(December 9, 2016 at 2:13 am)Moros Synackaon Wrote: We're well beyond that point. You asked and I clarified.
I asked Minimalist. I'd still like to know what he meant, because so far since the election I've seen him try to blame everyone but Clinton, and this seems more of the same from him.
Quote:Also, your disregard of the third party vote argument is not skeptical at all. Given how first past the post voting operates, vote splitting in an ideological axis weakens all players in said axis. It also heavily pushes consolidation for increased political powet in an ideological axis.
I know, but my comments were mainly for Minimalist again. He seems to operate under the delusion that any third party candidates somehow "take" votes away from the main parties, when you could reverse the candidates and argue the exact same thing (that the main party candidates "take" votes away from third parties).
Quote:You are free to blame Clinton. But let's not dismiss the reality of how FPTP makes third parties a damaging dead weight on its closest ideologically aligned party.
I'm not dismissing it, but rather saying there's more than one way of looking at it. People (including yourself here) tend to view the smaller party as the "damaging" one, and I believe this probably comes from years of seeing only two parties ever come out victorious. They are held up as the "major" parties, and people accept that as the norm, so third parties are often seen as "bad" or "lesser" off the bat. This, is what is truly damaging, IMO.
So are third parties a damaging dead weight on their closest ideologically aligned "major" party, or are "major" parties a damaging dead weight on the third parties?
No party has a right to your vote, and all votes are supposedly equal, and all voters have a free choice in who they vote for. If a person votes third party, more often than not, it's because they believe that third party is better than one of the major parties. If that party didn't exist, would they have voted for a major party? Maybe, maybe not. The fact is, they didn't.
That's the crux of the matter for me. Clinton failed to get enough people to vote for her, so did Stein, so did Johnson, so did any other third party candidate. They are all in the same boat.
