This is an older article, but it’s relevant to what’s going on right now. My analysis follows in this comment:

1. Third Parties don’t work in the USA. Quite simply, it goes back to my whole ‘100 kid SGA election’ example. Even if Bookish Girl was 100% legit and was really running to keep Nerd Boy from winning because he’s actually a bad guy, he’d be a spoiler to her if she was the one with 48 votes behind her name and bookish nerd boy had 3 voting for him. But the example of being picked by Cheerleader to siphon away 3 votes from Nerd Boy so Cheerleader could win is exactly how Jill Stein and the Green Party are working. It was exactly how (RFK) Junior was running, until it became clear he was going to attract more votes from Trump than Harris, and what is he doing? Getting out of the race so he doesn’t get Harrs elected!

2. Third parties have the problem of not forming a broad consensus. Americans are stuck in their ways, and like their parties. Even the liberals are conservative in the notion of ‘going with what just works.’ Forming a broad consensus is necessary to win in the model of government we have, which is why we’ve had two major parties since right after our founding.

3. There is a real faction of ‘ratfuckers’ who are here to split our vote and disrupt our election. Their goal is the conversion of the USA into a Fascist state, and they will use every tool in the box to fuck us out of our votes and fuck us into the Fascist state they want, and Third Parties are one of those tools.

If you want real change to the USA, you’ve got to do what Trumpets did – take over the other major party in America, build a coalition by growing beyond your single issue, and slowly but surely turn the party into the vehicle for your ideals. If you can’t convince more than a fringe party that your ideas are good and worth running on, you won’t win in America, or, frankly, anywhere else.

How do you expect to see a viable third party challenge in the US with our current system? All third parties do is get the major party most opposed to their position elected because it don’t matter jack shit if 51 people vote against Orange Hitler if 3 of them vote ‘Principled Third Party’, leaving only 48 people to vote for the major party candidate opposed to Orange Hitler. Orange Hitler wins 49-48-3, and all 51 people who didn’t want Orange Hitler get stuck with him because 3 didn’t want Grandpa Joe. Leave off with the Rebellion for now, and spend your effort on replacing First Past the Post. Until you do that, all you’ll do is ensure we get Orange Hitler.

I would say it doesn’t really compare to any of the Star Trek Armada games. It’s more 4x like Master of Orion or Civilization (Or Star Trek: Birth of the Federation for an in-universe game). You start with 4 planets colonised, and a handful of other systems that have resources you can mine, but rather than building research stations where you have to spend resources for techs like Armada, you’re cultivating researcher ‘pops’ (population units) to generate research points that let you pick up technologies. And rather than like a single system you’re trying to take over, it’s a full galaxy that you’re having to spread around with. And you don’t just blow up enemy ships. You also spy on the enemies (and your allies sometimes), and conduct diplomacy. And there are plenty of anomalies around to keep your science ships busy doing Star Trek-y stuff.

That was what givesomefucks was saying. Team Blue does not need any Team Red voters. They need Team Yellow and Team Green and Team No-Colour-Because-They-Stay-Home votes. But they keep reaching out to Team Red voters by shying to the Right in the stupid and hopeless quest to draw some of those voters over to their side, ignoring a much larger slice of people who don’t want our government slipping to the right. Of course, I have my theory – Team Green especially is horrible about staying home if they don’t get EXACTLY what they want. Team Red SEEMS to be the more reliable answer than Team Green, but they’ve already bought the propaganda that we’re all baby-eating, baby-f**king Satan worshippers over here on the Left.

So, if we’re going to get all judgemental and shit on each other, your ‘conscience’ is a thinly veiled ‘burn it all down’ anarchy tendency that will create an actual genocide, rather than the imagined genocide in your own head.

First, let’s talk Israel vs. Hamas. Yeah. Israel is a bad guy here. But so is Hamas. They’d GLADLY mow each other down in a hail of gunfire and explosions if they thought they could get away with it. BOTH are looking for excuses to nuke each other. BOTH are looking for opportunities to create mass graves. There are no good guys here. Just villains and victims. And let’s get real. Both the Jews and the Palestinians are in the victim camp.

Biden is walking a tightrope over the abyss, trying to negotiate cease fires and freeing of both Israeli and Palestinian captives. He’s trying to minimise the war as much as he realistically can. Hamas is being backed by Iran with support from other Iranian proxies in the area, and of course we know Iran is part of the new Russo-Chinese axis that’s trying to form in opposition not only to the United States but also the basic notion that everyone has a right to exist, live their lives, and form their own governments according to their whims. So forcing Israel to let Hamas just waltz into their land, kill and abduct a fuckton of people, and strike a blow at Israel without consequence is playing into Iran and thus China and Russia’s hands.

Of course, your ‘conscience’ won’t bear examining these facts because that’d tell you that there’s an uncomfortable complexity in this world. So you’d rather let the Authoritarian here in the States win because the other guy isn’t hard enough on what you consider a bad guy. And when that shithead gets into office, every person he hurts is going to be on your shoulders, whether you acknowledge that or not. I just hope my wife is out of the US before it happens, given she’s a Black Bisexual Pagan Goth gal.

Hi. So, your problem is that you didn’t get what you wanted, and now you’re going to throw a political temper tantrum and let the autocrat in. If gays and minorities are rounded up for concentration camps in the future, know that your letting ‘the perfect be the enemy of the good’ is why that happened. Hell, your posts on this very forum might be used to arrest and imprison you as a political subversive if Trump gets in, so you may well have skin in the game yourself. Something to think about.

Oddly enough, that’s all we ask for. Vote with your heart in the Primary. Be as passionate for change as you can be. But in the General, vote with your brain and for the Democrat. Tell yourself it’s a vote for the lesser evil. Tell yourself that any vote besides the winner of the Democratic Primary, whether that be Biden or somebody else, is a vote for Trump, just like it was in 2016 and 2020. And no matter how much you have to hold your breath while voting, make sure that in November of next year, that vote goes to the Democrat, whoever he is. That’s all we’re asking.

Difference is that on the good timeline, you die in your bed surrounded by your friends and family. In a bad timeline, you die at the rock mines as the Frog-Nazis whip your back. So I’m not sure I agree with you that this won’t affect you…

Short answer? He became a Democrat. Literally, that’s the only reason they hate him.

Tribalism. Gotta love it, right? Is there room in Europe for 84 million Americans? 🤣

You are one of the people dangblingus was mentioning about the erosion of the Education System. Here, let me help out.

Suppose you’re voting in an election for who is going to be responsible for the Christmas Decorations this year. The rule is the person with the most votes wins. There are three candidates. One person thinks that Christmas is a commercialised holiday that sucks money out of you. He’s saying that the community should NOT put Christmas decorations up, and instead, put that money into the pockets of the homeowners. Let’s call him Mr. Bah Humbug. The other person LOVES Christmas, and wants to put up decorations. We’ll call him Jolly Saint Nick, but your big problem with him is that he isn’t that inclusive. You love Christmas decorations, but you think that he should put up decorations for other Winter holidays as well. And thus, you don’t want to vote for him. So you put yourself up as the alternative to Jolly Saint Nick. Let’s call you Progressive Jim. And you’re going to cause the entire community to get NOTHING. How? I’m getting to that.

The community is narrowly divided on the question of decorations. There are 200 people on your block. 99 of them want to keep the money in their pocket, while 101 want decorations in the community. The 99 are all unified. There’s not much room to debate specifics in that position. All 99 want to keep their $$$ in their pocket. So there’s no vote splitting there. But you have ALREADY split the vote in the 101 side. What happens if you and two other people vote for you? Well, 99 people are voting for keeping money in their pockets. 101 people wanting SOME sort of decoration, minus your three votes, equals 98. The final breakdown is 99 Bah Humbug, 98 Jolly Saint Nick, 3 Progressive Jim. Congrats! You just ensured that NONE of the 101 people who wanted Christmas Decorations get what they want. You let the Perfect (having inclusive holiday decorations) be the enemy of the Good (having any sort of holiday decorations), and now you get the worst outcome of all, nothing at all.

In this system, you have to come to a consensus you can deal with. All the people who want decorations are just going to have to come together and negotiate on the type of decorations, and the thing is that in a democracy, you don’t always get what you want. You have to settle with ‘good enough’ if you want to get anything done. Another analogy used here is voting is like taking the bus, not falling in love. If you insist that you must get EVERYTHING you want, in First Past the Post, you regularly get NONE of what you want, especially if you’re the ‘fall in love’ party like Progressives are, and you’re up against a “Fall in Line” party like the Republicans/Conservatives.

There are fixes. Maybe you make your voting a Ranked Choice system, so people can specify “my vote for a progressive holiday season not tied to Christmas is not a vote for no decorations at all. If I don’t get what I want, I’ll settle for uninclusive decorations, grudgingly.” But that’s not the system we have. And until we do, Nic Cage is right. All you’re doing here is ensuring we get the worst outcome.

This is just wholly stupid. The Democrats aren’t casually corrupt and evil, any more than the Greens or Communists or any other political party is. And we’re not telling you you have to vote for the Evil Party ™. You know what we’re telling you? We’re telling you that the current voting system punishes you for voting third party.

Let’s take a district that has 51 Lefty voters and 49 Righty voters. The Right Party doesn’t have to convince 2 people to vote for the Major Right party to flip the seat from the Left to the Right. If they can convince 3 Lefty voters to vote for the minor Left party “because the major Left party isn’t Left enough,” they can win despite more people voting against them than for them. And many districts in the US (and indeed elsewhere in the world) are on such a knife-edge. If you want your particular ‘pure’ and ‘just’ Left party to have a shot, you got to change the election rules so that me voting for your guy doesn’t get the Cheeto Fascist on the other side elected. Unless and until you lot get that through your thick skulls, we’re going to keep reminding you that voting Third Party in First Past the Post is just voting for the guy most opposed to your positions to get in instead and either you’re too stupid to recognise that fact, or you’re actually secretly a Republican in disguise trying to divide our vote so you can steal the election and erase Democracy.

My problem what? Hint: It’s spelled ‘you’re’ in the context you’re using it. ‘Your’ is the possessive. ‘You’re’ is a contraction for you are.

And the actual point you’re making here? It’s not correct. Here’s why.

The GOP is the Authoritarian home. It’s the place for people who think that our problem as a nation is that other people are doing what they want in defiance of what the Authoritarians want. There is no vote splitting here. The jerks are lined up and HARD behind Trump, and the outcome of this election, without hyperbole, will be world-changing. Trump has already said that he will imprison a long list of people that includes people like you, and compared them to rats, roaches, and lice in a comparison frequently made by the kinds of people who have body counts in the millions after it’s all said and done. You’re not poaching any of those votes for your third party.

The only votes you’re poaching are Leftie Democratic Party votes. Who wins the election where 51 people vote for the Left Parties and 49 people vote for the Right Party? The Left, right? Wrong. It all depends on the breakdown of the votes. If 48 people vote for Blue and 3 vote for Green, while 49 vote for Red, it doesn’t matter than the 3 Green voters are closer aligned to Blue than Red. Red wins and all 51 people who voted against Red lose. Simple FPTP rules. Anyone that claims Green can remake the Left is either naive to the point of absurdity given everything that has happened over the past 23 years, or a plant from Team Red trying to get us to split our vote so they can steal the election.

You need to read up on Project 2025. If Team Red wins, that’s what’s in store for us. It’s bad. It’ll be bad for Gays. It’ll be bad for Minorities. It’ll be bad for the environment. It’ll be bad for Liberals. Exercising your protest vote will hurt a long list of people and priorities the Greens say they are behind.

It’ll be bad for Ukraine, and bad for the Russian people because Trump will crawl in bed with Putin and Kim and Xi to reshape the world away from the Western Liberal Order to an authoritarian order dominated by a Fascist USA, Russia, China, and North Korea. They have not hidden their desire to make the 21st Century a century of Authoritarianism. Team Red here in the USA is fully behind that, and their voters are looking forward to putting the boots on our faces. And there’s no argument you nor Team Green can make to sway them away from that goal. But they’ll sure back you in peeling votes away from Team blue, because they know 49 beats 48 every time and you’ll never get 50. You literally have no chance of overcoming Team Red, but you have all the chance to draw support from Team Blue to the point that both Blue AND Green lose, and Red tears down everything you ever (said you) cared about.

That’s why we are so dismissive of you. The only thing you’ll accomplish is ensure Red wins, then the game is over. Our only question is are you so stupid and uninformed that you’re doing this on accident, or are you one of them and are doing this on purpose.

I would have liked page references so I can read the lines myself and reference them against Righties arguing for this shit, but yes, her video was very useful in understanding what this 900 page document is actually saying.

I’ve given myself an assignment to read and review the entirety of the “Project 2025” document, and post that review. We need to highlight how dangerous this document is, which means some of us have to take it on the chin and read the damn thing, and extract the text that makes it clear what their goals are. So far, I’ve not seen anything overtly authoritarian, but I’m not even through the Forword section yet. There’s definitely a lot of Transphobic stuff in here, but transphobia is not the only thing. I’ve already called out “push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.” They’re not just coming for the Transgender people. We’re ALL on the chopping block. Democracy be damned.

Why would you go here, anyway? I mean, just call him a douchebag asshole with delusions of Christofascist Dictatorship. You don’t have to enable homophobia to call this shithead out.

…the party itself is in charge of the primaries…

I keep hearing this but what I’m not seeing is proof. It’s like Trump screaming the elections are rigged. Lots of sound and fury signifying nothing, but what I’m not seeing is actual fire. It sounds like you’re saying ‘don’t vote, it doesn’t matter’ with this, and that’s the exact bullshit I’m trying to stop, because the only people who benefit right now are the assholes on the Right who want us to stop voting so they can just steal it.

…raise hell when they don’t (earn your vote).

If you hold their asses accountable in the Primary like I’m telling you, then by all means, hold their asses to the fire. But Trump’s already said what he’s going to do in 2025 if he gets in office. I’ve not read the document yet, but there’s lots of talk about him jailing people like you and me, so maybe you’re going to want to vote the Mealy-Mouthed Democrat in 2024 so you aren’t jailed in 2025 by asshole authoritarians. That’s what I’m saying. You raise hell in the Primaries now, because the Republicans will jail you and murder all your gay and minority friends if we listen to what they say they want to do.

Neoliberalism… (in the Primary)?

Again. The Republicans are telling us they’re going to jail Liberals when they take over in 2025. I’m not asking you to not hold the Neoliberal’s feet to the fire in 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028. Hell, I’m not telling you to vote for the Neoliberal in 2024’s primaries. But if you vote third party or stay home on Election Day 2024 like so many of you did in 2016 (and 2000, and 2004…) and get my bisexual goth pagan black wife hurt or killed in the Project 2025 nonsense the Trumpers want to go, I’m going to be mighty fucking pissed at you because you let your fucking ideological purity get in the way of common fucking sense.

(Quibbling about the definition of a colloquialism)

Here’s another colloquialism for you to quibble on: Whistling past the graveyard. There’s a whole crowd of fucking Nazi Frogs outside of it, if you can’t see it through your ideological tests.

Quibbling about the rise of the Ayatollah…

Funny. I studied this shit in college. Yes, the Shah was bad. But what led the Ayatollah to rise rather than, say, a coalition of Leftists, Centrists, Academics, and Moderates of all stripes is the same ideological bullshit our little tiff here is exhibiting. While the Socialists, the Communists, the Academians, the mainstream Liberals, the Moderates, and the Business Owners fought over the best way to rule Iran, the Fundamentalists got busy stealing the reigns of power, and then outlawed the other groups and oppressed them much like the Shah had all of them. While you argue about the purity of your ideology, Trump and his merry band of fuckwits are dreaming of doing more than throwing us in the back of unmarked vans, beating us down with literal “secret” police clad head to foot in riot gear but with no indication of what service they were with or who they are, and drawing nasty political cartoons where Trump is Pepe the Frog in a Nazi Uniform pushing the button while various famous actors, politicians, and other people even remotely Left of Nazi Frog Trump get gassed in the next room over. I don’t want that to happen here!

But you have convinced me, buddy. You’ve convinced me that most hard-leftists would rather see the country burn than see Biden get another 4 years. I just hope my wife and I can get out of the oncoming Nazi Frog USA before it gets worse.

No, what helps the most is voting in Democratic primaries, and then voting for the winner of that Primary, no matter if you like him or her or not, to keep ALL Republiicans out of office. Don’t surrender your voice in the Democratic party in the misguided hopes that you can get the least crazy candidate on the Right (who frankly is going to be crazy by any reasonable measure). Why should we be responsible for fixing their shit, anyway?

This shows you don’t know history.

Hitler no more forced himself into power than Trump has. Hitler’s rise to power is a good study in how differing approaches lead to Fascism. Hitler did try the force himself into power approach in 1923. It ended poorly for him. He spent a year there, coming up with a new plan. That included a manifesto (Mein Kampf, perhaps you’ve heard of it), and a change in strategy. Rather than trying the direct approach, he decided to do something different. He promised to only build his party, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, through democratic means, and waited for an opportunity.

24 October 1929 provided him the opportunity he needed. He leveraged the average German’s frustration at the ineffectiveness of government to attend to basic needs and built support of his party from 2.6% of the vote in 1928 to 37.3% in July 1932. He’d see his support dip in November of '32 during a snap election, but he secured a promise to be appointed Chancellor of the Weimer Republic, and by March of '33, his party surged to 43.9%. Mind you, he achieved that goal by basically outlawing the political opposition, specifically the German Communist Party, and set up for his takeover of Germany. They worked fast. From March until July, every single other party in Germany was outlawed, and by August of '33, the only legal party in Germany was the Nazi party. And a year later, when Hindenburg died, Hitler officially took over his office as well, and became the Leader and Chanceller, which later just became Leader. You should know the German word for that. Führer.

There are differences between America’s road to Fascism, just like there were differences in Italy and Spain’s roads to Fascism. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco are all three authoritarian Fascists that rose to power by promising people stability. So is Trump. Mussolini did force himself into power and maybe you’re remembering that, but Hitler tried to force himself into power and failed, so he came at it a different way. A way that Trump’s using. Mind you, the final step IS forcing oneself into power, and Trump will try to do so eventually, but again. The roadmap there is always different.

Trump’s roadmap is still not written, but right now, I’d say we’re somewhere around November of '32 on Hitler’s. There has been a refutation of Trump’s power and base, and his support is flagging. But the economy is still struggling, and people are dissatisfied with the Status Quo. Trump is counting on Manchin and Kennedy to draw just enough support from the Left that another bitterly divided Congress is formed in 2024, and he rides in on a unified Right into the Presidency. Then we’ll be at March 1933 in Hitler’s plan.

Now, go read up on Trump’s Project 2025. That’s basically Hitler’s plan post-Chancellor. The most sure fire way to ensure you never lose another election is to jail your political opponents. We’ll go from March to July on Hitler’s roadmap, and many of us will be dead or in jail.

A lot of Germans wanted Fascism because people want to live more comfortable lives than their neighbours. That’s the same for Americans. By dismissing that fact, Germans got Hitler. I’d not like to get Trump, thank you.

You misunderstand the suggestion. The time to drive Democratic Party policy is in the primary. Vote for the Lefties. Vote for the socialists. Vote for the anarcho-communists. Vote for the leftiest Lefty that ever leftied. Drive the party Left there, but in that General, you need to vote Blue. The alternative may well ensure you never vote again because they have a plan that involves the voting public being turned into serfs and slaves for their policies. The righties have known this for a goddamn fucking long time. They express it as “Vote for the Conservative in the Primary, and vote for the Republican in the General.” We need to steal that thinking and modify it to ‘vote for the Liberal in the primary and the Democrat in the General.’ There’s fucking more of us than there are of those shitheads, just like there were in Iran in the 1970s and in Germany in the 1930s. When you get on your fucking high horse and say ‘they aren’t liberal enough’, that’s how you get people like Hitler and the Ayatollah.

We need to be advertising this everywhere. Until the Fascist Taint that festers in the GOP is gone, we MUST vote Democrat in every election, even if we don’t care for the guy on the Left.