Speak for yourself.

I know I'm all class but you are just a red neck or is ya a hillbilly?

Counter point: When you always vote for the lesser evil, you are still voting for evil, and (in a sense) tacitly accepting that evil will always win.

If enough people start voting somewhere else, the parties WILL adjust, and perhaps candidate acceptability will improve.

It would take a sizable number of people continuously rejecting what is being offered. If I'm the only one doing it, then yeah, it won't even cause a molecular sized ripple. If 1 million people are doing it, we'll see some change.

Look at the year guys. Its 2016 and the US needs a female president.

/s

And Jill Stein would be a terrific female President. (that's who I'm voting for, again)

The one good thing about her getting elected would be to not hear the word "Patriarchy" ever again.

Oh no wait, the patriarchy is probably still internalized in everyone except the enlightened.

The big problem with your statement lies with the word "continuously". As in: as long as enough people keep rejecting the two mainstream candidates (as much as folks like Trump could be called mainstream) election upon election, EVENTUALLY the parties will adapt. That may be true, but in the meantime, and a process like the one you're describing could easily take at least a decade if not multiple, SOMEONE will be governing, making policy, appointing supreme court justices, dealing with other countries and enforcing or dismantling regulations. (spoiler warning: it'll be one of the two "mainstream" parties)

Even if you think both options are evils, there's always one option less damaging to you than the other. Unless, of course, you're in a position where even the most damaging outcome barely affects you at all. In which case, lucky you.

I agree, this isn't a short process; within a decade, the president is (hopefully) only selected twice. Your spoiler outlines the problem of picking the lesser evil: the parties have no real incentive to change as long as their candidates are still getting picked.

I guess it comes down to this: If I am presented with two candidates for President that I find unacceptable, I'm not going to try and figure out which one isn't quite as bad. I'm going to refuse to vote for either. My buddy Bob from down the street can have a vote instead. The excuse "I only voted Hillary because Trump would have been worse" is a stupid excuse.

Except parties do change...but they do so slowly. Take gay rights for example. In 2004, Bush was able to use it as a wedge issue to boost his turnout. In 2008, Obama was kinda wishy-washy on it. Nowadays, the matter is mostly considered settled and politicians can openly praise companies threatening to withdraw from states that adopt regressive legislation. That wouldn't have been possible a decade ago. But politics is a very gradual process by nature.

I don't really see "I voted Hillary because Trump would have been worse" as a stupid excuse. Assuming those two get the nomination, one of those two is gonna represent you come next January. Voting for the candidate whose impact is the least negative may be slightly cynical and probably somewhat depressing, but far from stupid. It's called "damage control" and it's generally regarded as a perfectly sane action.

It's kinda like paying taxes. Nobody likes it, but most consider the alternative (being charged with tax evasion) much worse. So people grit their teeth and pick the less troublesome option. Pretending that the issue doesn't exist just tends to cause the worst outcome to happen anyway.

That works, if at least one of the candidates is acceptable. I trust Hillary about as far as I can throw her (not far, considering how much security she's likely to have), and Trump comes across as a rich idiot.

One can choose to vote for the less destructive candidate, and I can understand why someone would do that. However, one is still voting for a destructive candidate, and being willing to accept a destructive candidate "or else that one gets elected" may be part of why we keep getting destructive candidates.

If the choice is getting knifed or getting shot, why not at least try a third option?

Or you could look for a third option. If the taxes are too onerous, then work to get the tax laws changed.

In this particular case, a hole in the analogy is that you can reliably pay your taxes to avoid the penalty, but even if you did vote for the 'lesser evil' candidate (pay your taxes), you might still end up with the 'greater evil' candidate winning (tax evasion charges).

[I'll set aside that taxes are used to fund public projects, whether infrastructure, general utility, or armed forces. The USA tried voluntary taxation at first, but it caused problems]

The advantages of Trump and Sanders is that they don't have a (serious) politcal track record to be judged upon yet..... From a Western-European point of view, Hillary is just a puppet of elites and more likey to bring turmoil internationally than bringing peace. Even EU right-extremists prefer Sanders over her.....

I already have a lot of things to follow currently in the local and EU socio-economic news so I don't have much time left to dig deeper into the details of American politics but I noticed this book which looks very interesting:

"Queen Of Chaos" by Diana Johnstone
https://www.akpress.org/queen-of-chaos.html
(also available on Amazon)

A 30 minutes interiew of the author:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN06ovfdFiQ

Well, the one common sense option they have had since... ... I don't actually know.. is not going to happen now. It was a long, long shot after all.

By the way, if anyone from the US is wondering why Sanders is "questioned" on his "foreign policy experience" - but no one ever actually tries to quantify the question. Except for maybe Krauthammer, via something he thinks sounds appropriately imperious and hateful for the Russkies. Or why it's implied that Hillary somehow has a steady outlook on "foreign policy" that.. fills "people", somewhere, in some fantasy land, with confidence and motherly stern love, or something, that makes them behave respectfully (or whatever perverse paternal narrative is fielded with the presidency this time around) -- this has to do with the fact that her husband's administration is what the "Neocons" built on to upend the UN Charter and start two major aggressive wars in a couple of years, effortlessly..

The state department that gave you under the table deals in Paris that.. in the end turned out to have been unnecessary, pointless, have no relation to any policies - but made for a good story. Or that time every single government in the EU-region separately were asked to break the law in specific ways to score domestic political coin in the US from a pure PR perspective in the short term. Ah, such good memories.

Or that time everyone in Washington suddenly figured out Norway doesn't have the death penalty, and therefore won't extradite people to countries where they might risk the death penalty, as a matter of judicial consequence. And that, in fact, we don't make any exceptions under the table. While the government also, unbeknownst to the State department goons in the beginning, actually won't suffer politically if they say: "no, we will not kill someone out of revenge, because that's how things have worked here since the 1100s, long before the constitution, so shut up". But in fact that the opposite happens, and a very small minority would actually respect someone who argues for killing people, or going to war, for any amount of amazingly brilliant emotional reasons.

This state department, that on the one hand produced people like John Bolton as a UN Ambassador, or the state department that can still somehow in an instant leverage enough pressure to eternally prevent Iran from even applying to the WTO. The ones that treat Haiti and the Balkans as neat "small war" scenarios to distract the public from the President's unfortunate tabloid headlines. The state department that genuinely submits analyses on how to best "affect" the local governments for furthering "American interests", and employs hundreds of morons to write these papers rather than have one fucking sensible person go and talk to people, as an ambassador should. The state department that actually submitted a suggestion to the Norwegian government to build a military base outside Oslo that they could use as an embassy, because their fifty armed guards in the Embassy quarter were being eyed with some suspicion and fear by all the other embassies next door.

This state-department comes from the foreign policy approach that Bill Clinton had at the end of his presidency. He needed something groundbreaking to happen, something history-defining, and the State Department found it for him. They had to sabotage and burn a lot of bridges to do it, but they did it. And they repeated that process with Bush and just a couple of insane people planning "a few wars", to you know, save the world and bring it into a new era. And, although I didn't think that was possible, with even more amazingly horrifying results than before.

See, this is a state department that when a president says: "the law is a hindrance to us, how can we go around that?", then has west-point educated folks in small platoons file serious reports on how to do it in practice. Here's how you're going to deal with this, here's where the black sites should be, here's how you deal with allies, here's the techniques to use, here's the legal loophole, here's the legal justifications that won't fly but will be able to stonewall a legal process.

And with Hillary, there's an expectation that this enterprise will continue in some moderately predictable fashion. Perhaps with slightly less excesses than a Trump presidency ultimately will result in.

Personally I would prefer a Trump presidency, though. Since then it is much easier to say fuck you to any of the insanity that's being suggested. So we won't have to take part in yet another batch of small wars and crises we've created ourselves. Really, the captain in my old platoon is actually getting his fantasy fulfilled, that we're really eyeing a real war with the Russians soon. They've been hallucinating about the Red Danger attacking us for 50 years, and now we're going to attack instead, just to prove the danger was real. It's amazing.

What disturbs me is that everyone focuses on the presidential election and they vote based on what changes the president is going to do. Bernie wants us to be socialists, so vote for him and we'll be socialists. Yay!

But that's not the president's job. He's not our king. He doesn't make the rules. He can tweak some issues through executive orders, but he can't make laws. He is the head of backing those laws and he's the almost-final-stop in preventing bad laws. But he doesn't make laws.

That's what's disturbing. And our last 2 presidents (and the last one especially) have been setting some seriously dangerous precedence. Luckily, our courts are stopping him when appropriate. But from the youth I talk to (25 and under), they seem all on board with having a tyrant.

So little talk of "freedom" these days and too much talk about "economics" is scary. Our gov't isn't supposed to promote the general welfare while abandoning freedom. It's both-and.

Many people don't value freedom from what I see. I have a Bernie supporter in my family and she could care less if ministers are imprisoned for refusing to go against their god (in most Socialist countries, this is true), or if the Senate and House are wiped to get things done (total tyranny), or if people are imprisoned or killed for speaking against things they think are wrong but the majority think are OK (LGBT issues are what everyone's talking about right now, but it extends to many other arenas), and plenty of other issues.

I'm always hearing about the American dream being wiped from existence b/c of our economic situation. But the American Dream and what makes America great is our freedom, not our money. If we give up our freedom to protect our money, the we have lost. And from what I'm seeing, we're losing a bit at a time.

Sometimes we agree that we want to lose some freedom, of course. I know protecting waterways right now is against the Republican platform and for the Democratic platform. But people are voting across the aisle and for good reason. Business interests are good, but having clean water is better. Businesses should be responsible for cleaning every drop of water they dirty, IMO. Anyway, I got off my point. Sorry. :)

FREEDOM!!!!!!!! :)

>_< ..yeah. So here's the thing. I accept the fact that your logic is very reasonable in the US. And that your reasoning here is more present and logical than you would normally expect. And I don't mean to belittle your intelligence, at all, because you very obviously are not stupid. The counterpoint about how you're not supposed to elect kings is a very good one. Certainly a familiar argument that I've made before as well.

But the thing is that Sanders did it properly. He didn't go as a third-party candidate to split the democratic party, etc. He went through the nomination process as a normal candidate, to field policies and arguments for them that his counter-candidates would have to respond to. Thereby shaping an official and public platform for the remaining candidate, whether he would be the final one or not. That they would then have to follow unless they would want to suffer politically for ignoring what the party arrived at.

See, this is what we call "politics" in the rest of the world. Like when Elisabeth Warren fields a narrative about banking laws or tax reform, and asks the present candidates to respond to it. Then what she is doing is not "looking at which candidate to endorse, so she will hand over her voting population to a particular candidate". She's asking the final nominee, whoever that might be, to have a substantial response, based on their outlook, to a very important political issue that is still controversial in Congress. Will the party stand behind this direction, to favor opportunities for individual opportunity. Or behind that other one, to favor big business in a slightly more utterly overt fashion. You know.. this is basic, basic stuff.

And my problem here is that it doesn't take. I can literally count on five fingers the amount of people in the US who has any kind of holistic approach to all of this that isn't steeped in some weird internal narrative about the inevitability of history, or whatever. I mean, seriously, out of 400million people, I know of five who can write consistently and critically about the actual selection process and the outcomes of the races. The rest are lost in some weird plutocracy-land where a machine spews out a ream of paper every morning with the opinions they should hold today about which country is the most amazing in the world, etc. It's perverse. It's genuinely incomprehensible to me that a country with .. schools.. can produce something like this. I've literally been to countries where political meetings happen under a bush out on a hill where even the dumbest hanger-on had a more present approach to democracy than that.

I mean, how does it happen? How do you end up with a voting population that consists of 20% genuinely voting on movie-plot narratives from marvel comics - and the rest don't vote at all? It just makes no sense.

I think it has something to do with free will. I can crash in a plane and die, and it doesn't bother me, so long as I get to be the pilot flying the plane. That make sense?

We have to embrace both the light and the darkness. It's the only way we ever get through the door to the other side.