You are assuming this 4-way 25% split all has unique HARDLINE stances and assume majority decisions won’t get made. However that is not the case. 3 out of 4 may agree on an issue and vote majority. This isn’t “joining forces”, this is having a similar belief on an issue and voting what their party believes is the…

And this is what is so exhausting about self-described “independents” — the presumption that they uniquely inspect issues based on facts and merit, compared to those dirty people that join a party and believe whatever their leaders tell them to believe.

But how is granting a 10% minority that kind of power an improvement on anything? And if that third party votes as a block, aren’t they then just as bad as the Democrats and Republicans, according to the criticisms raised by “independents”? 

Yes, their system is definitely better, as are many other democracies. I’m also a fan of ranked choice voting, which enables people to both vote their hearts but also indicate who they’d prefer among the rest if their favorite loses. 

In a winner-take-all-system, the person that gets the most votes wins the office. If there are three candidates, and two of them are reasonable and one is shitty, the shitty one stands a much greater chance of winning if the two reasonable candidates split the reasonable vote.

Even if it makes society significantly better?

As our government is currently comprised, if there were three or four viable parties, either nothing would get nothing done legislatively or we’d be regularly electing politicians that represent distinct ideological minorities.

I still think it’s a very flawed assumption that the people that vote for third-party candidates would, in the absence of those third-party options, vote for one of the mainstream party candidates.

In a government that requires coalitions and majorities in both chambers to pass legislation, what is the point of not being tied to one of those coalitions?

It’s a massive misnomer to conflate journalists with the owners of media companies that were reaping the profits from those massive margins back in the golden age of journalism, when one outlet had effective monopoly control over advertising and classifieds in a particular market. Outside of a few very high-profile…

Not wading into your larger argument, but regardless of what MIT for NYC says, $33k is not nearly enough to live a “reasonable” lifestyle in a one-adult household in NYC. I know, because that was my starting salary when I moved out here. Even making twice that means you’re still very likely living in an outer borough…

The idea that the market always knows best is why “journalists” like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity make exponentially more than actual journalists that work their ass off for reputable publications. The problem with hard truths is that many people don’t want to hear them. Entertainment value will always trump truth…

This relies on the very flawed assumptions that the market rewards the best products, i.e. the cream rises to the top, and that masses will inherently prefer the highest quality product. What actually happens in a free-for-all market with an overabundance of choice for consumers is that the best marketed products rise…

I wish to tide us over they’d give us a new 2D side-scrolling Metroid. Games like Hollow Knight have shown that there’s still a ton of appetite for that kind of experience. I can only play through SuperMetroid so many times. 

I was referring to Finnish Fury.

When someone invokes their “rights,” it is almost always a strawman argument, usually in response to a criticism of something that person said or did. It is an intentionally dishonest conflation of “SHOULD you have done that” with “are you legally permitted to do that.” 

We sure that’s not Tomato? Sure feels like him. 

This. That clear message — and then the smirking denial of that clear message — is the point of wearing those f’ing hats. They are the physical incarnation of plausible deniability. Anyone wearing one can safely be assumed to operate entirely in bad faith, and should be treated as such. 

Kid’s got those dead shark eyes. I knew kids like him back in high school. I suspect we all did.

My friends and I have long joked that rich white guys (and sometimes, rich white women) only fail upwards. Trump is the easiest example — imagine bankrupting multiple companies through sheer incompetence and somehow ending up richer and more famous for it — but the entire conservative political and propaganda scene…