Years back I heard an anecdote about the artist Prince.
He’d be on tour in some remote place, be up late partying in the hotel, and would ask for an Elephant.
He wasn’t trying to be a dick, he’d just been living in Princeland a very long time and didn’t really understand how the normal world worked.
Since Trump I’ve been wondering how many of the super-rich are affected by this. They don’t live in the same reality we do, everyone around them has a vastly inferior social status, everything they see they either own or can buy at a whim, and they can delegate the vast majority of tasks normal people have to deal with to the point they might forget they exist.
I think it’s really hard to live in that world for a long time and not go a bit nutty.
Because voting for the lesser of two evils* means you’re actively supporting evil and not voting means there is no visible measure that you even want your views represented at all.
I understand the sentiment of wanting to keep the worst party out, but there is the fact that in the long term you’re helping steer politics overall in a direction you don’t like.
The real solution is to do anything you can to dump the undemocratic farce of FPTP and get it changed to a voting system that actually is functional.**
*- Depends on your actual opinions on the two main parties of course
** - Easier said than done though. IMHO, FPTP is the root cause of most problems with politics here in the UK…
I’m neither a billionaire (nor millionaire) nor am I a progressive in any sense. I’m pretty sure I’m the most right-wing regular commenter here, although most folks would put me down as center-right. I know I’m not going to move the needle around here, but that’s not why I keep hanging out here, then.
I was wondering why I hadn’t heard him take that position - and it turns out, he only admitted it because someone outright asked him, and then he immediately dismissed it as unimportant compared to financial issues (which seems like adhere to Republican policy). So… “pro-choice, but not in a way that would really come up”?
“You think he’d be able to pull off Dem votes and not just votes from the GOP?”
Oh but Comrade! Of course you can have the election!..for a price of course.
Vladimir can see to that, Da?
Putin doesn’t strike me as the kind of person whose primary motivation is material wealth. He’s definitely a “power” kind of guy, unlikely to be bought off with something as fleeting as mere money.
It’s a feature of the US electoral system. The UK has FPTP and while there are two big parties, the others are not irrelevant. Three way contests for a seat sometimes happen here.
Curiously enough, someone on the internet discussed always having them put that on his Starbucks drink order. He’d get a look, and he’d just look at them very intensely and say “is there something wrong with my name…?”
I don’t see him spoiling the election if he runs. I view him as the opposite of what John Anderson was in 1980. He was thought to be a spoiler for Reagan when he broke off and went independent as a reaction to Reagan’s move to the right. When he broke, he was polling at 20%+, but yet he ended up getting votes from both sides and a lot of votes that would have stayed home if he wasn’t on the ballot.
In some ways, it could be beneficial to have 2 voices against 1 all the way to the end. The Dem voter base will not break rank this election, but many swing voters that voted for Trump will. It’s OK if they vote for Schultz if you think about it. And the further right that Schultz is, the better in that regard. If he calls Warren the same thing that Trump does, he gets a certain chunk of votes, or rather gives those people a chance to throw their votes away.
