Double it

Is it? He looks very different

I see two front-runners in the general election at the federal level. One is a centrist neoliberal party, the other is a fascist party. My interests lie with the fascist party losing. Since our system is FPTP, that goal is achieved by voting for the lesser evil. Voting third party increases the odds of the fascist party winning, so that is unaligned with my interests.

I’m the primaries? Of course! In the general? Of course not, did you completely ignore everything that’s been said? Splitting the vote on the left only hurts us. The only people who advocate leftists voting third party are people who don’t understand FPTP, and people who want the left to lose.

Yes, that’s how representative democracy works. Do you have an alternative method which yields better results?

This has happened already. Even though the landscape is dominated by the power hungry, there are in fact principled people who run to actually make a positive difference, from time to time. And yes, I would say that generally candidates who support ranked choice also agree with me on other issues.

Have a good one

Thank you, I will try my hardest.

Presently, the biggest obstacle to that goal is the combination of ignorance and propaganda affecting the upcoming election cycle, which has been empowering the right and fragmenting the left. The goodness of the one I am going to have is largely proportional to leftist turnout, and largely inversely proportional to the percentage of leftists confused by that ignorance and propaganda.

Eh, the further left portion of the electorate has much lower turnout that the further right, largely due to apathy toward the centrism of Democrats. I think you’re right that a Democrat/Progressive landscape would result in both moving right, but I think the Progressive would be firmly to the left of the modern Democrats, and the Democrat would be firmly to the left of the modern Republican.

If you think acknowledging basic math is offensive I don’t know how to communicate the principle here. Your basic premise is either uninformed, or a deliberate bad faith attempt to divide the left.

Pretending that the principles of FPTP are different doesn’t make them so. As I said before, the cure is ranked choice. The mechanism of getting there is consistent turnout in primaries and all elections, especially local. That’s the only way to push the Democratic party toward ranked choice, which is the only reasonable way to achieve ranked choice, which is the only way to make third parties viable.

Voting third party in FPTP only splits the vote and hurts the left. Your point about he media narrative, while not false, is not particularly relevant. The main issue is FPTP.

You misunderstand me. Once the Republican party is defunct, the Democratic party can fill in as the center-right neo-liberal party while a progressive party can emerge to the left. Two healthy parties.

What attitude? You asked where we learned the adage that “voting third party is throwing your vote away”, I stated that it was evident in the basic math of the First Past the Post mechanism. It’s not a notion to be challenged, it’s a mathematical inevitability. The FPTP system is what obstructs free democracy. The futility of third parties is only a symptom of FPTP elections. Attacking the notion of third party futility is ignoring the symptom. The only cure is changing from FPTP to a different electoral model.

How many of us know by heart the old adage “voting third party is throwing your vote away”? Where did we learn this?

Through a basic understanding of the First Past the Post election mechanism. Voting third party does not help move the establishment parties left, it only hurts the left. The best thing for the left to do is turn up every single election (especially local elections) to vote D down the whole ticket en masse, until the Republican party is defunct. Additionally, voting for progressives in the primary.

The only way out of “voting third party is throwing your vote away” is to move away from FPTP. That means showing up and holding your nose until we elect enough candidates who support Ranked Choice.

In any nation with first past the post elections, like the United States, Leftists have exactly one rational voting strategy:

Step 1. Identify the two front-runner parties, and determine which of the two is further left relative to the other.

Step 2. Vote for that party in every single election (don’t forget midterms and local elections). Encourage everyone you know to do the same.

Step 3. Once the (relative) left party has an overwhelming majority (over 2/3) and the relative right party becomes vanishingly irrelevant (under 1/3), then split the (relative) left party into its own relative left and right.

Step 4. Repeat steps 1-3 with these new front-runner parties.

Step 5. Iterate step 4 until your relative left party passes election reform such that elections are no longer susceptible to Duverger’s Law.

Certainly try to push for reform within the relative left party between elections and during primaries, but at the ballot box the above is the only rational strategy. Voting third party, or refusing to vote the lesser evil, is not a rational strategy.

Did we read the same paper? I didn’t see any conclusions based on unsubstantiated non-scientific guesswork. I saw some speculation, but always tempered with explicit acknowledgement that it was hypothetical and speculative. The only conclusion they reached was that many reported UAPs could potentially be explained by plasma activity in the thermosphere.

Yes, they do hypothesize that it’s conceivable that dusty plasmas could foster conditions which could allow for the synthesis of amino acids and even RNA. They do also hypothesize that the structure and complexity of the plasmas could allow for the possibility of a non-organic kind of life. But then they are very quick to say that both of those hypotheticals are purely speculation, and that the plasma behavior can be explained by electromagnetic differentials without necessitating intelligence.

Overall, the paper seems like a collaboration between a number of authors working on different tangentially related topics, broadly under the heading of “extra-terrestrial cellular plasmas”: electromagnetic life, abiogenesis in the environment of plasma, and the complex behavior of plasma bodies observed in the thermosphere. Those in the first two camps seen very excitable (I would speculate they are responsible for all the !s and ?s in the paper) and prone to speculation, with those in the latter camp reigning in that speculation and trying to bring focus back to the main conservative claim: that observed plasma phenomena are consistent with many UAP reports.

Life is. Some is suffering, some is great. Altogether it is temporary. Some have argued that the great would be bland without the temporary or the suffering. The resolution to that argument will be clear at the end, or it won’t, and maybe nothing will. So it goes.

By my estimation, in any case the best course of action is to enjoy the great. Perhaps it’s also best to appreciate the great in context of the temporary, and the suffering. It’s macabre, but it’s either poetic, or it’s making the best of a fundamentally macabre situation. So it goes.

If i had one, I’d give it. Unfortunately, it’s a claim I found a source for once and now lives in the back of my mind, which is why I can’t commit more than a “supposedly”. Amusingly enough, that’s exactly the kind of casual acceptance the organization was supposedly designed to combat. So it goes.

Supposedly, flat earthers started as a thought experiment for scientific skepticism; acknowledging assumptions your knowledge is based on, even the most basic things.

The mathematics of First Past the Post elections drastically disincentivizes third parties, to the point of irrelevance. The winner will be one of the top two choices, so the only rational strategy (primarily in swing states, because of the fuckery that is the Electoral College) is voting against the worse of those two option.

Which is to say: when looking at third party options, would those voters be more likely to vote for the worst of the two main options, or the second worst of the two main options? Those are the only two candidates from which splitting votes is pragmatically relevant.

The evidence suggests to me that Orange Hitler is worse than Genocide Joe, since Orange Hitler would likely enable at least the same amount, if not more, Palestinian genocide; while also actively engaging in Ukrainian genocide; while also enabling Project 2025, which fundamentally threatens the thin veneer of democracy the US does have. I am not an accelerationist, I do not think that the probability of revolution it offers is high enough to counteract the probability of descending into fascism.

If you live in a deep red/blue state, then sure, vote third party so they get more visibility and funding, and encourage others in your state to do the same. But otherwise, vote for the second worst of the two main options, and don’t encourage those in swing states to vote third party.

I am aware. Praxis is the synthesis of theory and action, as distinct from pure idealism divorced from any actual action. Pragmatism is a guiding principle in choosing what actions to take, prioritizing behavior that has tangible results over fruitless ones.

I can see why you would think I’m conflating the two since I am advocating praxis specifically founded on pragmatism. However, I’m also generally advocating any form of praxis, pragmatic or not, over just empty both-sides complaining.