Now imagine more than two choices!
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Living in Europe this is fairly easy te remember. None of the choices are great, but they definitely exist.
Yeah, it’s a choice among:
all out evil
Definitely evil, but still pretending to be good. (Weirdly,they’re the only capable party, and though at least half of the stuff they champion is awful, the amount of things they get done that aren’t evil is somehow still larger than whatever good any less evil party can get done. It’s still not worth it, to be clear, it’s just a shitty quirk of this political climate.)
Doesn’t yet realize they’re evil, but they are
Half good hearted but misguided, half foreign agents trying to sow discord
Great except for one issue, will never get a high portion of the vote
Great all around, will really never get a high portion of the vote
Guess the country and guess the parties for a sense of being quick on the uptake and in on the joke.
hint for the last two
I’m in favor of giving Ukraine weapons and pro European unity
My guess
Germany
- AfD
- CDU
- SPD
- BSW
- The Left
- Greens
Pretty close- maybe I should have mentioned being bitter about our anachronistic coal usage in the spoiler. I didn’t include BSW, so it goes afd, cdu, spd, greens, die linke, and volt, though I would also put BSW in that category with the greens
Would be my guess as well, though I'm unsure about the CDU/CSU getting more good stuff done than other less shitty parties. The last administration did pretty well mostly thanks to the Greens even though the media kept bashing it to no end, and I do not want to imagine a world with a CxU/SPD coalition during the chaos after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Also I think The Left is far less likely to get a significant share of votes than the Greens.
The UK also has 1st-past-the-post voting, yet polling is showing that people are rejecting their 2 big parties: Labour (liberal capitalists) and the Tories (sociopathic capitalists), in favor of Reform (psychotic capitalists) and the Green party (ethical environmentalists).
"It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed." - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
"Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact." - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
Ranked Choice Voting.
Where we don't just have to hold our noses and pick from 2.
https://represent.us/
A video about it- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfQij4aQq1k
STAR voting is slightly better in a couple of situations but yeah, that would be real progress
I would love to be in a position to pick the worse if these two!
Ranked Choice has a Monotonicity problem. i.e. it's possible for a candidate to lose if a more people rank that candidate higher on their own ballot without changing any other ballots.
This has happened in recent RCV elections, and resulted in the candidate's ideological opposition winning.
There's a group called FairVote that's been pushing RCV since the early 90s despite the many flaws of the system. Flaws that have been known since the system was first designed in 1788.
Seriously, Instant Runoff Voting was invented by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1788 as an example of a broken election system that can eliminate candidates preferred by a majority of voters.
It was later reinvented in the late 1850s by an Englishman who presumably never learned French.
Anyway a modern voting system for consideration is STAR, it was developed in 2014 by people who have read Condorcet, the the works of Kenneth Arrow from the 1950s. (Arrow's Impossibility Theorium)
Find more info at www.equal.vote
I'd be willing to take the worse of two goods at this point.
Protest and elect. Emphasis on protest.
- Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
- Organize, network, focus on building solidarity.
- Vote at primaries for the most progressive candidate.
- Don't punch down
- Don't punch left.
All important, but those last two are key to enabling the rest imo
Then vote in all elections including local, special, midterms and especially primaries not just general. Choose progressives.
We are where we are, because voter apathy. When you don't vote, other pick the candidates for you.
We have that voter apathy because our voting system is awful, and doesn't allow most votes to even matter. People should still vote, but that alone isn't enough to fix anything. As things are now it's damage control at best.
It’s bad, especially in the US and Canada, but not voting isn’t going to fix anything. Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one, even if the systems are set up to look that way. Voting is always worth it.
Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one
There might not be rules explicitly for this purpose, but the Electoral College and Senate are hard-coded institutions in the US government that effectively guarantee this. The antagonism there is more framed as a rural vs urban one, but it effectively amounts to the same thing in practice. Going by Wikipedia numbers, every elector for NY represents the votes of up to 714,372 residents of New York, while in Wyoming, that ration is considerably lower, at 1 elector for every 196,251 residents. This ignores things like residents counted in the population who are ineligible to vote and people who just don't, but you get the point. Ditto for the Senate, where some 10 million New Yorkers get the same representation as just under 300,000 people in Wyoming.
Yes, rural states could eventually swing left again and make this no longer the case, but it certainly seems unlikely at any time in the near future.
Problem is in a lot of places those with the D next to their name aren't progressive with the only ones that actually are being third party. So not only do you have to convince a non-voter to vote, but you have to convince them to support someone that's not part of the 2 major parties.
Harm reduction. If forced into a binary choice, I’d rather lose a finger than lose a hand.
Sure, but at some point ya gotta think, "Maybe I should destroy the de-limbing machine," instead of continuing to put part of your body in there.
(This isn't a criticism of you or your beliefs, just a jokey perspective.)
i guess we need rage, rage against the delimbing machine?
Dont go slowly into the night. Rage. Rage against the machine
I mean yeah obviously
Democrats are organizing for the midterms. Add your voice somewhere it counts. The opinions of volunteers and contributors have much more influence than nihilistic comments on an internet chat board
At some point, you will run out of fingers...
Texas just had to choose between Talarico and Crockett. Both sounded like great candidates to me and hope that Crockett can continue her path in politics (albeit without the AIPAC issue she has)
To be fair, that is how primaries work. In many states only people registered with the party can pick who ends up at the binary vote. Which forces people to denigrate themselves by capitulating to a party in order to be allowed to run in their primary and get money.
In California the open primary allows everyone to vote for anyone. Last time that left us with 2 Democrats running for the final, but this year there are so many people splintering the Democratic voters, we could wind up with 2 Republicans.
Just pointing out that Texas IS one of those states where only people registered with the party can vote in the primaries...
No, it's not possible with unlimited corporate "donations".
Rs are left hand, Ds are right hand, AmazonEnronMega is the puppeteer.
They've made bribery legal, it's blatant and right out in the open. They all shared the stage, everyone clapped, thunderous applause
Voters can't out bribe them, they're too busy trying to make a living on half the pay their parents had
How will you get them to outlaw bribery again? Not legally.
(see Super PACs and Citizens United)
I don't know, but I absolutely support any attempt to find out.
Outside of the realm of politics, but one choice I've made somewhat recently that was "better of two goods" was picking a Linux distro
Half of Americans actively vote for the more evil candidate. That’s the problem you need to fix first.
I really wish I was exaggerating but it’s hard to describe it any other way.
Yep. I enjoy hypothetical discussions about how to fix our shit to benefit humans as much as anybody else.
But that's the wall I mentally run into every time: dozens of millions of people voted for the obvious greater evil THREE consecutive times.
And these weren't some kind of bland Romney v Obama elections that were very much two sides of the same coin. They were random politician v dementia predator Hitler and roughly half of voters were smashing that pedoHitler button.
It’s time to give up on this idea, given the outrage culture, the death of journalism.
We could have a race of Fred Roger’s vs fred rogers and someone would find or make up a scandal and half the internet will follow. For the foreseeable future all candidates appear to be evil, whether they are different from before or not, so our choice is who appears less evil.
Then there’s the death of the platform. Candidates compete to see how little they can say, to not give their opponents anything to go on, so all future candidates will not appear to have a good platform and our choice is who is less evil
Thats basically communism and socialism for me. I believe socialism would be better but its two goods either way.
Yes.
Anybody who says otherwise is likely (on some level) attempting to convince others to crush their hopes of a better world being possible.
I've been an Unaffiliated Independent since I first registered to vote in 1977, and I have NEVER voted for a candidate that I really like, at least not for President. Every single election has been the better of two evils, and often there wasn't even two, and often there wasn't even one. I haven't been even mildly interested in any of the candidates we've had in the 21st Century, except maybe Bernie, and he's never really had a chance anyway.
I like AOC, and a couple of others. I've swing hard into the Progressive side these days. Time to balance the scale away from Conservatives for at least a half century. I'll be dead by then.
Everyone is talking about ranked choice and other options, I don't have problems with that, but I'd like to say this:
I think if 80-90% of people voted for that lesser evil, then the greater evil would know that they have no chance, and shift themselves to get more votes. Either the candidate will change policies, or the party will dump those candidates and get someone new.
Problem is, both evils have equal chances of winning, so they have no reason to change significantly.
That's what surprises me. Why's the split 50/50 (±2% max)
I think a lot of people relate to that feeling. Most people don’t just want the “least bad” option — they’d rather feel like they’re choosing something genuinely good.