You're entitled to think whatever you want, but I am entitled to remind you that 2 + 2 = 4. We have an "A vs B mentality" because that's the design of our political system: it is structured to favor two dominant parties, which are themselves coalitions of interests.

Assange is many things, but "stupid" isn't one of them. Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump has the obvious impact of helping Trump, which is why the Trump campaign claims to coordinate with him.

That is really dangerous way to view people. I hope we have more common sense when we view security researchers that publish security vulnerabilities, rather than see them as campaigning for the competitor. Every published security vulnerability for windows is not an advertisement for apple, or vice versa. "If you are not in favor of Microsoft, you are in favor or Apple" is unhealthy way to view the world.

And it's not because I think security experts are stupid and don't realize the obvious commercial impact that a security vulnerability has.

I mean, you've made it clear how you feel, but not so much what that feeling has to do with the facts of this election. The choices are Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. To oppose Clinton is to support Trump. It is a zero-sum contest. If Assange wishes a pox on both parties, he could stay out of the election altogether. But of course, that's not what he's doing.

It's more like 0.5 + 0.5 + 4 * epsilon = 1.0

Your choices are Clinton + Kaine (Dem), Trump + Pence (Rep), Johnson + Weld (Lib), and maybe Stein + Baraka (Grn). No one else could win without deadlocking the electoral college.

To oppose Clinton is little more than calling a turd sandwich a turd sandwich. One does not also need to point out that her douche opponent is a douche.

While the US elections systems virtually guarantee a two-party system, it does not mean the two on top always have to be the same parties. If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.

I do wish a pox on both houses--along with a hemorrhagic fever, parasitic worm infection, and some kind of blotchy skin rash. I am not staying out of the election. I think Clinton would competently lead the country in the wrong direction, and I think Trump would be a national embarrassment on multiple fronts. Strategically, the best strategy I could follow would be to bash the presumptive front-runner, whomever it may be, to keep the two major candidates as close as possible, and hope that the minor candidates can somehow win enough states to deadlock the electoral college.

Note that it is unlikely that is the primary motivation for Wikileaks. But it does show that this game is not a zero-sum either-or.

> If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.

I think it's far more likely that if the Republicans fall apart, a large component will pivot and eat up one or more of those other parties to retain a Republican designation with slightly different values. It's a mistake to think of either of the two major parties as static.

This. An extremely important thing to understand about the American political system, and also the exact reason why the Trump campaign is failing (the belief that the Republican party is a single ideological force and not a coalition of different interests).

I learned this from The West Wing, along with most of my knowledge of how federal politics works. There are conservative Democrats, and liberal Republicans. Being a bleeding heart liberal in a swing state isn't going to win you the a seat.

This is in strong contrast to Westminster parliaments, where political parties are for the most part a monolith, only occasionally allowed a "conscience vote" (that's not to say there isn't infighting). To vote against the party is a very good way to get booted from the party, which as far as I'm aware is practically impossible in Congress, the closest you have is being expelled from a caucus.

Unless your argument is that HRC would be equivalently as bad for the US as Trump, this argument does not make sense. Neither Stein nor Johnson can win this election; neither has a chance materially better than that of Joe Exotic Speaks For America 2016.

I have no expectation that Johnson or Stein could win, except in a strictly mathematical-theoretical sense. They are both on enough ballots that they could win a majority in the electoral college, if and only if enough people voted for them.

But they do not have those votes--largely because many people who share your general opinion keep hammering home the message that if you do not vote for one of the top two candidates, then at best your vote does not matter, and at worst it destroys America.

My concerns are that Trump is a misogynistic sleaze who will undermine US diplomatic prestige, be generally ineffective as a government executive trying to act like a business executive, and will damage international trade; and that Clinton is a corrupt politician who will undermine US liberty, continue indefinitely the harmful policies of Bush II and Obama, and will damage the rule of law. The fact that those third-party candidates have a statistically zero chance of winning actually makes me more comfortable in voting for one of them.

On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place. And on the even more remote chance that the Democrats self-destruct, I want the Greens to be big enough to step into their shoes. Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power.

They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!

Ah, the Carlin theory of voting[1].

> On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place.

Don't kid yourself about some other party ever taking the place of the Democrats or Republicans. The best you can hope for is that the libertarians gain more influence than they currently have through the larger Republican party consuming them. Whether you view this as a needed shift in the right direction for the Republicans or not enough of a shift and at the cost of any power the libertarians had likely depends on how far you lean libertarian. Same with the Democrats and Green Party.

Our two party system hasn't survived for as long as it has because each party innately catered to it's constituents needs from the beginning. Each party has shifted greatly over time to track what their constituents cared about.

> Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power. ... They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!

They are never going to die, period. But that's okay. They don't need to die, they just need to change, and there's plenty of precedent for that.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jnf9GILjFM

Just to amplify the comments nearby: politics is more than presidential elections.

In presidential elections, because of the US political system, you really do have just two choices. You may lament this - I have! But it's the world we live in. Saying you'll vote for a third party candidate to "register your complaint" is a null gesture.

If you really care about politics, you'd have to work to push the party of your choice in the direction you want. This is long, hard work, and happens outside the presidential cycle. You have to march with signs, attend boring meetings, and persuade people you just met.

Complaining about the broken system every four years is neither mature nor effective.

I am moved to write this because, for multiple election cycles, I was that guy, until I realized my folly.

In a election that has the lowest ever recorded public opinion of the two candidates, my feeling of the election is this. The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.

If I was to favor the majority opinion, to oppose both Trump and Clinton is to campaign for democracy. If I had to guess what motivities Assange, if Clinton win people won't trust the government and if trump win people will fear the government. It is possible that the later will slightly produce more Snowden's.

"Public opinion of the candidates" doesn't mean anything. Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie Sanders, beating him by ten times the number of votes Obama beat HRC with in 2008. Similarly, Trump demolished his Republican opponents in the GOP primary. The voters made a clear choice.

Douglas Adams joked about this phenomenon by describing that people will vote for lizards they hate so long it means that the wrong lizard won't win. In a zero-sum game, that result is a Nash equilibrium.

It is still a lizard that get voted into office at the end of the day.

None of this is responsive to my comment. Hillary Clinton did not win in a squeaker over Sanders; she crushed him. The voters made a clear choice, and it wasn't for "the right kind of lizard". This is the Democratic primary we're talking about, and it wasn't a "lesser of two evils" race there.

If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion. Popularity opinion is shared between the left and right while same can't be said when talking about the vote for party candidates.

Some would point to the political events that the dc leaks talked about.

> If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion.

In favorability or approval (whatever that means in the context of a nominee) ratings? They mean different things, and aren't always directly related[1]. I could definitely see how Sanders would be liked more, but people would believe he's less likely to do a good job.

1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/14797/presidential-approval-vs-fa...

To suggest an explanation myself, voting where majority vote win has a different result that voting where highest ranking wins. When there is extreme high and extreme low opinion about choices, there is commonly a third option which is rated higher in average.

Say I rated taco, pizza and Italian salad as 10, 8, and 2, and you rated them as 2, 8, and 10, we can easily see that pizza wins even if neither of us has it as our primary pick. pizza in this case has highest opinion rating while the other two choices are quite far behind.

I don't dispute that, but it's not what I was referring to. Some polls ask what people think of the president (favorability ratings), and some are more specifically geared to asking about the job the president is doing (approval ratings). The article I linked to from Gallup points to situations where they do not always correlate as you would expect. For example, Bill Clinton in 1993 and 2000. In 1993 he had 59% favorability and 49% approval,and that just about reverse by 2000 when he had 60% approval, but only 46% favorability. People disliked him after the scandal, but they also conceded he was doing a good job.

So, what I wonder is what questions are actually asked regarding candidates? There isn't any data on them doing the job itself yet (unless they are an incumbent, which none are this cycle), so are they asking about how much they like the person, like the policies, or how confident they are the candidate can perform well? The answer to that question may lead to different likely reasons for the question at hand. Sanders is a likable guy. I like him. I'm also not convinced his policies, as expressed on the campaign trail, are feasible. Conversely, Hillary Clinton isn't very likable. I don't really like her. I do agree with many (but not all) of her policies, but most importantly I think her policies are feasible and have a chance of being implemented if she's elected. I am, in fact, the exact sort of person that might have expressed a favorable opinion for Sanders but voted for Hillary.

> The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.

Says right in the article, it was Russian hackers aiming to undermine the US democratic system. They saw this beautifully pristine, perfect and fair democratic system and said to themselves "let's undermine the fuck out of this thing".

Surely if it was already undermined to the point of being utterly broken they wouldn't have to bother, right?

your argument boils down to "don't throw your vote away".

well, when the system is this broken, the only throw away vote is a vote for either Clinton or Trump, because it validates the system.

you are right that my idealistic attitude might end up getting Trump elected. but that's the kind of attitude that makes clinton the alternative.

Maybe put it this way:

Imagine a lake of piss, next to it, a mountain of shit.

Now I dump a whole bunch of garbage onto one of them.

Which am I supporting?

Or maybe you can explain this bit from the article that really mystified me: "[Russian hackers did something] with the aim of undermining the US democratic process". We've all seen what this democratic process looks like on TV, so what does it actually still mean, to undermine this democratic process?

Most Americans, do not really want to support Clinton over Trump or vice versa, they're angry and disappointed that from a nation of several hundred million people, apparently these two are the choices given to them by "the democratic process".

And apparently this is the way it is, because the election system makes it that way. It's probably the same causes that make just about every US election for as long as I remember end up just about this close to 50/50. Which, if you know anything about voting systems theory, is the number one failure mode of majority voting. But nobody finds this cultural either/or winner/loser fixation alarming at all, apparently. So again, what's left to undermine, really?

It's just like accusing someone of trying to undermine freedom of speech in China.

Suppose someone decides whether he wants to join the military or not. Isn't it important for him to know, that either a moron or a psychopath will decide where to deploy him? That he'll be deployed either because a foreign leader said something mean about the president on twitter or because someone bribed the president?

Are those the only choices? Or could the nation undergo a transformation about how money & politics are entwined and rethink the presidential elections?

> Trump campaign claims to coordinate with him.

Citation please. I haven't heard anything about that.

> Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump

Wikileaks can only leak what they've been given. Maybe people are feeding them more info about Hillary, but I would respect Wikileaks far less if they withheld information during an election year to protect a candidate.

The voters deserve to know everything there is to know about their candidates. It's an assault against the voters to withhold negative information about a candidate because you don't want their opponent to win.

Why would Assange, a confirmed Anarchist, support conservative, capitalist Republicans? That doesn't make any sense.

If anything, Assange would want the third party libertarian to win since he is the only guy advocating to stop the wars and reduce American involvement overseas, which is what Assange wants. He sees America as a menace and wants to stop the brutality of American "peace" in countries they have no business being in.

Assange doesn't support Trump or the Republicans. He supports Hillary Clinton not becoming President, because of his personal vendetta against her. It just happens that his efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign help Trump.

As an anarchist, Assange probably wouldn't care about the libertarians more than any other candidate, since any candidate would only futher the existence and legitimacy of a state which he would rather see destroyed. If he did support Trump, it would be because he believes a Trump Presidency would only hasten America's demise.