Someone needs to pick up a Chinese history book…

Thank you! I’ll give that a try.

I’m using Cloudfare for DNS. I’ll check out what they have available.

Considering that Taiwan has been de facto an independent country for a long time, its easy to see why “forever maintaining the status quo” is the best choice for most people.

Declaring independence from China when they are already functionally independent from China would just be kicking a hornet’s nest. The outcome of a war with China would end in either a bloody defeat in which their country would be leveled and their freedoms taken away, or a bloody victory resulting in… the current status quo, just with lots of dead people.

So why would your average citizen desire anything but the status quo? They’re already a free country, this question is just asking them if they’d like a war for the fun of it, or their freedoms taken away.

I agree Reddit is toxic. I’d argue reddit actually stopped being Reddit around 2016. But it’s posts like this that clog it all up and are partially why it is the way it is today.

I gotta agree with this. The toxicity in any reddit thread increases dramatically when the poster pre-emptively complains about all the toxicity they expect to receive. Whereas when you just ask straight without going into a whole speech about comment quality, you get much better replies. Particularly because it’s hijacking your own thread; changing it from whatever question you wanted to ask into an analysis of the comments.

Assault is not free speech.

If that’s the understanding of my position that you came to after this several-days-long conversation, then I’m disappointed in your complete lack of attention to everything I’ve said.

I thoroughly read and thought about everything you wrote. You failed to convince me, but I at least listened to your position. It’s really disappointing you didn’t offer the same basic courtesy, and your last comment was the same kind of non-sequitur regurgitated rhetoric that the troll posters in this thread have been using.

Peace out, man. It’s a shame we couldn’t have a productive discussion.

And there it is. Not voting for Biden is stamping ones feet. The sheer entitled arrogance. Jesus.

Exactly. You are stamping your feet and exhibiting sheer entitled arrogance.

Your inability to comprehend the logical outcomes of your decisions is seriously disturbing. You’ve been polite enough and engaged honestly with me, and I appreciate that. But I don’t think we’re moving in any productive direction so let’s end it here.

I’ll just leave you with the same words I said before: You need to take a big step back, read everything that you wrote, and apply it to your own position. Then think on the actual outcomes that the two paths before you lead towards.

What a weird take. You’re not rewarding anybody. You’re choosing who will be the next president. You’re making a choice that will affect you and millions of other people.

I said previously I expect people to vote intelligently. You seem to be implying that allowing Trump to win just to spite the Democratic party for choosing Biden is somehow a rational choice.

You brought up blind arrogance.

Imagine being so blind that you fail to see that the outcome of a Trump victory would be devastatingly worse for yourself and for the world. That you’d be supporting an outcome that leads to more and worse genocide, despite that being a “single issue” for you. That’s blind.

Imagine being so arrogant that you’d choose the path that leads to more genocide and greater global suffering, despite genocide apparently being a “single issue” for you, simply to punish a political party made up of millions of people because they didn’t field the candidate you wanted them to. You said yourself: “The Democrats have a membership of millions.” Yet you are the one stamping your feet and threatening that if they choose Biden, you’re going to vote against him just to spite them. And help bring about more genocide, despite that apparently being important to you. That’s arrogance.

You don’t have to like Biden, you just have to prefer the outcome of a Biden victory over the outcome of a Trump victory. It’s akin to choosing between lima beans or rusty nails for everyone’s dinner. You don’t have to like lima beans, but if you are so arrogant to choose the rusty nails for everybody because you don’t want lima beans, you’re blind to how you will hurt others and yourself.

I’m sorry man, but you need to take a big step back, read everything that you wrote, and apply it to your own position. Then think on the actual outcomes that the two paths before you lead towards.

To be faced with two evils and to not choose the lesser one is crazy. Why would you ever not prefer the lesser evil!?

Again, that’s just saying someone better than Biden would be better. I’m not sure who you’re trying to convince that wouldn’t agree with you.

I expect people to vote intelligently based on the outcome they want. If there’s 2 outcomes and they don’t want outcome A, they should vote for B. Complaining that B isn’t sparkly and written in glitter doesn’t change the fact that they don’t want outcome A more.

I don’t know who’s selling this line you think is being sold. I’ll happily vote for a better Democrat than Biden. And I don’t know of anybody who is so enamored with Biden that they’d throw a temper tantrum if he wasn’t the nominee. I actually don’t know what you’re arguing here other than saying “a better person than Biden would be better.” Which is true, but it’s just a tautology.

Wow. That’s not what I said at all. You quoted me and you still got what I said wrong.

It’s obvious you didn’t understand the conversation then, because I didn’t say that at all, nor am I a centrist. So let’s hold off on the accusations of batshit ignorance, yeah?

Like I said to the troll poster above: if you’re interested in engaging honestly, let’s do this. Otherwise…

They might be doing that… but not possible? Come on dude. That’s just a failure of imagination. There are plenty of legal ways to corrupt the government. Lobbying is the most common one, and very legal. Insisting that they’re committing crimes without any evidence of it is just silly.

Their post was a complete non sequitur. And since they deleted their post and had half their other posts in this thread removed by the mods, they clearly weren’t here to have a discussion. It’s a weird thing for you to defend.

I don’t disagree with your assessment of Biden, but you’re saying this like he’s not the better choice of the two. Everything you accuse him of is amplified by entire magnitudes with anyone in the GOP.

And let’s be real here, Israel has been a central pillar of US policy for generations. There are one or two high-ranking politicians in the entire government who don’t support Israel, but they have zero chance of becoming president. Biden is being chosen not because of one belief or another, it’s because of his track record and his experience. He is capable of one of the most important jobs of the office, which is working with the rest of the government, even the people who hate you, to get shit done.

???

That’s not what I said at all.

Did you reply to the wrong person?

copyright law is never used by the small artists to protect their work

Tell me you’re not an artist without telling me you’re not an artist.

My friend, this is precisely the kind of thing I was alluding to in my previous post when I said “regurgitated by people who have clearly never created anything in their life.” I promise you that as an artist I have used copyright law to protect my work, and so has just about every artist I know. I don’t even know what you’re imagining to make you say something so patently false.

You’re right; incompetent is a stretch. Some of them probably are, but others are just… I don’t know, out of touch with reality? And others are probably there knowing they will lose, but showing up anyway just to make their presence known for one reason or another, whether naive idealism, or cynical attention-grabbing.

I’d love to kick both Trump and Biden to the curb, truly. Well, a little farther than the curb for Trump. But the only way to do that is to change the way the system works. There is no scenario where a) it is realistically possible to elect a 3rd party candidate, and b) a 3rd party candidate, if elected, would have the ability to make any meaningful change to the system.

Remember, we’re talking about changing election law here. And who is responsible for changing laws? Not the president. It’s the legislature.

If we want something like a viable Green Party or Libertarian Party or whatever, we need to focus on the legislature, not the presidency. If we want to eliminate FTTP winner-take-all elections for the presidency, we need to focus on the legislature, not the presidency.

And believe me, I do want all of that. Which is why the puritanical grandstanding about protest votes by people who don’t seem to understand the fundamental rules of US government is so painfully frustrating. If people were half as passionate about actual politics as they are about arguing badly about politics on lemmy, change would be possible. Instead, they are bamboozled time and time again, like clockwork, every four years by political insiders who feed them the notion that a protest vote that help the worst possible candidate is the most meaningful action they can take.