Also I’d like to add while rereading the thread, I’m not sure where you see the disconnect. Everything seems pretty straightforward to me.

You are pretty darn passionate about voting and 3rd parties and that’s great. I read your comment so I was replying to your comment.

Sometimes tangents happen online, and sometimes topics change. Please understand that I am also passionate about these things, so in a Lemmy thread we can end up in many different places. No need to get upset.

That was an aggressive reply and wasn’t very Mr. Rodgers of you.

Did you learn nothing from PBS kids?

I think the challenge this argument has is that it ignores the spoiler effect that is the biggest problem in FPTP, and it assumes party changes have happened because a third party successfully unseated a traditional party in a sort of coup.

First, the spoiler effect is very real. You’ll notice the better a third party does, the worse it is for that whole faction of the electorate. It’s a bit of a paradox but you can see it with the notable 3rd party runs. Teddy Roosevelt got Woodrow Wilson elected. Ross Perot gave the election to Clinton by splitting the right. Ralph Nader solidified Bush as president. The better the third party does, the stronger the spoiler effect. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just the math.

Next, when there is a party change, such as the fall of the federalists or the whigs, it is because they fell apart due to losing a war or their positions (such as opposing manifest destiny) became moot and they no longer had a purpose. This created a void that was then filled with a new party. This was not because a 3rd party arrived and had a David vs Goliath situation. In this metaphor Goliath was already dead when David showed up.

Some questions to ask: what does it mean to have a politically diverse election? How does FPTP or RCV have impact in a time where we have more tools for social engineering (like social media and surveillance tools)? What assumptions of the Republican and Democratic parties are we making? What assumptions are we making on the electorate that they are composed of?

You have good points and valid reasons to be upset in this election. If we don’t see change in this administration now, why should we expect it going forward?

That said, I would like you to consider a perspective shift on the impact of voting. Put yourself in the shoes of a politician. What is your bottom line? It’s to get reelected.

If you aren’t in a position of power, you can’t pass any bills. You can’t push any agendas. You can’t stop wars. You affect nothing. This is true for politicians, CEOs, Popes, dictators, board presidents, school principles, and homeowners association presidents.

In order to keep that power, you need to make your keys to power happy. In a democracy, there are a lot of keys- those are your voting blocks. The rich, the military, unions, families, students, different ethnicities, different religions- you need to calculate which blocks are most likely to get you reelected.

Now a lot of people wonder why is it that American election campaigns seem to go on forever. They take years. This is because candidates are looking to see who they can bring in to their side. Voters who they don’t please go to their opposition.

Let’s fast forward to after the election. You have won the presidency and are eager to get to work- but guess what, in 4 years you will need to do this all over again. This time, you look at the blocks who voted for you. These blocks were the ones who successfully got you in power, and you want to keep them happy. It’s easier to keep voters than to flip voters, this is the incumbents advantage.

You look at your voting blocks, and you notice there is a large chunk of your previous “supporters” (not that they like you necessarily, just that they voted for you) who want to end arms sales to Israel. If large enough, this group will be pivitol to your next victory. You may have run on a pro Israel stance, but if your electorate needs you to change, you will change.

This doesn’t mean protest sit outs aren’t effective. Michigan had a large vote for Palestine in Biden’s primary campaign. After that result came through, the administration took on more moderate rhetoric. It’s empty, but a first signal nonetheless. If this happened in Illinois or Washington State, his campaign would have ignored it, but since Michigan is a swing state, they paid attention.

In this election, I’m voting for Harris. However, down ballot I’m voting for pro-palestine candidates. Trump’s voting blocks clearly favor Israel, but Harris has a divide she needs to address, and if she sees enough voters voting pro-palestine down ballot, she is much more likely to change her course.

For a deeper look into power structures and how leaders are influenced, I’d recommend watching CGP Grey’s 20 minute video on the rules for Rulers.

There is so much nuance in this discussion that it’s difficult to put all counterpoints into a Lemmy comment while I’m sitting on the pot, but I hope this gives you some more questions to consider as you make the bridge between your values, ideal outcomes, realistic outcomes, and pragmatic strategies for getting that done.

I said it once, I’ll say it again-

Until ranked choice vote is established and the electoral college is abolished, there are no serious third parties.

The most serious third party imo is the Forward Party, only because they have one platform which is RCV, and they are quietly working in local elections only. They aren’t running any candidates in federal elections, although they had a big win in helping Alaska switch to RCV for their congressional race, which nudged out Sarah Palin.

With the forward party in conjunction with fairvote.org , they are laying the groundwork to create possibly the most revolutionary change to American politics ever.

But in order to do that, we need to have elections. Vote Harris.

Okay but here me out, what if we 10^43 more monkeys to balance out the speed?

In fact, let’s push this to an extreme. We get enough monkeys that their mass turns them all into one black hole. Inside the black hole, the laws of physics get all fucked. Next we need to somehow dissolve the event horizon as explained in This Kurzgesagt video. Once that happens and we are left with a bare singularity, anything can pop out of it, including a copy of Hamlet.

The monkeys, however, will very likely be dead.

Yep.

I would recommend folks watch this 20 minute video on Rules for Rulers from CGP Grey.

Despots, Presidents, CEOs, Deans, Homeowners Association Presidents, the guy who runs the open mic- at the end of the day they have to follow the same rules to maintain their power. The zero’th rule in the video is “without power, you affect nothing”.

I’m voting for Kamala, and I’m voting down ballot for any pro-palestine candidate. I want to send the message that in order to get reelected, she will need to change her stance.

When I see people not voting out of protest, they are giving their opposition the influence over their elected officials. Remember, they work for you, and voting is how you let them know what you want.

I’d like to do that too, but sadly that’s not on the ballot this year.

Only way I see our way out of these situations in the future is ranked choice vote and abolish the electoral college so 3rd party candidates are actually viable. I’ve been donating to fairvote.org and joined the forward party for that reason, but in the meantime I can only help damage control while I wait for the calvary of rcv.

I’m voting so the state doesn’t kill my sister if she has complications in her pregnancy.

Of course he pulls the classic “it was just a joke bro”.

That said, have dropped out of the comedy world years ago, it pisses me off to see dipshits like this get to perform for thousands while my friends who killed it at the open mics with real comedy are still struggling to get any attention. That’s showbiz I guess.

It was interesting because everyone thought she wasn’t hungry and kept giving solutions for that, but it wasn’t that she wasn’t hungry- she kept pawing at me and walking over to the kitchen/ her food bowl, but just wouldn’t eat what I gave her. She was very hungry, but I guess she was pickier than she was hungry.

Fair, but I do like seeing the federated model thrive and prove itself as a viable alternative to main stream social media. My utopian dream would be that profit driven internet would fall apart against what we have. I hate how much power is given to so few.

Thanks so much for your kind words.

I’ve taught at a private school as a long term music sub, which while being the job that put me in the red (I kept asking when the normal teacher would come back, they never gave me a straight answer until I walked into my office one day to find her stuff there. After that they kept stringing me along in hopes that they’d start a full band program- I spent weeks putting together a proposal for it to be rejected for “various reasons”).

I’ve been thinking about the regular job, but I have no idea what I can do to get me out of the red. Anything that would pay $80k+ just seems out of reach since those tend to be senior positions or for people who can code. I’ve tried coding many times but just can’t seem to get it. Sales has burned me time after time and marketing just doesn’t stick. I can do it for myself alright, but it’s just not something that wants me around in the corporate setting.

Sadly so much of the music industry is for creating commercial music to be used for businesses. When music is a commodity to be bought and sold, humans aren’t really necessary. Why would I pay a human to create a catchy tune for my advertisement when Ai can pump out something that does just fine? AI is also breaking the music tech side. It’s not 100% yet, but Ai mixing and mastering is taking off. If I’m an artist, especially one on a tight budget, an Ai mixer could do just fine for my album when normally I might pay someone with the experience to do so. This might seem great for the artist, but once they have their album, they can get paid $20 a year from Spotify.

The tech spokespeople keep trying to convince us that Ai won’t steal our work and livelyhoods. The thing is everyone in my industry, me included, don’t buy it. These are the same people who said tech would bring Seattle jobs and prosperity, but all it did was raise rents and push out the artists. Tech bros will disagree and say Seattle is just fine, but they weren’t the ones negatively impacted by the industry that allowed them to move there. There’s a group of us in Chicago who call ourselves Seattle’s artistic refugees.

We aren’t the only ones- San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Denver- so many cities are losing their artistic communities that made them worth living in. There’s still music in these places, but you’ll notice those performances are taken by big names for people who can afford those $60+ tickets.

Hell, even Death Cab for Cutie wrote an absolutely heartbreaking bop.

Digging for gold in my neighborhood

For what they say is the greater good

But all I see is a long goodbye

A requiem for a skyline

💔💔💔

I’m not trying to be doom and gloom, but I can’t keep living like this.

I love you. Thank you for commenting and being.

100%

I know I’ve even taken more extreme stances outwardly than I actually believed because I didn’t want to be outcast by my friend group.

Oddly enough when I became more comfortable to speak my mind in a non-threatening manor to those who trust me, I did get my close circle to show that they weren’t as extreme as they presented themselves either.

It’s almost as if social media has only intensified tribalism by giving us two dimensional views of the people we interact with. Our in-group has a diverse set of reasonable ideas, whereas the outgroup is a brainwashed monolith of everything we hate.

Fully agree.

My take as of late is that any 3rd party candidate who runs in our two party system can’t possibly be serious. They make a huge show, maybe get a message out, but almost always torpedo the party closest to them.

With the Stein’s and RFKs in the news, it’s all sexy flashy publicity without any serious effort to have a 3rd party win.

That said, there is another 3rd party personality that you might not have heard of in a while: Andrew Yang.

I actually believe he is serious about electoral reform, in fact that’s the one issue his Forward Party is about. He and his team have worked quietly to help get ranked choice vote in local elections. He is not running for president as a spoiler candidate. He is not running for senate as an independent. He is putting in the work along with fairvote.org to make the structural changes needed to have viable 3rd party campaigns. We saw what happened in Alaska when ranked choice vote was present- they kept Sarah Palin from holding a Senate seat and elected a Democrat instead.

If we had the NPVIC and ranked choice vote, our democracy would be much more representative, collaborative, and stable.

There is one exception to the “Trump hates negative press” that I’d like to note. When Dr. Fauci was called to meet with Trump after he corrected him on live TV about drinking bleach, he found Trump in his office saying “My god these ratings are amazing, they’re better than cable”. Oddly enough sometimes Trump sees any news is good news so long as he’s the main focus.

The times I’ve seen him really go off is when the news cycle stops paying attention to him.

Also she wasn’t even really interrupting him. If you watch the clip, she was muted and he was easily heard over her. It wasn’t as if she was really steamrolling.

You can tell it got under his skin in 2020, and this was just a pathetic way to “get back” at her for being a woman who asserted herself in a debate.