PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Jim Logajan on March 04, 2020, 07:39:26 PM
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I know you are all dying (from a yet-to-be-named virus) to know how LP presidential candidates are doing in their own little electoral universe (even if you don’t recognize a single name.) Reason.com has a summary:
https://reason.com/2020/03/04/libertarian-super-tuesday-big-night-for-jacob-hornberger-nota-john-mcafee-drops-out-and-backs-vermin-supreme/ (https://reason.com/2020/03/04/libertarian-super-tuesday-big-night-for-jacob-hornberger-nota-john-mcafee-drops-out-and-backs-vermin-supreme/)
Oh yeah, it may help to know the cast of characters, so here is one list of LP presidential candidates:
https://www.lp.org/libertarian-party-candidates/2020 (https://www.lp.org/libertarian-party-candidates/2020)
I recognize the name Lincoln Chafee as well as the more obscure Adam Kokesh and Vermin Supreme, the latter having a memorable handle.
The presidential race looks to be an off-year for the LP in comparison to 2016. Hopefully the LP candidates in the down-ballot races do well, where they have won seats and had some affect on local public policies.
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https://verminsupreme2020.com/
Has my vote I want a pony
Sent from my iPad . Squirrel!!
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Have you ever heard of Kamala Harris? If so, thank a Libertarian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_California_Attorney_General_election
Tim
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Have you ever heard of Kamala Harris? If so, thank a Libertarian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_California_Attorney_General_election
Tim
The CA AG post has been won by a Democrat in every election since 1998:
Lockyer ‘98 (51.5%)
Lockyer ‘02 (51.3%)
Brown ‘06 (56.3%)
Harris ‘10 (46.1%)
Harris ‘14 (57.5%)
Becerra ‘18 (63.6%)
The trend is clear and 2010 stands out as an aberration. If you scroll down to the results of the page you linked, add up the votes that went to the leftist parties: Green, and Peace and Freedom candidates. Comes to 419,295 by my count. Then add the Libertarian, and American Independent candidate votes. I get 416,576. If you assume all those third party votes would have gone to Harris and Cooley respectively, Harris would still have won. That is because the political demographic trend was on her side and she had to work at it to not get a clear majority. It had nothing to do with libertarians being spoilers.
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I’m not a good libertarian, ive never heard of any of these people. Vermin Supreme? I can’t even... I need my coffee.
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I’m not a good libertarian, ive never heard of any of these people. Vermin Supreme? I can’t even... I need my coffee.
I hold many Libertarian values, but don't know any of those people either. Until they can be a credible force in politics, I will lean towards the Republican who possesses as many of those values that I do. Yes, chicken and egg, but still I am not throwing away my vote.......yet.
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Thanks for doing the math I did not have enough caffeine yet to do it myself.
If you assume all those third party votes would have gone to Harris and Cooley respectively, Harris would still have won.
That is the part I hate, people assume the votes would go a certain way. How many of these people would not even of voted if it were not for the 3rd part?
Every election I here from both sides, If you vote 3rd party you are voting for the other side.
Already seeing Democrat friends saying if you vote 3rd party you are voting for Trump. I told one of them by their theory I have nothing to lose. I either vote for Trump, or I vote a 3rd party and it is the same as voting for Trump. She laughed and said Ok vote 3rd party please :)
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I hold many Libertarian values, but don't know any of those people either. Until they can be a credible force in politics, I will lean towards the Republican who possesses as many of those values that I do. Yes, chicken and egg, but still I am not throwing away my vote.......yet.
True libertarians want to dismantle 90% of the massive government structure now looming over us, but it cannot happen without open violent rebellion. Trump is trimming it a bit and trying to get rid of the more corrupt bad actors, but the thing is too permanent now - we need a destructive detonation to fix this. Because, look at how many people work in government jobs. And look at how they protect their budgets and their fiefdoms. Why do you think we will never have a flat tax? Because all those IRS employees would need to find jobs in the private sector. Federal, state and local government employees outnumber manufacturing employees in the U.S. by a factor of almost two to one. Let that sink in.
If you could do it, it would be wonderful, and result in explosive economic prosperity, but there would be a short term period of adjustment involving high unemployment and these government employees will never do this willingly. To avoid this you would need to do it gradually and piecemeal while ramping up private sector opportunities but you would be fighting upstream every step of the way against the nature of these entities which relentlessly drive to expand their power and secure their existence. I doubt even popular uprising and civil war could make it happen. It’s way too entrenched and now, it has the advanced tools of technology like never before, with the tech giants on its side: total surveillance of our every move. Not to mention the huge propaganda machine (media) and indoctrination camps for all the young generations (schools and universities).
I am afraid the libertarian vision is dead before it can even be born. The last live birth was the birth of the U.S. itself, our Constitution and classical liberalism is the closest the world will ever come to libertarian utopia. It happened in that once ever window of industrial advancement that lifted common people out of subsistence living and into modern comforts but not technologically advanced enough to secure a stranglehold on every individual’s privacy and reach tentacles into every minute aspect of our lives.
The best we can hope for is to try to contain this monster hovering over us like the giant UFO in Independence Day, as best we can, to limit its violations of us for as long as we can. This is exactly what Trump is doing, and it’s temporary. The Democrats want to unleash this thing completely, take it over and use it to massacre what portion of economic privacy and property we have remaining. Establishment Republicans are happy to merely allow it to grow naturally while lining their own pockets.
But we are stuck with these two parties. Trump grasps that this monster’s leash needs to be tightened a bit. That’s all he can do. He infiltrated the Republican Party, rose to power and is doing the best he can. There won’t be another Trump. When he’s gone we will continue the slide into tyranny and oppression, within a decade with the Democrats or within one generation if the Republicans manage to hold onto power. The libertarians are just a wet dream that will never come true.
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Bottom line: show me which country that has a libertarian form of government and how it’s working out for them.
I’ll wait.
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Bottom line: show me which country that has a libertarian form of government and how it’s working out for them.
I’ll wait.
Somalia?
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Bottom line: show me which country that has a libertarian form of government and how it’s working out for them.
I’ll wait.
Maybe the closest thing we've had is the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation or sometime right after the end of the Revolutionary War. Post Constitution things were fine for a while until the Federal Government became exactly what we rebelled against in the first place. The final nail in the coffin came in 1865.
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Bottom line: show me which country that has a libertarian form of government and how it’s working out for them.
I’ll wait.
The U.S. in the beginning is an imperfect approximation but the closest we will ever see. It nailed free market economics and that led to the rise of the greatest nation that the world has ever known. Can’t count slavery because they didn’t regard blacks as fully human, this also applied to Native Americans. The social freedom side of libertarianism was less relevant. You didn’t have identity politics, gay activists or government restrictions on what you put in your body. Religion and morality kept a tight lid on sexual freedom. There were no bans on marijuana, opiates, etc., and no ban on abortion. Your private and social life was controlled by your own conscience and your church community, not government law.
So the U.S. in its first half century came closest to a libertarian form of government. Not perfectly by any means. I don’t think it is possible to do it again, short of a comet strike wiping out most of us, and re-setting us back at Stone Age all over again. Which could happen.
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Somalia?
I hope you’re joking.
https://memepoliceman.com/is-somalia-libertarian/
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The CA AG post has been won by a Democrat in every election since 1998:
If you assume all those third party votes would have gone to Harris and Cooley respectively, Harris would still have won.
I see no reason to assume anything at all about the other third party candidates. I'm talking about Libertarians. Harris's margin of victory over Republican Cooley was 74,157 votes. There were 246,583 Libertarian votes. If just one in three of them had recognized political reality and voted Republican, Harris's political career would have been stopped, at least temporarily.
As it is, she is now a US Senator, and will remain one as long as she lives unless, of course, she eventually gets elected President, which she seems to want to do. She is as bad as Feinstein, and, in my view, worse than Boxer. The 2010 California AG election was the one and only chance we will ever have to stop her.
Tim
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I see no reason to assume anything at all about the other third party candidates. I'm talking about Libertarians. Harris's margin of victory over Republican Cooley was 74,157 votes. There were 246,583 Libertarian votes. If just one in three of them had recognized political reality and voted Republican, Harris's political career would have been stopped, at least temporarily.
As it is, she is now a US Senator, and will remain one as long as she lives unless, of course, she eventually gets elected President, which she seems to want to do. She is as bad as Feinstein, and, in my view, worse than Boxer. The 2010 California AG election was the one and only chance we will ever have to stop her.
Tim
And if just one in three Green party votes had gone to Harris she’d still have become AG. It is a special pleading fallacy to argue third party vote shifting for one candidate while holding all other third party votes unchanged.
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And if Republicans hadn't voted for Perot we wouldn't have had Bubba and the Wicked Witch of Little Rock, perhaps not Obama either.