Okay, first: Nebraska elects via plurality. That’s arguably worse in this case, because if 30% of the electorate votes Democratic, 25% DSA, and 45% Republican, the Republican candidate wins. That means that 3rd party candidates are in an even worse position.

Alaska has a real ranked-choice system, but also has the minimum number of senators (2), representatives (1), and 3 electoral college votes, which is the lowest that it’s possible to have. (Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, and Vermont all also have only 3 electoral college votes.) That means that Alaska is largely irrelevant nationally, as they have minimal input on national policy, or ability to affect the outcome of the presidential election. Note that they got ranked choice voting because of a ballot initiative; only half of the states allow for that in the first place. Ohio, California, and Michigan are the most substantial states that allow ballot initiatives. Texas–which has the most electoral votes after California–does not. The states with the most representatives and electoral college votes generally do not.

Run-off elections aren’t the same as not being FPTP. Without ranked choice, they’re still functionally FPTP, because they drop all but the bottom two candidates. So your 3rd party candidates are going to get kicked off the ballot in run-offs, and you’re also likely to see much lower turnout. (That’s the only reason that Georgia has Ossof and Warnock as senators; they both won in run-offs that had far, far lower turnout than the general election.)

All you’re really doing here is proving that you don’t understand how winning elections work. If you want to win nationally with a 3rd party, you need to put in the work at the local level first, then the state level, and you need to build a large coalition across multiple states. Without doing that first, bitching about the national elections is verbal masturbation.

Mexico is not a purely FPTP system; there are elements of ranked choice at the national level for their legislature. That makes it possible for 3rd parties to build a power base an support sufficient to win the presidency, which is a FPTP election.

Unless and until there is election reform to allow ranked-choice voting–which Repubs and Dems will both oppose, and which is illegal in some states–you can not realistically have 3rd parties winning. Unless and until 3rd parties build up their power by winning at state and local elections, they will not win national offices. Right now, 3rd parties have no foundation of power that they can use to win national elections.

The closest the US has come in the last one hundred years to a 3rd party presidential win was H. Ross Perot, over 30 years ago. Before that, you have to look at Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party, right around the time of the Great War.

to say America was stable and great under Biden is a bit silly,

Jesus, people have such a short attention span.

Covid-19 fucked the economy hard. It was really, really bad. That started under Trump, and Biden was trying to pick up the pieces. By the time Trump was elected, the foundation had been restored. I don’t know how much you paid attention, but economists had been talking about how we were going to have a hard landing, that we were going to have a recession, because of all the money that had been handed out by Biden to stem the economic tide caused by covid-19… And then, the summer before the election, economists were saying, huh, maybe everything is going to be fine after all.

Does that mean that things didn’t suck for a lot of people as housing prices went through the roof? No. But it meant that labor markets were tight, and a lot of people could hop jobs to get better pay. (Not everyone, but a lot of people.)

Going back to 2008, we had the same thing; the housing bubble popped under Dubya, and took the economy with it. (That, BTW, is why I couldn’t get a job related to my degree; I graduated in the middle of that, and there were no jobs to be had in my field.) Obama spent eight years as president trying to get things back on track with the policies that he could control. And, by the time Trump was elected, most people were doing a lot better than they had been doing at the height of the recession. Bush had inherited a booming economy and an enormous budget surplus from Clinton; he absolutely tanked it with deregulation and tax cuts. Clinton, in turn, took a relatively stagnant economy from Bush Sr., and oversaw it getting turned around.

We keep having this same fucking cycle, and we’ve been having it for at least fifty fucking years now. People can’t remember anything past two years ago, and so they vote for the fucking morons that keep shitting the bed on the economy, or they sit it out because they don’t think their vote matters, or vote 3rd party because they don’t understand how voting works in the US.

Does anyone actually oppose foreign military interventionism?

…Why would you? That’s the right thing to do sometimes. We could have totally stayed on the sidelines in WWII in Europe, and only gone to war in the Pacific, because that shit was absolutely not our problem, right?

We should, for instance, be intervening in Myanmar, and in Rojava. We should be protecting the Kurds–esp. since we said we would–from Syria and Turkiye. We should be helping the rebels in Myanmar, since they’re just trying to get basic human rights from a dictatorial military regime.

Does that mean that the US is perfect? Absofuckinglutely no. Not even close. Is capitalism great? Nope. Is authoritarian communism better? LOL, no.

…And yet again, Gen X has been forgotten.

Cool cool.

I doubt that they would show their hand publicly; they don’t want to poison a jury pool.

On the other hand, if they had better video of the shooter, I’m sure they would have released it, because they were trying to get people to ID the killer. One shitty video of half of a face doesn’t really help a lot.

Not really; without the items that were seized, they don’t really have much of anything that would link him to the location, aside from some bad security camera footage that, IMO, doesn’t really look like him. Insisting that he needs an alibi is reversing the burden of proof; it’s saying that, unless he can prove he was elsewhere, then their claim must be correct. But they have so little without the evidence seized at the arrest that the case would be very thin.

Look, if you asked me where I was when The Asshole Brian Thompson was shot, I’d have no fucking idea unless it was something that was a big enough deal that I noted it in my calendar. I don’t even remember where I was when 11 Sept. happened.

Yes. I voted for her because there was no other viable option. Claiming that she’s the best choice in primaries, for a 2028 presidential run is absolute nonsense. Running her again would be beyond stupid; it would be like running Clinton (Hilary, not Bill) a second time.

Fuck sake, get someone that’s a charismatic populist running on messages of, “hell yes, we’re going to tax the shit out of billionaires, we’re going to tax them until they’re millionaires”, with expansion of gov’t services and de-privatization as major platform planks. Dems need a Project 2028 that lays all of this shit out on an eyes-only basis so they can get the majority of it through in the first 4 months, too. Not just unwinding the damage that Trump has done to the federal bureaucracy, but EXPANDING it, and hardening it against any future interference from the executive branch.

No they fucking haven’t.

I don’t know who they’re polling to come up with that trash. Dems didn’t turn out for her in 2024 because she had no answers on the economy, and refused to admit Israel was genociding Palestinians, so they sure as shit aren’t going to turn up for her in 2028–if there’s even an election in 2028–when she still won’t have any answers about the economy–which will likely be in full depression territory by then–and all she’ll be able to do with Israel is say, "well, it’s too late, all the Palestinians have been genocided, oh well).

“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”

Their child literally died. How could it have been worse, exactly?

That’s an exceptionally dangerous claim to make; it’s going to cause people to further alienate people that are on the autism spectrum. When you look at the report that the US Secret Service released on mass shootings (I’d have to find it; I’ve got a copy saved somewhere), autism spectrum disorder is not listed as a factor, while things like divorced parents is.

Perhaps you missed the part that said, “[Forensic psychiatrist Dr Iain Kooyman] found Prosper had an ‘extreme lack’ of empathy and remorse - something that could not be explained by ASD alone.”

And, BTW, people on the autism spectrum lack effective empathy, not empathy. That means that a person on the spectrum has a reduced ability to understand what a person is experiencing or feeling, not that they don’t feel empathy when they do know.

The thoughts I’d be sending are all “fuck this dude, I hope she divorces him when she finds out this is what he voted for”.

You will no longer be an introvert. Your conscious will meld with ours. There will be no you, only us.

Check out Alan Wake, Alan Wake II, and Control, all by Remedy Entertainment. They’re not directly SCP, but they’re adjacent/parallel to it.

I consider the Borg to be a goal, not a problem.

Oh, no, I would never be sarcastic about that. Being sarcastic would mean that I was condoning violence directed at democratically elected officials that are surely doing what the people want and expect them to do, and are fulfilling their duty to the country and constitution.

Of course it’s not time for violence; violence have never solved anything. Asking nicely and remembering to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ will surely convince them to step down.

Anything I would have to say would get me permanently banned from the site for advocating violence.

Remember, as Napoleon Bonaparte said to Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, “Violence never solved anything.”

Right now, my vote is going for Robert Evans. Not that he would run.

Vance was polished, smooth, knew his talking points and bullshit claims cold. Walz, not so much. He didn’t have good counters to a lot of the shit that Vance was throwing out. The broad consensus is that Vance handily won the debate, much like the broad consensus was that Harris trounced Trump in the debate.

He’s literally obama, but white.

He is not even close to being a white Obama. Obama is a highly skilled orator, extremely skilled debater, and a scholar. Tim Walz connects well with people–perhaps especially well with midwestern people–but he is not a particularly strong orator, is fairly weak in debates, and is definitely not a scholarly type. They may be close on policy, although I would hope that Walz would be farther to the left than Obama was.