I think you’re at least partially right. Statisticians and election analysts have traditionally called those people by the technical term “dim-witted, narcissistic shitheads.”
The more modern, abbreviated term for that group is “Sarandons.”
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O I like him! That’s great.
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In case anybody missed it, Canada has reaffirmed its commitment to an open Internet - no throttling. So the best way to ensure a fair and balanced Internet for your new company might be to run a bunch of dark fiber links up to the North and use their backbone to connect everything. The Canadians have been through all this before and learned their lessons the hard way.
/ * This is a little long, so please bear with me */
True story: I was part of the team that ran the first Internet link into Canada, way back in the late '80s. That first link was slow (as in “56k link for a single computer science department” slow) but it got the job done, as we were at first serving just a single department in our university.
As word spread of our new technological marvel, just like everybody else who had a link we quickly became incredibly popular and folks started coming out of the woodwork asking for hookups to get themselves some of that cool Internet fix.
First it was other departments, then other colleges, then other universities across the province, then other folks who justified their need as supporting the province’s researchers. This same scenario was playing out in each province, over the span of a couple of years in the late '80s and early '90s (and yes, I can affirm that the first few steps of an exponential growth process can be a boatload of fun!).
Of course, as the other provinces came online, Canadian users started to want to communicate with each other, so our link began seeing more and more traffic heading down to the States just so it could traverse over the growing U.S. backbone and back up the appropriate link to Vancouver or Toronto or Calgary, etc.
So fast forward a couple years and Canadian government and university administrators began to see the light and started planning a nationwide Canadian backbone. Now, distances were pretty vast for the smaller Canadian population of would-be users (remember, at this point we were still mainly a research and teaching tool) so inter-provincial link speeds were just not as fast as the links we were operating down to the faster backbone our more numerous American counterparts could afford. No biggie, we had less traffic so things would stay local, right?
Well, the way this Internet thing works at its heart is based upon the idea that each packet is free to find its own way to the destination, and will try to do so as fast as possible based on current traffic patterns. So guess what? Yup, all those inter-Canadian packets continued to find their way down south, across and back up again. The folks building the new backbone actually tried to play with the routing to get the traffic to stay in the Canadian slow lane but that just meant that Canadian traffic sucked, but U.S. bound traffic was just fine. As a friend of mine pointed out at the time, we all were just constantly rooting for a Canadian Internet outage, as that would immediately bump up transmission speeds across the entire country!
Eventually the folks building the backbone realized that their crude attempt at censorship just wasn’t working. We kept beefing up our American bound links to handle all the extra traffic and they had to keep beefing up the inter-provincial links until eventually the Canadian backbone folks got their stuff up to modern fiber speeds and we all had access to the ubiquitous coverage we have today.
The take-away is an important one that this fascinating technology continues to teach us to this day - ***“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”***.
Sorry for the length of this, but the Internet has been trying to teach us this basic lesson from day one, and it seems as a collective group, humanity just won’t listen. Canadians got it early, let’s see how long it takes the U.S. to repeat those same mistakes and figure it out, too.
One last comment on all this: When we brought up that first TC/IP-based Internet link, we were also running two other types of network for communicating with other campuses (one based on IBM technology for connecting mainframes and another based upon dial-up standards for exchanging email). Both systems were mandated by higher ups, both sought to impose much more rigid control, and both failed and were absorbed by the TCP/IP-based Internet within a couple of years.
But hey, again - no biggie, right? All America really risks here is an essential part of our modern infrastructure, our international standing as a world technological leader and eventually our security (hey, if we do route all that traffic up north, we’ll be putting our backbone traffic in the hands of those nefarious Canadians - who knows what they’ll do with it!?!).
But a bunch of Republican politicians got to pocket a lot of cash, so all’s good, right?
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You’ve perfectly made my point, General.
Nobody’s assuming that “democracy requires a limit of only two parties.” But the United States isn’t an ideal or even generic democracy. We have our own Constitution with its own imperfections and idiosyncrasies.
Parliamentary systems have gravitated toward multiple parties. But in 228 years of elections, our political ecosystem always has gravitated toward just two parties, particularly at the federal level. Even transition periods — when a new major party replaced one of the two previous major parties — have followed a specific pattern that didn’t include a period with three parties: One major party disintegrated and the new major party then formed, basically the heels of a period of single party dominance: Federalists failed before Whigs came on the scene. Whigs had to collapse for the Republicans to form.
This wasn’t intentional, nor am I saying it’s a good thing. It just is. Washington and Madison hoped that we wouldn’t even have parties. As it turns out, however, Madison – being a realist – ending up forming what eventually became the Democratic Party.
Sure, third parties have had influence. Particularly at the state or local level, they’ve modeled reform (or reactionary demagoguery) that was then adopted by one or both national parties. In other cases (Dixiecrats and Wallace’s American Independents, for example), they facilitated the migration of voters from one major party to the other. They’ve also given voice to ideological minorities at the extremes of the political spectrums (e.g. Communists, Nazis) that were excluded by the mainstream parties.
But they’ve also had the perverse affect of harming the interests of their members by splitting the vote at their end of the spectrum and thus handing Electoral College votes to the other side. That’s an even a more predictable outcome now that the two major parties are more ideologically distinct than in the past. (It’s not certain that the Reform Party cost Bush the '92 election and it appears that Stein didn’t quite cost Hillary the Electoral win last year, but it’s a plain mathematical fact that Nader’s Green Party cost Gore the presidency.)
There’s a way to pull political dialogue and policy to the left. It’s by working within the Democratic Party both to pull policies within the party to the left and then to get Democrats elected. Of course, you may not get everything you want; that’s the nature of democracy.
But that really gets to the point of all this, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, third-party activists are exactly what they claim not to be: They hate democracy. They want everyone else to accept their ideas, without the give and take that liberal democracy requires. In the hurly-burly of intra-party debate, others may win the argument; compromise is necessary. If you take your ball over to the Greens you get to be ideologically pure, to claim (falsely) that you’re more democratic than the Democrats, and to hold yourself blameless of handing Florida to Bush and Cheney.
I hope you’ll actually attempt to engage in this discussion, rather than to regurgitate a talking point as you did with the previous comment. It’s not coincidence BTW that Thunderclap more pithily made the same point I made in his own response to you. This isn’t rocket science: We all should be able to agree that the sky is blue, that bears shit in the woods, and that, because of the way our Constitution plays out, the Green Party candidate always harms the interests of justice, equality and the environment and helps Republicans.
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It’s harder and takes much, much longer to turn good policy into good legislation than it takes to sign EOs and slap together a shit sandwich. Plus, we’re not even a year in. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
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In a very broad and non-technologically savvy way, I thought this was the case. I have thought all along that they were whistling up a stump trying to regulate the internet like this.
I think ways around are being crafted as I type.
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The only way a third party is going to make a difference is if it can elect enough of its candidates to the Senate and House to back up their candidate elected to the Presidency. And if they end up being so popular, due to some massive grass roots movement caused by a major economic and social disaster (which is almost always the cause of major rapid political shifts), they will no longer BE a third party; they will be the major and dominant party in the nation.
But until that happens, a third party candidate that gets elected President STILL has to deal with the TWO major parties in Congress - even if some of their third party candidates are elected to the Senate and House - neither of which owes the elected third party President any allegiance whatsoever.
What’s that old phrase? “Herding cats”?
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Not minor at all. You nailed the exact reason for it – the people who own Big Media and ISPs are either currently one and the same, or aspire to be.
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sharing…
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I can see a number of fairly obvious developments. In no particular order (except the first one):
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ISPs start charging differential pricing for on-ramps (and throttling & censoring to boot).
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Many high volume content and Cloud service providers route around this by relocating their content to out of the country (the infrastructure for this exists today, which is why we have to put clauses in our contracts specifying that content be hosted in the U.S. - otherwise we might not even know where it sits).
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New “censor-free” on-ramp companies spring up to provide links to those hosting providers.
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ISPs and Republicans cry “foul!” and try to throttle this traffic (but fail, as attempts to do so backfire spectacularly).
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The U.S. holds another election, which is seen as a referendum on all this malarky. Folks may not care for Hillary’s emails, but they sure as hell care about their own, and vote accordingly…
So long term, this will all be fine. We just have to let the fever break and get through to the next election. The feedback loop in the system can then do it’s thing (and if not, I should be able to host a few of you in my new house in Canada while you get settled in. If things do go bad I’ll post a link to a website to take applications, but you Yanks might not be able to see it, what with all that throttling that’s headed your way! 
)
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And I really wanted to watch “Feud”, the series about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. And I REALLY love Jessica Lange, so Sarandon doubly fucked me over with that one! LOL!
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That you find facts to be obnoxious says a lot about you
I took umbrage at the fact you provide no data or information to support your arguments but demand that I do and then say: “Be very specific.,” It did remind me of my eighth grade teacher.
So I was very specific. Your argument, despite the fact that there have been many major parties throughout US history, and many elections where more than two mattered, is to tweet: “Third and fourth party candidates are spoilers or public jokes—or both. Please continue to make yourself look foolish—it’s mildly amusing.”
Exactly so. And just exactly so with having to deal with the two parties who hold Congress. That’s another reason it’s not workable in this system. The president is not a hereditary monarch, he’s elected from a party so exactly.
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Doubtful. They tend to have sugar daddies that will help with that kind of thing.
How can something that gets no more than ~5% of the total support be considered “major”? History clearly shows that these 3rd parties have never done anything other than throw the election to their ideological rivals. That does not seem like the definition of something major or something positive for the prospects of third parties in the future.
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If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
I mean, c’mon, I wasn’t born on a turnip truck, okay?!
If it isn’t going to change then clearly something is wrong here, amirite?
On the face of it, that’s one of the most ridiculous statements they could make. Why else are they spending millions of dollars for? Because they like to? Because they would rather waste it on buying politicians than on paying their employees? Because nothing says wealth like a good office redecoration?
Jeebus, pikes indeed. And tar to preserve the rotting fetid things on the pikes.
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As far as Clinton voters are concerned we do not have to pretend, we know because it happened in 2008: an overwhelming majority of Clinton voters (myself including) enthusiastically voted for Obama. And Clinton in 2008 (unlike Sanders in 2016) worked her ass off to make sure that happens, from the moment she accepted the defeat and to the moment she voted in the general election.
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