Kremlin's favorite candidate Jill Stein refuses to call Putin a war criminal during interview

I neither posted nor commented on that photo.

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At the conference, Stein spoke out against Putin’s militarism and that of U.S. leaders.

What was that, the comedy act for the night? No idea why they would invite Stein. She lost every office she ever ran for. Can’t say i disagree with most of her views but she’s really losing the plot in her bids for POTUS.

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Did Dmitry Peskov, Sergey Ivanov and Alexey Gromov drop in briefly, or did Jill Stein have the honour of sitting next to them for the whole dinner?

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“In so many words” are weasel words. An honest and truly progressive person would have said “yes he is” and done it without all the teeth-pulling and Whatabouting.

As for the photo, by 2015 Putin had already illegally annexed Crimea, had already been subject to credible accusations of meddling in the upcoming U.S. election, and was already persecuting LGBTQ+ people and cracking down on the press and dissidents. And there’s that supposed paragon of progressivism and peace, Jill Stein, Bothsides-ing it up alongside Flynn (who at that point was running a military-industrial consultancy with lucrative Russian contracts).

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The American election mechanisms mean that third parties are basically pointless, except as possibly an electoral spoiler.

Thus, any people who want to actually achieve things will work through either the Democrats or the GOP. Third parties are for the loons and the egotists, the ones who can’t or won’t cooperate or compromise with others.

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What has Stein done in the last 4 years to make her a good candidate for the highest office in the United States? What government office has she held and done an effective job of representing her constituents?

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I agree our election format makes it difficult for a third party to gain any real power, but I wonder if it would still be possible if a party would try to start at the local level and build from there. They keep shooting for the moon and running for President. You rarely even see someone from these parties running for local or state office. But when you do, they often seem like much more normal and serious people than the people who run for President. Hell, take Bernie. He started with running for mayor, and ended up a US Senator. And then when he decided to run for President, he ran as a Democrat, because he knew he had zero chance as a 3rd party candidate.

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The last solid third-party candidate in the country’s history was Teddy Roosevelt, a former President from a duopoly party who still had a large following. Running as a third-party candidate without that combination of clout and experience is doomed to failure in the duopoly system, even if one is throwing hundreds of millions of personal or foreign money at the effort.

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By that definition, the only way to be qualified to be president as a third party is to cause a schism in one of the two big parties, like Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party. If you struggle to see how Jill Stein could be worse, start there.

As for the subject of the article, Campism is a shit view of the world and atrocity criminals are atrocity criminals no matter where in the world or on the political spectrum they are. Putin is a war criminal and was an atrocity criminal years before that. He’s also a capitalist, so I don’t know what Tankies think they are doing by supporting him.

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Brady Bunch Jan GIF by MOODMAN

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What’s so awful about Cornel West?

The very fact that he’s not running as a Dem or a Republican? :thinking: :person_shrugging:

Seems like something um, tautological? going on here…

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The Greens in the US continue to be basically useless wankers who accomplish nothing except their pointless and ineffective vanity pretend-campaign for president with their anti-vax weirdo candidate. They have no interest in actually building any kind of a base.

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Normalizing right wing reactionaries like Trump and DeSantis while demonizing mainstream centrist Democrats, for one. I don’t mind the demonizing of mainstream centrist Democrats so much, although I think that’s a bit strong, but doing so while normalizing people like Trump and DeSantis is beyond problematic. This is just one source, but he’s done this before, and he’s done it for years. He’s more anti-establishment than he is progressive.

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That’s what the Green Party seemed to be trying for a while; for example Green Party politician Gayle McLaughlin won two consecutive terms as Mayor of Richmond, CA (pop. ~110,000) in 2006 and 2010.

I think people like Jill Stein have really derailed a lot of the progress the party had made in being taken seriously.

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100%, although I’m not a huge fan of Ralph Nader’s possible up fucking of things in 2000. He was a pretty normal candidate, though.

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Personal speaking, I lost most of my respect for him after learning about his association with Bob Avakian’s Revcom cult.

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Thanks, and to @FrameBreaker , I’ll certainly rethink the affection that I’ve long had for West.

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I used to like him, too. And then I saw him on a couple of podcasts with right wingers crying about cancel culture and free speech and I just went WTF? He still advocates for socialist ideas and for Palestine, but then he does this weird shit with right wing weirdos, and I just don’t get it.

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Or, you could first try to be an excellent mayor of South Bend, or Burlington, or a member of the Illinois legislature, or a wonk who becomes a Massachusetts Senator. Representing constituents is not a partisan activity. It doesn’t make any sense to have amateurs work at the most difficult job in government.

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I think you missed my point.

Imagine if Jill Stein was on the fringes of the Democratic Party, but somehow became well known and built a following. Think Bernie Sanders, but now imagine if, when their presidential campaign fails they break away and run as an independent or third party, unlike Bernie but like JFK RFK Jr.

What would be your prediction for the winner of that hypothetical election? Democrats, Independent or a Republican? Narrow victory or landslide.

Worse still, imagine if Jill Stein won as a Democrat. it’s not quite as bad as Trump, but it’s not something people should be wishing for.

You are better off with keeping the weirdos siloed away.

Edit:
Corrected JFK Jr to RFK Jr. This year has been exhausting.

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