I don't mind the odd asshole who refuses to play ball, so far up their own ass they think they're so special and that the spoiler effect doesn't apply to their vote.

If that is, they're silent about it.

The second they start advocating for others to join them in their stupidity, they go from a harmless idiot to an active threat to democracy, exactly as bad as the MAGAt they likely are.

Most of the "centrists" if come across tend to regurgitate hard right talking points.

There's an old joke. The parties change but the message stays the same.

A group of Nazis have cornered a group socialists when a centrist comes along. The centrist listens to both sides, how the Nazis want to kill all the socialists and how the socialists don't want to die. Thinking long and hard on it, the centrist says that there's a compromise to be had, just kill half.

I was wondering what that expression was...

I'll say that Andy Weir got most of it right on how to do manned missions to Mars.

You build a huge space station, and then use that as the ship that goes to and from Mars.

Then the actual mission on the surface lasting a month or three before the astronauts pack up and head home.

Post WW2 European Democracy. The colonialism mostly didn't survive the colonizer having all their cities firebombed, often repeatedly. Most of the stolen prosperity burned. Not that every European country actually took part in the Colonialism,

And even then, half of the continent was then ruled by a totalitarian dictator, and were themselves exploited as colonies of Moscow. And the ones that were free lived in somewhat constant fear of being invaded by their somewhat insane neighbor.

But the key is, the people who wrote the post WW2 constitutions, wrote in stuff that made them more solid democracies than had existed before, what with many of them still being monarchies prior to a pair of devastating wars.

Lessons have been learned about the mathematical structure of democracy.

I believe that the true key to communism is extreme democracy. Every man, woman, and yes, child, should have a voice in government, and that voice should matter. And yes, the European Democracies are closest to that goal. Especially with the creation of the EU.

Closest, but nowhere near there yet.

I'll jump in. European Democracies that are taking care of their people are the furthest along.

Because that's how you get to true communism.

The pitfalls on the path are the same that any democracy faces. Mostly authoritarians seizing power.

Vanguard parties are also a threat on the path to communism. Lenin participated in one election, and lost. So he seized power and created a new feudalist state, and then called it communism.

Simple question, where are the Whigs today? Gone? Because that's what it takes to have a different party. The Whigs imploded, and the Democratic Republicans then swept the elections for a couple of years until the Republican Party coalesced.

Gore did not in fact win. Not because he didn't have more votes, but because it was close enough that Republicans could steal the election. I Ralph Nader had not been on the ballot, Gore would have easily pulled the win. But several thousand unimpeachable votes.

This is called the Spoiler Effect. It's the mechanism by with Durverger's Law works. A vote for a third party is a vote against your own interests. Ralph Nader voters were horrified to learn that they helped Bush win the election.

But all this debate here is effectively in a vacuum. We're not actually talking about the current election. A vote for a socialist third party in this year's election is a wasted vote. Full Stop. You'll not impress anyone, and the socialist candidate will not care about you. And that's because the "socialist" candidate is likely a Republican plant. Because the two major parties know about the Spoiler Effect, and Republicans specifically have been funding the "left leaning" third parties to split the vote so that they can win.

If you as an individual want to harm yourself, I'll not really care. I can't stop you. But if you start advocating for others to join you, I'll call you out as a Republican plant, working to fuck over the rest of us.

Just because you're too lazy to actually look them up, doesn't mean that they aren't full of equations.

This is one Proof of Arrow's Theorem;

Let G be a coalition with size ≥ 2. Partition the coalition into nonempty subsets G 1 , G 2.

Fix distinct x , y , z. Design the following voting pattern (notice that it is the cyclic voting pattern which causes the Condorcet paradox):

voters in G 1 : x ≻ i y ≻ i z voters in G 2 : z ≻ i x ≻ i y voters outside G : y ≻ i z ≻ i x

(Items other than x , y , z are not relevant.)

Since G is decisive, we have x ≻ y. So at least one is true: x ≻ z or z ≻ y.

If x ≻ z, then G 1 is weakly decisive over ( x , z ) . If z ≻ y, then G 2 is weakly decisive over ( z , y ). Now apply the field expansion lemma.

See how helpful that is? No, Well, if you had a phd in math or political science it would be.

This is the wiki link if you want the full Proofs. And that's just Arrow's Theorem.

Durverger's Law is both simpler, and more targeted. It simply states that if you have a system of government where there is single winner elections and plurality voting, you will inevitable have a two party system, and that further, any attempt to create a viable Third Party is not only doomed to failure, but is actively harmful to the interests of those Third Party voters.

In other words, the Spoiler Effect, Like what happened with Ralph Nader in 2000. He's the reason why Bush won.

Arrow's Theorem and Duverger's Law.

Trump has basically openly admitted that if he had his way, this would be our last election.

JD Vance is a weird corpo-monarchist. He's written about it a bit, but his corpo-daddy Peter Thiel has openly spoken about it.

Then there's Project 2025, a literal blueprint for Trump to follow to turn the country into a christo-fascist dictatorship. Vance wrote the forward to the book form, but the author is holding it back until after the election. Not out of shame, but because they know that being so open with their plan has hurt them in the polls.

Bots building post history in an abandoned looking sub. Usually done to get access to some other sub.

With the right looking post history you can scam your way onto a surprising large number of moderation teams.