I wouldn’t think anything of it if Biden did it.

The guy who appointed Hitler as chancellor was the “lesser evil” who was “the only way to stop Hitler.”

The Adults In The Room are here to make Tough Decisions just like in muh TV slop and wouldn’t you know it, those Tough Decisions involve slaughtering the poor and vulnerable for the benefit of the rich. Anyone who thinks wanton slaughter of the poor is bad, actually, is just a Whiny Child who Doesn’t Understand muh Complexity and Nuance needs to Grow Up and Accept Reality, and anyway that’s why we need to Kill All The Jews Palestinians.

Grow a fucking spine. Or a conscience. Or both. Grow up and stop looking for a grown up to tell you how the world has to work.

I’m glad to know where your priorities lie, I guess.

Areas with larger populations would have more influence, because there are more people there to represent. That’s how democracy works. It’s not, I don’t know, landocracy.

But every vote would be equal, so there would be more incentive than there is now to campaign across a wider cross section of people, including in less populated areas, because as it is now, the majority of those areas are in safe states where there is zero advantage whatsoever to a politician trying to win their votes.

Democrats would NEVER checks notes dance?

Putting aside the absurdity of the idea that people’s voices should be worth less if they live closer together… One of the most significant features of the electoral college is the existence of a handful of swing states. You don’t want a situation where the most populous 5 states decide every election, so your solution is to take like 5 less populous states and have them decide every election. Genius.

The democrats made that choice when they chose to alienate the left. They decided that they don’t need people like me to win, so we’ll see if that plays out for them. My position is set in stone, I’m not moving my red line on genocide (which is an extremely reasonable and justified line to draw), so it’s entirely their choice whether or not I’m part of their coalition.

Voting is a negotiation. I’m not willing to sacrifice my negotiating power out of desperation, because even if it worked, it would only kick the can down the road, while sacrificing any possibility of actually stopping fascism. It’s a doomed strategy.

It’s not “to preserve their voter purity.” At no point have I ever suggested that. It is a tactical choice to build power and exert influence.

As I’ve told you, the worst possible thing to do in a negotiation is to tell the other side that you’ll agree to whatever terms they offer. If the left does this with the democrats, then the democrats will have no reason whatsoever to consider our concerns, they’ll just write us off and say, “So what if we tell you to go fuck yourself, what are you going to do, vote Republican?” The result is that they will keep following Republicans to the right, and things will get worse and worse, and that’s exactly what’s happened, and how we’ve gotten into this situation in the first place. Lesser-evilism is a failed ideology, that neither makes sense logically nor is supported by historical evidence.

It’s long past time to grow a spine and make demands, and that’s the only possible way that we’re ever going to get the changes we need to address the root of the material problems that allowed Trump to come to prominence. Failure to address those problems is just kicking the can down the road, and if we don’t ever address them, then we will keep getting people like Trump forever. Voting for shitty corporate Dems forever is just kicking the can down the road and allowing problems to fester and get worse, there is absolutely zero chance of actually turning things around that way.

Voting for a left-wing third party accomplishes two things, first, telling the democrats that there are votes available if they move left, and second, it begins the process of replacing and unseating them if they refuse. Both of those are longshots, but they at least have the potential to actually change things.

You are strawmanning me when you describe my position as being “both sides are the same.” No, one side is substantially worse than the other. But both sides fail to meet the red line of “not supporting genocide,” and in a negotiation, if you have a red line, you should follow through with it if you don’t want to sacrifice all future credibility and bargaining power. It’s just game theory.

So if I don’t rally behind your candidate, it automatically means I’m acting in bad faith? Ridiculous.

I suppose the third of Americans who don’t vote are also all right wingers?

Again you repeat the claim that I’m repeating “right wing talking points.” I’ll ask again, which “right wing talking points” am I repeating? Opposition to genocide?

What “right-wing talking points” exactly have I parroted? Opposition to genocide? That’s a left-wing talking point that the right sometimes parrots.

I’m not blind to the difference between Democrats and Republicans. However, I don’t believe in unconditional support for the Democrats, regardless of how bad the Republicans are. To offer unconditional support is to sacrifice every ounce of bargaining power I might have otherwise wielded. The worst possible thing you can do in a negotiation is to walk up to the table and say, “I’ll agree no matter what.” I do not subscribe to the ideology of lesser-evilism, which is a bad strategy from a game theory perspective. Moreover, genocide is a hard red line for me.

Ok, then I don’t understand what you’re accusing me of.

Sorry, maybe I misunderstood. Are you accusing me of being a foreign secret agent or are you not?

You claim that half of these couldn’t possibly exist

Nowhere did I claim this. Kind of funny that you strawman me right after accusing me of strawmanning you.

A conspiracy theory is not something that is impossible to be true, it’s just implausible. It could be that the checkout clerk at my local grocery is an undercover FBI agent, why couldn’t it? It’s just that there’s no evidence for it and it would be pretty unreasonable to assert that, especially if there was no possible way to falsify it.

I could just as easily claim that you’re working for US intelligence, I’d have just as much basis. But I’m not a paranoid conspiracy theorist, so I don’t. By Occam’s razor and the principle of charity, I assume that you simply believe other things than me. That concept of people having different beliefs and values seems to be something that liberals simply cannot grasp - as if there’s one obviously correct position and everyone else is either stupid or being deceived by bad actors. It’s quite silly.

I don’t espouse any “right wing” positions, and I don’t generally see other people on here doing the same. My criticism of liberals is from a leftist perspective, grounded in leftist values and theory, and drawing from leftist intellectual traditions. It’s just that liberals want to lump anyone who disagrees with them on anything for any reason as right wing in order to discredit and dismiss them.

Oh, so now it’s that you’re surrounded by secret agents from foreign countries, and that’s the only reason people disagree with you. I’m assuming that there’s no possible evidence that would falsify this conspiracy theory, right?

There’s more discourse about the Democrats because there’s less disagreement about Republicans being bad. I wrote up a post about Trump’s foreign policy doublespeak a while back where I called out anyone who might support Trump from an isolationist standpoint. It didn’t get much engagement, but that’s not my fault. Most of my comments are responding to things other people say and there are more Harris supporters than Trump supporters.

I might remind you that Lemmy was developed by communists, so an alternative explanation is that communists are more likely to both vote third party and use Lemmy.

The idea that we’re secret conservatives is so absurd that I doubt you actually believe it, and are just using the accusation as a talking point to discredit the other side. Conservatives are awful at impersonating communists, they don’t read or understand leftist theory and typically can only make it a few hours at most before breaking character and shouting slurs. You’re vastly overestimating their intelligence and creativity. To say that Bayes’ theorem supports your accusation is patently absurd.

At some point, claiming that communists are just conservatives in disguise means claiming that conservatives read more leftist political theory than liberals do. As entertaining as it may be to imagine a bunch of good ol’ boys getting together and starting a book club where they discuss, like, the finer points of Simone de Beauvoir, I think if you’re doing Bayesian analysis you should probably assign that a pretty low probability. They don’t even read their own theory, much less ours.

They’re pining for the party of Bush because it was grounded in truth and ideas.

It was WHAT!?

Complete drivel. Why do liberals think repeatedly telling us the same condescending nonsense without engaging with any of our actual arguments is convincing? There isn’t a third party voter alive who hasn’t heard these arguments.

So while each individual unhappy voter wants to keep their hands clean and not vote, they would each like the other 9,999 unhappy voters to step up and swing the outcome in favor of their preferred candidate.

What third party voter is asking other people to vote for a major party? This is such a blatant strawman that I find it hard to believe that this author has ever had a single conversation with a third party voter.