No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Your argument is a false dichotomy.
Just because the Libertarians ran a spoiler candidate too does not magically make Jill Stein not a spoiler.
Those votes would not ever go to Clinton, therefore there is no spoiler effect. Green party voters would sit out the election than support forever war (Clinton's foreign policy) or genocide (Harris' foreign policy).
Not correct. I voted green in a very, very blue state in 2016, because Stein--at the time--seemed like the best candidate to vote for to register my opposition to Clinton and the conduct of the DNC. I suspect that there were a fairly large number of people like me in the state that I lived in at the time, although the state still handily went blue.
I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:
Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.
I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.
Any unbiased "what if candidates had done things differently" evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.
(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)
This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of "the chief is good, it's everybody else whose a problem". The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their "chiefs" to same standards as they do everybody else.
Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.
Well said-I feel the same.
You should look up what a false dichotomy is. A false dichotomy is typically when someone presents two choices as the only possible options, ignoring other possibilities. My argument doesn't do that. I'm arguing you have no-idea where Stein voters (or Johnson voters for that matter) would go if not for Stein. Also, you may not have noticed it, but you quite literally engage in false dichotomy in your response.
You are still making the assumption that voters only have two choices. No matter how much you've convinced yourself that's the case; its not reality. Voters don't have to vote. Voters can vote Republican or however they want. No candidate is owed a vote, however much Democrats want that to be a thing.
The entire rhetorical approach you are engaging in is why Kamala has been slipping in the polls, and its precisely why Hillary lost in 2016. If you want your proffered candidate to win, you actually have to convince people that they are worth voting for. And unlike Kamala, Trump is out there doing that. Stein is out there doing that. Chase Oliver is actually doing that (you don't know who that is do you?), and guess what? Oliver is beating Stein in most swing states.
The claim that Stein is spoiling when they are polling at literally less than measurable numbers is so obviously idiotic, no one worth respecting would give it anything more than a cursory swipe.