Is voting for a third party candidate or not voting at all a cop out?

I can't read Deuces' writing, I find it totally impenetrable. Just skip to the verb conjugation part and explain that, thanks.

I cant teach you how to read and understand

I could probably pick up a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook at my local thrift store and look up the cypher you and Deuces are using to make your posts comprehensible only to each other.

I don't find Deuces hard to read at all and I'm intrigued by what it is you're seeing. Can you quote a post that find incomprehensible?

I'll be honest, I just find his style gratingly bombastic so I stopped reading after the first couple of sentences. This might be influenced by past interactions with him and it also wouldn't hurt if he used paragraphs. Plowing through walls of text is a chore.

deuces style is a little pompous but par for the course for intellectual marxists, many people on his team write a lot worse than that.

at least he looks old school enough to avoid made up words /concepts more than young intellectual marxists do

Same can probably be said of most "intellectual *ists".

I dont think deuces is a Marxist. he arrives at a lot of the same conclusions and makes the same observations tho. bc hes smart and not brainwashed.

Yes, when I think of ideological extremists, "smart" is the first word that springs to mind by association.

The easy assumption that others are stupid is a huge barrier to comprehension

Don't follow.

Voting for president is a waste of time if your only consideration is affecting the outcome. You're probably more likely to win back to back lottos. If you live in a deep red/blue state, even more so.

Voting makes sense if you find value in using your rights. In which case, you shouldn't vote for someone who is evil.

Our 2 party system has been created to make sure the public have little to no input and it has been successful. I'm sure most of you know the famous Princeton study showing this.

There are many issues ranging from family leave, to HC, military spending to the drug war, on which both parties oppose 55% to over 80% of the population. Outside of a few culture war issues those in power agree on most everything. They are funded by the same people and made personally rich by them.

There is some disagreement on degree... should we completely ignore critical environmental issues or make gestures that might slightly delay bad outcomes? Should you go 80k in debt for college or 100k? Should 10,000 people a year die for lack of hc or 20,000?

If we blindly vote for whichever party agrees with us on culture wars, there is no reason for change to ever occur, either by the R/D politicians considering our interests or by changing the system to something more democratic.

Things will just continue to get worse and you'll wind up picking between Freddy and Jason. Arguably, this is already true as both parties bomb more civilians than any slasher has killed.

The chances of averting this are very small, but I don't think it follows that you must completely give up and it certainly doesn't follow that you must give your stamp of approval.

Most people care more about the "culture war" issues than they care about the deaths of people they don't know in countries they will never visit. You may find that immoral, but I certainly think it's not irrational.

I disagree about some of your specific points as well, but even if they were all true it doesn't affect my point.

Your chances of winnign back to back lottos increases dramatically if you form a large group who share the entries/winnings and keep entering. Large enough group and it becomes really quite likely.

Democracy is not just the act of voting but voting is an essential part of it.

That second sentence is monumentally incorrect. By a factor of many billions.

In several states it can be 1 in many trillions trillions tbh, if we are talking the next election.

If for some reason californian presidential elections are going to be determined by 1 vote in november 2024, i don't think there is any scenario where Trump wouldn't win anyway.

Same for Alabama with Biden the automatic winner.

Basically parlay the chances that a state is decided by one vote or is tied and the chances that if that result is flipped the electoral college result is flipped. If you want to be technical, cut that result in half. I would think it is more likely than one in a million. Winning your next two lottos is one in about 300 million squared.

Im not sure if the definition of having your vote count is really only applicable in a one vote difference race. While I get that example, it's predicated on the assumption that everyone else went out and voted the same way whether you did or didnt vote. I was thinking more along the lines of a situation where lots of people make the same assumption that their vote wont matter, and stay home, but then the net effect of thousands of people each thinking their vote doesnt matter results in a surprise result because the other guy stayed home as well.

This ^^^^^ is too logical for this forum.

Do you think one person’s decision to abstain causes others to do the same?

Maybe we need to distinguish between the precise act of voting itself, and a person’s general “life activities” leading up to an election (e.g. consuming media, discussing voting intentions with others, etc.) If I just decide to stay home on Election Day because I’m sick, I don’t see how that causes any cascading assumptions by others. But if I spend time leading up to an election explaining to my friends why both candidates suck and that’s why I’m abstaining, that could cause others to abstain as well.

The OP sounded like we were discussing the former but maybe we should be discussing the latter.

This would assume that one side would have an over representation of "**** it" non-voters than the other. Maybe you could argue that is what happened in 2020 that lead to record numbers of voters. If that is your example then it worked out in your favor. Ultimately, "everyone voting" should be statistically relevant to "everyone voted who wanted to vote".

If statistically Democrats are over-represented in the "our vote doesn't matter" then its a failure of the Democratic party, not individual voters.

It might be a geographical feature.

More democrats live in perma-blue areas than republicans live in perma-red areas.

In perma-mono-coloured areas your vote (in the general) actually doesn't matter. At all. The seat is already won.

So what democrat-leaning people need to understand is that in many (most?) places where they live, the actual real election is the primary one.

So if you are democrat -leaning, outside of a few purple districts/states, your political opponent isn't trump, isn't maga, at all. They don't matter, your vote doesn't influence that.

Your political opponent is your fellow democrat, the centrist one if you are hardcore leftist, or the hardcore leftist one if you are a centrist. That's who the election is between in Perma blue areas.

If people who don't vote tend to be more likely to have voted for the worse candidate because there is a correlation between choosing not to vote and picking that bad candidate, then it is a good thing that voting is not required. The problem of course is that those who are more aware of the miniscule chance that their vote affects the outcome are apt to be slightly more likely to vote for the better candidate. There is probably a technical name in philosophy regarding whether one should be persuaded by the words "what if everybody did that".

But ultimately these are fine points that don't matter because the majority of people who vote are persuaded mainly by psychological tricks that candidates have learned over the years rather than by a thoughtful evaluation of their actual policies and values. Thus, while I don't think we should go back to kings and queens, I also think it is ridiculous that our leaders are picked in the way they are now unless the there is a legitimate worry about guillotines.

Kant's Categorical (Moral) Imperative is pretty close to that .

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."