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All of the brain geniouses ITT who are defending lesser evilism are either dumb or liars, because in reality lesser evilism doesn't loving work. If you actually are concerned about winning elections you should never ever make an argument as self-defeating as voting for the lesser evil, because it literally cannot convince anybody who isn't already on board. So the only logical reason why people make the argument is either because they're completely out of touch or because it lets them feel smugly superior to people who've been driven away from voting by the failures of the parties of less racist neoliberalism.
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Feb 14, 2018 14:17
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Yeah, don't you know that you need to be grown up and realistic and doggedly insist that obvious garbage isn't garbage, then get real mad when people aren't convinced?
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Feb 14, 2018 15:56
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If the dem fanboys were half as interested in turning the party into something that people actually want to vote for than they are in making excuses for the incompetence and corruption of the dem establishment, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
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Feb 15, 2018 14:33
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Hillary clinton got the majority of the votes in the election. By several million people. Cool that she's president, then. This is incidentally why your lot is useless at winning anything - you literally end up ignoring objective reality in favour of poo poo that doesn't loving matter but you wish it did.
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Feb 15, 2018 14:44
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You literally just said democrats need to turn into something people vote for. People voted for them, more people voted for them than republicans, millions of more people voted hillary clinton than trump. More people have voted for democrats than republicans in all but like one election in the last 25 years. Getting raw numbers of people to vote for them is the exact thing democrats are actually good at. Cool that the dems haven't been completely routed and lost the entire federal government as well as most every state government, then. I'm sure that if you just win the semantic argument everything will be fine. It's not like you're zealously shielding incompetents, after all.
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Feb 15, 2018 15:18
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Like, leaving political opinions aside, the real bad thing about lesser evilism is that it makes it nearly impossible to reform a failing party like the Dems because you get a core of true believers to whom even demanding some sort of accountability from the party leadership is going too far. It's obvious why they keep losing all the time, because failure is never punished.
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Feb 15, 2018 15:35
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VitalSigns posted:This conversation reminds me of the really tiresome DNC chair debate, with the usual D&D liberals demanding complete surrender to them and calling it "compromise". It's almost like there's a kind of centrist who doesn't actually care about what actual laws and policies are passed as long as it's done by the right people.
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Feb 20, 2018 19:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah okay? now trump is president and the whole country has moved to the right and odds are the next democratic platform is going to have to fight to get minimum wage back to 7.25. Instead of the next election being a minimum wage of 12 and someone being able to campaign in the primaries on 17. The main reason why Trump is president literally because people like you and your manifest avatar Hillary Clinton wouldn't fight for good policies.
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Feb 20, 2018 20:58
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:And what have you gotten us exactly? Where is this savior that is supposed to show up if we just keep our hands pure and let conservatives win every election forever? I see you're not big on owning up to your own personal culpabilty in getting Donald Trump elected.
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Feb 20, 2018 21:44
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:They hold elections, one side wins or the other side wins. There isn't a secret box you check that makes them lock her up and bring out bernie sanders. Yeah, so when are you going to own up to the fact that your irrational purity tests led to the good guys having an unelectable candidate in 2016?
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Feb 20, 2018 21:54
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Potato Salad posted:I offer a more accurate philosophy behind Franken's pressured resignation: "Vote the lesser of two evils, still hold these guys accountable." Not doing that second part is the centrist purity test, btw.
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Feb 27, 2018 19:54
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Potato Salad posted:I look forward to the As opposed to yours, which has been such a smashing success, I take it?
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Feb 27, 2018 22:00
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Potato Salad posted:Why? Given your own arguments ITT your game plan makes no loving sense if you think about it even medium-hard. As in, it cannot possibly work if people behave like you want them to.
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Feb 27, 2018 23:44
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Potato Salad posted:Yes, progress doesn't come from activism, it comes from internet thoughts and prayers Progress doesn't come from putting the progressive movement in a literal no-win situation, you massive dolt. Potato Salad posted:Like, say, wrest for control of the Dems? You literally cannot wrest control of an institution from the establishment if you're categorically binding yourself to always support said establishment in the end, because then they can take away your ability to influence the institution with impunity. Like, let's say that you're making progress in your plan, but since the establishment knows that you'll vote Dem in the end, they abolish the primary system. Now every candidate is handpicked by, say, the DNC. The hell do you do then?
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Feb 27, 2018 23:56
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Potato Salad posted:Never in history, people tell me never in history has a party realignment or severe shift ever happened. As has been explained to you, that's literally impossible to pull off if everybody acted like you want them to. This shouldn't be a difficult concept to grasp, even if you're thick as pig poo poo.
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Feb 28, 2018 00:29
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I see that Potato Salad has adopted the bold debating strategy of ignoring all rebuttals to your argument in favour of just restating it over and over.
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Mar 1, 2018 14:22
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SSNeoman posted:If you're hoping to hear me make some defense of the dems' stupid practices then I am going to disappoint you. Everything you talk about comes as a consequence from a FPTP voting system. As such, Duverger's Law reigns supreme. Thing is that it doesn't. There's nothing in Duverger's law that requires both parties to be lovely, that's just a result of the choices that bad dems have been making for the past few decades. Hell, just look at the U.K. right now and compare Labour to the Dems.
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Mar 3, 2018 09:14
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SSNeoman posted:It does however demonstrate that voting third party is a pointless endeavor and that's my rational for making the choice and voting for one of the two parties that best represents my position. That was ultimately what the hypothetical was about and what this thread is about, isn't it? Everything beyond that needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Do you even know what Duverger was actually saying? Because he pretty explicitly rejected this absolutism that you're describing here. Like, the dude was making a descriptive statement and you're trying to paint it as normative, which is kinda dishonest. Then, of course, there's the detail that your approach doesn't work in reality.
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Mar 3, 2018 10:41
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Spanish Matlock posted:How do people feel about the accuracy of polling data? I feel like that has a lot to do with how you approach the situation. If you assume that polling data is accurate, you would almost have to vote for one of the two candidates who are projected to take the majority of votes, but if you feel that polling data is completely inaccurate then you might assume that it is possible for a third party candidate to come from behind to win. The data itself is good, but the way the data is interpreted is the biggest goddamn pile of bullshit you'll ever see.
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Mar 3, 2018 11:08
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Hey Potato Salad, are you ever going to address the fact that your arguments ITT logically contradict each other or what?
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Mar 3, 2018 21:05
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Potato Salad posted:I was at the Ellison v Perez vote. You weren't. Was is reaching these hallowed heights that freed you from the shackles of having to obey the rules of logic, or did that happen earlier?
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Mar 3, 2018 21:41
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Potato Salad posted:I'm getting the sense that an old fat socialist that argues in favor of the notion that the dnc can be hijacked as the quickest path to revolution just doesn't fit into any of your desired worldviews The literal reason for why hijacking the DNC is even a possibility is because people don't act like you demand they should lol
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Mar 4, 2018 10:46
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Since he's obviously going to acknowledge any rebuttals, I'd just like to explain for the rest of you why Potato Salad is a goddamn idiot who should not be given the time of the day. To recap, ITT he's basically been pushing two ideas, which are a) the left needs to take over the democratic party and b) at the end of the day you need to vote Dem no matter what. Let's look at the first idea. How can the left take over a private institution like the Democratic Party? Obviously it needs to follow the party's internal rules to get leftists into positions of power. However, who makes those rules? Currently that's the centrist establishment, and as we've seen, they're not shy about interfering to protect their power. If they wanted to they could change the rules to make a leftist takeover impossible, if not today then certainly back during the Obama years when they wielded power pretty much unquestioned. So why haven't they? It's probably part complacency where they've been assuming that they'll just win all internal votes, but the larger part is obviously because they fear that people wouldn't support a party that they have no say over. This is one of the big reasons why primaries were introduced in the first place. Now let's look at the second idea. Let's for the sake of the argument assume that all (or even most) people actually behaved like how Potato Salad wants them to. Now the calculus above changes completely. Why wouldn't the establishment immediately kill off all internal party democracy? There's literally no downside from their point of view, as they get all the power and lose few to no votes in the general. So without the threat of losing a significant amount of voters, the establishment has literally no incentive to allow even the possibility of another faction seizing power. Therefore we immediately see that if people adopted the second idea, it makes the first impossible to accomplish. This is called a logical contradiction, and is generally seen as something undesirable to have your arguments end up in, or at least it is among non-lanyards. Cerebral Bore fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Mar 4, 2018 |
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Mar 4, 2018 13:24
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Josef bugman posted:I would personally say I agree much more with the first point (I can see the attraction of wanting to change a large body that has resources at it's disposal) but disagree with the second. However I am unsure to what extent PotatoSalad is arguing the second one and would appreciate clarification on that score. Go to any of his posts, click the question mark under it and see for yourself.
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Mar 4, 2018 13:37
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Potato Salad posted:Oh no, I'm irritated and annoyed in a thread. This is the most pathetic thing I've seen in a long time. Also you do know that people can view your posts ITT, right?
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Mar 4, 2018 23:05
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Potato Salad posted:And, no, Cerebral Bore, Jesus poo poo, do you even halfway understand what I've been saying? Because it's looking mighty like you don't ever understand the basic rules of logic or why you don't get to break them all willy-nilly and still be taken seriously here. Besides that Potato Salad posted:My read is that Corbyn is another rare, highly-charismatic star like Obama. He's going to meet resistance as he represents anathema to his Tory and establishment opponents. This is kinda out of scope. lol, literally "I have no earthly clue what I'm talking about, but I'll still opine on it because my assumptions just have to be true".
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Mar 5, 2018 02:56
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Nevvy Z posted:This but unironically. That's when we can party split. So in other words never.
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Mar 6, 2018 18:39
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I guess this provides a good case in point here, so I repeat my question from a while ago to all you "vote left in the primaries but always vote D in the general": What the hell do you plan on doing when the establishment really starts rigging the primaries? Because if they're pulling poo poo like this at a mere prospect of an actual challenge it's pretty obvious what they'll do if somebody manages to primary out a sitting bad dem.
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May 5, 2018 21:33
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