I feel like people who don’t vote based on polls think like white hat dude:
Today’s xkcd.
7 Likes
useful information for every citizen of the united states–
4 Likes
Oh, come on. Baron? With the cyber?
Winner-take-all voting will only ever produce a two-party system. There can never be a viable third party in the United States unless ranked choice voting becomes the norm. That’s likely a long, long way away. In the meantime, our options are: 1) Sit out elections and whine because the Democrats aren’t perfect (not saying that’s what you’re doing, of course), or 2) recognize that the perfect is the enemy of the good, vote for the better of the two candidates, and apply leftward pressure by bringing actual leftists into the party down-ticket. I’ll be doing the latter.
10 Likes
Trump frequently seems to forget Barron exists, and when he does remember he refers to Barron as “his wife’s son.”
Probably the best thing for the kid, really.
11 Likes
For me, understanding that i am literally a man of all the privileges, straight, white, cis, male, Christian and pretty well off, I can quite comfortably refuse to vote for the dems knowing it will not cause me any harm personally. Repubs or Dems, I will be fine. My LGBTQ family members face having their civil rights, and even their very humanity, legislated away, the Black community that saved me as a child executed in the streets, my daughters having their bodily autonomy taken away. But none of that will affect me. Except it will. There are my family, my friends, people who mean the world to me.
24 Likes
Wow, you sure showed them.
11 Likes
That is probably a clue, that he never says “my son”… but “[my] wife’s son”
Just saying.
2 Likes
Outdated memes… this is how I roll success kid never dies
I heard only Boomers type ellipses
1 Like
Republicans look very scared in Texas. At least the governor’s latest attempt at voter suppression — reducing ballot drop off boxes to one per county — just got overturned by a federal court:
11 Likes
Change comes in incremental steps because change is inevitably a product of negotiation, diplomacy and struggle against countervailing forces. so if your ambitions only extend to incremental change, you’ll inevitably find yourself going backwards.
So we’re going to start seeing Alaska represented at scale on election maps?
5 Likes
or punctuation nerds of all ages. . .
7 Likes
I thought that VOTING itself is a ‘principled moral stand’.
Please don’t give me that garbage about ‘throwing my vote away’ by voting 3rd party. As far as I am concerned, the (r)s have devolved into Fascism, & the (d)s have become Corporate Shills, and not that far removed from the (r)s. I like to tell people:
“I voted for the Republican in 2016. Her name was Hillary Clinton.”
Some of the 3rd parties have policies closer to what I want.
So, just why should I vote for something I don’t want?
THAT would be ‘throwing my vote away’.
3 Likes
So, everyone who voted for Hillary in 2016 didn’t get everything they wanted, either…
I’ve been voting for over 40 years, so that would be more than twice.
My point being, I voted FOR something for most of that time. In 2016 and this year, I am voting AGAINST something (namely, Lord Dampnut & all he stands for).
2 Likes
Why not? It’s true. As I posted upthread, there can never, ever be a viable third-party under the system of voting that the United States uses. If you vote third-party you are squandering your opportunity to improve our lot.
6 Likes
Well, one reason would be if you know that your vote is certain to promote something you want less.
Of course there should be some degree of voting your conscience, or the whole exercise would be moot. But it is critically a matter of degree. If your choice cannot possibly get more than 1 or 2 percent of the vote, then you are not even participating in the contest that actually decides a winner; you’re just doing some unrelated niche cosplay activity against the same backdrop.
It’s not impossible for outsider candidates (or outsider platforms) to break into mainstream politics. But they don’t do it by picking up 0.2% every four years; they do it by having some form of existing notoriety from outside of politics, and turning that into at least a double-digit result in the first race they ever enter. For obvious reasons, it’s usually TV shitheads like Turmp.
10 Likes
And - crucially - by joining one of the two dominant parties, as we saw with both Bernie and Trump.
7 Likes
Voting for a candidate you know has zero chance of winning the election is effectively stating “I have no preference which of the two major party candidates becomes President.”
If you honestly couldn’t see any meaningful difference between (say) George W. Bush and Al Gore, or even between George W. Bush and any of the candidates running in the 2004 Democratic primaries, then I don’t know what to tell you.
13 Likes
Because you give a shit about literally any other person in this country than yourself. And if that’s not true then fine… be that way if that’s how you’ve gotta be… but accept that most people are going to recognize you as pathologically selfish when you open your mouth about it. I’m personally just so sick of this “I’ll hold the whole country hostage if I can’t get what I want attitude.” If that is your take then make your peace with it and accept some people will always judge you negatively for it.
15 Likes
Think of it this way. You’ve got one net, and two creatures are loose in your house. One is a cranky opossum with irritable bowel syndrome. The other is a very, very rabid weasel. Your options are as follows:
a) You can risk your life by ridding yourself of the shit opossum, knowing the very, very rabid weasel will almost certainly bite you continuously during the process.
b) You can focus on the very, very rabid weasel, admitting the shit opossum is a problem, but one you can address safely at your leisure once the real danger has passed.
c) Throw a tantrum because there are no very, very fluffy kittens to catch, and stand around complaining about shit opossums while the very, very rabid weasel kills you.
You have chosen c). Congratulations.
13 Likes
