You're an idiot.

Most of us vote for the candidate that best upholds our interests no matter the letter on the lapel.

This also isn't true. Hypothetically, rational voters would vote their own self-interest or using other rationally explicable criteria, but those are hypothetical voters. Those "thought exercise" voters are just as hypothetical as the "invisible hand" that magically makes markets fair, or the hypothetical economic rational actor in the economy that always has perfect information and behaves rationally to maximize their own self-interest. They're more fictional than the "spherical cows" involved in introductory physics problems.

A lot (or maybe even most) of the people that vote Republican vote against their own interests. That's why Cory Doctorow talks about them being "turkeys voting for Christmas".

Farmers that vote Trump are voting against their own interests. People from small towns with decaying infrastructure and social security recipients that vote Trump are voting for a circus clown that will not do anything to improve their life a single iota.

If you have to type fifteen responses complete with diagrams about your ideology, then everything I'm saying about it not being straightforwardly definable is 100% correct and you're proving it right now.

Gallup found that voters who identify as libertarians ranged from 17 to 23% of the American electorate.

Exactly, "identify as"...do you really think 17-23% of the American voting populace actually has consistent, definable meanings about what it means to be a libertarian? I'm willing to bet that they do not. Relatedly, I have never seen the Libertarian Party get 17-23% of the vote in my lifetime. So, sure, you have a bunch of people that "identify" as libertarian (as I once sort of did in college despite always voting Democratic) but in reality, they are not part of the organized party at all. The Libertarian Party gets up to the low single digits in national elections which is a pathetic showing and is why they do not even get to debate the candidates of the two main parties.

They show up every couple of election cycles, take their "conscientious objector to the 'duopoly'" single digit voter percentage, occasionally cause spoiler effects, and then fuck off back into the wilderness. They're basically the "Green Party" equivalent for right-leaning people, exactly as I was saying above.

American politics is akin to the aisles in the grocery stores here: lots and lots of different labels and colorful packaging, and very little actual choice.

I read the linked article, and noticed that verbiage: "considered by some". That's exactly my point. Nobody has the ability to define what exactly libertarianism is in this country because there are so many little feuding factions, and it's a 1-5% movement in the first place.

It's essentially a thing you can pretend to be when the Republican candidate is too repulsive to openly support and that's about it.

Are you going to change the definition of pacifist or are you going to call me a violent non-pacifist.

If you and all of the other pacifist movement people are really violent then I'd say the same thing about your movement, you're running a naming scam.

In this particular case, it's difficult to even call libertarianism a set thing, because the "movement" spends much of its time discussing what is and isn't libertarianism, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that individual liberty versus collective responsibility is largely a more difficult balance to strike than they're pretending, and there's no clear and fast way to cut it for every scenario. Pacifism, on the other hand, is much more straightforward to define.

George Will can eat shit.

they’re just using that moniker because it fits whatever they’re really trying to accomplish.

That's what Libertarianism is. The same naming con also applies to the so-called Green Party. I don't know why we are so easily fooled by names of things, especially when we live in a country full of scams where people constantly try to fool you like this. You'd think we'd develop a tolerance considering it's a constant thing, but nope, we're still just as stupid and naive as we were decades ago. If anything, we've gotten more naive.

Yes, and they do.

This is Twitter equivalent to fucking yourself down the bar skank ladder. I knew of Laura Loomer exclusively from Twitter when I was there and she was in a similar but less illustrious category as that guy who got caught pretending to be a black man, that weirdo whose profile pic looks like he bought a shirt too small in order to roid rage out of it, or that former Hercules idiot.

I think the step you're missing is 4chan

So, we’re not doing Section 230 anymore ?

That's a part of a US law, and as such doesn't throw a shrimp on the bar-b in Australia, mate.

all you’re doing is feeding those Green voters into the non-voting demographic.

What's your proof of this claim?

(Succession)

Laura Loomer is Trump's Kerry Castellabate, now all we have to do is hope that not wearing the compression socks on flights in order to impress her takes him down like it did Logan Roy.

👆 Trump in the "spin room" afterwards.

I agree partially, but he also did reasonably well perception wise against Hillary Clinton. I understand that she was kind of wooden, and that she is very much not a gifted orator, and that she had 30 years of media hatred beamed directly at her, but there were a lot of people saying the debates were going to be a blowout against Trump and they never were.

Harris worked her strategy in the debate nearly perfectly. She told the audience what they were going to see before they saw it (a hostile, out of touch, out of control liar), and later referred back to what she said when he became exactly that.

Hillary had canned lines like "A person who can be baited with a tweet should not have control of the nuke codes", but she was telling instead of showing.

Kamala told the audience exactly what to expect, laid the bait out for him and completely knocked him off message, and then when the buffoonery arrived she pointed out that there he was, exactly as characterized. She showed everyone how easy it was to rile him up instead of just telling them, and by the ending portion where she was saying things similar to "Putin would eat you for lunch" and "strongmen want you to win because you're weak and easily manipulated" it was clear that she was correct even to audience members who had no additional context about Trump.

Kamala told the audience what to expect and then demonstrated to them that what she was saying was accurate.

It wasn't just anyone that could've executed this strategy so brilliantly against Trump. Many others have tried, and although I think most people suspected it would be possible to bring Trump the miserable, angry racist couch potato up onto the stage during a debate, we got only a tiny glimpse of it during a debate once before (when Trump had active COVID).

Despite it looking easy to manipulate him on a stage, in actuality I think it is pretty difficult to not get sucked into the non-sense vortex when someone's feet away from you spewing out vile bullshit, and Harris was the first one to be able to not only trigger a storm exactly on cue, but also stand back calmly, get out of the way of the swirling debris, and stay focused on what she wanted to communicate with the audience.

It is amazing to me that these assholes will say "thoughts and prayers" or completely deny that things happened when it comes to schoolchildren being murdered in their classrooms, but expect people to be filled with righteous anger when it comes to brown people entering the country. If school shootings are a "fact of life" in America, assuredly immigration is a "fact of life" here...and it is one that has the advantage of being beneficial to the country.

Another thing that irritates me is that these babbling gobs (and particularly this caricaturistic, flanderized bobble head) prevent actual debate around how immigration should function in this country...ensuring that we will continue to be told by the media that there are only two positions on immigration: become a country that nobody new can enter even as we dwindle in population and inventiveness, or have "open borders" that allow absolutely anyone into the country.

I know the reality is that the Democratic party has nuanced positions on asylum and immigration, but the straw man position the Republicans keep insisting Democrats have completely chokes the public discourse to death leaving us continually discussing the two "options", and thanks I fucking hate it.

Yeah, I too don't understand why everyone around him is just OK with the idea of the guy being a completely responsibility-free empty vessel.

It seems that once again they want to absolve this...former president of all responsibilities, but him being responsible for what comes out of his donkey-brained mouth is the lowest possible bar of accountability before the bar clangs to the floor.

He has concepts of a plan.

You're right that every capitalist wants to be a landlord, but the distinction between the two groups is that capitalists aren't there yet, and capitalists are largely also subjected to rents by those that already are.

A lot of the recent movements in software has been away from selling products and toward rents (i.e. away from capitalism and toward neofeudalism / technofeudalism). That is why everything has become a subscription service (even things that you used to pay once and be able to use as is until you wanted to "upgrade" like, for instance, Adobe Photoshop).

Doctorow explains the difference in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Tl6yIsCoY

Try to enjoy them; if Trump wins, these will be remembered as the good times.