Vote Trump!

 

I prefer to promote democracy, and to avoid asinine acts that are counter to my own interests. But you can vote for the guy if ya want.

 

Boy this thread sure took off in another direction.... ; )

 

Better choice than Cruz.

 

I forgot what thread this even was.....

 

There isn't a "none of the above" on the ballot, so, there is no vote that will promote democracy. You get a choice of which rights you want revoked.

 

You probably didn't see it because it's spelled differently, but it's there. Just look for Jill Stein.

Keep voting for the death on two legs candidates and you'll keep getting death on two legs rulers. Me, I'm far too uppity to just keep eating feces because it's all that ever comes down the pipe. A smart person who doesn't like the taste of it eventually has to have the simple idea "oops, wrong pipe", don'tcha think?

 

I really don't think so.... Unrealistic, and unworkable. Some nice ideas, but, also some delusions. Not any different from any of the other candidates.

That aside, third party candidates don't stand a snowballs chance in hades in this election cycle.

 

Voting for a third party is effectively voting for the guy you like the least to win.

 

"None of the above" only wins if it gets more votes, too. That's the part I was talking about. You want one, you got one. It's just spelled differently.

Voting for a duopoly party, rather than just effectively voting for the candidate I like least, would be directly voting for the one I like least. I fail to see any actual difference. There may be one if I were egotistical enough to associate myself with a candidate just because he or she might win, but it doesn't take much brain to figure out that the outcome of an election isn't any reflection upon me at all so I'd have to be delusional to believe otherwise. And if it's not self-evident that this is true, as I believe it should be, I can argue that it is the correct view with reliance upon facts and data. For example:That's from the lead-in of a study recently (in 2014) conducted by some guys who've devoted their professional careers to the study and analysis of politics and decision making, and it's backed by data. Not perfect data, since none exists, but darn good data, and it's the first time anyone ever actually did a data driven impartial analysis using scientific methods to discover what the data actually tell us about how our government actually responds to the competing interests of the classes. You can read it for yourself in the PDF here. If you're not into that kind of reading, just skip to the last couple of pages before the endnotes and read the summary.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that this is true because we all at least should have learned in high school that the stated intent of the Constitution was to thwart the democratic impulses of the electorate so it would be unable to diminish the power of the elites to set policy. There's no supposition at all in that statement -- we know what the framers did and why they did it and the arguments that were heard before they decided to do it because they wrote it all down with their own pens, and they certified as accurate and complete the minutes of the Constitutional Convention. I'm not promoting some radical view of history. What they wrote was that their intent was to isolate the government from the will of the people because, as Alexander Hamilton wrote:Our modern elites didn't corrupt the system. The system isn't even corrupt. It is working as intended. It effectively thwarts the democratic impulses of the people because that's precisely what it was designed to do by the elites of two and a half centuries ago.

Something else we learned in high school: The Declaration Of Independence is what catalyzed the revolution and motivated the British people of the colonies to violently overthrow their government, but the Declaration is not the law of the land. The Constitution, written a decade later, is. My revolutionary grandfather (whose name was Nathaniel) went to war because he believed that all are created equal and have some wonderful and inalienable rights that any legitimate form of government will promote and defend, and that any form government that is injurious to those ends rightly deserves to be altered or abolished. But then a decade later it was decided that all are not equal, and it is not the government's place to secure for its citizens life, liberty, and conditions promoting happiness.

I'm not even making up the part about my revolutionary grandfather's motive. The national archive (now online at archive.gov) contains letters that passed between my revolutionary grandfather and George Washington over a number of years, from the time of the revolution itself through the formation of the second government and Washington's election as President.

The Declaration made promises that the two governments intentionally broke. Some of us are still a little bit pissed off about that.

Which has f-all to do with a guy having sold his old truck, so I'm going to try to just let it be now. Thanks for a fun discussion, folks.