Is that you, Lloyd old boy?
And I maintain that pointing out that Jill Stein may not (arguably!) have cost Clinton the election, based on vote totals, is germane to this discussion. The title of the thread is “Jill Stein is a stupid cretin”, after all, not “CandidGamera gives facts and should not be responded to”.
Meh. With the restaurant offering the choice of a mediocre hamburger or a pile of steaming dog shit, Mtgman orders braised monkey nuts (an item not even on the menu) and says “Meh” when the waiter brings him the dog shit.
Are we still taking nominations for the Darwin Award?
In defense of Steven, the perception among many diners was that they were being offered a choice between two featured menu items - 1) a pile of steaming dog shit, and 2) a pile of flaming dog shit spiked with nuclear waste.
The prospect of warmed-over dog shit in 2020 isn’t very appealing either.
Question:
When you LOSE an election, what happens to all that money in the “war chest”??
You can expect more Steins and Johnsons etc, vote splitters to come at us from now on, riding a tidal wave of fake news distributed from Russian sources, alt right freaks, dubious "leaks from Comey (or someone like him) and provocateurs like Bannon and James O’Keefe, etc.
Senate and House seats will be up for grabs soon, and the whole shit show will start all over again.
When Trump and company yammered about fake news, they were, in true right wing tradition, projecting their own guilt.
Now they know it works.
Flood us with bullshit. Split the vote. Profit.
The eternal delusion of third party supporters; the belief that they have some widespread public support that’s somehow being prevented from voting for a third party candidate.
What would make this all hilarious if it weren’t so bitterly tragic is that in a nation with 320 million people, there are 160 million with above-average intelligence, and perhaps 100,000 actual geniuses.
Yett both Johnson and Stein showed the intellectual acumen of 5th-grade dropouts.
If you want to change the direction of American politics, you should go the Bernie Sanders route. Get inside one of the two real parties and try to take the wheel.
While that may be an adequate defense of Steven, the diners who held such a perception are indefensible. It was always patently obvious that the choices were mediocre hamburger and dogshit.
What about Florida? I remember reading that Stein voters there could have won the election for Clinton.
No. Trump won Florida with 4,605,515 votes. Clinton got 4,485,745 votes so Trump’s margin was 119,770 votes. Stein got 64,019 votes in Florida.
Perhaps you’re thinking of Gary Johnson who got 206,007 votes in Florida. But it’s hard to imagine many of them were potential Clinton votes.
I can’t wait for Scott Pruitt to be confirmed as EPA head, just to see how fucking “green” the Green Party voters feel now about having handed the country over to a radical right wing minority government.
Only the official Communist Workers and Peasants Revolutionary ( Marxist-Leninist ) Party and the Communist Peasants and Workers Revolutionary ( Marxist-Leninist ) Party are to be permitted to run the state. Votes cast for all other parties will be discarded as attempts at pointless change bringing the System into disrepute.
Well, you’re almost exactly half right. As in: your first paragraph is a load of wank, and your second paragraph is right on point.
Jill Stein was not a candidate. She was as much a contender to win the election as Vermin Supreme was. Now, as a liberal, here are your options:
- Vote for Clinton.
- Vote for Jill Stein.
- Don’t Vote.
Only option 1 helps prevent Trump from getting into the white house. Options 2 and 3 are effectively identical, with perhaps the negative side effect that voting for Stein encourages her stupid, stupid, stuuuuupid party to continue existing.
You think Jill Stein doesn’t get this? You think anyone in the green party hierarchy doesn’t fucking understand this after Nader in '00? In that case, they’re running to rule over a system they don’t understand at a third-grade level (seriously, you could show this video to a fucking 7-year-old and they would probably get it). Otherwise, they are trying to make the democrats lose. These people are not your allies. If they aren’t willing to do their best to not make a bad situation worse, they are not helping.
Meanwhile, are you still going to claim that Trump is better than Clinton? Because in defending your vote, that’s what you’re doing. You effectively have two people who could have won the election. One was clearly an absolute fucking dumpster fire of a candidate. Do you think Trump was better than Clinton? If so, you’re a shitty liberal and a shitty thinker. And if not, there’s no excuse for not voting for Clinton. Gary Johnson can’t win. Jill Stein can’t win. The continued existence of the green party is proof positive that a lot of people are morons who continue to absolutely refuse to learn from their mistakes.
Oh go piss on an electric fence, you fucking moron.
That would be a relevant comparison if it was also argued it’s meaningless to donate to third parties or to run third party candidates at all the other levels of government. Voting for Sanders in the primaries was a sensible third party action. Not voting for Clinton in the election was being an idiot.
I’ve posted before my 10-20-30 plan for third-party candidates, but I think it’s a great fucking plan, so here it is again:
10-20-30 Plan for Third Parties
- Run candidates for local office! City council! County commission! Board of education! Mayor! When you’ve obtained 10% of the seats in a local jurisdiction, proceed to step 2.
- Run candidates from this jurisdiction for state office! State Senate! State House! Governor! When you’ve obtained 20% of the seats in a state, proceed to step 3.
- Run candidates from this state for federal office! Senate! House! When you’ve obtained 30% of the seats in a nation, proceed to step 4.
- Run for president! DON’T YOU FUCKING SKIP STEPS 1-3, ASSHOLES.
The Libertarian and Green Parties this go-round were nuttier than the GOP! The only recent 3rd party to do well was the populist Reform Party; we ended up with a populist this time — how’s that working out?
To misquote Shakespeare:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our parties, But in ourselves…
If your point is “Jill Stein sitting this one out wouldn’t have let Clinton win” then as far as I can tell, no one is disputing that. No one is assuming all those Greens would show up in the same numbers and vote for Clinton. There’s just a “what if”. So the point is moot. And it’s especially irrelevant to the subordinate discussion that my post was a part of.
But, of course, she IS a cretin.
The US lags most of the developed world in voter turnout, but is in the top ten or so for voter registration. So it’s not like these people couldn’t vote, they just choose not to. It’s not unreasonable to believe that this is because the choices they have aren’t appealing. We’ve got enough registered voters staying home to absolutely swing an election, possibly even win it outright if a third party could get them to turn out. That’s a fact, not a delusion.
A) I never said I was a liberal.
B) My choices are the ones printed on my ballot.
C) What part of “unapologetic” don’t you understand?
I would generally agree with this strategy, in theory. And I’ve seen it work for individual candidates who have the stamina to work their way up(Bernie Sanders anyone?). The problem, which is also an opportunity, is that at local levels people pay less attention to the races and know less about the candidates. Party votes tend to carry the day rather than issues and policy. The president of my local school board is an insufferable asshole who looks good on camera and has a “Dr.” in front of his name(mommy and daddy made him finish dental college before they’d bankroll his first business, but he hasn’t touched a dental instrument in decades). He’s a racist and the worst kind of entitled micromanager. But he won the election, so there you go.
The real problem is the way humans make this decision in the first place. We call it hueristics, biases, or, cognitive ease. But tis’ all the same in the end, bad decision making.
Enjoy,
Steven