It’s worth repeating what Lynna already said: the Republican party platform is made of poison.
– the platform committee endorsed constructing a wall along the U.S./Mexico border, just like Trump wants
– the committee changed “illegal immigrants” to “illegal aliens” in the text
– the committee refused an amendment that would have pushed for a restriction of magazine capacity in firearms
– they approved an amendment that would make it legal for parents to force their LGBT children to go through conversion therapy
– Children raised in “traditional” homes are “healthier.” “Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime, or become pregnant outside of marriage,” the platform reads.
– Education includes “a good understanding of the Bible.”
– Coal is a “clean” form of energy
You don’t like Clinton (I don’t particularly care for the Clinton regime, either). You think Sanders was robbed. Ignore both Hillary Clinton and your grievances about the DNC: if you don’t vote to make sure that odious collection of lies and destructiveness isn’t put right at the top of our nation, you’re not helping.
Even with my top choice not making it on the ballot, this is the goddamned easiest election decision I’ve ever had to make in my life.
While my country is by no means perfect I’m grateful that I don’t live in yours.
No offense.
No, that’s an entirely appropriate reaction, pipefighter.
pipefighter:
I don’t even know where you are, but I wish I were in your shoes.
I can’t believe there are still people out there who think that “Clinton and Trump are basically the same” or on a more general point that “Democrats and Republicans are just two flavours of the same party”.
Seriously … on what planet do those people live?
And yes, I’m also glad that I live on the other side of the pond (and Channel). Truly, the idea of a Trump presidency (or a Republican controlled House and Senate) still scares me more than the idea that there are probably still people walking around right now plotting on a do-over of Zaventem/Maelbeek. And I pass those places every day on my way to work.
What also frightens me most is that those “great America” demagogues have a good chance of hurting us outside of the US more than a large portion of the people inside the US … and we don’t even have a say about who should lead the so-called “leader of the Free World”.
Anyway … guess I’ll have to search for some relaxing short videos (Shaun the Sheep often does the trick) before going to sleep tonight.
If Clinton can’t win an election against Trump without the support of people like me who can’t stand her history of right-wing policy followed by “whoops, I didn’t intend the consequences of that”, then too bad. The Democrats had their chance to attract my vote, and they not only didn’t take it, they openly sneered at the idea that it was worth trying, and chose the candidate who, out of everyone available in their party, had the worst negative ratings by the electorate at large. If Trump hadn’t won the Republican side, this wouldn’t even be a contest, and you’d be preparing to live under that poison.
If Clinton is truly such a good person as her supporters claim, and she is doubtful that she can win, I suggest she resign from the race and tell her voters to support Jill Stein instead. Everybody (who claims to be to the left of the Republicans, at least) wins: since this will unify the not-Republican vote, we get an actual progressive in the White House, who is also a woman, Trump loses, and as a bonus we don’t have Clinton which means we don’t start a bunch of pointless needless wars and enact a bunch of stupid-as-all-get-out trade agreements and benefitting-only-the-1% economic policy.
That may seem outrageous, but it’s no more outrageous than seriously believing that Clinton’s “evolved” views on gay marriage are sincere, mere months after publicly describing gay marriage as “unnatural”. If Clinton supporters can believe that, then the true fact that the Green Party does a better job of representing the majority of Americans than the Democrats do should be easy.
If, on the other hand, Clinton doesn’t need a unified left to win, then the kind of whinging embodied by this blog post is just pointless. If your only reason to vote for Clinton is fear, then it only serves to highlight what a bad choice Clinton is, which reinforces the determination of people like me never to vote for her.
I’m afraid that this is the way things are going to be from now on.
Forget about progress. Forget about social democracy, single-payer health care, tuititionless college, a living wage, secularism, or any of the other amenities that modern nations enjoy being established in this capitalist, theist shit hole. Either because of fear of losing to the Republicans, or a upper-class corruption (“I’m mean, of course I’m liberal. I drive a Tesla, my Malibu beach house is certified Green, and I donated my last stock option check to Planned Parenthood…”), the Democrats have abandoned the working poor and “settled” for a candidate who is slightly better than the right wing loon because the candidate with any vision or scruples is somehow “unelectable.”
It shouldn’t be too surprising. This country was founded by religious fanatics and profiteers, built by slaves and exploited immigrants over the mass graves of Native Americans. Greed, superstition, racial and sexual chauvinism, and willful ignorance are a part of America’s cultural DNA. How many decades or generations will it take to purge that evil from our society’s narrative? How many years does America, or indeed, the human species have left?
From now on, the purpose of voting is not to advance society. That won’t happen. Now we vote for the candidates and the part that will help keep America’s inevitable slide into extinction as slow and as painless as possible. Maybe it’s for the best. The U.S. is a cancer upon the Earth. The rest of the human race may have a chance once we’re gone.
Face it. It’s over. The bad guys won before the game ever started. Just hope that your death is quick and painless.
At least, as families are being torn apart, The Vicar will rest easy knowing he didn’t have to vote for someone named Clinton. That is, after all, the important thing.
Yes, nothing says ‘clean’ like coal, which is heavy in emissions and leaves you with big ponds or tanks of toxic slag. You know, those things that always leak into the river they’re next to, poisoning a few hundred thousand people down-river. In fact, ‘clean’ is definitely the first thing to come to anyone’s mind when coal is mentioned.
Anyroad, colour me naive but I had no idea a party platform could be a list of lies. I would have thought it would be something among the lines of goals or targets the party would like to achieve, e.g. actual clean energy, more jobs, fewer people below the poverty line. Things that voters might actually like to see enacted.
This, on the other hand, looks pointless and makes the Republicans look (more) ridiculous. What exactly can we expect to happen here? If Trump is elected, will coal suddenly become clean? Will conversion therapy stop being a nightmare humans talk other humans into because they hate them with a passion? Will kids’ lives in ‘traditional’ families improve dramatically over night? This makes as much sense as a starfish for a cogwheel. Looks like the thing we want but turns out to be nothing like it.
Therefore I present to you my very own party platform:
– The sky is green (time to change things up a bit. Each state may vote on its preferred shade of green.)
– With regard to the above, all colours are now considered shades of green. Knowing this will upset people, I proclaim this to be a matter of diversity, inclusivity and political correctness.
– Coal is the devil’s candy: anyone using it is automatically and irredeemably damned to hell. Therefore heavy investments into alternative energy sources are necessary to save your very soul.
– The military is too bloody expensive and ineffective. It is to be disbanded over the next 20 years. In the meantime it will be run by seasoned NASA administrators, which ought to the army down sufficiently to avoid further bloodshed.
– Every three-letter agency is fired immediately, ostensibly due to budget cuts. The CIA and NSA will also be charged with violating the prime directive.
– The second amendment stands unassailable. It does not mention ammunition, the possession of which is a felony punishable by up to 700 years of community service and loss of all second amendment privileges. I fully intend to carry on the proud American tradition of cherry-picking the constitution to the letter as it suits me.
– The alien mothership is on an intercept course with our planet. Once elected president I promise to immediately discharge the entire nuclear arsenal at its current location in deep space. This will save the US tax payer an enormous amount of money and the potiential embarrasment of being involved in humanity’s downfall. It is not impossible that an alien mothership on an intercept course will actually be destroyed in the process.
I believe this is no less realistic and …. slightly more sensible than the Republican platform. Come November vote Komarov for Dictator for Life – or until he’s sick of it, or you of him. I promise I’ll go quietly when my time has come. (That’s my campaign slogan)
komarov
A very attractive platform.
I would vote for you but you have a weird nym.
Also I’m not American.
On planet White Dude With An Inheritance Who Just Discovered Marx’s Reader Digest
Who gives a shit whether she is saying it out of genuine concern or not, the fact remains that she is saying it and the other shitheads aren’t. That’s not to say that a politician is guaranteed to follow their word, but still it remains immaterial why they endorse something, only that they endorse it.
I’m surprised they didn’t go the whole nine yards and throw on mandatory virginity tests (for women only, naturally) and a return to anti-miscegenation laws.
Of course, until it’s politically convenient for her to endorse the opposite position. Would you oppose Clinton then?
Of course you won’t, because no Matt what shit the Dems pull THE REPUBLICANS WOULD BE WORSE!!!! Politics is not about ideas or making civilization into what it should be. It’s one group of millionaires trying to beat another bunch of rich assholes by pandering to the lower classes.
Edit: …no matter…
P.S. While the possibility is extraordinary unlikely (bordering on impossible), if some hypothetical “moral revival” were to sweep the country and public opinion were to slide against same sex marriage, anyone here who doesn’t think Hillary would be the first to declare her support for “traditional marriage” is delusional. Even though he is still a miserable excuse for a human being, Trump has zero personal support for the fundamentalist vomit that constitutes the Republican Party’s platform and is merely using the party rubes for his own ends… in the exact same fashion that Hillary has no intention of honoring any progressive goals and is only trying to hold onto Sander’s supporters. Both candidates are using their respective party bases and will shed them like a used condom the instant the election results come in. The party platforms may be vastly different but the candidates themselves are mirror images.
@#8, Nerull
The Obama administration has deported a record number of immigrants, and Clinton has promised to keep up Obama’s policies in that area. So that’s an empty threat.
More worrisome is the question of whether those families will have a chance to be torn apart — Clinton is trying to provoke Russia and China, both of which have a lot of nukes, and her history (particularly Libya) shows that she absolutely has no clue what the limits of American power are. If the family gets vaporized by a nuclear exchange caused by Clinton not understanding that some enemies can actually retaliate before they get torn apart, does Nerull consider that better or worse than deportation?
With this, I agree. But I suspect they wouldn’t want a curriculum that gives a real good understanding of the Bible…
“Today, class, we’re going to read all about the people that God killed or ordered killed, according to the Bible, so that we have a real good understanding of the Bible. Say, anyone wonder where all the skeletons of all of those dead people are?”
Clinton wants nuclear war with China and Russia, really? Awesome. You do you, Vicar.
@#7 Akira MacKenzie: “Now we vote for the candidates and the part that will help keep America’s inevitable slide into extinction as slow and as painless as possible. Maybe it’s for the best. The U.S. is a cancer upon the Earth. The rest of the human race may have a chance once we’re gone.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Shouldn’t we be trying to make the extinction as fast as possible? Get rid of the cancer more quickly??
Aside from what I now describe as an unhealthy lack of giving a fig about what happens anymore, I’m just going to look at the electoral college and the US voting system. If it seems like there’s a chance Clinton can win my state, I might vote for her… if there’s a chance she won’t win my voting district. Otherwise I might as well try to make the Green Party more visible. But if I do vote for Clinton I might have to make my actions reflect my vote and put all my money into military and health insurance company stock, then piss off every foreign country and mildly poison everybody in the US. Or just research how to make a lot of money at the expense of everyone who makes less money than me.
@#19, numerobis
I don’t think she wants a nuclear war, I think she wants to try to intimidate both China and Russia, and stands a good chance of setting off a war in doing so, and a direct war with either China or Russia stands a good chance of turning nuclear. I have no confidence in her ability to tell how far is Too Far, or what policies are likely to end in disaster, because she has a long history of screwups, one worthy of George W. Bush but centered in politics rather than business. (She thought repealing Glass-Steagall would be a great idea, for instance, and that we could pull a military invasion of Libya without any sort of disaster.)
As far as Russia goes, Clinton is one of the people pushing for “defensive” nukes to be cited in Eastern Europe pointed at Russia, she wants a “no-fly zone” in Syria which will put the US in direct military conflict with Russia (which is flying missions in Syria at the behest of the official Syrian government — you know, the one we undermined by funding terrorists who turned out to be Al Queda after the fact?), she wants a military confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine, and of course she’s pushing for the $1 trillion’s worth of new nuclear weapons (which Obama is also in favor of, incidentally).
And then there’s China. She has done less saber-rattling there, but she’s one of the people claiming that China has no right to patrol the South China Sea (and threatening military action over what China is doing), and her campaign platform specifically said she wanted to “confront” them.
The New York Times noticed a while back that Clinton is more hawkish than many Republicans, and she certainly believes that the US has the right to interfere with other countries’ politics — that was why Henry Kissinger famously said she was doing such a good job in the State Department. And she has no problem with horrible US-backed strongmen, either. Bad foreign policy is just What Clinton Does; when she says she “gets things done”, her supporters cheer and never ask “gets what things done?”
The Vicar;
You are a vile, entitled sack of shit.
So.
When the United States of America dis-unites, what will the map look like?
@#22, oliversarmy
That’s… pretty much what I feel about Hillary Clinton, her awful husband, her daughter, her son-in-law, her fellow-travelers in the DLC, and all her supporters. So, er, I guess the feeling is mutual?
@ #6
Sure, vote for Stein, then we can get rid of those pesky mandatory vaccinations that prevent childhood diseases, and we can all, “support the teaching, funding and practice of holistic health approaches … such as herbal medicines, homeopathy,” etc., etc. (From the Green Party Platform.)
Yep, you are whiny piece of shit about the Clintons, and offer no VIABLE (meaning electable by the general populace) alternative. Vote your own conscious, and shut the the fuck up about your hatred. It simply makes you look like a piece of shit every time you bloviate your paranoia.
@#25, tomh
That is literally the only complaint Democrats ever bring up about the Green Party’s platform, but they generally can find plenty to complain about in the proposed platforms of either Clinton (TPP, more little wars whether you think they’ll get big or not, fracking, no more banking regulation) or Sanders (failure to confront the NRA, tendency towards isolationism, continued commitment to existing bad — i.e. violent — foreign policy). I was willing to compromise down to Sanders, but compared to Clinton, the nonsense about vaccines in the Green Party platform makes Jill Stein look as much better than Hillary Clinton than you Clinton supporters claim Hillary Clinton looks better than Donald Trump.
(Besides, during the last 7 years, the Democrats have claimed almost continuously that not having an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress means that nothing whatsoever can possibly be done, so they should be relieved of the responsibility of their utter failure to even try. If that’s the case, why worry about who the President is at all as long as there are 41 Senate seats “safe”? …unless, of course, you’re willing to admit that the Democrats are a bunch of liars who will use any excuse available to avoid moving even slightly away from the policies dictated by their corporate, pro-military donors. And if you admit that, then why bother with the Democrats at all?)
@#26, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Do you know, I put this into Google Translate, switched it to Esperanto and back, and it said “I can’t refute any of your points so I’m going to try obscenity and intimidation”? True story.
I love you, too, Nerd. Don’t ever change.
One should follow Chomsky’s advice:
Swing state: Clinton
Non-swing state: Stein
The rest of the time: activism.
FWIW, Clinton as of (?) no longer supports the TPP.
oddly, the DNC still does however, and is included in the platform for the convention.
wonder how that will work out?
since trade negotiations are one of the actual powers of POTUS.. does it even matter what a democratic congress thinks? they can only vote on the language. it’s up to POTUS to decide the issue one way or another.
so say the DNC does NOT end up changing its platform… and neither does Hillary.
I can only assume that means no TPP. Living in NZ, who would be the bottom man on that totem pole, that’s fine by me.
The Vicar;
Here is the difference; my feelings about you have no consequences, other than perhaps some abstract hurt feelings on your part.
Your juvenile reaction to Clinton in the face of a Trump election has real world consequences. I can only assume that you are fairly well off white man that will would weather a Trump administration without any significant detrimental affects to you personally. To hell with anyone that may suffer from your childish purity politics, right?
That, Vicar, is what makes you a vile, entitled sack of shit. And there is nothing mutual about it
Gotta protect the purity of our precious bodily fluids, eh?
Oh noes, GMOs!
…and a end to all nuclear use/research – even product irradiation/sterilization, nuclear waste destruction and nuclear fusion – and a halt to nanotechnology development because of fear of gray goo?
@ #13
Not true, I have complaints about some of her other anti-science positions. Stein calls for a ban on GMOs “until they are proven safe.” (Here’s a clue, they have been.) Ban nuclear power. But, of course, my main objection is that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. I guess from your point of view, that’s a plus, not a minus.
I have long said that the US’s two party system is no different than a one party system because there is always a majority.
Now the two party system is no different than a one party system because their policies are indistinquishable.
*indistinguishable
How did I manage that? They’re not even adjacent….
*looks at the party platforms*
you need new glasses. seriously.
I have no idea who will win the election but if I listened to all those with such dire predictions I would feel pretty bad about now cause there is absofuckinlutely nothing to prevent one of the two worst candidates in history from getting elected.
Not one of the Cassandras have offered any ideas or suggestions what so ever
vote for anyone at all or no one absolute disaster the end of democracy will happen any way.
sounds like it is time take a long walk on a short pier.
uncle frogy
I feel like I should join in the defense of Green and the idea of voting for and not voting against, but I’ve said I don’t give a fig. I’m probably insane. I lean slightly towards the world burning now than the world burning later.
We’re in a cave. There are two tunnels. One tunnel leads to a pit of screaming bats and spikes and dynamite, and the other leads back to the cave we’re in now. Hey, what’s that other tunnel with the light? No, that one smells funny, and besides we might get pulled into the bad pit instead, and once we’re there we can’t leave and I mean of course we’re going to set off every stick of dynamite, explosions are cool??
I guess what I’m saying is if there happens to be dynamite in the looping tunnel we can use to block off that death pit then fine. Fine. Just as long as we don’t set off the dynamite while in the looping tunnel, and especially not if we proceed to use it to block our way out of the tunnel. Also, I should have mentioned this sooner, but there’s poison gas in this cave. It’s okay, it’s only near the floor, but we are going to have to have some people ride on others’ shoulders, and I think you know how we decide who gets on top. But maybe we’ll build some stilts for older people, and eventually we might clean up this gas, ha ha ha ha ha
Oh yeah and reports say the tunnel was flooded. Still, proponents say that they’ve flushed out all the water, at least. Gee, I hope so. I also hope we don’t stop to drill and blast minerals out of the tunnel. You know, causing more cave-ins and whatnot.
That metaphor went on a bit longer than I intended. If anyone wants to add to the metaphor in favor of voting Clinton or not, by all means.
Vote Green then. Gotcha.
The one where actions speak louder than words.
Fuck you.
Seriously, fuck you.
So, are we not supposed to vote along issues that we care about, then? Because I am very heavily against the Green party’s anti-science bullshit.
Overlooking that because reasons seems like just an extension of the “not as bad as the boogieman du jour” complex we’re supposed to be railing against.
@unclefrogy, #37
“I have no idea who will win the election but if I listened to all those with such dire predictions I would feel pretty bad about now cause there is absofuckinlutely nothing to prevent one of the two worst candidates in history from getting elected.”
I would call that a fairly accurate assessment of our current situation. Otherwise I agree with The Vicar. By the way, if you’re going to talk about irrationality:
http://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_large/public/views-article/clintonaipac.jpg?itok=1mCxW7xQ
That’s the form of irrationality that’s absolutely guaranteed to get a lot of people killed, and a lot less likely to be moderated into anything even remotely reasonable.
For the record – even if I was going to vote for a third party, it would absolutely not be the Green party. If I’m going to throw strategy to the wind and vote based purely off of whose platform I prefer, “anti-vaccine pro-homeopathy” is a disqualifying plank.
@Vivec, #42:
So who would you prefer otherwise, and if the Green Party dispensed with those elements of that platform would that be sufficient to change your mind about it? (Not criticisms, just curious).
If I was purely voting on whose platform I preferred – which I’m not – that would certainly make the green party more attractive.
#39 Jake
It’s time to grow up Jake.
Jake Harban #39
You can <blockquote>. Well done.
Did you know that when you copy/paste a block of text,
you can also copy/paste the nym of the commenter?
I quite like much (most?) of the Green Party platform, but the anti-science stuff and inability to actually win an election in the current climate really puts me off. Reparations for generations of genocide, slavery, theft, abuse, etc.; strong global action on climate change; universal, comprehensive health care system; progressive tax and banking reforms; end of the war on drugs; end of privatization of prisons, schools, and other government services; nuclear disarmament and massive reallocation of ‘defense’ spending to public services; end to patents on algorithms and information; discouraging use of cars in favor of mass transit and human powered transports. Fuck yeah!
As one living in ‘it’s not just the heat, it’s the humidity’/’I hear dueling banjos’-land, it’s dangerous enough to use a car on the road, so can’t really use bikes on most roads at most times of day unless you have a death wish. Also lots of really tall and steep hills, but an electric assist motor can help greatly.
My take:
If you like Green, vote for them bottom up. Try to get Greens elected to city councils and state legislatures (where they would presumably caucus with Democrats to oppose Republicans). Maybe even try to get a Green elected to Congress.
But not for president. In a 2 party system ANY vote not for Clinton is a de facto vote for Trump. Likewise, ANY vote not for Trump is a de facto vote for Clinton. Personal preference has to give way to pragmatism.
@45 oliversarmy
Just shut up, you ableist asshole.
Inspired by @48 futurechemist, here’s a few open questions to Clinton supporters:
1. Can you name any reason to vote for Clinton rather than simply against Trump?
2. What policies or actions would you find so odious that you would never vote for anybody who did/supported them, even if they were a Democrat running against a technically-more-evil Republican?
I’ve been reading the political threads here for a good while now, and I’m amazed by the contempt and insults that The Vicar gets.
There’s plenty of people arguing against him with actual arguments and it’s very interesting.
Those few who are desperately trying to diminish him really stand out as people with poor arguments though.
I’m done concern/tone trolling.
“A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump” is a stupid argument.
Let’s assume:
Clinton: 1000 votes
Trump: 1000 votes
If I vote for Stein, the situation doesn’t change.
If I vote for Trump, the situation does.
I could say “A vote for Stein is a vote for Clinton” and it would be just as correct.
For the record, I’m not a US citizen but I’d vote for Clinton just because climate change.
Er, what? Do you oppose taking action against climate change, or do you think Clinton supports it?
Jake @49
Ableist?
What?
Do accusations of political immaturity constitute ableism now?
I am more inclined to think that your (and The Vicar’s) childish political purity that, if enough morons like you cling to, could result in the election of President Trump is an ableism rooted in your white male privilege.
You’re an idiot Jake. It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.
I kinda figured it was because of that whole “third party pulling enough votes from the ideologically similar main party that the opposing party wins” thing?
Yes.
1. She’s a woman. That’s a minor reason, but in a contest between Clinton and a hypothetical male candidate who held exactly her positions I would vote for Clinton to establish the precedent. The first woman to become president in a country is generally a conservative or relatively conservative. The next one may not have to be, Theresa May aside. President Clinton makes a future President Warren more likely. It’s an investment.
2. Her position on reproductive rights. I’m a fertile uterus bearing person. I survived one pregnancy due to a combination of dumb luck and good care. It’s unlikely I’d survive another. Abortion access is a life or death issue for me.
3. Health care reform. Her platform supports expansion of Medicaid and a public option expansion of Obamacare. These are ideas that might go someplace in the short term. Medicare for all, leaving aside the problem that private insurers have infiltrated Medicare pretty thoroughly, is not going to be law any time soon. Sanders’ proposal to make that the law has not a single cosponsor. The populace doesn’t support it in a way that is going to result in new congresspeople who will support it in the short term. I’m ready to get what I can.
4. Immigration. Her platform calls for ending family detention and closing private detention centers.
5. $15 an hour minimum wage. Or even $12/hour minimum wage. Either one is higher than the current minimum.
6. Sane Supreme Court picks. They won’t all be RBG, but they won’t be Trumps weird friends either. And she might be able to sneak another Ginsberg onto the court.
7. She’s the only candidate–including Stein– who doesn’t seem to think that people with autism are useless eaters deserving of bleach enemas and maybe the T4 program.
Tell it to the Canadians *cough* Harper *cough*.
Independent parties in the US are useless unless the US changes to a coalition type of government.
I don’t see anything really stopping that from happening, but I also haven’t seen any movement towards doing so either.
not really sure why…
that would assume the rest of the electorate is sorted equally… but they aren’t.
The GoP has cultivated a radical right base for 3 generations now, and it gives the a solid 20% (at least) voting base to work with. those are votes they KNOW they are going to get, no matter what.
with a total 40% voter turnout.. if EVERYONE remaining voted for the other candidate, you would have a draw.
if 1% vote for a third party… GoP wins.
THAT’S how the math actually works.
as evidence… take any midterm election in the last 20 years.
Ichthyic @57: There are generally two major parties in US politics, but they aren’t always the same two parties. It is entirely possible for, say, the Republican party to implode and the Greens to take over as the major second party…if the Greens develop enough of a base on the local/state level to be taken seriously on the national level. I would be completely open to voting Green in my local elections, for example, especially since I live in a “machine” city where the real election is the primary. But they don’t seem to be running anyone.
.. you aren’t ADDING a vote of you decide to vote green, the way the us system works, you are subtracting that vote from one of the other parties.
like I said… get a coalition style government in place, and voting independent will actually mean something. As it stands now?
nope.
spinning your wheels to vote green in the US.
But then they might have to do some actual governing and policy-making. And worse, sully themselves with negotiation and compromise.
Much easier to just be holier than everyone else and otherwise irrelevant.
The German Greens found that a problem when they got into the national government. I remember a quote from sometime in the 1990s where a prominent Green said something like, “The economy, energy, Kosovo…it’s all so complicated now.” But they somehow managed to work out how to do it and are now threatening to take over from the SPD as the major left wing party. True, it’s easier in a parliamentary system, but I see no reason why Green politicians in the US can’t work it out too.
That The Vicar thinks* that Clinton is more likely than Trump to bring about nuclear war tells us all we need to know about him: anything and everything, including his beliefs about reality, is subordinate to his ego – as his shameless repeated admissions that he plans to vote on the grounds of spite confirms. Remarkably similar to Trump in that respect. Clinton, we can be very confident, will continue standard US post- WWII foreign policy: brutal, mendacious, dangerous, but something the world has survived for 70+ years. Trump will conduct his “foreign policy” on the basis of near-total ignorance and a hugely swollen but immensely delicate ego, sensitive in the highest degree to any perceived slight. We have already had foretastes of his approach in the Mexican wall nonsense, the proposal to ban Muslim entry to the USA, the support for the Brexiters and response to their victory (the fall in sterling will be good for his Scottish golf courses). The thought of that man with his finger on the nuclear button would induce terror in anyone even approximately rational.
*I’m assuming he is being honest about this belief, difficult though that is to credit.
@53 oliversarmy:
I was going to say that there could be an argument for “ageist” given your “grow up” comment, but…
This is what we call “ducking into the punch.”
So much for the argument that Trump’s talk of a wall is just hyperbole or rhetoric and not something he intends to try to do or that Congress will stop him if he does try. I suppose the “politicians lie” argument is still doable, though I would note that it gets used every time Trump says something evil or insane or Clinton says something reasonable and progressive. Why people who claim to be “leftists” are willing to dismiss the worst of Trump and the best of Clinton, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s the Y factor that we’re not supposed to talk about.
@59 dianne:
More likely, if the Republicans imploded, the Democratic Party would split. It happened before, and the Democrats had a chance to make it happen again in 2008, though they opted to rebuild the Republican Party instead.
@60 Ichthyic:
Which one?
If I vote Green, which other party am I subtracting the vote from?
@61 Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y:
What did that poor straw man ever do to you?
@63 Nick Gotts:
The world may have survived, but a lot of people didn’t.
If a genie offered you the chance to guarantee Clinton’s election by personally killing just one of the people who would have died anyway in a Clinton-ordered drone strike, would you do it? I seem to recall you avoiding the question last time.
To be fair, anti-vax *is* glaringly stupid one.
@67: If it helps, I can add some more:
1. They’re pro-Brexit.
2. They’re anti-GMO, no matter how much the proposed modifications have been proven safe and effective.
3. They’re arguing for an autism “cure” which is a dog whistle for all sorts of nasty things to be done to people with autism without their consent.
I expect I could find more if I looked into their platform in more detail. Those are just the ones I hear them bragging about.
Those advocating the Green Party are the Underpants Gnomes of the Left. 1) Permit the election of an unstable, egomaniacal, fascist. 2) ?????? 3) socialist paradise!
Voting Green in 2000 was understandable. Clinton really had passed some terrible policies. The previous Republican president wasn’t a complete disaster. The Democratic nominees were explicitly clinging to the center. But in 2016, with historical experience, there is really no excuse.
Anyone determined to throw their vote away on such vanity should just be honest and write in their own name.
Okay, no, wait, I think I got it. A vote for Green is a vote for Trump, a vote for Libertarian is a vote for Clinton, and therefore we should all be voting Libertarian. Did I get it right? No? Bah, I’ll just move to Antarctica, probably simpler there. What do you mean I have to vote for Penguin President?
The problem with looking at the platform of a party is it’s mostly symbolic, like when the Democrats made their 2016 platform and symbolically handed a dead flower in the grasp of a severed arm to Sanders supporters. What do the candidates support? In the case of Green, Jill Stein. I’m still working on figuring that out. We got another four months to go, peeps. Another. Four. Months. Can we just make the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt president-for-death and start focusing on improving other areas?
Okay, how about this: everyone pools their money together to buy everyone a ticket to a foreign country for four years, we let the US explode, and then come back and fix everything. That sounds reasonable. Or at least treasonable.
Jake Harban@66,
I don’t answer stupid, dishonest, impossible-hypothetical “gotcha” questions. That you ask them – and then refuse to answer them yourself, as you did last time – says a lot about you, none of it good.
http://winningdemocrats.com/sanders-just-sent-this-letter-to-the-leaders-of-bernie-or-bust-and-it-is-awesome/
Sanders has accomplished what he set out to do, and what I supported him for: to bring progressive politics into the mainstream, to empower this movement and seriously challenge the incremental and pro-oligarchy policies of the Democratic Party. He has forced them to concede that they need us. He has weakened the power of the establishment. He has begun the process of changing the Democratic party and if we can keep it up we can bring about real change in the nation.
But this revolution dies if Clinton loses.
Now is the time to prove that you’re actually in favor of changing our country and not just exalting the charismatic savior du jour. There are only two options in November: Either Clinton will be president, or Trump will be president. Clinton isn’t a great choice, and her history is questionable but if she’s proven one thing it’s that she will be a useful tool to those who she believes are useful – and our stunningly powerful movement is extremely useful to her.
Trump and the Republican party is genocidally awful. A Trump presidency directly threatens the safety of me and many of my friends. a Clinton presidency can be used to continue our cause.
And one last thing: If Trump wins, where do you think we will be, hmm? If our movement isn’t forgotten like Occupy, then we will be remembered as the whiny, entitled manbabies who sold the country to almost the literal Devil when we couldn’t get every single thing we wanted. The Democratic Party will see that its most-progressive-ever platform lost to the most evil, bigoted reactionary platform in memory and abandon us to court the Right.
We can support Hillary and continue our fight for the long-term, show the country our leadership, and work to transform the Democratic Party and get more progressive candidates in future elections. Or we can pout, cry and throw a tantrum and break all our own shit, and let the revolution and the country burn.
For my own safety and those of my friends and millions like me I urge the latter. If you are willing to send us to the noose then I will know you were never one of us, or a traitor.
urge the former*
dianne@68,
The US Green Party is pro-Brexit??? They might at least have consulted the three UK Green parties (England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland – the northern Irish Greeens act as a region of the latter), all of which campaigned against it.
Further to #74 – and AFAIK all the EU Green Parties also opposed Brexit.
Don’t forget the anti-nuclear-power stance. If we can get nuclear power clean and safe, it would be very green. Yes, that’s an “if”, and some folks are never going to call it clean and safe enough, but it’s getting better. Banning nuclear research altogether is not going to help.
Nick @ 74: That’s the claim anyway. See, for example: http://www.forwardprogressives.com/green-party-candidate-jill-stein-praises-brexit-vote/
This post shows the original text of Stein’s statement (now revised): http://www.forwardprogressives.com/green-party-jill-stein-busted-cover-up-praise-bigotry-driven-brexit/
This whole election is a failure mode of the American electoral system. It has produced two wildly unpopular candidates, and third parties can’t get out from under the stifling “spoiler effect” that doesn’t exist in a ranked-choice voting system.
I haven’t seen any evidence yet that the Green Party is anti-vaccine. Can someone post sources on this?
The Greens do support various quack alternative medicines, but that’s not the same thing as opposing vaccines.
When it comes to HIV/AIDS, the Green Party platform actually claims to be pro-vaccine and pro-cure. Still quite a bit of ‘Big Pharma’ stuff in there about the greedy selling long-term treatments for chronic conditions instead of developing cures (HIV/AIDS, diabetes, etc.), but that is not too surprising or completely without merit.
As for Jill Stein’s AMA, the vaccine portion seems to acknowledge the reality that vaccines do help prevent disease, but still includes some of the shitty “I’m not anti-vaccine, I’m pro-‘safe vaccine'” talk common to those trying to deny being anti-vaxxers.
MattP: Invent a safe and effective cure for HIV, diabetes, etc and I can practically guarantee that the only problem you’ll have with big pharma is the pile of bodies outside your door where various big pharma reps trampled each other trying to get to you to offer you tons of money first. Because the one that got to you first and got the rights to the cure would be in a position to make many tons of money off of it and they would not give a figurative or literal rats ass about what it did to the profits of the companies that lost out.
I should add that there are many problems with big pharma, but the risk that they’ll hide the cure, if they have one, is not one of them.
@68 dianne:
If arguing for an autism cure is a dog whistle for doing nasty things to autistic people, what do I say if I genuinely want to see an autism cure?
Oh, wait, wait, I just remembered, one of the reasons I don’t yet want to vote Democrat is simply because voting for a candidate who isn’t my preferred one completely strips my vote of absolutely any power whatsoever. I don’t wanna live in a world where money is speech and voting is not. We want the Democrats to earn our votes. Some people think they haven’t, some people think they have. But if we vote for them without them earning our vote then that’s saying “hey, democrats, it turns out you can win elections by pushing the republicans further right so they end up nominating an absolute force of chaos, then you can just keep getting lots of money from big business people and people”.
So, real talk: people not on the Clinton train yet (which includes me), watch the coming presidential debates, watch Clinton, do everything you can to get a read: is she really supporting the issues she moved on in light of Sanders or is she just Nixoning it? Will she only support this stuff until she’s elected then go back to the old positions, or will she actually follow through and say, hey, these people really want this, let’s actually try to make it happen. (Or not happen, as the case may be. TPP opposition and getting public options for health care cost coverage are my two issues, personally, followed by general environmental hey-let’s-not-make-the-planet-a-smelly-fireball stuff, and Clinton has moved in a good direction on these–I just want to make sure she’s real on that before I commit.) (Having Jill Stein and hex even Gary Johnson at the debates would help with this. Honestly you know if you’re worried about third parties taking away votes then just lend equal support to Green and Libertarian.)
And then if people say vote for her anyway then why don’t you just go vote for me? I mean, I don’t see a reason to spend time doing something I don’t want to. In fact, I like that idea. I’ll vote for Clinton regardless if someone else votes for me. If I give permission it’s not voter fraud, right, because I don’t want to add any fuel to that nonsense.
Just wait till 2020, with the way things are going, we’ll be choosing between a Kardashian and a Dugger. ;)
@71 Nick:
That you deny the existence of America’s ongoing drone war says a lot more about you than I ever could.
Now that I know you’re a troll, I can treat you accordingly.
You reconsider why you think autistic people need to be cured, and if you still think so at the end of that, keep your thoughts to yourself?
Duth Olec @85 – if you want to see progressive policies enacted, that’s not a question of who is president, it’s a question of who controls Congress.
GENERAL REMINDER: THE ENTIRE US HOUSE AND 1/3 OF THE SENATE ARE UP FOR RE-ELECTION. Not to mention all the governors, state legislators, judges, sheriffs, school boards, etc. who are all being voted on as well.
I don’t really give a flip if you don’t vote for president, but if you use the excuse of “both candidates are terrible” not to vote at all, you’re an asshole.
@88 Vivec:
Well, I can only speak for myself, but not having enough spoons to work or write or cook or even task-switch away from this aggravating thread may have somewhat diminished my quality of life. Maybe. Just a bit.
Since when did “cure debilitating disease” become a bad thing? Are we no longer researching a cure for HIV and breast cancer or did I just draw the short straw?
@89 drst:
That’s something the “Clinton or bust” crowd should spend a little more time thinking about.
If there were a progressive Democrat running for President, I probably wouldn’t think twice about voting Democratic down the ballot. But as long as I’m forced to pick Stein for President I might just consider the wisdom of voting Green for Senator too. After all, establishing the Greens as a major party means starting with lower offices as they’re fond of repeating.
Autism being considered a debilitating disease by autistic people does not seem to be remotely universal. Even if it is debilitating for you, there are plenty of other autistic people that are fine and do not want to be “cured”, nor appreciate the implication that they should be cured.
That being said, I don’t have any irons in the fire, so I’ll reiterate that you’re welcome to feel however you want on the matter. I’m already pretty convinced by the “no cure” camp, though.
dianne, 82
The ‘not without merit’ bit of my comment was meant to be about certain incidents of price gouging, especially of uncommon and/or orphan drugs. One of the easiest solutions is to ensure plenty of government funding for research and development while requiring the work to be released into the public domain without patent.
A touch of reality for your wacky-backy pipe dreams, from a Reuters-Ipsos poll.
You will be unable to elect those you vote for. They won’t govern in 2017. They won’t even be suiting up.
That is why you are derided for being a True Believer™, as your dreams are out of touch with reality. Feel good with you vote. Mine has to make the world a better place with practical, electable, and governable choices.
@drst #89: Oh yeah, sheesh, completely forgot about the non-presidential races. And here I even considered earlier making a joke about instead of everyone voting for president we should just take all the results for every single other race and have that decide who becomes president. Actually that’s slightly how the UK works, isn’t it?
But no, I’ll definitely go and vote in all the other races. I actually want to look up everyone who is running, research them, and figure out who would be the best to vote for in each race. It’s kind of hard, but the internet makes it possible. It’s just the stupid presidential race makes it easy to forget what really matters (whatever that is, I’ve forgotten again).
1. Can you name any reason to vote for Clinton rather than simply against Trump?
Healthcare
Women’s rights
Gay rights
Anti-racism
Police reforms
Minimum wage
Climate change
Gun control
Student debt
Immigration
In most of these cases, Sanders had a stronger platform, but that doesn’t mean Clinton’s platform doesn’t move us in the right direction on all these issues and more issues I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Also, she’s a woman. I want girls and boys to see a woman in the Oval Office. Representation matters. Role models matter.
The only issue where she’s likely to move us in the wrong direction compared to current policy is on the military. Her foreign policy isn’t nearly as bad as Sanders supporters pretend it is — after all, she supports using diplomacy first, which is why she was on board with the Iran nuclear deal. The idea that she’s going to start WW3 is idiotic. Still more interventionist than I’d like, and we need to do more to support the Palestinians. That said, it’s still better than Trump wanting to abandon NATO and give Japan nukes, or whatever else his whims drive him to do on any given day.
Jake @90:
I’m autistic and I need accommodations, not a cure. Fuck you, you ablist neurotypical jackass! It’s attitudes like yours that make my life harder.
Remember when there was “no difference between Gore and Bush”? That, plus a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees, got the world eight years of a W. presidency.
Also, even if Clinton withdraws from the race, there is no way there will be a Jill Stein presidency. It just guarantees Trump.
I see autism as any other mental health issue: there probably is not going to be a ‘cure’, but I definitely support research into, and easy access to, evidence-based treatments that can improve the quality of life of those who desire it. Would love a cure for my anxiety and depression, but currently settling for fluoxetine maintenance of ‘not shitting myself to death every time I get nervous’.
In general, anyone talking about a ‘cure’ for anything instead of ‘treatment’ tends to set off alarms in my head. People throwing around the word ‘cure’ often indicates thinking that there is some simple trick/fix to make things ‘normal’ and that every case can be handled identically. Reality is much messier than that.
I’m also kind of just leery about the line of reasoning in usual.
I’m sure there are trans people that would be interested in some sort of conversion therapy, and there are real life world class scientists with a role in policy making (I was in a class taught by one such person), who think that the only humane thing one could do upon hearing that your kid is trans is seek to crush the feelings as early as possible.
This scientist is not only the director of his department, but has also given medical counsel to both the white house and the Olympic committee.
If we’re going to define anything with potentially negative consequences that deviates from the norm a disease and seek to cure it, we’re entering a very slippery slope that we were already sliding down in the past (IE “lol cure gayness with electroshock)
Multi-tool @80
I haven’t seen any evidence yet that the Green Party is anti-vaccine. Can someone post sources on this?
Here you go
With respect to her position on Brexit, If Jill Stein had said something like “Oops – I hadn’t realized that was the primary motivation – I was wrong – that would be admirable. Scrubbing her previous comment before changing her position speaks volumes about her character or lack thereof.
This is not so much a case of being anti-vaccine as pandering to the anti-vaxxers. Sort of I’m not anti vaccine, but …
The same is the case with homeopathy. Anti vax and alt-med and to lesser extent anti-GMO are anti-science positions that are prevalent on both the right and the left although they are stereotypically considered to be common on the left.
In general, that is.
I’m not rich enough to afford an official autism diagnosis (like $4k where I live), but anecdotally I share a lot of traits in common with the syndrome. Whatever it is I am, I would love to at least have the *option* to change it.
Believe it or not, social isolation can be devastating. It can grind your humanity away.
Maybe some neurotypical people would like a pill to become autistic too, so why not find a ‘cure’?
People with autistic spectrum disorders are not all the same, and do not all want the same things. Autistic spectrum disorders vary a great deal in the detail of their effects and their severity. Respecting the basic humanity of people with autistic spectrum disorders means allowing them to decide for themselves how they would like to deal with their individual problems. Some people would like better accommodations from society, some people would like a “cure”, and some people would like elements of both.
The problem is that, socially, something having a cure generally means that people will be pressured into using said cure. Hence, the whole controversy about cochlear implants, with some people even calling for parents that don’t give their kids implants to have their kids taken away.
And, as mentioned earlier, I have serious problems with proposing medical cures for social problems. Said scientist I mentioned above, for example, is in favor of conversion therapy for LGBT people, because being gay or trans comes with additional social hardship. Making people not homophobic or transphobic is too hard apparently, so instead we should “cure” gay or trans kids so they don’t get bullied.
Nothing wrong with research, but it would be like trying to “cure” homosexuality. The condition of homosexuality is partially genetic and partially developmental, from what I have seen from the evidence to date. What would you target, when would you target, what effects would it have, and what side effects would there be?
I suspect a “cure” would require genetic manipulation of a fetus before it is known whether autism is present or not.
@Jake Harban – please feel free to throw your vote away. I wouldn’t vote for the Green Party at any level, since they’re anti-science and Jill Stein is a transphobic radical feminist. Also fuck you for thinking my existence is something that needs to be “cured.”
That is shady. And the argument in her original statement was disturbingly incoherent and politically naive.
Jake Harban, #50
“Simply against Trump” is the same thing as “will be a better president than Trump.” And that is sufficient reason to vote for her since those are the only two choices for president.
Also, yeah, Jill Stein got another disqualifying mark from me. When asked about transgender women being allowed to use the women’s restroom, she did the whole “why not let them use a gender neutral bathroom because god knows we can’t have women in the women’s restroom” thing that school districts keep trying to pull, rather than just accepting that trans women are women.
@91 Vivec:
I’ve fucking noticed.
I never implied anything of the sort. I said that I would very much like to be cured given the debilitating nature of this condition. I’m sure there are many other people who would agree with me.
By “no cure camp,” do you mean autistic people arguing that they don’t personally want a cure, or arguing that no one should want/be allowed a cure? If the latter, then exactly what arguments did you find persuasive?
@93 Nerd Troll:
You mean a torch for the straw man you erected.
Wow, that’s better than I thought! And that’s before Clinton had much of a chance to pivot to the right. Stein might just break the 5% threshold yet.
Incidentally, based on your previous definition, this poll shows that Clinton has already won— Trump has failed to clear your previously defined 45% threshold, therefore he is not “viable meaning electable,” which means a vote for Trump is the same as a vote for Clinton.
Just be careful— if Trump manages to claw 3% of the voters on his side between now and November, it means no one will be “viable, meaning electable” and so we’ll have no president at all for four years.
Yes, and…?
The point of an election is to vote for the candidate you support, not to vote for the winner. In any case, I’m thinking longer term than 2017.
In any case, you’ve already admitted you’re a concern trolling conservative so why don’t you fuck off back to the pit you crawled out of.
@94 Duth Olec:
But that’s the same thing as voting to put Trump into literally every office! The only reasonable option is to blindly vote Democratic no matter what. You can decide what policies you support after you’ve already given up any control you have over what policies are enacted.
@95 llamaherder:
Clinton’s record on all of those policies is at best dubious and at worst actively terrible— just for starters, Clinton opposes even the most basic rights for LGBT people, supports mass deportation of immigrants, opposes health care reform, and plans to do precisely bugger all to raise the minimum wage (empty promises on the campaign trail notwithstanding).
Stein’s records on all of those are much better, so none of them are reasons to vote for Clinton; in fact, those are just some of the reasons I plan to vote for Stein.
@96 microrapor:
I’m autistic and I need a cure, not accommodations.
In the absence of a cure, I am forced to live a decidedly unenjoyable life as an unemployed isolated shut-in for as long as my parents can pay my basic needs, followed by becoming homeless, institutionalized, or dead. If we developed a cure, it would free me from this miserable fate while having precisely no effect on you.
As such, you have as much right to denounce a cure as a straight person does to denounce same-sex marriage— it has no impact on you, and don’t you dare try to claim you know what’s best for me.
I’m neurotypical now? Gee, does that mean I can get a job again? Leave the house regularly? Start writing?
Tell you what, since you seem to think I should want “accommodations” rather than a cure, then feel free to “accommodate” me and quit posting.
No seriously. I don’t have enough spoons for a task-switch/quit-task right now, so if everyone stopped posting in this thread it would be a lot easier for me to break free of its clutches.
@97 Tabby:
Funny you should mention that. Despite alienating the liberal base, Gore won by the tiniest margins and his very first official act as President-elect was to cede the White House to Bush. So in that case, they were literally identical.
@98 MattP:
I use “cure” as shorthand for “continued research towards incremental improvements in treatment and prevention, making continuous if halting progress to approach (though likely never reach) the desired goal of eliminating the disease entirely.”
@102 multitool:
Ho-lee fuck don’t I know it.
I’m a little lucky, actually— my complete inability to focus on the outside world and tendency to oscillate between zoning out completely and becoming hyperfocused on mostly-pointless tasks largely distracts me from the realities of my isolation.
@104 Vivec:
The problem is that autism isn’t a “social problem.” If you could magically teleport to a society completely free of transphobia, then the fact that you’re non-binary would be a complete non-issue. If I could magically teleport to a society free of ableism, then I would still be a miserable, unemployed, isolated shut-in.
Ableism is a social problem, but my inability to function has nothing to do with it. If I could be cured, then the acquisition of able/neurotypical privilege would be an ancillary side benefit; simply not being disabled would be my driving motivation.
Like vaccines?
@Nerd of Trolls 105:
No it fucking wouldn’t because being gay is not a disease. No one has ever faced any limitations or disabilities as an inherent physical consequence of not being straight.
I’m not sure whether you’re being homophobic or ableist here, so I’ll go out on a very sturdy limb and say both.
It’s kinda funny to hear Green Party supporters talk about wars, since they’re responsible for the war in Iraq. The Green Party knowingly took republican money in return to intentionally helping a republican get elected.
But I’m sure they’ve evolved. They would never do anything like that again.
@106 drst:
Your ideas are made of straw. Show me, with evidence, that the Greens are electable in a general contested election for president. PUT UP OR SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Nope, she is a fourth option, and is running fourth out of four. That is reality. Deal with reality elsewhere. You aren’t doing that here.
The latter, and that they consider their autism an important part of who they am and don’t take kindly to the idea that people like them shouldn’t exist, which is a direct consequence of “eradicating the disease entirely”
Not necessarily, my dysphoria would still exist. Even in a society free of transphobia, I’d still be fundamentally uncomfortable with aspects of my body.
I wouldn’t take kindly to people hypothetically trying to find a way to eradicate transness to preemptively save people from having to go through transphobia or dysphoria either.
Uh, yes? Also like the example I actually brought up, where parents are actively being threatened with having their kids taken away if they don’t get their deaf children cochlear implants.
I’m not saying that its inherently bad to have a social expectation to cure things, I’m saying that as a consequence, it’s not really possible to have a “Well I want a cure, you guys don’t have to use it though” situation, when people will try to socially pressure others into using it.
If parents of an autistic child elect not to use your hypothetical cure, for example, what then? Given the example of cochlear implants, they’ll be accused of child abuse and risk losing their children.
Jake Harban, #112
I meant for president in January 2017.
Her popular vote will be in the single-digit percentage so she’s not an option for president. You know this.
I’m giving you reasons to vote for her relative to the current state of the nation. Comparing her to a unicorn is a waste of time. All of her policies and views move us in the right direction on these issues. That is a reason to vote for her.
Vote down ticket. Seriously, vote down ticket, because that’s where you have the biggest impact, and the chance to pick the people who have the biggest impact on your day-to-day life.
Frankly, I’m pretty distressed that 2 of the 4 prez candidates have clearly stated that they are anti-vaccine (and I’m not at all certain about Johnson, since libertarianism tends away from things like public health). I’m concerned that having an anti-vax president of the USA is a quick way to pandemics, and no one has got time for pandemics of diseases we can prevent. We have enough trouble with the diseases we can’t prevent/treat.
I haven’t followed this issue at all. Is there any threat of this actually happening? If so, that’s absurd; deafness isn’t life-threatening, and they can always get implants later if they choose to.
@118 JustaTech:
My understanding is that while anti-vaxxers are common in the Green Party, Jill Stein herself is not one.
JustaTech#118
Twitter feed from Gary Johnson, Libertarian presidential candidate.
https://twitter.com/govgaryjohnson/status/113419678730301440
No to mandatory vaccinations.
Llamaherder#120
https://www.isidewith.com/candidate-guide/jill-stein/science/mandatory-vaccinations
Should the federal government require children to be vaccinated for preventable diseases?
Jill Stein’s answer: No, fund public ad camapaigns about the risks and benefits instead
I saw a documentary about it in a contemporary medical issues class I had to take. The problem is that cochlear implants aren’t perfect no matter when you put them in, but are more affective when you do them earlier on in life, before the child can get used to compensating for their deafness.
The dad (who was also deaf) in the documentary talked about how it’s treated as if they’re intentionally crippling their deaf daughter by considering forgoing the treatment, even when the examples of people with the implants were only a little better at hearing than he was (ie could hear faintly but still had to lip read and still couldn’t talk in the same way a non-deaf person might)
@122 Nerd of Redhead
Yuck. Thanks for your help. I was getting my information on that from Stein supporters who were trying to downplay the issue.
Oops, I scrod the blockquotes. Let’s try that again.
@106 drst:
So you’re voting for Clinton, who is just as anti-science and just as much transphobic without even the benefit of radical feminism.
I said that where? Oh wait, I didn’t.
OK, so I ask again: If saying: “I, personally, would like to be cured of autism” is a euphemism for “I think all autistic people should be killed,” then how do I express the literal meaning of the phrase: “I, personally, would like to be cured of autism” then?
@108 Saad:
Nope. Jill Stein is on the ballot, so that’s a third option.
You can oppose the third option. You can vote against the third option. You can come up with any reason for doing so. The one thing you can’t do is deny the existence of a third option.
Incidentally, would you care to take a stab at my second question? I think that one is actually more interesting.
2. What policies or actions would you find so odious that you would never vote for anybody who did/supported them, even if they were a Democrat running against a technically-more-evil Republican?
And as long as I’m at it…
@111 Nerul:
Which Green President started that war? Nader or Stein? Which Green representatives voted for it?
I know Clinton voted for it, but IOKIYAD, I guess.
@113 Nerd Troll:
Show me, with evidence, that I believe that Stein has any chance of winning under the current circumstances.
See, that’s what I mean by “straw man.” I plan to vote Green because there’s no other candidate on the ballot who is viable (meaning tolerable). That Stein won’t win is irrelevant; I vote based on issues and policies, not based on some absurd desire to have voted for the winner no matter what. If Stein can claim 5% of the vote and earn future campaign funding for the Greens, that would be a best case scenario. If Stein can claim enough of the vote to sway the Democrats to the left in future elections, I’d call that a huge win.
So proving that Stein almost certainly won’t win is beating up a straw man— if you want to convince me to vote for Trump, you’ll need to address my actual position.
@114 Vivec:
With all due respect, saying: “I feel that being autistic is part of who I am, therefore Jake Harban should be condemned to a life of misery” is mind-bogglingly offensive. My life is not acceptable collateral damage to defend your right to feel as though a disease is part of your “identity,” whatever that means.
Now that I’m (struggling to) apply for disability benefits (that I apparently don’t need since autism is just a “social problem?”), I have dealt with direct in-my-face ableism— infantilization, failure to provide the most rudimentary accommodations, and an assumption literally written into the paperwork that I’m incapable of handling my affairs by definition. Yet all of that is less aggravating than the “no-cure” camp of self-proclaimed autistic advocates who tell me: “Being disabled is who you are! You should be proud of it!”
I think there’s a major selection bias in place— autistic activists tend to oppose a cure because they don’t need one because the people who do need one are too disabled to be activists.
Again, being trans is not a disease, dysphoria notwithstanding.
So wait, are you an anti-vaxxer?
OK, hold up. We do agree that refusing to vaccinate your children is a form of child abuse, right?
I’m not sure about what cochlear implants involves, but assuming there are no major issues or side effects, then what’s the problem with expecting parents to provide them to their deaf children?
You’re an adult. You can resist social pressure.
Declaring that I should spend my entire life burdened by a debilitating disease because to save you from the horrific fate of facing social pressure to be cured of that disease is beyond obscene.
If parents elect not to give their children a non-hypothetical MMR vaccine, for example, what then? Curing any disease necessarily entails eliminating the demographic “people who have that disease” by moving them into the demographic “people who don’t have that disease.” Is there any reason why autism should be treated any differently from, say, HIV? Or do you seriously consider the existence of people who treat their having the disease as part of their “identity” to be sufficient reason to abandon any attempts at treating it?
@115 Saad:
Oh. Well, I’m not allowed to personally choose the President. I’m not even a member of the electoral college.
I thought you were asking me about who to vote for.
@117 llamaherder:
Actually, 8 years of Obama have shown quite the opposite— much like Clinton, Obama is a solidly-conservative Democrat who was elected into power along with a Democratic majority in both houses of congress and a strong mandate to pass a progressive agenda.
While it’s true he took a few half-assed steps towards that agenda, his complete and utter disregard for it and his progressive base led to the do-nothing Democrats being swept right back out of power two years later by a Reupublican Party that, in 2008, was teetering on the brink of collapse after the disaster of Bush.
Trading the long-term viability of the Democratic Party and any chance of getting a progressive into power before 2024 in exchange for a bouquet of empty promises on the campaign trail and a mostly-gnawed bone while in office is a shining example of “penny wise pound foolish.”
@123 Vivec
Good to know. Am i right to assume that by “earlier in life,” you mean young enough that they wouldn’t be able to make this decision for themselves?
The first night of the Republican convention will have a “Benghazi Focus,” and that tells you that Republicans have decided to live in fantasy land; and that, in reality, they’ve got nothing. All of Trump’s conspiracy theories about the attack in 2012 have been debunked.
Link
One other detail about the Republican convention: six of the people with speaking slots have the last name “Trump.” There’s the candidate himself, his wife, and four of his kids. Other speakers:
– pro golfer Natalie Gulbis
– former Calvin Kein underwear model Antonio Sabato Jr.
– former fotball star Tim Tebow
– Peter Thiel
– Ultimate Fighting Champ president Dana White
– Mary Fallin, governor of Oklahoma
– Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin
– Rick Scott, governor of Florida
– Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader
– Paul Ryan, House Speaker
– Kevin McCarthy, House Majority Leader
Sarah Palin won’t be there. Sad!
We have very different memories of what happened in 2009-2010. I watched the President throw everything at the wall for over a year in an effort to pass a healthcare reform bill that only passed by the narrowest of margins. He sacrificed all of his political capital to do this while all his advisers were telling him to go smaller.
He did all of this in spite of the fact that Obamacare was unpopular. Because it was the right thing to do.
The left rewarded his courage by abandoning him in 2010. The left let the GOP take majorities in both houses, and you know what? He got a bunch of progressive stuff done anyway. It’s unbelievable that he’s being attacked from the left for not doing more, by the very same people who are indifferent to the idea that Trump could take over in 2016.
How can you be mad about lack of progress when you’re refusing to contribute to it?
ps: The idea that the feckless Democratic Party would move left in response to a loss to Trump is laughable. Jill Stein will be a villain, which will give the country more excuses to ignore her, and the Democratic Party will move to the right to capture the votes Trump got. The way the left wins is by building on success, not by throwing elections.
Latest 4 way presidential polling. Looks like the Greens are losing support as time goes on.
Latest poll had only 2% for Stein.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
President Obama and his diplomatic team deserve some kudos for the nuclear deal with Iran. Despite dire warnings from Republicans, and scorn from Donald Trump, the deal is actually working.
From coverage in the NY Times:
Lots of challenges remain, but this proves that when congressional Republicans sent a letter to Iranian leaders telling them not to trust President Obama, and making other claims intended to sabotage American foreign policy, they were wrong. They were stupid.
Trump has vowed to revoke the agreement if he is elected President. If he tears up the Iran deal, the consequences could be bad for everyone on planet earth. Now who looks like a dangerous guy whose actions just might lead to nuclear war? It’s not Clinton. It’s Trump.
@125
It’s listed in the DSM the same as Autism spectrum disorders are, and the diagnosis does not mandate the presence of physical dysphoria.
Uh, no? As indicated by the “I don’t have a problem with people mandating cures in and of itself”, especially in the case of things that are actually life threatening.
I was not referring to autism as a social problem, I was referring to people’s reactions to autistic people.
It’s an invasive surgery that doesn’t wholly cure deafness and often involves therapy that can ruin a kid’s ability to function in deaf spaces (since they’re encouraged not to learn signing or lip reading). All that, when deaf people without cochlear implants are perfectly able to live full, fulfilling lives.
If deaf people can navigate society pretty well compared to people that aren’t deaf, why try to eradicate it/ Plenty of deaf people are happy just the way they are, and consider it a big part of who they are.
There are people who do not consider it debilitating and see this as an attempt at eugenically removing people like them, despite them being able to live perfectly fulfilling lives.
I don’t think it’s pretty fair to tell an entire demographic of already socially disadvantaged people that they ideally shouldn’t exist, and take steps to ensure people like them never exist again. I’m able to put myself in their shoes because there are a lot of people actively advocating literally that exact same thing with transgender people.
Oh, okay. Condemning people to harassment and the threat of having their children taken away is just a minor thing you can brush off. Baller.
Also, the homophobia/transphobia comparison isn’t particularly “out there”, seeing as there are major, respected specialists that think the only humane way to respond to a kid coming out as gay or trans is to immediately begin conversion therapy.
@126
Yes, it’s recommended to be done as early as possible, which in this particular case meant single digits age.
Then you clearly spent 2009-2011 in a world completely divorced from reality and anything further you have to say on the subject would be staggeringly irrelevant.
You were goodthinkful 2009-2011 duckspeak unrequired.
No, the point of an election is to elect someone. Presumably every serious voter goes into an election with ideas about the direction they want the polity to go – policies they want to see continued or expanded or dropped or newly instituted. They should then vote for the candidate with the best realistic possibility of advancing those policies (or the lowest chance of sabotaging them), or at least the best realistic possibility of contributing to an environment in which people can fight to advance those political goals (or the lowest chance of creating an environment in which they can’t). Having the best realistic chance of advancing a policy agenda or creating an environment in which political goals can be advanced necessarily means realistically being electable.
In this election, there are only two candidates who have a realistic possibility of being elected – Hillary Clinton or (presumably – barring a historic shake-up at the RNC this week) a mendacious buffoon, conman, and neo-fascist.* His party is highly reactionary, and poses an existential threat. As a result of this election, one or the other will be elected president of the United States, and electing Trump would have unimaginably dire consequences.
An election isn’t a vehicle for personal expression. It’s a collective means of electing someone, and voting intelligently and responsibly means appreciating reality and how votes can contribute to outcomes. In this election, voting for a third-party candidate with no realistic shot at being elected – even if they’re the ideal candidate in the abstract – will do far less to advance the goals you support than voting for the Democratic candidate. If you truly care about your political goals, that’s just the reality.
But elections aren’t our only means of fighting for our political goals. It’s one day out of the year, and we can spend the other 364 – or however many we’re able to dedicate to it – to meaningful action.
* Who will likely choose as a running mate a corrupt authoritarian, a fellow huckster, or a Koch stooge.
@132
This reminds me so much of Freepers who think the GOP congress has been letting Obama do whatever he wants.
It’s like people don’t realize there are two political parties who try really hard to stop each other’s agendas. If you think the Presidency is so powerful, why are you not more afraid of Trump taking over?
@131 Vivec:
Still not a disease.
I can’t work. I can’t support myself. On bad days, I can’t manage basic self-care. I can’t do anything that would make my life worth living and have occasionally contemplated suicide as a result.
Does that count as “life-threatening” enough that I’m allowed to ask for a cure?
And I’m referring to my disability. I want a cure. If you think that’s undesirable, then why? And what do you think I should want instead?
If a deaf person said: “I am not happy this way, I don’t consider it ‘part of who I am’ and I would like cochlear implants,” what would you say?
There are people for whom it is not debilitating— I’m a second-generation autistic but a first-generation debilitated autistic. What right do they have to speak on behalf of those who are debilitated? You might as well oppose cancer research on the grounds that people with benign tumors think it’s not that big a deal.
The comment about eugenics is pure unadulterated bullshit. Might as well set it on fire.
I have personally decided never to have children. There are many reasons for that decision, but one of the reasons has to do with autism being (quite clearly) hereditary. I despise my life and I don’t believe for a second that I have any right to inflict even the risk of this condition on another person. So am I practicing “eugenics?” And if so, what should I do instead?
For that matter, was curing polio a form of eugenics? Even when people survived the disease, it often had a considerable impact on their lives but ever since the vaccine was invented polio has been effectively eliminated from this country. Was that an unjustified attempt at “eugenically removing” people who had been debilitated by polio?
You know, “exonerees” (ie, people who were wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit) count as a demographic of already socially disadvantaged people. Do we need to guarantee a certain number of wrongful convictions to prevent the elimination of this demographic?
What assholes advocate is completely irrelevant.
Ableism is fundamentally unrelated to the physical facts of disability. I can’t function. I would like to function. If there was a treatment that would let me function, I would accept it in an instant. What randos think of my ability to function or lack thereof is not a factor in that equation.
At present, she’s on the ballot in 23 states.
Those of us who read politics for 40 years prior to that disagree with you and your idea of presidential authority to dictate any legislation by fiat. You are WRONG.
CONGRESS makes the laws, not the president, who then administers the laws. That is what the US constitution says. And getting anything past Congress requires real politicking.
Which is why down-ticket voting is important.
I’m already practicing making my mark for a democratic US senator, congressman, and state representative (the state senator will be up for reelection in 2018, along with the rethug governor).
Exactly. Under the circumstances, there are no good options, forcing me to make the best of a bad situation.
That choice is Jill Stein.
No it doesn’t.
If you were given the choice between Donald Trump (R), George W. Bush (D), and Jill Stein (G), who would you vote for?
Or would you pretend you don’t understand the question?
A fact that I have been repeatedly trying to explain.
Being able to appreciate reality and understanding how votes contribute to outcomes confirms that my voting for Jill Stein is the only remotely realistic option.
How, exactly, does it advance my political goals to vote for a candidate who explicitly opposes them?
Seeing as it’s an argument that I don’t really have any irons in, I’m going to concede and defer the argument to people that do.
What did that poor straw man ever do to you?
Which state? Mine doesn’t have a lot of action in 2016, but I have a senator, a representative, and a state representative to vote for. Thus far, I’m leaning towards (G), (D), (D) respectively but I suppose you’ll get confused by that decision because you’re not used to the idea that people vote based on issues rather than blind party loyalty.
Asshole question from a well refuted asshole pushing a totally non-viable candidate. Loser avoiding reality. You have nothing cogent to say, and have been saying it stupidly for months now.
Nobody is agreeing with you. Why are you still here? THAT IS THE INTELLIGENT QUESTION.
Yes, the only potential concrete political effect – i.e., not in the voter’s mind – of such a protest vote would be to send a message to the Democratic Party in order to lead them to recognize the importance of the set of protest voters and move to the Left in the future. But I don’t see how this is expected to happen.
Clinton wins: the small percentage of Stein voters remain as marginal as ever, with the added effect of being seen as irresponsible and likely impervious to entreaties since they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Democrat even against a neo-fascist
Clinton loses: if Stein and those who voted for her didn’t make the difference, they remain marginal and scorned for the reasons noted above; if they did, they’re widely loathed on the Left for helping elect a Republican generally, and a monstrous clown specifically
Well said.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you can’t tell the difference between party loyalty and trying to have a positive impact on the world.
After all, if you actually cared as much about implementing progressive policies as you do about believing them, we wouldn’t be having this argument.
JH can’t seem to understand nobody gives a shit about who and why they are voting for at this point in time. Vote Green JH.
Just quit telling anybody else here who they should vote for. Once you have declared you preference, you are done. At 2%, the Greens are only a potential spoiler, not a serious challenge to either of the two major candidates. So, go vote your conscious, and leave us alone.
I’ll vote my conscious, which will be for the good of the country, not my ideology. Which no one party does more than overlap a portion of on any political Venn diagrams.
Why not follow your own instruction?
What?
I honestly don’t understand the question in relation to my statement that you quoted. In any case, it’s a weird hypothetical that you’re trying to insert into a serious discussion of high-stakes political reality. You need to address the reality.
But I think I do see what you’re trying to do here, which is to imply that this election is equivalent to your hypothetical one in that Clinton and George W. Bush are basically interchangeable. I find that irresponsible. There are many important ways in which the parties – and less institutionally, Liberals and Conservatives – are the same, especially when it comes to foreign policy, nationalism, and a general relationship to capitalism. But they also differ in meaningful ways, particularly with regard to domestic social policy, authoritarianism, and domestic rights. The latter differences are important both in terms of people’s lives* and the possibilities for social movements fighting for leftist goals. In many cases, the differences can be a matter of life or death, freedom or oppression, progress or destruction.
So it won’t do to suggest that George W. Bush could just as easily be a Democrat in a hypothetical that’s supposed to relate to the real situation at hand. There’s a reason he’s not a Democrat – and that Clinton isn’t a Republican – and if he’d been in office for the last 16 years vs. the eight he was, the country and the world would be a very different, and much worse, place. There’s a reason leftists have to continue to fight to keep Republicans out of office. They are a fundamentally hateful, destructive, dangerous party.
So what you’re really asking is if I would vote for one Republican, another Republican, or Stein. I assume you mean if they were the candidates with the same chances of winning as the real candidates. Again, I don’t accept the insinuation-premise of the hypothetical comparison. That said, Bush. He’s a criminal (then again, so are probably all US presidents since 1945 and likely since before that) and a Republican, but he’s not a fascist. I can’t overstate the danger I see in Trump’s candidacy. I’m writing a post about Alfred Hugenberg – the Kochs-Murdoch-Adelson of Weimar Germany. His party was quite similar to today’s Republicans. Their obstructionism, polarization, and refusal to compromise or moderate sabotaged democracy and set the stage for Hitler’s rise. They had a multi-party system, but if the choice in today’s system were Hugenberg, Hitler, or Stein, with Stein having no chance of winning such that there were only two realistic options, I would vote for Hugenberg over Hitler. I would then keep fighting, knowing that as dismal as the situation is it’s at least better than it would be if Hitler had been elected. I think a “vote against the fascist” policy is a reasonable one.
How, concretely? What are the political consequences you anticipate of your vote for Stein, and how do they contribute to advancing your political goals?
First, I don’t accept your characterization. If you have leftwing goals, I don’t believe you really hold that Clinton explicitly opposes all of them. More likely, she opposes some, shares some but from a position to the Right of yours to a greater or lesser degree, and largely coincides with you on others. Second, I’ve explained how: by contributing to the election of the only realistically electable candidate who isn’t a neo-fascist and thus to the non-election of the neo-fascist.
(Jill Stein is on MSNBC right now, by the way. …They’re now reporting that a truck drove into a crowd at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice and has killed dozens of people. I hope that number is exaggerated.)
Sorry – my asterisk above was supposed to go to: *As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m having surgery soon, which I expect to help enormously. I wouldn’t have a diagnosis, plan for treatment, or any hope of things improving were it not for the ACA. And the Republicans have done, and will continue to do, everything in their power to do away with it. My case is minor – my problem isn’t life-threatening or completely debilitating; I’m not an undocumented migrant, a trans person, a poor rural woman in need of an abortion, a black teenager,… The differences that do exist between the parties matter. They matter for people’s lives, and for the possibility of making them better.
@Jake Harban #52:
I have to settle for “will not outspokenly deny climate change”.
@Vivec #54:
Whether they are enough ideologically similar is not up to you to decide.
Some will decide that they are not, and it’s a legit decision.
Do you negotiate with kidnappers with the risk of encouraging more kidnaps?
I don’t think there is a right way to choose.
@Ichthyic #58
This assumes that someone who decides to vote for Stein does so rather than voting Clinton.
Might have been true with Nader.
Is it true now?
This game of the lesser evil has been running for a while, and there seem to be no end in sight.
Can you blame people for wanting out, even if the price is so dire?
People keep hammering that there is no viable alternative, but I think they are missing the point.
What’s the viable alternative for fixing your democratic system?
What’s the viable alternative to force the democratic party to uphold left-of-centre values?
What’s the viable alternative to have to vote for an incrementally greater and greater evil every four years?
You have offered no viable alternatives.
Until you do, I don’t think I can blame people who refuse to vote for the lesser evil.
@ F.O.
Really? I can, and when the greater evil arrives, I will blame them even more.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote, because I’m having a hard time seeing the relevance of your objection.
If party A is big and Center-left in platform, and party B is small and solidly leftist in platform, then a significant increase in votes for B probably indicates crossovers from A.
Said crossovers could be sufficient to make party A lose to a similarly big (but politically right) Party C.
Start from the bottom-up and elect more progressive local, state, and congressional politicians?
Fantasy world-living is obviously not confined to Republicans.
vivec, Harban…I can’t bring myself to pose any questions to you. It just generates more slop.
I’ll just state the obvious:
It satisfies your high ideal of individual liberty to accept a Drumpf presidency outcome.
You may even hope there is still the chance of summoning up of some nation-wide groundswell of people as miffed that reality doesn’t proceed as cleanly as you demand it should, no matter how forlorn the hope, and that there is a certain sacrificial grace involved in adhering to the priority of the individual over the consequences meted out to the population at large.
You know, ask the world – not just England – about what it will have to endure with Brexit.
Or, perhaps, you prefer the more dignified resignation of, ‘Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out’.
You won’t even get a chance to select a condiment for that…or parade on about how gratifying it was to ‘do the right thing’.
As long as you got to exercise your personal freedom, that’s all that should really count.
That’s enabling change alright.
Actually, I have for months. But the quick fix folks don’t like it.
1) Get involved in the political party of your choice. This might include being part of get out the vote phone banks, handing out literature door to door, driving carless people to the polls, and donating some money.
2) Try to get progressive people you meet to run as candidates for local offices. If elected, have them run for open offices at higher levels, or against non-progressive officials in the primaries.
3) Keep getting out the vote. My congressional district elected a democrat in 2012, and in 2014 he lost to the person he beat in 2012. Who received about the same amount of votes as in 2012, but the democratic voters failed to show up in the numbers to assure his reelection. Hopefully, the presidential election will bring out sufficient democratic voters to retire the incumbent again. Democratic voters don’t vote in every election these days. That needs to change.
4) If possible (not here in Illinois), get IRV or some other form of required majority ballot referendum onto the general election ballot.
Then do it all over again the next election cycle. Think long term.
Well, “blame” is a strange word here. I argue that the price is far too steep, and that they’re thinking in terms of a false choice.
I suppose the most important argument I can make is that there is no out. There’s no realm transcending our reality, ugly as it may be, and so there’s no choice that offers an escape. It’s the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir said. Making a choice to act politically in the false belief that your idealism stands apart from political reality will almost invariably lead you to serve ends very different from those you desire (in this case, reactionary ends). On this, Machiavelli was right.
The discussion here is specifically about voting in presidential elections. This act, and the act of voting in general, is just one political act, not the be all and end all of our political lives.
As an anarchist, I sometimes find participating in these discussions arguing against abstention or third-party voting in the general election weird. On the other hand, it’s not weird at all. I see voting as a means of preserving the best possible environment for activism, and at the very least of fending off the Right to the greatest extent possible. Creating viable alternatives doesn’t take place in the voting booth. It happens through protesting, writing, making movies, arguing on the internet :), forming organizations, going out on strike, debating the good life and how to make it possible for everyone, creating art, exposing realities, occupying land and offices, bringing attention to activists, digging gardens, helping and rescuing humans and other animals, blocking traffic,… And all of these involve compromises and difficult choices in which no option is pure or ideal. It’s the human condition.
Uh, what? I’m in the “will hold my nose and vote Hillary” camp.
@148
Which President or major nominee is Obama a greater evil than? How far back to do you have to go to find an example? Carter? How was Dukakis on gay rights? The notion that our adherence to the two-party system is resulting in a greater evil every four years falls on its face right out of the gate.
12 years of GOP rule resulted in centrist Bill Clinton. It’s clear that GOP victories do not yield leftist candidates. Of course they don’t. It wouldn’t make sense for them to; if the right is winning, then the Democratic Party will shift rightward to compensate. If you want to push the party to the left, keep winning and you’ll embolden the party to try more progressive policies. Hillary is running on the most leftist platform in the history of the Democratic Party. She’s trying to build on Obama’s victories, rather than trying to pick up the pieces after eight years of John McCain.
This is a good thing.
Will she be able to achieve everything in that platform? Of course not. Change is hard by design. Conservative constituencies get representation too, and the GOP is really good at winning votes. We grind away, achieving what we can when we can. Total victory will never be in the cards unless it’s achieved in a bloody revolution nobody wants.
That’s not to say the system doesn’t need to be reformed. People should be able to vote for their favorite candidate regardless of viability. We need a runoff system. Unfortunately, until the system itself changes, voting for a Jill Stein is self-defeating: If you want progressive change, voting third party achieves the opposite.
I just want to reiterate:
Bill Clinton ran on a centrist platform after 12 years of Reagan/Bush.
Hillary Clinton is running on progressive platform after 8 years of Obama.
Just in case anyone’s wondering whether winning pushes you left or right.
@tomh #149
Whatever makes you happy.
@Vivec #150
Fair enough. So people don’t feel represented by A and move to B.
And somehow it’s B’s fault, not A?
Do you think that B voters owe any allegiance to A because they are less far from B than C is?
I think this brings us to building our viable alternatives.
Agree wholeheartedly, but I don’t see this being discussed or considered or mentioned at all: all the focus is on why it’s evil not to vote for Clinton.
What you propose should be the priority, should be where people put their actual energies.
But’s just not happening, exactly as everyone is not suddenly voting for the Greens.
@Nerd of Redhead #153
Prove me that reforming the Dems is possible, show me that the alternative you propose is any viable.
This is what you have been asking to Stein voters so far, it seems only fair to apply your own standards to your ideas.
Don’t get me wrong, I think you are doing the right thing, and I wish there were more people like you, and for years I did try to do pretty much what you describe, first in Italy and now in Australia, I joined local parties, went to the meetings, campaigned (hell, I even ran for the Town Council elections), tried to reach those around me.
I just don’t think it’s working.
Well, yeah. As mentioned above, I have significant problems with the Green party platform. Even if I was voting purely based off of ideology and not viability, I wouldn’t vote Green.
Well, at least you can’t say that you’re alone in being willing to support Hillary Clinton.
Sam Harris, although with reservations is on your side!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRghkcEEGO8
“I don’t think that he [Sanders] has thought about foreign policy very much. He certainly hasn’t said much about it. The little he has said makes me worry that he’s been somewhat infected by Noam Chomsky’s worldview, which I think is the moral black hole swallowing everything on the left part of the spectrum. So i don’t know whether we can’t trust Sanders to be wise on the most crucial question, which is our fight against global jihadism. And there are many other questions where I would expect Hillary to be far more seasoned and smarter, frankly, on foreign policy, whether it’s with Russia or China or any other hard case.”
Brilliant argument. If Sam Harris is on my side, I’ll definitely change sides posthaste – that’s only reasonable.
…But wait! Sanders and Chomsky are also on my side! What to do now?
No, Dr. Jill Stein Does Not Support Homeopathy
Sorry Clinton supporters but Jill Stein is not an anti-vaccine presidential candidate
Clinton hasn’t done a good Job with respect to fossil fuels. I get it.
That doesn’t give me any good reason to vote Green. I don’t see any benefit in trading in climate change (which we’re going to have to adapt to regardless, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels right now) for epidemics of measles and polio killing populations and costing the United States billions of dollars to attempt to control. We don’t need a president lending legitimacy to the anti-vax movement, just like we didn’t need a president lending legitimacy to young earth creationism. The fact of the matter is Stein couldn’t successfully end the burning or fossil fuels anyways. She’d meet the same challenges Obama has been inhibited by over the last eight years.
It’s also super alarming that the leader of the green party has a science education and is trained as a clinician yet leads the party of anti-vaxxers. WTF? And making GMOs out to be a bogeyman when much of the planet relies on them for survival is unacceptable behaviour from anyone with a rudimentary education in science. At least I can give Clinton the benefit of having no scientific education to speak of (which is still no excuse.)
Stein is not Sanders. She’s not an alternative to Sanders. Sanders has said as much. The party Sanders has influence in is the Democrats. In order to support his policies and enable him to continue influencing the shape of the Democratic party I need to support him, not Jill Stein.
#161, @SaltyCurrent:
So it doesn’t concern you in the slightest that Sam Harris is supporting Hillary Clinton out of the hope that she’ll start a campaign of indefinite warfare against the Middle East…when she already has a track record of supporting and administering a campaign of indefinite warfare against the Middle East?
And remember what Bush got us: He fired the translators that could have decoded the terrorists planning the WTC attacks and therefore stopped them before they happened because they were gay. Gore would have continued the sleazy “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, not fired them, and most likely arrested the terrorists before they acted.
Bush then went on to invade Afghanistan. At that point, even Bernie Sanders voted for it. I’ve heard a claim (can not back it–sorry) that the Clinton administration had plans to invade Afghanistan but didn’t do so because they didn’t want to do so right before leaving office and drop the responsibility for cleaning up on the next administration. I would have been pissed as hell at a Gore administration that invaded Afghanistan on a vague “fighting terrorism” justification, but given that that was where al Qaeda was hanging out, it would, in hindsight, have had some legitimacy. Barely. It probably would have resulted in…exactly what is currently happening there: a military bogged down in a war it can’t seem to bring to any form of conclusion and a civil society that is in ruins. Whether there would have been any decrease in the risk of terrorism is not at all clear to me. In short, it would have been a Democrat starting a messy, apparently unjustified war and Jake would have said that it proves that Bush and Gore were just alike. But at least we wouldn’t have had…
The Iraq War. There was never any reason for the Iraq war except for Bush Jr wanting to prove himself manlier than Bush Sr. If Hussein had stayed in power, Iraq would continue to be a fairly nasty dictatorship, but it would have had a working government and there wouldn’t be vast swaths of the country outside any government’s control, which provided a place for al Qaeda members and other disaffected people with nothing better to do than plan an Islamic paradise (with themselves in charge) to get together and organize. The result of which was ISIS.
So, most likely if Gore had won there would have been no 9-11 and no ISIS. Also probably no Bush recession and no citizens united decision and thus, likely, no risk of “President Trump”. Would these differences, which would have resulted in considerably less human suffering, even while not eliminating all human suffering or even making US foreign policy in any sense of the word “good”, not justify voting for Gore over Bush?
@162: Interestingly, the article you linked to uses as its “proof” that Stein is not anti-vax the very quote that demonstrates that she is anti-vax. Only the most radical of anti-vaxxers will come out and say, “I’m against vaccination.” The more “moderate” ones talk about “safe vaccines” and make vague statements about the dangers of Big Pharma and freedom to decide. Let’s look at Stein’s statement then:
Clearly, she is implying that in the US vaccines are mandatory and medical exemptions are not allowed. How anyone with an MD can believe this, I don’t know, but I can tell you for certain that it is untrue. I am, for example, bumped out of getting the third in a vaccine series because I had a mild fever after getting the second in the series that might POSSIBLY have been related. Or I might have had a cold. Anyone with a history of bad reactions to a prior vaccine or similar vaccine, allergy to a vaccine ingredient, suppressed immune system, etc is medically deferred from being vaccinated with a given vaccine. Across the globe. Including in the US.
Again, BS. Virtually all developed or semi-developed countries have required vaccines. Try going into a country that is concerned about yellow fever without getting vaccinated for it and you’ll find out how “voluntary” “most” countries think vaccination is. Again, just one example. For another, my daughter had to have proof of vaccination prior to starting school in Germany. (And the US. Again, in either country, proof of medical inability to be vaccinated would have been acceptable too, but “I didn’t feel like it” would not have been.)
I have no real idea what she means here apart from dog whistling big pharma. The current head of the FDA has previously worked at Duke and in government. I can’t see that he has any pharma experience at all. If anything, I’m a bit worried that he hasn’t seen the inside of pharma enough to know what they’re up to properly. A quick scan of other FDA officials provides a similar impression. I’m not seeing the corporate lobbyists that are supposedly packed in there and I’m pretty sure that if you offered a pharma CEO a spot at the FDA they’d laugh in your face and ask why they should take an order of magnitude salary decrease in order to get a less exciting job. Furthermore, experience in pharma is not, as far as I know, a disqualification for working in regulatory agencies in, at least, the EU. So what’s the difference? Stein is simply casting vague aspersions without any particular evidence or even meaning.
This statement basically says that anyone who is not “skeptical” of vaccines is a dumb sheeple. So tell me again how this statement proves she is not anti-vax?
I agree, more or less. I don’t know what she means by “medical procedures” being tested because, while medical devices are tested and approved before they can be used, medical procedures per se are not. But if she means that vaccines should be approved in the same way that other medicines and medical devices are, I agree. And so does the law. Vaccines must be tested and approved by the FDA much like any other medicine.
Again, what revolving door. Which “industry lobbyists and CEOs” hold which “key regulatory positions”? And how do you even get a “revolving door” on a position for which it takes 6 months from the offer of a position to actually hiring someone anyway? That revolving door could use a little grease-it doesn’t spin very well.
So basically that last sentence is a completely unsourced and unsupported attack on the regulatory agencies in the US, a reference to some unmentioned other countries which do it better (somehow), and an appeal to fear of “big pharma”. How can anyone read this and not conclude that Stein is essentially not only anti-vax but anti-medicine?
SC@147: I’m glad to hear that you’re getting proper care, whether for something minor or not.
You mentioned a poor rural woman in need of an abortion in your post. I’d like to point out that, at least preliminarily, the Democratic platform has repeal of the Hyde amendment as a specific plank for, as far as I know, the first time. So how is Clinton more conservative than past Democrats?
Man, y’all need to get yourselves some voting reform. If you don’t like preferential voting, fair enough – I’m sure there are alternatives – but it seems to me that a lot of this rancour between left voters could be resolved if a vote for a minor party didn’t necessarily mean your vote eventually got discarded.
I mean, there are problems with preferential voting too. It has taken the best part of a week to even figure out who won our recent election in Oz, but I certainly don’t feel compelled to “vote Labour or else the conservatives win” (and indeed I didn’t). It may not be a panacea, but it’s hard to see how it could hurt.
Gary@168: While I don’t disagree about needing voting reform (among other things), I would point out that the conservatives did win the recent election in Australia, so I’m not sure that example is the most immediately compelling.
dianne@169:
They did, for sure. However, there was a massive swing against them – they went from approximately a 70% majority to about a 52%. And we’re still waiting to see how the Senate shakes down.
That said, Malcolm Turnbull is about the most liberal Liberal Prime Minister we’ve had in a long time. I’m not saying I wanted them to win – I didn’t – but he’s far from Donald Trump. We do have our equivalents of such people; Pauline Hansen would be an obvious pick, of the One Nation party. They are a minor party with very little influence in Australia; we have our own problems, of course, but we don’t have the equivalent of His Orangeness one step away from high office.
gary@170: Yeah, much as I have problems with some current Australian policies, I did not mean to imply that Turnbull was in the least way comparable to Trump. Sorry!
dianne@171:
Oh, I wasn’t offended. I have some serious issues with a lot of our policies; off the top of my head, our asylum seeker policy is inhuman, but that policy sadly was shared by both major parties – one of the reasons I voted Green, but with the knowledge that my electorate (which was won by Labour) wasn’t going to suddenly go Liberal because of that.
That’s my main point. Those of you upset with Clinton could vote someone else, but as long as you still put Clinton over Trump, you wouldn’t be effectively having your vote “count as a vote for Trump”. Again, I’m not saying y’all have to copy our system – just that it shouldn’t be the case that you risk wasting your vote if you really don’t like either candidate, assuming there’s one you hate less than the other.
Gary @172: I don’t know…the last thing the US imported from Australia was Rupert Murdoch and that hasn’t worked out so well. (Kidding! I’m not blaming you for Murdoch.) I’d like to see the US change its system in a way that makes it easier for minor parties to become part of the government, but to do so would require an amendment at least and a constitutional convention at most and I’m not sure what that would result in given the current political climate.
*suddenly has a guitar and is playing terribly because I’ve literally never even held a guitar before* We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome someday…
Yeah, maybe Green won’t be president this upcoming election, but if voting strategically is a thing, then look at where Clinton is practically guaranteed to win or where Trump is guaranteed to win and work to bump the Green vote to noticeable levels. If you’re in an area where the result isn’t so clear-cut, then vote against, not for, but support Green, look at the smaller races and vote Green, or try to get Green candidates running if there aren’t any, and work so that in the foreseeable future we can vote green and people won’t say “waaaaste”. (Incidentally Australia has one of my favorite voting systems and I didn’t even realize that was being discussed until I looked up.)
And if you like the Green Party except for parts of the platform that suggest homeopathy or anti-vaccine or other science problems, work to get that platform changed. They got parts of the Democrat’s platform changed, surely there can be a push to make Green more palatable to sane people. What if you don’t like Green at all? Then keep working to push the Democrats to the left, keep the push Sanders started going, and maybe–just maybe–we can have future elections with presidential candidates that people like!
Maybe not today, maybe not in four years, in fact probably not in four years because that’ll probably be an incumbent election, but if we just keep pushing against the status quo then we can make both Democrats and Green a party we can be proud to vote for, we can make Green a party we can vote for, and if we push the Democrats, and if we keep on with the pressure, maybe, just maybe, we can get a change in the electoral system with two rounds of voting or sets up a system that means we never have to argue about throwing away our votes again. But this can’t be done by blindly voting for whoever isn’t a monster, we have to make the Democrats want this change, we have to push them left enough and make the Green Party strong enough that a political alliance between one of the entrenched parties and a third party doesn’t sound like some crazy European idea!
Let’s work on it. Let’s make this happen.
And if it doesn’t happen in my lifetime then let me just say I’m glad I won’t leave any offspring to deal with this garbage because the human race won’t deserve my genetics for the future. (I know that sounds incredibly conceited, it’s mostly a joke but like, come on, humans suuuck.
duth olec@174:
I dunno man, I quite like some humans. And I hope the planet survives, because that’s where I keep all my stuff.
Since Obama refused to fund the Death Star, I don’t think we have any planet destroying capacity. The biosphere, OTOH, there might be some question about that…
dianne@176:
I dunno, some of these look pretty plausible:
https://qntm.org/destroy
@177: It may have to be subcontracted to the Vogons.
And just how messed up is it that the discussion turning to the destruction of the earth means that it’s lightened up a bit?
dianne@179:
Touche. Touche, indeed.
@marinerachel #163
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING!?
There is no fucking comparison between the damage done by anti-vaxer and climate change.
You know Syria? Triggered by drought.
How many displaced people we have only out of that? 60 MILLIONS? How many deaths?
Measles doesn’t even compare.
This is only the beginning.
I get that as an American you don’t give a fuck about the rest of the fucking planet, you will always have money to buy food out of poor people’s mouths, but maybe, just maybe, you could consider that what the US does affects heavily the rest of us.
And BTW, action on climate change is the one only crystal clear reason I see to play the lesser evil game and support *Clinton*.
I’m sure I don’t know why I’m supposed to care what ignorant doofus Sam Harris thinks. I think everyone would agree that Sanders – for all his lack of knowledge about global affairs (he’s admitted he knows little about contemporary Latin America, which is pretty shocking for a socialist) – would be much less enthusiastic about imperialist covert action and wars than Clinton.
But the fact is that Sanders isn’t in the race for president. The choice now isn’t between Sanders and Clinton, but Clinton and Trump. Given that choice, Sanders has endorsed Clinton. Noam Chomsky, who is extraordinarily knowledgeable about US imperialism and whose views I respect, also advocates voting for Clinton anywhere it could make a difference:
So that’s another problem with your argument by association, in addition to its being fallacious.
* As others have mentioned elsewhere, though, in this election it might be harder to know if you’re in a swing state, so wise to err on the side of caution.
I hope that people who otherwise wouldn’t turn out to vote, even though they oppose Trump, have learned something from Brexit.
Sanders: “The goal here is to do what I think the Democratic establishment has not been very effective in doing,” Sanders explained. “And that is at the grassroots level, encourage people to get involved, give them the tools they need to win, help them financially.”
http://fusion.net/story/325838/bernie-sanders-progressive-organizations-2016
dianne @ # 166 – Good points, if perhaps a bit Manichean…
Here’s (yet) another take from the Patheos Atheist channel, disagreeing in part with the previous analyses but spotlighting other problematic aspects of Stein’s (& Clinton’s) positions.
Thanks, btw, for your # 78, exposing Stein’s literal duplicity on Brexit. (sigh)
Also, kudos to penalfire @ # 29 & SC (Salty Current) @ # 182 for pointing out what these debates usually omit: the screwed-up US electoral system means identical votes have very different impacts in different states.
Dianne @165
I believe the justification against al qaeda that the clinton administration chose to delay action on was the bombing of the USS Cole.
I’m not kidding.
The planet will survive the anti-vaxxer movement. My interest in keeping the earth up and running ends where our species ceases to exist. Only a fraction of our species will survive the end of vaccination.
Climate change is something we’re going to have to adapt to to some degree regardless. A lot of the damage is already done and there is no means by which we can reverse it.
The speed at which the anti-vaxxer movement will end human lives, particularly with respect to super infectious diseases like measles, is a shit-ton faster than climate change.
We can afford to take a little bit longer to resolve our misuse of fossil fuels, primarily because we’re already in a position we’ll have to adapt to. We’ve already done immense damage. If we continue to for a short while longer at a reduced rate, to harm our planet through the burning of fossil fuels it won’t make the immediate difference discarding vaccines will and we’ll have time to adapt.
What we can’t afford is polio and pertussis and rubella outbreaks. Those are things that destroy existent lives immediately.
In a perfect world there wouldn’t be american presidential candidates representing fossils fuels OR the anti-vaxxer movement. My choice is which one can we reduce at a slower rate without killing any extant humans. It sure as fuck isn’t whooping cough. We’re already watching babies needlessly die of it. I’m not going to promote another one of those deaths. I will promote a less immediate end to the burning of fossil fuels before I do that.
will you be telling that to the parents of children that died of whooping cough because some irresponsible idiot in their neighborhood chose not to vaccinate their kids?