wait another 4 years for change 🤷♂️
I remember what the “blue team” did in 2016 by forcing an unelectable shit candidate upon us. So I will never vote for them again.
It can be easy to feel like a drop of water in a large ocean when it comes to national elections. But you should also vote in your county and state elections; you can probably make more of a difference there.
I’m not saying “don’t vote in the national election”, but just know that there are other elections to vote in, and thry are just as important as the nationals.
Yah I can vote for the red mayor who wants more cops or the blue mayor who wants more cops. Freedom rings!
Unless you’re in a big big city, mayoral and council races can actually have a lot of diversity in terms of political outlooks. Never forget that a town elected a dog as mayor. Nobody that pure would ever make it to federal office.
You understand that “voting for a dog” for mayor is just Conservatism right? You know make the government small enough to drown in a bathtub, Reagan etc?
It’s not a question of policy. Republicans literally killed people last election trying to overthrow democracy.
Not that I even like democrats, but anyone who votes red after Jan 6th is fundamentally an enemy of democracy.
This sham democracy that you fervently support kills people everyday.
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Voting is the least you can do, so I will choose to vote against Capitalists and not for genocide. If you can’t even do that bare minimum, you don’t deserve democracy.
…what anti-capitalist do you think you’re voting into office?
The PSL candidate.
PSL are a bunch of losers. They can’t even win local elections, let alone put any of their people in state or Federal offices.
I’d be happy to vote for someone better who isn’t pro-capitalist and pro-genocide, who do you suggest?
I’m voting for the most progressive candidate possible in the primary, and then whoever’s not the Republican in the general, and I fully intend to do that for the rest of my life.
The Republican Party has some plans they’re putting together, and between that and the rhetoric that most major Republican politicians and candidates spout these days (very specifically including Trump), it’s abundantly clear they’ve more or less completely given up on democracy, and are planning on dismantling a significant proportion of the core institutions of our country and government, which will effectively usher in the American Empire (as in: a possibly theocratic, but definitely authoritarian and likely outright fascist dictatorship). To be clear: that would be a Very Bad Thing. You think Russia is troublesome now? Wait until Trump or someone similar starts treating them like an ally, emulating as much of Putin’s power structure as possible just because they think it’s cool and would make them look powerful, and potentially teaming up to do shitty things to the rest of the world because we have something like 95% of the nuclear weapons ever produced, and while Russian ones are in a questionable state, ours definitely work.
If Republicans win this next election - and especially if they are able to secure the presidency and both houses of Congress - I genuinely don’t think things will recover without significant domestic political violence, which may ultimately result in a civil war. I’m doing my best to prepare for some “GTFO” contingencies that could be executed in the next few years, but it’s not an easy thing to do, and there’s still a huge number of unknowns in a ton of dimensions.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, you’re not paying attention.
Oh hey look, it’s the only rational voting strategy in a FPTP elective structure! Anyone who thinks different is just more evidence we need Civics back in our schools.
more evidence we need Civics back in our schools
Maybe we need more math as well - have you heard of the Ultimatum Game? Sometimes the rational strategy is to reject unfair split offers, even if that makes it a guarantee that you both get nothing.
I’ve taught game theory. Voting isn’t the Ultimatum game, because the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing, resulting in the main party generally becoming more conservative. Look who ran after Reagan - the entire Democratic Party shifted right with the third way. Look who we ran after Trump.
In voting the way it’s currently configured, there are two elements from game theory that apply. The first is minimax strategy - minimize the maximum damage your enemy can do. Above all that means keeping republicans out of office if you care about minimizing harm to women, minorities and immigrants, the poor, and the LGBT community.
The second concept that applies is the BATNA - the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If the negotiated agreement fails (we get a left democrat on the ballot) our next best alternative is to get a Democrat elected.
We came within a hair’s breadth of not having another election, and at the very least we will be looking at a roll back of LGBT rights, a nationwide abortion ban, and a massive crackdown that will make sure they don’t lose any more elections.
the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing
If the third party can force the main party to lose, then it holds ultimatum power and game theory rules apply. The main party irrationally keeps rejecting the ultimatum and as a result keeps losing. To execute the threat of the ultimatum even after the unfair split has already been offered is the paradox of game theory. You have to appear credible enough to carry out such a threat, but the only reliable way to appear credible is to actually follow through on such threats every time.
The Democratic party keeps losing and shifting right because it acts irrationally and fails to execute optimal game theory strategy. It could have offered the left a fair split and we could have all had guaranteed single-payer medical care, food, and housing, but instead none of us will have women’s rights, and the immigrants and gays among us will be herded into cages.
That is literally not how it works. That’s how people think it should work, but when you see that it doesn’t, you have to turn back and review your premises and your model. I know the way you think it should work and how you want it to work, but when it doesn’t work you need to revise.
The problem is this - the feedback loop is insufficient and the correlation is unclear. If you are directly negotiating with someone, then you can play Ultimatum. If you are one of a hundred million people casting a vote for one person or another, you cannot. Perot cost Bush I the election, and Nader cost Kerry the election. Neither party decided that they needed to move in the direction of the spoiler candidate. They’re especially not going to do so for 3p candidates who pull in the low single digits, even if they lose by low single digits, because they’ll think they can get more by moving towards the center.
You can vote however you want, but don’t base it on a theoretical foundation that has less than zero application to the scenario you’re modeling. It really, honestly is a minimax choice, and if you are truly an ally for those of us in marginalized communities, you have to recognize it.
I’m not being a right winger here - I’m a member of the DSA and this is in line with what they (and people like Chomsky) advise. But I’m not talking about even that angle. I’m just talking minimax and BATNA. If negotiations fail (ie we didn’t get Bernie), the best alternative is Hillary. At least Roe wouldn’t have been overturned and we wouldn’t have states suing to make ten year olds give birth to their rapist’s babies.
So I am proposing that the Democratic party is acting irrationally and suboptimally, but you claim that the Democrats are acting most optimally, and it is the fringe left that is acting irrationally instead by refusing to accept a unfair split against all game theory guidance, causing all of us to eat shit (despite them making up only low single digits). Yet if the Democrats are so rational, how come they keep losing? Shouldn’t they have found an optimal strategy to get around the irrational ultimatum of the left? Yet here we are.
I do not mean this to come off as blunt as it sounds, but I’m trying to be both clear and concise.
What you’re talking about is not how game theory works. What you’re doing is taking the most basic, highly abstracted representation of a generic idea and expecting it to correlate with reality. It’s the same thing people do when they ascribe some kind of wish fulfillment to the free market or to evolutionary dynamics. It’s not even a platonic ideal - it’s drawing a supply/demand curve and thinking you understand how prices work in a market economy. Here’s the main issues you’re running into when you try to play Ultimatum with something the size of the Democratic Party:
- Noise. There is a permanent base of 3-5% of the electorate that’s going to vote Green, or whatever. The protest voters almost never rise above that noise floor. Focus on a single (potentially complex) issue would help. Green rallies (and others) often have everything from antivax to prison reform to the environment to voting rights to BDS and BLM. All of those things (except the antivax) might be important, but there needs to be a central focus. IMO it’s voting rights - I’d love DSA to drop everything to just start suing states and protesting for voting rights, because everything else is lost without that. We can even both/and, as long as there’s a vision and a focus on a main first objective. Right now we’re coming off like a bunch of verses from We Didn’t Start the Fire. Ultimatum with multiplayer and a noise function is a completely different game.
- Feedback loop. The consequences for actions needs to be tightened up, and they need a wide base. There needs to be visible and constant representation out in front of both cameras and politicians. This can be people like the Squad or figures like Robert Reich, but there needs to be a uniform voice that doesn’t wait for the election cycle. Groups like Moms for Liberty have this kind of thing on lock. They have a brand and spokespersons and will host and endorse, or else attack on Fox News within hours of a political decision. They’re shit in every way, but they can work the machine. Ultimatum with a delayed feedback loop is a completely different game because the failure of the deal is less attributable.
- Solidarity and messaging. The majority of Americans want universal health care. The majority of Americans want green energy. The majority of Americans want a cease fire in Gaza. By spreading opinions across multiple realizations of this top level policy objectives, we dilute the message. Ultimatum requires identifiable players with identifiable agendas.
We as voters aren’t playing Ultimatum. Instead, we are playing minimax as an emergent strategy to defend the rights of marginalized populations.
Not having another sham election sounds like a great outcome to me.
Sounds great, but then the genie grants it and you don’t get any more elections, sham or otherwise. I’ll take the illusion of democracy over blatant mask-off fascism, personally.
If you live in the “illusion of democracy” then the elections don’t matter in the first place, so we may as well forego the mask so taht even blind people like you can see it. And polite fascism is actually worse because then liberals like you will support it and chastise others for pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
For example, do you know who started using drones to bomb civilians? Do you know who first started putting kids in cages? Because liberals like you think he was the greatest president to ever president, and you gleefully supported him since he was polite with his fascism.
Lotta unsubstantiated assumptions about me there. Maybe reassess your own biases before offering analysis.
The Constitution needs to be rewritten anyway and we are overdue, preserving the status quo is enabling American fascism.
I’ll vote for a non-Zionist candidate in the primaries with no real expectation of them winning. But I will vote blue no matter who for national and state politics, and Working Families Party for local if any run.
Is “Genocide Joe” an accurate nickname? Yeah. But fuck that, it’s not like Trump will be any less zionist and third parties/independents don’t work in FPTP. I’m mixed race, I’m bisexual, I’m worried about worst case scenarios with a second Trump presidency (which is basically “what Trump is saying out loud” at this point,) and I am willing to vote in enlightened self-interest.
Joe Biden is no more pro-Israel than any president before him. In fact, he’s publicly asked Netanyahu for humanitarian pauses so they can actually get Palestinian people out of the line of fire. Small gesture yes, but no one else has even mentioned Palestinian survival before.
“asked”
Yep, found your problem right there. It’s your argument, full of holes, it is.
You don’t ask a genocidal power that you’re supplying to stop commiting genocide. You tell them they’ll stop or best case scenario (for them) they’re on their own. Worst case scenario (for them), you stop them yourself.
