You’ve got to remember that these are just simple voters. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.

It is literally ~60%-40% as of right now. I would hardly call that a crushing blow.

What is a pubnix?

Edit: Short for Public access UNIX apparently.

Crimes of opportunity are not need based, they are want based. People take something because they want it and are unconcerned with the potential consequences of taking it. Even the cop quoted in your linked article admitted that 'Cars stolen for the purpose of committing another crime are not what’s behind the majority of thefts. ’

I would say my OC at least applies to the people who get caught. Maybe not always to those who actually do the crime.

I call it virtue signaling. It’s the same idea, just a clearer term for it.

Do those mythical organized thieves really exist? I think 80+% of crimes are crimes of opportunity done by vulnerable people like crackheads, mentally ill, or other low income people.

Politicians passing laws based on things they don’t understand?

aka virtue signaling

Of course. The problem is that when someone says one thing is another thing, that is not obviously metaphorical. Maybe you’d be able to tell in person but not through text where the message is monotonized and broadcasted to the entire internet.

I agree with your general point that third party votes don’t matter nationally. This is kinda blunt, but you are making the false assumption that Party politicans are entitled to everyone’s votes. You can’t remove a vote that was never casted for a particular candidate.

“The rhetoric isn’t misleading.”

It is to me. A vote for an independent candidate does not in any way, shape, or form count as a vote for Trump. They are not the same thing.

It is a fact that a vote for an independent candidate is not tallied the same as a vote for trump. It is nonsense to say they are the same. It’s like saying a vote for Hawaiian pizza is a vote for Pepperoni Pizza. It is hokum.

I never advised anyone to vote for an independent candidate. I am simply correcting your misleading rhetoric.

Good advice on focusing locally for third parties.

A vote for an independent candidate is a vote for Trump.

No. It is a vote for an independent candidate.

That is a good humorous example of a first past the post voting system and it flaws. I like the bit where Bobby is a pigeon.

In any democratic zero-sum system, removing votes for one party passively enables another.

No, actually not in any democratic system. In our current first past the post voting system, it is applicable (minus the electoral college). But (ranked choice voting)RCV or (Score then Automatic Runoff)STAR based systems the outcome would likely be different in some cases. That scenario also ignore the most common scenario where people simply don’t vote. In your scenario, everyone is required to vote. In real life, of the 25 bobby votes some would sit out, some would vote third party and some would vote for a ‘major’ candidate like Biden or Trump.

Pasting the two definitions does not clarify what I was asking. You claim that they are two different things. In what way are they different to you?

No one is saying a person not voting is supporting anyone. They are saying that it helps another individual by doing so. And you yourself are saying so, when you admit that those individuals not voting are effecting the outcome of the election, and because they didn’t vote, it helped the individual they didn’t want to be elected to win the election.

Actually the OP explicitly said that. “Every single person who doesn’t vote for Joe Biden and could is supporting Donald Trump”

Once again, I agree with the main idea of the OP. It is their false claims that are embedded within it that I am challenging. I do agree that not voting in some cases is helping Trump. But saying it is a mathematical fact is misleading. There is nothing mathematical about it.

It’s ironic you say this when your entire argument is “they didn’t intend to support anyone so they aren’t helping anyone win.”

Nice strawman. I did not say that.

hmm, kinda seems like a personal attack. I wonder if the rules say anything about that.

The only reason you are calling it sea lioning is because it is massively downvoted. If this same discussion was upvoted you wouldn’t care.

Sea lioning

Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.

Asking someone to explain their claim that I don’t know what I’m talking about is not a request for evidence. And I’m not feigning ignorance on this matter, I am explaining why the original claims in question were false.

And you clearly have no idea what a mathematical proof is.

Exactly that is exactly my point. Calling something a mathematical fact is in essence claiming it is always true. Which in this case is false. But at this point, some people are just following acceptable groupthink and not actually listening.

What do you claim I am wrong about or don’t understand? If I clearly don’t understand it then why did you feel the need to point that out?

I value what you say and would not laugh at you for expressing your beliefs. :P

In what way are they two different thing? Support could be a more specific form of help but that’s about the only difference imo. They have essentially the same meaning to me. I don’t really want to quibble over semantics.

Are you saying their votes, or lack thereof, didn’t matter? That their choice to stay home and not vote made no difference?

I never said that. Not voting is not supporting anyone. Voting for Biden is supporting Biden. Voting for Trump is supporting Trump. Any claims that not voting supports a certain candidate are political rhetoric. Trying to conflate an individual not voting with supporting a certain candidate is nonsense.

I don’t deny that there are organized actors who are trying to convince certain people not to vote and that some people saying that may be a part of such a campaign.

I also don’t deny that on a national scale not voting does harm democrats, but that is entirely different than on the individual scale. It is a political trend in our current culture not a fact.

What do you claim I don’t understand?