Lord Zentei wrote:Go fuck yourself right back. I was not the one who first spoke about Hitler in this thread, so you can shove your Godwin invocation back up your rear. You had ALREADY answered a question from Thanas and you played along just fine until now.
Using Hitler as an illustrative example of evil to test the limits of one's convictions is one thing. It is what Thanas did, and it is OK. It is like testing Utilitarianism by asking questions about when torture is permissible and seeing if someone sticks to their guns and provide a good argument. Saying "your proposed course of action leads to or is equivalent to Hitler" is another, particularly when you lie about it, by omission or otherwise.
And I am well aware of the historical events leading up to the ascension of Hitler, spare me your lectures. The point was to demonstrate that obviously you have to take more into your evaluations than merely taking the "lesser of evils" approach, which was unquestionably a key issue to Hitler's ascension. And you ignored this entirely in favor of ranting. And now you've also ignored my more recent post as well in which I responded to your points.
I did not ignore it. I just have not gotten to it yet. And no. You do not get to backpedal and move the goal posts.
As another aside, this approach is EXACTLY how Hitler was able to gain enough votes to grab power in 1933. People knew very well that he was bad news (though they didn't realize quite how bad), but they voted for him anyway since at least he wasn't a Communist, and the centrist parties didn't have enough support for them to be considered "viable".
Where exactly did the point you say is there come in? Where is the awareness of history you claim to have demonstrated in there? I dont see it.
Now for the rest of your post.
Now it's you who don't read. I just explained the justification for protest votes which have a low-to-zero chance of making a difference. Making people feel better was NOT the criteria.
You mean this?
Unfortunately, if everyone (or at least enough people) holds this position, then that is definitely a self-fulfilling prophecy. Supporting the prevailing approach to analysis like this is itself an act with consequences. Meanwhile, aiming for higher ground does make sense, even if you have to pass through a local minimum in the utility curve to get there.
Was that a matter of me not reading, or was that edited in? The lag time between your post and my beginning a response was pretty quick, and in my initial reading, I do not remember this being there. Not an accusation. Just a question. I will address it presently.
I am speaking within a limited set of conditions. Namely, a 2 opponent race in which both have shored up large guaranteed pluralities and are fighting over leftovers insufficient to give the election to a third option. Under those conditions and just for that vote, voting for the lesser of two evils is the only viable option.
That does not mean that third parties being non-viable is self-fulfilling. You just have to understand the nature of the US political landscape. Very little of the vote in the US is actually apportioned based on positions and policies. Most of it is apportioned based on party loyalty. Group membership. Jim gets raised in a republican household and thus is highly likely to vote republican. Same goes for the democrats. You know those people who approved of the job Bush was doing when he left office? 35% or something like that. Yeah, those people. About the same number for the democrats. So, 70%ish of the electorate is made up of Die-Hard Will Support No Matter What fans of one party or the other. The other thirty percent are undecided voters. Of those undecided voters, only a minority think enough about policy to consider protest voting, and they may be right or left leaning (I for example am about Sweden level left-leaning). The rest are the mindless middle (which is not to say that the partisans cannot be mindless) who make up their minds based on trivial things like how personable the candidate is, and whether or not they might want to have a beer with the candidate, or who had the most recent public gaffe.
Mathematically, protest voting in the presidential election is not a viable option for changing the outcome in a positive direction. There is no way to make it one in the short term. Instead, you have to change the game. Doing that cannot be accomplished by voting in a presidential election. No "message" will reach the major party that they need to shape up via disorganized protest voting--because their policies dont necessarily depend on what the voters want, they can manipulate the message of the election, and the signal to noise ratio of disorganized protest voting is too low because the votes are distributed across several third parties and reduced voter turnout. Moreover, if the local minimum in the Utility Curve is too low... well... any future gains
may not be relevant, or it may nullify the end gain via less dramatic means.
What you have to do is induce changes in who gets elected in a direction you want, in a way that the party machinery cannot manipulate or ignore. You must make them afraid of an actual faction.
1) You can make your displeasure noted by abandoning the party in an organized fashion. Get the local liberals in states like texas who are often very liberal out of pure contrarianess to vote green in local and federal elections. You can win elections this way. They wont be the presidential election, but it will force local democratic politicians to swing left. It WILL make the party as a whole take notice when they start losing the few seats they have in the state legislature and federal congressional delegation. This is probably the hardest to do.
2) Primary challenges from the left in safe seats (where, if you win the primary challenges, you are likely to win the general due to the same party loyalty that otherwise might hamper you), and well-funded campaigns in what the republicans think are safe seats for them, in off-year elections with naturally low voter turnout when a few thousand mobilized votes can actually matter. This is what the Tea Party did. It worked.
3) Using the above strategies to build a base for either a more progressive democratic party that the power brokers must fear and placate, or a viable third party that can win elections and form a group-loyal party base. Hell, you can even do both.
You just have to organize it, and if the Tea Party can exist in the pocket of the Koch Brothers, such a progressive movement can be funded by Ted Turner, or individual donors. It is a possibility.
Protest movements are seldom rational when they first begin. But making short term gains is not the point, as you yourself agree to in the following point.
Protest movements can be very rational. In the long view. That does not mean that the methods taken are rational or effective. There is no point in protesting in a way that can never actually be effective. You instead protest in a way that is effective.
They got the message, all right - and their bosses and financiers then proceeded to alter the message in the media. After all it's not as if they're stupid.
Then you accept the argument that protest voting as we are presently discussing it (individuals doing it in a disorganized and ad hoc way) wont affect long term change. Gotcha.
It's only when they genuinely think that they'll consistently lose, or when a protest movement becomes powerful enough that they have no choice but to assimilate it that they not only get the message, but actually accept it.
Protest movements rarely actually work unless they are organized and unless they have concrete goals. This is one reason (among several) why the Tea Party worked to radicalize the GOP and make them more powerful, and why the Occupy movement has done no such thing.
The Tea Party had goals. It could mobilize voters. It put forth its candidates for office and took advantage of the off-year congressional elections. Occupy has few concrete policy goals. It did not put forth its own candidates. It got beaten, often literally. You can count Elizabeth Warren as the only politician at the national level that one could even come close to saying they elected. The other members of the progressive caucus predate them.
You are putting forth a protest movement aimed at the presidential election, and claim that
somehow a bunch of people doing this can make long-term changes in the political landscape of a country even if they must pass the country through a local minimum in the utility function, with no short term benefit other than making people feel better about themselves (which is the only benefit, while passing through said local minimum). I am offering a method by which long term benefit can be achieved, while not passing through that local minimum and gaining electoral benefit in the short and medium term.
Which is superior?
-- Asuka
