And, lo and behold, he did not respond with specific responses to the actual claims I made. On reddit, this is when I would hit the “block” button, because I know they’re just wasting my time. But here they just keep responding forever until I stop responding myself.

How is it that I had heard of them months before the election, and you’re still catching up?

Back to the point I made elsewhere - the population is abdicating their responsibility to vote responsibly, that is the core problem here. Election came and went, and you didn’t even research the non-D/R candidates. As the saying goes, politics isn’t a spectator sport. Your approach is basically like going to a car dealership and asking them nicely to give the best deal. You gave up all your power at the door. You didn’t fight them on the random fees they threw into the price, you just went, well, at least it’s not the RAM dealership across the street. You didn’t look on Craigslist for used cars listed by sellers, you didn’t ask a mechanic what brand to get, nothing.

You claim I don’t, but you don’t show it. That’s the big red flag for “Dunning-Kruger” - unsubstantiated claims, or claims with faulty arguments behind them.

And for the love of god, don’t respond to that with anything but specific responses to the actual claims I made. I cannot take anymore of these circular arguments today.

It’s not the “human condition”. All of these things are products of cultural practices and belief systems. Not all societies wage war. Not all societies put mass murderers in control. You cannot be so careless with your logic and hope to ever arrive at a correct conclusion.

That is the problem I’m describing. It is the population’s job to evaluate and choose candidates. Simply waiting for them to be handed to you gets you totalitarianism.

you’ve done the ground work elsewhere in government built up awareness of the party from holding smaller offices first.

This logic for a preemptive discreditation of a third party applies the same - incorrectly - to any office. The choice for a Senate or House or governor or even state legislature seat can face the same dilemma.

You’re not voting for the party, you’re voting for a candidate, and it’s virtually irrelevant what other offices members of their party holds. An entire population voting on “brand awareness” is suicidal. A population must make educated decisions on political candidates or risk totalitarianism. I am well aware of the stupid processes people use to select political candidates, that’s what I’m complaining about in the first place. The fact that we haven’t solved this problem already got us where we are now.

People have both individual thought and herd-like psychological behaviors? Your comment could be read as either supporting or disagreeing with my comment, not sure what you’re trying to say.

Case in point - pigeon on the chessboard. You shouldn’t even comment if this is your attitude.

The odds of winning, for the candidate that secures a majority of EC votes, is exactly 100% (so long as that process is followed). The determining factor of that is the voting decisions of the population. That is not a function you can describe only in probabilistic terms. By all means, let’s hear your broken explanation filled with omissions and logical errors.

Did you see this part of my comment?

Why the fuck would we, AS A POPULATION, choose anything but the best option.

The population voting for C gets you…what? Let’s think about this. Is it…C? Hmm, yes, it is.

Notice how I made a point to phrase it that way, to preempt comments like yours entirely? And then you went and posted that anyway, either because you didn’t read my comment, or just felt like ignoring the point I was actually making?

You people INSIST we only ever look at it in terms of, “49.999 are voting Trump, 49.999 are voting Harris, your vote decides the election!” The pre-narrowed, individual choice. But that’s not how the game theory applies here. The game in this case is that there’s ~210M people with the ability to vote for anyone. There is no pre-narrowing. Their collective decision results in the electoral outcome. Your application of game theory here is literally incorrect.

“Work the way they do”. Oh, OK. If that’s not how electoral politics work!

Any reasonable person would reason with the points I addressed against that point in my previous comment, instead of just restating the premise. Just repeating what has already been said when somebody points out the problem with it is literally the definition of “unreasonable”. Literally, you cannot be reasoned with.

I’m not going to read the rest of your response,

Then don’t reply.

or you don’t understand game theory when one side is always going to vote for their guy regardless of how criminal or openly fascistic he is.

Humans are not robots. Anyone can vote for anyone. Their mindset at the time of voting is the only thing that determines their vote. Do notice how fixated people are on attacking third party voters with almost no influence over the election, instead of… 77 million? Trump voters, who decided the election. Have you tried unbrainwashing them at all? Like, tally up all the time you spent trying to influence people’s votes - what percent was aimed at Trump voters?

It isn’t a self defeating choice that got us here it’s literally how the system was designed.

It resulted from the design of the system + our society, but those two things are not mutually exclusive. Logical error.

The actual choice:

A) Stabs you in the heart

B) Stabs you in the lung

C) No stabbing, picks wildflowers for you

And you guys go, “C isn’t viable! At least you’re less likely to die if you get stabbed in the lung - you have an entire hour to get to the hospital!”

Bro, C is right there. Was there the whole time. Why the fuck would we, AS A POPULATION, choose anything but the best option.

Did you think that maybe uniting behind an evil candidate as your collective sole effort to defeat Trump was a bad plan?

You all say, “if only you all did what we did, we would have won.” That’s true in reverse - if you had all only done what we did, we would have won. And we wouldn’t have had a war criminal in office either.

Why is the Democrat the default vote? How is it compatible with democracy at all, that the one thing we actually control as a people, the vote, isn’t even based on who’s the best candidate?

In my mind, this is very simple, we have a basic responsibility as a people to exercise FULL control over who’s in office, to secure the outcomes we want. And we’re failing to do that. We don’t go through the process of figuring out who out of every candidate is best. The TV tells us which of two candidates to pick, and we pick one of those two. That eliminates all democratic checks on the government.

Get ready to vote Dem really hard in 2028 /s

Let’s start with the very basic logic here. Let’s say 80, 90 million people come out and vote for, say, De la Cruz. Accounting for the electoral college and all that, enough to secure a victory. Is it not true that virtually all of us had the option to put a check next to her name, or write that name in? It is true. Is it true that we would have had a better outcome for the society with De la Cruz, than we would have with Harris or Trump? That is also true. So what - SPECIFICALLY - stopped this from happening.

That anger is extremely misdirected. You demand unity behind your political candidates, from people who refuse to support them on account of them seeing absolutely horrendous flaws that you refuse to see yourselves.

Why would a mass murderer deserve unity behind them, but a non-mass-murderer doesn’t? The fact that you’ve arrived at that conclusion at all demonstrates the absolutely bankruptcy of your political reasoning - the things that we’re trying to achieve with a social system in the first place are sacrificed. Human life, economic equality, quality of life, all of it.

You’ve lost sight of the entire goal. That’s the logic of drug addiction - chasing a high, diminishing returns, at the cost of your health. You’re continually investing in something which provides you worse and worse outcomes, and refusing to acknowledge alternate choices.

I would argue the entire problem is the self-defeating mentality that the D vs R choice is the only choice. It’s in fact the population believing that - in itself - that results in the poor election outcomes for third parties. Something which was not true as recently as 30 years ago.

The population, in fact, has the option to vote for any candidate on the ballot, or even write in candidates. The so-called “viability” of third party candidates is a mental fiction. The “viability” only has to do with people’s willingness to vote for them, which, in a massive circular logic, is based on their perception that the rest of the population will not vote for them. That is the actual mechanism at play here (besides the truly brainwashed, faithful supporters of the two major parties, at least).

In fact, the entire U.S. constitutional system is only a tradition/custom, that we have the option to up and abandon when it no longer serves us. The reason we get stuck with it is the various state actors (cops, military) who do not understand that it’s not some sacred inviolable thing, or actually support it, and are willing to use violence on the population to enforce its implementation. What actually happens if the indoctrination of the entire population - Trump and Harris supporters and all - is undone, and we come up with a different, better vision for our society?

So, every hypothetical situation besides Trump winning, in the end, did not play out, due to the failure of the American population to mount a united opposition to Trump. Harris didn’t win, De la Cruz didn’t win, Stein didn’t win, West didn’t win, etc.

Now let’s focus on this question for two seconds, because I don’t think you all have ever actually addressed it. Putting aside the supposed “viability” as a reason for to vote for them - since that’s circular logic before the election has even happened. Putting that ASIDE. Of all the non-Trump candidates, who, in the seat of the Presidency, would have been the best candidate for the job? Who, sitting in that office, would have produced the best outcome for Americans, or the world as a whole?

I use it unironically and just think you’re an idiot.