[ExI] calling for our exi computer security hipsters, was: RE: Donald Trump

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 4:06 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> Another take: plenty of voters, perhaps even a majority, might say “This
> weird year, the libertarian guy really is better than either of the majors,
> but we already know we must choose between one of the majors, since we
> already know we must choose one of the majors.  Only one of the majors can
> win, even if a majority realizes the third party candidate is superior to
> either of them.  So cut the fantasy crap and choose the least bad of the
> two majors…”
>
>
>
> Is this really what we are saying?
>

We're saying a majority of voters will not vote for a third party.  The
chain of logic you give applies to an unknown percentage of them, quite
possibly most of them.  Then you have die hard party loyalists, who will
not vote for anyone but the party they have been programmed (as in cults)
to vote for no matter how loathsome or detrimental to their own lives the
candidate is.

It is possible to break that to significant degrees, as Ross Perot and
Ralph Nader demonstrated.  No such third party candidate in this race has
yet to engage in the actions and strategies they engaged in.  Just
passively being a better candidate is not enough; they need to campaign,
including a serious amount of media advertising.  If they are unwilling or
unable to do that, they are as unable to win the presidential race as
someone on foot - even one of the world's best sprinters - could win a
stock car race.  It's not literally physics (unlike the stock car race) but
it might as well be.

If you wish for your libertarian candidate to take advantage of the
opportunity you perceive, you need to get him to start campaigning on a
scale similar to what Clinton and Trump are doing.  If he needs to spend
other peoples' money to do so, to afford the TV ads and travel budget -
well, that's what Clinton and Trump are largely doing; he doesn't need to
match their campaign budgets exactly but he will still need to go through
millions of dollars to have a chance.  (By contrast, Trump's campaign has
gone through roughly $50M so far - remarkably frugal for a major party
nomination winning effort - and Clinton's done a few times as much.  So
it's very likely that any successful third party will need well over $1M,
probably over $10M.  Again, though, that need not be - and probably
shouldn't be - mostly his money.)  If he refuses to raise or spend that
sort of money (say, if he thinks that spending a few hundred thousand or
less is enough), then he refuses to do anything but predictably waste what
time, energy, and money he and his supporters put in.

If he objects to taking money from large donors, he can take a page from
Bernie Sanders and get lots of people to donate small amounts.  (Copying
what works from your opponents is a basic politician skill.  It goes with
the basic political realization that almost nobody is complete scum;
everyone has good that can be salvaged.  Someone you rabidly oppose on one
issue today may be your best ally on another tomorrow.)

And...well, honestly?  Get him to do some serious research into what has,
and what has not, worked with regard to getting elected President.  If he
wants to skip the "get nominated by a major party" part, fine, but there's
way more to it than that (and, honestly, a lot of what goes into winning
such a nomination goes into winning the Presidency anyway).  Of the rest,
what has he been doing, and why isn't he doing the rest of it yet?

Answer that, and you have the likely real reason to why he's not going to
win.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160506/0e3d2b05/attachment.html>