We have seen exactly zero indications that the republicans might start nominating better candidates anytime soon. The next candidate will probably be “Trump, but less incompetent at implementing his agenda”. It makes sense to want to stall as long as possible, but needing a democrat victory every single election from here out is not going to be a winning strategy longterm. If Trump winning is guaranteed global chaos, then there aren’t votes we can cast that will do anything other than slightly delay that.

Non-voters are idiots but ultimately they will not vote. You can’t lead a donkey to water

I don’t understand what you’re trying to suggest here. Taking it at face value doesn’t make any sense at all - in spite of massively outnumbering third-party voters, the potential impact of non-voters should be dismissed because they are all somehow incapable of being convinced that voting is worth their time? Casting a ballot is a difficult mental hurdle to clear, so it’s reasonable to write off anyone who has not yet shown that they’re capable of doing so as a hopeless case?

If the argument is that third party voters are throwing their votes away, why should we consider a protest vote to be different in any meaningful way from a protest non-vote?

I don’t understand why people make such a big deal out of these voters. Maybe I’m just consuming the wrong media, but it feels like third-party voters get 50x the blame nonvoters get for ruining elections with probably something like a thousandth of the population. I basically never see this discussion call out both third-party voters and nonvoters equally.

I keep seeing third-party voters maligned for thinking a candidate has hope to win a national election, I see so many arguments to address why third-party candidates can’t win. In spite of that, I have never come across any community anywhere where people collectively believe these candidates actually have a chance. People who consume crazy media can believe crazy things, that’s why MAGA is a thing, but there’s a whole Fox News etc media machine feeding those people. Is there a forum somewhere with more than ten people where there’s a consensus that a third-party candidate might actually win? None of the third party voters I have known or met irl believed this, and I would be shocked if they’re all weird exceptions.

Like, please, where are these people congregating to spread the ludicrous idea that a third-party candidate can win a national election? Looking on the recent green party posts on their subreddits, the only thing I see even close is a thread with a headline about “candidates are electable if people vote for them”, where the furthest they go in the comments is a few people talking about how big a deal it would be for the party if they got 5% nationally, and a couple other people replying to say the greens won’t even get 1% this year but the election is still very important because of some nonsense about incremental gains.

It feels like we’ve imagined a brainwashing machine that does not exist in reality, rather than admit to the existence of protest votes. Condemning protest votes means condemning protest nonvotes equally, and we’ll never have sufficient information about protest nonvoters to reasonably make a claim about how they would have voted. That would severely muddy any attempts to assign blame for election results.

If you’re trying to convince these voters to act differently, the way to do that would be to address the arguments they’re actually making, like the incremental gains nonsense. If you’re addressing arguments they haven’t been making at all, then it’s worth asking whether you’re trying to convince someone other than them.

It really bugs me when people don’t comment their code at all. I have no idea what this is supposed to do.

I 100% believe the lemmy developers’ firm belief in this policy is why the platform was able to take off eventually. In the early days we would frequently have people join and then stomp their feet about free speech and the slur filter and then fuck off to whatever variant of voat was en vogue (…that was wolfballs for a little while). It was a small community, discussions were heavily (but not exclusively) tech and communism, but I don’t think it would have been an appealing landing spot if that kind of toxicity had been allowed to grow.

Absolutely no question there’s more hostility in the conversations here after redditors came here, but more users will do that. The exodus has made it a lot easier for me to abandon some of the smaller subreddits I was still active on.