Let’s run with your hypothetical. Let’s follow it to the logical conclusion… The election is going to come down to swing states, and the only voters that could possibly affect the result are the Muslim voters mentioned above. Magically, nobody else exists or matters. Don’t worry about how. If they vote third party, Trump wins, and it’s all their fault… That’s your scenario.

Except wait. Today isn’t Election Day. Harris could do a 180 on her stance this evening. She has the ability to act now to change the future, to get those precious votes, the only votes that matter. But for some reason, she really doesn’t do it, she doesn’t care… And that’s the problem your hypothetical has.

In reality, her campaign staff made their own choices, and they still have the power to adjust course if they feel like it. Or not. Whatever they like. But somehow you think it’s the Muslim voters who are in control here.

Single issue voters and third party voters have always existed, and always will. If your political strategy is to blame them when you lose, you deserve to lose. Make a halfway decent campaign strategy. Or don’t.

Kamala knew how to get their votes, and she decided to support the continued violence instead. Maybe she had good reasons, maybe not, but it was a clear calculation and choice. Why would you insult her intelligence? Why would you undercut her campaign so close to election day? How dare you endorse Trump!

That’s you trying to blame someone other than yourself. You knew what could happen. You could have volunteered more. You could have donated more. But none of that matters compared with finding a scapegoat.

Patriotism leads to xenophobia, in the medium run with a large population. Xenophobia leads to racism. That’s not the same thing as fascism, but fascists are happy enough to take advantage of it.

There are no both sides. The two-party myth is nonsense. But stripper is really do exist.

Many of us realized that the simplistic labels don’t apply. We have views on issues, some of those views are quite clear and others less so, but you can’t capture our positions in a few words.

Honestly, you just become more protective of your stuff and things you consider yours as you get older.

Isn’t that plainly false? When I was in college, and just after that, I had almost no money, so I was incredibly protective of my stuff and things I considered mine. Later my income went up, so I didn’t need to worry about it as much. Surely many other people have had similar experiences.

You’re bringing up a good point. People who say we’ll become more “conservative” are usually equivocating on the meaning of the word. It’s not like we’re going to wake up tomorrow and decide that global warming is a hoax, or that we should stop eating cats and dogs. Of course we’ll keep doing those things.

What you wrote is true in systems that use the popular vote. It’s not true for states that use winner take all under the electoral college.

What’s the difference? If you are a minority voter in a non-swing state, your vote is worth zero. That’s slightly, but importantly, less than 1/300,000,000.

I think this is going to be great. Vance can’t control himself, and with no one fact checking him, he’s going to make up even more ridiculous s***. Just think of all the entertainment we got from the sofas and the cats and dogs. He’s just a walking meme machine.

(Yes, the cats and dogs story did lead to violent racist assholes trying to do bad things, but that was caused by Vance, not by us mocking him.)

What if we change your question. What if we ask about asylum seekers? Does that make it any clearer?

If you spend about 20 minutes online, you will find out that many people are fleeing their home countries because they don’t want to be killed, forced into slave-like conditions, or forced into occupations such as prostitution. Or they want to prevent that from happening to their children.

If you were to ask people in situations like this what country they’d like to go to, in the abstract, they might not say the United States. But their options are limited. So, what country are you suggesting as an alternative? If someone is starting in El Salvador, to pick a random country in Central America, where do you think they should go?

I think other people covered the main points, but when I haven’t seen mentioned yet here is the fact that, for the news to catch your attention, it has to be something exceptional. That shouldn’t be true, but many publishers believe it. They compete to have what’s new or different or exciting.

I blame this mostly on the big media companies, and also partly on consumers who believe that consuming news is a passive activity when in reality it’s an active choice. They could go find online websites and create their own RSS feed, for example, and then they wouldn’t be stuck listening to drivel. But it does take some work and some awareness.

For example, and I don’t want to go into details about specific political parties, think about all of the polls about the election. Those are mostly meaningless. We’ll find out exactly what public opinion is on Election Day. It’s not that you couldn’t have a poll, but if you’re posting new polling data every day it’s because you’re desperate to cover up for the fact that you don’t have anything new to say.

Challenge presented. Who has courage to accept? We shall see.

To think they found a position that is morally reprehensible from every possible angle, under all interpretations, and also involves bodily fluids, that’s somehow amazing.

In other words, racism was so overt that you don’t even need to mention it.

There are simple and solid answers to this. First of all, dozens of other countries make it work. So there’s nothing magical that needs to be done. Second, the Bill of Rights is there to protect the minority from the majority. It’s also there to protect the people from the government, which is partly synonymous. Third, right now everyone in the minority in a winner-take-all state is being disenfranchised. My vote never mattered, not once in my entire life. I think that’s far more important than rural voters having cool voting power. At least they would still have some voting power, whereas I have none.

Who is “we”, my friend?

If only CO2’s warming properties had been discovered in 1856. If only good models of global warming had been created in 1896. If only those had happened, maybe society could have taken more substantial actions…

Lol they’ll charge customers more if they get regulated. But that means they think customers would pay it, which means they think customers could be paying it now but aren’t, which means they aren’t generating as much revenue now for their shareholders as possible, which makes them a Bad Corporation.

And from a casual perspective, telling people their vote is pointless is (a) a way to show them you’re an asshole, (b) mostly pointless, and © quite possibly true regardless of how they vote.