Why I'm Voting For Gary Johnson And Why You Should Too

boing
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Well, I have addressed everything you’ve said, repeatedly, in this thread, although not entirely in response to you. You don’t want to read my huge posting history, I understand, you’ve got stuff to do, that’s enough. But for the same reason, I don’t want to go read a bunch of columns that are supposed prove how horrible I am, when I have almost certainly already responded to their content, probably in this very thread, already.

But OK, I will respond to your quoted points again.

I have a fairly complete working understanding of how US politics work. I have been a voting official in a presidential election, for example, and have been politically active at the local level for decades.

I can’t object to your characterization of my own viewpoint as idiosyncratic; that’s probably a very fair statement. I don’t know anyone else who entirely shares my viewpoint.

I have never said it makes no difference to me who is elected. I have said that I will likely survive who ever is elected, and the world won’t end, it’s just ridiculous and childish fearmongering to suppose that business won’t go on as usual.

Right now, the race is very tight, and a Republican victory would certainly disappoint me more than a Democratic victory. In neither case will I move to Canada, or start shooting people, or prepare for an apocalypse, or do any of the other silly hysterical things that more mainstream commenters claim I either will or should do. The USA will blunder along under either bad President, although almost certainly with less violence directed towards me and my family if Ms. Clinton is elected, and almost certainly less violence directed towards Arabs and Persians if the Republicans win.

Meanwhile, the pollution problem that threatens to make vast areas of the globe uninhabitable to all but the richest human beings, which is more important to me than four to eight years of bad Presidency, will not be fruitfully addressed.

Is there anything I didn’t answer enough? There actually is a Jill Stein thread if we need to do this some more. (Gary Johnson’s crying right now, he can’t even keep our attention in his own thread.)

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[quote=“Medievalist, post:239, topic:86033”]
It sure looks personal.[/quote]
Really? Criticizing a candidate on his or her positions or fitness to lead is petty, or evidence that the critic has a personal grudge? Since when?

For the record, Stein and I did go to the same high school, but we did not overlap - I think she was my sister’s year - and in any event I didn’t socialize much with the “age of aquarious” crowd. I suppose it is possible that to the list of reasons I gave above as to why I dislike Stein I might also add that her candidacy brings my alma mater into disrepute, but I’m afraid Graham Spanier already did that.

Speakiing as someone who used to do pollution control for a living, I believe that it is important not only that we have a president who believes in science, but also that this president can invoke strong electorate support for political capital. That means as many votes as possible for Clinton even in uncontested states. She needs to not worry about political fallout for appropriate action.

Of course, Johnson’s statements about the environment raise serious doubts about his grounding in reality…and no, he didn’t jilt me in high school.

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Valid criticism, applied fairly, is something I have never objected to, or called petty.

You aren’t going to deny having lied about Jill Stein, are you? If you go edit your comment history you can probably get away with it, I didn’t make any screen shots.

But you just implied that she doesn’t believe in science, which you know is a factually incorrect statement. That’s really not very far from saying she doesn’t believe in Jesus or Mohammed or whatever, she must be a witch. You are being petty and it really does look personal. That’s how your behavior looks.

As I said, I appreciate your humor and intelligence… when commenting on other topics. You lose your objectivity on this one topic, it seems.

Yeah, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t really realize how bad. I just looked into it when Rob posted this thread… holy carp. That’s some serious denialism going on there.

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[quote=“Jabberwocky, post:240, topic:86033, full:true”]https://twitter.com/AlanKestrel750/status/758734246072586240?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
[/quote]

Paraphrasing:

“Trump is just a representative of a broader global movement towards neofascism, and that movement is greatly empowered by the corrupt bastardry of the neo-liberals. If you want to defeat one, you need to defeat both.”

Seems perfectly sensible to me.

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Nope.

I want America to continue.

P.S. That means The Hill.

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I never lied about Stein. I did quote her on occasion.

No that’s a Stein tactic with which I do not agree.

[quote]
But you just implied that she doesn’t believe in science, which you know is a factually incorrect statement.[/quote]
What I know is that she uses the same equivocal language when discussing vaccines and wi-fi and GMOs that the anti-science community uses (hence my use of the term “dog-whistle” above). This has raised legitimate concerns among many scientists. Of course, the worst of her positions on her website were changed pretty drastically a few months ago (only!) in response to the criticism, but her defenses of her current weasel language continue to be filled with the kind of false allegations that are the bread and butter of these anti-science groups.

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Why paraphrase when you can quote the woman herself?

“The answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism.”

That’s the answer of a “dilletante candidate”, dripping with privilege, who stands to lose nothing.

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Or someone who recognises that stopping Trump is a Pyrrhic victory if you don’t also halt the long-term global slide towards fascism. Which she identifies (debatably, but I think accurately) as being driven by the obvious failures of corrupt neoliberalism.

I’m all for stopping Trump; if I were a USAdian, I’d be holding my nose and voting Hillary.

But I’d also recognise that stopping Trump is only the beginning of the fight, and that the establishment Dems are not on the side of the 99%.

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You weren’t calling her an anti-vaxxer? I’ll stand corrected, then. I’m so constantly having to repeat the same debunkings of the same anti-Green propaganda that it’s gotten hard to keep track of the anti-Green roster.

As for the ongoing anti-science canard, it still looks pretty personal.

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I did crack some jokes, for example this and this. I don’t believe she doesn’t believe that vaccinations work, but I it is clear she was willing to use the language of the anti-vaxx crowd to pander to them (and given her profession should have made anti-anti-vaxx statements before she was called on her views).

I don’t know to what extent repeating the statements of anti-vaxxers makes you one; if someone says “Evolution is only a theory” then later says “I believe some form of evolution is probably true” then you don’t get a free ride. It is weaselly, like Trump’s quasiretraction of his birtherism. I don’t think Trump ever really believed Obama was born in Kenya either.

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The first one is clearly a joke; the second just seems like a weaselly way of propagating the meme; using the language of “I’m just joking” to pander to people’s misapprehensions, and then blaming Poe’s Law if someone takes it seriously.

If you know what I mean…

We’re already derailed anyway, so I’ll say in passing that the Republican performance at the debate was almost hilariously weak. The woman who broke Sanders did very well, even got out a triple-meme-score phrase at one point.

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Clinton didn’t break Sanders; on the contrary, he provided her a tangible demonstration that the progressive values she’d strongly held as a young woman but suppressed for pragmatic reasons 25 years ago were actually popular, and gave her an opportunity to return to those values. Unfortunately, the debate didn’t really let her articulate her views except in reaction to Trump.

I am pretty happy that neither Johnson nor Stein were there, as both of them (surprisingly in Johnson’s case) see Clinton supporters as their targets, and so Trump would have gotten off more easily.

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I hope that you are right. But Occam’s razor says she hasn’t changed, since her actual behavior is consistent with her entire career to date. She’ll say whatever David Brock tells her the polls want her to say.

This comes as no surprise.

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I generally like 3rd party candidates at debates. I loved Perot at the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates, he helped focus attention on issues that were important in that election cycle. I wish Nader had been there in 2000, he might have helped deflect from Gore’s surreal performance. I can’t imagine any contribution that either of the 3rd part candidates could have made this year that wouldn’t have distracted from letting Trump hang himself, which for me is the most important function of these debates.

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i don’t think either of those possibilities is particularly simpler than the other so i’m not sure how occam’s razor applies to the situation.

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i have opposed republican policies on most issues for 40 years and voted against republican presidential candidates for 36. i have survived through awful republican misrule before and i have actively campaigned for mondale, for dukakis, for bill clinton, for gore, for kerry, for obama, and i am pleased to do so now for hillary clinton. i felt that reagan was an awful president who brought into power a hideous group of henchmen and henchwomen who actively worked to make my country and this world a more awful place to live. occasionally they would do something constructive, but as my father would have said even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then. at no time in the past 40 years have i felt that the election of a republican president had a chance to do irrevocable harm to the world and my country until now. with an open seat on the supreme court and the likelihood of another one or two vacancies coming up a president trump would be able to install a group of vicious thugs to make scalia look like thurgood marshall. a president trump would be willing to sign into law anything a republican congress could pass–repeal obamacare and end healthcare for millions resulting in thousands of extra deaths each year, eviscerate the clean air and clean water acts and make the epa as irrelevant as the sec, privatize social security and make the backbone of our social insurance network as stable as wall street. additionally his encouragement of hatred and prejudice towards immigrants, muslims, and blacks from the oval office could set in motion a hideous cycle of discrimination and abuse. this is an exceedingly rare event in our history and i find it very hard to take your attitude towards this election seriously. indeed, it is extremely difficult for me to respond to your attitude towards this election with the restraint i have tried so hard to maintain.

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