Again, there are other options. There are never only two candidates on the ballot, even in a first past the post election. You’re telling me you’d vote for Trump simply because he was nominated by a major party? When, for example, Hillary or Bernie or Mr Rogers whoever your favorite politician is are running against Trump/Hitler on another ticket? You’d still vote Trump in that scenario?
I can’t see how that is a moral method of voting. What if the major parties nominated Hitler and Stalin? Would you vote for Hitler because he didn’t kill as many people, and he has the support of a major party? Or would you vote for Hillary, or Obama, or Abraham Lincoln, or whoever isn’t pure evil but runs for a third party? Or is the very concept of voting for anyone except the two parties that have recently (but certainly not always) dominated US politics anathema to you?
Is voting for who you like scary? Like, what if they win and they absolutely suck? Better vote for the lesser of two evils, I guess, so you don’t have to take responsibility for your choice, you can just say “that choice was forced on me”, instead? I don’t get it. Why anyone wouldn’t vote for the best candidate running, and instead vote for who they think their lemming-like peers will probably vote for, just seems like a morally bankrupt way of choosing your leaders. In my opinion. Take responsibility for your choices and stop deferring to the majority. In any other walk of life “doing what everybody else does” is considered weak, spineless, etc. But in voting, that’s the only proper decision?
Jeez, no wonder the best we can elect in this country are narcissistic assholes who happen to not quite be violent sociopaths and who probably won’t start a third world war. :rolleyes:
If it’s the American system and Trump is the nominee of one party and Hitler the other? Of course I would vote for Trump. Other systems might allow different strategies, but the US system does not.
I’m responsible for what my country does, so I’d better do my best with what I’m given. I don’t just get to shrug and say that I’m blameless because I didn’t vote for anyone icky.
I’ll vote for whoever has a realistic shot at winning and is the [del]lesser[/del] least evil.
I’ve spoken with people who voted for Nader in 2000; the ensuing presidency was anathema to them. I strive to learn from their hard-won experience.
Because the alternative got us Dubya instead of Gore. If people are swayed by your argument, the alternative might well get us Trump instead of Clinton.
And I don’t want that. I didn’t want it then; I don’t want it now.
If it helps you, think of it the other way around: I’m not reluctantly voting for the lesser of two evils; I’m wholeheartedly voting against the greater of two evils. And so I’m an idealist when it comes to the big decision – who to stop – and a pragmatist when it comes to the second part, the Who-Can-Stop-Him part.
And that, to me, is “proper”; it’s responsible, it’s moral, it’s all the other stuff you said: you resolve to vote to stop the greater evil, because of course you do, and then as an afterthought you mull which candidate has the best shot at doing it.
I’d totally vote for Stalin in that case and wouldn’t regret it if Gandhi didn’t have a chance in winning.
You want to talk about responsibility or rejecting lemmings or keeping yourself morally pure, that’s fine. But all that and a nickel will get you a stick of gum. You seem to be forgetting that if you don’t vote for Clinton or Trump, you’ll still get one of them. They don’t magically disappear into ether and we have a redo with new candidates if you don’t vote for them. ONE OF THEM WILL BE PRESIDENT. And its up to you to decide which one, as you can sway the vote just a little bit.
No matter how much you hate Hitler or Stalin, one of them will be in charge. Better to try to decide which is the least bad than closing your eyes and wishing they would both go away. That kind of thing happens in fairy tales, but in the real world, Hitler and Stalin killed tens of millions of people and I’m sure all of them, before they died, wished it never happened. But it did. And it will again in the future. You have to accept reality, not your dreams.
I see your logic the other way. You don’t want any responsibility in the world, so you pretend you’re outside of it, voting for a 3rd party or not at all, so you can claim you didn’t inherit whatever mess comes to pass. But not voting is a choice too, you will bear responsibility even if you didn’t vote for Clinton or Trump, because you could have in a small way made sure that one of them didn’t become president
There are many things you can do that don’t influence the final outcome of the election.
You can live in a state with >99% chance of going one way or the other.
You can see how many marshmallows you can stuff in your mouth.
You can ride your bicycle on the sidewalk.
You can set yourself on fire.
You can hide in a bathroom and drink gin.
You can vote for a third-party candidate.
I don’t see these actions as morally distinct. Well, maybe #1 and #4 are, the first because #1 can have other advantages, and #4 because don’t do that.
But in all these cases, you’re not going to influence the presidential election, and I don’t much care about your choice therefore. If you live in a swing state and you choose to stuff marshmallows in your mouth rather than influence the outcome of the election, that’s morally the same thing as choosing to vote for a third-party candidate.
DrCube, the reason taht “but everyone else is doing it” is morally relevant here and not in other cases is because elections are a group decision. Unlike choosing whether to kick a puppy, the outcome of an election is entirely determined by the mass choice. You kick a puppy, one more puppy is kicked, you’ve made a difference in the world. You vote Green party, the only difference you’ve made is as part of the mass decision, and the difference you’ve made is that you’ve not helped keep Trump out of power.
Saying you’d vote for Hitler because Stalin would be worse, is exactly what got the real Hitler into power in the first place, by people deciding the alternative would be worse. The fault in that thinking is that there is always more than one alternative.
For your scenario to make any sense, they’ve already won their party primaries. People have already voted for them. People are going to vote for them. Objecting “not if people don’t vote for them” is an irrelevant objection, along the lines of “Not if they’re carried away by fairies.”
If they were running as Republican and Democrat then there would be a certain number of people who would vote the party line, regardless…so, it’s just not realistic to think that neither would be president. One of them WILL be, because that’s how our system works. Voting 3rd party is just a protest vote and isn’t going to affect that equation at all. Voting 3rd party in a swing state means there is that much more chance that the greater of the two evils (in your own opinion) will get the top spot.
And in back in the real world, Hillary is clearly the only sane choice. If you are a Sanders fan then you would agree with more than 50% of Hillary’s platform…while, to even the most loony lefty Trump will be an unmitigated disaster, far surpassing Bush II. Luckily, IMHO most of the Sanders crowd is not completely around the bend and will support Hillary when the time comes. The alternative is unthinkable.
No, my vote is my decision alone. Why should I let others decide that for me? They choose the candidate they want, I choose the candidate I want, and we see where the chips fall.
If Hillary loses, your vote for her was just as meaningful as a write in or third party vote, or simply staying at home for that matter. Stop pretending that voting for the eventual loser is equivalent to not voting, or worse, voting for your opponent.
If you’re referring to the fact that Hitler wasn’t elected, it’s not relevant to my point. The point is that the people who put him into power and supported him did so because they felt the (singular) alternative was worse. And that’s fallacious thinking, because there is always more than one alternative.
If you’re voting for anyone on the ballot, you’re letting someone decide for you. Someone chose to run. Someone got enough votes. Someone got enough signatures. All of these things are decisions that were made before you had a chance to make yours.
So you don’t get to choose from the entire universe of potential candidates. You are already choosing, if you want to look at it this way, the “least bad” option. It’s just that I have a narrower window for who qualifies as the least bad option than you do. My options are limited to plausible winners. But we are both making decisions that have other people’s decisions as their foundation. Others are choosing who we get to choose from.
Sure, your vote is your decision. But it’s a totally meaningless decision if you vote third-party: it’s the moral equivalent of stuffing marshmallows in your cheek. It has no more influence on politics than if you decided on election day to spend the entire day rolling back and forth across your lawn.
The group decision is the decision who the next president will be. To vote third-party is to abstain from that group decision, under current circumstances. Which is of course your choice, but I think it’s an unethical choice. It’s a classic case of doing what’s necessary to see evil triumph.
“We’ll see where the chips will fall”? Your choice is to have nothing to do with where those chips fall. If you want to have an effect on the falling of the chips, work on every other day of the year to make third parties more relevant to our national politic; then on election day, until such time as third parties are relevant in a specific election, vote for one of the two parties.
It sucks, I fully acknowledge that. But you don’t turn the tide by smacking it with your fist.
This is bizarre. What singular alternative did they think was worse, and what evidence do you have that the masses of brownshirts who supported him saw only a single alternative?
No it’s not, because it has not and never been a choice between two evils except because people buy into Hillary’s bullshit claim of inevitability and make it a reality by dismissing any other option. There are literally one hundred and fifty million people eligible to become President of the United States, and I refuse to believe that Hillary Clinton - a person who is on the record as siding with Bush on both the Patriot Act and the Iraq War - is the lesser of all one hundred and fifty million evils. We only need five to ten people per generation. We can afford to be picky.
Personally, I’m bitter about the opposition to the Iraq War only lasting as long as it was the Republicans’ ox being gored. I identify Clinton as the enemy because she voted in support of a stupid, unfounded war that got a hundred thousand people killed. If you think you need to look past the six digit death toll for the “real” reason, you’re trying too hard.
Your post is completely wrong. First, there is no “zero evidence.” Evidence is “anything presented in support of an assertion.” The assertion is that Sanders wishes to reduce immigration. The evidence, as posted by Ibn Warraq, is that he believes that low-skill immigration takes jobs away from Americans and reduces wages for Americans, and that this needs to stop. You may think it’s weak evidence, but pretending it’s not evidence at all does your case no good.
Secondly, I’m not sure why you feel the need to mischaracterize the evidence that exists. No one is citing his opposition to completely open borders. The cite is to a answer about open borders, yes, but the relevant part is where he expresses his beliefs on the impact of immigration on American workers, and his relative valuation of good-to-immigrants versus harm-to-Americans.
For what it’s worth, I actually don’t draw the conclusion that Sanders is necessarily anti-immigrant. Rather, I think the more likely conclusion, given the speaker that we’re talking about, is that Sanders’s thinking on the issue is shallow and muddled.
There were other options in the beginning. But at this point, if you think there are other options, then you must ignore the winnowing effect of a long and arduous nomination process, along with everything it has taught us about voter preferences.
Funny, none of the Bern-heads had problems supporting a major party when they thought Bernie had a shot at hijacking the Democratic nomination. Why do you suppose he did that instead of taking the purist approach of running as an independent? Because it affords more electoral reach and a better shot at winning. That’s why I’d vote for <distasteful candidate> with major party backing, not out of any love for the party or blindly imitating others.
Sure, there are other options. You have to option to cast a petty, ineffectual protest vote. You have an option to vote for Evil Incarnate, and you have the option to vote for the best challenger to Evil Incarnate. Those are all options. But don’t pretend they are all equally moral or realistic.
Oh for fuck’s sake. The evidence in support of this assertion is equivalent to the evidence in support of the assertion that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster. I thought everyone was able to figure out that “zero evidence” means “zero evidence that’s remotely relevant, convincing, or reasonable to offer,” but Go You, you win the prize for pointing out that technically, there is (unconvincing, irrelevant, unreasonable) evidence!
If that’s the level of discussion you’d like to have, have it with someone else.