I actually agree with your last sentence. it’s a no-win situation for the democrats and there’s a seemingly growing contingent that thinks the best loss they can take is one where a new candidate or set of candidates are introduced to the electorate.

polls are wrong all the time, you’re right. what does it look like if against all odds, biden wins? the man has shown himself to be incapable of cognitive function. should voters fall back on trusting his cabinet and handlers “our competent administrators, their unelected sycophants” style?

hes facing significant opposition from the other branches of government and even at the end of his life when faced with a supreme court ruling that gives him the legal go ahead to enact his administrations policies he won’t do it.

that’s not looking like a great second term. if he lives through it then they’re the do-nothing democrats who can’t accomplish their agenda and abandon their constituents, if he dies then they’ve got kamala who would be very funny but is incredibly disliked.

the democrats are between a rock and a hard place right now because they ran on trump being a dictatorial fascist who will crown himself god-king and now that hes going to win they’re at fault for cynically using the threat of fascism to get votes instead of building the kind of base to oppose fascism that one and a quarter centuries of history would dictate or being the boy who cried wolf if it turns out there’s a peaceful transition of power in 2028.

basically there’s no way forward with their current messaging and platform because when trump wins and institutes american fascism (it’s already here, but i’m typing from the perspective of democratic strategists) they’re naive buffons who pissed away their time and resources trying to get people to vote for an inadequate candidate on a shuffling the deck chairs platform and when trump doesn’t send the brownshirts into the streets and has a largely uneventful second term theyre the people who pissed away their time and resources on a candidate and platform which aren’t up to the challenges we face because of orange man bad.

they’re done for and the best possible outcome is an uneventful trump presidency with a smooth handover complete with “restored faith in our electoral process”. in that case it’s best to go ahead and start getting their benchwarmers out on the field to find out whos up to the task in 2026 and 2028.

There’s also a cost to transitioning to the new technology.

Normalizing arbitrary size removable media makes physical exfiltration much easier because no one is asking why you’re using an illegal technology in the government building.

Floppy disks are not able to identify themselves as a keyboard and release a payload of keystrokes on command, or hide entire soc computers complete with network adapters.

There is also the matter of retraining on an institutional scale, and if you think it’s as simple as “put this into the computer, not that” you’re woefully underinformed.

Just as an aside, it’s pretty fraught to compare a language transition caused by centuries of forced resettlement to switching the kind of computer thingy government employees use over the course of two years.

The people calling for Biden to drop out are supporters of his party, the democrats, who recognize that he’s unfit and incapable of winning. They want him to be replaced by someone else to increase their party’s chances of victory.

No one is calling for trump to drop out because he’s looking more fit in comparison to Biden and he’s projected to win. No one would call for a candidate to drop out when they’re in the lead if they support that candidates party.

Criminal allegations, true or false, don’t enter into it because America has a two tiered justice system where the wealthy and powerful are less beholden to the law than the rest of us and because presidency requires the violation of myriad international laws, norms and human rights.

The job title might as well be War Criminal in Chief and none of the allegations leveled at trump are disqualifying.

Well that’s dumb.

The government can use whatever system it wants, and if there aren’t components on the market it can justify a make work program to domestically produce them.

Governments were able to run perfectly well without high density removable storage, why is it necessary now?

Why would it want to get rid of floppy disks?

Magnetic disks. The person who said ssds hasn’t tried it. Spinning magnetic disks lose their data much more slowly than any ssd cell.

Even 3.5” floppies do better than ssds.

Jokes on you, not thinking!

We’ve already been through this.

Third parties aren’t vote splitting spoilers.

People who don’t vote for democrats aren’t insane.

If you’re really afraid of project 2025, buy a gun and develop deeper relationships with your neighbors. Voting against the person who already did January 6 won’t protect you from them.

we need to keep voting for conservative, xenophobic, genocidal democrats in the hope that something which hasn’t happened in seventy years is going to happen again before we can actually make our voices heard in a way that can’t be ignored?

and that will somehow not send democrats the message that racism is the winning strategy?

thats a counterproductive and extremely bad idea that hasn’t been thought out.

don’t do that.

you just said the only feasible way to change things is to keep voting for the lesser of two evils. doesn’t that seem a little absurd, given that its what got us where we are through a consistent movement right, not left?

how can you suggest that the democrats just need more of our votes when they got enough of them on a popular left movement to win both houses and the executive in our lifetimes only to pursue a right wing policy program?

you said republicans would change if they keep losing, but that’s predicated on republicans losing consistently. even if by some act of a power higher than both of us biden manages to win this go round, how much longer do you think it will take before republicans resign themselves to it? two more regimes? four? before or after florida is lost to the rising atlantic? before or after every person who ends up at the southern border is detained indefinitley or put to death? can the people of gaza last until even this november?

how long do i need to patently wait? twelve, twenty four years?

What youre suggesting rests on fundamentally misunderstanding both the history we have to refer to the record to see and the history that we both lived through!

I will not wait for some unspecific pie in the sky future to be heard and neither should you!

lets say youre right, and the president can’t do anything to stop arms shipments. simply forcing the (it wouldn’t be swift, the supreme court works on a set schedule) case would be better than rubberstamping the appropriations of our genocidal congress.

simply forcing the supreme court to rule would be powerful!

make them put their names on their genocide! even if the executive fails wouldn’t it be better to actually try everything to stop the genocide than to simply say “nothing i could do!”?

of course, if the executive branch were so weak there’d be no reason to fear project 2025, but i’ll leave that alone.

but there are tons of ways to hamstring aid, usually it’s not explicitly listed what aid will be sent in a bill, that’s left up to the executive. in that case de la cruz could send nonlethal military supplies like food, medical and replacement parts.

in the case that aid is specified, it can be slow walked as part of a peace deal, it can be deactivated or simply sent during adverse conditions that will ensure it never arrives.

psl has been running in state, local and congressional elections since 2008.

its astounding to me how many people reply to posts like this saying “you can’t win, so dont try!” or “its going to be hard and people will oppose you, so give up!”.

it’s already like that.

wow, maybe you ought to hold the biden administrations feet to the fire on that! i bet a person who was president could do something about it no problem!

you’ll have to forgive me, i’m not here to debate people so i don’t link a million things or drop the good ol’ tankie wall of links unless its asked for. my assumption is that if someone wants to learn something they can just look it up themselves.

Perot was not a spoiler, another source for that, people mad at hw bush lying about taxes voted for clinton, the wikipedia article on public opinion about nafta.

now usually I wouldn’t link a wikipedia article but there’s just so fucking much there that i’d rather someone actually read the sources linked in it rather than try to wrangle its’ citations. one thing that isn’t covered in the wikipedia article is that as public opinion changes, polls that ask specifically about nafta get negative results and polls that use more open ended language about “free trade agreements” get more positive results.

of note: the wikpiedia article specifically recognizes the effect perot had on public awareness of nafta, citing two sources that say support rose after his 93 debate with al gore (those sources cite one of the polls that asks about “free trade agreements” and not nafta specifically, natch).

I don’t have the energy to figure out what sources would convince a person that kerry ran to the “left” of gore. i just have to trust that a person would see it and figure it out even though kerry was a piece of crap in his own way. as far as proof that platform was a response to the greens in 2000, there was no major third party turnout in 2004 and the greens positions in 2000 were subsumed into the democrats platform or winnowed away in 2004.

to your claim that third parties can’t force other parties to do anything: you’re right, they can’t. we have the right tacking biden regime because of that. the democrats have decided that it’s a better electoral strategy to run on, and i know i’m sounding like a broken record and its frustrating to always have to respond to these positions, genocide and border detentions rather than literally anything else.

third party votes can’t force the biden regime and the democrats to abandon those positions, but they can show the democrats how much support they could pick up by taking them on.

you said every major candidate runs on platforms that the majority of americans don’t support. you’re right. why can they get away with that? is it possibly because people have accepted the “throw your vote away” logic?

I don’t know the answer to that, but i do know that actually expressing what we want with the only voice we are given that politicians can’t deny is a phenomenal way to change it!

Okay so if you really believe that trump is a foreign asset who will attempt a coup then why are you worried who people vote for?

You ought to be pushing people to prepare to defend themselves and the country from January 6 part 2, not vote in an election whose results won’t matter (because the foreign asset led coup attempt will have to be defeated).

Hmm, yes, who can say why every candidate for over twenty years has had to explain what they’d do about nafta after the year some guy got on tv and yelled about it non stop when before no one could even describe it?

Who can say why the democrats tacked left after they failed to out conservative the bush administration?

Perhaps things are just occurring with no relationship to each other and can’t be connected!

Of course you’re not gonna find much succor for voting blue no matter who when you’re suggesting that we live under a complete breakdown of causality…

Your point that third parties havent been a threat isn’t in any way related to the documented effects third parties have had.

If the only outcome from a vote was winning or losing then you’d be right, but votes are used to figure out which parties get funding, presence on the ballot, event appearances, media coverage and public awareness.

Both major parties look at the recorded vote and triangulate how to get the numbers they need from the electorate that came out.

If there were a set number of voters than you’d be correct, there’s no reason to care about third parties, but third parties pick up tons of voters who’d otherwise stay home. Something like 30% in perots case and upwards of half in Naders 2000 campaign.

The reason the two major parties pick bits and pieces off third party formations is so they can add to the voting base and not have to try to chase after their opponents constituency. You know, like how the democrats are doing.

Oh well, if you clearly communicate your needs during the primary and fall in line for the general then why wouldn’t the democrats reward your loyalty by adopting your positions!

How clear and transparent would the upcoming trump presidency have to be for you to jump ship from the democrats and take up a position that they have to aim for in 2028?

Perot 92 was not a spoiler campaign.

After the dust settled, everyone accused it of acting as a spoiler. In the next two decades several groups studied the results and found that Perot only reduced Clinton’s margin of victory.

Perot 92 was listened to. Every candidate from it’s inception to the adoption of the usmcta had to answer “what are you gonna do about nafta?”

People like to call Nader 2000 a spoiler, but that’s just a distraction from the fact that jeb bush stopped the recount and the supreme court declared bush the winner.

Nader was listened to. The democrats ran left in 04 and 08, at least in word.

At what point does a person recognize and admit that Biden or trump, we lose?

If someone is only going to do the least they possibly can, vote in the election, when should they stop trying to pick the least harmful winner and instead start working towards an alternative?

If all a person will do is vote then is t it most important to record their policy preferences in the only way that can’t be glossed over, lied about or deepfaked?

Voting for what you actually want to happen is literally the only way to communicate your needs to political parties that they actually listen to.

There are people whose whole education and job is just to know how many people in a given district that the party can pick up by adopting aspects of a particular platform.

Tell them! Tell them that you won’t vote for them unless they take up the antiwar, Medicare for all torch! Tell them that they can’t get your district without a housing guarantee and free school lunch! Tell them to stop the genocide in the only way they listen to!

It’s not a protest to use your vote.

I’m voting party for socialism and liberation and you can too. They’re running Claudia de la Cruz on a platform of Palestinian statehood and an end to arms shipments to Israel.

For me there’s no better time to start building a new American political formation. If the democrats wise up and snap left when they see the third party/lack of turnout then that’s fine too.