US Election 2016

Who are you voting for, or would you vote for if you were old enough/a US citizen/not a felon?

I’m leaning towards voting for Johnson.

For background, I voted for Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, and Johnson in 2012. Like in 2012, I live in a state/district where I know with a high degree of certainty that the electoral votes will go to the Democratic candidate (Illinois in 2012, DC now), and that fact influences my voting behavior. Both then and now, I don’t know how I would vote if I lived somewhere where there was even a chance that my vote could affect the outcome. I do know that in both situations, my second choice is the candidate I’m sure will win my state/district: Obama in 2012 and Hillary now.

I’m leaning towards Johnson in large part because the two party stranglehold on our politics is incredibly caustic. But I also think his positions are good, and I believe him when he says that he would veto a LOT of legislation, and would succeed in reducing the creeping scope of government (or at least slowing the creep).

At the same time, Johnson isn’t as extreme as some of the other libertarian candidates he beat out. Indeed, the more extreme libertarians would paint Johnson as a moderate social democrat. For me, that’s a selling point; as my previous voting history indicates, I’m ultimately a progressive, and I like libertarian for pragmatic rather than principled reasons. Johnson seems to be close to my flavor of libertarian: he’d seek to reduce government, but not recklessly. I think he is the candidate most likely to support a universal basic income, a policy I put a lot of stock in (possibly too much). He also supports reasonable gun control, some anti-discrimination legislation, and some state funding of services. He could probably be sold on single-payer healthcare if someone presented him with a case that it increases freedom.

I think Hillary will be our next president, and that she’ll be a very good president – within the normal bounds of the presidency in our two party democracy. But in the long term, the system we have is not sustainable, it’s very undemocratic, and the best way to change it is to raise the profile of alternatives (Dave Rubin makes this same point effectively). I’m voting not so much to change the outcome of this election, which I’m particularly unable to do, but to influence future elections and slowly move our democracy toward a better version of itself. I like Johnson’s policies more than those of the other candidates, and I like what a vote for him says about what’s possible in the next election and the one after that.

What about you?

Anyone but Cruz or Clinton.

I like Trump in that he has better ethics, in that he wants a wall… this will substantially break the back of most foreign drug cartels in the western hemisphere, and end a pretty nasty civil war in Latin America… and reduce US casualties and economic morass related to drug use. This matters for me more than anything.

Second is his embrace of Ben Carson, I don’t mind a thought out and CONSTITUTIONAL medical system, one we can pay for and actually is responsive. We don’t have it, I am scared when I see more and more major insurance companies pull out, and the most Communist minded liberals can say in response is “don’t worry, the free market will fix it”… yeah, that’s so sincere on your part. No… we will just end up with a absurd out of debt and Obamacare existing in a few wealthy counties who for what ever silly reason can’t shake it, like a rich country in a liberal state. They don’t want it, state won’t let them get rid of it, supreme court built a web of unconstitutional exceptions… zombie medical system as the rest of the nation moves on. I ultimately can accept any pragmatic and cost effective system done legally and with eyes wide open.

Third reason is, Trump is willing to play hardball with some parasites we mistakingky have called Allies for decades. We don’t have much of a reason to be in a lopsided alliance where most aren’t pulling their weight. It turned us very militaristic and we’ve had to undercut our own social development while they blow their money on socialism, instead of doing the right thing in putting the pact first. Your socialism means squat if we aren’t around to protect you, and we’ve got decades of overspending we got to pay off now compensating for lazy, selfish Europe. It absolutely amazes me the flip flop the left took from wanting to reduce military spending to burning it all on hardheaded cold war era mindsets on spending. Gotta be honest, I’m not that impressed with Denmark or Norway as if yet, and don’t get me started on Germany. Turkey is a whole other problem. We really do need someone who can inspire fear into some of these countries into thinking if they don’t start playing fair, we are backing out. Gone, finished, goodbye. I would prefer a working alliance, or no alliance.

Also, Trump has a lot of experience dealing with property legislation, and a good understanding of how government red tape works. If anyone can break the morass around construction projects, it would be him. That’s what he does for a living, he does it well.

I also like given enough pressure, after some loyalty and giving people a chance despite public scrutiny, he will fire them if it isn’t working. He isn’t too glued to any idea to the point of destroying the country like Obama did with pulling out of Iraq or not responding… or not paying any attention to anyone when the country was screaming at Obama to stop when he went around the House of Representatives, violated the Origination clause, and passed his dictorial legislation. Trump eventually feeds to enough pressure if his people are able to explain to him why it is a shitty idea. This is becoming rare in a president. We pay all that money for presidential advisors, the best public service and military advisors you can get, and it is apparent nobody is listening anymore till it is too late. Then it is like “oops” and they shrug it off, and their political parties patch over the issues come election time. Obama and Hillary committed some nasty war crimes, just as bad as the left can ever claim Bush did… if anything he has more blood on his hand, but the political machine covers this up.

Which is my final point. Trump (and most candidates) do not have a war crimes record. They haven’t horribly failed in public office like Hillary has. They haven’t been dragged constantly before courts and Senate hearings, and gotten out of trouble by pulling political strings. She is a evil woman and shouldn’t be allowed near Washington DC, period. I’m very worried the Secretary of State who ran our nations affairs during the Arab Spring, ISIS and Qaddafi is going to be Commander and Chief. She shouldn’t be allowed to bungle up or kill anyone else because the job is too hard for her.

What is Trump? A scary isolationalist? Only if we can negotiate any alliance on more balanced terms. If we gotta go back to just defending the US, so be it. We have a absurd financial strain keeping these complex alliances going. If China wants them, I say give our role, we will peg our currency below theirs and sell shitty plastic products and locks that don’t work while try drive tanks around in Germany, my feelings won’t be hurt. I will salute them and giggle. Can they take the UN headquarters too while we are at it, and the costs of funding that? Why do we have to be so damn militant and protective? We are protecting countries that mock us, exploit us, don’t really give a damn anymore. Don’t see the silver lining of sticking it out in a evermore decrepit military federation with them.

I was even on board with Sanders being a possibility, for much of the same reasons… he isn’t panic prone like Hillary was during the Arab Spring, he isn’t a warmonger like she is, he is unlikely to force new constitutional measures, if he tried, as in the case of trump, the courts would slap him down… and both would have to play nice with Congress to get legislation passed.

Hillary has been slipping in the polls last two days I checked, as expected, once Trump started with the advertising blitz, her lead started crumbling. It is going to be more balanced each day as the debates approach, and Trump has a stronger rhetorical stance.

Only reason I dislike Cruz is I’m a strong constitutionalist, and he is running on that platform, despite the constitution prohibiting him from running. It sends a nasty signal to anyone who actually read the constitution that the man is a hypocrite out for himself.

Just about anyone else could work. So long as not Hillary or Cruz. I could go to Lafayette Park and just pick a random homeless guy and make them president over Hillary, would be a better choice.

I could live with a libertarian president. I’m surprise they aren’t more popular.

I posted the libertarian party platform in my other topic, I don’t remember seeing anything in there about the dire threat of global warming and the need to address this. Libertarians have a flaw in their belief-set which goes something like, “government is INHERENTLY inept and corrupt”. Because of thei idea libertarians are driven to always limit and undermine government’s ability to do anything, and the libertarian always interprets anything the government does or causes in a negative light, emphasizing detriments and harms and de-emphasizing benefits and gains or just ignoring these.

Easy example is the auto bailout under Obama. Libertarians were violently against this. “The government has no business meddling in the economy!” they say. Their belief forces them to a single position on this issue: let the auto companies fail on their own, never help them out with public dollars. Romney supported this position.

But the auto bailout was a huge success. There is no fundamntal reason to oppose public spending more than any other kind of spending, it’s just a case of different incentives and structure of accountability, also of scope; the govrnment can quickly spend a huge amount of money across a huge scope of the economy, which in certain situations is very effective.

Libertarians are deeply skeptical and basically think we live in 1984 or are just about to get there. They disbelieve in global warming thinking this is a “plot of big government liberals to take my freedom away”. They disbelieve in strong public sector education as a fundamental social right, preferring parents to pay for education themselves and make school choices rather than have experts make those choices (and what about so many parents who can’t afford to pay for private schools?) This also gets us back to how libertarians view taxation as evil and fundamentally irrational… think all that Ayn Rand nonsense. I mean these people deny that global warming is even fucking happening, that’s how far up their own asses their heads are. What about other issues like healthcare? Nope, same ideological repeat over and over “individual responsibility, no taxes or government involvement”, so I guess society will just have to live with millions of people dying and sick all the time because hospitals turn them away for not having enough cash in their pocket. Same with police and fire rescue, if you can’t pay for this individually then what business does society have supporting such a “free ride” system with taxes on MY money?? Utter insanity, the way libertarians think.

Libertarianism is shit. It aligns to the Right, not to the Left. If you believe in the rational, classically liberal values of western civilization and you’re not an extremist or an ideologue then you naturally swing left politically, which I notice Carleas indicated he does by saying he voted democrat in the past; in that case you should look at the Green Party as the only viable alternative to the unacceptability of Clinton as the democrat candidate.

Libertarians rend to be centrists… I’ve had to guard rallies for them and both the Republican and Democrats, most outrageous thing I’ve seen libertarians do is have a guy ride around on a marijuana horse. Big ass horse with weed symbols on it’s rider’s blanket.

They want extreme caution over the unnecessary use of law and taxation, while doing all the crazy shit Democrats do. If you wanna form a several thousand man long, naked anal train orgie around the block in downtown Manhattan sniffing coccain off each man’s ass before you, they could care less, just so long as the taxpayers don’t have to drop money on policing it or carting people to the hospital after that fuckfest.

I think of all the political parties, they definitely come the closest to limited yet financially responsible government, while letting the naughtiness of Ben Franklin types reign.

Wyld, your political beliefs are to the left of Hitler or Mao, so far left nobody can see you on the map of the left anymore. I once thought you couldn’t get more “progressive” than Hitler, but you have managed. Your not in a good position to dictate what mainstream America traditionally has been. Certainly isn’t the Green Party. Your free to choose whatever party you want, but lying like that isn’t going to fly so well. Nor is acting angry or confused like you usually do gonna work.

Turd’s form of engagement:

1. offer nothing substantive and utterly fail to address any points made by his opponent.

2. call opponent a “leftist” or “liberal”

3. make accusations like “you’re more left than Hitler and Mao” without offering even a single piece of evidence or argument defending that assertion.

Tough call really, I’m thinking Mickey Mouse or Deez Nuts for candidates.

I hear both have a rather interesting political foreign policy.

2016 American presidential elections, the choice of what kind of political elitist brand you want to rape you as a citizen or the international stage at large. What a bargain choice to have or be beholden to…

Choices, choices, choices…

Turd, best I can tell, Trump made his money through inheritance and highly unethical business practices. He isn’t the negotiator or the businessman he presents himself to be. He does a great job of selling to the poor and uneducated, but as president he’d mostly be working with worldly, well-educated people who would see right through his nonsense.

And while he might have some experience with red tape (more likely has experience hiring lawyers with daddy’s money), it isn’t clear that he has any motivation to actually change things. His entire history shows him to be purely selfishly motivated and not have any principles to speak of, so that we shouldn’t expect him to care much one way or the other about red tape that is no longer his concern.

To Hillary’s many appearances before courts and hearings, she’s innocent until proven guilty, and she has never been proven guilty – and to preempt claims that that’s not how the justice system works in practice: I agree, but the objection cuts both ways. She was dragged before courts and hearings for entirely political reasons, so the failures of the justice system mean that just being haled into court isn’t evidence of anything other than our bitterly partisan political system.

Wyld, Stein’s policies are troubling. She’s concerned about global warming, but strongly anti-nuclear, which is just not a reasonable set of positions to take. Nuclear is the only viable technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the near term. Resistance to it is largely symbolic (much of it tied to feelings about nuclear weapons, to which Stein compares nuclear energy). Other parts of her platform show a pattern of poor appreciation for scientific consensus, and a favoring of the symbolic politics that plague the left. GMOs are safe and valuable (especially, again, in reducing the energy input required to feed the world); the minimum wage hurts low wage workers most; international trade is a force for peace and benefits the poor in the US by reducing the price of goods.

I like Obama and Clinton because, while they pander a little to the left side of their base, they are ultimately relatively pragmatic centrists. I’m really more of a neo-liberal than a liberal: capitalism is a good thing, and government is best used to structure a mostly free economy so that dollars and value are closely aligned. That means policing only actual harms (not symbolic or potential harms like drug use or GMOs), giving people money and healthcare instead of regulating businesses to force them to provide it.

Your description of libertarianism isn’t wrong so much as incomplete. Libertarianism is a bigger tent than you give it credit for, and while it certainly includes people who might be better described as minarchists or anarcho-capitalists, they aren’t the same thing. Left-libertarianism would accept government intervention where it tends to increase freedom. And Johnson in particular is far more centrist that the caricature you present: he’s said explicitly that he accepts anthropogenic global warming, he just disagrees about the best way to address it (though I do disagree with his resistance to carbon taxes), and he wants regulation of businesses to prevent discrimination.

Sort of tangential, but since you brought it up: I don’t think there’s consensus on the auto bailout. It does appear to have saved the auto industry, but it isn’t clear that was the best use of government influence. Much of that savings went to people who were fairly well-off: share holders, executives, etc. Employment in the auto industry hasn’t recovered from where it was, the middle-class workers who were hit and whose welfare justified the bailout were largely displaced. What would the economy look like if we’d just given the money we spent on the bailout to the most vulnerable people in the country? Or directly to auto workers? Or any number of other ways? We’ll never know. Just saying the industry recovered, or even that the government made its money back, ignores the oportunity cost of the spending, and the demographics of who benefited.

Poor Carleas chooses not to address my points. Predictable…

Imagines a world run by nuclear power where nuclear spent fuel rods in dump zones spread all over the world with no trespassing signs along with engraved skull crossbones symbols on them.

Imagine five thousand nuclear wastelands on every corner of the planet, what’s not to like about that?

I just can’t wait for this technological future utopia to unfold. It seems like a marvelous and desirable place to live in. Very wholesome and life affirming.

We’ll have social justice campaigns trying to raise money for teenage girls and their unwanted nuclear mutant babies. We’ll call them nuclear mutant orphanages for unwed teenage girls.

Will somebody please take care of my unwanted nuclear mutant love child?

With election day tomorrow, I decided on voting for Johnson. This vote won’t effect the outcome, since I live in DC, which going to be like 90% for Clinton.

I don’t think I would vote for Johnson if I lived in a swing state that had any chance of going for Trump. I don’t think I would vote for Johnson if it might decide my state between Johnson and Clinton. I’m not even sure that I would vote Johnson over Clinton if I were going to single-handedly decide the outcome.

But the biggest impact I’m likely to have in this election is in deciding whether the Libertarian party will be eligible for ballot access and federal funding in the next election: Johnson needs 5%, and predictions have him around 4.8%, or ~300k votes away. The most good I can do with my vote is to influence that outcome, so that’s what I’ll do.

Stein is the only sane and rational candidate. If you actually watched videos of Johnson you would see he is a gas.

Both Stein and Johnson have the same problem,
they sound normal after 5 minutes of listening to them,
but suddenly around 9 minutes, they turn insane… Listen to
a speech by either and they seem normal up to about 9
minutes into their speeches and suddenly, boom,
they lose it and go wacko… It is quite scary…

Kropotkin

Yes, but neither of them has any chance of winning, so for me (and for most voters) it’s irrelevant whether they’re crazy. The question is whether they can get 5% of the popular vote, which won’t affect the current election, but will greatly affect the next two elections.

I see it as a vote for a structural change, which I have a relatively high likelihood of affecting, since I don’t have any realistic chance of affecting the actual outcome.

I am voting for Hilary because She is the only workable choice.

This election is unlike any other, and it is akin to the forum about reality and simulation. Not that all e
lections have increasingly become more simulated and manipulated, but the average voter does not really understand how a virtually simulated , machine
scripted election could have any other then a one dimensional
topography.

Now I am not trying to outguess
the polls, the incessant hourly dramas and analysis of
as to how they change the odds, but rather, trying to establish relationships, often haphazardly brought in, to undermine, or fortify newly credible reasons why
this or that candidate is better equipped to win; only trying to look below the surface.

The structural underpinnings require mass one dimensional

publicity, since those in the know , have the connections of deeper , more lasting signifiers as to what the messages really entail.

Trump is the reality star/ risk taker, whose political movements, exemplified the hidden connection of vast
popular unhappiness with the status quo, and it took some looser like him, to become the voice of the silent majority. But it took a subtle act to reduce him
to the simulated version of a winner in disguise. His
job was to take advantage of this incredible political
back swing, diffuse it, but not by winning.

I
really think, he brought it through magnificently, and by chance he would have won, which is still a very credible possibility, he would have been completely
controlled by his debtors. That he owes a great deal, is verified by both Cuban, and his own refusal to release his taxes. They have him by the balls, he knows it, they know it, and he would have become a puppet, not to Putin, but to the indebtors.

That it would have become a meaningless and vacuous role for him, would only have been known to this silent contractual relationship, and any mess up, and he would be finished.

There is quantum power at stake again this stage of world unification, and not much slack could be afforded for mess ups.

I do not believe for one second that it would have made any difference who comes in, for clearly such dramatic opposites in a near anarchic society would, could not be sustained.

This is why , the conflation between public perception of the conflict between political correctness and correction is drawn with very bold overlapping brushes, creating very wide grey areas of dissension.

Hillary already won the election, don’t waste your vote. They’ll rig the machines so Trump will lose in a couple of key states.

Instead, put your vote to Stein so that she’ll have a better chance of winning in 4 years…if our country’s still around and everyone’s not dead by then.

But at this point, if society is too stupid not to vote for any party other than what the media tells them, there is no hope of ever escaping the brainwashing and bullshit ever in the future. It’s probably for the best that Hillary destroys the human race.

Funny, because I thought those were attributes of Hillary and Trump.
Stein seems rather rational to me.

Then you are voting for the nuclear war, Jerkey.