Voting isn’t analogous to the trolley problem. That’s a thought experiment with a huge number of unrealistic simplifying assumptions that makes it only rarely at all applicable to the real world. To make the trolley problem actually reflect the situation of voting, you’d have to add in so many variables that it wouldn’t actually help explain anything.
First off, the comparison isn’t valid because it treats the parties as unflinching machines that have no agency. In reality, the electoral process is a negotiation in which the parties attempt to build coalitions, and in a negotiation, accepting the other side’s position as ironclad and unmovable is a choice and often a bad one. If the other party is committed to being reasonable, then you can offer them a terrible deal that is only slightly better than what they would get otherwise - it is a position of weakness.
You, as well as the democratic party, want to put people like me into that position of weakness where our decisions are the ones that are most scrutinized and up for critique, but it ought to be the opposite. Democracy is about the will of the voters being exercised on the political process, not the will of a party being pushed onto the voters. If you wanted the trolley problem to reflect this, then you’d have to put someone in the problem who is standing by the alternate track who put the person there on the tracks and is fully able to release them at any time, but chooses not to, while also trying to persuade you to switch tracks, which would also put them in a position of power. Negotiating with that person and demanding they release their victim is a reasonable thing to do which complicates the problem.
The hypothetical also isn’t valid because it ignores any alternatives. The reality is that there’s more than two tracks that the lever can switch to, and some of them don’t have any people on them at all. However, there’s not just your lever, but 300 million levers involved. And also, it’s not just one trolley problem, but repeated ones over and over, and the results of one trolley problem are used to inform the next one. As I said, when you add in all the meaningful differences between the hypothetical and reality, it becomes just as complicated as reality and fails to be useful.
As for just focusing on local elections - the fact of the matter is that local elections don’t get nearly the same level of attention as presidential elections. Promoting third parties in the presidential race is conducive to helping them win local elections because it helps publicize them, and it makes up the vast majority of what people actually talk about. Ignoring the presidential race would mean sitting on the sidelines and ignoring virtually every political conversation, which is not an effective means of advancing a political cause.
Tbh, I’m very skeptical that you actually want anything like the same things that I want. There’s this pervasive trend among the democratic party and their surrogates to simply accept whatever values or goals a constituent wants, and to simply focus on how voting democrat will help accomplish that goal - to be everything to everyone, in other words. In this case, what I want is for the democratic party to be unseated and replaced, and you’re going along with that while trying to argue that the most effective means of accomplishing that is to vote democrat. I find that pretty absurd. No, the most effective way of advancing the goal of a third party replacing them is to vote for that third party, and that should be extremely obvious to anyone.
After reading that, I still can’t think of a more concise or accurate response:
I’m not gonna nuh-uh-yuh-huh with someone who doesn’t understand elections, or the trolley problem.
You don’t understand the purpose of the trolley problem, and you don’t understand how elections functionally work. To add to that, you also don’t seem to understand how communication works either.
the most effective way of advancing the goal of a third party replacing them is to vote for that third party, and that should be extremely obvious to anyone.
Just because something is obvious to a simpleton does not mean it is correct. Science is overflowing with examples of this, where the conclusion that’s “obvious to anyone” for centuries was actually very wrong, often times so wrong that the solutions it generated actually made things worse. It’s obvious to anyone that water puts out fire, until they throw water on a grease fire. “Voting third party in a FPTP post elections helps third parties win” is one of those conclusions. It’s like water on the grease fire of encroaching fascism.
I can’t possibly know what your political goals are. You could either be a sincere but woefully misguided leftist whose end goals are indeed roughly aligned with my own, or you could be a competent fascist sowing confusion among the leftists to help fascism win; your arguments are equally well explained by either.
I generally like to be charitable with my assumptions of the intelligence of others, but on the off chance that you really are just a bumbling leftist unwittingly holding the rest of us back, I’ll leave you with one example:
Ralph Nader, 2000. I’m sure he meant well (can’t say the same for Jill Stein) but polling shows, definitively, that had he sat out the race we would’ve had Gore instead of Bush. Instead of comprehensive responses to climate change, a balanced budget, and expanded funding for education and healthcare, we got another perpetual war in the middle east, the Patriot Act, tax cuts for the rich, Roberts and Alito, and the 2008 financial crisis. And oh yeah, support for the Green Party has gone down since Nader, so the inefficacy of building support for third parties this way is obvious.
I know when you’re young, simple straightforward solutions seem obvious. But once you actually interact with people and situations in the world with some frequency, you’ll learn that this is rarely the case outside of trivially simple problems. This is not a trivially simple problem, and the trivially simple solution has not been working at all for the past 40 years. The trivially simple solution helped give us GWB and Trump.
I have nothing but support for those Green candidates who have been elected Mayor, City Council, etc. The sooner we see those City Councilors become Mayors in big numbers, and see those Mayors become Governors and Senators and House Reps, the closer we’ll be to a seasoned representative who can convince the voting population that they’re capable of the job of President. Right now, you’re trying to elect a candy striper as Head of Surgery.
what I want is for the democratic party to be unseated and replaced
You can technically get that, if the opposition party with a record and stated goals of obstructing, overturning, and straight up bypassing elections beats the Democratic party this year and follows their stated game plan. We’ll have one glorious, unquestionable MAGA party, Democrats will be excised from office, and you may never have to worry about who to vote for again.
Now, if your goal is to unseat both sides of the duopoly and replace them with representatives to the left of the current mainstream political spectrum, then voting for inexperienced third party candidates for not achieve that goal, and In fact jeopardizes that goal. The Dems won’t be unseated by some inexperienced possible Russian asset. It might cost them the presidential election, but history shows they’ll run to the center to find voters.
The duopoly will be unseated by a popular, multi-term third party Governor or Senator, and to actually accomplish anything they’ll need a Congress full of third party Senators and Representatives. Without those conditions, voting for a third party President is pointless: they won’t win, and even if they did they wouldn’t get anything past Congress, and those failures will help discourage voters from choosing third parties in the future. These small minded goals do not change anything for the people in any meaningful way.
By far the best strategy for long term, lasting, effective change is to destroy the GOP first, making room for a leftist party. This is accomplished by 66+% victories by the neo-lib party. As long as the races are close, rational voters will vote strategically against the greater evil. Once the greater evil is insignificant, we can focus on splitting off from the lesser evil. Then, once the Green Party has overwhelming majority support, we can split off from them to form an even better party. So on and so forth.
I know it can be complicated to think about, but the world is complex. If you insist on simple solutions to complex problems, you’re throwing water on a grease fire and endangering everyone. If you want change, you have to understand how change implementation works. It’s not enough to want something and do the first most obvious thing you can think of to get it. You have to actually understand how the system in question actually operates, and how to use the operational mechanics of that system to accomplish your goals.
Or, you can keep throwing water on a grease for and hope things turn out differently this time, while the rest of us scream at you for setting the house on fire.
We’ll have one glorious, unquestionable MAGA party, Democrats will be excised from office, and you may never have to worry about who to vote for again.
This sort of alarmism is a lot harder to sell when Trump’s already been president once. If Trump wins, lots of bad things will happen, but there will absolutely still be elections in 2028. In fact, the 2028 elections will be the most important election of our lives, until the 2032 elections which will also be the most important election of our lives and so on.
This is accomplished by 66+% victories by the neo-lib party.
That is completely and fundamentally impossible for reasons that I’ve already explained to you several times. Conditions are declining, the neo-lib party is tied to the status quo, so there is no future where they end up in this fantasy of sweeping every election with wide margins. This fantasy is a pure myth that you’ll use to try to cajole people into completely unconditionally supporting for the Democrats until the end of time - there is absolutely zero practical difference between that and just being a true believer in neoliberalism.
You don’t understand the purpose of the trolley problem
Of course I understand the purpose of the trolley problem. And I also understand how the electoral system works, and how to communicate. You keep making these base assertions without backing them up in any way.
Liberals always see things in terms of “rational” or “irrational,” such that anyone who disagrees with you must either be too stupid to understand, or they understand but are malevolent. The reality is that I understand everything you’re talking about perfectly, but I disagree with it, not because I’m some kind of deep cover republican or secret agent sent to sow confusion, but for the reasons I’ve plainly spelled out.
This sort of alarmism is a lot harder to sell when Trump’s already been president once.
It’s easier to sell when he used that term to load the courts with sympathizers, including 3 SC justices who ruled that the president is above the law. Also he tried multiple times overturn the election. Also this time there’s an organized game plan. Because incremental progress toward your goals is more effective than big performative gestures with no results. The GOP realizes this, even if you don’t.
If Trump wins, lots of bad things will happen, but there will absolutely still be elections in 2028.
“Absolutely” is optimistic. There is, as you like to say, a non-zero chance of no elections in 2028.
That is completely and fundamentally impossible for reasons that I’ve already explained to you several times.
You’ve done nothing of the sort. You’ve shared your own immature fantasies.
you’ll use to try to cajole people into completely unconditionally supporting for the Democrats until the end of time -
Except where I explicitly said it’s nothing but a lesser evil strategy to buy time until there’s a viable candidate. It’s like you’re deliberately straw manning my position to pretend your strategy isn’t counterproductive. You have the 2000 and 2016 elections as minimum showing your strategy is doomed to failure. I have every party split in history to show my strategy works. You’re using your fantasy to cajole leftists into a voting strategy that fundamentally harms them and their cause.
That’s a pretty strange thing to disagree with. It’s very straightforward logic so it would take quite a bit of evidence to put it in doubt.
And I have no idea what evidence you’re looking at but I know what evidence you’re not looking at, for example, the rise of Hitler in Germany. As the status quo became worse and worse, more people turned away from the establishment parties and to the far-right (and to the far-left, unfortunately to a lesser extent), which brought about the end of the republic. You can see similar cases in most every fascist state that has ever existed. I would very much like to know which historical examples you are looking at that don’t support my third statement.
Voting isn’t analogous to the trolley problem. That’s a thought experiment with a huge number of unrealistic simplifying assumptions that makes it only rarely at all applicable to the real world. To make the trolley problem actually reflect the situation of voting, you’d have to add in so many variables that it wouldn’t actually help explain anything.
First off, the comparison isn’t valid because it treats the parties as unflinching machines that have no agency. In reality, the electoral process is a negotiation in which the parties attempt to build coalitions, and in a negotiation, accepting the other side’s position as ironclad and unmovable is a choice and often a bad one. If the other party is committed to being reasonable, then you can offer them a terrible deal that is only slightly better than what they would get otherwise - it is a position of weakness.
You, as well as the democratic party, want to put people like me into that position of weakness where our decisions are the ones that are most scrutinized and up for critique, but it ought to be the opposite. Democracy is about the will of the voters being exercised on the political process, not the will of a party being pushed onto the voters. If you wanted the trolley problem to reflect this, then you’d have to put someone in the problem who is standing by the alternate track who put the person there on the tracks and is fully able to release them at any time, but chooses not to, while also trying to persuade you to switch tracks, which would also put them in a position of power. Negotiating with that person and demanding they release their victim is a reasonable thing to do which complicates the problem.
The hypothetical also isn’t valid because it ignores any alternatives. The reality is that there’s more than two tracks that the lever can switch to, and some of them don’t have any people on them at all. However, there’s not just your lever, but 300 million levers involved. And also, it’s not just one trolley problem, but repeated ones over and over, and the results of one trolley problem are used to inform the next one. As I said, when you add in all the meaningful differences between the hypothetical and reality, it becomes just as complicated as reality and fails to be useful.
As for just focusing on local elections - the fact of the matter is that local elections don’t get nearly the same level of attention as presidential elections. Promoting third parties in the presidential race is conducive to helping them win local elections because it helps publicize them, and it makes up the vast majority of what people actually talk about. Ignoring the presidential race would mean sitting on the sidelines and ignoring virtually every political conversation, which is not an effective means of advancing a political cause.
Tbh, I’m very skeptical that you actually want anything like the same things that I want. There’s this pervasive trend among the democratic party and their surrogates to simply accept whatever values or goals a constituent wants, and to simply focus on how voting democrat will help accomplish that goal - to be everything to everyone, in other words. In this case, what I want is for the democratic party to be unseated and replaced, and you’re going along with that while trying to argue that the most effective means of accomplishing that is to vote democrat. I find that pretty absurd. No, the most effective way of advancing the goal of a third party replacing them is to vote for that third party, and that should be extremely obvious to anyone.
After reading that, I still can’t think of a more concise or accurate response:
You don’t understand the purpose of the trolley problem, and you don’t understand how elections functionally work. To add to that, you also don’t seem to understand how communication works either.
Just because something is obvious to a simpleton does not mean it is correct. Science is overflowing with examples of this, where the conclusion that’s “obvious to anyone” for centuries was actually very wrong, often times so wrong that the solutions it generated actually made things worse. It’s obvious to anyone that water puts out fire, until they throw water on a grease fire. “Voting third party in a FPTP post elections helps third parties win” is one of those conclusions. It’s like water on the grease fire of encroaching fascism.
I can’t possibly know what your political goals are. You could either be a sincere but woefully misguided leftist whose end goals are indeed roughly aligned with my own, or you could be a competent fascist sowing confusion among the leftists to help fascism win; your arguments are equally well explained by either.
I generally like to be charitable with my assumptions of the intelligence of others, but on the off chance that you really are just a bumbling leftist unwittingly holding the rest of us back, I’ll leave you with one example:
Ralph Nader, 2000. I’m sure he meant well (can’t say the same for Jill Stein) but polling shows, definitively, that had he sat out the race we would’ve had Gore instead of Bush. Instead of comprehensive responses to climate change, a balanced budget, and expanded funding for education and healthcare, we got another perpetual war in the middle east, the Patriot Act, tax cuts for the rich, Roberts and Alito, and the 2008 financial crisis. And oh yeah, support for the Green Party has gone down since Nader, so the inefficacy of building support for third parties this way is obvious.
I know when you’re young, simple straightforward solutions seem obvious. But once you actually interact with people and situations in the world with some frequency, you’ll learn that this is rarely the case outside of trivially simple problems. This is not a trivially simple problem, and the trivially simple solution has not been working at all for the past 40 years. The trivially simple solution helped give us GWB and Trump.
I have nothing but support for those Green candidates who have been elected Mayor, City Council, etc. The sooner we see those City Councilors become Mayors in big numbers, and see those Mayors become Governors and Senators and House Reps, the closer we’ll be to a seasoned representative who can convince the voting population that they’re capable of the job of President. Right now, you’re trying to elect a candy striper as Head of Surgery.
You can technically get that, if the opposition party with a record and stated goals of obstructing, overturning, and straight up bypassing elections beats the Democratic party this year and follows their stated game plan. We’ll have one glorious, unquestionable MAGA party, Democrats will be excised from office, and you may never have to worry about who to vote for again.
Now, if your goal is to unseat both sides of the duopoly and replace them with representatives to the left of the current mainstream political spectrum, then voting for inexperienced third party candidates for not achieve that goal, and In fact jeopardizes that goal. The Dems won’t be unseated by some inexperienced possible Russian asset. It might cost them the presidential election, but history shows they’ll run to the center to find voters.
The duopoly will be unseated by a popular, multi-term third party Governor or Senator, and to actually accomplish anything they’ll need a Congress full of third party Senators and Representatives. Without those conditions, voting for a third party President is pointless: they won’t win, and even if they did they wouldn’t get anything past Congress, and those failures will help discourage voters from choosing third parties in the future. These small minded goals do not change anything for the people in any meaningful way.
By far the best strategy for long term, lasting, effective change is to destroy the GOP first, making room for a leftist party. This is accomplished by 66+% victories by the neo-lib party. As long as the races are close, rational voters will vote strategically against the greater evil. Once the greater evil is insignificant, we can focus on splitting off from the lesser evil. Then, once the Green Party has overwhelming majority support, we can split off from them to form an even better party. So on and so forth.
I know it can be complicated to think about, but the world is complex. If you insist on simple solutions to complex problems, you’re throwing water on a grease fire and endangering everyone. If you want change, you have to understand how change implementation works. It’s not enough to want something and do the first most obvious thing you can think of to get it. You have to actually understand how the system in question actually operates, and how to use the operational mechanics of that system to accomplish your goals.
Or, you can keep throwing water on a grease for and hope things turn out differently this time, while the rest of us scream at you for setting the house on fire.
This sort of alarmism is a lot harder to sell when Trump’s already been president once. If Trump wins, lots of bad things will happen, but there will absolutely still be elections in 2028. In fact, the 2028 elections will be the most important election of our lives, until the 2032 elections which will also be the most important election of our lives and so on.
That is completely and fundamentally impossible for reasons that I’ve already explained to you several times. Conditions are declining, the neo-lib party is tied to the status quo, so there is no future where they end up in this fantasy of sweeping every election with wide margins. This fantasy is a pure myth that you’ll use to try to cajole people into completely unconditionally supporting for the Democrats until the end of time - there is absolutely zero practical difference between that and just being a true believer in neoliberalism.
Of course I understand the purpose of the trolley problem. And I also understand how the electoral system works, and how to communicate. You keep making these base assertions without backing them up in any way.
Liberals always see things in terms of “rational” or “irrational,” such that anyone who disagrees with you must either be too stupid to understand, or they understand but are malevolent. The reality is that I understand everything you’re talking about perfectly, but I disagree with it, not because I’m some kind of deep cover republican or secret agent sent to sow confusion, but for the reasons I’ve plainly spelled out.
It’s easier to sell when he used that term to load the courts with sympathizers, including 3 SC justices who ruled that the president is above the law. Also he tried multiple times overturn the election. Also this time there’s an organized game plan. Because incremental progress toward your goals is more effective than big performative gestures with no results. The GOP realizes this, even if you don’t.
“Absolutely” is optimistic. There is, as you like to say, a non-zero chance of no elections in 2028.
You’ve done nothing of the sort. You’ve shared your own immature fantasies.
Except where I explicitly said it’s nothing but a lesser evil strategy to buy time until there’s a viable candidate. It’s like you’re deliberately straw manning my position to pretend your strategy isn’t counterproductive. You have the 2000 and 2016 elections as minimum showing your strategy is doomed to failure. I have every party split in history to show my strategy works. You’re using your fantasy to cajole leftists into a voting strategy that fundamentally harms them and their cause.
Democrats associate themselves with the status quo
The status quo is a system in decline
As the status quo declines, people will be less inclined to support a party that is associated with the status quo.
Which part of that, exactly, is an “immature fantasy?”
3 for sure. That’s not supported by any historical or sociological evidence.
That’s a pretty strange thing to disagree with. It’s very straightforward logic so it would take quite a bit of evidence to put it in doubt.
And I have no idea what evidence you’re looking at but I know what evidence you’re not looking at, for example, the rise of Hitler in Germany. As the status quo became worse and worse, more people turned away from the establishment parties and to the far-right (and to the far-left, unfortunately to a lesser extent), which brought about the end of the republic. You can see similar cases in most every fascist state that has ever existed. I would very much like to know which historical examples you are looking at that don’t support my third statement.