100% agree. I think it's just gotten much worse recently with the rise of Facebook geniuses and the like. I used to ignore both major parties, vote third party or deliberately not vote, comfortable that they were roughly balanced and would do roughly similar magnitude damage. I can't fully rule out just getting more conservative as I get older, but these days it feels like there's basically one half-sane option where the preaching-to-the-choir issues are at least still mostly the fringes of the party. The last primary election I found myself reading candidate blurbs on dogmatic issues trying to figure out which candidates were merely paying lip service to the expected narratives and wouldn't actually focus on them as a priority.
This has basically never been even slightly true. Look at Bush Jr normalizing torture and mass surveillance while starting a war based on false presences that killed a half million people and cost trillions.
Basically you threw away your vote because you didn't understand any of the stakes.
Oh golly gee, I'd never considered that before. Thanks for enlightening me.
Of course we have no data about the counterfactual where Gore was president instead. Half of Bush's wars were a direct reaction to external stimulus. The "Patriot" act was a bipartisan thing. And when the team in office did change, it's not like Obama did much of anything to roll back Bush's activities - hence the equivalency of considering both parties not terribly opposed to authoritarianism, just favoring different flavors of it.
So Gore would have just sat around twiddling his thumbs and not doing anything that Bush didn't do? That's the part you're ignoring.
FWIW that particular election I voted third party. And "show support for this bad candidate if you don't want to suffer this even worse candidate" is exactly the dynamic I reject, especially when the other tribe is doing the exact same thing with the candidates reversed. Also I was in a state that consistently goes one way, so pragmatic consequentialist arguments carry even less weight.
There is no reason to believe that Gore who contemporaneously expressed support for a different strategy would have followed the exact same track as Bush.
You can't actually reject that dynamic we are stuck with it until we fix it.
> There is no reason to believe that Gore who contemporaneously expressed support for a different strategy would have followed the exact same track as Bush.
and I have said nothing of the sort.
> You can't actually reject that dynamic we are stuck with it until we fix it.
According to math and reality where you have 2 major parties that split the vote relatively equally.
- You can't win the presidency by the popular vote this means you could easily need 60-70% of the popular vote to actually get a majority of the EC vote. The major players can depend on "safe" states like Washington, California, Texas whereas you can depend on wasting massive chunks of your wins buying 1/4 of Nebraska and 1/3 of Wisconsin and winning exactly zero EC votes for all the votes you gained in those states.
- If you don't get 50%+1 EC votes it goes to the states which decide with one vote per state. The Republicans win this on numbers.
- If you take more from one side than the other then if you do not win you tank the side this is by definition more like yourself
The person with the Republican or Democratic Party nomination might in theory win by having a pulse and a mouth you will win if you are literally Jesus.
For any given action you can compute the expected benefit by multiplying the value positive or negative by the probability of that outcome and combining the possible outcomes. For instance we can asign for the sake of argument a Trump win with a value of -100 and the value of a hypothetical Biden aalternative candidate with major traction if successful as +5. Lets use the value of bidenv2 as our zero point not to say it is of zero value just a baseline.
Lets assign the possibility of a Biden alternative win at say 1 million to 1. If my trusty calculator is working the expected value of a Biden alternative geting substantial traction is -99.999895 the expected value of running Biden alone is -20 if he ends up with an 80% chance of victory after Trump gets the next year to fuck himself. The expected value of running my cat under the Democratic ticket is -100 because we will certainly lose.
This means your stategy is only slightly better than making my cat the Democratic nominee.
If it was actually dead people would stop bringing up the twin fictions that it doesn't matter which you vote for and voting for a third party isn't throwing away your vote.
