third party

Voting Against

Some of my friends have been asking people to not vote, as a protest against the corrupt system. It won’t work.

Don’t misunderstand me: I agree that the system is corrupt. Elections are regularly fixed — NOT, as the conspiracy theorists would suggest, by stuffed ballot boxes and voter farming, but rather by the simpler method of limiting the pool of candidates to those Wall Street and the Establishment would find acceptable. We have a choice between terrible and worse.

Which is why I intend to vote against.

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F&L 2020: But I Don’t Wanna!

“But why would you vote third party? Don’t you realize that Trump is an existential threat? It’s not like the Greens will win anyway.”

I’ve heard this dozens of times and in many different ways, but the message is always the same. Substitute Biden for Trump and Libertarian for Green and it still works — though I more often hear words like “disaster” and “horrific” from my conservative friends.

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Voting Is Not Enough

Every four years like clockwork there’s a major campaign designed to guilt people into going out to vote.  And every four years like clockwork we’re presented with a choice between two of the most detested humans on the planet.  In 2020, it’s more of the same.

Even the exceptions (more…)

F&L: Our Endorsement

The editorial staff of The Not Fake News, together with our Brain Trust, has long debated registering our formal endorsement for the Presidency of the United States.  With the departure of Bernie Sanders from the race, we have finally determined that there’s absolutely nobody running we think is qualified, competent, mentally stable, and has unimpeachable moral standards.

This is nothing new in American politics.  Very few of our presidents (more…)

Third Parties In 2020

If you’ve been reading my stuff for any amount of time, you might remember that I was a pretty fervent supporter of Gary Johnson in 2016.  Now, I’m no Libertarian; likewise, I don’t smoke pot.  I just really dislike both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either one.

(Not to worry; I voted in Maryland.  I didn’t get Trump elected.)

This time around, the most prominent Libertarian is running as a Republican.  That’s only fair, since the most prominent Socialist (more…)

Is Voting Third Party Wrong?

NOTE:  This is intended as a response to an article by T. N. Reider published at “The Conversation” entitled “Is the ‘lesser of two evils’ an ethical choice for voters?”  That article is well-written, and I recommend reading it.  All quotes come from there.

As I’ve discussed in other articles, despair is endemic in this country.  The presidential politics of this year underline this in a fashion seldom seen before, with the fiercest supporters of each candidate shouting loudly that their pick for president isn’t quite as bad as the only other choice.  People have stopped questioning the system, which seems to guarantee that the worst possible candidate always gains their party’s nomination.  Instead they like to shout at one another about how the other option is worse.

One thing that cannot be denied:  Americans hate both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and they do so in record numbers.  We haven’t seen this level (more…)