Headhunter wrote:Jigsaw wrote:Headhunter wrote:Jigsaw wrote:Headhunter wrote:Jigsaw wrote:Headhunter wrote:Jigsaw wrote:I love the idea that far-left individuals who vote third party "don't seem to know" we're "helping" Republicans.
Believe me, every Democratic jackass, as soon as they hear we didn't vote for Clinton, gets on our asses about it and doesn't shut up. We know damn well what Democratic-supporting idiots think.
And you also understand the mechanism of a two party system.
So what are you calling bullshit on? I'm just laying out hard truths. You help Republicans. It is what it is. How comfortable you are with it is between you and your conscience.
"Helping Republicans" isn't how I see voting third party at all. That is a slant you are taking.
The truth is I am voting for leftist third party candidates. The truth is I dislike both Democrats and Republicans. The truth is that neither party runs candidates I have any interest in supporting.
And in your eyes, just because I am not voting for Democrats, I'm "helping Republicans."
That may be how you see it, but I do not accept that as truth.
Jig, I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist. Two parties matter. If you're taking away a vote for one, you essentially help the other. Since Republicans rely on low turnouts, your vote is as good as not showing up. You can spin it however you want, those are the consequences. 99.9% of Americans don't care who Joe Blow Socialist is, or Larry Libertarian or whoever.
I "took away" a vote from both.
No party owns our votes.
If Jill Stein wasn't on the ballot or an option to write-in, do you really think that they en masse would have voted for Clinton? Most Stein supporters I know simply wouldn't have voted, and Trump would have won anyway.
The whole "people are either Democrats or Republicans" mind-set is just ridiculous.
If Stein wasn't a choice, I would have written in Monica Moorehead (WWP). If neither Stein nor Moorehead were choices, I would have written in Mimi Soltysik (SPUSA).
If Soltysik, Stein, or Moorehead were not choices, I wouldn't have voted, period.
I don't know who the fuck Salty Stick or Moorehouse are. These names are important in your bubble, they mean nothing to me or the country as a whole.
I understand your perspective here. To me, winning is all that matters. I didn't always feel this way but here I am.
The problem is, you saw a Clinton victory as "winning."
I saw a Clinton victory as "losing," same with Trump. It didn't matter who won, we all still lost, in my opinion.
So how do you win?
Getting leftists elected locally (which is entirely possible, even in the two-party system), education, and ensuring we do our best to get spread our message.
There's a lot of problems, there's no easy fix, and we will not win over night, or probably for the next hundred years. I will be long dead by the time, if it even happens, that the leftist vision will come to be.
Voting Democratic, most of the time, doesn't lead us toward victory, because, and this is important, Democrats don't want anything similar to what most leftists want.
I see it this way - both the Republicans and Democrats support capitalism, and want to keep capitalism moving forward. I don't. Therefore, neither party represents my interests, and I have to do what I can to find a way to movie forward outside of both of them.