I don’t like Joe Biden, I’ll never forget the Neoliberal bullshit he did with the Republicans in the 90s we are still suffering from further eviscerating the safetynet to the draconian war on people suffering addiction. He’s one of the OG former opposition party members the Reagan Revolution convinced to take the bigger bribe checks from Wall Street than Unions could ever match, today’s neoliberal(D) party.
That said, I voted for him in the last election, and I will again out of harm reduction. He has improved on policy, but l even if he didn’t, the American people do not get a vote on whether or not to elect a senile President this cycle.
You can have any President you like, as long as he’s senile. If you vote, we’ll get a senile President. If you don’t, we’ll get a senile President.
The question is whether you want senile and gleefully cruel®, or just senile(D). I’ll take just senile.
Except you do get to vote for no senility. That is what the primaries were for. Trump was actually struggling quite a bit against a young woman.
As was Biden for a hot second against a younger candidate. That was short lived. Biden was also getting a bit of a slap by a few people who were not on board for having Biden run the party again.
This is why you don’t sleep through the primaries and complain you only get the only one vote on parties.
2016 proved that wasn’t true. The DNC pushed the candidate they wanted, and the guy who kept being up or near Hillary just got ignored by the press so most people barely ever saw him. You don’t get to pick anything in the primaries. The two parties in charge tell you who you get to have.
Or vote third-party, and you’ll probably get a senile President, but maybe not.
And more importantly, you’re helping to break the Duopoly and normalize voting third-party.
If a minor party manages to get 5% of the vote, they qualify for federal funding in the next election, and that might lead to real change.
Cornel West is polling at about 3% (and after Biden’s performance, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cornel picks up a couple more percent). We could be close.
Edit: Or just keep on thinking you have to settle for the lesser of two evils. (How’s that working out for you?)
If you’re in a state that will certainly be blue or red and has 0% chance of swinging unless a huge proportion of the population changes their party affiliation (California, New York, Mississippi, Alabama, to name a few) then vote 3rd party, sure.
If your state was within 10% of flipping colors in any of the past 3 presidential elections, DO NOT vote 3rd party. Your vote matters too much to risk it.
Yeah, that’s the conventional wisdom. When Ross Perot ran, most of his support came from states that weren’t swing states.
(Despite often being called a “spoiler”, he probably had little impact on the result of the election because of that.)
But! Later polls showed that 35% of voters would have voted for Perot if they thought he could win. And if all those people had voted for Perot, he would have won!
If we could somehow ensure that our actual desires were reflected by our votes without simultaneously risking our vote being wasted by splitting support between similar candidates, we could have actual representative democracy. But we all have a duty to prevent the worst to the best of our ability, even at the sacrifice of our support of what we think would be best, but unlikely.
Vote for ranked choice voting however you can. This paradox is intentional design, not an unforeseen consequence. We need to rework the voting system before things have any chance to get better without violent revolution.
It’s actually been mathematically proven that ranked-choice voting does not eliminate the so-called spoiler effect. It’s called Arrow’s Impossibity Theorem.
As people who live in a country with FPTP voting, we’re all intimately familiar with the drawbacks of FPTP voting. But all voting systems have their drawbacks.
(I’ve actually been a volunteer election worker in a country with ranked ballots and proportional representation, and the experience actually soured me on ranked ballots and proportional representation.)
Countries like Canada and the UK manage to have four or five parties with FPTP voting.
Stop waiting for the perfect voting system, because there is no perfect system.
I disagree. I too have been involved in elections in my country (Australia) and preferential voting system is pretty popular. As candidates get eliminated your vote keeps moving to your next choice. What could possibly be fairer?
Approval or STAR voting, since they are more heavily utilized by all citizens instead of just white people, they are purely additive unlike ranked, which allows for easy auditing and making sharing the results possible in real time.
They’re also far easier to explain, which makes voting more inclusive, and the results more straightforward to follow.
RCV is definitely better than what we have now, but if we’re gonna have election reform we should go for the best possible system, not a half measure like RCV.
Or vote third-party, and you’ll probably get a senile President, but maybe not.
Vote third party and we are guaranteed to get a senile president. It’s a two party FPTP system.
Edit: Or just keep on thinking you have to settle for the lesser of two evils. (How’s that working out for you?)
Better than telling people to throw away their vote. How’s that working for you? How many 3rd party presidents have you gotten elected with your strategy? How many fascist policies has your strategy avoided us?
I’ve long fantasized of people being so fed up with both parties, that along would come a third party at the right time and enough people would flock to them that and vote them into office.
But it’s just that: A fantasy.
And anyways, there’s always the chance that said third party would be way way worse and maybe there’s a good reason why they weren’t more prominent to begin with.
There are several reasons why the MAGA crowd were allowed to take over the GOP. First, because they weren’t pushovers, if the party had tried shenanigans to stop them there was a real possibility of people defecting from the party en masse, and even of violence at the convention. Second, because the things they wanted weren’t really all that contrary to what the rich donors wanted.
The Democratic base is much more weak willed and willing to go along with whatever to stop the right. We don’t have enough of that Karen energy, that “my way or the highway” attitude. And election reform is directly contrary to the interests of the establishment, and the aim of prioritizing ordinary people over the rich goes against the interests of the doners. They’ll crush any internal movement in that direction, and people will still vote for them because of “vote blue no matter who” and lesser evilist ideology.
First, because they weren’t pushovers, if the party had tried shenanigans to stop them there was a real possibility of people defecting from the party en masse, and even of violence at the convention.
I think this overstates where things were at when Trump first got nominated during the GOP primary in 2016. If Trump had lost that, they just as easily could have voted red anyways. Republicans have been doing it for decades, they use their geriatric & evangelical blocs to strong arm their nominee to the presidency regardless of who it is.
Second, because the things they wanted weren’t really all that contrary to what the rich donors wanted.
Sure, but a lot of the time DNC candidates do things that the rich donors hate. Biden’s cap on insulin prices is a good example of that. There will always be pushback on good policy. Complaining doesn’t get us anywhere.
The Democratic base is much more weak willed and willing to go along with whatever to stop the right.
This is only really relevant for the actual elections. This effect isn’t nearly as strong in the primaries where it counts and is needed.
And election reform is directly contrary to the interests of the establishment, and the aim of prioritizing ordinary people over the rich goes against the interests of the doners. They’ll crush any internal movement in that direction
Look, either we work within the system to make things better, or we have a violent revolution. There isn’t much of a middle option. And I can pretty much guarantee you that a violent revolution would be the worse option given that it is a militarized police state with citizen tracking out the ass.
If every single leftist wins their DNC primary, the DNC doesn’t have much of a choice but to run with them. That’s how you get better candidates like AOC/Summer Lee/Jamaal Bowman, etc. They aren’t perfect by any means, but they are a hell of a lot more to the left than the DNC is. And I can tell you the DNC fuckin hates having said candidates within their party. But they suck it up and deal with it.
It is very much possible to get more candidates like that, but it requires focus on the primaries, just like the MAGA crowd did.
the American people do not get a vote on whether or not to elect a senile President this cycle
I feel like I’ve somehow become trapped in some kind of simulation or thought experiment where the purpose of it is to make lesser evilism seem as ridiculous as conceivably possible, and every time I think it’s peaked with just comical levels of absurdity, it somehow manages to escalate.
If you’re counting on one of them dying before the election, keep dreaming. FFS, Trump might very well run while incarcerated and it probably won’t dissuade anyone who is already committed for him.
I’d put more money on one of them dying than seeing the inside of a prison cell. The judge in the Trump trial explicitly stated that he did not want to put a sitting president in prison.
Trump isn’t a sitting president yet, he’s still a former president.
Judge Merchan said that before the guilty verdict, when Trump violated his gag order 10 times consecutively. His next words after “I don’t want to put you in jail” were “…but I will if you continue to jeopardize the judicial process.” (paraphrasing). Obviously, the judge did not want to resort to jail for criminal contempt because the case had a lot of eyes on it and jumping to jail before issuing warnings and fines gives the impression of impropriety or bias, which could have been grounds for a mistrial had he taken Trump’s bait.
Most people think he’s going to walk on the basis that he has no prior criminal convictions and that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, but there’s also the fact that he’s shown no remorse for his crimes even after the verdict and that allowing him to escape a prison term with a slap on the wrist house arrest or a fine will not realistically deter him or others from committing the same crime.
I’d say it’s still a good possibility that he sees jail. Probably not for the max 3 year sentence, but some token amount of incarceration would be appropriate. He’ll likely be out before taking office should he actually win, and they’ll probably make special provisions for him to continue campaigning, so he probably won’t even spend that much time in an actual cell.
The real kicker is his next conviction will mean he has to contend with a criminal history, which will vastly increase his chances of receiving actual prison time. That all hinges on him not getting elected and pardoning himself for all the federal crimes he’s accused of, the most severe of which being his role in the J6 insurrection and the classified documents case which could easily land him in prison for the rest of his life.
His next words after “I don’t want to put you in jail” were “…but I will if you continue to jeopardize the judicial process.”
After the tenth contempt citation.
Most people think he’s going to walk on the basis that he has no prior criminal convictions and that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, but there’s also the fact that he’s shown no remorse for his crimes even after the verdict and that allowing him to escape a prison term with a slap on the wrist house arrest or a fine will not realistically deter him or others from committing the same crime.
I doubt he’ll make this particular mistake another time, mostly because he’s got too much media scrutiny to still run around with high end call girls.
But when it comes to the actual governance? He’s not going to get punished for that.
I’d say it’s still a good possibility that he sees jail
I would not put any amount of money on it.
The real kicker is his next conviction will mean he has to contend with a criminal history
All the rest of the cases are either dropped or delayed until after the election. Either way, there’s not going to be a “next conviction” before it no longer matters.
Not sure why you cut that out of my original paragraph as if I didn’t already mention it.
I doubt he’ll make this particular mistake another time, mostly because he’s got too much media scrutiny to still run around with high end call girls.
Oh no, Trump has learned a valuable lesson, just not the one he was supposed to learn. He was supposed to learn “I should not commit fraud”, but instead he learned “Why bother with fraud when my idiot supporters would have voted for me anyway?”.
All the rest of the cases are either dropped or delayed until after the election. Either way, there’s not going to be a “next conviction” before it no longer matters.
Which is why it’s all the more important to keep him out of office. I understand the cynical outlook on the judicial process, especially after what we’ve seen so far. Between sympathetic judges treating Trump with kid gloves and him getting released on bail after stealing classified documents, it really does highlight that we are living in a two-tiered justice system. But I still believe that the process is working despite it’s obvious flaws, and that sooner or later, justice will catch up to Trump and he’ll be out of free passes.
A lot of people said that we would never even get as far as we have. It was “Trump will never be indicted”, which gave way to “There won’t ever be a trial”, to “He won’t be found guilty” to “they won’t sentence him to any prison time”.
We can only wait and see next month what they decide to do.
It’s up to the DNC as to which candidate takes the running ballot. I’m betting there are a lot of conversations right now about who will be that person.
You are half right and half wrong because that decision will come down to whether establishment Democrats or populist Democrats win.
And to be quiet frank, I don’t even think the DNC gets a say. Since Biden is the incumbent, unless he bows out voluntarily, I don’t think we the people or the DNC get to choose.
Our hands are really tied when it comes to the presidential frontrunner, unfortunately.
It’s always telling when some one insists that a statement is true when they themselves know that it isn’t.
It’s 💯 the case the Biden isn’t the nominee today. I’m not arguing if it’s going to be a progressive or a insider that replaces him. Frankly, I could give a shit because either will be doing instantly better than Biden.
Biden is replaceable and there is a cult of personality that has developed that believes this isn’t the case. They’re wrong. There as delusional as the right wing MAGA crowd and their doing MAGAs work for them as the useful idiots that they are.
It’s important to keep it clear that I’m not arguing that some how magically were going to replace Biden with a progressive. I’m arguing that needs to, and will be, replaced. That’s what Thursday showed us, and I know for a fact that the Beltway heard this.
The party that needs to be convinced is Harris. And I think she can be. All of these machinations are happening this weekend, as we speak.
My called shot: Biden steps down as early as Monday, as late as two weeks from Monday. I’m going to be making some calls and seeing what tea I can find spilled.
I don’t like Joe Biden, I’ll never forget the Neoliberal bullshit he did with the Republicans in the 90s we are still suffering from further eviscerating the safetynet to the draconian war on people suffering addiction. He’s one of the OG former opposition party members the Reagan Revolution convinced to take the bigger bribe checks from Wall Street than Unions could ever match, today’s neoliberal(D) party.
That said, I voted for him in the last election, and I will again out of harm reduction. He has improved on policy, but l even if he didn’t, the American people do not get a vote on whether or not to elect a senile President this cycle.
You can have any President you like, as long as he’s senile. If you vote, we’ll get a senile President. If you don’t, we’ll get a senile President.
The question is whether you want senile and gleefully cruel®, or just senile(D). I’ll take just senile.
Except you do get to vote for no senility. That is what the primaries were for. Trump was actually struggling quite a bit against a young woman.
As was Biden for a hot second against a younger candidate. That was short lived. Biden was also getting a bit of a slap by a few people who were not on board for having Biden run the party again.
This is why you don’t sleep through the primaries and complain you only get the only one vote on parties.
2016 proved that wasn’t true. The DNC pushed the candidate they wanted, and the guy who kept being up or near Hillary just got ignored by the press so most people barely ever saw him. You don’t get to pick anything in the primaries. The two parties in charge tell you who you get to have.
Or vote third-party, and you’ll probably get a senile President, but maybe not.
And more importantly, you’re helping to break the Duopoly and normalize voting third-party.
If a minor party manages to get 5% of the vote, they qualify for federal funding in the next election, and that might lead to real change.
Cornel West is polling at about 3% (and after Biden’s performance, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cornel picks up a couple more percent). We could be close.
Edit: Or just keep on thinking you have to settle for the lesser of two evils. (How’s that working out for you?)
If you’re in a state that will certainly be blue or red and has 0% chance of swinging unless a huge proportion of the population changes their party affiliation (California, New York, Mississippi, Alabama, to name a few) then vote 3rd party, sure.
If your state was within 10% of flipping colors in any of the past 3 presidential elections, DO NOT vote 3rd party. Your vote matters too much to risk it.
Yeah, that’s the conventional wisdom. When Ross Perot ran, most of his support came from states that weren’t swing states.
(Despite often being called a “spoiler”, he probably had little impact on the result of the election because of that.)
But! Later polls showed that 35% of voters would have voted for Perot if they thought he could win. And if all those people had voted for Perot, he would have won!
Just something to think about.
If we could somehow ensure that our actual desires were reflected by our votes without simultaneously risking our vote being wasted by splitting support between similar candidates, we could have actual representative democracy. But we all have a duty to prevent the worst to the best of our ability, even at the sacrifice of our support of what we think would be best, but unlikely.
Vote for ranked choice voting however you can. This paradox is intentional design, not an unforeseen consequence. We need to rework the voting system before things have any chance to get better without violent revolution.
It’s actually been mathematically proven that ranked-choice voting does not eliminate the so-called spoiler effect. It’s called Arrow’s Impossibity Theorem.
As people who live in a country with FPTP voting, we’re all intimately familiar with the drawbacks of FPTP voting. But all voting systems have their drawbacks.
(I’ve actually been a volunteer election worker in a country with ranked ballots and proportional representation, and the experience actually soured me on ranked ballots and proportional representation.)
Countries like Canada and the UK manage to have four or five parties with FPTP voting.
Stop waiting for the perfect voting system, because there is no perfect system.
I disagree. I too have been involved in elections in my country (Australia) and preferential voting system is pretty popular. As candidates get eliminated your vote keeps moving to your next choice. What could possibly be fairer?
Approval or STAR voting, since they are more heavily utilized by all citizens instead of just white people, they are purely additive unlike ranked, which allows for easy auditing and making sharing the results possible in real time.
They’re also far easier to explain, which makes voting more inclusive, and the results more straightforward to follow.
RCV is definitely better than what we have now, but if we’re gonna have election reform we should go for the best possible system, not a half measure like RCV.
Don’t know those systems so you could be right?
Vote third party and we are guaranteed to get a senile president. It’s a two party FPTP system.
Better than telling people to throw away their vote. How’s that working for you? How many 3rd party presidents have you gotten elected with your strategy? How many fascist policies has your strategy avoided us?
I’ve long fantasized of people being so fed up with both parties, that along would come a third party at the right time and enough people would flock to them that and vote them into office.
But it’s just that: A fantasy.
And anyways, there’s always the chance that said third party would be way way worse and maybe there’s a good reason why they weren’t more prominent to begin with.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have the same fantasy, but until we get election reform it will only ever be fantasy.
And until it happens, we will never get election reform.
Not necessarily. The MAGA crowd took over the GOP. The same could be done for the DNC, but with actual leftists and election reformists.
There are several reasons why the MAGA crowd were allowed to take over the GOP. First, because they weren’t pushovers, if the party had tried shenanigans to stop them there was a real possibility of people defecting from the party en masse, and even of violence at the convention. Second, because the things they wanted weren’t really all that contrary to what the rich donors wanted.
The Democratic base is much more weak willed and willing to go along with whatever to stop the right. We don’t have enough of that Karen energy, that “my way or the highway” attitude. And election reform is directly contrary to the interests of the establishment, and the aim of prioritizing ordinary people over the rich goes against the interests of the doners. They’ll crush any internal movement in that direction, and people will still vote for them because of “vote blue no matter who” and lesser evilist ideology.
I think this overstates where things were at when Trump first got nominated during the GOP primary in 2016. If Trump had lost that, they just as easily could have voted red anyways. Republicans have been doing it for decades, they use their geriatric & evangelical blocs to strong arm their nominee to the presidency regardless of who it is.
Sure, but a lot of the time DNC candidates do things that the rich donors hate. Biden’s cap on insulin prices is a good example of that. There will always be pushback on good policy. Complaining doesn’t get us anywhere.
This is only really relevant for the actual elections. This effect isn’t nearly as strong in the primaries where it counts and is needed.
Look, either we work within the system to make things better, or we have a violent revolution. There isn’t much of a middle option. And I can pretty much guarantee you that a violent revolution would be the worse option given that it is a militarized police state with citizen tracking out the ass.
If every single leftist wins their DNC primary, the DNC doesn’t have much of a choice but to run with them. That’s how you get better candidates like AOC/Summer Lee/Jamaal Bowman, etc. They aren’t perfect by any means, but they are a hell of a lot more to the left than the DNC is. And I can tell you the DNC fuckin hates having said candidates within their party. But they suck it up and deal with it.
It is very much possible to get more candidates like that, but it requires focus on the primaries, just like the MAGA crowd did.
I feel like I’ve somehow become trapped in some kind of simulation or thought experiment where the purpose of it is to make lesser evilism seem as ridiculous as conceivably possible, and every time I think it’s peaked with just comical levels of absurdity, it somehow manages to escalate.
Yeah this is just false.
Which candidate of our only 2 parties that matter isn’t senile this cycle?
He’s probably a brain parasite guy.
He said, with no examples or evidence of any kind.
Edit the way "vote’ is used in that sentence isn’t so much a ballot transaction…it’s more a “choice”.
Biden or trump WILL be the next president.
This sucks but cannot be avoided.
Edit edit choose left right or abstain, it’s all the same. A senile president will be the next president
Both are over the mean life expectancy, neither is in particularly great health, and it’s another six months until the inauguration.
If you’re counting on one of them dying before the election, keep dreaming. FFS, Trump might very well run while incarcerated and it probably won’t dissuade anyone who is already committed for him.
I’d put more money on one of them dying than seeing the inside of a prison cell. The judge in the Trump trial explicitly stated that he did not want to put a sitting president in prison.
Trump isn’t a sitting president yet, he’s still a former president.
Judge Merchan said that before the guilty verdict, when Trump violated his gag order 10 times consecutively. His next words after “I don’t want to put you in jail” were “…but I will if you continue to jeopardize the judicial process.” (paraphrasing). Obviously, the judge did not want to resort to jail for criminal contempt because the case had a lot of eyes on it and jumping to jail before issuing warnings and fines gives the impression of impropriety or bias, which could have been grounds for a mistrial had he taken Trump’s bait.
Most people think he’s going to walk on the basis that he has no prior criminal convictions and that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, but there’s also the fact that he’s shown no remorse for his crimes even after the verdict and that allowing him to escape a prison term with a slap on the wrist house arrest or a fine will not realistically deter him or others from committing the same crime.
I’d say it’s still a good possibility that he sees jail. Probably not for the max 3 year sentence, but some token amount of incarceration would be appropriate. He’ll likely be out before taking office should he actually win, and they’ll probably make special provisions for him to continue campaigning, so he probably won’t even spend that much time in an actual cell.
The real kicker is his next conviction will mean he has to contend with a criminal history, which will vastly increase his chances of receiving actual prison time. That all hinges on him not getting elected and pardoning himself for all the federal crimes he’s accused of, the most severe of which being his role in the J6 insurrection and the classified documents case which could easily land him in prison for the rest of his life.
After the tenth contempt citation.
I doubt he’ll make this particular mistake another time, mostly because he’s got too much media scrutiny to still run around with high end call girls.
But when it comes to the actual governance? He’s not going to get punished for that.
I would not put any amount of money on it.
All the rest of the cases are either dropped or delayed until after the election. Either way, there’s not going to be a “next conviction” before it no longer matters.
Not sure why you cut that out of my original paragraph as if I didn’t already mention it.
Oh no, Trump has learned a valuable lesson, just not the one he was supposed to learn. He was supposed to learn “I should not commit fraud”, but instead he learned “Why bother with fraud when my idiot supporters would have voted for me anyway?”.
Which is why it’s all the more important to keep him out of office. I understand the cynical outlook on the judicial process, especially after what we’ve seen so far. Between sympathetic judges treating Trump with kid gloves and him getting released on bail after stealing classified documents, it really does highlight that we are living in a two-tiered justice system. But I still believe that the process is working despite it’s obvious flaws, and that sooner or later, justice will catch up to Trump and he’ll be out of free passes.
A lot of people said that we would never even get as far as we have. It was “Trump will never be indicted”, which gave way to “There won’t ever be a trial”, to “He won’t be found guilty” to “they won’t sentence him to any prison time”.
We can only wait and see next month what they decide to do.
Sure. But the chances of both of them croaking in the next 6 months are very low.
Biden has the whole US government at his back, highly trained and motivated to not let the sitting US president die.
Trump, well, terrible bastards seem to never die.
The way Biden looked with a simple cough? And with the physical burden a continuous high stakes campaign puts on a candidate?
Wouldn’t even be the first time a President campaigned himself into an early grave. Harrison, Taylor, Harding, and FDR all leap to mind.
All the SS agents in the world can’t save you from COVID
Bruh called it.
It’s up to the DNC as to which candidate takes the running ballot. I’m betting there are a lot of conversations right now about who will be that person.
You are half right and half wrong because that decision will come down to whether establishment Democrats or populist Democrats win.
And to be quiet frank, I don’t even think the DNC gets a say. Since Biden is the incumbent, unless he bows out voluntarily, I don’t think we the people or the DNC get to choose.
Our hands are really tied when it comes to the presidential frontrunner, unfortunately.
It’s always telling when some one insists that a statement is true when they themselves know that it isn’t.
It’s 💯 the case the Biden isn’t the nominee today. I’m not arguing if it’s going to be a progressive or a insider that replaces him. Frankly, I could give a shit because either will be doing instantly better than Biden.
Biden is replaceable and there is a cult of personality that has developed that believes this isn’t the case. They’re wrong. There as delusional as the right wing MAGA crowd and their doing MAGAs work for them as the useful idiots that they are.
It’s important to keep it clear that I’m not arguing that some how magically were going to replace Biden with a progressive. I’m arguing that needs to, and will be, replaced. That’s what Thursday showed us, and I know for a fact that the Beltway heard this.
The party that needs to be convinced is Harris. And I think she can be. All of these machinations are happening this weekend, as we speak.
My called shot: Biden steps down as early as Monday, as late as two weeks from Monday. I’m going to be making some calls and seeing what tea I can find spilled.