Do me a favor and tell the middle school kid who’s giving you all your quips that if he keeps trying, he’ll get there eventually.

Good talk, very high level and productive. You’ve really given me a lot to think about.

Throwing around a bunch of playground insults and then accusing me of being the troll is a good bit, 7/10.

I’m rubber, you’re glue, what you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

If that’s the level of discourse you operate at, I can join you there, I guess.

No.

By the way, quick question, would you say that you don’t like me based on who I’m voting for in the presidential election, regardless of how I vote down ballot? Because it kinda seems like you’re proving my point here.

Tell you what, if Illinois goes red this election, DM me and I’ll send you $200.

👍

It is in my country lol. Just because I don’t get to meaningfully vote in it doesn’t mean I don’t live here.

“I know you are but what am I?”

Highest level of discourse.

Misinterprets what I said to create a strawman

Is explained to that that’s not what was meant

Repeats strawman.

“Advising people to vote in” is not the same as “caring about” or “paying attention to.”

Is there any mention of specific candidates? Any passionate arguments over the details of specific races? Any discussion of political theory or historical precedent or anything like that in that context? Has anybody called someone a Nazi because of how they’re voting for down ballot?

No. Because what people care about and pay attention to is the presidential race, unless you’re some kind of weird nerd or responsible citizen or something.

I’ve never voted for a major party presidential candidate in my life. It has never cost anyone anything, because I used to live in a deep red state and now live in a deep blue state. There’s a better chance of helping a candidate hit thresholds that would qualify them for things like campaign funding, then there is of Tennessee or Illinois being the pivotal swing state. The vast majority of Americans are in similar situations, there’s only a handful of states where your presidential vote matters at all.

Despite this, and the fact that I’ve voted for Democrats down ballot, liberals hate me, and are always trying to fight me over it. Why? Because the presidential race is the only thing anybody cares about. For all the countless, identical debates over the presidential race, I’ve seen virtually no discussion on here of other elections. Culturally, your take on the presidential race is how your political identity is defined. That cultural tendency is so powerful that it can even bleed into foreign countries.

The more people focus on my presidential voting behavior, which has no potential to affect anything, the more it reaffirms that such behavior is important. The reason that people care so much about my vote is not because they care about the outcome, it’s because they want me to display a sign of loyalty, to bend the knee, to conform to their norms. But if everyone’s going to treat it as an expression of identity, then, all else being equal regarding the outcome, it would be better to define myself according to what I actually believe. The fact that people get big mad over someone voting third party even in an extremely solid red or blue state is all the more reason to do it. My vote doesn’t affect your life at all since it’s totally irrelevant to the outcome, so stop obsessing over what amounts to a personal decision.

Neither does yours.

Of course. That’s why I cited a bunch of actual evidence and examples that aren’t dependent on my personal experience.

It’s only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it’s all for show.

Is it? I don’t recall bringing up my personal experience in that matter at all, or bringing up that matter in the first place. Nothing about my personal experience seems relevant to that question, it’s not as if I have firsthand experience with politicians in Washington that I’m using to determine whether they’re trustworthy or not.

Most people don’t know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don’t really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don’t even know about it?

Now this is just silly. Are you suggesting that performative legislation never happens? It happens all the time, especially during election seasons. Just because not every person hears about ever minutiea doesn’t mean that nobody ever hears about anything or that it can’t influence voters. You’re literally using it right now to try to influence people.

We can talk about whether this particular example is performative or not, but to rule out the entire concept of performative legislation categorically is ridiculous.

It sounds like you’re basing it entirely off personal experience. But your personal experience probably doesn’t give you a representative cross section of Americans.

The Greens also got 1/3 of the votes in 2020 as 2016, both times being about 1/3 of the Libertarian party.

There’s also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd. There was tons of infighting over the speaker and whatnot. Trump himself was obviously controversial, and I mentioned the threat of him running third party. If Republican voters would just line up to vote for anybody, the establishment would’ve never allowed things to splinter to the degree they have, they’d kick people out of the party and the voters would go for whoever they offered instead. I don’t see how any of that is explainable if what you’re saying is true.

I feel like part of that narrative is just seeing the right run shitty candidates and seeing right wingers vote for them, but that’s because the voters have different values and preferences. They still care quite a bit about the things they do care about, and break rank when they don’t get their way, and much more so than people in the left do from the numbers I’m seeing.

Right wing people tend to be subservient and just fall in line and vote Republican. People on the left tend to be less pragmatic

People are always saying this, but is there actually evidence that it’s true? The Libertarian Party regularly gets more votes than the Greens, so if anything it seems like the opposite is true. Ross Perot got the most votes of any third party candidate in history, and in both the elections he ran in, Bill Clinton won. In 2016, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of a third party run if he didn’t get the nomination, and it appeared to be a serious possibility.

So is this claim just based on vibes or what?

I think the phrase is, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The economy had been trending upwards under Obama, and it peaked under Trump. If you’re a Keynesian, you might gripe that Trump increased spending when the economy was doing well rather then saving for a rainy day. Then, the rainiest of all rainy days hit with the pandemic, which shot spending through the roof. That caused rapid inflation that became most noticeable after Biden came in. Most Americans either don’t pay enough attention or attribute cause and effect to more or less random factors, so the experience is, Trump economy good, Biden economy bad.

Second, skepticism of the government is a facet of American culture, fed into from the national mythos regarding the Revolutionary War, by anticommunist propaganda about how the government doing stuff makes things worse, and also from experience with getting disillusioned from politicians not delivering on promises and the government generally not acting in people’s best interests. Kamala comes across more as representing the political establishment, and her messaging doesn’t tap into that dissatisfaction or contrarian nature.

Third, people feel like they’re getting fucked, and Trump offers a clear, simple narrative of who is fucking them. And the narrative scapegoats people at the bottom of the social structure, who are least able to push back against said narratives, and who already have negative stereotypes about them. If you’re not going to do that, then you either have to tell people they’re not getting fucked, or you have to blame the people who are actually doing the fucking, who are at the top of the social structure, who are most able to push back against your narrative. Imo, in order to employ the latter strategy most successfully, you need a sense of solidarity, a sense that everyone is included in your movement and you won’t allow anyone to be scapegoated or sacrifice anyone for your own advancement -and it’s kind of hard to do that with the whole genocide thing going on.

My balloons comment was meant to demonstrate that your hypothetical bore no relation to reality. You can construct an entirely different scenario where such and such action is justified, but if it diverges too much from reality it’s meaningless. You are asking me to imagine a world where Mexico is more powerful than the US, before even getting into the conflict, that world diverges so much from ours that I’d have to completely reevaluate tons of stuff.

Russia has no intention of invading the whole of Europe. The question is whether US interventionist policy does more good or ill. And I have completely soured on it following the whole, “20 year long war of aggression that achieved nothing” thing. It’s not about “America first,” it’s about containing the damage that we do to the rest of the world.

One of them talked about a Marxist who will get rid of Israel within 2 years and wants to defund the police and give everyone healthcare and provide transgender operations to illegal immigrants, and the other talked about a person who hates the US military, admires China’s handling of COVID, and wants to defund the police and pull out of NATO, and I just wish I knew the names of either of those candidates because they’re both way better choices than what we’ve actually got.

I hate them.

Let me give you a scenario. What if balloons could sneeze? What then?!?