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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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Yes, and it is deeply flawed logic because it rests on an analogy which is fundamentally unrelated to electoral strategy. There is no "refuse and both parties get nothing" mechanism in elections. You have a choice between a 99-1 split and a 100-0 split, and rejecting the 99-1 split guarantees you the 100-0. They don't start the election over with new candidates and policies because you didn't like the options. One party wins despite your efforts. The election is the worst possible time to try to negotiate, when greater evil has so much support.
Are you high? They absolutely constantly do exactly that which is exactly why they win. I can't even count the number of people I know personally who hated Trump, but voted for him anyway because they viewed the Democrats as the greater evil. Republicans don't fool around with red lines, they dutifully act in lockstep to secure wins. Your claims to the contrary betray a terminally online isolation from reality.
The left has been shouting about red lines for decades, and I don't see a single positive outcome. You should definitely align with Democrats, you share an obsession with avoiding hard choices so strong that it prevents you from actually accomplishing anything you claim to want to do.
Lmao! That's literally exactly how my example works. You chose between $1 and $0.
Really? The libertarian party generally gets triple the votes of the greens, the biggest third party candidate in history, Ross Perot, primarily siphoned votes from the right, Trump in 2016, despite being the last candidate the establishment wanted, got the nomination after making a credible threat to run third party, and if you spend any time around actual Republicans, you'll hear them complaining about "RINOs" who don't meet their standards, and nobody goes around in Republican circles being like, "Yeah this guy doesn't support our views on guns or abortion, but you have to vote for him or the democrats will win!" That whiny nerd shit would get you bullied.
They absolutely, constantly use red lines and purity tests, and they've red lined and purity tested all the way to overturning Roe V Wade. That would never have happened if they were constantly compromising.
The "moderates" might fall in line, sure. The problem is that the left is full of those kinds of "moderates," while on the right they're only a fraction of the base. They "fell in line" behind what the radicals of their party pushed for, just like how liberals like you would fall in line if we ever got a significantly strong radical left to push for left wing candidates. That is very different from the radicals falling in line behind the moderates.
This is completely delusional and reflects your own "terminally online isolation." There are far more Republicans who won't fall in line behind "RINOs" than the equivalent on the left - and there are vastly fewer people on the right who would waggle their finger at anyone making demands of the Republican party and insist that anyone who doesn't immediately fall in line unconditionally is "just trying to make the right lose," that anyone who sticks to their guns on abortion or, uh, guns, "isn't a real right-winger."
No it fucking hasn't! When? Who? The left always falls in line. Every time. It's just that every time anyone anywhere makes even the smallest demand, everyone loses their mind over it because liberals (like you) are so preoccupied about how everyone always needs to fall in line unconditionally forever. Meanwhile, the right does that shit all the time and nobody considers it anywhere near as big of a deal because it's just accepted.
No, it isn't. Your example falls apart without the "refuse and no one gets anything" part. Unsurprisingly, when you change a major component of a scenario, the strategy best suited to the scenario often changes. Your solution to the scenario is to refuse, because the scenario you devised specifically assigns a significant outcome to refusal. Elections lack that outcome, refusal has no significant outcome.
It's like test taking strategies. Some tests penalize incorrect answers, some do not. Guessing is a logical strategy on tests that do not penalize incorrect answers, and an illogical one on tests that do. You are suggesting a strategy which is useful in the contrived scenario you suggested, but that scenario you suggested is so fundamentally different from the actual real life scenario of elections that the strategy is not only useless, but counter productive.
So? Come election day they vote for them anyway. That's exactly my point. They got their representatives in, and pushed farther right.
But I don't feel like wasting any more time with a hypocrite who doesn't know the difference between effective praxis and liberalism. As you keep saying, it is valid to brand someone with a label when they meet the requirements, even if they disagree. You are, thus, definitively an accessory to left-fracturing propaganda. Assuming you aren't a deliberate bad actor, I hope you eventually come to your senses. Otherwise we're doomed to the fascism you insist on helping to cement.
Republicans winning is the "no one gets anything" outcome of a breakdown of negotiations between the democratic party and their voters. So the example holds.
I like how you completely ignored all my actual examples and focused on the one thing I said that wasn't hard evidence, and just baselessly asserted the nonsense that "Republicans fall in line" without a single shred of evidence to back it up. It is unfalsifiable orthodoxy, assumed with no regard for how reality actually works, just like the unfalsifiable orthodoxy of lesser-evilism. Nothing you say is ever actually backed up by the facts, you're just regurgitating the "conventional wisdom" that the ruling class told you to get you to fall in line and not cause any trouble by doing things that are actually effective.
Again, completely useless pawn seeped in bourgeois ideology, a pure liberal through and through, completely and totally cooked. Your utter uselessness and fecklessness is the reason we're unable to change the conditions that are giving rise to fascism.
Oh hey, proving my original point.
Ah yes, the very serious and rational leftist belief that fascists are better than liberals. Why oh why would anyone think that "leftists" who are helping accelerate fascism might be bots or trolls? Truly an indecipherable mystery.
Ftfy
Literally never said anything remotely like this and you know it. In fact I said the exact opposite, in my analogy, liberals offer us $1 while fascists offer us $0. Proving my point again that you reject everything we actually say in favor of the shit you make up about us whole cloth.
"No U," truly the height of liberal discourse.
Yes, and by rejecting the $99-1 offer in favor of the $100-0 offer, you have expressed your belief that the $0 was better than $1. By rejecting the liberal candidate, you admit that the fascist is preferable.
A perfectly valid response to willful hypocrisy. A little more valid v in my case than the several times you've thrown it out so far.
Completely missing the point, as always.
Of course $1 is preferable to $0. That's why I assigned them those values. However, being "preferable" is not the same thing as "being worth sacrificing every ounce of bargaining power over." I don't want the Republicans to win, but if disciplining the Democratic party or building an alternative to it causes that outcome, it is an acceptable risk.
Likewise, in the experiment I presented, obviously anyone would prefer $1 over nothing, but people still reject $1 offers. It's not really a difficult concept to grasp. You don't show up to a car lot saying, "I NEED this car, no matter what, I must have it today!" Hell, even if it's true at the very least you should try to bluff and feign that you might walk away (though do that repeatedly and they'll catch on).
People like you are either the worst negotiators on the entire planet, or, you don't actually have as much of a problem with the Democrats as you claim, and that's why you lay down your hand before the betting's even started.
I would love to get the chance to play that $100 game with one of you to find out which it is - I would absolutely offer you only $1, and if you refuse, I would know that you understand how stupid lesser-evilism is which would prove that you're fine with everything the democratic party stands for, and if you take it, then I would know that you genuinely are that bad at game theory.
I truly don't think any other culture on earth has ever produced so many people this bad at negotiating. We need to bring back haggling or something for you to learn.
Exactly. Fascism was an acceptable bargaining chip. That's the difference between you tankies and actual leftists: we care about people, and try to avoid subjecting our fellow people to fascism as a gambit.
Yes. Game theory experiments have a different set of conditions and consequences than elections. They refuse because that doesn't cost them anything. They leave the exchange neutral. There is no neutral electoral state, refusal does not fulfill the same function in the game as in elections. Refusing to vote doesn't mean no one wins. The rules of the game do not functionally map to the rules of elections, the strategies of the one do not apply to the other.
And by refusing to take that risk, you turn fascism from a risk into an inevitability. If you were actually a leftist like you say, you would understand the material conditions that gave rise to Trump and the fact that the democratic party is never going to address those conditions (at least without significant, genuine pressure). That is one of the primary reasons why we need to pressure the democratic party in the first place and why they are fundamentally unacceptable. It just guarantees fascism at a slightly slower pace.
The only ones advocating a strategy that has any possibility of averting fascism are us "tankies." Also, I find it hilarious that you're attempting to take the moral high ground, as if you're the ones who "actually care about people" when you happily accept the sacrifice of countless Palestinians right now, rather than taking an approach that could potentially save them. You have already written them off as an acceptable sacrifice on the alter on which you worship the democratic party.
Your liberalism is showing again by the fact that you think the Dems winning is a perfectly acceptable outcome that doesn't involve sacrificing anyone and doesn't just let the crises we're facing fester and get worse. As a "leftist," you ought to understand how fucked we are regardless of who's in charge at the moment, and that the capitalists aren't going to come down from on high to save us.
This is a completely arbitrary distinction. Not getting a dollar you could've gotten is no different from losing a dollar you could've avoided losing, change the experiment to where they lose $50 by walking away as opposed to losing $49 by accepting a one-sided agreement and you'll get the same results.
This is just nitpicking. You're trying desperately to find any reason to avoid accepting the obvious truth. The game is only one example, in any negotiation, the same principle applies.
Uh, yeah. Obviously. Never said that wasn't the case.
Yeah. Exactly. I said this back at the beginning. A vote for Democrats is a vote for more time to prepare a functional progressive movement. The sole reason to vote for them is to keep fascism developing at the slower of the two inevitable rates, while building the material capability to apply significant political pressure.
According to you. It's a baseless claim unsupported by history or theory.
Did you take that approach? Did it save them? Did you get close? That "potentially" is straining the limits of logic. It could have "potentially" saved them the same way I could "potentially" win the lottery tomorrow, and I didn't buy a ticket. It was a bad plan, it was never going to work, and now the bodies are stacking even faster.
Yup. And as a materialist, I know that ignoring the mechanics of elections doesn't get you closer to a solution.
Categorically false. Arithmetically, psychologically, just plain incorrect. Maybe if you're a gambling addict, but in the general population we generally find losses are felt much more strongly than equivalent gains. You're just making up poorly constructed psychological experiments, claiming what those hypothetical results would be, and extrapolating that to national politics.
You haven't supported any of your divisive nonsense with anything more than your say-so.
Right, "buying time." While sacrificing the opportunity to push for progressivism in the present. That's just called procrastination, and we don't have time for it. Actually, procrastination generally involves actually doing the task later on, whereas you've admitted (even if you baselessly contest the specific phrasing) that you'll continue supporting the democratic party unconditionally and indefinitely - until this progressive alternative magically materializes out of thin air, without anybody doing anything to actually bring it about! Absolutely ridiculous, absurd on it's face.
The only way to effectively build such a movement is to publicly challenge the democratic party and lay out demands and to be genuinely willing to break from it if it refuses those demands. And if any demand is reasonable to make, "don't do genocide" indisputably is.
Uh huh. Sure. And you got a timetable on that? Can we start applying political pressure in 4 years? 8 years? 20 years? Or is it "whenever it's ready," which will of course be never, since previous election results inform our readiness and refusing to deviate from the democratic party means they will never reach the point of being ready? You don't have to answer that, I already know. There will never be a "more convenient time."
You're trying as hard as you possibly can to not understand the effect that the experiment demonstrates. I don't need to "prove" any of this because it's extremely obvious and self-evident. If you demonstrate that you are potentially willing to walk away from a mutually beneficial agreement, you are in a better negotiating position. If you lay out from the start that you'll agree to anything as long as it's better than nothing, you are putting yourself in a weak negotiating position.
The reason I laid out the experiment is not to prove that approach is to correct, but to demonstrate and explain a very simple and basic concept that you either don't grasp or are pretending not to grasp. You can invent some hypothetical and pretend negotiating principles wouldn't apply there, but that's entirely your say-so.
Again, either you are an absolutely terrible negotiator, or you just don't really care about negotiating because you're content with what the party offers.