I’m with you for most of your points but I don’t agree with this one.

In a system with a well established multi party system it’s perfectly useful and frankly necessary to vote for smaller parties.

Mainly because not doing that would bring it screeching back to a two party system and that’s clearly a shitshow.

But also because there is often coalition governments where the smaller party will have considerable influence on policy because they are needed to get the majority votes. In Germany we got a whole lot of progressive ideas implemented during a SPD (similarish to Democrats) & Green coalition because the Green Party was able to push them outside their comfort zone.

And because people know that coalition governments can and do work they feel more comfortable voting for different parties based on their actual campaign goals and not ‘oh I always voted red gotta keep doing that’.

BUT the US doesn’t have that system so just vote for whoever the democrats eventually decide on pretty please.

I don't think so at all. If there has been one clear winner on the international stage over the past 3 1/2 years, it has been Russia and Putin. He has increased his influence in the Middle East immensely, seems to be operating without checks in Europe and is otherwise untouchable. This is all possible because Trump is covering for him.

As far as Lee goes, he is literally on Russia's payroll. Maybe he got the gig because his politics aligned with Russia's goals in the first place, but at the moment he is furthering their goals. Convincing people to opt out of voting against Trump or voting Green is 100% beneficial to Russia.

RT is undeniably a Russian-State backed outlet. Ask yourself this: Why would Russia be operating a(nother) news channel, of all things, in the US?

They are not trying to promote Russian films or culture, they are not trying to compete for advertising dollars with Fox news, CNN, etc. They are looking to put out stories or spin stories that benefit Russia.

Absolutely - to be clear, I mean voting for new parties/candidates promising to "change everything", by getting 2% of the votes, and 0 seats. That's especially tragic if the country in question applies something like the D'Hondt method that disproportionally boosts top runners (intended to help form a stable government).

Handling >2 runner voting results in a fair manner is more complex than it sounds, but generally, elections where you can rank your favorites ("Sanders, otherwise Biden, otherwise a cardboard cutout of Biden") and provide good-enough representation would get rid of most strategizing the average person isn't equipped to parse.

Of course, any two-party system beats a gerrymandered, over-bureaucratized, registration-requiring, purging-allowing, no-holiday, count-deadline two-party system.


In some cases it's ironically healthy to amplify certain divisions (by dragging issues into mainstream, letting people get accustomed to it and form own opinions), but it becomes problematic when close to US elections.

Speaking of divisions more broadly, here's Trump in office; right now when you take a look at Sanders folks' Twitter feeds, the current state of affairs is that Biden has a mental illness (pretty much a conclusion on KATG as well); and the plan is to vote for the nominee (and that's just a shortcut term, because whoever it is, they're going to a much better choice than Trump - we know the options). Lack of very loud, very clear, very simple endorsements on behalf of every reasonable candidate and movement involved in the election may result in 2016 v2. Most reasonable arguments are not the loudest, it's the opposite - so odds are that people barely interested in politics won't go out for the nominee, because they misunderstood how democracy works.

Also, let's not mix hand-wrestling Jesuses with attempts at establishing relationships with upcoming/present administration. The former is a nuisance solved by raising an educated society (and perhaps kept in check by campaign conduct oversight), and the latter a political fiction-level counterintelligence nightmare.

I'm weary of how a lot of the talk around Russia sounds like it's coming out of the 1950s. Russia and lots of other authoritarian regimes around the world try to influence the media. I don't think it's worth putting too much thought into, compared to the other global catastrophes we're dealing with. I think if the Democrats had spent the last four years fighting Trump's policies on immigration and healthcare rather than his Russia connections, we'd be in a much stronger position right now. Obviously the hindsight of the Mueller investigation and impeachment flopping makes it easy to say that.

With everything being awful I’m sure Biden will be nominated.
He was together with Bloomberg my least favorite candidate.

I’m currently listening to all the episodes called out in the beginning of the show. Each one of those leads me to another episode which leads me to another etc etc. I love being a VIP member! There is always content. Congrats on the 15 years guys!