It's a trolley problem.

Oliphantom Menace

It's a trolley problem. There will only ever be one of two outcomes, because they designed the fucking tracks. They designed the trolley. They designed the lever.

All they have to do is convince you not to participate, or to go looking for another mythical lever, while the thing careens down the rightmost track.

Don't like that this is the scenario?

Me either.

But I'm old, and I'm trying to save you a lot of heartache. You'll feel good sending the message, you'll feel very justified.

And in the end, your "message" will mean absolutely fuck all if that trolley goes down the rightmost track.

You know what message they'll take from it?

"Maybe we should be even more like the Right."

Oliphantom Menace

Real change happens in between elections, but let's not pretend who runs this shit doesn't make a difference.

For starters, do you want someone at the EPA that believes in their job, or someone who thinks the EPA should be abolished?

What judges should get lifetime appointments?

You really think there's no distinction there? Honestly?

Oliphantom Menace

I wrote in Bernie in 2016. I voted in Minnesota, I knew it was going for Clinton, it felt like a safe protest vote.

And there are still people who won't talk to me because of it. "You are part of the problem," they said.

They never understood the message I was trying to send.

And I ultimately realized it was the wrong venue for sending a message.

We can't play dice with people's lives.

Oliphantom Menace

"So what about Gaza, then?"

They aren't letting us vote on Gaza this election, I'm afraid. A vote for Jill Stein isn't a vote for Trump--let's be clear about that.

But it is wasted, insofar as it will not help determine the inescapable binary outcome of this election. And it is also wasted, insofar as the people you want to take a lesson from it?

They won't.

Trust me, they won't. There are better ways to make a point. We literally have to live with one of two choices for the next four years--and let's be absolutely clear about this: it is only one of two choices, I don't give a fuck who else is on the ballot, I'm talking about actual observable reality here.

Anyway, that's my argument. You do as you like. Hold to your principles when you can, but there's a certain cold utilitarianism that has to take over when you're living in a fucked-up system, and this has been the cruel lesson of a lifetime for someone who used to consider himself an idealist.

Oliphantom Menace

People outside of the USA might shake their heads at my binary thinking, and how we've all been convinced we have no choice....

But those people still think, on some level, this is about the popular vote. And when it comes to the President of the USA, it is not.

It's a winner-takes-all election, and the electoral college allows the popular vote loser to become President.

Whether Trump or Harris get 19 of Pennsylania's electoral votes comes down to which of the two of them get the most votes in the state--and in that sense only it's about the popular vote.

But it's about the majority. It's the first past the post, there's no ranked choice. If there are ten candidates running, the winner might only get 25% of the vote, and guess what, they are now the winning candidate in that state.

And then all of those electoral votes go to the winning candidate with 25% of the popular vote.

And you have to get to 270 votes, because math, and we know more or less how certain states (eg., California) are going to vote before the election even happens based on polling, past elections, etc, so that's 54 electoral votes. And we more or less know how Texas is going to vote, so we're writing (in ink) 40 electoral votes for the Republicans for Texas.

And then we just go down the list. Alabama? Mississippi? Arkansas? ...Kentucky? New York? Washington? Anyone doubt where those are going?

And we pencil those in, too.

And what we're left with are the handful of states that are 'too close to call' and thus we call them swing states, and most of them award at least 10 electoral votes, but even the single electoral vote expected to be delivered by Nebraska could be what gets Harris to 270.

You get it yet?

This is a fucking game. This is absolutely ridiculous, but it does no good to point that out, because it is extant, it is a thing that actually exists, and we have to get past the offensive ridiculousness of it.

This is like the stock market, but for elections. There's a whole underlying logic to the system, and there are people who "buy stocks" and have no fucking clue what they are doing, and then there are stock brokers.

And they'll tell you: if you're not playing the game, or at the least, if you don't know how the game is played, the game plays you.

So when you're convinced that your principles absolutely must not vote, or that your principles cannot support one of those two candidates, you are still playing the game that one of those candidates absolutely wants you to play. The game is rigged, the house (Dems/Reps) always wins in a Presidential election, until we rewrite the rules, that's just the way it is, and elections have a 4 year (and potentially 8 year) downside to picking wrong and you, your family, your children, your friends, the rest of the world, even, will have to live with the consequences of your voting decisions for much longer than your conscience should let you blithely ignore.

You get to pick a slightly less shitty life for yourself and other human beings, and then after this farce of a game is over, we need to pull apart the system, get more states to sign the National Popular Vote compact, or just build a better world--stuff like that.

This isn't even the whole game, anyway. But it's an important step and let's not pretend that a Trump administration wouldn't be absolutely fucking exhausting and demoralizing, horrific and cruel beyond measure--and probably further scar me and my children even more than they already have been, not to mention literally deporting people by force..... but you do you.

It's just....there's nothing else to it, really. They've not given us any choices here, and I hate that we don't have them, but that doesn't mean we actually have them.

Voting for President comes down to one of three choices: Vote Dem, vote Republican, or cast a vote that will ultimately have no bearing on the final outcome.

And the thing is, you absolutely do know that one of two outcomes is worse. And you'll have to live with the knowledge of which of the two you helped support (or did not try to prevent).

So play this stupid fucking game with me so we can stop thinking about the goddamned election and how we're going to ride the ass of whoever wins this farce of a thing.

Weyoun 6

@oliphant this resonates with me. I also really wanted to believe that voting 3rd party would "send a message" in safe districts. I never saw that because it's not how things work. I still want it to be true, so I get that in other people. But wanting something to be true does not make it true.

Oliphantom Menace

@weyoun6 So Clinton only won Minnesota by about 10k votes, and it took a while for the votes to come in, and I was really biting my fingernails on that one. Like I'd have truly felt awful if she'd lost Minnesota, that was not my intention. So after she won the state, it was kind of like, "Oh, good, I sent my message, and I did it safely and tactically. But holy fuck was it close."

But I wanted the DNC to see that and think, "Holy shit, we almost lost Minnesota. Clearly, what we did with Bernie and his supporters and the whole way we ran this thing was fucked up, we'll have to do better in the future and appeal to that part of our base--"

And I think you know the lesson they actually took from that. It was, for starters, "Oh no, Russia was responsible for a malign influence campaign" and everything that required the least amount of introspection possible. Hearing Clinton talk about why she lost rather than just being like, "I clearly wasn't that great a candidate if I could lose to Donald Fucking Trump, and maybe I could have campaigned in Wisconsin" it's clear she still doesn't get it or want to take the message I was trying to send.

It's a big aggregate pool of data, and the pundits and the analysts will make of that raw data what they will.

My reasons will get lost in the shuffle. It'll be all sifted out into something simple like, "Russia and Bernie Bros."

Oliphantom Menace

Please help me defeat Donald Trump this election so I don't have to listen to rapturous news anchors talk for the rest of my natural life about the "political genius" of Elon Musk.

Oliphantom Menace

I realize it's not very cool or anarchist of me to promote 'electoralism' but I'm just talking about a tactics, and solidarity.

Once you recognize that there is only going to be one of two possible outcomes here, that's all you have left. It's fine to be pissed off that these are our choices, get used to that feeling because it never goes away and only once in a while do you get to vote for someone who really inspires you, but most of the rest of the time you're just hoping the Republicans aren't really serious about, say, Sarah Palin are they?--oh fuck they are. And you stare in absolute shock and horror at who you are sharing this country with and think to yourself, "Holy shit, they'll vote for anyone with an R next to their name, no matter how horrible they are, perhaps because of how horrible they are" and you'll also be like, "What is this country I find myself in, that I'm surrounded by such an army of bitter cocks?"

And you'll be tempted to be mad at "the red states", not recognizing that the 'red states' have made voter suppression an absolute art form, and those red states have a lot of black folks and the biggest fear of the leaders of those red states is that one day the black folks will keep winning and turn them into a 'purple' or swing state.... like Georgia. And then they'll pass an absolute barrage of voter suppression laws, hoping to keep that from happening.

This shit is complicated, that's what I'm saying.

The greatest satisfaction comes when the truly unexpected happens.

In 2008, Obama won in spite of soooo much voter suppression and ratfucking, like it was pretty bad. It wasn't "terrifying the poll workers with machine guns" bad like we are going to have now, but it was still like, "remove everyone from the voter rolls who shares a last name with someone in prison and oh gosh, does that disproportionately affect black people?"

(That was Marsha Blackburn who did that, who is still in Congress, by the way, and a truly shit human being, might I add.)

Anyway, the Republicans cheated really bad in that election.

And they lost anyway. A groundswell of folks swept into the polls, and voted in such numbers that even with cheating, the Republicans couldn't steal the election.

So that's what I hope happens here.

I hope what happens is that Elon Musk and his blatant attempts to buy the election for Donald Trump, and Donald Trump's lawsuits and GOP challenges to election laws, and all the intimidation of poll workers, all of it--

That it fails.

That they lose anyway.

And just as I hoped people would deny Elon the satisfaction of being lord of "the global town square" by leaving, en masse, the day after he fired most of the company, I suspect I may be disappointed in this hope, perhaps cruelly.

But hope springs eternal, so I'm still hoping.