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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • I don’t expect the Democratic establishment to implement it, that’s why the Greens should actually get some state reps elected. Or even just compete in the places where they do have ranked choice voting. There’s plenty of state level races that don’t need a lot of money to be competitive. My rep was reelected with 3,000 votes.

    But voting for Jill Stein for president isn’t going to do anything. She has literally zero chance of winning, doesn’t seem to even put in the effort to understand the position she’s theoretically trying to obtain, and just pops up every four years to perpetually lose elections while grifting money away from rubes.


  • Flags of convenience for local people elected to powerless neighborhood boards do not indicate the party itself actually did anything. It’s actually not even that. They claim any win by a member of the Green party who’s not a member of another party is a Green party win. So the criteria is more about the candidate themselves giving money to the Green party than any effort in the other direction. And no, winning neighborhood board seats is not the level of foundation needed to launch a presidential run.

    Like I said, my state is a prime target for contesting elections from the left, but they do less than nobody parties organized around niche local issues. We’ve got low turnout, plenty of uninspiring neoliberal Democrats that are to the right of many voters (or even outright conservatives), and no real Republican party to worry about spoiling for. I’ve never even received so much as a flier from them. I had no idea they even fielded any candidates until well after the fact. This is possibly the best possible environment for Greens to come in and challenge the Democrats and it’s hard to even call their level of effort an afterthought. They fielded candidates in two whole races in the entire state.





  • You pulled out your Facebook memes to say you wanted to break the two party system by voting third party. Nothing about my response is trying to address whether you should be voting, but your chosen action is stupid and has no potential to accomplish what you say you want to do.

    Your username may be ironic, but outsourcing expressing feelings to a vague and not quite appropriate meme response rather than actually trying to say what you think and defend your personal opinions is one of the big reasons people shit on Boomers. Granted it’s a step up from my old conservative acquaintances on account of not also being in service of the most vile opinions humans espouse, but it’s just as tired and unwelcome.



  • Because it’s literally not a solution. The absolute best case scenario is causing the closest ideological party to fail for many elections in a row before it disintegrates and reforms in the third party, which is now the second party in a two party system and filled with many of the same politicians and beholden to most of the same voters.

    Voting reform is the solution for everyone complaining about the two party system. Get ranked choice and leftier challengers who actually care about the results of elections will run against establishment politicians more often.



  • The more you look for it the more you recognize that a lot of the people in charge of politics (and business for that matter) aren’t smart or knowledgeable or even master strategists, they’re just the sort of person who skirt through life through some combination of charisma and utter willingness to say whatever it takes to please the people who can advance their career.

    Like you expect the dumb shit they say to be an act by a keen mind who understands politics deeply and is manipulating the public into advancing their interests, but they’re often just fucking idiots with no principles who whenever they’ve been stymied due to their idiocy just let it slide off their back and move on to a new path with utmost confidence.

    Jill Stein isn’t going to slink away into the darkness after a public demonstration of political ignorance for a lady whose whole public persona is supposed to be about politics, she’s just going to forget about it and keep the scam going. Not knowing the basics of government isn’t going to stop her from saying she knows how to fix the problems with government. Not being on the ballot in states is unimportant for whether it sounds good to her in the moment to say they can win in all 50 states. They’re all just unimportant “facts” and you can just keep talking and most people will forget or not know that you’re an idiot.



  • Use those other sites. Third Way is a large contributor to why the Democrats are continually threatened by third parties. Their whole idea is that Democrats can and should go as hard toward the right as possible because the left flank of the party is (a) bad for their financial backers and (b) has to vote Democratic. You can’t promote that position and then act like a shocked Pikachu when your own philosophy ends up creating the problem you now want to warn against.

    Plus all those godforsaken inaccurate pie charts other people pointed out.






  • There’s no reason to take this guy or his organization at face value when they make claims. It’s been hype and hopium for a decade now, fueled by TED Talks and wunderkind-loving media.

    Cleaning up the garbage patch isn’t just a matter of collecting nicely floating big pieces of plastic. Doing that is good, but it’s not actually something that can ever get it to “clean”, it’s just something that helps slow the accumulation over time. You get the big stuff (relatively) easily, then it gets progressively harder, and eventually impossible.

    Which is progress. It’s just not the lofty result they keep promising. If all it took was a big net and a relatively modest (by government standards) budget, this wouldn’t be a problem.



  • It’s literally the question, unlike vague concepts of “supporting Israel militarily” until an ideology is disbanded (hello War on Terror).

    Proposals for a cease fire include releasing all the hostages. And for those that want to somehow accomplish the impossible task of dismantling an ideology, only half support it. Less than half to be precise. And those are mostly Republicans.

    Nearly seven in 10 Republicans (67%) favor supporting Israel until Hamas is dismantled, compared to only four in 10 Independents (44%) and Democrats (41%).

    Another way to say this is “a majority of Democrats and independents do not favor supporting Israel militarily until Hamas is dismantled”. Yeah, great factoid. One might even call it misleading to use it to indicate Democrats don’t support restricting arms.


  • If the question is “do you support Israel”, yeah, but that’s not the question.

    At the same time, a bare majority of Americans (53%) agree on restricting military aid to Israel so it cannot use the aid toward military operations against Palestinians, similar to previous readings. Seven in 10 Democrats (68%) and more than half of Independents (54%) support restricting military aid to Israel, while the majority of Republicans (59%) oppose doing so.

    Combined, nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) also say the United States should pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire, either with diplomacy (27%) or by reducing arms shipments (37%). However, three in 10 (29%) say the United States should continue arm shipments to Israel and not pressure it to accept a ceasefire at all. While the majority of Republicans say the United States should continue its arms shipments to Israel and not put any pressure on it (53%), nearly half of Democrats (47%) and a plurality of Independents (42%) say the United States should pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire by reducing its weapons transfers.

    https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/americans-see-united-states-playing-positive-role-middle-east