Aye.
I don’t understand this meme that says if the guy Putin likes wins then we’ll have a nuclear war.
Putin wants a nuclear war?
Putin will order his White House puppet to commit acts of aggression against Russia?
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I see your buttercream and raise you Carvel Ice Cream:
(Yes, that’s from my birthday)
Chocolate and vanilla,with a cookie layer.
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I think those are independent clauses. Trump’s policies on nuclear weapons are:
Anti-Non-Proliferation act - he’s berated it a few times, and has said he’s not concerned with nuclear weapons in N. Korea, S. Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, or basically anywhere.
He’s shown a near-indifferent attitude towards nuclear weapons regularly to the point of expressing confusion about why the US makes nuclear weapons if not to use them.
He’s said he wasn’t concerned if Europe was hit with a nuclear attack since it’s “a big place.”
Has said repeatedly that the most important character trait for a leader in charge of nuclear weapons is to be “unpredictable.”
There’s a lot more, the guy’s out of touch with reality so he says all kinds of crazy things about literally everything. It just gets especially disturbing when he’s talking about nukes, women, minorities, or any more sensitive topic.
So that’s the nuke part, and it really should be terrifying to consider putting a person so mentally unstable and unfit to lead in a role where they have the nuclear codes - that’s a really big deal.
He’s also a puppet of Putin, which is it’s own can of worms, but certainly almost as undesirable trait for a president as crazy talk with nukes.
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It’s weird, but the persistence in outright ignoring @aLynHall’s more salient points and the manner in which people think they can make @aLynHall vote for HRC really just makes me not want to bother with voting.
It won’t in the end, but the discussion helps @aLynHall’s general point that the highly partisan system makes even intelligent people throw the person they vote for into a moral blindspot. Hillary will kill people that don’t need to be killed. That is a fact. There’s a moral position that says it is unacceptable to be complicit in her killing which try as I might, I cannot find utterly ludicrous.
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Yah.
I disagree with @aLynHall’s decision in this particular case (because I thnk Trump is uniquely horrible even by GOP standards), but it’s not like that was an immediately obvious choice to make. If Trump had been Romney, I’d probably be pushing hard for a third-party vote.
From a working class economics, racial justice, environmental survival, gay rights and pacifist POV, Clinton is crap. You’ll get ineffective symbolic action at best, shifting to straight opposition if the political winds turn that way. But Trump is much, much worse on every possible issue.
You’ve got the choice between disastrous business-as-usual plutocratic decline, and catastrophic racist apocalypse. Option one sucks for everybody, option two intensifies the suck focussed on brown people. To me, that justifies option one, but it doesn’t provide cause for celebration.
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Changing it up to, as @smulder suggests, Charlie Sheen, and while i might not vote for Huntsman, i’d definitely vote third party in my battleground state. On the other hand in this election i’d say, even though it sounds like damning with faint praise, that Secretary Clinton’s not even close to as bad as at times i’ve been lead to believe.
ETA: And, honestly, i like Huntsman enough that if the third party candidates were crap …
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Then don’t. Vote third party or just don’t vote at all, should that seem like a solution to you. I certainly can’t assess any of your interactions in other parts of the world, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone here trying to talk you into voting for Clinton, although a great many people have explained at length while they will be doing so despite misgivings about her.
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I’m not a big fan of Clinton, really. I don’t hate her, I think a lot of the issues raised against her are pretty absurdly frivolous, but I’m not a big fan of some of her policies. I think she’d do a competent job. She’s just not amazing. It’s been a long time since we had a president who was amazing, and I keep hoping that someday it’ll happen again.
But as a practical matter, the two possible outcomes of this election are President Clinton or President Trump. And in my opinion, President Trump would be (to use his catchphrase) a disaster. I will not be voting for Trump.
So with that in mind, my options are that either I can vote for a third-party candidate who won’t win but perhaps reflects my personal values (which makes Trump less likely to win by not giving my vote to him), or I can vote for Clinton (which affects Trump’s chances to win twice as much as voting for a third party candidate would have; not only did I not vote for Trump, I also gave my vote to his strongest opponent). In my head, if I don’t vote for Clinton, then I’m not doing the most I can to keep Trump from winning the election. And to my mind, Trump is the clear danger in this election. I don’t care nearly as much about who becomes president as I do that it’s not Trump.
So… I mean… the vote for Clinton negatively affects Trump twice as much as a vote for a third-party candidate. So… can I justify to myself not voting for Clinton, even though she wouldn’t necessarily be my pick if she was up against somebody more fit for office?
Complicating this, again as a practical matter, my vote kind of doesn’t really make a difference anyhow, since it’ll be counted in California, which always goes strongly democrat; my vote absolutely would not change the direction the state goes, especially not this year. And as a doubly-practical matter, I’m voting using an absentee ballot this year, as I’m out of the country. This means it’s likely that no election official will even have seen my absentee ballot, and certainly not counted it, before the concession speech is given by whoever is determined to have lost the election. So maybe I should just resign myself to the idea that my vote doesn’t matter in any real sense, and that therefore I should feel free to do a conscience vote for a third-party, or a conscience vote for staying in bed?
But I keep coming back to the idea of the “1x not Trump” vote of voting for a third party vs the “2x not Trump” vote of voting for Clinton. And… it’s kind of hard for me to rationalise not voting for Clinton in this election, just because of the scale of how bad I feel Trump would be for the country, if allowed to enter office. This absolutely is not like previous elections, where I’d be happy to go third-party if I wasn’t a big fan of either candidate. This one feels more like defending the Union against an internal threat. And… so maybe the “2x not Trump” vote for Clinton makes sense, in that context?
I don’t know. Is anybody else grappling with this, and found a way through it that they’re comfortable with? Because I really haven’t.
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Sorry, those were two separate thoughts in my mind.
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Trump has openly talked about nuclear weapons more than I’ve heard since the 1970s. He’s shown support for Japan and South Korea building a nuclear arsenal. He says it would be a last resort for him, but he still keeps on talking about it, you know? It’s one of the few policy related items he keeps talking about.
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We are hearing from political leaders and others in major media sources around the world that they are very worried that the U.S. might actually elect Trump. They recognize how damaging it would be both for our country and for others because of our oversized influence on the rest of the world. The only country that seems to be quite pleased at the thought is Russia. (Probably because Putin knows he could manipulate Trump into pretty much anything he wanted.)
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Yup, exactly!
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I’m in a safe state and was initially planning a write-in, but I’ve changed my mind. At this point “Not Trump” has to be more than a close loss in the EC and popular vote to be seen as a mandate, and given that kooks (including Trump himself) are already claiming election rigging, a stronger loss helps discredit that ignorance more effectively. Ideally the loss should say “Not Trump” loud enough that the idea of running another figure like him is seen as a clear non-starter, and I’m okay with voting towards that goal since backing Clinton is not backing her going off the rails and indiscriminately bombing strangers (which she hasn’t promised), but backing her platform which I mostly am unhappy with for not going far enough in some of the policies it promotes.
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Plus, didn’t he threaten to blow Iranian ships out of the water over rude gestures?
How I picture a Trump Presidency:
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–To a real degree, the Clintons’ (both of 'em) ability to triangulate and and steal a fair number of “big business and Wall Street” types from the Republican party are responsible for the rise of the tea-party/Trumpster wing of the party. The “Southern strategy” brought Southern and rural social conservatives strongly into the Republican party. But for decades they had relatively little effect on the party as a whole, other than making “right to life” a litmus test. They weren’t a majority of either the country or the party, but they were often enough the tipping point to swing national elections or votes in Congress their way. But centrist Democrats like the Clintons managed to steal away enough of the business wing of the party into their fold that now the Tea party wing seems to have taken control of the Republcan party.
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For the most part? Or just Chicago and its suburbs. (which would be “for the most part” population wise…
Probably the city and suburbs is my guess. I’m 360 mile south of Chicago and it’s most a giant corn field in between. There are blue pockets here and there I suppose but a lot of rural areas tend to be pretty conservative
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That’s coal country, practically in Kentucky compared to Chicago. Pretty deep red.
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I did notice that the chart showed certainty of voting in 2012, which may not correspond to this election. I suspect many who otherwise would support a Republican candidate will not feel motivated enough to go to the polls.
Yes, and also taking care of your own health.
When I block the Murdoch press/Daily Mail/Daily Express/Breitbart It’s because they repeatedly have articles that trigger my PTSD. The Telegraph and the Spectator manage to not trigger it, even when expressing views that I find abhorrent, so I allow those.
Besides, if I wanted an echo chamber for my ideas then I’d find that at Urban75 or LibCom, not here. There are a lot of ideas further to the left than the Democrats (even including Bernie Sanders)
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