Well, yes, that was sort of the point. He’s so die hard MAGA that even when faced with a hateful and demonstrably false statement, he still calls it “directionally” true, which is even worse than any of the corporate misspeak he ever made fun of in his days of popularity.

Scott Adams calls these sorts of lies “directionally true”

So they believe that Democrats automatically means higher taxes for them, regardless of income level.

Should you manage to get them to consider the taxation would only target the wealthy, they are afraid the wealthy class will fire them due to the loss of money. Similarly afraid that stronger worker protections would just lead to the jobs going away. They think the benefits achieved by Democrats favor cities and rural areas don’t see their moneys worth. Now they didn’t spend that much money on taxes and they do get great benefit, but they see the cities get bigger stuff and that leaves an impression.

Speaking of jobs going away, they fear immigrants. Both on racist grounds and the general perceived increase in labor competition.

Fewer arms to Ukraine because they see it as wasting money on a cause that has nothing to do with them. More arms to Israel because they are afraid of Muslims.

Particularly dangerous as key people recognize this is a lot of people, but not the majority. So there’s a great fear that democratic voting means they would ultimately be marginalized. So they also are the party most inclined to game the vote however they can, mapping districts, limiting voting access, stalling absentee ballots.

Well yeah… The electoral college consistently lets a minority opinion override the majority, so of course a majority want it done.

Problem is that minority that gets their way today aren’t going to yield if they can help it.

Huge difference, Ukraine military operations were for a long time purely defensive, only engaging in their own territory. Now they are starting to target military facilities in Russian territory more with no evidince of excessive collatoral damage, which is still understandable. If Russia withdrew offensive forces, Ukraine would not be trying to ‘wipe out’ Russia.

Versus Israel where just tremendous indiscriminate operations are inflicting more ‘collateral’ damage than what would be considered understandable targets for deliberate damage. I think the world might have been pretty fine with surgical incursions against Hamas and Hezbollah, but Israel has not displayed that discipline.

Well, he might be on to something.

I’m studying world history for the first time and I’ve so far gotten to 1938 and while I know absolutely nothing that happened after that, so far it looks like this suggestion has worked with this Hitler fellow.

In Afghanistan? Sure, I’d accept that any administration faced with the successful WTC attack would likely have ultimately reacted a similar way. Though there is some data suggesting that intelligence agencies were a bit off due to the delay in transition from the Florida indecision, so a more decisive election either way might have caused the agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Maybe there’s a case to be made of it being handled better, but I can’t think of any data to suggest either way how that hypothetical would have gone.

However, the thread specifically mentioned the Iraq war, which was a distinctly Bush/Cheney adventure. Even in the vague “Middle East” starter, it would have been fewer, by virtue of at least limiting the engagement to Afghanistan. Iraq would have been left to its own devices in a Gore presidency.

If out of proportion in scale, back in 2000, Nader voters going for Gore would have decided the nation for everyone. Ultimately the choices of a few hundred people overcame over half a million votes going the other way. The very small number of Stein voters in a certain place can decide the output. I don’t fault them for 2000, even if I disagree with them, because I don’t think folks could have reasonably foreseen the warmongering that was to come.

If out of proportion in severity, between November 2020 and January 2021, you had several attempts to undermine the election, and that was with very little planning/prep work. You had trying to get the states to “find enough votes”, you had fake electors, trying to get the VP to unilaterally refuse the election, inciting a crowd to storm the proceedings. In the aftermath you have certain people planning their whole political careers on promising to guarantee the elections for GOP, speculation that Vance was picked carefully as someone willing to do what Pence wouldn’t, and a whole carefully constructed plan to start getting things ready for 2028 election the moment 2025 starts, if they can. You have a supreme court that ruled that a president may be considered immune for crimes, unless of course the supreme court decides it’s not an “official act”, reserving the ability to selectively enforce law on the president themselves.

With respect to Russian influence, this is specifically a Stein situation and plenty of evidence to support that Stein is being supported by and manipulated by Russia. It makes sense too, as Trump has shown himself to be awfully susceptible to Putin’s manipulation, so taking advantage of a naive Stein to foil the votes of naive voters in favor of Trump is a plain strategic path for them.

Yes, we can talk about her platform, particularly about her wish to dissolve NATO and stop support of Ukraine, but other parts of her platform are difficult to explain the nuance of the problems. Like “dump money on third world nations”, which sounds the decent thing to do, but historically trashes any semblance of local economy and frequently reinforces warlords instead of the people.

What they ultimately do with their vote is their business, but I’m just responding to the premise that would-be Stein voters would not vote for Harris anyway, because they are “too dumb” to vote for Harris, which is incorrect.

As to discussing the strategic situation, I think that is important to reiterate the consequence of their vote. Stein will not win, it’s very obvious, so a vote thrown that way is merely a message to try to break the self fulfilling prophecy of third parties being hopeless. If you truly feel either candidate is roughly equal, this is a fine and strategic move. I could understand that perspective in most presidential races I have seen. Given the happenings associated with Trump’s first term, I personally can not understand that perspective, but ultimately it is their business.

To be quiet on this would be to let what seems to be forces looking to weaken the Harris prospect prevail in swaying people to vote for Stein, despite those forces not actually wanting Stein, but just wanting a spoiler candidate to take some votes the way they want.

You don’t have to be “smart” to vote for a good candidate.

Stein is the nominally “more liberal than the Democrats are willing to be” candidate. So most likely if they were forced to vote and could only vote for Trump or Harris, then I’d wager they’d mostly go Harris.

A relative weakness is that on the left there are currently more people ready to discard strategic thinking and stand on what they consider their absolute principles. The right is currently a bit more unified, as they are more willing to yield on their differences to vote closest to their overall goal with a decent chance to win.

Or the left is fairly unified in practice but Internet manipulations present the illusion otherwise, I have no idea

If you are talking about federal candidates, it is not the only thing that can, and in fact it won’t happen even then because a federal candidate gets zero say in how the elections are done.

No federal office is going to give you RCV.

The logistics of federal elections are the purview of the state governments.

That’s all well and good, but useless in any federal race because the federal government does not dictate how the elections/voting are done.

Brings it back around to if you care so damn much, then focus your resources on state governments.

Actually, an RCV system may help the democrats, at least in the short term.

For the last couple of decades, the “spoiler” candidates generally take from the democrats more than the republicans. Last big spoiler third party that screwed the right was Perot that I remember. With RCV, then the ‘fringe’ votes can still be cast and democrats can work toward being the second choice of those hardliners. At least in the short term, it alleviates the need to actually compete for votes with candidates that are going to lose anyway.

Longer term, it may cause a viable third party or more to get some steam (attracting practical candidates that no longer see the need to be a D or R to get votes, the parties generally getting left alone by outside forces that find them not worth weaponizing), but I don’t think the politicians are too concerned on that long a time frame.

That would mean actually caring about running campaigns for state goverments. State governments are the ones that can (and in Alaska’s case have) implement RCV.

On the ranked choice voting, she wouldn’t give you that anyways. Here’s a clue, Alaska has RCV already. The president doesn’t get to pick how the states run their elections. The place to push for RCV is at the state level.

On healthcare, you’d need congress. There’s not even a whiff of that being a possibility, even less than Stein presidency. That’s a general issue with her platform that there’s very little “how” in how she could actually do anything, and much that isn’t even theory under the authority of the federal government, let alone the office of the president.

Note that I went to her own platform page and that was enough for me to be a hard pass even if I went worried about Trump and even I never heard anything from anyone about her.

The deal breakers for me were:

• Disband NATO.
• Stop material support of Ukraine

There’s a bit more I find to be problematic, but those are sufficient.

Even if it weren’t true, is just an “alternative fact” that would clearly be “directionally true”

deleted by creator

I think it would have been a smart choice. The rationale behind muting was trying to force both parties to having a nice, civil discussion, to force decorum upon the proceedings that formerly was just a given, but generally not respected by Trump, by his nature.

However one part of the first debate was that the muting might have saved Trump from his own worst impulses. To be sure, Biden made his own problems that were far far worse, but part of Trump looking relatively reasonable in his conduct that night was being forced only to speak in turn.

Slam dunk is if you let him put his unhinged nature and unreasonable behavior on full display, while also managing to manage him so that you are still heard.

I would not be surprised if a career in the courtroom dealing with all manner of hard to deal with people is the best prep anyone could ask for to deal with a personality like Trump.