Dear reader, when you read OP’s posts, take the time to look at the upvote to downvote percentage. This poster is going out of its way to bash Democrats, and while we can’t say why that is (thanks mods!!!), we CAN say that there is a concerted effort by Republicans, Russians, right-wing trolls, and other authoritarians to throw this election to Trump to establish authoritarianism here. Keep that in mind as you read these articles from this poster.

And gets downvoted by ridiculous measures, which I’m glad for.

Hopefully most, if not all, of those 64k unaffiliated voters mark Harris and Trump needs FAR more than 12k votes to steal it.

Absolutely. Carter is an inspiration. Trump is an attention-seeking asshole.

Yeah. My first vote was for Bill Clinton in '92. I voted for him again in '96. I saw no difference between Gore and Bush and didn’t vote in 2000. We got the utter shitshow that was Bush 43, but even then I still voted third party in some elections.

No more. Team Red is now Team Fascist, and either Red or Blue will be in office unless and until Team Green or Team Yellow or whatever you got can take more than half of their political ideology’s votes.

That’s the real problem here. Third Parties cap out at 10% of the total vote, or about 20% of their ideologies’ parties vote share. They can’t win THIS party’s primaries. How can I expect them to win the country?

A couple of points I’d add to this:

1. Trump is a symptom, not the cause. Put another way, should Trump choke on an overcooked steak tomorrow and die, the threat won’t be ended. The cancer is the entire GQP, not just its leader.

2. Americans as a whole have a desire for authoritarianism. ‘Make those bad people behave the way I want them to’ is endemic in American culture.

3. Not only can it happen here, it has, twice, and damn near took our Democracy down with it both times.

Could be, though I’d question the prolificness. I guess that’s why the mods come down on us so hard. You can’t be certain of anything because…well, there ARE Russian bot-farms, Trumpers (even teams of them operating in tandem), and of course True Believers ™, and short of catching the guy in the act and examining his rig, you can’t be sure what you’re dealing with. That said, IMO, there’s not really a huge difference between them when it comes to debunking them. A vote for a third party is a vote for the major party most opposed to your third party in the USA. At least until we get RCV in more places!

Heh, I’ll leave it to you then. I’ll point out the flaws in this poster’s logic as I can, but really…with how prolific it is (can’t say it’s a bot, can’t say it’s a bot…), that’d be a fucking full-time job.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

And this poster’s response to this was as predictable as the sun rising in the east, setting in the west, water rolling downhill, and Russell Wilson sitting on the bench for a different team while we pay for him. 🤣

You called this poster out properly, and the mods refusal to let us call a spade a spade here. Readers, I invite you to read the definition of a troll from Merriam-Webster: to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content. The poster that constantly changes its name over and over again repeats it’ll keep posting its content despite being soundly rejected over and over again, just so it can piss us off. I’m not asking for it to be removed, though I sure won’t turn down such an outcome. But can we at least call a spade a spade where this poster is concerned?

The poster you’re replying to is very much designed to drive engagement, and any attention, good or bad, serves its purposes. I’d rather not feed this particular type of poster, but if we don’t point out the flaws in its reasoning, we might lose a few of those genuine Greens and Socialists.

I don’t disagree that voting in America is a pick between a steaming mug of donkey pee, and an elephant dung sandwich, and has been this way for decades. I’m even with you in that we should have a choice that doesn’t include donkey pee and elephant dung. But the reality is you can’t have 150 million different people in the world’s largest picnic each get different food, so there HAS to be a limited menu to vote from, lest nobody can agree on what we’re gonna eat and we all go hungry. And whatever has the most votes at the end of the day will be what we all eat, and unfortunately, that looks like it’ll be between not just donkey pee and elephant dung, but that the elephant has a bad case of gastroenteritis and the bread on the sandwich is EXTREMELY mouldy, AND there are a crazy number of rabid fans of elephant dung sandwiches for some fucked up reason. There are also a lot of crazies who have a taste for donkey pee, but at least you can wash that down with a stiff alcoholic drink. The elephant diarrhoea with two mouldy pieces of bread, on the other hand, can’t be gotten rid of except with a high-pressure wash. Since I don’t want the elephant excrement consumers to dictate what I am doing, and there’s not enough sane people in the world to offset the donkey pee or elephant dung choosers, I’ll pick the lesser of two evils.

And I say this as someone who is already a lockin for Proposition 131 (Colorado’s RCV) and who has voted third party in the past.

Numbers are really clear. When we can’t call a spade a spade, just point out the inhuman posting speed and let people come to their own conclusions…

This poster gets SOOO close to making an observation that would utterly destroy its half-baked, IMO inauthentic reasoning, if it’d only take a closer look at what it’s saying. So, I’ll close the gap here.

Suppose we could wave our magic wand and get everyone to agree with this poster, getting everyone who is voting Kamala Harris today to vote for … Rachele Fruit. But the price of this vote is that everyone who WAS voting Rachele Fruit now has to vote Kamala Harris. Suddenly, it’s Harris who is spoiling the vote for Fruit…and Jill Stein remains as much as spoiler for Fruit in this magic universe as she is for Harris in this real one. That’s the problem with third parties. No matter how the votes line up, whether it be for the Social Workers Party in this parallel universe or the Democrats in this one, votes for Third Parties merely harm your political ideology by taking away votes from the major party on your side of the political aisle and empower the major party most opposite of your ideology. You’d have to go to another parallel where we made Ranked Choice voting work before you could risk a SWP vote in a Rep-Dem world or a Dem vote in a Rep-SWP world.

SOOOO close, yet so far away.

Goddamn, Mods, you finally remove something this poster says? Are you starting to see the light in regards to this…person?

As another poster pointed out, Ohio is not a swing state anymore. It voted Republican in 2016 and 2020, and is Right of the country as a whole. Trump is +11, +9, +6, +8, +9, and +9 on polls in September, which is in line with August and July numbers. 538 has Ohio in Trump’s column 892 times out of 1000 runs. Harris only wins 108 out of 1000 simulations. Ohio is Trump Country. Period.

Yep. I’m not concerned one bit what self-described Socialist Chaos Tro…w is going to do in the privacy of the voting booth. If all it was doing was voting Third Party, I’d only blame it in aggregate for the outcome if Trump won by thinner margins than the number of idiots (and I’ll stand behind using this word to describe them) who voted for Left-Wing Third Parties.

What I’m arguing against is this poster and its ilk coming in and saying we shouldn’t vote Dem, and pushing inane BS like the Dems are somehow as bad as or even worse than the GQP and that it’s OK to throw our votes away as Third Party votes in light of what Team Pepe and the Trumpster Fire has planned for everyone in this country.

I’m too OLD to fight in a Civil War!

I’d seen the quote, but not the withholding of endorsement. Well, I guess he’s going to join the ‘both sides bad’ crowd.

Still. What does his opinion matter? He’s leaving the Senate next year so his proper alt-Right replacement can take over…

Things that make you go HMMM……

The people you call “Moderate Republicans” - the ones that you say Harris is ‘reaching out to’ - I consider to be fascistic.

And I call bullshit on this entire line of reasoning. Everyone right of you is not Fascist, and calling everyone who is right of you a Fascist is a really shitty thing to do to people, and is a good part of why this country is so paralysed.

lmao, Clinton lost because she arrogantly believed she didn’t need to address progressive concerns, just like Harris is doing now.

Bullshit equating Clinton with Harris but par for the course for these people.

I happen to be tired of the liberal bullshit being spewed here, personally.

Well, here’s this poster’s problem in a nutshell. If we don’t give these particular type of posters EXACTLY what they want, they’re gonna lump us in with the Christofascists that are currently taking over the GOP.

If you find .world’s politics intolerable, you should really try spending time in an instance that hasn’t gone as far out of their way to avoid leftist perspectives.

Why would I subject myself to such a bullshit factory. Little echo-chambers where nonsense like “Kamala Harris is a Fascist that murders Palestinian babies” is the same kind of bullshit factory that produces nonsense like “Kamala Harris is a Far-Leftist that murders and fucks babies for her Master, Satan,” just on the Left instead of the right.

And no. I don’t find .world’s politics intolerable. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. I find the brigade from .ml and other instances, coming here to push their bullshit that Harris is a secret Fascist who is just going to implement Project 2025 for Trump, to be intolerable, as much as the shitheads from the other side that pop in to say Harris is going to sell us off to the Mexicans and the Muslims, while being a baby-eating, baby-fucking Satan worshipper that plans global domination from the basement of a pizza parlour that doesn’t have a basement…

I’d suggest this poster and its fellow spreaders of left-wing conspiracy theory bullshit might fuck off back to a “Leftist” instance of Lemmy and circlejerk with each other about how EVIL the Democratic Party is and how UNLEFT it is, but that would be mean and censoring their opinion as another purveyor of this kind of bullshit I’m calling out here put it. So, instead, I’ll just call out the bullshit as I can, and call this stupidity that Harris is a secret Fascist as exactly what it is…stupid bullshit.

You actually remind me of another user here that was repeatedly banned for constantly accusing other users of being russian (sic) trolls…

Well, this is the Internet, but I’ll say I’ve only had comments banned. That’s why I am not engaging with this … person directly, because if I said what I want to say to this person, it would get removed, and I might get banned. I’d also point out that if you keep acting like “russian” trolls, you’ll keep getting called Russian trolls, just not by me, because we’re not allowed to do that here, DESPITE the fact that there was a troll operation discovered and exposed doing the exact same things that are being done here, today. That’s my only beef with the mods. But since I can’t call a spade a spade, I’ll just keep debunking the bullshit being pushed by… people I disagree with (see, I didn’t call 'em Russian Trolls, mods! I are good catboy!) This isn’t a fight we can give up because Russia DEFINITELY wants Trump running the show here regardless of the motivations of a given poster.

It might be time to log off and touch some grass, bud.

For a member of a faction who really screams loudly about being censored by other factions on the Left side of the spectrum here in the USA, this poster really likes to try to censor those other factions.

That’s OK. I’m touched that this poster is concerned about my health. I had a nice relaxing bike ride, that included lots of grassy areas. My health’s good. But I think I’ll stick around and keep pushing against this frankly offensive bullshit being pushed that Harris is somehow Fascist. I don’t care if this particular poster is motivated by a paycheque from Putin, one from Trump (but I repeat myself), one from Stein (but I repeat myself), or because it’s a True Believer ™, this bullshit serves Putin’s and Trump’s purpose, so I’m not gonna stop calling it out. I hope that doesn’t inconvenience this poster too much! :)