If Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, and you can’t see yourself voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, then don’t. Vote third party.
Consider the Libertarian or Green Party.
Don’t feed the establishment by voting for Clinton, and don’t feed authoritarian isolationism by voting for Trump.
No. The absolute largest chunk of people considering changing their votes at the moment are disappointed non-conservatives. There was barely any competition among republicans; from the get-go, the voter base united behind Trump. If non-conservatives split their votes across multiple fronts, they WILL lose.
Voting third party in America throws your vote directly into the garbage. Our system does not work like Australia’s. You don’t get a second or third choice, and candidates who win aren’t going to look at the numbers and say “I see 25% of Americans voted Green, I should implement Green policies.” That’s not how it works. Conservative voters overwhelmingly back a single party, the GOP, while non-conservative voters are the ones that scatter across multiple, weak fronts when faced with an unappealing Democratic party nominee. Think about it like this:
The majority of Republican voters support Trump and are not changing their vote even though party leaders and figureheads are universally decrying him. They’ve been groomed for decades by the GOP to be this way, and now party leaders have lost control of the impressionable voter base they created for themselves. There’s nothing they can do about it at this point. While a small number of Republicans can and are switching parties, it’s not very much. Meanwhile, Democrats are floundering, trying to decide which front to unite under. Some of them go to the Green party or Libertarians, sure; the rest stay with the Democratic party in the hopes that even with people leaving, they will have enough to block Trump. But Trump doesn’t need a majority of total Americans to vote for him; he only needs more than the other candidates have. Do you understand what I’m saying? Trump could get 10% of the vote, but as long as no other party has more than 10%, he still wins. The second you split the left and middle across three or four fronts, the right seizes control. This is how it goes down every single fucking time we go through this.
The other thing to consider is that the electoral college is NOT going to weigh in favor of a third party. Doing so would be political suicide. They are paid to vote certain ways, and not doing so would fuck up their careers. Even if an entire state votes in favor of a third party, the electoral college is going to vote for whichever primary party matches up the closest, and sometimes not even that. Their votes are counted when making the actual choice of president; ours are not. They proved that with Gore. The majority of Americans voted for him; the electoral college installed Bush anyway and told us to suck it up. The question at this point is whether they’d risk it a second time, and we have to hope that they won’t, which is why we have to unite under a single front to block Trump.
^^^^^^^THIS!!!!!!!!!! People do not understand that under our plurality system, it doesn’t matter if the majority of the population doesn’t vote for Trump. As long as he has more than any of the other candidates, he wins. Splitting up the more liberal voters is now what non-Trump supporters want to do.
DO NOT SPLIT THE VOTE, PLEASE! GOP is gonna vote Trump, they won’t vote for a 3rd party person. That means a solid voting bloc. Dem who split the vote are in essence giving him a free vote. HILARY WITH ALL HER FAULTS IS STILL BETTER THAN TRUMP!
GOD DAMNIT YALL BETTER NOT SPLIT THE DEM VOTES
This is how the Conservative Party in the UK won the last election with less than 40% of the overall vote!!!!
Don’t do it America!
NOT splitting the vote is how Canada snagged this magical unicorn man in the last election. Basically everyone I know voted strategically, even if it was against their party, to ensure that Harper’s crusty conservative ass was kicked the hell out. Personally I waffle between the Green Party and the NDP politically, but I sure as heck voted Liberal last election.
Think about how much Obama accomplished with a hostile Congress in 6 of his 8 years in office.
Now think about how much Trump can “accomplish” with a Congress that isn’t hostile.
I’m legit scared of this election because of this. Our system is screwed up and I’m sorry if you hate both parties (I’m still shocked we ended up where we are), but realistically, writing in Bernie because you’re “Bernie or bust” or voting for a third party isn’t going to work this time.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes – tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.
(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)
Welp, time to go save a trillion Sebastian Stan photosets to my Google Drive.
I told you how much I loved you.
and how much you loving me meant to me.
I told you that if I looked at my whole life,
you were one of the best things that happened to me.
I asked you to forgive me
for all of the hurtful words I said.
I only said them because I was
so angry that you
stopped loving me.
So you said:
“okay”
and I said:
“this is exactly why we are here.
I deal with my feelings by expressing them,
and you deal with yours by avoiding them.”
We both went silent.
You- because you knew
I was saying the truth.
And me- because I knew
that there was nothing left to say.
moment of silence for the missed opportunities in once more with feeling without cordelia, oz and faith
faith expecting herself to have some hardcore rock ballad if anything but it ends up being a slow, sad ballad about craving acceptance and validation and the whole time she’s trying to shut herself up through various techniques like holding her hands over her face and sticking her face underwater but she won’t stop fucking sINGING
cordelia is getting SO impatient waiting for her bursting-into-song moment that she just starts singing everything without needing to. when she Finally gets her moment and the music starts swelling for her, she coughs, and realizes she’s lost her voice. fu ck.
oz. my man oz. it doesn’t affect him but no one else seems to notice?? and every time there’s a group number when the camera focuses on him it just goes Dead Silent. no singing. every scene, every song– he just looks into the camera like he’s on the office.
i feel like we’re all just kind of reblogging it in a circle and looking at each other uneasily like, waiting for someone to finally give in and yell it out in the reply chain
burnoutbrightly 