WH wins fight to keep drone killings of Americans secret

[Lord Zentei]

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.

Read the post again. I did NOT say that your proposed course of action is equivalent to Hitler, I said that the APPROACH you advocate was the one that allowed Hitler to gain enough votes to gain power.

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.

I have done neither of those things.

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.

That's because you are jerking your knees. Take a look again: I did NOT claim that I had actually demonstrated history in my post. I merely said that I was AWARE of the history. Your verbose and condescending rant covered things which I deemed common knowledge, and which had nothing to do to alter the fundamental point. That point being that choosing the lesser of evils was an approach which permitted Hitler to gain power. An observation which was perfectly legitimate given that you had already said that yes, you would choose Saddam over Hitler. But now that it is pointed out to you that others used the "lesser of evils" approach to chose Hitler over the Communists in real life, you throw a hissy fit and accuse me of lies and goalpost moving.

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 honestly don't recall whether that particular couple of sentences were added; I did make clarifications to my post a couple of times before you replied, and I made none afterwards.

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.

An option which is not going to lead to effective change to the policies of the lesser of evils for that vote, nor for it to feel any kind of political pressure from its constituents. You are still stating your conclusion as though it were self-evident.

I have pointed out that Obama has consistently shown himself to support Republican policies, both domestically and abroad, and that the Democrats and Republicans are playing a good cop/bad cop game with the electorate. This game undermines your naive application of utilitarianism, since this way there is no justification for choosing an option other than one of the two for such a particular vote, and the two have the same objectives and the same paymasters. These special interests don't give a shit whether you achieve your utilitarian benefit on some Nth decimal point on the voter return index, and they certainly know how to present you with exactly the options that they want you to choose from. The only viable option is not to play their game at all. The only viable way to rejecting that game in a general election is not to vote for either of the big parties.

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.

This is not bred into people, it is the prevailing political culture. The whole point of supporting third parties is precisely to undermine that culture. And you're assuming that it is hopeless to change it. So yes, that is certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially since you yourself reckon that 30% of the electorate are NOT the diehard supporters of the parties, but are merely people who are voting for the one or the other because voting third party does not occur to them. Is it because they're "mindless", or are they using the exact same metric that you're using?

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.

I have absolutely no objections to changing the game in the long term, but that doesn't justify short term apathy. If you're intent on changing the game, then it's not enough to do so only during primaries. You have to demonstrate that the challenge in the primaries wasn't an irrelevant minority opinion of people who are willing to toe the line when their backs are to the wall. And as for the utility curve: the functional difference between Obama and the Republicans has shown itself to be very minor indeed. The difference is principally that Obama is better at fooling people into thinking that he's on their side, hardly a good thing.

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.

So... as an alternative to protest voting, you can protest vote, including in Federal elections, except not in the Presidential election?

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.

I believe I mentioned this in an earlier post:

A good point, though I don't think that movements like OWS and the Tea Party are all you can do to effect change. Rely on them alone, and they can be patronized, marginalized or ignored. However, third parties which adopt the positions of movements like them would be more effective than the third parties by themselves or the movements alone, even if only to make the incentive to change for the better more powerful.

So... yeah.

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.

I recall that in the OWS thread, my primary objections to the Occupy Wall Street movement was precisely that they didn't have any kind of plan to organize properly and that they didn't politicize their movement and gain a foothold in the Democratic party, so yeah. I haven't said that organization was something to be avoided, you know. Merely that the individual voter should not vote for the lesser of evils in a general election and claim that he had no choice.

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.

So they can, and so you should. But it's too late to do that in the general election, as you've concluded yourself. But the general political culture insists that protest voting in the general election is pointless, so hardly anyone does it.

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.

Are you actually attempting to be as smarmy as possible? Why are you picking this sentence out of it's context when it is obviously qualified by the very next point that you are quoting?

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?

Not correct. I am principally putting forward a point on personal moral responsibility during the general election. If enough people had that mindset, then a protest movement would be less likely to be necessary in the first place, and additionally that if more people do that, then a protest movement is more likely to emerge from it. I am certainly NOT putting against an organized-from-the-start long-term movement. Have at it.

[Thanas]

The reason why the Hitler comparison is so apt is because it is so very much the same argument here - the Communists/social democrats/Romney are going to make the poor starve, so let us vote for other guy who has a bad human rights record as well but at least is not a communist, true bastions of evil they are.

[Lord Zentei]

You can calm down, as Alyrium was obviously using 'Hitler' and 'Saddam' as pegs for 'Very Bad Choice' and 'Bad Choice', and how not voting at all could be effectively a partial vote for bad choice when such things are extremely close run.

The argument of protest votes is that they're in physical terms, the exact equivalent of abstaining from voting at all. And thus, you have a higher chance of 'Very Bad Choice' occurring, instead of 'Bad Choice', because you could have voted for the lesser evil but chose not to. One can be all high minded about a better system, but that's not happening without a collective hivemind of individuals suddenly becoming extremely well organized and gaining massive resources. In the real world, your personal moral stance is utterly irrelevant to the physical reality of things, unless suddenly and spontaneously thousands of other people suddenly, visibly and very vocally align with you, while having the means to make this known.

I'm not going into the Hitler thing again, see my previous post for that.

On the "avoiding a very bad choice", I've addressed that multiple times. Also a question I posed on page 1 remains unanswered:

I'm still waiting for someone to prove that the Democrats are the lesser of evils, and not pretty much the flip side of the same coin.

OTOH, I have in fact provided evidence for the fact that the Democrats (or at least Obama) are NOT the "lesser of evils" after all.

And while protest movements would be nice to see, this is also about personal moral responsibility, as Aly himself accepted when he talked about voter return index....

No, fuck it. All of this has already been covered.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Read the post again. I did NOT say that your proposed course of action is equivalent to Hitler, I said that the APPROACH you advocate was the one that allowed Hitler to gain enough votes to gain power.

So... you ignore one part of a sentence and respond only to the other. Leads to Hitler. Perhaps a bit of a simplification but...

Your verbose and condescending rant covered things which I deemed common knowledge, and which had nothing to do to alter the fundamental point. That point being that choosing the lesser of evils was an approach which permitted Hitler to gain power.

No. It was not. Backroom deals that got him the Chancillorship, followed by burning down the Reichstag and blaming the communists and SPD for it, and subsequently literally beating your opponents and their voter base while taking advantage of 9/11 esque fear in the days immediately afterward to create an executive dictatorship is how Hitler got to power.

In order to make your point, you twisted the truth beyond recognition. You dumbed it down and reduced it to a fairy tail like the story of Pocahontas in an american primary school classroom.

I honestly don't recall whether that particular couple of sentences were added; I did make clarifications to my post a couple of times before you replied, and I made none afterwards.

That is fair. It is responded to now.

An option which is not going to lead to effective change to the policies of the lesser of evils for that vote, nor for it to feel any kind of political pressure from its constituents. You are still stating your conclusion as though it were self-evident.

Because empirically, that is what has occurred. In 2000. Message spinning will nullify any long-term advantage. We know this, because it has happened. By your own admission.

You want, in this case, the democrat to lose their seat. However, you want them to lose their seat to your guy. To someone who will not drag the country through hell. You dont play their lesser of two evils game and complain about it. You change the rules of the game so that the lesser of two evils is not permitted to run in the first place. For that, you have to do actual leg work.

I have pointed out that Obama has consistently shown himself to support Republican policies, both domestically and abroad, and that the Democrats and Republicans are playing a good cop/bad cop game with the electorate. This game undermines your naive application of utilitarianism, since this way there is no justification for choosing an option other than one of the two for such a particular vote, and the two have the same objectives and the same paymasters.

This is not actually true. They dont have the same objectives. Obama has supported relatively progressive policies. Obama care is not what I would have wanted, but it was better than what the Republicans wanted. Even if his polices are decades-old republican ones. The political landscape of the US has swung rightward in the past few years for a variety of reasons. Having the same paymasters is one reason. The perception that in order to win, the democrats have had to lurch right to capture the "center" is another (why they strategize this way, I have no idea. It may just be the rhetoric they mumble while sucking General Electric's dick). We can argue back and forth about the reasons for this. They dont matter. This situation simply IS, and it is one we have to deal with.

In effect, the country can spiral into the 5th circle of hell slowly or fast. If it does so slowly, you have some room to work in order to arrest the spiral. I will elaborate below, I suspect you will know why I choose to delay.

This is not bred into people, it is the prevailing political culture. The whole point of supporting third parties is precisely to undermine that culture. And you're assuming that it is hopeless to change it. So yes, that is certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially since you yourself reckon that 30% of the electorate are NOT the diehard supporters of the parties, but are merely people who are voting for the one or the other because voting third party does not occur to them. Is it because they're "mindless", or are they using the exact same metric that you're using?

Some portion of them might protest vote and instead use my logic. Some do protest vote. They are a minority of that 30ish percent. The mindless middle... no. They are mindless (at least in terms of the election). They dont vote with their heads. It is hard to explain to someone who does not live here and experience our election seasons. First presidential debate is a really really good way of explaining it. Romney "won" the first presidential debate. Not because he put forth better arguments. He lied through his teeth the whole way. He won because he "took control", by which I mean he bullied the moderator. The metric of who wins is based on opinion polls taken just after the debate, of people who watched. Some percentage of them (assuming the same initial population breakdown I described above) will vote for one candidate or the other anyway. Some vote with their heads based on the facts and probably would have said they prefer Obama. Others are making the decision with their primitive ape brains that respond strongly to social dominance. Those are the people I refer to. They are the ones who actually decided that Romney "won" the debate. The others were spoken for already. The debates in the US are more about drumming up the party base and winning over those people. They are not actually attempts to convince anyone of anything based on the facts.

A good historical example was the Kennedy/Nixon debate. Kennedy won in large part because he was physically more photogenic than Nixon was.

As for undermining. When you undermine, you go after the foundations, not the commanding upper floor of Rochester Keep.

So... as an alternative to protest voting, you can protest vote, including in Federal elections, except not in the Presidential election?

Under certain circumstances, you can. Just not when the effect of protests matters in the short term. IE. Texas, where the outcome is essentially pre-determined.

The thing with a presidential election is that the amount of money and people you have to move in order to affect the outcome of the election in a direction you actually want is very very high. In this case, the direction you actually want is toward a good, not the lesser of two evils. If you fail, you get the greater of two evils, and the lesser will do what has happened historically and turn your failed effort into a talking point about how no one should ever ever protest vote again. Lest they get 8 years of Bush. If you fail, you make it harder to do the money and people moving next time.

You have to have a LOT of very stubborn and determined people who dont burn out to make that work in the long term, because it wont work in the short term and constant failure is hard to maintain.

It is oddly meta. I know. It is not so much that I accept the idea that one should vote for the lesser of two evils in the presidential election because third parties are not viable--and thus buy into a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I am actually doing is accounting for the fact that this is the popular perception and any gains made by the greater of two evils in the process of such protest voting in the presidential election will be "interpreted" (by which I mean both interpreted and spun into) that perception being reinforced.

So, you have to do things that they cannot spin away. Like the Green Party taking half the formerly democratic seats in the Texas Legislature, or a number of safe moderate democrats being challenged and beaten in the primaries by actual leftists who will join the Progressive Caucus and act like Alan Grayson or Dennis Kucinich (who I voted for in the 2008 primary, incidentally) from a safe seat not subject to being taken by a republican. That is a thing you can actually accomplish. More importantly, it is an actual win that will motivate the leftists in your camp, and make it easier to sustain political momentum. It is a victory you can carry into the future, rather than a doomed last stand against the forces of darkness.

It sends a real signal. "Be liberal, or you might lose your power and be replaced by someone of our choosing". And unlike doomed protest voting in the presidential election, it cannot be spun into oblivion.

That becomes power you can actually leverage into policy. It also lets you claim victories you can leverage into political capitol, and a larger protest vote movement given enough success. But you need to have that success first, and you need to not undermine yourself by starting with the general presidential election. That should wait until later.

Note: the two major US parties are not monolithic. They are essentially coalitions that dont have separate parties. There is a more progressive faction within the democratic party. There are various fault lines within the republican party. This can be manipulated. It should be manipulated.

I believe I mentioned this in an earlier post:

Yes. The big difference is that the Tea Party was being used. It was not the thing with the power, it had puppeteers named Koch and strings made of Glenn Beck and Limbaugh.

Had Occupy been politically competent, it could have done the same thing and been much more difficult to marginalize.

Are you actually attempting to be as smarmy as possible?

No, I just dont get handed a straight-line like that very often.

If enough people had that mindset, then a protest movement would be less likely to be necessary in the first place, and additionally that if more people do that, then a protest movement is more likely to emerge from it.

I am a die-hard realist, I am afraid. I deal with the world that is. I then attempt to change it. It is useless to me to wax poetic about how condition X would be wonderful, and if only it were true so many problems would be solved.

I would LOVE it if taking the moral high road in elections were viable and lead to good outcomes. It would be awesome. It is currently not the case that this is true. The solution is of course to MAKE it the case. In order to do that though, you need a strategy. It may be the case that we are just talking on different levels here. You are talking about the virtues of a particular end goal. An end goal I happen to share. I however am talking about how you get there. How you get enough people together and build a coalition around taking the moral high road in elections, and have it actually yield good results. And I wont accept dragging the country through a local minimum in a utility curve to do it. The Bush administration was bad. Whoever the current GOP puts into the White House would be worse. I cannot accept that. I may hate my country right now (and I do), but that does not mean I want the decent people living here to suffer, or for that matter for the innocent people of Iran to suffer.

[K. A. Pital]

I have pointed out that Obama has consistently shown himself to support Republican policies, both domestically and abroad, and that the Democrats and Republicans are playing a good cop/bad cop game with the electorate. This game undermines your naive application of utilitarianism, since this way there is no justification for choosing an option other than one of the two for such a particular vote, and the two have the same objectives and the same paymasters. These special interests don't give a shit whether you achieve your utilitarian benefit on some Nth decimal point on the voter return index, and they certainly know how to present you with exactly the options that they want you to choose from. The only viable option is not to play their game at all. The only viable way to rejecting that game in a general election is not to vote for either of the big parties.

A short addition to support this observation.

Entryism as a tactic has failed (not just in America, but elsewhere as well). There were many movements which attempted to co-opt larger parties by entering them and trying to exert pressure on their overall policies, but it's not really changing much. I'm willing to reconsider my conclusion if someone points me to a successful entryist movement.

[Simon_Jester]

Regarding the Hitler thing- if the Communists had blatantly advertised that their human rights record was going to be just as bad as Hitler's, or even boasted about it being worse, how would you know ahead of time? In that case, it'd just be a choice between having Hitler start World War Two and kill millions, or having the Communists do it. You could make a choice there, but it's not the same choice as "vote in party of decent human beings, or vote in Hitler because your biases make you think the decent human beings are 'worse.'"



Entryism as a conscious tactic by a group 'outside' a major party fails. Entryism by factions within a party has a better track record. The Republicans have been subjected to at least two or three big waves of it since the 1980s, with religious fundamentalists, policy neoconservatives, and now the anarcho-capitalist Tea Party all taking turns dominating the party's political discourse.

Basically, a big enough and well-organized faction that's already connected and organized within a political party can change it, at least temporarily.

People who on the American political spectrum are as far left as SDN posters*? That is a faction which is neither big nor well organized. Not at the moment.

*I don't know how else to describe it...

[K. A. Pital]

The Hitler example is absolutely irrelevant as the competition in the early XX century was not centered around major human rights issues so much as it was centered around major geopolitical projects driven by a certain class. Neither party advertised their particular human rights failures or successes; they promoted certain projects. Hitlers programme would never work if the population was not already deeply antisemitic and nationalistic.

*I don't know how else to describe it...

Libertarian left.

[Simon_Jester]

The Hitler example is absolutely irrelevant as the competition in the early XX century was not centered around major human rights issues so much as it was centered around major geopolitical projects driven by a certain class. Neither party advertised their particular human rights failures or successes; they promoted certain projects. Hitlers programme would never work if the population was not already deeply antisemitic and nationalistic.

I agree; I was speaking to others. My point being that the argument "people who thought like that would have voted for Hitler over communists because they thought communists were worse!" doesn't hold much water. It's based on the premise that a rational observer would think the communists were worse. And if that were so...

Well, if that rational observer were anywhere near right, then it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference whether you voted in that election or not, or who you voted for, and certainly voting for the communists wouldn't be the answer.

*I don't know how else to describe it...

Libertarian left.

It's not just the libertarian left, it's all kinds of (relatively) far left in the US. There simply isn't the kind of organization or funding that makes 'entryism' a viable tactic at the moment. If there was, it'd have already happened.

It should happen, and I suspect that for much of my adult life I may be allied with political movements trying to do it, but right now we're in bad shape.

[Lord Zentei]

Read the post again. I did NOT say that your proposed course of action is equivalent to Hitler, I said that the APPROACH you advocate was the one that allowed Hitler to gain enough votes to gain power.

So... you ignore one part of a sentence and respond only to the other. Leads to Hitler. Perhaps a bit of a simplification but...

Your verbose and condescending rant covered things which I deemed common knowledge, and which had nothing to do to alter the fundamental point. That point being that choosing the lesser of evils was an approach which permitted Hitler to gain power.

No. It was not. Backroom deals that got him the Chancillorship, followed by burning down the Reichstag and blaming the communists and SPD for it, and subsequently literally beating your opponents and their voter base while taking advantage of 9/11 esque fear in the days immediately afterward to create an executive dictatorship is how Hitler got to power.

In order to make your point, you twisted the truth beyond recognition. You dumbed it down and reduced it to a fairy tail like the story of Pocahontas in an american primary school classroom.

You are really being a dishonest asshole right now. Does this issue really cause you such uncomfortable cognitive dissonance? "Leads to Hitler" is NOT the same as saying "your approach is the one that allowed Hitler to gain power", any more than "is the same as Hitler". It's not a simplification at all. You had already accepted Thanas' question about Saddam and Hitler, and you had already acknowledged questions testing your moral convictions, but now when a real-world example was brought up with Hitler, you throw out all kinds of ridiculous accusations. And yes, you know full well that this was also an observation testing your moral convictions - obviously I don't think that your stance will literally lead to Hitler or is equivalent to him.

As for your objection: you're being evasive again with your emphasis on the context of Hitler's rise to power. Obviously there was political violence and obviously there were also backroom deals. That does not change the fact that people feared the communists and saw him as the lesser of evils. Both the fact that my point was NOT a Godwin but a legitimate follow up to Thanas' question, and that the comparison with Hitler vs the communists was legitimate have been backed by Thanas above.

You've also consistently avoided the related question: IS THERE A POINT AT WHICH YOU WOULD NO LONGER USE YOUR UTILITARIAN METRIC?

An option which is not going to lead to effective change to the policies of the lesser of evils for that vote, nor for it to feel any kind of political pressure from its constituents. You are still stating your conclusion as though it were self-evident.

Because empirically, that is what has occurred. In 2000. Message spinning will nullify any long-term advantage. We know this, because it has happened. By your own admission.

You want, in this case, the democrat to lose their seat. However, you want them to lose their seat to your guy. To someone who will not drag the country through hell. You dont play their lesser of two evils game and complain about it. You change the rules of the game so that the lesser of two evils is not permitted to run in the first place. For that, you have to do actual leg work.

By my own admission... only if you ignore the rest of the paragraph you're referring to! If they lose a seat once in a while, they can spin it. If they consistently lose seats, they will understand that they have problems. And again, I don't think I've ever rejected the need to do leg-work. If your leg-work fails or has not been performed, then what? You're in the voting booth, and your party has rejected your more moderate candidate. You're going with them rather than the third option? Then you've given them more incentive to always try and shaft you in the primaries than they already had. Defeat needn't be contrary to your long term goals. As you may recall, the Tea Party only gained power AFTER the GOP had been trounced in the 2008 election. Parties can learn.

I have pointed out that Obama has consistently shown himself to support Republican policies, both domestically and abroad, and that the Democrats and Republicans are playing a good cop/bad cop game with the electorate. This game undermines your naive application of utilitarianism, since this way there is no justification for choosing an option other than one of the two for such a particular vote, and the two have the same objectives and the same paymasters.

This is not actually true. They dont have the same objectives. Obama has supported relatively progressive policies. Obama care is not what I would have wanted, but it was better than what the Republicans wanted. Even if his polices are decades-old republican ones. The political landscape of the US has swung rightward in the past few years for a variety of reasons. Having the same paymasters is one reason. The perception that in order to win, the democrats have had to lurch right to capture the "center" is another (why they strategize this way, I have no idea. It may just be the rhetoric they mumble while sucking General Electric's dick). We can argue back and forth about the reasons for this. They dont matter. This situation simply IS, and it is one we have to deal with.

I disagree. Understanding their motives is crucial to getting anywhere, because this is central to the whole issue. My guess (not that I know it) is that they are indeed mumbling rhetoric as you say, but also that they think that they stand to gain more by stealing votes from the Republicans than from what they think are fringe groups. But there's only so much room they can expand into, and the more this is made into an issue by protest voters, the less viable it will be for politicians to behave this way. They may be looking out for their paymasters interest, but they can also count vote tallies, and they presumably want to keep their jobs.

In effect, the country can spiral into the 5th circle of hell slowly or fast. If it does so slowly, you have some room to work in order to arrest the spiral. I will elaborate below, I suspect you will know why I choose to delay.

Your president is assassinating your fellow citizens, no longer needs to provide any justification for having done so, is arresting them without charge and without due process, and is detaining them indefinitely, not for things which they have done, but for things which he claims that he believes they may do in the future. He's doing this to people abroad. He's sending people to be tortured. He's maintained Guantanamo Bay, which he swore would be dealt with. Add to that, he has used drone strikes many times more often than his predecessor, and has used anti-whistle blowing tactics more often than ALL his predecessors combined. On economic issues, he has also given more than the Republicans initially asked for during the fiscal cliff negotiations, so much so that the deficit plan actually INCREASED the deficit - see the videos I posted on the first page of this thread. And I've pointed out that Obamacare is a huge crock (which I suspect you'll find out soon enough) not only based on what Republicans proposed years ago, but which Romney - you know, the guy who lost - actually implemented in his state when he was governor. On gay rights, he has ONLY changed his stance on DOMA after the courts looked like they would shut it down anyway, and after public opinion started to shift.

So, just for the reference... which circle of Hell are you in at at this present moment? And is there a point at which you would no longer use your utilitarian metric, and not vote for the "lesser of evils"?

This is not bred into people, it is the prevailing political culture. The whole point of supporting third parties is precisely to undermine that culture. And you're assuming that it is hopeless to change it. So yes, that is certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially since you yourself reckon that 30% of the electorate are NOT the diehard supporters of the parties, but are merely people who are voting for the one or the other because voting third party does not occur to them. Is it because they're "mindless", or are they using the exact same metric that you're using?

Some portion of them might protest vote and instead use my logic. Some do protest vote. They are a minority of that 30ish percent. The mindless middle... no. They are mindless (at least in terms of the election). They dont vote with their heads. It is hard to explain to someone who does not live here and experience our election seasons. First presidential debate is a really really good way of explaining it. Romney "won" the first presidential debate. Not because he put forth better arguments. He lied through his teeth the whole way. He won because he "took control", by which I mean he bullied the moderator. The metric of who wins is based on opinion polls taken just after the debate, of people who watched. Some percentage of them (assuming the same initial population breakdown I described above) will vote for one candidate or the other anyway. Some vote with their heads based on the facts and probably would have said they prefer Obama. Others are making the decision with their primitive ape brains that respond strongly to social dominance. Those are the people I refer to. They are the ones who actually decided that Romney "won" the debate. The others were spoken for already. The debates in the US are more about drumming up the party base and winning over those people. They are not actually attempts to convince anyone of anything based on the facts.

A good historical example was the Kennedy/Nixon debate. Kennedy won in large part because he was physically more photogenic than Nixon was.

Well, if you have such low opinions of your fellow electorate, then it's small wonder you have no inclination of trying for anything but a cynical vote.

As for undermining. When you undermine, you go after the foundations, not the commanding upper floor of Rochester Keep.

You can chew gum and kick ass at the same time, presumably. And use carrots and sticks at the same time too. Or to use your example, you can attack the foundation and the towers simultaneously. But you have also got to make them understand that if they manage to undermine the challengers in the primaries, they face defeat in the general. If the dissident faction fails to gain the nomination (which is highly likely), and the party then votes as a block anyway, then why the hell should the party pay the dissidents any heed at all? See more on that point below.

So... as an alternative to protest voting, you can protest vote, including in Federal elections, except not in the Presidential election?

Under certain circumstances, you can. Just not when the effect of protests matters in the short term. IE. Texas, where the outcome is essentially pre-determined.

So... voting for Jill Stein (sigh) for the presidency in Texas is acceptable to you, but only because there Obama has no hope of winning anyway? That's something at least - though I really don't think they're going to care that much if they've got nothing to lose. You need to present THEM with a utilitarian dilemma. However, at this stage it seems you have basically agreed with me, except only in seats where your party has no chance of winning.

The thing with a presidential election is that the amount of money and people you have to move in order to affect the outcome of the election in a direction you actually want is very very high. In this case, the direction you actually want is toward a good, not the lesser of two evils. If you fail, you get the greater of two evils, and the lesser will do what has happened historically and turn your failed effort into a talking point about how no one should ever ever protest vote again. Lest they get 8 years of Bush. If you fail, you make it harder to do the money and people moving next time.

You have to have a LOT of very stubborn and determined people who dont burn out to make that work in the long term, because it wont work in the short term and constant failure is hard to maintain.

Protest voting (or protest abstaining for that matter) doesn't preclude following up with movements in the wake of the election. You, as an individual, stand no more chance of forming such a movement by yourself than you stand of swinging the election by yourself, and you have to start somewhere, so it might as well be there.

It is oddly meta. I know. It is not so much that I accept the idea that one should vote for the lesser of two evils in the presidential election because third parties are not viable--and thus buy into a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I am actually doing is accounting for the fact that this is the popular perception and any gains made by the greater of two evils in the process of such protest voting in the presidential election will be "interpreted" (by which I mean both interpreted and spun into) that perception being reinforced.

In light of the fact that only limited losses can be spun, your second sentence does seem to contradict the first. And this relies on the assumption that very few people will not lodge protest votes. Sort of a prisoner's dilemma if you will. Sorry, this still looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.

Incidentally, how do you think that a victory at the polls will be spun by Democrats? Probably something along the lines of "oh ho ho, those guys were just blowing hot air" and "well it's nice to see everyone lining up behind the president" and "this is a vindication of our policies and a refutation of the naysayers". The fact that loss can potentially be spun ignores the fact that victory hardly needs to be spun at all.

So, you have to do things that they cannot spin away. Like the Green Party taking half the formerly democratic seats in the Texas Legislature, or a number of safe moderate democrats being challenged and beaten in the primaries by actual leftists who will join the Progressive Caucus and act like Alan Grayson or Dennis Kucinich (who I voted for in the 2008 primary, incidentally) from a safe seat not subject to being taken by a republican. That is a thing you can actually accomplish. More importantly, it is an actual win that will motivate the leftists in your camp, and make it easier to sustain political momentum. It is a victory you can carry into the future, rather than a doomed last stand against the forces of darkness.

It sends a real signal. "Be liberal, or you might lose your power and be replaced by someone of our choosing". And unlike doomed protest voting in the presidential election, it cannot be spun into oblivion.

In other words, you want a leftist version of the Tea Party. Of course, the anti-moderate tactics they used in safe areas backfired for them when they took them too far in 2012, so as far as I can see, it's not as if your strategy doesn't entail risks too.

That becomes power you can actually leverage into policy. It also lets you claim victories you can leverage into political capitol, and a larger protest vote movement given enough success. But you need to have that success first, and you need to not undermine yourself by starting with the general presidential election. That should wait until later.

Note: the two major US parties are not monolithic. They are essentially coalitions that dont have separate parties. There is a more progressive faction within the democratic party. There are various fault lines within the republican party. This can be manipulated. It should be manipulated.

I know about the heterogenuous nature of the parties. And sure I appreciate that you have a strategy, but you haven't actually proven that protest votes should be avoided in the case where such tactics are not present or have failed. In fact in a limited sense (as opposed to the punishment related sense), you have actually accepted their utility in your overall approach.

I believe I mentioned this in an earlier post:

Yes. The big difference is that the Tea Party was being used. It was not the thing with the power, it had puppeteers named Koch and strings made of Glenn Beck and Limbaugh.

Had Occupy been politically competent, it could have done the same thing and been much more difficult to marginalize.

I seem to remember a lot of talking heads on the left mainstream media attempting to claim the OWS mantle, as well as labor unions trying to hijack them, but perhaps you wouldn't mind the latter.

Are you actually attempting to be as smarmy as possible?

No, I just dont get handed a straight-line like that very often.

And yet, you saw fit to use this one sentence without the context to claim that I had "admitted" that losses due to third party involvement would always be spun in a point you made above. While here, you seem to realize that my actual position was that consistent losses of this sort are not going to be spun this way. Tsk tsk.

If enough people had that mindset, then a protest movement would be less likely to be necessary in the first place, and additionally that if more people do that, then a protest movement is more likely to emerge from it.

I am a die-hard realist, I am afraid. I deal with the world that is. I then attempt to change it. It is useless to me to wax poetic about how condition X would be wonderful, and if only it were true so many problems would be solved.

I would LOVE it if taking the moral high road in elections were viable and lead to good outcomes. It would be awesome. It is currently not the case that this is true. The solution is of course to MAKE it the case. In order to do that though, you need a strategy. It may be the case that we are just talking on different levels here. You are talking about the virtues of a particular end goal. An end goal I happen to share. I however am talking about how you get there. How you get enough people together and build a coalition around taking the moral high road in elections, and have it actually yield good results. And I wont accept dragging the country through a local minimum in a utility curve to do it. The Bush administration was bad. Whoever the current GOP puts into the White House would be worse. I cannot accept that. I may hate my country right now (and I do), but that does not mean I want the decent people living here to suffer, or for that matter for the innocent people of Iran to suffer.

I'm not entirely sure that this attitude vis-a-vis the underlined sentences is as utilitarian or realist as you want to believe it is. In particular, you have not shown that your approach can avoid a local minimum. Especially since you seem to agree that your approach leads to a slow slide anyway. Neither have you shown that Bush is worse than Obama, nor that Romney would be worse than either of them. See the video I posted of Noam Chomsky saying that in many ways Obama was worse than Bush. See also my question on whether the "moderate" governor of Massachussets would be worse than the man who is worse than the man who was supposedly the worst president ever. Are you entirely sure that you're not merely seeing this through party-tinted shades?

More importantly Obama gets away with far more than Bush ever did. He uses more drone strikes and more anti-whistleblower tactics than Bush, makes the Bush tax cuts permanent, and PEOPLE STILL LOVE HIM! It's un-fucking believable. If Romney tried half of that shit, everybody would be all over his ass, both at home and abroad, because he's got the "rich elitist guy" vibe, and therefore people are disinclined to trust him. Meanwhile, Obama is like the bastard love child of Ghandi and Justin Timberlake, not to as many people as originally, but to an unaccountably large number of people nonetheless. And they just assume that he's doing great.

Besides which the Democrats would control the Senate anyway, so it's not like Romney could do whatever he wanted.

[Lord Zentei]

The Hitler example is absolutely irrelevant as the competition in the early XX century was not centered around major human rights issues so much as it was centered around major geopolitical projects driven by a certain class. Neither party advertised their particular human rights failures or successes; they promoted certain projects. Hitlers programme would never work if the population was not already deeply antisemitic and nationalistic.

That's not really crucial to the point of his being a lesser of evils to his backers. The metric for assessing what is "evil" may vary, but the tactic has the potential to backfire badly either way. Incidentally, Hitler made no secret of his overall intentions, nether did the Communists.

[K. A. Pital]

Neither positioned themselves as lesser evil. Hitler's plans did not really differ from old-time colonialism, except they were to be executed in Eastern Europe which already was densely populated. So I am deeply suspicious people at the time really even recognized those intensions as "evil" or "lesser evil". His backers believed Hitler was good, and did so with a quasi-religious fervor.

[Thanas]

Neither positioned themselves as lesser evil. Hitler's plans did not really differ from old-time colonialism, except they were to be executed in Eastern Europe which already was densely populated. So I am deeply suspicious people at the time really even recognized those intensions as "evil" or "lesser evil". His backers believed Hitler was good, and did so with a quasi-religious fervor.

Not all did. Many believed he was the preferred alternative to Germany being weak even if they had qualms about his methods. Even a lot of the resistance fighters thought so at the start.