Here’s part 2 of my comment because lemmy wouldn’t me put this in the first reply.

I’m not familiar with this one, and a brief search makes me think it may be HOAs on steroids. Do you have an explainer you can link?

What Does It Mean to Decommodify Housing?

Federal policies enabling real estate speculation have allowed private actors to profit off housing investments while evading their fiscal, social, and legal accountability to tenants (Ferrer 2021). Combined with the disinvestment in public and subsidized housing, this has led to an unprecedented level of commodification, which produces and perpetuates housing injustice. To achieve increased (and ideally universal) housing affordability and access, advocates are calling for housing to be removed from the speculative market, or decommodified.17 This entails removing a significant portion of the housing stock from the private market, thus reducing the impact of speculation on housing access and ensuring permanent affordability by shifting to alternative housing models that promote public or community ownership and focus on protecting residents from displacement.18 Decommodified housing models fall into two broad categories:

◼ Public or social housing, which is generally owned by governments or other public entities, and

◼ shared equity models, in which ownership is generally shared between residents and community members or organizations

https://www.urban.org/research/publication/decommodification-and-its-role-advancing-housing-justice

? You mean just more of them? We have them in like every park around here.

For a while, Pierre-Louis writes, drinking fountains were a more popular source of water than bottled water. But the trend reversed and today drinking fountains are, by all accounts, disappearing. “Though no one tracks the number of public fountains nationally, researchers say they’re fading from America’s parks, schools and stadiums,” she writes.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-thinking-public-drinking-fountains-are-gross-problem-180955931/

I would at least give various levels of police support for the wellness check, ranging from a police radio to backup close at hand.

Having security for social and health care workers or someone to restrain a patient is a separate concern from what the police do. If the police show up they can use deadly force, which isn’t wanted in health care cases. Social workers will most likely own a cell phone to call 911 and could easily be provided with one. I recommend watching Last Week Tonight, they’ve done extensive research into police reform.

https://themighty.com/topic/mental-health/police-respond-mental-health-crisis-check-dangerous/

https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-police-are-trained-to-do-when-confronting-suspects-2015-4?op=1

How do you even go about that?

The Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA), which I have developed and tested to combat cult mind control, encourages a positive, warm relationship between cult members and their families while helping to raise essential questions for cult members to consider.

It seems there has been work done on this topic. There are apparently more effective ways to go about it than 1970s cult deprogramming techniques. By all means, do those. But the answer cannot be to do nothing. It’s got to be to do something.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-of-mind/202303/beyond-cult-deprogramming

My own parents are the best possible argument for it,

My Mom and my deceased Grandmother are as well. I’m sure lots of people can attest to this.

but it would still need to pass muster in terms of the Constitution.

I definitely have a distaste for media that attempts to proselytize, though.

The foundation of freedom is the truth. That’s true of free speech and free press. At the bare minimum the media needs to be committed to telling the truth. To be clear, correcting errors is important, but I am referring to the Fairness Doctrine. We used to have standards for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

No, I didn’t mean climate science hasn’t been replicated.

We are discussing climate science, so this wasn’t relevant at all. Specifically we are discussing climate science in the context of Chris Murphy’s assertion that we need to embrace climate science skeptics and other people on the right. A populist movement will be able to bring uniformed or even misled people into a broader movement without needing to compromise on any of the social, cultural, gun and climate issues listed in his tweets. The Democratic Party needs to build a populist narrative that will attract people into a coalition, not continue the failed strategy of trying to grab moderate Republicans while alienating progressives and socialists.

The above paragraph is what is relevant to the discussion at hand. I thought it was fair to exchange a general list of positions since part of the topic is coalition building. I am going ahead and responding to most of these topics, because what we as individuals need to be doing is educating ourselves and others.

Also, I’m not google, and I don’t always have the free time to respond. If we dive too deep into any of them we will miss the point of this discussion and the lengths of our comments will get too long. If you want to go deeper into any of these topics, I recommend starting a post in Ask Lemmy or another relevant community. As it is I am going to have to break this reply into multiple comments because we’ve hit the capacity for comments with our discussion.

for COVID they also needed to trust a wider apparatus that included government.

The anti-vax movement, which has existed for centuries, is the reason the COVID misinformation was so widespread.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/history-anti-vaccine-movement-4054321

If someone trusts the institutions only while their party holds them, they cannot be said to trust the institutions.

For many people, if not most people, these are one in the same. The idea that institutions themselves are what need to be changed is seemingly unintuitive in today’s society.

Yes, I think the main objection lately is only who controls them.

There are people who want a dictator that agrees with them.

Do you mean something beyond my “safety net”?

Fear of losing customers, and therefore revenue, may prompt business owners to allow outdated payments. By not enforcing price increases for all clients, businesses ultimately will lose money as they struggle to satisfy unreasonable customers rather than focus on clients willing to pay the current rates.

Best business practices involve not doing business with ‘unreasonable’ people who won’t pay higher rates. Unreasonable is a cute way of saying a person cannot afford to pay more. I’m sure for some businesses who only deal with rich people this advice seems harmless. But when it’s the same advice that a landlord would use when raising rent it goes from cute to making people homeless. In a capitalist society, it isn’t profitable to target the lowest income brackets. Especially when the initial investment the business needs to make is in new buildings.

https://postpressmag.com/articles/2015/top-5-reasons-to-fire-a-customer/

As far as I know, tech is the main area we don’t already do this, just because it’s relatively new.

The majority of the industries in the U.S. have oligopolies that are dominated by a few large corporations. This creates significant barriers to entry for those wishing to enter the marketplace.

We aren’t doing this enough in every sector. Tech is a noticeable example of this.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-some-current-examples-oligopolies.asp

I’m partial to a “death tax” (estate tax) myself.

Waiting for billionaires to die will take too long. We needed wealth redistribution decades ago. Billionaires have access to the best health care money can buy and they are in no hurry to die.

Even then, I think there is a risk of capital flight that needs to be mitigated somehow.

When it comes to tax policy, Congress has broad latitude to enact policy as it sees fit, within constitutional limitations, of course. And to that point, the constitutionality of retroactive income tax changes is well-settled. They are allowed.

More recently, in cases such as United States v. Hemme, Welch v. Henry, and most notably, United States v. Carlton, the U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed that both income and transfer tax (e.g., estate and gift taxes) changes may be implemented retroactively, “Provided that the retroactive application of a statute is supported by a legitimate legislative purpose furthered by rational means…”

We have the capacity to write tax laws that do not give legal windows for capital flight and we have the capacity to enforce those tax laws. The US legally freezes assets, usually as part of sanctions, routinely. We need the political will to do so.

Also, we are currently spending more money than the next nine countries combined on defense spending. We are logistically capable of stopping billionaires who attempt to illegally move assets out of the country. The 2024 article is more recent but the 2020 article does have some interesting comparisons with the rest of the world.

We also need to cut defense spending, because it’s taking money from education and essential services. Not to mention electing a dictator who does whatever other dictators want is bad for national security and military readiness. So not educating people is actually bad for national security and military readiness since an uneducated populace is easier for a christo-fascist dictator to manipulate to take power.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreylevine/2021/06/11/can-congress-really-increase-taxes-retroactively/

https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-9-countries-combined/

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/04/30/us-spends-military-spending-next-10-countries-combined/

I don’t trust that you can actually do this without triggering a catastrophe. I would be more interested if it were structured as incremental reforms.

It’s not an issue of trust. It’s an issue of understanding ideas and math. This is the prevalence of neoliberal ideas my argument references. Incremental reforms will not work because the owner class will always take measures to thwart them. This is because they will always be incentivized to behave that way. And as long as they have the money to do so, they will be able to act on those incentives, both economically and politically. There is no catastrophe that will be triggered if rich people are less rich and everyone else is better off. Instead we would see economic prosperity.

Eh… You might as well say it would be cool if we could all be Vulcans.

This attitude could have been used to dismiss any technology. Star Trek popularized the idea of computer tablets. Now we have tablets. The humans in Star Trek live in a post-scarcity society. If we don’t dismiss it out of hand, people could be living in such a society or comparable society in the future. In real life the answer might not be replicators, but more equitable and inclusive political and economic institutions.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago/

I might fight you on the particulars… I like efficiency and simplicity, but redundancy can be valuable in critical systems.

If the costs of the redundancy outweigh the benefits we should remove the redundancy. The redundant elements of society are billionaires and millionaires. As long as we use a market base system people are going to amass a certain amount of wealth that can easily stretch into the tens of millions. Billionaires have billions does not add anything to the economy. Having an investor class with tens or hundreds of millions that give loans can allow for new small businesses to take off. But we need to regulate these investments and eventually replace them with other systems or else investors will amass too much wealth.

That argument against the states only works so long as the federal government is trustworthy, though.

It works as long the federal government is representative of the majority of people.

I’m not including the debt that is important for the weird-ass way the global economy works now.

That’s what deficit spending is. The US is not a household. Deficit spending is a strategy and is not inherently irresponsible or responsible.

Does anyone do it like you want? I agree that we need healthcare reform, but I don’t generally see glowing reviews of other systems either.

There are currently 17 countries that offer single-payer healthcare: Norway, Japan, United Kingdom, Kuwait, Sweden, Bahrain, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain, and Iceland.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-single-payer

This is mostly a budget thing IMO. If you can set aside funds for it, go ahead. If you can’t, that’s society deciding this is not worth doing.

This is an issue of political will. As the Republican Party wants to rule, not lead, having an uneducated population makes their job of deceiving people easier. Trump is notorious for his comment on loving the poorly educated.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-love-poorly-educated/

The replication crisis gives some validity to their concerns.

This hasn’t been an issue for climate science at all. People have done separate studies and come to the same results. In fact Exxon’s models seem to be highly accurate.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/

It doesn’t help that these people are by and large not scientists and don’t have the training to read the science.

These news articles don’t require scientific training to read, but they contain the results of the research.

These are non-issues.

Ha! I don’t think you would easily find anyone to defend the institutions as infallible right now, least of all the trumpers. The Courts, Congress, the Deep State (career workers in the executive branch), it’s all suspect for them. I myself was counting on SCOTUS to hold until it didn’t.

This is conflating trust in the institutions with trust in the people. I’m sure most people would be happy to change the individuals in charge of the systems. But I doubt those same people would be interested in radically changing those systems.

I think you are significantly overestimating the pull granted by simply being in the tent.

That is putting the cart before the horse. The policies of the tent are created as part of the groups forming the coalition. It’s not an afterthought. Your argument is underestimating the pull of populism in the early 21st century.

Your turn.

The US needs majority rule democracy. Currently US democracy is flawed as it has many institutional issues that lead to minority rule. The electoral college and our first-past-the-post voting system are two culprits. But also things like the House being capped at 435 seats, the filibuster in the Senate, the fact each state gets two Senate seats. The Supreme Court justices need an enforceable ethics code, term limits, and should be selected by popular vote.

The US needs socialism. We need a welfare state for the people who fall through the cracks. It’s too easy for businesses to fire the poorest customers on essential services like housing, even when a person works multiple jobs. We need to regulate businesses to prevent conflict of interests, malpractice, and oligopolies. We need to have a wealth tax on billionaires and millionaires to reinject the wealth that is not larger circulating in the economy.

We need to redirect the owner class’ source of wealth. The workers need to own the means of production. Which means workers need to own an equal portion of the corporations they work for in the form of non-tradable stocks or bonds. The workers need to receive regular payouts at least quarterly in the form of dividends or interest respectively. And those corporations need to be run like democracies in a way that reflects the number of people working there for things like choosing the C-Suite and company values.

The goal is to eliminate a class of people, not the individuals themselves. As long as the owner class exists, they are incentivized to overturn our democracy. Even now we are seeing an oligarchy of billionaires forming around Trump as a dictator.

Also, corporations are not people and we should get private money out of elections.

I am adamantly opposed to abolishing money or ownership of real estate.

I mean if we could get rid of those while keeping all the benefits the technologies give us that would be pretty cool right? I see a stateless society like that as an ideal to strive for by removing unnecessary or theoretically redundant layers of hierarchy in our society. I’m a social democrat. Some people would say I’ve taken from market socialism, but it’s not my fault if they only have one idea.

I suspect you would more eagerly expand its power.

The US is a federal presidential constitutional republic. I’m fine with federalism as long states’ rights are about governmental separation of concerns. When states’ rights become states have the right to be a dictatorship where people have no rights, that is where I have a problem.

I support several federal agencies such as the FDA, USDA, EPA. This support is somewhat reluctant; if I could devise an alternative that didn’t accrue power to the federal government I would prefer that.

I would like to see a radical change with how we fund government agencies. We should get rid of the debt ceiling. Congress will still need to budget for the year. But if agencies need additional funding they should be able to pull from Congress who could choose to approve or deny funding as needed. Like a US military model of pulling resources as opposed to a Soviet military model of pushing resources. Government agencies shouldn’t be in a position where they aren’t fully funded or think they won’t be fully funded if they don’t use all of the allotted funding. But there should be transparency to the process of funding.

Single payer health care, free college tuition, decomodify housing, public drinking fountains.

Defunding the police by having them focus on solving crime and giving the excess funding to agencies that specialize in jobs we don’t want police doing like mental health or animal control, etc. Cops shouldn’t be making wellness checks on patients or wasting their time catching stray dogs.

I think social media may have ruined education for Generation Z, as if we had given them all really bad drugs. My aversion to government action is making me uncomfortable with what we may need to do.

I recommend talking to people from this generation. The people I have met in person are all well adjusted people.

We will need a massive and sustained cult deprogramming effort for people who have been watching Fox News for nearly three decades. The alternative is continued political unrest and domestic terrorism even if we manage to educate the rest of the population out of neoliberalism and fascism.

Based on what you wrote I’m going to guess that the cult deprogramming position is going to be the most disagreeable with you. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. It is based on my own interactions with people who have uncritically consumed right-wing media for too long while trapped in an information silo.

Outside of defending ourselves, violence is our least useful tool. It seems like your account is new, but people have multiple accounts. This take is probably on the milder side here on Lemmy. You’re likely to come across people and communities that are prone to fed posting, if you haven’t already.

I firmly believe we can educate the population out of this problem and that education is the long term solution to fascism. There are a lot of people on here who do not feel that way. Regardless I believe the big tent can include all people on the left and even neoliberals and neocons who are willing to learn.

Tankies are red fascists, authoritarian communists, and I wouldn’t include them anymore than I would include fascists. Both red fascism and fascism are far right ideologies. Hexbear and Lemmygrad are the two main culprits. With a few notable and welcome exceptions I suspect the majority of users on .ml are tankies.

Thanks for sharing your views.

No more “lesser evil” crap. I’m not voting for evil again, period.

The strategy you are describing makes minorities the cost of doing business. Instead of attempting to achieve moral victory over Democrats consider voting for Democrats in elections to leverage power for the people Republicans want to hurt and kill.

Are you supposing that any scrap of unscientific propaganda in a person’s opinions makes them functionally a fascist?

No, that’s why I separated the two in my argument.

I posit that someone can doubt the science and believe in liberalism.

How in good faith does a neoliberal doubt the science? They definitely incorrectly doubt the magnitude of change to our society that is required to fix climate change, sure. But the science itself?

Hell, I think some of the people who voted for Trump still believe in liberalism (not that they would call it that) even as they enable fascism.

Neoliberalism is part of how those people got to fascism. It’s much easier for a fascist to convince people to adopt fascists positions when they already have neoliberal ideas in their head. Neoliberalism only allows change to the people in charge of systems. It’s a smaller jump to convince neoliberals to change the people in society than it is to convince them to change institutions they believe are infallible.

This descent into madness has been really hard to watch.

Yes, but in hindsight it is clear how we got here. Neoliberalism and the right-wing information sphere are two of the major culprits.

If any of them were to renounce Trump, I’d welcome them eagerly.

We don’t get this for free though or by comprising all of our positions. Democrats have been trying to reach across the aisle for a while. They failed in this election in large part because of that continued attempt to reach moderate Republicans. What Democrats need is a populist narrative. This will rally people around our side of the issues.

I think you risk not being able to solve anything because you’re so picky about allies. I think improving climate policy remains possible with a minority of climate deniers in the tent.

Not if we have to comprise our positions to get them in the tent. We need full speed ahead on climate change action. If we have to go the speed we are now, slower, or backwards like we will be in a few months, then that isn’t a useful alliance.

I don’t know, do you really want to compare comprehensive political positions?

I think you’re referring to harm to other living, breathing people. You want to be a part of the big tent? Time to spill the beans on your positions. Whether they’re considered political or otherwise. A bulleted list is fine. edit: typos

Me not going quietly to the death camps is me being selfish and rich according to you, got it. Real ally. =P

No, I’m one of the trans people you use in your pursuit of moral victories over the Democrats.

There already are two. We must co-opt one with a populist candidate. The Republican Party was already hijacked by Trump. That leaves the Democratic Party.

Not believing in climate change does not make someone a fascist

Weirdly, no where in my argument do I claim this. But if a person isn’t a fascist or isn’t at least brainwashed by their propaganda, why would someone believe climate change is not real? There is a large body of research that demonstrates climate change is real and is caused by humans. Not to mention Exxon knew this as early as 1977.

Murphy was talking about accepting people who don’t want to be aligned with MAGA. That is plainly a strategic imperative.

No he said:

But here’s the thing - then you need to let people into the tent who aren’t 100% on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns or climate.

He didn’t mention the MAGA movement or how aligned with MAGA a person wants to be in that.

your meter is too sensitive.

The time to advert key tipping points in the Earth’s climate is the next five years. Either we advert these tipping points or catastrophic damage will be done to the environment. There’s no time to delay. Let alone time to be actively making things worse by increasing fossil fuel emissions as much as possible. Why is your argument’s meter not picking this up?

I suspect I would be more hands-off about correcting some harms

Sorry, what harms are those? =/

I would take FDR 2.0 if that’s what can defeat MAGA, but I don’t have confidence that it’s a good approach. I do think the wealth/income gap is a threat to liberty and stability.

Billionaires have formed an oligarchy around Trump who is threatening to deport millions of people, round up homeless people into camps, and be a dictator on day one. This state of affairs is directly derived from late-stage capitalism and the 40 years of neo-liberalism that enabled the rich to extract wealth from everyone else.

People want a populist narrative. We can easily give them that since it’s the truth. That’s what the Democrats were lacking in their campaign that Trump used to win, a populist narrative. Democrats spent the months between the DNC and election day appealing to moderate Republicans. Their reward was around 10 million fewer votes. Murphy is another Democrat who refuses to listen and is part of the Democrats predictable shift to the right in response to this loss.

There can be more than one lesson to learn from an election. People do need to learn to leverage power and vote for Democrats in elections, but the Democrats need to learn from their mistakes as well. Or at least be co-opted by people who learned the lessons for them.

Unfortunately our democracy uses a first-past-the-post voting system which trends toward a two-party system. This makes the Republicans and Democrats the only game in town.

Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting

We need to leverage power to reduce the harm done to the minority groups fascists in the Republican party want to hurt. So rather than attempting to achieve a moral victory over Democrats, people on the left should do the most useful thing they can during elections for minorities and vote for Democrats.

The Alt-Right Playbook: The Cost of Doing Business

The problem with that strategy is that our democracy uses a first-past-the-post voting system which trends towards a two-party system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&t=31s

Uh huh. Are you only able to cooperate with people who agree with you in every way?

We should not cooperate with fascists especially when they don’t believe in climate change. It would be a waste of time since they want to kill us and want to pollute as much as possible.

And yours is going out of its way to manufacture enemies.

My argument didn’t tell the MAGA movement to be fascists. A progressive and socialist populist movement could rally most people without needing for anyone to hate minority groups or disregard scientific consensus.

Again, sure. Not worth fighting over the phrasing.

Good, so you agree then? We should move the Democratic Party to the left. Democrats should champion systemic change and wealth redistribution. edit: typo

He doesn’t say anything else on climate, and this is not “abandoning action on climate change.” The people already in the tent don’t agree on everything, and they have not “abandoned action” because of it.

The people who don’t agree with climate change don’t believe it exists.

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/06/trump-victory-sweeping-climate-consequences

This is not “uncritically supporting men’s rights.”

Your argument is focusing on the bait and ignoring the switch.

Listen to poor and rural people, men in crisis. Don’t decide for them.

We are listening to them. This is what they are saying.

This time around, one of the attack lines is “your body, my choice.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/384792/your-body-my-choice-maga-gender-election

Sure, if that’s how you need to frame it to fit your worldview go ahead. Just please try to find agreement when feminist framing is not used, because it usually won’t be.

That’s how we’re framing it. If that’s not appealing to some people, there’s a mainstream fascist political party they can join. We don’t need two mainstream fascist parties.

By the way, the worldview is that all people are equal. And that inequality harms us all, but some people are harmed more than others. People on the left have no interest in a worldview where women are second class citizens.

Murphy starts off saying we should abandon neoliberalism which is good.

The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us.

But then finished by uncritically supporting men’s rights, abandoning social issues, and abandoning action on climate change.

But here’s the thing - then you need to let people into the tent who aren’t 100% on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns or climate.

Listen to poor and rural people, men in crisis. Don’t decide for them.

It fits the description to a T. We don’t have time for 50% or 0% action on climate change. The window to avert key tipping points that will have catastrophic consequences for the Earth’s climate is now.

As a trans person, I am not interested in 50% or 0% of my rights. I would like my right to exist, 100% of the time.

We should push back on some of the more fringe men’s rights groups. No one is entitled to a state mandated girlfriend. But it is probably worth understanding how patriarchy harms men because inequality harms us all.

They didn’t show the entire tweet chain. Murphy starts off saying we should abandon neoliberalism which is good. But then finished by uncritically supporting men’s rights, abandoning social issues, and abandoning action on climate change.

He’s calling for Democrats to move to the right. The big tent he’s pitching is fascism. A true populist movement that champions socialism and progressive causes can bring people together while also championing these issues.

The republican party didn’t even form until 1845. For a while it was the Whigs and the Democrats. We’ve had at least 5 different parties win the POTUS. I’m not saying this is astonishing, but the claim that a third party has never won is laughably wrong. I even explicitly noted it to you and you weren’t smart enough to go look it up on your own.

Political parties have come and gone. But there were only two main parties at any given time. Characterizing new parties as third parties when they only had one political party as opposition is disingenuous.

Incorrect. The votes still count. When it comes to the electoral system, it’s effectively the same on the outcome.

The votes count, but since they are towards a candidate with no chance of winning, it is the same as not voting for the purpose of counting votes for the main two political parties, Republicans and Democrats.

However, when it comes to showing who you support, clearly who you actually support (especially if we are talking by giving them your vote) it’s not even remotely the same.

In a two party system, support for a third party is measured in the votes it detracts from the candidates from the two main parties. For example, the Green Party took votes from Al Gore in Florida and cost him the 2000 presidential election.

No, you refuted nothing. You just called them liars with zero evidence. Your accusation is based solely on the fact that it contradicts the conclusion you’ve already come to. You don’t care about reality, you care about trying to convince people you are right.

I have already copy and pasted my argument once. Pretending my argument doesn’t exist won’t help your argument.

But are you just going to drop the fact that you used the ad hominem to refute their claim?

I pointed out that their meaningless statement was false and therefore that they were lying, for the sake of clarity. Your argument has unsuccessfully attempted to misrepresent this clarifying statement as my argument. Not because it was my argument, but because my argument saying they were lying sounds like it was making an ad hominem statement as the basis of my argument when it was not.

Actually, you know what? You’re lying right now and you actually agree with me, because no one would be stupid enough to hold your position. That was easy. lol I like this style of debate.

My argument’s position is that they are supporting Trump, by not voting for Biden. Their statement that they are not supporting Trump, is false. Therefore it is a lie. But the fact that they are lying is simply the conclusion I reached by following my arguments logic. It is not how I arrived at that conclusion.

I think you have convinced yourself with your arguments. But the goal of debating someone is to convince others. I know my arguments. I know your argument is misrepresenting them. Your argument is not going to fool me. I can see your arguments misrepresentation clearly and write down exactly what it’s doing. Anyone else can do the same. If you want to convince people, argue against what was said and not what you’ve decided was said. Or keep doing what you’re doing, but it won’t convince anyone.

Incorrect. It’s unlikely, but “we can’t know that for sure.” Republicans were, at one point, “the third party.” You can’t keep going back to “what we likely know is true” because we’ve already established that “what is likely true” only matters when it helps your point, and ignored when it hurts it.

Neither a third party candidate nor an independent candidate has ever won the presidential election in this country. That’s not a statistical anomaly. We live in a two party system.

I tend to agree here. Except when it comes to who you support for POTUS. If you’re voting for a candidate, literally the thing that most shows your support for a candidate, you can’t say they don’t support the candidate they are literally voting for. Well, you can say it, but we’ve already established that you will say bat-shit crazy things in a desperate attempt to not be wrong.

For the purposes of counting votes, voting third party or independent for a presidential election is the same as not voting.

No, it’s absolutely an ad hominem. Like the most pure form of it. You are questioning their motives instead of what they are literally saying. It’s a textbook case of it. Do you mind if I point some students to this in the future as a perfect example of the ad hominem?

No, I refuted their central point in that statement by establishing the logical contradiction there in. I think the most obvious reason for them to say a meaningless statement like that is to save face. This supposition about their motive for doing such a thing is not the refutation of their central point.

Your central point is that they are supporting Trump. That paragraph of desperate nonsense that kind of loosely resembles logic is your argument for that point. But make no mistake about it, your central point is that they are Trump supporters. Something they explicitly have said is untrue, and the only refutation you have against what they have expressly said is an unsupported accusation that they are lying, which is an ad hominem. You’re argument falls apart because it relies on an unsupported attack on their character for it to be true, and you pointed out early how bad arguments that rely on ad hominems are. Of course, you were wrong at the time that my argument hinged on an ad hominem, I was just insulting someone who kind of deserves it, but you were right that if your argument relies on it, like yours does, that it’s pretty clear how “unconvincing” your argument is.

This is at least in the right ball park. Again, I think they are pro-trump in the sense that they are supporting him in the presidential election. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that most of these people voted Biden in 2020 and do not identify as MAGA hat wearing Republicans.

Anyway, I think you have the idea now. Refuting an argument’s central point makes for arguments that are far more persuading.

Except, of course, the fact that you can actually support pretty much anyone you want for POTUS and are not restricted to the two major parties, and the fact that they have openly said that they don’t support Trump. I mean, those are only the most damning facts for your argument. There are plenty of others that we have hashed over that also demolish your self-contradictory position.

It is well understood no third party candidates or independent candidates have any chance at winning the presidential election. Choosing a candidate who has no chance of winning is the same as not voting for the purpose of counting votes. The only real options are Republicans or Democrats for presidential elections.

But, of course, by accusing them of lying, this is also an ad hominem. Something you were hilariously and hypocritically up in arms about me doing just a little while ago. I’m shocked it took me this long to realize that that accusation was just a warning that you were going to do it at some point.

This is not an ad hominem because I am pointing out the logical contradiction in their statement. Rather than directing my arguments at them, I am refuting their central point in their statement.

edit: Adding this to respond to your edit.

Your central point is absolutely demolished by the fact that they explicitly said they don’t support Trump.

Again, here is my refutation of their central point:

The fact that the statement is meaningless can be deduced from the fact we live in a two party system. Since one candidate must win and the other must lose the situation is a zero-sum game. We also know that Trump, as the presumed Republican candidate, will benefit from low voter turnout as all Republican candidates generally do. Not to mention these peoples’ movement resets on the idea they can influence the election simply by not voting for Biden in order to punish the Democratic party. In short, we know the statement “We’re not supporting Trump” is false, because all the available facts contradict it. All their statement proves is that they don’t want to admit they are supporting Trump in the election.

If you want to refute my central point in your argument, then direct your argument at this paragraph.

The fact that the statement is meaningless can be deduced from the fact we live in a two party system. Since one candidate must win and the other must lose the situation is a zero-sum game. We also know that Trump, as the presumed Republican candidate, will benefit from low voter turnout as all Republican candidates generally do. Not to mention these peoples’ movement resets on the idea they can influence the election simply by not voting for Biden in order to punish the Democratic party. In short, we know the statement “We’re not supporting Trump” is false, because all the available facts contradict it. All their statement proves is that they don’t want to admit they are supporting Trump in the election.

I read the posted article and saw their claim that they don’t support Trump. I did not take their word at face value because I saw the contradiction in their statement.

Your argument is good at making it seem like it won the debate and its aggressive nature makes it seem like it is constantly on the attack. But ultimately a lot of effort is wasted on posturing without delivering any substance with it. With half as much effort put at refuting my argument’s central point, your arguments would be much more compelling.

“We don’t have two options. We have many options,” Jaylani Hussein, director of Minnesota’s Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter, said at a press conference in Dearborn, Michigan, when asked about Biden alternatives. “We’re not supporting (former President Donald) Trump,” he said, adding that the Muslim community would decide how to interview other candidates.

This is the kind of meaningless statement I’ve been talking about in my argument. They are planning on not voting for Biden in historic swing states so that he loses and Trump wins. Them saying “We’re not supporting Trump” doesn’t mean anything if they help Trump win an election. They are empty words meant to save face. Another way to put it is this person is lying.

Literally and explicitly straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re committed to addressing the arguments in good faith, you’ll admit that you are wrong now. Well, of course, unless you’re a troll or a complete idiot. And, no, that’s actually not a false dichotomy.*

The reality of that is so obvious, given what we know about our election system and the two parties we have to choose from, that simply stating the opposite isn’t a compelling argument. Rather than trying to articulate why the opposite is true, your argument simply relies on ad hominem statements. But this topic has nothing to do with me and thus your argument isn’t persuasive.

*actually it probably is, there are probably a number of other embarrassing reasons you might try to deny it. And based on how much you’ve simply ignored reality in this debate during while “arguing” in “good faith” I’m sure you’ll try. lol

Also, a good faith discussion doesn’t mean one of the people arguing has to admit that they’re wrong. I believe another person can see my arguments and not be convinced by them.