(December 9, 2016 at 2:39 am)Tiberius Wrote: 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.
No, it comes from understanding that voting third party in this past election was a predictable disaster for this nation. One could have been sensible and voted for Hillary and then voted third party everywhere else.
And if third party voters actually, truly, honestly gave half a fuck about their chosen third party, which they don't, but if they did, they would have managed to have gotten them on the ballot in a lot more places. They'd be working now instead of waiting for four years to play the no-risk game of "I'm gonna run for President even though the only effect I'll have is either nothing or to get someone like George W. Bush or Donald Trump elected, thereby fucking everyone in the U.S. for the next four years. That's because I'm principled."
Quote: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.
This^ is total bullshit. Get over it. What's truly damaging is that Donald Trump is going to be POTUS.
Quote: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?
I don't know. Since we're on the verge of being Great Again, let's just wait and find out.
Quote: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.
Votes are not counted equally in the electoral college system, which is why, if one pays attention, they'll realize that Stein voters played a huge role in getting Trump elected. If a person votes Whatever way but can't distinguish from disaster, then what does that say about the person casting that vote?
Quote: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.[/quote]
No, they weren't all in the same boat. The third parties were in the boat that had no chance to make the first quarter mile in a thousand mile race but were close enough to shoot a fucking torpedo at Clinton and give us Trump.
Third party voters can rationalize this horse-shit all they want, just like they're still doing about Nader, but the fact is there are hundreds of thousands of dead people and several trillion dollars worth of debt because they decided to vote for a third party nothing-fuck who had no chance of doing anything except getting the worst person elected.
That's the reality. So maybe in 2020 you can make that massive sacrifice and not cast a vote that amount to a vote for Trump.
