No, I didn’t ignore your comment at all. I countered it with the fact that a VP becoming the next presidential candidate is not only not remotely like nepotism, but is the standard for US politics, going back to the 18th century.
Your anger at me is misplaced. I do understand how the system works, and I don’t like it either. But I prefer to direct my outrage where it will actually make a difference, and I’ve pointed out where you can, too: we need to change the system so 3rd parties actually matter. In the meantime, I’ll oppose anyone who will usher in a fascist government where women and minorities will have their rights stripped away, and where Christian nationalism will be forced into our orifices.
Because I doubt you’ll care enough to click that link, here’s a partial list:
John Adams (under George Washington)Thomas Jefferson (under John Adams)Martin van Buren (under Andrew Jackson)John Breckenridge (under James Buchanan)Henry Wallace (under Franklin Roosevelt)Richard Nixon (under Dwight Eisenhower)Walter Mondale (under Jimmy Carter)George H W Bush (under Ronald Reagan)Al Gore (under Bill Clinton)
And I’ve left out many, many more who didn’t wind up with the nomination, partly because I’m on mobile and cross-referencing between Lemmy and web sites is a lot of work.
This is nothing remotely like nepotism. Pretty much every VP does this. It’s part of the point, ffs.
Any more arguments I can immediately debunk with facts?
FPTP voting means 3rd parties can only be spoilers for the party they’re most aligned with. That’s a mathematical fact, whether we like it or not.
I hate that as much as you do, but edgy protest voting only gives the fascists more control.
If you really care about that, stop propping up fascists, and instead put that effort into an actual grassroots effort to make the US electoral system more fair:
The difference is stark and utterly bonkers. Look at every single headline coming out of CNN, CBS, NYT, NBC, ABC, FOX – literally all of them… the fact they’re all reporting on Harris and trump as though it’s a normal candidate dichotomy and not the insane disparity between a politician and a raving lunatic who should be sectioned by his loved ones for his own protection, is simply madness.
This should not be a contest. Nobody should be taking seriously a man who is a demonstrable racist, fascist, unhinged lunatic who rants about toilets and windmills, who has been found liable for rape, who can barely string sentences together, who has felony convictions, and who has demonstrably committed treason twice – and he’s treated the same by the media as a career prosecutor with none of that and who has actually sane (if centrist) policies….
Yes, and he’s been carefully learning from his failures ever since, honing his strategies in concert with other actually intelligent fascists like Bannon, Miller, etc, as well as foreign dictators like Erdoğan, Orbán, and Putin.
This threat is not being taken seriously enough, partly because they have a buffoonish carnival barker of a front-man who, by design, deflects attempts to take the threat seriously.
Plotting coups has been Roger Stone’s MO for decades. He was behind the Brooks Brothers Riot in 2000, and the J6 insurrection. He’s one of the key players and amongst the most dangerous fascists in the US, and it’s astounding he manages to stay out of our conversations – and largely away from repercussions – to the extent he does.
He’s been getting away with absolutely devastating ratfuckery since Nixon (whose face is literally tattooed on his back).
He desperately needs consequences. He’s needed consequences for decades.
I have a full shelf at this point that’s brimming, end to end, with books by ex- and current officials calling trump an actual fascist who is a danger to the country – The Divider, Why We Did It, Unthinkable, Betrayal, I Alone Can Fix It, Frankly We Did Win This Election, etc.
Proof:
None of the millions of words in those books have moved the needle much. This is good to hear, but nothing other than voter turnout will help.
Since there’s not enough time left for him to recover from this brutal ego bruise, I predict he’ll only do rallies from now on, or appearances on far-right media, because he’ll retreat to his snowglobe for reassurance for a while. He’ll avoid addressing Kamala directly, but he’ll ramp up his own network and rile up his mob. His team will struggle to rein him in, and some appearances might be cancelled.
He’s been more restrained at his rallies than I expected (he’s unhinged, sure, but only mildly more so). It may take him years – if at all – to recover from being so thoroughly bodied by a minority woman.
Men, definitely.. They do cancer screening, and men tend to be squeamish about prostrate exams (& I don’t blame them; I feel someone should pay me for my mammograms, not the other way round)), and ‘free’ & ‘anonymous’ removes a couple of hurdles.
e: ‘definitely’, not ‘too’. Weed kicked in as I started this comment. Sorry.
A federal law, the Hyde Amendment [1977], is already in place to block federal funding from going to abortion services and PPWP is audited annually to verify our compliance.
So this is even more performative and vindictive than it seemed at first glance. Thanks for pointing that out!
In addition, Planned Parenthood isn’t just an abortion clinic. It’s much more, providing crucial anonymous and free healthcare to the communities it serves.
Planned Parenthood served 2.4 million people last year and provided 328,348 abortions, according to its annual report. That works out to 13.7 percent of patients.
eta: that leaves nearly 90% of their patients seeking non-abortive care. I don’t know if it’s the same today, but in my day, they were the major non-school, community sex-Ed advocacy group.
The remainder received services including cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection testing and contraception. Nationally, STI testing and contraception were a part of more than 7 million visits. […] Nationally, Planned Parenthood provided 9,419 “prenatal services" and 2,889 adoption referrals in 2016.
In many places, they’re amongst the only free, anonymous providers of reproductive healthcare that young people can turn to for preventative education and care, pregnancy wellness, family planning, and yes, abortion.
It’s disheartening they’re under attack again. In 2024.
e: inclusivity: they provide men’s reproductive services, too! Thanks @Nougat & @FuglyDuck!
In a perfect world, where the president was chosen by the popular vote, yes, you’d be right. Going by pure mathematics, everything you said is true.
Unfortunately we have the electoral college, and in key places, the margins are so thin that only a handful of voters being swayed to vote for Stein can make all the difference. We saw this in 2016, where the popular vote went to Hillary but she lost, and the margins in key areas was less than what Stein won in those areas.
This is why she’s being pushed so hard. It has worked before.
I get that people are disillusioned by the clusterfuck that FPTP voting has created, which is why I’ve been pushing so hard for people to fight that, rather than protest-voting, which is objectively worse.
No, I didn’t ignore your comment at all. I countered it with the fact that a VP becoming the next presidential candidate is not only not remotely like nepotism, but is the standard for US politics, going back to the 18th century.
Your anger at me is misplaced. I do understand how the system works, and I don’t like it either. But I prefer to direct my outrage where it will actually make a difference, and I’ve pointed out where you can, too: we need to change the system so 3rd parties actually matter. In the meantime, I’ll oppose anyone who will usher in a fascist government where women and minorities will have their rights stripped away, and where Christian nationalism will be forced into our orifices.
How is that hard to understand?