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  • Perot absolutely had an effect on American politics. I already brought up nafta which is the obvious thing for anyone who remembers that time, but did you know that his particular type of outsider conservative populism has been compared to trump?

    I didn’t, but it’s easy to see him as a precursor to 2016.

    Like I said before, you’re making a mistake saying third parties can’t be effective. One of the legs of the argument against third parties is that they’ll have an effect on the election! Not to mention the obvious truth that third parties have pushed and pulled major party platforms!

    It’s better to stay with the mopey, “nothing can change” argument instead. At least people who already believe that will agree with you. Suggesting third parties don’t have an impact is both provably false and undermines your point.

  • I think you’re making a mistake here. You’re gonna wanna stick with stuff like you had before where you imply nothing can change.

    Perot 92 and 96 were extensively studied and had far reaching effects on domestic policy, campaign strategy and both gave rise to the spoiler/throwing your vote away discourse in the modern day and were also proof that it was false after people had time to study the results.

    I remember after 92 people would spit on the ground when you brought up nafta. They didn’t know about it before the election that year and the deal was all but signed at that point. Perot dragged that thing into the light and that campaign is the reason trump could speak to people’s memories when he said how bad it was and talked up how good the usmca would be (even though it’s basically a continuation).

    I like when people bring up the reform party because there were lots of well studied measurable effects and they didn’t come from serious disciplined parties like one might think of psl or something as but from the abstract, goofy reform party. They even fucked up in 92 and had a little will-they won’t-they drop out.

    There’s some study or article in the 92 Wikipedia article that references people’s exit poll sentiment that they “would have voted for Perot if they thought he could win”. Not just in passing either, but reaching the conclusion that he could have won if those people had voted for him.

    Did they not vote for him because they didn’t think he was for real after the drop out?

    Would the reform party have been able to make more of Perot clowning on hw and Clinton if it had been running candidates in downballot races?

    On a more touchy-feely level, I wouldn’t be bringing up how the American political system is most vulnerable to third parties when its sclerotic leadership is struggling to differentiate some of its two parties policies.

    Not if I wanted to convince people not to vote third party at least.

  • And before then?

    Even if the threshold for funding and ballot access isn’t met, voting third party helps get your party at events, tells the major parties how popular their platform is and builds support and awareness.

  • Votes are used to determine ballot access in future elections, funding, event presence and of course, by the two major parties to figure out where they could pick up an electoral vote or two by tacking a third parties platform onto their own.

    Why some parties and political movements even use voting as a means to organize and raise awareness around their platforms and issues!

  • If winning were the only effect that voting had then you’d have a great point.

    No ones taking votes away from Harris, if she wants to get psl voters she can take up policy positions they support.

  • How much (metal, refined, produced on earth) wire would you say is required to produce an air (actually vacuum, but we know air core really well so there’s math for them) core electromagnet which can generate a field capable of deflecting solar wind over the area of its pv array? In order to maintain that field strength, how much current is required? Can it be supplied by a pv array equal in area to the effective field area? How many of those are needed to cover the area of mars?

    That’s-a lotta metal!

    Also speaking as a person who deals with e-waste daily, it’s both by volume and mass composed of petroleum products. Fiberglass is reenforced plastic. Ics are 90% plastic by volume. Discrete components are made of petroleum distillates in a lot of cases and encased in them in even more cases!

    Even if you only considered the boards as the e-waste and not the plastic cases and bodies themselves, those dont exist in a vacuum like our hypothetical electromagnets, a reduction in printer boards means fewer printers which are almost completely just plastic.

  • Who are you talking about?

    Third party votes get counted and have an effect. The whole idea of throwing one’s vote away is so nonsensical that it was lampooned in a simpsons bit.

    If third party voters are inflicting harm on all the groups you mentioned, does that mean they’re responsible for the harm caused by one or the other party? Would you extend that to people who actively voted for those two parties? To the people enacting those parties policies? Deciding them?

    Just how responsible for Bidens genocide in Gaza would you say a person who voted third party or trump in 2020 can be held?

  • So that’s a real specific problem I have with the greens: they have no theory of power.

    Green politics of all stripes are predicated on, at best, recognizing that there is a system in place and that if it were different, things could be different. I tend to take issue with the specific causes and effects involved in the things greens want to change up, but even if I didn’t, the party has no idea of where the political power it purports to desire to wield comes from.

    Democrats and republicans have clear understandings of that. The different weird communist parties have understanding of where they think political power comes from.

    Green conceptions of power are inscrutable.

    What you just wrote is a great example of that. Where does the power to enact any of the changes you claim greens want to make on the electoral system flow from? From being elected into positions in government by the same system that keeps people from exercising their political will?

    Part of why even looney lefties like myself dismiss the greens is because at the most serious level they’re still just trafficking in “well, if i was in charge” rhetoric.

  • The scale of what you just described is really goofy.

    It’s also a very delicate shield against a very serious problem.

    I don’t think it’s feasible to protect a mars-diameter disc of massive magnets from damage by either normal objects traveling through the area or from some human engineered attack.

    If you’re imagining the capacity to create such an emplacement, don’t you imagine that such phenomenal effort and wealth of resources would be better spent solving some terrestrial problem?

    There’s a real difference between e-waste, which is mostly byproducts of the petroleum refining process with electronic components smeared liberally on, many of which rely on petroleum byproducts themselves and electromagnets, which are, at the scale you’re discussing, massive chunks of metals refined, shaped and organized into configurations that will create magnetic fields when dc is present.

    I have a hard time imagining a level of focus required to bridge that gap.