Rinox

Ok, let's try again. Those who like the left usually don't vote for the GOP, agree?

Then, for them, the options are three, either vote Dems, vote third party or don't vote. Now, if, like in the example of before, these people are that 5%, do you agree that not voting or voting a third party will result in the GOP winning, while voting for the Dems will result in the Dems winning?

If you think that the Dems and the GOP are one and the same, then fine. If instead you'd rather the Dems win, then do you agree that these people should vote Dems rather than do nothing or vote for a third party, which would lead to a GOP win?

Btw, this is why there's no third party in a fptp system and there can never be one. Your votes are better spent on the candidate you dislike less rather than on the one you actually like, because voting for the one you like will inevitably result in the one you really dislike going to power.

Edit:btw watch that cgp grey video, it's really good. He's really good in general tbh, great guy, very good at explaining.

You don't understand the basics of a First Past The Post system.

Let's say, for example's sake, that 52% of the people voting tend left, while 48% tend right, and let's also remove all the state, gerrymandering and grand elector bullshit for a moment (I know, so much bullshit)

If everyone were to only vote for either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, come November, the Democratic Party would win with 52% of the votes and secure the presidency. Now let's assume that there's a third party, let's call it "The True Left Party" and let's say they can have a very successful campaign and secure 5% of the votes, which would come from the left leaning side of the voting pool, aka from those who would have otherwise voted for the Democratic Party. Now come November the results would look like this: Republicans still at 48%, Democrats now at 47% and True Left at 5%, so now the Republican Party wins and Trump becomes president.

This is how voting for a third party only helps your enemy. If I were the Republicans, I'd be turbo donating to any left party right now. Divide et Impera as the Romans said.

my point is that disaffected leftists voting for third parties [...] does not mean support for Trump

With the current American Electoral law, it kind of does. Let's say that 5% of the votes instead of going to the Democrats go to some other third party. In an election this close, where both parties are likely to get between 48 and 52% of the votes, this would mean ensuring the victory of the Republicans.

This is a huge problem with the FPTP system, but that's the law for this election. It would be great to change it, but that's talk for the next one. Voting for a third party ensures that the party you like the least will win in a FPTP system. CGP explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Not quite accurate. Voting third party signals that third party platforms are more popular, and can shift the larger parties.

Maybe, but you are still conceding these elections.

Organizing and mass protesting can get meaningful change, same as striking. Forcing concessions is the way true change has occured historically, not simply at the ballot box.

You can definitely do this as well as voting for the party that best represents you. If you don't vote, it means you leave the choice of who will rule the country to the others. At least vote for the candidate that you think is more likely to listen to your protests, rather than forfeiting the elections in favor of the candidate that you know for sure will never listen to you.

If you don't vote, it means you are ok with either one and don't care enough either way to go to the ballot.

Not voting it's not a third option, it's a statement that you don't care about either of the two options. Voting a third candidate is instead simply useless and in practice amounts to the same thing as not voting or voting with a blank ballot.

So in practice the options are: voting for the Democrats, voting for the Republicans, doing nothing and being ok with either one winning or leaving the fucking country.

It's not stupid if it takes hours instead of minutes to charge up. If this tech really delivers, then I'll be more than ok with a 200 miles battery that charges in 3 minutes.

I mean we have entire genres only because people back in the day modded the shit out of game servers. Team fortress and DotA were both mods before becoming actual games.

And that was when, pray tell?

Quora ahahahah

Also a whole block of text all to say he fought against ISIS and al-Qaeda. I wonder who else fought against them... Oh yeah, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and pretty much every other country they came in contact with.

Now that they are mostly gone, the Levant is more stable. I wonder if he helped stabilize or destabilize the region...

Still no sauce

I'm talking about the murders and mass rapes that happened in Nazi occupied countries after the arrival of the Red army. Go ask the Baltic states, the Polish, the Hungarians, the Romanians etc.

Also that number is just the "confirmed and directly attributable" deaths caused by Stalin in just the Soviet union. The real.number of death caused directly or indirectly by him is sooo much higher

What in the what?

After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[8] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[9][10] some 390,000[11] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[12] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. [Also] the deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[14] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 (known in Ukraine as Holodomor).

This from the official Soviet records only and only in the Soviet Union. Real numbers are probably higher. Winter War death toll not included. War crimes and civilian casualties by the Red Army during the march on Berlin also not counted.

democratically elected government officials

Yes, and Mussolini won by plebiscite.

The best democratic elections are those where you only have one choice, it's known.