Are you suggesting that famous people from outside the party should be placed at the top of the ticket?

Good leaders spend a long time building experience. Someone with a strong legislative, judicial, or executive record should be the candidate. Not some reality TV star or shitty actor. We’ve done that enough in my lifetime.

So yeah, the candidate should be someone that’s been with the party for a long time, and that’s why it’s so important to get involved and vote in local primaries and elections so that the kind of candidate you want to support is the one that’s been working their way through party leadership for 20 years.

No. It very much is not in his powers.

Biden’s term ends at noon in 2 months. He can’t just declare that it doesn’t. If he could, Trump would have done that in 2021 instead of trying to overturn the election.

If you want them to win, you should encourage them to caucus with and run as a member of a party that can win.

Any effort put into 3rd parties is a waste of resources because they can’t ever win in our system of government. You can wish for things to be different, but wishing doesn’t accomplish anything.

How many primaries have you voted in? Do you engage in local politics and primaries to support progressives early in their careers to steer the party left, or do you show up every 4 years when CNN is talking about your state’s primary?

If you do the former - great! Encourage others to do so, and understand that it takes time to change a party’s direction. And in the meantime, support that party in the general elections because they’re still better than the alternative.

If it’s the second, then get more active.

They made their own bed. I don’t want to hear a word out of them that isn’t working towards a realistic, attainable solution.

Voting in the general election against the worst party and voting in the primaries to make the other party better is a solution.

Choosing not to participate and then whining that those who do participate are making all the decisions is not.

That’s 100% false. Did they have preferred candidates? Absolutely. Did they keep people from voting for other candidates or discount their votes? No.

In fact, in 2016 when it was “stolen” from Bernie, the only way for Bernie to win would have been the superdelegates ignoring the results of the caucuses and primaries and installing Bernie as the candidate, which is exactly what everyone implies they did for Clinton.

It’s like there’s a recurring theme here: those who actually get off their ass and vote have more power to steer elections than those who bitch and moan about everything and stay home pouting.

There were primaries every one of those years. There was no rigging of the primaries. If people had voted differently in them we’d had different candidates.

Once again, did you put in a minimal amount of effort to educate yourself on the candidates and participate, or did you just whine about it after the fact?

What about the other primary years when the important stuff is really decided? Biden, Obama, and Clinton didn’t just magically appear and become contenders to the Democratic primaries. They spent decades as party members, working their way up from the bottom. You think Bill Clinton would’ve been President if he hadn’t been Governor? You think he would’ve been Governor if he hadn’t been Attourney General? You think he wouldn’t have been Attourney General if he hadn’t previously run for the House?

There were primary elections every step of that path, and he won them all. That’s how he became Bill Clinton. And why did he win that first nomination?

He was a coordinator for the McGovern campaign and clerked for Senator Fullbright.

People don’t magically get nominated for the Presidency. It takes decades, and the people who will be nominees in the future are running for county clerk, state rep, or city council now. But if you only show up to vote in general elections every 2-4 years, or only vote in the Presidenial primaries, you don’t get to bitch about who gets selected because you wait 20 years to give your input on a candidate.

Take part in the process and give your input when and where it matters or stop bitching about nobody listening to you.

Primaries during incumbent sessions are never serious for any party, so 2012 doesn’t really count.

They had a very long primary process in 2016, but Hillary won. Yes, the establishment wanted her, but she also won more primaries than Bernie by the time the convention came around, so the super delegates deciding not to overturn the will of the primary voters is hard to argue against, even though I preferred Bernie.

2020 had a primary season, and Biden won.

2024, they had an incumbent, and Biden didn’t drop out until like 2 weeks before the convention.

And there were down-ballot races in the primaries endo one of those years and more. Did you vote in all of them, or are you just bitching because the people who do get off their ass and participate don’t do what you want?

Name one national election in the history of the US where voting third-party resulted in the goals of those voters being achieved.

We’ve had a 2-party system for over 200 years. You aren’t changing that by believing super duper hard in a third option.

What you have to do is change the parties. Party direction isn’t set by losing general electionsm It’s set by choosing better candidates at the local level and in primary elections. Voting for a third party or choosing not to vote at all will never, ever move the country in the direction you want. It’s impossible.

The GOP is cancer, and right now the Democratic party is chemotherapy. It sucks, the side effects can feel worse than the disease, but it’s the best way to fight and survive.

Voting third party is going to a spirit healer. It’s playing make-believe and letting the cancer spread.

They’ve been trying by bitching about the party every couple years when the primaries they don’t participate in select the wrong candidates.

You know what makes them win even fewer election? Allowing fucking Donald Trump to win the Presidency.

Vote dem in the general election, and change the party in the primaries. It’s literally the only path leftward in our system of government. Doing anything else moves the government further right.

You know what 5% of the electorate could do?

Ensure the GOP loses every general election and participate in primaries to move the Dems to the left.

That’s how you make change in our system. Not by throwing away votes.

Nader got nearly 97,421 votes in Florida. After the Supreme Court stopped the count, Bush won by 537 votes.

The environmentalist voters stopped Al fucking Gore from being President.

For the white folk like my family that are out there wondering why so many people are afraid: here it is.

You don’t have to be an illegal immigrant to get caught up in this. If you’re an American citizen who is arrested and thrown in a camp without access to communications or legal counsel, how can you prove you’re a citizen? You’ll end up being in line at a deportation hearing, get 30 seconds in front of a judge, and find yourself deported because you didn’t have the correct documentation on your body.

Or if you did and the immigration gestapo “lost” it.

I’m so white that even sunburnt I still look like a ghost, so I’m safe. But that shouldn’t be what protects me from illegal deportation.

Even with all the bullshit the Court pulled, Bush ended up winning Florida by such a razor-thin margin that it would have only taken 0.5% of Nader’s Florida voters to tip the election to Gore.

Third-party voters gave the GOP the opportunity to steal the election.

In 2000 they 100% did and we’re still paying for that shit.

No, I really am not.

I’m saying specifically that a link is a bad reference, whereas a citation to a statue, book, or other reference that doesn’t change domains and stop functioning is a good one.

A code citation is an excellent reference. A link to a Congressional site isn’t when Congress is liable renamed after Trump’s favorite donor in 6 months.

If you want to get into it, it’s links that aren’t acceptable as citations. I’m academically published and onto of the number 1 rules of citations is that links on their own are never acceptable sources because they’re ephemeral.

When I cite a book or journal entry, edition, and page number, that source will still exist in the future even if tracking it down is difficult. If I had cited a link to a Geocities site or a page that was edited after my publication, future researchers wouldn’t be able to find my sources. Ever.

Sometimes, you have to cite a webpage, but if you do you it needs to include date accessed, the name of the page (sometimes sites change their urls and the data can be sniffed out afterwards if you know to look for the organization), and the relevant data should be copied into an Appendix in case it disappears forever.

No, but there’s the “fighting words” doctrine. Depending on the level of targeting of the hate speech, it may not he protected. Let’s use Mike Pence as an example because it was a whole thing 4 years ago.

Saying “Hang Mike Pence” to the air is probably protected. Whereas going to Mike Pence and saying “I’m going to hang you” isn’t.

The weird greyness is that telling someone to hang Mike Pence can also be a crime (e.g. conspiracy to commit murder or disturbing the peace), so the details and context matter.

Basically, if it’s a threat with teeth, it may not be protected. Being offensive is legal. Inciting a riot or threatening or provoking someone into attacking first is not.