All right, there was another Democratic debate last night between Clinton and Sanders. Both of them revealed different strengths and weaknesses, and make no mistake, both of them have weaknesses. I think it’s because they’re both human beings, and not gods.
And now today I look out at all my friends, who are also all human beings, and I see their weaknesses exposed: it is not enough to favor one candidate, you have to divide them, so your favored person is the candidate of Heaven, and the other is Satan’s representative. Just stop it. Please. Here’s what I want you to do instead.
Vote your conscience in the primaries. It’s going to be between Sanders and Clinton, so just pick the one you like best. You can even write in a different candidate! It’s easy!
After the primaries, the party apparatus will be working to promote the winner, who will face off against the Republicans, who actually are the Evil Party. Maybe your favorite did not get the final nomination, but that’s the nature of politics, compromise. Hold your nose and vote for the non-Republican, whoever it is. It’s OK. You have to refocus and get a job done, and it is the nature of American politics that trying to stick with your ideal candidate who does not have the consensus of the party is futile, and can only aid the opposition.
But, you are saying, you are an idealist and want to see your philosophical and social utopia implemented in government now, and the official candidate falls short! This is true. But, I will point out, the president is one person, and has limited power to implement your goals while in office, and if your dreams are all so narrowly aimed at that one office, you’re never ever going to see them come true.
If your candidate isn’t the final nominee for president, vote for the nominee in the election anyway, and before the election, pay attention to that mob of rat-fucking assholes in congress. Are you for Bernie, but Hillary gets the nod? Work to get more progressive socialists into congress right now. Are you for Hillary, but somehow Bernie rides an unlikely populist wave to the White House? Buckle down and get more pragmatic women elected to represent you. Run for local office yourself! Don’t forget that there are also these midterm elections that always have reduced voter turnout.
I’m just saying that if your ideological position doesn’t get the White House, the best response is to then turn your passion to those other branches of government, congress and the courts. If your hero doesn’t snag the national office, get more heroes into state and local government.
Also, please, pay attention to the media. They want to see the spectacle of Bernie fanatics battling Hillary fanatics. They are intentionally feeding that antagonism, because they don’t want to see the electorate focused on fixing problems — fixing things never gets the goggle-eyed viewership of ongoing catastrophes. Don’t let yourself be used.
Personally, I’m voting for Sanders in the Minnesota caucus, but will vote without hesitation for Clinton next November, if she’s the Democratic candidate.
I’ll also vote for Franken and Klobuchar, my two Democratic senators.
I wish I could vote for a liberal local representative, but in rural Minnesota, we only get anti-choice assholes.
I won’t be running for office myself, because a) the electorate out here would not vote for an open atheist, and b) my social skills are nonexistent. I’m best off being walled up in a cave, sending out wordy missives that don’t require people to ever interact with me.
Both of your Senators are up for reelection in the same year?
Very good: I’ve shared this on my Facebook page.
Vote for the very best candidate in the primaries and hope they become the Democrat nominee. Vote for the Democrat nominee in the general election regardless of who it is; any Democrat is better than any Republican.
I haven’t read up on what further weaknesses Sanders has revealed, but I’m already lukewarm at best on him. I’ll definitely hold my nose and vote for him in the primary, and if he wins it I’ll vote for him in the general election without hesitation.
If Clinton wins the primary, I’m not so certain.
Because your post glosses over the “Obama problem.” Namely, the fact that there are plenty of Democrats who are almost as evil (or just as evil) as Republicans, and that an evil Democrat can be more damaging than a more evil Republican because by virtue of being a Democrat, they establish it as Common Wisdom that the evil things they do are the liberal option and give the Republicans the option to be even more evil.
Obama was swept into office promising health care reform, economic stimulus, the closure of Guantanamo, and an end to executive overreach. Once in office, he opposed all four of those things; “compromising” the first two with ineffective half-measures and blocking the second two outright. Overall, he proved pretty much identical to Bush. Yet by virtue of having a (D) after his name, the media as a whole announced as common wisdom that he was a liberal, the right declared him a socialist, and people unsatisfied with the results of his right-wing policies (yet too ill-informed to understand the politics involved) have now begun to consider the Republicans as a legitimate alternative.
If we had a liberal president who actually delivered the promises Obama campaigned on, the Republicans wouldn’t even be a viable party in 2016 (if only because most of their prominent figures would be in prison). Voting for the Democrat no matter what because the Republicans are the Party of Evil only serves the Republicans in the next election by blurring the lines between the two parties, and it serves the cause of Evil overall by giving both parties leave to become even more evil; if a right-wing Democrat is declared a “liberal,” it lets the Republicans move further to the right and if a right-wing Democrat can win the vote of the liberal base it gives the Democrats greater reason to think they can take the base for granted and move further to the right to try and capture Republican votes.
Jake:
Maybe you ought to just get out of the whole voting thing. If you see Hillary Clinton as some sort of Manchurian candidate from the Republican side, this might not be for you.
Perhaps you care to read this view on Hillary Clinton by Melissa McEwan. While you’re at it, go read some more by Stefanie Zvan (yes, inspired by Melissa McEwan as well). Please be aware: By viewing Clinton as a right-wing candidate in disguise, you might just be buying into decades of propaganda from the Republicans and their cronies.
And don’t forget that even Sanders does not have a very coherent plan for magicking his ideas into reality. I have a good guess that even if he is elected president, people will have much to be disappointed about after four years – just like with Obama. As PZ tells us, Sanders and Clinton are both only human.
Well said.
We can’t afford to take “baby steps!” There are real problems that need to be dealt with now (e.g. climate change, foreign policy, income inequality, corporate corruption, etc.) and can’t wait for some great liberal awakening that might never come. We need some in power who will use the position as president to speak out on these issue, something I guarantee a warmongering, Wall-Street-bought politician like Ms. Clinton won’t do.
This is not so much about “purity” as it is “priority,” and I don’t think Hillary Clinton has those priorities at heart.
I simply cannot understand the point of view that Obama has been “pretty much identical to Bush”. Speaking as someone far to the left of most US politics (and indeed far to the left of most politics in the country where I live), the differences between Bush and Obama are stark and obvious on a huge number of issues.
On social issues the gap between Bush and Obama couldn’t be wider, on pretty much every issue from same sex marriage to abortion to race relations.
On economic issues, Obama, while a centrist, is a keynesian. I can’t begin to imagine the horrifying mess of a stimulus package that Bush or a Bushlike Republican would have forced through in 2009 but it isn’t pretty.
On healthcare, I would prefer single payer (and actually would prefer a national health service) but anything that gets more people covered is a step in the right direction.
On foreign policy, I would have preferred a less hawkish president, but Obama’s hard line is the hard line of Bill Clinton (police actions and airstrikes) not the hard line of Bush and Cheney (invasions, occupations, and cash grabs).
Obama is a centrist Democrat. There’s vast amounts of clear blue water between a centrist Democrat and a neoconservative Republican, and those who can’t see this either have short memories or very skewed perspectives.
As a woman of a certain age, I’ve watched Hillary’s career for many years. I simply don’t understand the problem that so many Democrats have with her. She’s worked hard for many years, especially for women and children. I’ve contributed to The Clinton Foundation a few times because of the good work that the Foundation has been doing for women and children in this country and all over the world.
Hillary is a consummate politician, and I think that is exactly what we need right now. She has experience with working with other politicians as well as with other world leaders. She pointed out last night that she understands exactly what diplomacy and negotiating means.
I’m all for Hillary and I have been since before she declared her candidacy.
Agreed! I wish you would post this on Daily Kos and other sites.
And both will also most likely to have to deal with at least one house of Congress in the hands of the Rethuglicans. One cannot do much as President if you are stymied at every proposal by the do-nothings. Which is why voting down the ballot is also crucial.
More important than congress are your state and local representatives. The federal government can only do so much and your state and county legislature can really screw things up. Whatever you do, vote. Every cycle! And get involved at the local level. It’s easy and sort of fun too. I hosted an event and got to meet one of my past governors. In my own back yard!
ianrennie @9: Well said. Note also that Obama (like Bill Clinton) would have been a strong favorite to win a third term. Democrats like him a lot, on balance, and some Sanders supporters seem not to understand this. Bernie is clearly a good guy, and pushing the debate left is a good thing, but I’m starting to see way too much antagonism and flailing about. That doesn’t help.
Thanks for the much-needed dose of perspective, PZ.
The big winner of last night’s debates? Democrats. Those two candidates, with their flaws and their strengths, delivered a debate that was the best one we’ve seen so far.
No one promised to carpet bomb parts of the Middle East like Republican candidates. They discussed the problem of toxic water in Flint, Michigan without lying about it like Ted Cruz did. Neither Sanders nor Clinton included their poll numbers as an arbiter of virtue like Donald Trump does.
From Taegan Goddard on Politicalwire:
I’ll be voting for the only Dem candidate I can – the one that did not vote for the AUMF. Seems time hasn’t rid me of my promise to never vote for anyone who supported it.
Both Sanders (in the House) and Clinton (in the Senate) voted for the AUMF
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/107-2002/h455
then we’re talking about different AUMFs
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll342.xml
Apologies for the confusion.
My bad :) There are more AUMFs than there should be.
@M’thew 6:
You attack a straw man (I never said that Clinton was working for the Republicans; I said that supporting evil Democrats tends to make both parties more evil). You declare that because I disagree with you, I shouldn’t bother to vote. And then you post two links purportedly defending Clinton that make no actual arguments in her defense— no liberal policies she supports, no conservative positions she has repudiated, no evidence she is no longer in Wall Street’s pocket or willing to support pointless wars. Both of your links can be summarized as: “Anyone who opposes Clinton does so because of sexism and for no other reason.”
@ianrennie 9:
On social issues, the gap between Bush and Obama isn’t as wide as you might think. Bush and Obama opposed same-sex marriage and supported DADT and DOMA; that the latter was overruled is not a point in his favor. Bush opposed abortion rights eagerly while Obama tends to oppose them reluctantly but an anti-choice bill being passed is still an anti-choice bill being passed and whether the President salivates at the prospect of signing it or holds his nose and signs it in order to convince the Republicans not to shut down the government is immaterial. On race relations, Bush and Obama both tend to support the media narrative that racism was a bad thing that ended forever in 1965; Obama makes speeches alluding to the subject but hasn’t taken any action.
On economic issues and health care, you make the mistake of giving Obama credit for what he opposed simply because he signed it in the end. I’d prefer single payer health care as well, but it’s important to remember that when the Democrats controlled the entire legislature and could pass anything they wanted, Obama was the one twisting their arms asking them to water down their proposals. I’d sooner give the Republicans credit for the ACA; after all, they wrote it.
On foreign policy, the distinction between Bush and Obama is one of tactics. Both support war. Both support the mass murder of brown people on the other side of the planet. Both support ruining the lives of powerless people who can’t object. Exactly how they go about doing it is immaterial.
Meanwhile, on non-war aspects of foreign policy, both Bush and Obama support the cooperative surveillance state in which America and a handful of other western powers work together to ensure the right to privacy evaporates throughout the formerly-free world. And if you check the news recently, you’ll notice that the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership was recently signed and will be presented to Congress for ratification— a destructive treaty negotiated by Obama and supported by Obama worse than any international agreements Bush came up with.
SCOTUS, Jake, SCOTUS.
There’s a fair chance the next president will get to nominate a replacement for 3 to 4 of the current justices. Can you even begin to imagine what 30 to 40 more years of Citizens United-type rulings would do to this country, and the world?
Wider than you think….Which means you aren’t being realistic, rather ideologistic.
SCOTUS nominees will be far different with a dem vs. rethug. But you are too blinded with your ideology to consider wider ramifications like that.
Apparently beergoggles@16 can’t understand that some people can learn from their mistakes. An apparently someone who changes their mind when the available evidence changes is unfit for high office.
I don’t get a vote here, being Canadian, but I can tell you that we will be horrified and frightened if any republican candidate gets elected president. The leader of the USA has the power to basically blow up the world along with the leaders of China and Russia too, of course.
That being so I cannot imagine anyone refraining from voting for the candidate, however badly he or she may perform otherwise, who is at least the most likely to avoid blowing up the entire world.
Elections confuse me too much, because I’m such an absolutist: I tend to think that mass murderers are absolutely disqualified. That’s why I supported Obama for his first term. He promised to close Gitmo, end torture, leave Iraq, and just generally sounded like someone who wouldn’t commit mass murder.
…and then he went and greatly increased the frequency of drone strikes, personally authorized by himself, and oversaw the implementation of “signature strikes” in which nobody even knows who they’re shooting their missiles at. And promulgated the doctrine, which even Bush was afraid to do, that the President could declare anyone in the world an enemy combatant on his say-so, and then kill them with missiles fired from drones.
So for his second time around, the choice was between an incumbent mass murderer, and a challenger who promised on the campaign trail that given half a chance he would be an even bigger mass murderer than his rival. So which candidate deserved the “NO mass murder at all” vote?
This time around we have Clinton versus Sanders (versus a playground full of bullies vowing to prove that the world ain’t seen mass murder until it’s seen their brand of mass murder). Clinton served in a mass murdering administration, and shows every sign of being as hawkish as her predecessors, so all she has going for her is the technicality that she never personally ordered anyone killed. Then we have Sanders, who benefits from the same technicality, but who also vows to make war a “last resort” and to substitute diplomacy for unilateral military action.
Since it’s practically a given that Clinton will get the nomination, it’s going to boil down to Clinton vs Trump or Cruz. Which one deserves the “NO mass murder at all” vote?
Sigh. I realize that I’ll simply be told that I’m an unrealistic dreamer. But to me it’s perfectly analogous to choosing a college president, say, who is great across any metric of college presidenting, but who murders people from other colleges (and reserves the right to murder his own students if they “threaten the interests of the college”). Is it really acceptable to hire the one with the lowest body count? Or the one for whom murder is so far merely an aspiration?
If you are a one-issue only selection for your candidate, you don’t understand how to select somebody to vote for.
You need to look at the totality of what a candidate/party does and thinks on all issues, rather than just that one issue. If you are overly pure about that one issue, you are down your own rabbit hole.
The differences regarding Obama v Bush? Huge, in outlook and intelligence. But at this point, who cares? The difference between Sanders or Clinton v any of the potential Republicans? More than at any time in the past 100 years, including Hoover v Roosevelt. It may well be that all the Republican candidates are just pandering to the ‘base’, but even if they don’t actually mean what they say, their incompetence is palpable. Every single one of them comes across as an immoral buffoon compared to almost any decent human, let alone either of the two Democrats. Anyone who does not vote because they say they cannot support whichever Democrat wins the nomination is asking for one of these fools to become the next president. Wanting a better candidate is understandable, but how will allowing the country to be pushed closer to ruin help in any way?
This argument comes up here and elsewhere every election. I understand it to an extent. The Democrats have played the Republican Lite game for decades. But the way our system works, stupid as it is, means we have to hold our noses and vote for one of two candidates every four years, or not vote at all. The Republicans are going to vote. They get their hateful, fearful base riled up. It’s about all they do or stand for at this point. Hate and fear are great motivators for passion and action. Republicans have also worked hard to keep those who oppose them from even being able to vote, so it’s more important than ever that anyone who does oppose them gets to the polls.
Don’t like the choices? Then get more involved. Run for local office. Lots of offices are going vacant, at least in small towns like the one I live in. Or bad candidates are elected unopposed. I am on my local school board. If you cannot run yourself, help someone at the local or state level whom you can support. The Republicans have beten us at this game, too.
I will gladly vote for either Sanders or Clinton. I have mixed feelings about both of them, just as I did about Obama. But if I don’t vote for one of them, I really will be saying that the other choice — whichever egomaniacal fool the Republicans settle on — is fine by me. I’d find that hard to live with.
I posted my comment before reading what A Masked Avenger wrote ate 25. I was not aiming my comment at anyone in particular. I actually completely agree with the assessment of Obama. My wife has been able to stay enthusiastic about him; I don’t know how. Still, the choice was not difficult for me when he was up for re-election. I didn’t vote happily, but I had a clear choice nonetheless.
A Masked Avenger @ 25:
So, your argument is that “Meh, whichever” is a superior moral position?
Either the frontrunner Democrat or the frontrunner Republican is going to be in the White House come next year. You can help one outcome, you can help the other outcome, or you can decide that the difference between those outcomes isn’t worth your vote. If it’s the latter, why bother entering the conversation at all? Seriously, I’m asking. If you truly don’t care, why not just shrug and walk away?
Aw, thanks for your patronizing!
So do you judge potential employees, bosses, romantic partners, friends, business partners, etc., on “the totality of what the person does/thinks on all issues,” and disregard the fact that they serially rape women on the grounds that they’re awfully good in other areas?
Should I get my Bill Cosby records back out of the trash after all?
Would you like to explain your reasoning to the mothers of the children shredded by Obama’s missiles? And of the first responders slaughtered by the second strike, in a strategy known as “double tap”?
“Dear bereaved mother: I’m sorry for the loss of your children, but at least we got Obamacare. Love, An American.”
Yep. And when one of two rapists is going to be your next boss, you’re morally bound to pick the less rapey rapist–and then you can also enjoy moral superiority over the ones who supported the other guy, because they must be inferior if they support a rapier rapist than the rapist you supported.
Also, you get to be smug about the deluded fantasists who blubber about wanting a boss who isn’t a rapist at all. Because that’s great when you’re 2, and really believe that Horton heard a Who, but this is reality we’re talking about.
Ed Seedhouse@24,
Sure people are capable of learning from their mistakes. But that doesn’t entitle them to my vote.
I have certain lines that candidates don’t get to cross to get my vote. They can backtrack once they think it’s safe, but I will judge them on their actual votes when it wasn’t safe because that’s the only concrete evidence I have for how they perform when it matters.
A Masked Avenger
I’m not sure what your advocating here as regards to this upcoming election. It sounds to me like your position is: Since either candidate will be a turd, I should not vote. Thereby absolving myself of any responsibility for who wins.
If that is your position, I’m afraid I don’t see how that is remotely helpful for anyone.
I’m raising a question that’s difficult to answer, given that any one of us has at most a 1/129,235,000 share of the say, and given the role of the party in pre-selecting the candidates for the primaries, considerably less than that.
But a start would be acknowledging the existence of the problem, at least to the extent of realizing that any good done by any recent president is being done by a mass murderer. So for example going to a rally for a mass murderer and cheering for them would be, at minimum, most incongruous.
It would also help to acknowledge that there’s something significantly fucked up in a system that presents us with, at best, the choice between the lesser of two mass murderers (or one actual and one wannabe mass murderer). If anyone blathered about making Shermer or Grothe a leader in the atheist movement citing “the totality of what they think/do on all issues,” and accept the occasional rape as the price one pays for leadership, they would be rightly shouted down as a shitstain completely lacking in moral sensibility. The fact that we have a method of discourse designed to avoid the reality that our incumbents have been mass murderers, and our next ruler will be a mass murderer if they aren’t already complicit in prior mass murders, indicates a seriously fucked up system.
And bear in mind that it’s incidental that we’re talking about a few hundred (or thousand) brownish foreigners being murdered. The nature and magnitude of the crime is irrelevant. If Obama had nuked Afghanistan, would that have been enough to make anyone here vote for Romney? Particularly given that Romney would no doubt have campaigned on promises not to be as “soft on terrorism” as Obama, and vowing that as President he would have dropped TWO nukes?
Our national dialogue is based on denial of the problem. Your post would have been equally apropos in any election prior to 1865, in which both candidates were pro slavery. And we’d have the same dismissal of people “throwing away their vote” on third party candidates like James Birney of the Liberation Party because he didn’t stand a chance and his abolitionist platform was therefore irrelevant. (He got 2.3% of the popular vote.)
Or if you argue that electing a mass murderer is acceptable, if that’s what the people want, then that calls in question the basic premise of a Constitutional Republic, that some things are out of bounds regardless how many people want it. By that argument, slavery was also acceptable right up until it wasn’t.
I’ve never understood the idea that voting for a compromise candidate is somehow sullying your hands. This isn’t about you. Stuff the bullshit analogies, this is not a job interview, this is not picking a life partner, this is about who is going to run a globe-spanning empire, together with the most deadly military force the world has ever known, for the next four years. Like it or not, that person is going to wind up responsible for some things you’re going to disagree with – that person is going to wind up responsible for some things they, themselves, will likely regret. Even Jimmy fkn Carter has blood on his hands, and he’s the closest thing to a pacifist we’ve elected in… probably ever.
You want better candidates? Get involved. Like PZ says, watch your local races, encourage the people you like, or throw your hat in the ring yourself. Your messiah is not going to just appear out of nowhere – you’re going to need to help create the environment in which your ideas can flourish.
And most of all, write to your representatives and let them know what you think, and encourage others to do the same.
This is the real meat of it – when you stay home because nobody’s living up to your standards, and the people whose ideas you oppose do come out and vote, they win. And when the losing party looks around, they’re not going to see the people who didn’t vote. They’re going to see the side that won, and say “how can we be more like them?” There’s little incentive for them to listen to feckless, “principled” non-participants.
So get your party’s candidate in office, and then make their lives hell. Let them know that they owe you, and they better keep you happy. The only time a politician has to listen to their constituency is when they have one.
I voted for Obama. He proceeded to murder people at an even higher rate than Bush. Thank you VERY much for telling me that my hands are nevertheless clean, but frankly, fuck you. Explain it to the parents of the murdered children.
So is this all about your hands being clean?
Because then I’m going to tell you not voting doesn’t get you that, either. If you don’t vote at all, when you could have, that still makes you responsible for the result.
They know that they owe you fuck-all, because you’re sure as fuck not voting for the Republican. And knowing they can count on your vote regardless what they do, they’re too intelligent to waste their energy trying to make you happy.
Um, how the fuck have *I* become the center of the discussion? Why are the dead children and first responders not front and center in this discussion? It seems we’ll engage in any contortion imaginable rather than directly confront what our rulers are doing in our name. The same rulers we’re voting for, and attending rallies for, and discussing in any way at all without a preface like, “He/she is a mass murderer who by all rights should be on trial at the Hague, but…”
@Jake Harban 21
“On race relations, Bush and Obama both tend to support the media narrative that racism was a bad thing that ended forever in 1965”
All right, I’m out. Someone who could not only write something like this but actually believe it isn’t shopping for reason so I can’t be bothered trying to sell it.
Have fun with your ideological purity while effecting no change in the world whatsoever.
@ianrennie
But they are effecting change – in the wrong direction.
@ianrennie 40
Yeah well, the same poster said “the Democrats controlled the entire legislature and could pass anything they wanted” without apparently realizing that the process involved persuading the most right-wing Dems to go along with it. It was a political triumph for Obama & Pelosi & Reid to get as much as they did. Or as Biden put it, a BFD.
@A Masked Avenger 39
I don’t think anyone is trying to imply that dead innocents don’t matter. The problem I and others have is that you seem to think that it is morally acceptable to treat the election of the next POTUS as a single-issue decision with respect to your “no mass-murderer” stance. If we are forced to choose between 2 candidates that are both likely to use military power to end lives, then it behoves us to cast our vote for the one that gives the HIGHEST probability of a LOWER body count.
You seem to like analogies, so here’s one. Before you are two persons about to be killed, and two buttons. The button on the left will kill only one person, while the button on the right will kill both. If you leave without pressing either button, one of them will be pressed at random anyway. Since you had the chance to mitigate the loss of life and did not take it, I think you would then be morally and ethically responsible for the loss of the second life should you walk away. Any protestations of the unfairness of the choice won’t mean squat to person who could have been saved. This is the danger of rigid, “absolutist” moral stances.
Masked Avenger: what action do you propose? Throwing up your hands in disgust doesn’t stop the mass murders.
Joeeggen @43
Thank you, I like that comment very much.
HIGHER rate than Bush?
There is exaggeration. There is hyperbole.
And then there is this.
To those who think a single issue gives you permission not to vote: when in doubt, vote for the candidate that will do the least harm. Given the clear and conclusive differences between the two parties, that means vote democrat. If you won’t do that, you do more harm to the rest of the population. That is your reason for not being a single issue voter, voting for an nonviable candidate out of ideological purity. You essentially cast a vote to the candidate causing the most harm. That is what you will have on your conscious.
Regardless of whether Sanders is “experienced” enough or “can get things done”. It is ludicrous for anyone to suggest that any of her opinions matter when her and her husband have received hundreds of millions of dollars for their support. Thier views on things do not matter when they constantly say one thing and then do another.
Does anyone here actually believe Clinton is going to crack down on the the banks and bribery that goes on in our government?
If the answer is yes I would honestly like to know how you can believe that when all the evidence shows she will not.
I don’t know if Sanders, once he becomes president, will somehow transform into a warmongering, bribe taking, oligarchy supporting democrat. All we have is his track record we have known Sanders for 50 years his past is an open book. If his cunning plan was to be ethical for 50 years and then in his 70s rise to seize power and then show us his true colors well it worked on me.
@42
It is funny that they neglected the little datapoint of DINO’s. There’s always been a decent amount of right-leaning democrats and borderline republicans in congress, perfectly willing to associate with the Tea Party, NRA, and other such groups.
@#42, petesh
You are ignoring what actually happened. Are you young enough that you weren’t aware of the process, or are you just revising history to make yourself feel better? There were several points when they had a bill which supposedly had enough support to pass, and then they threw progressive parts out because Obama specifically wanted some Republicans to support the bill. When the Republicans refused to do so, rather than restoring the progressive parts, it was left compromised. And — and if you want I can dig up the sources for this — after the ACA passed, Obama’s aides admitted that Obama, himself, was the one who shut down all discussion of both single-payer and a public option. He went around telling Democrats that they had to shut up because Republican support was needed. Furthermore, one of the aides admitted that the bill which eventually passed was what Obama had been hoping for all along — he never even wanted single-payer or a public option or anything like that.
(And all of that is ignoring the fact that the ACA was nothing but a huge red herring to distract everyone from the fact that the Democrats refused to do anything about the banks. Polls were showing over 90% support — across all demographics — for breaking up the “too big to fail” banks, back in 2009, and throwing the executives in jail. If the Democrats had led with action on that front, they would have basically been able to set their own agenda for years, and the Republicans would have been faced with some extremely awkward questions from the voters if they had tried to obstruct the process. The ACA was a way to throw away the genuine mandate from the voters and hope nobody would notice.)
@#43, joeeggen
Actually, we aren’t forced to choose between 2 candidates. There’s a Green Party as well. So, to use your metaphor, there’s a third button which kills nobody. So why are you telling everyone we have a responsibility to kill someone, again?
@#47, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
So, the Green Party again, then? Nice to see them getting some endorsements.
OK, there’s three buttons. The first button kills two people, the second button kills one person, the third button kills nobody. If you push no button, then someone else will push a button at random.
Naturally, the only correct choice is to push the second button, because that kills only one person instead of two. The third button would kill nobody, but you obviously aren’t going to push that button, so pushing it is the same as pushing the first button that kills two people.
@50
I suppose a better rephrasing of Nerd would be “when in doubt, vote for the candidate that will do the least harm, and has a chance in hell of winning.”
A Masked Avenger @ 34:
…except that slavery violated someone’s basic human rights and a major party candidate’s winning an election doesn’t.
But ok, if electing either of them is unacceptable in a Constitutional Republic, what will you do when one of them wins? Appeal to your local County Sheriff? Sit there and just not accept it until it stops being true?
The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) @ 50:
So, the last time the Green Party won a national election, the US didn’t kill anyone for the length of their term? Impressive!
Hunh, come to think of it, the US didn’t kill anyone the last time I was President, either. I guess you should vote for me!
I will tentatively suggest that when the absolute best, the political high-water mark of your party’s experience is that 97% of the people who voted disagreed with your choice of candidate – a success which you certainly can’t aspire to this cycle – perhaps you’re not actually what the people want.
Jake Harban @ 51:
Actually, the third button is just labeled “kills no-one”. Nobody has ever been able to actually determine what would happen if it was pressed.
But hell, in politics, things always do what they’re labeled, so…
Jake Harbin @ 51
The buttons are hooked up to a machine, the first one sends the signal to kill one (democrat), the second button sends the signal to kill both (republican), and there’s a bunch of other smaller buttons of various quality and make(third parties), these last ones are just for show and aren’t hooked up to the machine. The machine is on a timer (voting day), since you have clicked on one the other buttons which do nothing, the machine randomly decides on the outcome of the two buttons actually wired into the machine.
Without a strong presence in Congress from which a party can actually have a presence on the polls, you aren’t going to get the nomination or even into the White House, just like every time they have fronted a presidential candidate. The way the American voting system is set up guarantees that third party candidates will always lose in today’s political climate. Would it be nice to have a Green Party candidate in the White House? Hell yes. Are they going to get in anytime in the next couple decades? Hell no. They lack the numbers and presence in big government to have any strong political pull in caucuses, primaries or any such things.
Hell, just look at their poll numbers over the years. Its abysmal. And this is why The Vicars harping on people to vote for the Green Party or other third party candidates betrays his rank idiocy when it comes to the harsh reality of voting. We don’t get to decide on the better of two candidates until we get rid of Republicans permanently, and good luck with trying to do that. The harsh reality of voting in America is voting for for the lesser of two evils or wasting your vote on trying to not have blood on your hands.
the way this voting system works is the one with the majority of the votes wins.
Does not matter what the actual number is at all, could be only 2% of the eligible voters voted the winner is the one with the majority of the votes cast.
So if you do not like any of the major party candidates you can vote for someone else and encourage others to do the same but simply not voting at all will do nothing to make it any different.
If you think some where else is better go there and join with the people there. If you find no where any better then drop out to the ascetics cave because complaining about it and advocating none involvement at the same time makes no sense to me.
I do understand the frustration I too was dumb founded with the process that got the ACA enacted.
Obama is just not a rebel leader nor someone who revels in confrontation he is a consensus kind of guy with a conscious but he has not proven to be anyone who could be out front which is why he got elected don’t forget he was not very scary to most people.
uncle frogy
I could never vote for a warhawk like Clinton. I could never live with myself if I voted for a person I knew would enact foreign policy decisions that would lead to violent conflict over resources.
Anyways, we’ve got every reason to believe Clinton would be almost exactly like Obama and it’s hard to express the disaster that has been, more torture, more indefinite detentions, more invasions, more ruinous trade agreements, more baffling energy policy decisions, more trillion dollar bailouts to the financial sector and at least a dozen other things that haven’t immediately jumped to the forefront of my mind.
I am curious what people think about if the one who gets the final nomination for the Democratic Party, should the other be chose as the vice presidential candidate? I think this duo would win no matter who the Republicans pick.
Might also set the stage for Sanders resigning the presidency for “health reasons” upon securing re-election, and handing over the reins to Clinton. The mass headsplosion would be grand to witness.
True, but the other two buttons do as labeled. Even if the third button injures someone it’s still better than either alternative.
So you’re saying that votes for third parties literally aren’t counted? Or that if a third party receives a majority vote, this is ignored?
If not, then the other buttons are hooked up to the machine and functional. The only reason why the Green Party isn’t a valid option is because you aren’t going to push it, therefore pushing it would be a waste of your chance to push a button.
Without a strong presence in Congress from which a party can actually have a presence on the polls, you aren’t going to get the nomination or even into the White House, just like every time they have fronted a presidential candidate.
What does that mean? Someone has won the Green Party nomination every election for decades— that they haven’t won the general election is another story.
The way the American voting system is set up guarantees that third party candidates will always lose in today’s political climate.
Exactly. If you want your vote to matter at all, you have to choose between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. No other parties stand a chance.
Oh wait.
This argument is ultimately circular— you assume the Greens can’t win, therefore you oppose them as not politically viable. Because you oppose them, they have no chance to win, and you point to that as confirmation that your decision to oppose them was justified.
It can’t be done as long as the Democrats and Republicans maintain their symbiotic relationship in which the Republicans move to the right, the Democrats move further to the right in the hopes of swinging a few Republican voters, the left votes for the Democrats anyway and implicitly blesses the move, the Republicans move even further to the right to differentiate themselves, and the Democrats move further to the right to try and keep up their appeal among Republican voters.
Of course, that cozy arrangement only works as long as the Democrats can justifiably take their base for granted. The minute the Democrats have to worry that their latest atrocity might cost them an election by convincing disgusted liberal voters to back a third party is the beginning of the end for the Republicans— once the Dems are forced to earn the liberal vote, they will move back to the center and if the Republicans don’t follow them then the Republicans become a third party.
We’ll teach those Democrats to earn those liberal votes – at the cost of civil rights for the next twenty years.
Vote for the democrat, then work to select better candidates for the democrats next time, at all levels. If you can’t get the democratic party to elect someone to the left, what hope do you have of getting the country at large to do it?
Meanwhile, continue to work towards getting proportional representation, allowing you to attempt vote alternative parties like green into office without handing victory to the republicans.
@61
Yep.
“Man fuck those guys for shooting me in the foot occasionally. I’ll shoot myself in the chest instead – that’ll teach them!”
Jake Harbin, I can unequivocally say that you are completely deluded when it comes to the viability of the Green party or other third party candidates. Look at the poll rankings and numbers for Green Party numbers in national votes.
Numbers of overall votes for years 1996: 0.71% for Ralph Nader, 2000: 2.74% for Ralph Nader, 2004: 0.10% for David Cobb, 0.12% for Cynthia McKinney, 2012: 0.36% for Jill Stein. Look at those numbers. Really look at them. You think this year is going to be any different?
Do you honestly believe that the Green Party has a chance of winning over 50% of the national votes to get into office this year? Because if you do, you seriously need to get your head recalibrated. In addition here is the number of Congressional members: 0. Their numbers for every year of voting for any congressional seat have been less than 1%. They have literally no presence within the major governing body of our country. They hold only 67 local positions nationwide. 67 positions at local levels in the entire nation. You want a viable third party? They need at least 1 member of Congress, and a fuckton of local positions, at least in the thousands. That shows that they might have some actual political clout and ability to actually govern a nation. Right now it’s just a small bunch of people talking a good talk but failing epically to capture the hearts of the nation and demonstrate they have actual power.
Build a fucking political base first instead of trying to catapult yourself to head honcho of an empire on the dreams of the disillusioned minority. Until then, you’re going to either get in the the muck we plebs fight in for the actual seat of power or you can sit in the bleachers all white and pure and heckle us people actually doing something to keep people from suffering under Republican rule.
Since nobody here – including our esteemed host – has raised the question of the Electoral College, I feel a need to shine a light in that direction. (Content warning: Situational Ethics ahead!)
Much as I deplore Clinton (for anyone wondering about the irascible non-sequiturs in comments # 3 & 4 of M’thew’s 2nd link @ # 6: those replace a deleted comment by me citing HRC’s war-mongering & pro-plutocrat tendencies), I fully expect to vote for her in November, though I plan to vote, with much less reluctance, for Sanders in the primary.
However, Clinton has more money behind her, and our modern Democrats have long since passed the level of corruption where that overrides all else, so her nomination seems inevitable. Had I chosen to settle in a state where either of the major parties has unquestioned predominance, I could cast my ballot into the wind for Jill Stein or someone else who actually has and supports progressive principles, in hopes of building up a party which does not nauseate me.
But, I live in Florida, where the major-partisan balance is often too close to call, and where the 2000 debacle clearly proved the dangers of “third-party” quixoticism. Those who live and vote in states with some room for margin have a space where matching ballots with consciences makes political sense, and many of the above comments’ arguments apply; the rest of us don’t enjoy that luxury.
Wrong delusional asshole. Show me numbers of the Greens polling even above 1% of the likely voter nationally. That isn’t even viable, which requires numbers in the 30-40% region at this stage. Until then, keep your delusions to yourself.
But Nerd, clearly my act of voting green will shift people out of their deeply entrenched party affiliations and make the party viable.
That’s exactly the point— do you seriously think you’re the only person who’d rather see a Green but votes for a Democrat you hate on the assumption the Greens can’t win? You’re still making a fundamentally circular argument; people assume the Greens can’t win, therefore they oppose the Greens, meaning the Greens don’t have enough support to win.
Except that anytime anyone actually tries to build a political base, we run into loonies like you declaring that it’s futile and we should give up and vote for whichever of the Established candidates is the lesser evil.
It seems that you have already decided that you’re omniscient and don’t actually need to read or comprehend what other people are saying before you spew out a reply.
For example, you say that I’m “completely deluded” on the subject of the Green Party’s viability yet you don’t actually know what I believe on the subject. Exactly how viable do you think I think the Green Party is in 2016? It’s rather critical, yet rather than figure out what I believe, you simply assumed I believed something silly and beat up the straw man.
You also spelled my name wrong for good measure.
Yeah, if we don’t pledge our undying support to the Democratic Party, we may end up with a president who tortures political prisoners, assassinates American citizens without charge or trial, operates a massive surveillance state, and persecutes whistleblowers, all while giving a free pass to rich and powerful people who commit serious crimes.
How are you supposed to “work to select better candidates next time” when you’ve explicitly told the Democratic establishment, in no uncertain terms, that the last candidate has your support and can win? When was the last time any incumbent president faced a significant primary challenge?
How are you supposed to get the Democratic Party to elect a liberal if you keep voting for conservatives?
@68
Have whatever opinion you might want about the possibility of a green victory in 2016 that you want, but it’s hardly crazy to recognize that they’ve never managed to garner a viable amount of supporters.
Even if I supported and considered voting for the green party, I have next to no ability to counteract other people’s voting preferences. Given that I don’t have magic crowd-affecting “Vote green” powers, it’s not an unfair assumption that people will probably continue to treat this like a two-party game.
You don’t know what my opinion is, but that won’t stop you from assuming.
That’s irrelevant in more ways than one.
It’s irrelevant because you make the assumption that if someone has no support now, it is impossible for them to ever be supported in the future. It’s also irrelevant because a Green victory isn’t actually the goal (or rather, it’s the least likely of several equally desirable outcomes).
That’s a pity. Sanders doesn’t have a PAC or billionaire backers; he only has ordinary people like us with our apparently-nonexistent abilities to influence other people’s voting habits. I guess you must believe Sanders is not a viable candidate, then.
Jake Harban @ 60:
No, I’m saying that a third party that on it’s very best run barely got out of the margin of error of typical exit polls is not going to receive a majority of votes.
Or even a large minority of votes.
Or even a noticeable small minority of votes.
And as such it is not even going to influence policy by being able to deny it’s closest rivals a victory.
I find it a bit ironic that Green Party supporters tend to get up in arms about that (as far as I can tell false) story that they cost the Democrats Florida in 2000. Because honestly, that’s what you’re going for, right? Given that you’re not so delusional that you believe that you’ll win a national anytime soon, your only hope to change policy is to act as a spoiler for the Dems (’cause, let’s face it, Repubs aren’t going to vote for you. No matter how much you claim to not be able to tell the difference between the two major parties, they sure as hell don’t have the same problem with regards to you).
You guys should trumpet that story – it would have been a real victory for you: “Lookie, you didn’t please your most progressive elements well enough, and just barely enough of them voted for us, and you lost! See how relevant we are!”
As it was, your best showing so far has to been to almost – but not quite – be instrumental in causing 8 years of Republican control of the White House. That’s your party’s shining moment, it’s gift to posterity, it’s legacy… to be nearly powerful enough to make the Democrats lose to Bush.
Let me put it to you this way: what’s the most optimistic percentage of Democratic voters that you think you might flip? The best you actually believe possible.
Is it enough to cause the Dems to lose the general?
If so, does that result make you happy?
If not, why should they listen?
Yo, there was actually a reason why I worded that so ambiguously. I don’t claim to know what your opinions are about their viability.
I’d be more than willing to vote green, were they shown to have anything near a viable shot in the future. However, the fact that they might be viable someday will not motivate me to throw my vote into the wind and hope others do the same.
Given a likely evil, an equally likely lesser evil, and a crapshoot for a good person, I’ll vote the second one every time.
Sanders is a viable candidate by virtue of belonging to the democrat party. People tend not to change their party affiliation after their first vote, and I doubt lifelong democrat voters are going to flip Republican or third party if he gets nominated.
That being said, I’ll gleefully vote for Hillary too, despite the fact that I find her abhorrent, because she’s less abhorrent than any republican and has more of a chance of winning than any third party nomination.
Once again, this depends entirely on you and your insistence that the Democratic candidate must be supported No Matter What.
Fact is, the disaster of right wing rule really only became obvious to all in the runup to the 2008 election. In ’08, Obama promised to be a liberal and in ’12 he was an incumbent with all the advantages that entails. Now, though, we have the prospect of a right-wing Democrat running for a first term with a long history of staunch right wing votes before a populace increasingly discontent with right wing rule having been taunted with an alternative. If we can overcome the Democratic brand loyalty your people seem to be afflicted with, the Greens might manage 10% of the vote— especially if the people normally inclined to stay home can treat a Green vote as a protest.
The story is false (Gore won Florida). However, since I’m not a Green Party supporter, I’m not really in a position to speak on their behalf.
Not quite. A significant showing for the Greens wouldn’t merely act as a spoiler for the Dems, it would (a) teach the Dems not to take their base for granted, and (b) establish the Green Party as being hypothetically viable in the future— if 10% of likely Democratic voters flip to the Greens, it demolishes the idea that they can only ever earn a negligible number of votes, which makes them just prominent enough that they can’t be ignored.
I’m not sure why you’re addressing that advice to me, given that I’m not a member of the Green Party. Nor am I sure why you think it would be advantageous for the Greens to trumpet a false story. If anything, it would support the right; out of context and misinterpreted, it implies that liberals are an irrelevant minority that can be safely ignored by the Dems.
My party? What makes them “my” party? If being forced to vote Green for lack of other options makes the Greens “my” party, then you’re a Republican.
Maybe 10% if Clinton wins the primary and the country’s dire state can overcome voter apathy and Democratic brand loyalty.
Depends. Some polls suggest Clinton can’t beat Cruz or Trump regardless, but if Clinton could otherwise pull off a razor-thin margin in her favor then yes, it could cost her the election.
If Clinton is the Democratic nominee, then a happy result simply isn’t on the table. The only result we can hope for is the least unpleasant one, and the least unpleasant result is a strong showing for the Greens costing Clinton the election and teaching the Dems not to take their base for granted, followed by two years of Trump or Cruz before he’s neutered by a left-leaning Congress in 2018.
If you think a Clinton victory is preferable, then let me ask you this— how evil do the Democrats have to be before you stop supporting them? If 2024 sees a Trump or a Cruz running as a Democrat against a Republican who is even more evil, would you still support them? Where is the line your party loyalty won’t cross?
And before you dismiss the idea that someone of Trump’s beliefs might run as a Democrat in 2024, consider what you might have said if I told you in 1996 that voting for (Bill) Clinton would open the door to a Democrat further to the right than Dole running for office in 2008? The idea that any candidate, much less a Democrat, would openly support the executive power of the president to kill American citizens without charge or trial would have seemed absurd.
Take your delusional if and shove it where the sun don’t shine. You don’t have a cogent argument, any more than a godbot and their desire that their imaginary deity exists. Reality says that Greens are smidge on the left wing, just like the communists were for years (ever hear of Gus Hall?)
More evil than the rethugs. DUH. You aren’t making any smart arguments. Quit flailing about. You are embarrassing yourself and your cause.
My line is substantially higher than political radicalization is ever likely to cross.
I mean, sure, we could make up some silly hypothetical like “I’ll nuke every country party” vs “I’ll only nuke France party” vs “Modern day Green party” in which case I’d probably vote green, but I severely doubt that degree of radicalization will occur without people jumping ship en masse, because that would cross almost everyone’s lines.
As long as the democrats are to the left of the republicans, and no other party has a viable shot of winning, I’ll probably vote democrat. If my line does get crossed, almost everyone else’s line would get crossed too, making a third party viable.
I want that wall.
First of all, the distinction between the “greater” and “lesser” evil gets narrower all the time.
Second, you’re thinking short-term. The world won’t end in 2019.
Consider this— I offer you a choice of three options. You can give me permission to kill 100 people, give me permission to kill 1 person, or give me permission to kill 0 people.
If you choose the first option, I will kill 100 people, get away with it, and then offer the same choice to someone else.
If you choose the second option, I will kill 1 person, get away with it, and then offer the same choice to someone else.
If you choose the third option, I will kill 100 people, but without your permission I have no guarantee of getting away with it. The police will investigate my murders, and try to hunt me down. I will offer the same choice to someone else if I can, but no matter how clever I am at evading capture, I might still be arrested. And the more people I kill without permission, the more likely I will be to get arrested.
If you view only the very short term, you can make a convincing case that the second option is the best (or at least the least evil). After all, killing 1 person is far preferable to killing 100, and while choosing the third option keeps your hands blood-free it also results in 99 more people being killed. The problem is that endorsing my lesser evil gives me leave to keep doing it, and there’s no reason to think I’ll stop.
It’s true that choosing Option 3 hardly guarantees this mass murder will be my last; after all, I may well be able to evade the police after one unauthorized murder spree. However, withholding your consent for my evil is still the best option in the long term— and the more people who support that option are willing to take it, the more effective it becomes. Would you rather see 1,000 people dead and me in prison, or 10 people dead and me killing an average of 20 more people per week for the rest of your life?
It’s called the Democratic Party, and Sanders isn’t one of them. He’s an independent who has typically been loosely associated with them.
In that case, I’ll ask you too— where, if anywhere, do you draw the line? What thing is so abhorrent that you will refuse to support anyone who does it, even if they’re a Democrat running against a Republican who is worse?
srsly
Yeah, but it’s still there. How narrow it gets isn’t a contradiction.
Flawed comparison. I have access to the voting turnout data in the real world. Your thought experiment doesn’t have this.
1. Fuck off, typos happen, and are likely to happen again. Don’t be a pedant when I’ve never done the same to you.
2. Bad phrasing on my part. Running as a democrat, or “able to be nominated as a democrat” work just as well.
See @75.
But in short: significantly higher than politics are ever likely to get, and probably higher than the majority’s line.
So you would endorse any atrocity as long as someone else proposed a worse atrocity?
Mind you, I don’t actually expect a meaningful answer. I quoted the only sentence from your post that was even passingly coherent; at this point, you have clearly abandoned any pretense of rational debate in favor of spewing nonsensical insults.
Where, exactly, is it? Considering that our current president is a Democrat who supports a massive surveillance state, persecution of whistleblowers, torture of political prisoners, mass murder of brown foreign people, and assassination of American citizens and their families on his unquestioned word that they are criminals, it’s a serious question. If none of those things cross the line for you, I shudder to think of what would. Mass deportation of anybody of Hispanic descent regardless of citizenship status? Mass imprisonment of same? Mass murder?
Higher than that, considering I’d gleefully vote in favor of the things you listed when faced with the likely chance that someone who supports even worse could win.
The point is that if you’re making a calculation of how much you support each candidate vs. their odds of winning, the distinction matters; risking Clinton losing to play a long game with the Greens is much less foolhardy than risking Sanders.
The analogy maintains all the pertinent details; a choice between a greater evil, a lesser evil, and a protest that will be overruled by the greater evil but (potentially) leave lasting effects on people’s future decisions such that its short-term failure can contribute to an overall best outcome.
You know, I’ve never actually gotten a straight answer to that question. I can’t help but wonder if maybe there is no line, or that the Democratic die-hards just don’t want to admit that maybe they’ve already crossed it.
Appealing to “the majority” is a cop-out. The only reason you dismiss the Greens is because “the majority” opposes them. Of course, “the majority” consists of people who prefer the Greens but vote Democratic on the assumption that everyone else will do so; it’s all one big Abilene problem. Which means that promising to abandon the Democrats as soon as everyone else does simply creates a deadlock.
I guess, then, our disagreement is too deep to be resolved.
I simply cannot figure out how to debate someone who would eagerly support mass murder on the flimsiest of reasons.
I remain unconvinced said green party long game is actually an option on the table.
Still remain unconvinced that the “leaving lasting effects on people’s future decisions” part is a thing that will actually happen.
I very obviously do not think that the Democrats have already crossed it, given the fact that I would gladly vote for Obama over a worse option.
Hell, if Trump ran as a democrat in 2020 with the exact same platform, had the majority support to get nominated, and ran against someone even worse than him, I’d gladly vote for him too.
Regardless, if you’re looking for a “my line is exactly the point when democrats start advocating x” answer, you won’t get it. My line takes into account the other parties stances and their chances of winning. I’m also not really capable of thinking of every conceivable platform any party could make in the future.
Indeed, that appears to be the case.
As it is, I’m always going to choose the lesser evil, rather than vote for the greater evil or throw my vote away and allow the greater evil to win anyways.
And I will always choose the option which is the least evil overall, even if it allows a greater evil to win a temporary short-term victory.
Hence our disagreement being too deep to resolve.
Why help people now when you have a wildly unlikely chance of possibly helping people much much later?
Oh, and things will get much much worse for the foreseeable future.
Why would you endorse hurting people now on the hope that some wildly unlikely miracle will make things better in the future?
Suppose a Pakistani woman came to the United States to ask why her son was killed in our drone war. She asked you whether you supported Obama and his murder of her son. What would you say? Would you lie and say you voted against him? Would you tell her that you voted to put him in power but have no responsibility for anything he did? Would you tell her that you voted to put him in power, and claim you were justified because her son’s death was the “lesser evil?”
I’m glad you’re sufficiently privileged that you can casually dismiss the death of brown foreigners as “helping people,” but even claiming you had no other option won’t wash the blood off your hands.
And how, exactly, do you think anything will improve if you keep voting for people who intend to make it worse?
You’d have blood on your hands either way.
All 3 options (vote Republican, vote Democrat, vote Green and thereby let a Republican win) end up with drone strikes being authorized.
I’d say hey, talk to my friend Jake, he’d rather your whole country were nuked.
Do you seriously not understand the difference between endorsing something and opposing it? By your logic, you are responsible for every murder that happens in your home town because by failing to don a mask and cape and dedicate your life to fighting crime, you have “allowed” them to happen and thus become responsible for them.
Then in what sense is the Democrat the “lesser evil?” If anything, they’re the greater evil, because by virtue of being a Democrat they will establish the media narrative that drone strikes are an uncontroversial bipartisan tactic that everyone supports.
But then, your entire approach to voting seems to be based on the assumption that the world will end in 2019 and nothing anyone does will have any effect on future elections.
Or in other words, you’d lie and try to dodge the question.
It seems as though you’re trying to assuage your own guilty conscience. You endorsed drone strikes and now you’re desperately trying to convince yourself that you had no other option.
No, I just fail to be kept up at night by things that would happen no matter what choice I made. No action I made out of the three options I gave could have possible averted the aforementioned drone strike, so my answer would be “Yes, I voted for Obama, and I’m very sorry that happened.”
I’d be just as sad for her as anyone else that has a family member killed, but that’s about it.
To anyone who might be tempted to not vote if their preferred Democratic candidate does not get the nomination, please remember that Supreme Court nominations are coming up.
Further, withholding your vote is not going to change anything. Your game theory is flawed. If you do want to change something, then start getting involved in organizations that are trying to get a constitutional amendment passed to change the election system to a ranked preference voting system, instant run-off, or some other voting system besides biggest-plurality take all. Maybe even something radical like party rolls like party list proportional representation. Ex:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Hondt_method
We need a better election system, and that’s what would allow third party candidates to have a real shot at winning. That’s what will break the stranglehold of the bullshit two party system.
I’m going to have to agree and also disagree.
Unlike many people, I believe that staying silent in the face of evil makes one morally complicit and responsible. Of course, not to the same responsibility as the person actually committing the evil act. Further, it’s less moral responsibility than even a legal accomplice like a getaway driver.
However, that’s not an absolute rule. I do not expect nor demand that someone spends their entire life campaigning against evil. I understand and expect that many people will use most of their own time to tend to their own lives and matters that directly affect themselves. That’s reasonable. It’s not evil to do that.
I’m not going to pretend to be able to specify where is the line. But I do believe that there is a line, and that we all have a duty to make the world into a better place, and that pure apathy is just another form of evil.
This position is best summed up in the phrase “all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing” (which is often attributed to Edmund Burke, but it may be more accurate to attribute it to John Stuart Mill).
However, in the context of American presidential elections, there is no analogy. I have absolutely no blood on my hands for voting for Obama, even though he is ordering drone strikes. I was faced with effectively three real options:
1- Vote Democrat
2- Vote Republican
3- Do not vote (includes voting for third party candidate)
Almost by definition, the least evil option is not evil. Specifically, it imposes no moral responsibility. By voting for Obama, I have effectively no personal moral responsibility for drone strikes, even though I know that Obama will do drone strikes. In particular, by often speaking out against drone strikes, I have definitely cleared all moral responsibility that I might have by voting for Obama.
Remember, in the real world, we often have to make choices where every choice involves some extreme negative. The thing that a rational person does is to find the seemingly best option, aka the seemingly least evil option, and that is clearly to vote for Obama, as much as Obama is good, but in this case moreso in order to ensure no Republican win, which would be much, much worse.
OK, tell you what.
I live in America where I can get easy access to guns. I’m going to buy a gun and go on a murder spree. However, I need your input first.
First, I need you to name a place. It needs to be a suitable public place where many people will gather, and have limited police presence. You can name any place on the planet (since this is just a hypothetical example; obviously I’m not going to do it but I need you to play along), but I do need you to name an actual place, such as Tiananmen Square or Trafalgar Square or Times Square. Then, I need you to decide whether to give me permission to commit a mass murder or a single murder.
If you name a place and give me permission to commit a mass murder, then I will go to the place you specify, murder as many people as I can before the police show up, and then surrender. When questioned, I will point to your post and claim I was acting on your explicit orders.
If you name a place and give me permission to commit a single murder, then I will go to the place you specify, murder exactly one person, and then immediately surrender to the authorities. When questioned, I will point to your post and claim I was acting on your explicit orders.
If you fail to name a place or fail to give me permission to commit any murders, then I will go to a public place of my choosing, murder as many people as I can before the police show up, and then surrender. When questioned, I will point to this post, your lack of reply, and claim I was acting on your implicit orders.
By the logic you have used thus far, you are morally bound to choose the second option. After all, I’d kill someone no matter what choice you made but I have offered you a “lesser evil” that minimizes the death toll.
While I remind you once again that this example is purely hypothetical and I will not actually kill anyone no matter what you do, I would like you to actually follow your own logic by posting a public place and granting me your explicit permission to commit one murder at that location.
I’d call the cops about the person threatening a mass shooting online, if I had even the smallest inkling you’d follow up on my response.
Stop with the bullshit analogies already. We’re talking about the presidential election in our unfortunate two party system. No amount of false equivalence could bridge the moral gap between the sweetest Republican and the nastiest Democrat. Projection of guilt or not…
The conflation of “vote third party” and “do not vote” is absurd. A lack of vote is not counted; election turnouts are always low and one’s reason for not voting is never recorded. A third-party vote is essentially a vote for “neither of these choices.” It is counted and it explicitly registers your disapproval.
Your actual choices were:
1- Vote Democratic, and explicitly endorse drone strikes.
2- Vote Republican, and explicitly endorse drone strikes.
3- Vote Green or write-in and explicitly oppose drone strikes.
4- Do not vote and implicitly accept the standard you walk past.
That the moral option is unpopular or difficult does not absolve you of responsibility if you explicitly endorse an evil option.
If you feel you truly had no choice, consider the hypothetical example I posted above. Are you willing to name a real place and give me your explicit permission to commit one murder at that location? Or would you hesitate despite knowing that it’s purely hypothetical and your decision will have no real-world consequences?
As I wrote above, it’s simple game theory. There is no line that the Democratic party will cross that will make me not cast any vote for the president, because that is comparable to the vote for the more-evil Republican party, because game theory. It’s extremely unlikely to see the rise of a third party because of the current election system, according to obvious game theory.
There is another line that has already been crossed by the Democratic party, and the consequences of crossing that line make me a fervant supporter of election law reform, which is where we should be focusing this conversion, in order that next time I will have more options besides “Democrat”, “Republic”, and “let someone else decide between Democrat and Republican”. We need to change the rules of the game in order for game theory to produce the outcomes that we want, rather than wishing on a star.
That’s exactly what I would say, and I would say it with an entirely straight face and clean conscience, because every other option that I had would produce more evil.
The real world does not care about your petty semantic word games. The world cares about actions and the results of actions. The goal should be to make the world into a better place, not to placate your petty conscience.
See my post #97.
This is not reasonable game theory. You believe that by allowing Republicans to win, we’ll change the public discorse so that drone strikes become less acceptable. This is a fool’s vision of the future. This is not how it would play out. Again, you’re not applying the basics of psychology, sociology, and game theory. Instead, you’re living in your pristine world of moralistic absolutes, and not in the real world. Again, if you want to do something, then join and support a group for election reform. See my post #96.
I still fail to buy a Democrat losing because of a good Green party turnout would necessarily result in them going “Wow, we’re too far right, better lean more left next election” rather than just going “Dang, we lost, oh well. We’ll try again next year”
To Jake Harban
But no one cares that you voted third party instead of not voting. It’s not going to change the political calculus, the game theory, of anyone involved. It’s not going to change the Democratic leadership. It’s not going to change the Democratic followers.
Again, it’s simple game theory. It’s the game theory analogy of the freerider problem. The amount of dissaffected people voting third party is almost always going to remain small, because the marginal benefits of voting green are nil.
PS:
I actually consider the Green party to be rather revolting. If one is not pro-nuclear, then one is not an environmentalist. I consider the Green party to be the party that is most responsible for the ongoing global warming problem, ocean acidification problem, and the ongoing deaths of millions of people every year from airborne particulate pollution, outdoor and indoor, from coal and other heating and cooking fuels, and many other problems from their ridiculous anti-environmental positions.
What cops? You don’t know where I am. By the time anyone has figured it out, I will have already committed the mass shooting and by your logic, you will be responsible.
Of course, you’re missing the fundamental point of the analogy— there is no equivalent to calling the cops for Presidential elections. I offer you the choice between endorsing a greater evil, endorsing a lesser evil, or opposing evil knowing that the greater evil will be carried out anyway. By your own argument, you should endorse the lesser evil, but you hesitate because you don’t seriously believe your own argument.
That’s just special pleading. I offer you a choice between endorsing a greater evil, endorsing a lesser evil, or opposing evil and facing the risk that the greater evil will be carried out against your wishes. If you believe endorsing the lesser evil is the way to go, then put your proverbial money where your mouth is and post: “I give Jake Harban permission to commit one murder at [location].”
If you feel my analogy is in any way inaccurate, post your reasoning as to why.
Actually, I should correct that.
The problem is that voting third party has negative marginal benefits in the short term, which is why it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll see the rise of a third party in the current election system. We need election law reform. For example, if we had instant runoff, then voting third party would have at worst zero marginal benefits, and arguably it would have a very small positive marginal benefit, because voting third party in that system would not indirectly help a Republican candidate win. Whereas, in the current system, voting third party (Green) is helping a Republican candidate win, which is negative marginal benefit.
You’re asking people to ignore these problems, and operate on the assumption that millions of other people will spontaneously change their votes at the same time too. It’s a colossal and insurmountable collective action problem.
Whereas, it’s much, much more reasonable to get people to advocate for election law reform, because the marginal benefits for doing so are not negative.
Uh, whatever cops I get when I call 911? People report online mass shooting threats fairly frequently, and if I report a threat of a crime and the crime still happens, I don’t lose any sleep.
If I call the cops, they say we’ll take care of it, and I find out in the morning that you shot a bunch of people, I’d shrug, say that sucks, and be glad it wasn’t me.
No, I don’t hesitate, I take an option that isn’t in your bullshit false trichotomy.
Well, simply, because proofs by analogy are fraud. Quoting one of my heroes, Bjarne Stroustrup.
Analogies can be incredibly useful when explaining new concepts to someone, and to draw out a new point. However, analogies as a replacement of proper argument are simply bad.
With presidential elections, I have effectively four choices, to cater to your pedantic desires:
1- Vote Republican
2- Vote Democrat
3- Vote Green
4- Do not vote.
Because I understand game theory, I know that options 3 and 4 will have the same likely outcome, which is to let everyone else decide who will win the election. Thus, I only really have 3 choices:
– Vote Republican
– Vote Democrat
– Let everyone else decide without my input
Your cop and shooting analogy makes no sense. I don’t see the parallel. They’re different situations. If you called me up and asked me those questions, I would refuse to answer, and immediately afterwards call the police to report you.
Let me explain by analogy. Again, it’s just an aid to gain understanding, and I’ll try to explain again without analogy afterwards.
When Sam Harris makes arguments in support of torture, he runs afoul of the same flaw that you just made in your cop and shooting analogy. For example, Sam Harris might say that aliens come and abduct you and someone else, and they promise you that they will kill that person in one hour unless you torture them before the end of 1 hour from now. The flaw is thus: Perhaps the aliens are doing this as part of a morality test to on the population of Earthlings, and perhaps they won’t seriously go through with it. The intended scenario is that one has sufficiently certain knowledge that the only choices available will lead to consequences: 1- the person is dead, or 2- the person is alive but tortured. However, the scenario as literally presented does not necessarily lead to just those two options.
Your cop and shooting example is similarly flawed. When you randomly call me up to ask how many people you should randomly shoot that day, I have no reason to believe that anything I say to you will actually affect your behavior in a predictable way. You could further elaborate on the scenario, like shooting people once a day, calling me up every day, and allowing me to test you by playing along with your game, and then I would be in a situation where I would rightly believe that what I say will have meaningful consequences on your behavior, but I do not have that in your initial scenario as described.
Whereas, in the voting scenario, I have very good reasons to believe that I only have 3 meaningful options, vote Democrat, vote Republican, and don’t vote.
It seems that the crux of this argument is not in the morality of it, but rather in the estimation of likely outcomes. It seems that you think that by voting for Green, this will do magical thinks to drastically improve the situation in the near future, while sacrificing some immediate possible gains of Democrat over Republican. Again, this seems to be the crux of the argument, and not these other silly things that we’re arguing about. And your seeming position, IIRC, that voting Green will actually do something in the long term – that is an incredibly foolish opinion, for the reasons that I explained in my other posts up-thread.
I’m terribly sorry, but saying “game theory” repeatedly will not make your unsubstantiated assumptions any more valid.
And how do you propose achieving election law reform while electing people who oppose it?
While the current game may be rigged, it’s not so rigged that it’s worth throwing in the towel and agreeing to support any atrocity other than the worst.
After all, you claim that a vote for the Green Party is essentially a vote for Republicans because the Greens are declared a priori to be nonviable. Therefore, if even a small percentage of Democrats pledge that they will vote Green if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, it means a vote for Clinton in the primary is essentially a vote for Republicans because the Sanders-or-nothing pledge means Clinton is nonviable.
Which means that my pledge to vote Sanders or vote Green is actually a strong statement of support for Sanders in the primary. Since Sanders is far less evil than Clinton, my need to support the lesser evil actually compels me to preemptively declare I’ll vote Green if Sanders is the nominee.
And if she asks: “But why did you support it?” what would you say?
If you’re so eager to endorse the lesser evil and absolve yourself of responsibility for its consequences, try out the example I posted. All it takes is one sentence, and you don’t even have to deal with the consequences IRL.
Then why not give me permission to commit a single murder, lest I commit a mass murder against your wishes? I posted the example, yet all the people who crow about the virtues of supporting the lesser evil have thus far been too cowardly to follow their beliefs to their logical conclusion.
While you merely refer to those fields without offering a shred of evidence from any of them.
How would you advocate resolving the Abilene problem that is the Democratic/Republican party system?
I posted my example above re: mass vs. single murders. Leave the pristine world of moral absolutes and make your choice. Then join a gun control group to prevent that sort of thing from happening in the future.
And yet, you believe that a far-right Democrat winning will necessarily result in them going: “Wow, we’re too far right, better lean more left next election” rather than just going “Hey, we won, we must be doing something right. We’ll try being even more conservative next time.” You know, which actually happened.
If the Democrats lose an election because a significant number of their “safe” votes were captured by the Green party, do you seriously think no one would care? Do you seriously think the Democratic leadership would simply ignore the prospect of their most reliable voters abandoning them?
The marginal benefit of voting at all is nil. Individually, you will have no meaningful effect on the outcome. In most states, the winner might as well be pre-printed; whoever wins the Democratic and Republican primaries, it is a foregone conclusion that the former will win New York and the latter will win Oklahoma.
No eating your cake and having it too.
You can’t claim that the Green Party is too evil to support and that one should support the lesser evil no matter what and that anything the Green Party says is irrelevant because they are a priori declared nonviable.
Insert where I said that I think the Democrats will necessarily go more left if they win. Because, if I did say that, it was a mistake on my part, because I definitely don’t think so.
Man, you’re really big on using unnecessarily charged language against people answering earnestly.
If someone called me up or messaged me and said “pick a place and a number of people and I’ll kill them. Don’t pick a place and a number, I’ll pick for you”, I’d call the cops and wash my hands of it, like real life people do when they witness real life threats of mass shooting.
Because we can build support and momentum for election law reform without facing an insurmountable collective action problem.
Asking people to vote Green party asks people to make a choice that has a significant negative marginal utility, which is why it’ll never happen. It’s an collective action problem (related: free rider problem), and because of the massive number of people involved, and the stakes at play, it’s an insurmountable collective action problem. The only way that you solve problems like this is a central governing body and non-voluntary enforcement with force and violence, or by changing the rules of the game to avoid the collective action problem.
Asking people to support election law reform does not have a negative marginal utility, which is why it can slowly grow over time until we have a large enough majority to get it done. There’s no collective action problem here in the technical sense of a problem where there is marginal negative utility, but where the best absolute solution is beyond the dip of marginal negative utility. People can support election law reform without allowing Republicans to win office. There is no cost to support election law reform. And eventually, if we get overwhelming support in favor of election law reform, then we can cram it through our corrupt current electoral system.
We’ll never get there because of the insurmountable collective action problem.
Yes. This is a serious problem. That’s why we need election law reform. And more people active in primaries and changing the attitudes of the general public. Overton window and all.
It was intended as a snarky aside (which I actually do believe). I have otherwise been conversing under the premise that Greens are the most preferred party for the purposes of argument.
Sorry if I missed anything important. I skimmed a bit, and chose not to reply to things which I felt were not relevant. Bug me if you actually want specific replies or answers please.
I need to expand:
The reason that we’ll never get there is because of the following. At any one time, you might be able to convince a few people to go against their personal interest marginal utility, but you’ll never be able to convince a large enough segment of a rational population to go against their personal interest marginal utility. Or at the very least, it’s extremely unlikely. Again, it’s basically the same problem as the free rider problem. The problem is that you need to reach a critical threshold of people to join with you before you see benefits. If people join with you and if you don’t reach the critical threshold, e.g. if you’re still in the negative marginal utility section of the utility curve, then everyone who joined with you loses, and everyone who didn’t join with you wins. And because you’re likely to lose on the first few times out, you’re going to get a lot of defectors who decide that it’s not personally worth it, and they’ll go back to the option of positive marginal utility. Again, collective action problem.
In even more simplistic terms, it’s like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma"prisoner's dilemma. It should be noted that an iterated (repeated) prisoner’s dilemma does allow “rational” self-interested people to come to agreement when the dilemma is limited to two agents, but imagine a prisoner’s dilemma where you receive a benefit if you testify against your fellow prisoners, and no one receives a benefit unless 50% or more of the prisoners do not testify. For a population of millions of prisoners, imagine how hard it would be to get 50% of them to not take the option of testifying for their own personal benefit, in the hopes that 50% of their fellow prisoners also doesn’t testify, with a particular culture and history where it’s always true that 99% of those millions of people always testify. Going from 99% of people testifying to 50% of people testifying is an incredibly hard thing to do. It’s practically impossible.
Sorry, I’ll try to proofread before submitting now. Too used to disqus now. Fixed:
For a population of millions of prisoners, imagine how hard it would be to get 50% of them to not testify for their own personal benefit, in the hopes that 50% of their fellow prisoners also don’t testify, when inside a particular culture and history where 99% of the population has consistently testified in the past.
OK, first of all, I seem to be the only person here who is capable of thinking long-term. If everyone else can’t understand how this election may affect the next, then we’re basically screwed anyway.
Second, I am neither expecting not assuming the rise of a third party. As far as I’m concerned, the Greens are basically a protest vote. However, placing this protest vote has a number of outcomes. (1) It signals to the Democratic Party that they can’t take their base for granted. (2) It acts as a moral option in Obama vs. Romney style races where the difference between “greater” and “lesser” evil has effectively evaporated. (3) It moves the Green Party into a proto-viable status, in which they will never be viable as a third party but create the credible risk of displacing the Democrats in the two-party system should the Dems ignore the voters further. (4) The prospect of casting the protest vote influences Democratic primaries in favor of non-evil candidates by pressuring Democratic voters to support non-evil nominees by diminishing the future electoral prospects of evil ones.
Yes, but we don’t have those systems, and we won’t have those systems unless they are enacted by people elected under the current system.
Yes, and you may be surprised that there’s actually a way around that seemingly-insurmountable collective action problem. It’s called a “political campaign.” Believe me, there’s nothing spontaneous about it.
Suppose we got a campaign up and running, and a large number of registered Democrats publicly took this pledge: “If Sanders wins the primary, I will vote for Sanders. If Clinton wins the primary, I will vote Green.”
As a Democrat who seeks to prevent Republicans from winning at any cost, what does game theory tell you about how this might influence your vote in the primary?
And yet, if I vote Green and we find out in the morning that the Republican won, you declare I am personally responsible for that outcome and anything which happens as a result.
So then you advocate that I/we kill the Republican candidate and his running mate on the day of the election, thus guaranteeing he cannot win? I suppose that is technically an option that isn’t in the “bullshit false trichotomy” of D-R-G but you’re still cheating.
Since you have repeatedly refused to endorse the “lesser evil” of the options I presented, I think I can safely conclude you don’t actually believe your own argument.
The only thing I seek to “prove” by it is whether you believe your own argument.
The parallel is simple. In my analogy, you have four options:
1- Endorse mass murder.
2- Endorse single murder.
3- Oppose all murder.
4- Make no statement.
Because you understand game theory, you know that options 3 and 4 will have the same likely outcome, which is that I commit a mass murder. Thus, you really only have three choices:
– Watch me commit a mass murder on your instructions.
– Watch me commit a single murder on your instructions.
– Watch me (probably) commit a mass murder against your will.
Which option do you pick? If you fail to see how this might be relevant to voting (depending on who’s running) then I really can’t help you.
And if I asked you for your opinion on the trolley problem, you’d say you’d pull the trolley’s emergency brake and save everybody’s lives.
You are presented with a hypothetical that offers you the exact same choices as a Presidential election and is subject to the exact same logic. That’s the point— I’m asking whether you’re willing to act on your beliefs if you have to make your actions explicit. I’m asking whether you’d support the lesser evil in a scenario where you’d actually be asked to explain your actions.
Actually, the flaw in his logic is that the scenario he proposes has no logical connection to any real-world events, not that it relies on absolute knowledge of the sort that exists in a hypothetical. If you were offered the choice between torturing and killing someone and it was a given that those were your only two options, then sure it’s better to torture them than kill them. However, you will never encounter a scenario that’s even remotely comparable in the real world.
In my example, the choice I offer you is one that you explicitly state you are offered. You admit that you (potentially) face the choice I gave you. The absolute knowledge that you have only those three choices is required by the hypothetical for the purpose of synchronizing it with your own real-world scenario by denying you the options your real-world scenario doesn’t have.
Which is exactly the point I’m trying to make.
In the shooting scenario, you have the same reasons to believe you have only 3 meaningful options; endorse the mass murder, endorse the single murder, or oppose all murder with the resulting consequences. That this knowledge is given under the terms of the hypothetical is irrelevant; the fact that the shooting scenario seems to offer other options is what makes it less analogous to the election.
Good. Then follow your logic to its conclusion and post: “I give Jake Harban permission to commit a single murder at [location].” Being as it’s purely hypothetical, you have nothing to lose (save the argument) and even if I were to actually commit the murder, your logic absolves you of any responsibility for authorizing it.
Hardly. There’s nothing magical about it.
Voting Green (or promising to vote Green) offers these benefits:
1. Prospect of moving the Democrats to the left out of fear they’ll lose their base.
2. Prospect of making it to 2020 without getting blood on one’s hands.
3. Prospect that superior Democrat will win the nomination.
4. Prospect of shifting the political calculus in the future by making the Dems cautious of continuing threats from the Greens.
Those benefits come at this cost:
1. Certainty of Republicans winning election now.
Obviously, the four benefits taken together are comparatively slim, but if the distinction between the Democratic candidate and the Republican one is practically nonexistent, then the slim benefits of voting Green outweigh the slim benefits of getting a “lesser” evil that really isn’t any lesser.
Keep in mind, though, that a Democrat who is slightly less evil in absolute terms may still be the greater evil simply because anything a Democrat does is presumed the “liberal option.” Only Nixon could go to China, and only a Democrat can end Social Security. Think about what the 2016 (or 2012) election might (have) look(ed) like if the Democrats in Congress proposed single-payer health care only to have a Republican president oppose it, twist their arms to water it down, and ultimately agree only to the half-measure now known as Obamacare.
No, not really. Truth be told, I think you think I care about this significantly more than I do. My response to a hypothetical Trump victory is “that sucks, I tried, time to batten down the hatches and hope people vote better next election”, not some kind of frothing condemnation for allowing him to do whatever. While I think that’s pretty much the worst case scenario here, I’m fairly certain I’ll come through fine – plenty of other criminally stupid/evil people have been president before him.
So yeah, my opinion on the matter is “You vote for who you want, I’ll vote democrat. If you want to hold that against me, fine. I can handle disdain from random internet people.”
I mean, welcome to real life? That’s totally an option, and if you want to try that option, good for you. I wouldn’t pick it in that context, but that doesn’t make it cheating. In real life, there’s millions of actions you can take in response to the dilemma of “Who do I vote for?”, so a thought experiment where I’m limited to three doesn’t really interest me or map to real life all that well.
I could move out of the US now and give up my right to vote. Sure, a republican might win, but I’m no more culpable for that than any other citizen in my destination country.
Or I could pay an assassin to eliminate every president I don’t like.
Or I could organize a worker’s revolution and overthrow the US government and replace it with a system of anarchist communes.
Those are all options with various probabilities of success, from “Really easy to do” to “Possible in theory only”, but since we’re courting the idea of the Green party winning someday, I don’t see why a low chance of success is any reason to discount an option.
Signals to whom? The leaders, or the voters?
The signal to the voters will not be impactful, again because of the collective action problems that I described above.
In order for the signaling to matter to the leaders, there needs to be a credible threat of a significant fraction of people choosing to “protest vote”. However, that will not happen. There never will be a significant fraction of people choosing to “protest vote”, again precisely because it’s a collective action problem. If the protest vote segment is very small, then the leadership won’t care. In order to make the leadership care, you need to make the protest vote segment big enough, and that has the same collective action problem: You’r asking individuals to take a negative marginal utility hit with the hope that enough other people take the same marginal utility hit in order to reach a collective mass large enough to signal to the leadership, which is precisely what you should not expect if you apply proper game theory as I just have.
Talks about “for the future” are just talk that you hope that over time, more people will behave contrary to the standard game theory model, and choose the negative marginal utility option, and that this segment of people will grow over time, suffering the negative marginal utility consequences the whole way, in spite of all sociology evidence to the contrary.
Again, you just don’t understand basic game theory.
This is foolish and naive. You’re basically saying that the free rider problems are easily to overcome, and are overcome all the time by overcome by voluntary consensus and voluntary discussion. Come on. What are you – a libertarian or something? Free rider problems on the scale of millions of people are effectively never overcome. It’s incredibly rare at best.
Further, the political campaigns that do work are exactly like the political campaign I propose for getting electoral reform. In partical, political campaigning works precisely when people who support a particular position do not have a negative marginal utility for doing so. That’s how change happens, and I entirely agree.
You don’t get to make that supposition. I say that this is over and above a reasonable amount of fiat power for our discussion. You don’t get to suppose something that is effectively impossible. From the impossible, of course anything can follow.
My position was a lot more nuanced than that, and I’m pretty sure that the other person’s position is a lot more nuanced than that. I suggest you reread my post 97.
Again no. Practically speaking, I could say almost anything I wanted to you on the phone, because I have no basis for expectation that anything I say will cause you to murder or cause you to not murder. I have no basis for expectation that my endorsement or non-endorsement of murder will have any effect on the outcome, and again that logically entails that my endorsement or non-endorsement does not matter.
To ensure that we’re not miscommunicating, let me talk about another hypothetical example. Suppose it was well known and well established that aliens are in orbit around the planet, and every day they communicate with a (seemingly) random person on Earth via long range communication (suppose a two-way communication Star Trek hologram). In that communication, they claim that they will kill 1000 named people, or 1 named person from the earlier group of 1000, and they offer the following choices to the person: 1- ask that the 1000 be killed, or 2- ask that the 1 be killed, or 3- make some other communication or non-communication, in which case the 1000 will be killed. Suppose it was widely known and well established that the aliens without exception carried through on their threats, and it’s been going on for years. Suppose that we have tried diplomacy options, military options, and all other options, and have failed.
In that scenario, if you happened to be contacted by the ailens, then yes, the only moral thing to do is to explicitly ask the aliens to kill the 1 person, and only that 1 person. Any other option (or non-option) in that scenario is extremely morally abhorrent.
I must emphasize, in order to reach that conclusion, you need a lot of additional framework on your hypothetical scenario in order to avoid the common flaws that I attributed to Sam Harris. In other words, the scenarios that Sam Harris trots out to defend torture either have A- alternative options that are more moral, or B- they are so unrealistic that they almost no practical similarities to real world problems.
I suppose that voting in elections with millions of voters is an exception. It seems that this is quite comparable, even equatable to, the unrealistic aliens scenario that I proposed, and the sort of ridiculous and unrealistic torture scenarios that Sam Harris proposes. I wholeheartedly agree with your intended description of my position and its logical consequences. I see a moral equivalence with voting for the lesser evil, and asking the aliens in that scenario to kill the 1 person. I am entirely unrepentant about it, and I am horrified by your principled naivety and the needless evil that it will inflict on this world and its people.
So you don’t want the Democrats to move further to the left?
You have made absolutely no attempt to answer earnestly.
And if asked to make Sophie’s choice, you’d say: “I’d save all my kids.”
Answering earnestly requires you to answer the question you were actually asked, not answering a completely different and much easier question.
Actually, that runs into the same collective action problem.
Supporting election law reform means organizing and protesting and petitioning, all of which carry costs. The less likely such a campaign is to succeed, the less rational it is to pay those costs. If I can be reasonably certain that Congress won’t pass election reform no matter what, then it’s not worth my while to do that work.
And it’s funny that you mention the free rider problem, because here it’s actually worse. If election reform is passed, I benefit whether I supported it or not.
Of course, it’s completely moot because election law reform and last-resort-Green-protest are not mutually exclusive. If you have a coalition dedicated to election law reform, why not have them promote a pledge agreeing that (a) you will vote for Pro Reform candidate in the primary, and (b) if Anti Reform candidate wins the primary, you will vote Green in the general?
Except that’s not actually true. Remember, voting Green is a last resort— it’s something to be done only if the Democratic candidate is just as bad as the Republican (adjusting for the Nixon China effect). In such a scenario, there is no negative marginal utility because a Democratic win would be just as bad as a Republican win. (Or rather, the benefit of a Democratic win is smaller than the negligible benefit of making a potentially-effective protest.)
Think of a Green vote as basically like a voter filibuster— it won’t help the actual issue being decided, but if that issue is already a lost cause then it’ll provide incidental benefits on other issues.
Except that if I convince some percentage to support election law reform and succeed, the people who did not support still benefit, but if I convince some percentage to vote Green, the people who don’t still see a Republican President and a newly-cautious Democratic party. Under my proposal, the free riders suffer nonetheless— and if the Democrats disregard the message and the Greens become proto-viable, the “free riders” have greater incentive to join us.
Your claim that campaigning for election law reform has no negative marginal utility rests on this assumption. Remember, our current corrupt system is governed by people who oppose that reform on principle. If both Democrats and Republicans are united in their opposition, what incentive does either have to budge?
Being willing to vote Green as a last resort creates that incentive by putting the Democrats in an untenable position where failure to support the will of the people can actually cost them an election.
You concede that changing the attitudes of the general public can be done, but claim this willingness to change magically stops when a third party gets involved?
Snarky aside, snarky reply. I use the Greens as shorthand for “protest vote,” but you could easily swap it for write-in or any other party real or hypothetical.
Except that example isn’t apropos. Society as a whole is a massive iterated prisoner’s dilemma and it tends to work out fairly well; as long as people can generally keep track of each other’s reputations the impetus to cooperate for fear of damaging one’s reputation keeps most people in line most of the time.
Elections are also an iterated prisoner’s dilemma but my proposal only covers a limited subset which aren’t actually prisoner’s dilemmas at all. In a true prisoner’s dilemma, it must be in your personal interest to betray no matter what the other players do, yet mutual cooperation yields greater utility than mutual betrayal. In my proposed scenario of “vote Green if the Democrat is too evil,” the incentive is to vote Green no matter what. If many other people vote Green then there’s a Green victory which overturns the establishment and its corruption, no matter what you do. If some other people vote Green, then there’s a Greens-spoil-Dems Republican victory which shakes up the Democratic establishment and offers better prospects for the next election no matter what you do. (Remember that a Republican victory offers no negative utility compared to a Democratic victory, or you wouldn’t consider voting Green in the first place.) If few people vote Green, then there’s a Dem/Republican victory no matter what you do, but if you voted Green then you can disavow responsibility for their actions because you didn’t support them. No matter what, the incentive is to vote Green.
No?
What I want to happen, and what I think is the necessary consequence of an action are two entirely different things. I’d love if they moved further to the left, but I am not convinced that is an outcome of either voting democrat or letting them lose by voting green.
Literally how in the fuck?
If you called me, and said “Pick a place and I’ll kill however many people there you want. If you don’t pick, I’ll pick for you.” I’d hang up, go “What the fuck was that?” and call the cops.
That is literally what I’d do in real life. If you want to group that under the “don’t do anything and implicitly let you commit mass murder” then so be it, but I wouldn’t lose an hour of sleep over it. I’d probably avoid any obvious soft targets for a day or two, but c’est la vie.
If your ethical dilemma is so removed from real life that the action I’d take in real life – an action that plenty of real life people have taken in the past – isn’t actually an option, I don’t really give a fuck about your dilemma.
I’m too tired to continue this debate right now. I may be back tomorrow, but before I go I’ll just point out one last thing.
People behave contrary to the standard game theory model all the time. Take a look at the Ultimatum game. If your position is based entirely on the assumption that people will always behave in accordance with a completely discredited set of rules, you’re simply wasting everyone’s time.
We are no where close to that, and you are a fool if you think we are.
No, I very carefully explained that it stops when there is a collective action issue involving millions of people. Changing the attitudes of people, one by one, can be done, even if it has a small cost, but convincing people to accept a negative marginal utility option, when the marginal cost is significant (like a Republican winning over a Democrat), and when the collective action problem needs millions change behavior to reach a better outcome – that is impossible.
For a rational self-intersted actor, who vastly prefers Democrat to Republican, and vastly prefers Green to Democrat, given the current equilibrium voter behavior of other voters, please explain how they should vote for Green.
No. It’s very much prisoner’s dilemma – given that 99% of other voters will vote Democrat or Green, changing one’s own vote in isolation will never help Green win, and changing one’s own vote in isolation from Democrat to Green has no chance of benefit, and a small chance of allowing a Republican to win, aka severe harm.
Had the starting voting population behavior been different, i.e. had the past behavior been that 99% of people voted for Green or Republican, then the situation changes. However, in this iterated dilemma, one needs to take into account the past history of the other actors in order to make your own plans, which means we’re stuck in this equilibrium, unless we change the rules, or unless something truly radical and extremely rare happens, which I sincerely doubt. I’d rather go for the plan that is not fighting against a massive collective action problem, thank you very much.
As I said, the problem is that the first few people to move lose, and that’s why you’ll never get more people to move. Reaching critical mass is impossible.
And again, to contrast this to other political campaigns. You can easily get people to change their positions on issues, because that doesn’t have a marginal cost. Change in issue preferences in the population can move from a small minority to a large majority, and then it can percolate up through primaries and the current election system, albeit slowly. The current two party crony system would not be able to stop election reform if election reform became the biggest visibility isuse and highest priority issue for 90% of the population. The system isn’t that corrupt yet, IMHO. In other words, there’s enough decency in people, even in politics, for that kind of popular support to push something through.
I asked you a question. You have made no attempt to answer the question at any point. Instead, you answered a completely unrelated question and pretended it was the same thing.
Or in other words, the dilemma I presented completely disproved your earlier claim, but because you believe as a matter of faith that Democrats must be supported at any cost, you deployed the tactic of crimestop by deliberately failing to understand simple logic that would otherwise lead you to think an unauthorized thought.
Because you are clearly incapable of rational discussion, this debate is now over. If, at some future point, you become willing to consider my position based on the facts rather than your unquestionable faith, I’m happy to continue then.
I agree. My position has been that the problem is not solvable for large groups of people. I encourage you to read what I actually write and converse with my actual positions, rather than the positions that exist only in your head. I’ve been rather clear about this, and this strawmanning, whether accidental or purposeful, it starting to get annoying.
It’s well known that small tribes can govern by consensus up to around a few hundred individuals, but after that ruling by consensus becomes impossible.
More generally, it’s entirely possible to overcome collective action problems of hundreds of people, but it’s practically impossible to overcome collective action problems of millions of people. I’ve said this several times already. Please read and understand that this is my position. It’s also sociology 101, and economics 101, and game theory 101, and so it surprises me that you’re still not yet familiar with the concept.
I’ll pass, thanks. As I said two or three posts back, I don’t really care too much about who wins, nor about internet randoms thinking I’m right about which option is preferable.
That being said, thanks for giving me something to do for the last couple hours or so. You have given me a new appreciation for how easy it is to get worked up on an issue you don’t really care about, so at least I know to avoid that in the future, too.
I strongly encourage you to reread my post #116, the end of it, which is entirely relevant. You need to understand the difference between your scenario as described, and my aliens scenario as described. You may intent for your scenario to be functionally identical to my aliens scenario, but intent is not magic. People are not mind-readers. IMHO, in this case, most of the blame falls on you. If you really mean to give such an outlandish scenario, then you need to fully specify the outlandish scenario, like I did in my aliens scenario. Had you done that, then I believe that the Vivec would be much much more likely to answer “Yes, the only moral option is to ask the aliens to kill the 1 person”. However, you also have to recognize the usual inherent flaws in that approach – if you make the scenario so ridiculously outlandish, then many people will rightly complain (at least it’s often right to complain) that the scenario is so detached from reality that nothing can be learned from it.
However, I admit that this is one time that the scenario is pertinent, and I am surprised, and I thank you for making me realize this.
You must understand that many of the regulars here have a well justified extreme aversion to outlandish scenarios like my aliens scenario, because they see it all the time from the likes of Sam Harris, where Sam Harris tries to equivocate between an outlandish scenario like the aliens one, and your much more realistic scenario like your shooting one, in order to justify torturing real Guantanamo inmates. So, many of the regulars here are quite wary of such scenarios, and many will flatly refuse to play along.
Because I’m a pedant, I did play along, but hopefully I’ve also made my position clear that your shooting example has to be very much removed from any sort of realistic scenario before I adopt the answer that you want, except for voting. And that is because of the differences of voting with almost every other scenario that you can propose. In particular, the difference is that I have a very good expectation about the likely consequences of my choices, and my choices are extremely limited, and it’s extremely unlikely that I can change the rules of the game. That’s exactly like my aliens scenario. In the aliens scenario, I gave background information which should give anyone good reason to form the intended expectations. Whereas, in your shooting example, we lack the proper background information to create the intended expectation that what is said on the form will alter the behavior of the shooter. In order to create that reasonable expectation, you have to go to normally absurd lengths like my aliens scenario, or the only realistic comparison that I know: cultural consensus of millions of people in a voting system. Large, unchangeable, seemingly amoral in certain important ways, and with highly predictable outcomes based on choices. Again, what a surprisingly comparison and conclusion. Thanks for pointing it out!
Ah frak it. SIWOTI Syndrome is in full effect. I can’t sleep now.
I’d honestly take it as a kindness if you could abstain from further posts for about 45 minutes to give me time to break free of the internet’s clutches.
Anyway.
The leaders. Their decision on who to back in the primary will be influenced by whether the left will accept them.
I already explained why there is no negative marginal utility to such a protest vote.
Every political campaign overcomes a free rider problem; if I don’t vote in the primary I will benefit from a Sanders victory nonetheless, yet I will vote.
It’s your supposition. You were the one who proposed an organized campaign for election law reform. As long as such a campaign exists, it could offer the pledge I described.
If the supposition is effectively impossible, then your plan for reform is dead in the water.
Once again, the analogy I made is the same logic as the voting booth given a cosmetic change. In my example, you have just as much reason to assume I’m telling the truth as you do to assume your vote will be counted.
This is just a rehash of Vivec’s straw man. In the voting booth, you have a choice— you can (a) vote Republican and endorse evil, (b) vote Democratic and endorse lesser evil, (c) vote Green/write-in and oppose evil only to see it done against your wishes, or (d) say nothing and see evil done with your silent assent.
My example provides the same logic— you can (a) support mass murder and endorse evil, (b) support single murder and endorse lesser evil, (c) oppose murder and see it done against your wishes, or (d) say nothing and see murder done with your silent assent. The point is to create a conflict between the desire to see less evil done overall and the desire to not cause evil; this and the actual voting booth and your alien example are really just variations of the trolley problem.
The distinction is that both the voting booth and the murder example involve a context in which opposing evil carries its own indirect benefits. If you vote Green, you diminish the stranglehold the right has on both parties, while if you oppose my murder spree you diminish the risk of being arrested as an accomplice. Your alien example omits that context by explicitly describing the aliens as absolute and omnipotent.
If my shooting analogy were too confusing, try this— suppose you were offered the traditional choice between (evil) Republican, (lesser evil) Democrat, and (not evil) Green but with the caveat that if you vote for the winning candidate, you can be held personally responsible for their actions to some degree. Who would you vote for?
You see a moral equivalence in your alien scenario which is set up specifically to omit the moral dilemma that I created.
We were in 2012, and we will be in 2016 if Clinton wins the primary. Remember to adjust for the Nixon China effect; a Democrat banning abortion is worse than a Republican banning abortion and contraception because the Republican must face reelection against a Democratic challenger seeking to loosen the restrictions while a Democrat must face reelection against a Republican seeking to tighten them.
Obviously, some of this comes down to personal values, though. I believe that the distinction between one mass murderer and another is irrelevant, but some people in this thread believe that Obama’s willingness to pay lip service to social justice is all the difference in the world compared to Romney even adjusting for Nixon China.
I already explained why it’s not a collective action problem, why voting Green under extreme circumstances does not have negative marginal utility, and why convincing people to campaign for election law reform does suffer from a collective action and free rider problem.
Why are you assuming a priori that this hypothetical actor “vastly prefers Democrats to Republicans?” Voting based on tribal identity is for Republicans and Vivec. Most liberals vote based on issues so the preference should be based on the extent they agree with each candidate.
Preferences would actually be determined by three factors— (1) to what extent do I agree with the candidate? (2) what is the candidate’s odds of winning? and (3) what effect will the candidate’s victory have on future elections?
Looking at the 2012 election, I agreed with Romney on 5% of the issues, figured he had a ~50% chance of winning, and that his election would result in a continuation of right-wing governance, causing harm to me and the country, and breeding further antipathy against the right and shifting the overton window leftwards in 2016. I agreed with Obama on 8% of the issues, figured he had a ~50% chance of winning, and that his election would result in a continuation of right-wing governance, causing harm to me and the country, and breeding antipathy against the left on the assumption that his policies were liberal and keeping the overton window stationary at best. All told, the two seemed exactly the same, leaving me with no preference for either. Meanwhile, I agreed with Stein on 75% of the issues, figured she had a <1% chance of winning, and her election would result in the end of the establishment and a new era of reform pushing towards left-wing governance. The benefits of voting for Stein were slim, but since her defeat would result in a win for either Obama or Romney, both of whom were identical, there was no reason not to vote for Stein.
I tentatively feel the same way about Clinton/Cruz but not Sanders/Cruz.
The problem is that you’re assuming a Republican beating a Democrat is “severe harm” but I only propose voting Green as a last resort when this is not the case.
Except the decision to vote isn’t made in a vacuum. There’s a massive campaign and many polls first.
There is absolutely no marginal cost to telling a pollster that you plan to vote Green. If many people answer surveys saying they plan to vote Green, these facts will become public knowledge before the election. Thus, people will go into the voting booth with the knowledge that the Greens do have widespread support and make their decision in light of that knowledge.
Remember, the Greens don’t actually need to win. They just need to tip the election to a Republican at the expense of an equally-evil Democrat to scare the Democrats into running fewer evil candidates.
They can also bubble up during campaign season and boil over on election day.
I’m afraid you’re being naive here. First, there’s the fact that incredibly popular issues like health care reform were shot down by the establishment. Second, mere popularity among the voters never got a law passed without an actual push to pass it. Third, such a push runs into the collective action and free rider problems you mentioned previously. And fourth, what incentive does either party have to approve the will of the people when the people have no other options to turn to?
My Green-protest-last-resort plan is not mutually exclusive with your own; rather, it serves to create just enough incentive to let a reform bill get passed.
The problem is that this is not a collective action problem, for reasons I have explained.
The use of hypothetical moral dilemmas constrained by absolute knowledge is well-established; my shooter scenario is basically just a modified version of the trolley problem. When such a hypothetical scenario is proposed with explicitly enumerated options, it is generally assumed that those are the only options; in the event of confusion, I made as much explicit in post 114. That the scenario is “outlandish” is incidental; in order to work as an analogy, it must match the logic of its analogue even at the expense of its own realism.
I was not aware that Pharyngulites would instinctively dismiss “outlandish” hypotheticals out of association with Sam Harris, so I apologize for that; I’m not psychic.
That said, your aliens example does not preserve the logic of the voting/shooting analogy, so your answer in that example is inapplicable. I did, however, post a clarified version of the analogy in #125, though I realize there was a slight error. It should read: Suppose you were offered the choice between (evil) Republican, (less evil) Democrat and (not evil) Green with the caveat that if you vote for the winning candidate or you cast no vote at all, you can be held personally responsible for the winning candidate’s decisions to some extent.
A more clarified example of the shooter problem might read thusly: Suppose you were living in a society where a certain artifact was banned as taboo because of its ability to force people to tell the truth and involvement with it carried a death sentence. You hired me to bring you this artifact, putting both of us at risk of a death sentence if caught. Luckily, I am very good at my job; I have left no evidence so the only way either of us can be caught is if we turn ourselves in. Upon providing you with the artifact, I advise you than in addition to being a taboo-truth-artifact-thief, I am also a hitman. A potential client is interested in my services, but wants me to prove my capabilities first so I offer to perform a free hit on your behalf such that I can win a valuable contract from this potential client. While holding the artifact to guarantee that I cannot lie, I assure you that my arrangement with the potential client will have no effect on you, nor will the hit I perform on your behalf. I then offer you this choice: (1) I kill an entire family on your behalf. If caught, I name you as my client and we both face the death penalty. (2) I kill one person on your behalf. If caught, I name you as my client and we both face life in prison. (3) You decline my assassination services, and I perform a hit on someone else’s behalf, without any effect on you whatsoever. Still holding the truth artifact, I advise you that the reason I’m so good at stealing truth artifacts is that I’ve convinced the police to overlook my involvement in that crime. Accordingly, if you go to the police, I will inform them that you have a truth artifact that I stole on your behalf. You face the death penalty for having a stolen truth artifact; I walk free on the theft because of my special relationship with the police and I walk free on the murder because I haven’t committed it yet and you can’t prove I’m going to.
Obviously that’s a bit cumbersome, but I figured that you’d be familiar with the trolley problem and understand my modifications to it. All told, the open ballot option is probably a better example overall.
OK, here’s an even more succinct and accurate version of the same analogy.
Suppose the Evil Brigade comes to town and proposed the murder of Minority Group members. They announce that there will be a vote as to whether such a murder will occur and if it is to occur, there will be a second vote as to whether all or half of Minority Group’s members will be killed. Naturally, you’re not happy with the situation but Evil Brigade is too powerful to challenge at the moment. If you diminish their recruiting prospects, their power will dwindle but for now you can’t stop them from carrying out the vote and progressing accordingly.
Of course, the first vote agrees that the murder will occur because the Evil Brigade’s members outnumber the townsfolk and they always vote for murder. However, Evil Brigade’s members disagree on whether it’s more evil to kill all or half of a group, so the second vote could go either way. You have the chance to potentially swing the outcome.
There’s just one catch: In order to cast a ballot in that second vote, you must make an affirmative declaration that you support the murder of Minority Group’s members. You must publicly denounce their existence, and you must make a statement explaining, in your own words, why it is morally virtuous to kill them. Your statement will be published in newspapers read by people who may potentially choose to become Evil Brigade members in the future.
Alternatively, you can make a statement denouncing the murder, affirming the basic human rights of Minority Group, and condemning anyone who would kill them. Such a statement would also be published.
What choice do you make? Do you (a) denounce Minority Group and vote to kill all of them, (b) denounce Minority Group and vote to kill half of them, (c) defend minority group and allow all or half of them to be killed depending on the outcome of a vote in which you have no say, or (d) remain silent and allow all or half of them to be killed depending on the outcome of a vote in which you have no say?
barkbarkbark….ʞɿɒdʞɿɒdʞɿɒd
I missed that. Could you explain that one again please? Copy-pasting is acceptable, or point me to a post please.
Again, my position in short: Given the current voter population behavior, changing one’s vote in isolation does have a marginal negative value. Are you objecting to my explicit conditions? Are you objecting to something else? Surely with my explicit conditions, you agree that there is a negative marginal value.
You’ve lost me.
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Acceptable. However, note that this is not a defense of protest voting. This is the kind of electioneering that I support. It might involve some “lying” to pollsters about who you are really going to vote for, but I condone as moral this particular form of lying in this context.
Thus, I don’t see how this relates to the conversion and the points under contention.
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In general forms of the free-rider problem, there is a large cost for individual cooperation (which is outweighed on a per-individual basis if the cooperative project goes through). In my analysis, the large individual cost is not going to vote in the primary, or in the general election. Rather, when I refer to the marginal cost, I am referring to how voting for Green will increase the odds that Republicans will win. It seems that this is the relevant marginal cost which is incredibly hard to surmount in collective action.
Thus, I don’t see how this relates to the conversion and the points under contention.
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This is getting tiresome. I’ve been explaining myself quite clearly. Please try harder to read for comprehension.
I am using something like the following for the definition of a collective action scenario.
Consider the following scenario. There is a population of actors. There is known background information regarding the “normal” behavior of actors in the population. There is a particular change of behavior B that is available to some actors in the population. In isolation, if any one person changed their beahavior to B, then the individual will suffer a net negative (e.g. negative marginal utility). However, if a large number of persons all changed their behavior to B, then every individual in the population will be better off.
I assert (with justification) that with a sufficiently large population, and with a sufficiently large
negative marginal utilty, then overcoming a collective action issue by convincing individual persons with
persuasion is doomed to fail. I call this an insurmountable collective action issue.
Convincing people to “protest vote” fits this definition.
Convincing people to join a campaign to ask their representatives to vote for election reform does not fit this definition.
I am ok with someone using debate fiat power to ask for the creation of a political campaign which will convince lots of people to ask their representatives to vote for election reform.
I am not ok with someone using debate fiat power to ask for the creation of a political campaign which will convince lots of people to “protest vote” because it is an insurmountable collective action issue (according to my above definitions).
More generally, I am ok with debate fiat power use for political campaigns that are not practically impossible according to sociology and game theory, and I am not ok with debate fiat power use for political campaigns that are practically impossible according to sociology and game theory.
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I don’t understand your scenario. Can you repeat it one more time for me – copy pasting if necessary all of the pertintent details please?
As Vivec says, if it’s a one-off scenario where I receive a random call in the night from a stranger, with no special background knowledge, and the person on the phones asks questions about how many people that they should shoot, my answer is the same as Vivec: Any answer (or non-answer) that I give is entirely irrelevant. I can give any answer that I want, because in all likelihood the answer that I give will have no practical impact on whether the other person on the phone murders, and how many people they will murder. I can hang up immediately. I can play along and say “yea, kill everyone”. I can tell them how they’re a disguesting human being. None of the options are morally different, because they all have about the same expected consequences.
In order for my answer to matter, you need to give me a reason to believe that my answer will actually affect or cause the other person to commit more or less murders. For that, you need something like my alien scenario. If I have sufficient background knowledge to form an expectation that my answer will indeed affect or cause the other person to commit more or less murders, then my answer changes, according to my answer to my aliens example.
Is that answer not sufficient? I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Please start from the top, and be clear.
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Bullshit.
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Held responsible in what way?
In a court of law? For what crime? All of the wrong-doings that elected person commits? Only wrongdoings enabled by the official capacity? Or all wrongdoings including crimes without the aid of their official capacity? If I was to be held accountable in a court of law for all of the wrong-doings of the people I elect in their official capacities, subject to jail time or more severe punishments, then I would never vote for anyone. I wouldn’t vote for Republicans, nor Democrats, nor Greens, because the risks seem way too high. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even vote for my best lifelong friend under these conditions.
In the court of public opinion? For what perceived wrongs? Generally I wouldn’t give a fuck, because I’m slightly anti-social, and I generally don’t give a fuck what other people think of me, especially if I believe that their opinions are ill-founded or unjustified or otherwise wrong.
In the court of my own personal opinion and conscience? Well, I cannot answer that one, because then I would be a different person.
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And for that you are hopeless fool.
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Because that is the world that we live in, and that is how people behave in this world.
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This seems like moving the goalposts, because we’re no where close. Alternatively, you’re quite ignorant and/or deluded, and arguing that we are there. Either interpretation of your position is that your position is bad.
Currently, especially in the presidential campaign, there is no such thing as “an equally-evil Democrat”.
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Health care reform is not 90% popular, like what I envision needing to get a constitutional amendment passed. In fact, I’d guess a sizeable portion of the US population is dead set against it, in the neighborhood of 25% to 50%.
Which is why I advocate for political advocacy on our representatives, and trying to get in the political parties, and running in primaries, voting in primaries, etc.
I still fail to see how. All you’ve done is bring up the cost of voting, which is a negligable cost in my opinion, unlike the risk of letting a Republican win which is a severe cost.
It’s possible we don’t even need to win a federal election or have any federal representative in favor of federal election reform to have it happen. We can go through the state legislatures. It’s been done before.
Also, seemingly unlike you, I think that the political parties are more vulnerable to public pressure than 0. Example: Bernie Sanders. Ron Paul (batshit insane, but still principled). Dennis Kucinich (also batshit insane, and ridiculously incompetent at being a legislator, but still principled). It’s not a hard and fast rule that all people in politics are bought. Just most of them. If it’s known that people will make this their number 1 issue, then the people running for office will respond to that pressure.
For states that allow ballot initiatives like California, it might be possible to avoid the state legislatures in those states altogether. (I’m not entirely sure of the legal details, but seems legally possible to pass a California constitutional amendment that somehow “requires” the state to vote in favor of a certain federal constitution amendment. Again, I don’t know though.)
Again, it’s really not. The trolley setup is constructed in such a way that most people find it immediately intuitively obvious that there is no third option. Your shooter example is far, far, from that. Whereas, my aliens example is quite comparable to the trolley problem in terms of giving strong confidence in particular expectations for particular choices. Your shooter scenario as described gives me no basis to form any expectations that any of my “choices” will result in different outcomes. Again, my aliens scenario does give you basis for expectations that your choices will result in different outcomes. That’s a necessary part of the problem.
I answered the question already as best as I could, with questions for clarification. See post 129, starting “Held responsible in what way?”.
Sorry, you’ve lost me already at the start. Why would I do such a thing? It’s incredibly difficult for me to answer such a question, because I would never do that, and so it’s hard to imagine myself in that situation. Further, the scenario is so outlandish and convoluted that I’m having difficulty understanding what you’re trying to get it, and how it relates at all to voting.
Can I modify it so that this guy makes it clear that he could frame me for hiring him to obtain the artifact beyond all doubt? Proceeding thusly, I would take a variant of option 3: I would decline services, do the best I could to gather incriminating evidence, and go to the police. Alternatively, if I was feeling selfish and if I thought that this guy’s framing was foolproof, then I would decline services, do the best I could to gather incriminating evidence, send that to the police anonymously, and live life on the run under an assumed identity in a foreign country as best as I could.
I don’t see how this scenario is comparable to voting at all. You’re introducing this additional element where I am to be held personally accountable with jail and/or death, which doesn’t exist in voting (generally speaking, at least in the US), which radically changes the way that I approach the problem. You’ve lost me entirely.
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It depends on a lot of particulars. I suspect you won’t like the answer, because you’re assuming several things about the scenario in order to evoke a particular response, but then you’ll assume the opposite in order to criticize my response.
My aliens example works because it’s like an indefeatable, unchangable force of nature. For any realistic evil army, they are defeatable, and that’s an option.
My aliens are also unchanging. For any realistic evil army, persuasion is always an option.
My aliens have also demonstrated their sincerity beyond doubt. For this evil army, it’s very hard to imagine having any degree of confidence in their sincerity.
So, if we make these assumptions explicit, then I give the answer that you’re digging for. Specifically, we have to assume the following. I am a mind-reader, and I can determine that the evil army is fully sincere. I am supernaturally gifted at predicting the future, and I know that my two courses of action will result in the expected outcomes, and that attempts at persuasion, armed resistance, and other options are futile.
Then yes, examining short term goals only, it seems that the only moral thing to do is to argue forcefully, using evil rhetoric, that the best / most evil(?) option is to kill only half the minorities, in order to save the other half.
Of course, one final angle that is relevant and different from my aliens example is the possibility that my rhetoric will actually change people’s minds to be more evil. That’s one last final assumption that should be made explicit. I assume that most of the townsfolk are against being evil, and that the evil army will eventually be defeatable, and thus the lasting harm of my speach in terms of changing minds is minimal. Whereas, in a more realistic world, I would have to concern myself with the possibility that my speech will be effective rhetoric in the years to come for changing more minds to evil. This is a very hard element to control for, which does not exist in my aliens scenario. I also don’t see how this element relates to voting. When I vote for a candidate, this is not rhetoric to support every single position of that candidate. Most people, almost all people, know this. Except for you, maybe. But even for you, my vote for an “evil candidate” is not going to persuade you to do more evil in the future, which makes this point moot. tl;dr I fail to see how this particular angle relates to voting.
Overall, I don’t see what purpose these scenarios serve because they are so very different from the voting scenario, and my largely equivalent aliens scenario.
Being old enough to remember “clean for Gene” and then McGovern and then Carter’s reelection campaign (just for a start), not to mention Bush v. Gore, I am amused to be accused of being too young to “remember” simplistic distortions of what happened in 2009–10. Just a reminder that ad hominems only work at all, even rhetorically, if they bear some relation to the individual.
That said, I think most of this game-theory-style discussion is completely irrelevant to the way national Presidential elections actually work. They are chaotic processes that frequently conclude in a majority consensus with which the minority resolutely disagrees. However, the public — or these two or more publics — come to a fundamentally emotional conclusion about who appears Presidential and then rationalizes the decision. Bill Clinton was a great example: Over the course of 1992, he appeared to grow in stature, and certainly in confidence, and retained that power to the utter dismay of Republicans no matter what they threw at him. [Personally, my main political effort during the 90s was in opposition to sanctions on Iraq, before anyone confuses analysis with preference.] Obama has done something similar.
In 2016, no one is there yet. (Trump tried to pretend.) All this frothing around in February is part of the process, but annoyingly premature. However, let’s not throw around terms like “evil” and “murderer” — they don’t help to clarify the issues. Can we just have a debate about political ends and means without slinging mud?
This is from way up top, but it’s the last one I was involved with, so…
Jake Harban @ 73:
Please either quote where I say this or stop misrepresenting what I’m saying.
Perhaps you mean electoral advantage, but the context sounds like you mean advantage in being an Executive. If I’ve misunderstood, my apologies, but if not… see below.
Setting aside the fact that you’re stacking two “if’s” on top of one another – neither of which has actually occurred at any time in the Green Party’s real-world history – could you cite where you’re getting your numbers from?
If you’re just spitballing, that’s fine, I just wanted to be certain where we are, numbers-wise.
I apologize for assuming you were. I’ll alter my arguments going forward.
(a) appears to still require the party to act as a spoiler – listen to us, or we’ll cost you the election.
(b) would be significant – and would only require the Green Party to garner more than triple the block of the voting public than they have every garnered in the past, even at the height of their popularity, which isn’t now. That’s one hell of an ‘if’, IMHO.
An error on my part.
Because according to the story, ignoring it cost them Florida, and therefore the election. See your (a) above, about taking that block for granted.
The Greens don’t get to have it both ways: either they’re a spoiler subset of the Democrats who can alter the major party policy by abstaining/voting Green, or they are a viable third party that doesn’t have to poach votes from one specific party, or they aren’t either and can be pretty much ignored.
You’re the only one that can change your voting preference. You can choose, but that’s not the same as being forced.
Two things: first of all, I don’t think it’s a dead cert that the DNC would look at a spoiler result from the left and a win from the right as being a good reason to swing left. If so, presumably, the 2000-2004 elections would have resulted in a shift to the left by the mainstream – which defies your entire objection to the current situation, yes?
Secondly, the bit that I bolded above, about Obama’s Executive situation? Compare it to the bit I bolded in this statement. Again, if you just meant electoral advantage, this is irrelevant, so I might be misunderstanding what you were saying.
The answer is I don’t rightly know. Such a line certainly exists, we haven’t hit it yet.
Also, this isn’t 2024.
No, sadly, it wouldn’t.
US history is rife with executive overreach, undeclared wars, and war crimes from the Oval. This is not new or unique. Sorry you assumed I’d dismiss it – looks like that was something you should have checked on first before arguing against it.
I struggled through the last 40 or so comments in stages all I came away with was those harping on the greens and not being a green and the democratic candidate choices were all murderers and worse was vote suppression. to tie up the liberal, radical left wing supporters and the general left-wing democratic supporters with doubt and futility enough to suppress the vote.
I will post this here because I was sent it I am sure one for Hillary could be found as well
uncle frogy
Comment 125:
Looking at the 2012 election, I agreed with Romney on 5% of the issues, figured he had a ~50% chance of winning, and that his election would result in a continuation of right-wing governance, causing harm to me and the country, and breeding further antipathy against the right and shifting the overton window leftwards in 2016. I agreed with Obama on 8% of the issues, figured he had a ~50% chance of winning, and that his election would result in a continuation of right-wing governance, causing harm to me and the country, and breeding antipathy against the left on the assumption that his policies were liberal and keeping the overton window stationary at best. All told, the two seemed exactly the same, leaving me with no preference for either. Meanwhile, I agreed with Stein on 75% of the issues, figured she had a <1% chance of winning, and her election would result in the end of the establishment and a new era of reform pushing towards left-wing governance. The benefits of voting for Stein were slim, but since her defeat would result in a win for either Obama or Romney, both of whom were identical, there was no reason not to vote for Stein.
The only reason I considered voting Green is because I considered Obama and Romney to be functionally identical. Because a Romney win over Obama is not a net loss, there is nothing lost by voting Green.
In 2008, I opposed Obama in the primaries but voted for him in the general without hesitation because without any history explicitly confirming his right-wing leanings, his loss to McCain would have been a net loss overall based on the information available at the time.
Yes, I am. I object to your assumption that any Democrat losing to any Republican would be a catastrophic loss. In fact, due to the tendency of Democrats to provoke a right-wing backlash and Republicans to provoke a left-wing backlash, a Democrat who is almost but not quite as evil as a Republican in absolute terms is just as evil when accounting for that backlash.
I also object to your (apparent) assumption that voting takes place in isolation. You concede that if the Greens had mainstream support, the collective action problem you propose is nonexistent. You also concede that telling pollsters you intend to vote Green has no negative marginal utility and does not form a collective action problem. The thing is, that if sufficient people tell pollsters that they intend to support the Greens, it creates mainstream support for the Greens.
If you concede that sufficient people prefer Greens over establishment Democrats but vote for the latter on the assumption the former is nonviable then your collective action problem is also an Abilene problem— everybody has the same first choice but votes for their second choice on the assumption that everyone else will. An Abilene problem is a function of information and communication; polls making it common knowledge that many people support Greens over Democrats provides the necessary information and affects people’s choices.
Simple. When I vote Green on election day, that’s a protest vote. When I say explicitly: “I will vote Green on election day if Clinton wins the primary,” that’s electioneering.
Thanks to secret ballot, you don’t ever know how I voted. What I post online or tell pollsters, on the other hand, is that I will vote for the candidate I support whether that’s a Democrat or not. It isn’t even a lie, since I reserve the right to change my mind prior to election day; who I plan to vote for now may not be who I plan to vote for when I have further information next November.
Yes, I know what you mean by a collective action scenario.
However, asserting the pledge I describe does not carry a negative marginal utility and is thus not a collective action scenario. Voting Green in an election where you consider a Democratic and a Republican victory to be equally disastrous is not a collective action scenario. Voting Green after taking the aforementioned pledge may not be a collective action scenario depending on the negative marginal utility of a Republican victory vs. that of breaking your pledge.
Except it does.
Suppose I ask you to donate $50 to the cause of election law reform. If you make that donation in isolation, you lose $50 and see nothing for it, because the campaign can’t be run on $50. However, if a large number of people donated $50, we could successfully petition for election law reform and the entire population would be better off.
I wouldn’t call it insurmountable – campaigns can and do work – but it’s still a collective action problem.
I’m not asking that the campaign convince people to protest vote; I’m asking that it convince them to sign a public but legally unenforceable pledge that, given the choice between a desirable and an undesirable candidate in the primary, they will (a) vote for the desirable candidate and (b) place a protest vote in the general election if the undesirable candidate wins the primary.
Doing so will have the primary effect of helping the desirable candidate win the primary by making the undesirable candidate less viable.
If the undesirable candidate wins anyway, it may have the secondary effect of making the “protest vote” into a legitimate vote by establishing a media narrative that a sufficiently large number of people already plan to do it; given that this is discussion of strategic voting, such narratives become self-fulfilling.
Since you keep getting lost on the cosmetic details of the analogy, the fundamental point is this: Which would you take of these four options: (1) cause a great evil to happen with your explicit permission, (2) cause a lesser evil to happen with your explicit permission, (3) fight against evil knowing that either the greater or lesser evil will happen against your will, but with the hope your fight may eventually pay off, or (4) do nothing, knowing that the greater or lesser evil will happen without your input?
What evidence do you have for this hypothesis? I suspect most left-leaning voters make their decision on the issues; voting Dem over Green is a strategic decision, not a commitment to support any Democrat at any cost.
There was in 2012. There may be in 2016.
Remember, when I say “equally evil,” I mean in totality. The same position is more evil when held by a Democrat than by a Republican because anything a Democrat says is treated as the “liberal option” and invites a right-wing backlash.
Campaign finance reform, then. Name the issue, it doesn’t matter. In fact, studies suggest that common people have effectively no influence on Congress.
Except that the discussion of protest votes is contingent on Sanders losing and designed to prevent him from losing. You can’t use the prospect of a Sanders win to argue against a last resort option that is only on the table if Sanders crashes and burns.
That’s an issue of comprehension on your part. I made it clear early on that there are only three options in my scenario (four if you count inaction).
And that’s a failure of imagination on your part.
The trolley problem is equally outlandish but you seem to have no problem understanding that.
No you can’t. That you keep dodging the question by answering modified versions of it is sort of the problem.
That’s exactly the point— the aliens are unchanging. All of my examples rest on the assumption that change is possible but achieving it conflicts with achieving the lesser evil up front.
But if you like your aliens problem, let’s go with that.
Suppose it was well-established that there is a group of aliens in orbit who regularly contact seemingly-random humans, and offer them a choice: “Kill one human yourself, or we will kill 1,000 humans.” Suppose it was well-known that they always follow through on their threats and this has been going on for years. Suppose that we tried diplomatic and military options, but nothing has been able to convince them. However, suppose further that there was a second group of aliens more powerful than the first. Every time the first group of aliens kills a human, there is a very small but non-zero chance that the second group of aliens will intervene and put a permanent end to the first group’s killing but otherwise they will do nothing. Suppose that this fact were confirmed by undeniable evidence, but there is no way to influence the actions of the second group or provoke them to intervene faster.
If the aliens contacted you, would you personally kill the one person?
Except that hard-to-control element is sort of the point. Choosing lesser evil over greater evil is easy; adding a risk that choosing the lesser evil cements it as the new normal and allows greatest evil in the long run makes things harder.
Yet in the real world, it’s far from outlandish. Already, the idea of the president assassinating American children by drone on his word that their parents are criminals is accepted as normal and endorsed by a Democrat. If even a single-digit percentage of the population considered that to be a moral event horizon and voted Green in 2012, it may have guaranteed the practice continued for four years under Romney but it would not have created the scenario in which the practice is an uncontroversial one with bipartisan support that is likely to endure through many future presidencies.
No, but it is a vote for every single position of that candidate. The idea that casting a vote to put someone in office does not constitute any endorsement of their positions is absurd.
The idea that they must meet every fuckwitted idea you have is absurd. Voting, like democracy, is about compromise. You vote for the viable (meaning they could legitimately garner 50%+ of the vote) candidate that best meets your criteria. They won’t meet them all. Never have since I started voting 40+ year ago. You appear to be politically naive. Which is a reason not to listen to your idealistic drivel, as it is unrealistic and not backed by evidence.
I did. All else equal, people are more likely to vote for incumbents.
Yes, it requires them to act as a spoiler.
Tripling a very small number is easy.
In 2002, the country was gripped with 9/11 hysteria. In 2002 and 2004, the disastrous effects of right wing rule had not fully become manifest.
A spoiler from the left arising out of a clear leftward shift among the population that the DNC has intentionally ignored would be a far clearer message than one in 2002 or 2004.
@135 Nerd:
So would you vote for Kodos or Kang?
Jake Harban @ 136:
So, the Green Party has shown itself to be incapable of doing something “easy” given multiple chances at it?
Is running a country “easy”?
And right winning an election wouldn’t be a nice, clear message?
Is getting only about 460,000 votes in the general a message?
Typical non-sequitur. They aren’t running, and aren’t viable. I’m still waiting for something other than “ifs” to show that the green are viable.
There is the old-fashioned way to pull the democrats to the left. Join and work for the party, and encourage and support candidates more to the left in the primaries. Then work for the turnout in general elections to elect democrats. The religious right did that to the rethuglicans, and succeeded in pulling the party to the right. But, then that is work, compared to carping that non-viable third parties are ignored.
Wait what? A problem involving a runaway train and a switch in the tracks is equally outlandish with a convoluted story of assassinations for hire, magical artifacts that force someone to speak the truth, and a world-wide ban based on taboo against using the artifact with a punishment of death? Please. Even my aliens scenario is more realistic and plausible than your magical artifact scenario. Dittos for your evil army scenario.
And it all comes back to the fundamental disagreement: That you think protest voting can actually accomplish something, and that you think it’s possible to overcome the collective action issue. I still strongly disagree. I see now that this is what you’re trying to draw out with your incredibly convoluted examples, and I still maintain that this is not a comparable scenario to elections and protest voting. It is possible to defeat an evil army. History is rife with examples. It is practically impossible to convince a large enough section of the population at the same time to vote for green. The history of the United States, especially in modern times, is full of history that supports the position that third party candidates do not win in national elections. There’s a few outliers, but all I’ve ever claimed is “extremely unlikely” and “incredibly hard to overcome the collective action issue”.
Correction: Ok, I forgot about part 2 where you push a “fat person” on the tracks to stop the train. That’s pretty outlandish. However, I still find that much easier to swallow compared to all of the convolutions that you have to go through in your stories. It’s so many that I honestly get lost and don’t understand the point. And no, the fault is not mine for “not understanding”. Again, intent is not magic. Communication is a two-way street. And in this case I’ll be more than happy to put most of the blame on you.
I can’t wait for the primaries to be over.
We’ve got two great candidates, and too many people think supporting one means you have to hate the other.
Late to the party, but the success of NDP in Canada shows that the logic that “voting for the 3rd party is a waste of time/vote” is flawed. Essentially, NDP was viewed as a non-viable party that wasted left votes and thus giving the power automatically to the conservatives. But small successes very quickly snow-balled into a big win. So, voting green is not necessarily a waste of vote because it might have the benefit of snow balling into larger turn out for the future elections.
However, that being said, in the particular case of US, I don’t think voting Green is viable because US is a conservative society and I don’t think Greens have any reasonable chance of winning even if they were given the same mainstream support that Democratic party has today.
Also, let’s be honest, the nominee for the Repubs will be either Cruz, Rubio, or Trump. Hillary is a much better choice than any of them.
Forgot to add, even Romney is a much better choice than any of those three clowns.
if you take the two party system as we have it here in the US and realize that a case can be made that the two major parties function more as umbrella organizations made up of increasingly distinct factions then the conventional analysis and labels begins to break down. It is apparent that there is a conflict going on inside the Republican party between the christian coalition, the tea party activists and the old guard main-street republicans.. Does the appearance of Bernie Sanders and his grassroots success also indicate the beginning of a split or shift between the center-est conservative democrats and the left wing democrats.
It is also good to remember that the parties in and of themselves are not a thing but are made up of human voters who can and have changed their allegiance from time to time, often with surprising results.
uncle frogy
As am I. If you find someone arguing that, try asking them.
If Clinton wins the primary, then the only viable candidates would be the Republican and Clinton, neither of which meet my criteria.
You’re missing the point. The purpose of the analogy is to demonstrate that your “short-term lesser evil at any cost” strategy has results you probably wouldn’t accept. The exact story used to establish the analogy is irrelevant.
There is no collective action issue. You made it up.
Your claim that protest voting is a collective action issue is based on two absurd assumptions, namely (1) that all or most liberals would vastly prefer any Democrat to any Republican under any circumstances, and (2) that everyone decides who to vote for in complete isolation without any influence from each other, campaigns, polls, or any other source of information except for the idea that Greens are non-viable.
By the definition you so helpfully posted in #129, the American Revolution itself was an insurmountable collective action issue that (would have) required many thousands of people to risk the net negative of being hanged for changing their behavior in isolation.
By assuming that voting is a collective action issue, you commit the same fallacy as creationists who declare a system couldn’t have evolved by assuming all the mutations necessary to produce it must have happened in isolation.
You compare a very general statement to a very specific one— “defeat an army” vs. “convince the people of one country to vote for one specific party under a very narrow range of circumstances.” You also seem to completely misunderstand the point of my analogy, so let’s try this again.
Suppose you run a large company. Your company is sued by a patent troll. You can settle the suit for $10,000 or you can pay $250,000 in legal fees to go to court and win. Which choice do you make?
Is that sufficiently realistic that you can understand it? And can you finally understand the point I’ve been trying to make?
And I’m just going to have to go back to this…
Has anybody ever tried? Past performance is no guarantee of future results under the best of circumstances; assuming that established methods of campaigning can’t acheive a political goal because no one has ever tried using those methods towards that goal is foolhardy.
You’re also forgetting the part where you have absolute unquestionable knowledge that pushing the fat person onto the tracks will kill him and no one else, that failing to do so will kill everyone on the train, and that no other options exist.
Contriving a hypothetical scenario in which you have absolute knowledge that couldn’t exist in the real world for the purpose of constraining available options in order to show the superiority of one choice over another without confounding variables is a very common practice that you seem entirely unfamiliar with. Yes, it’s “outlandish,” but that’s sort of the point— realism takes a back seat to demonstrating the principle in question.
I’m afraid I’ll have to let you keep most of the blame. I couldn’t be expected to know that the very concept of setting up a hypothetical scenario to demonstrate a moral dilemma would be alien to you.
The underlying point is simple: (a) endorsing a lesser evil to prevent a greater evil can create the greatest evil in the long term, as your endorsement normalizes the lesser evil, and (b) there is a certain threshold of evil that you would likely balk at committing even in the name of preventing a greater evil; for example, you would probably refuse to order a hit even if you knew many people would die if you didn’t.
All of my various analogies were fundamentally just revised versions of the trolley problem, none of which were any more “outlandish” than the original. That you made no effort to understand any of them is not a failure of communication on my part.
Jake Harban:
One of my criteria for an actual sitting president (not a potential or hypothetical one, nor a mere candidate) is that the person is elected democratically. Otherwise, they can’t legitimately have the position, much less do anything (good or bad or neutral) with it. A hypothetical Green Party president does exactly nothing as a real president in the real world, because they’re not a real president in the real world. We should make the best choices we can about what (we think) is really happening and will probably happen, because of those choices.
You don’t seem to get that talking about the one who “best meets” your criteria is talking about the one who is the closest match, which need not be a perfect or exact match. My ideal candidate doesn’t exist, and I know that. I also know that I still need to make a choice about the ones who do exist who aren’t ideal.
I don’t think we need to assume much at all. We have lots evidence, from numerous polls, giving us more than enough reliable information about which presidential candidates in 2016 have some not-absurdly-tiny chance of actually being hired to do the job and actually doing something once they have it. If you want me to grant that a Green party candidate (couldn’t even tell you their name right now) has an absurdly tiny chance of being elected, I’ll happily do that: they have an absurdly tiny chance of being elected. It can’t be completely ruled out, nor does it need to be, because the chances are so absurdly tiny. So, we don’t need to assume much of anything based on past results. All those independently-conducted polls could somehow be off by an order of magnitude or more, but that’s wildly unlikely possibility too, like the odds of a Green candidate actually winning the election and doing something.
Trolley problems aren’t contrived to demonstrate the truth of some principle — you’re right that they’re not meant to be taken as realistic, but it’s done to isolate moral reasoning (the types we use for situations like this) from other sorts of reasoning, to put some boundaries on the problem so we don’t stray off too far into irrelevant concerns that don’t have anything to do with morality (and into raising doubts about what is even happening, for instance). Given the parameters laid out in the story, it just misses the point to dispute the facts about what’s going on (that the situation described is happening just as it’s described, your choices really are limited to those you’re given, not that you merely believe any such thing and may be mistaken). Like you would think about a work of fiction, there’s very little use in disputing with the author (who gets to write whatever story they like) about what actually happened in their own story.
Yes, Kylo Ren killed Han Solo, and you don’t get to argue about things like that unless you want to declare it non-canon or write your own fan-fiction in which that didn’t happen. Nor do you get to delve into an explanation about why fucking lightsabers don’t really exist. You do get to offer reasons why he shouldn’t have done that (or why he should have, or why it makes no difference whether he does or doesn’t kill him), because we’re trying to focus in on that sort of question and not any other sort of question.
In other words, you take it that the bare facts are correct (suspending disbelief if you need to), so that your task is only to decide what can and should be done about them. If everybody knows what’s going on, or agrees about the situation they’re supposed to be assessing, then they can proceed on the basis that they’re assessing the same thing (at least the same given the amount detail the storyteller provides), meaning they can compare/contrast the reasoning each would use and the decisions each would make about that same thing.
But it’s not a foregone conclusion that we must all decide to respond the same way, simply because we have the same beliefs about what the situation is that we need to make a decision about. That’s not the point of trolley problems — to make an unrealistic/contrived/extreme example which is supposed to be analogous to a realistic one somehow, in order to convince people to make the same choice about it as you in the realistic case, because your choice is supposed to be the obviously superior as somehow demonstrated by the hypothetical. That would be silly. The point is to get people to think about the same thing in the first place, so that you might be able to figure out how their (possibly different) moral reasoning works or what their reasons even are. If a realistic situation simply isn’t analogous to a particular form of a trolley problem, then this sort of mental exercise probably won’t be very useful to you in the realistic case, and it certainly won’t prove anything about which one of you is wrong.
Wait, we were talking about criteria used for casting votes. Saying that one criterion for casting your vote is that the person must be elected democratically presumably means you can only vote for incumbents? Or only vote for winners?
When deciding who to vote for, one absolute criterion of mine in which I refuse to compromise is that they must not endorse serial mass murder. After 16 years of serial mass murderers in the White House, I have lost all patience for the idea that one murderer is less evil than another.
And you don’t seem to get that Romney and Obama were and Clinton and Cruz potentially are identical in every respect.
Put it this way, if both Clinton and Cruz announced their intent to support drone strikes against me and you personally, then I wouldn’t vote for either of them and I think you’d do likewise. When two candidates both agree that you, personally, should be killed then talking about who “best meets” your criteria in other ways is an absurdity; how can one person who plans to kill you be any better than any other?
If Clinton and Cruz announced their intent to support drone strikes against our respective loved ones, I wouldn’t vote for either of them and I think you’d do likewise. Sure, you may live through the drone strike which means that maybe one candidate will mock your grief while the other will send you flowers and give you better health care but in the face of your loved ones being murdered, the distinction is irrelevant.
So suppose instead that they announced their intent to kill Pakistani children by continuing the drone war. If announcing their shared intent to kill you or your loved ones renders any distinction between them meaningless, why should their intent to kill brown foreign strangers be any different? If you would vote for a candidate who would kill Pakistani children because they “better meet” your criteria but would refuse to vote for them if they planned to kill your family, then you are essentially arguing that the lives of your family are worth more than the lives of Pakistani children and I refuse to do that.
Yes, but what evidence do you have that the Greens have ever run a national campaign on anything approaching the same level as the D/R duo? I’ve been inundated with ads and petitioners and telemarketers from every Democratic and Republican candidate any every election, but never from the Greens. In fact, I’ve never heard so much as a peep from any of them in any election thus far.
The reality of today’s presidential campaigns requires actually, you know, campaigning. That a party which doesn’t bother doesn’t get more than a handful of votes is unsurprising. However, you can’t argue that their poor showing without a campaign would prove that campaigning wouldn’t work for them; you might as well claim that because you’re no good at painting now, there’s no possibility that you will ever improve with practice.
Yes, exactly. Trolley problems are contrived to isolate moral reasoning; in particular, the choice of deliberately causing harm in the hope of preventing greater harm that wouldn’t be your fault if it happened.
My various scenarios were contrived to isolate moral reasoning under slightly different circumstances; namely, the choice of deliberately causing harm in the hope of preventing greater harm under circumstances that risk creating greatest harm by normalizing the lesser harm.
Sort of like the reasoning that one might need to employ when deciding whether to vote for Democrats and explicitly endorse a lesser evil that you risk normalizing or vote third-party and risk the greater harm occurring (albeit without any blood on your personal hands). Like the trolley problem, the scenarios I describe isolate the moral reasoning from the practical ambiguities (such as your own vote having negligible impact no matter what you do).
Mind you, that while we got, well, sidetracked with the trolley problem analogies, I originally posted it in response to Vivec, who tried to claim that choosing the non-evil option makes you responsible for the greater evil that occurs while voting for the lesser evil option absolves you of responsibility for the evil you endorsed; that pushing the fat man in front of the trolley makes you responsible for zero deaths because taking the “least evil” option absolves you for that evil while declining to do so makes you personally responsible for the deaths of everyone on the trolley for failing to act, or that voting Green makes you responsible for the actions of the Republican president you opposed while voting Democratic absolves you of responsibility for the actions of the Democratic president you supported.
Correct. Of course, while Vivec may not know it, they actually did offer the same response I did, namely:
That this contradicted Vivec’s previously stated position went unnoticed at the time.