Reckless

And in who's interest is it for people to continue perpetuating that voting for third parties is pointless?

The fact is the "least bad" option for any political office in the US is pretty much always someone not affiliated with Democrats or Republicans. Because despite the ideals they say they stand for, neither in the last hundred years have acted in good faith or in the interest of their constituents. They accrue power to further their own agendas.

Its time people seperate liberal from Democrat and conservative from republican. They are not and never will be synonymous. The organizations are the main problems not the ideals.

Right now we have a situation where people no longer vote with their ideals. They vote as part of a strategy. "if enough people vote for x, then y won't win, even though I actually agree with z". Both sides and anyone who votes that way are only feeding the beast.

First past the post has its own issues, but to be clear, it doesn't necessarily preclude a third party being seriously considered. If you honestly want to know I consider myself pretty libertarian in most aspects but I'm all for an ammendment allowing for a ranked choice system. Problem again with the current two parties is like term limits, neither side will vote for anything that could restrict their power.

The only way to fix this is to vote out BOTH party's candidates in favor of younger folks, liberal, moderate and conservative who understand that congressional representation is not meant to be a career path, but more a service to your peers akin to the military. You have to start voting the in at local and state levels and work up.

While I'm ranting, can we talk about the presidents ACTUAL responsibilities are. Appointments, federal orgs (illegal anyways but let's gloss over the abuse of the interstate commerce clause) and PR. Anyone who votes for a candidate ON EITHER SIDE that promises legislative action has a fundamental misunderstanding of our government. I'm so sick of all the presidential drama. The shitty judicial and organizational appointments still have to be vetted and approved by enough of the legislative body on both shitty sides. Other than that, all this shit amounts to reality TV. We need to bring back honey boo boo and American idol so people can get their stupid out on those votings.

OK rant over. If anyone genuinely wants to have a conversation with a 28yo moderate libertarian, I'm pretty baked so AMA. I much like many moderate libertarians (not the ones in the news. Do you think media owned by the two party's will ever display a third as rational?) am open to a dialogue and willing to consider and compromise. I grew up with a lawyer for a mom, so I'll be the first to admit I like playing devils advocate if only to explore all possibilities. Used to drive her nuts.

Maybe it's a garbage system concocted by literal slave masters?

Let's be honest here, while the first past the post system is conducive to a 2 party dupoly, many countries around the world use it and they don't have it nearly as bad as the US. The real issue in the US is the first past the post system coupled together with the relic of the industrial age that is the Electoral College, which expands all the shortcomings of the first past the post system to a state level and eventually to the district level for the senate elections.

Many countries in Europe use the D'Hondt method of proportional distribution of senate/assembly votes according to the national election results, which more directly represents the will of the people and reduces issues of swing state strategic voting. You simply can't have equal standing of every state simultaneously with proportional representation of the will of the citizens due to the population differences. In order to have both, you'd have to redraw states so that they have similar population sizes. You either make some people's votes worth less or some states' votes worth less. In the case of the US, some people's votes, mainly in highly populated centers, are worth less than votes from rural areas in order to preserve state parity, if i understand correctly.

So in sum it's the first past the post, the electoral college and the senatorial system. The whole jig is rigged so that Democrats and Republicans are artificially always toe to toe more or less equally in a permanent stalemate. Over time this has created stark divisions in the US society. There are republican newspapers and democrat newspapers. Republican culture and democrat culture. There are even people who only want to date republican or democrat. Even this post is a manifestation of the ridiculousness of the US political system, by shaming the people who refuse to participate in this blue or red theater of politics, calling their preferred choice a "wasted vote". To anyone not in the US, it is just absolutely a ludicrous disrespect of political plurality to call someone's vote "wasted". People vote for who they want to vote.

Keeping people in this sisyphean hamster wheel of politics is the point, which is why some states aren't even given representation lest the jig runs amok. Historically, preserving the jig has always been paramount to the US political elite, demonstrated, for instance, by the pre civil war one state democrat-one state republican equal division. In the post civil war era, states weren't given statehood if they were going to threaten the permanent democratic-republican balance that's so important in the US.

Just as a side note, those models are not invulnerable to manipulation. In my country it's the same, but the central government is ruling from one of the flimsiest coalition governments, with the same lack of power that goes along that dumbasses still claim they are solely responsible for. The opposition claims they 'won' because they got more votes than any other party (which should have also made it easier for them to form their coalition and they weren't able to) and now it is getting so bad and stupid (and troll factory brigaded) that people getting convinced by the rhetoric are trying to pass off the US electoral system as a success story.

It provides more representation, but it does not provide infallibility. I think we have the technology today to do considerably better than what we had several centuries back - in fact, to a large extent we could be voting ourselves on key issues instead of letting it fall back to representatives and false promises if we wanted to. The biggest problem isn't that people in a democracy aren't on equal grounds when grasping different issues and yet they can be radicalized to vote out of rhetoric more than those who would and should be more informed. I think we could have better democracies if we shifted to meritocracies, where you could vote on issues only if you certify you were more informed and the history, reality, and minutiae that govern those issues through exams. But that would also create a system that could be gamed.

Any system can be corrupt, and in democracies it's not just the political candidates but society as a whole when it becomes complacent, ignorant, yet loud and willing to break the system for those that manipulate then into doing it.

Voting in your best interests is dumb, and people should mock you for it. Got it.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, just go vote.

Even with all the bullshit the Court pulled, Bush ended up winning Florida by such a razor-thin margin that it would have only taken 0.5% of Nader's Florida voters to tip the election to Gore.

Third-party voters gave the GOP the opportunity to steal the election.

You know what 5% of the electorate could do?

Ensure the GOP loses every general election and participate in primaries to move the Dems to the left.

That's how you make change in our system. Not by throwing away votes.

This couldn't have been cornier if you'd said it's harder to come out as conservative nowadays than as gay. Do better.

So working to change this situation, 3rd parties contested every house and senate seat. Right?

Did any Trump voters actually say "genocide"? The ones I've met call it "the war".