Letter from the Editor

This was really well written but I fear the people it needs to reach aren't going to read far enough to get the point.
- This was really well written but I fear the people it needs to reach aren’t going to read ~~far enough to get the point.~~
  
  That too
- It misses the part where Jill Stein is completely full of shit. She's in bed with Trump and Putin.
  At least Nader was genuine.
- Nah, they were never interested in being convinced otherwise in the first place. Feeling smug and superior because their hands are clean (or so they delusionally believe) is far more important than facing the harsh reality that their third party vote is doing more harm than good and that a perfect candidate has not and will never exist.
  
  Very well said.
- I don't think they even open images, they just reply to inbox messages

this was my experience voting for jill stein in 2016
never. again.
- Johnson in 2016 for me (I regarded it as a protest vote, not an affirmation of any supposed libertarian principles; I was a Berniecrat). Election night of 2016 is seared into my fucking head, and will be for the rest of my life.
  My vote wasn't the difference between victory and defeat. I lived in one of the safest of safe states. But I realized then that such performative moral objection necessarily includes moral acceptance of the end result. I didn't do the literal least thing I could have done to prevent Trump. And I had to live with that as he took the oath of office.
  The practical end of preventing fascism, not only for one's own good but for the good of the country and the world, is more important by an order of magnitude. But the moral and personal element is not inconsiderable. It weighs on you.
  
  Election night of 2016 is seared into my fucking head, and will be for the rest of my life.
  fucking SAME
  i was watching the webcasts. i refused to accept it until the announcer declared that michigan fell. even then, before he ever even stepped foot in any official office, i knew how fucked we were
  
  Wasn't that the guy who didn't know where Aleppo was?

I too voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 but for different reasons. I too regretted it. If you are waiting for the ideal candidate that 100% aligns with your beliefs you're going to be waiting a long time.
- I wasn't paying attention back then so much-- what was Nader offering as a green that gore wasn't? Didn't gore make environmental policies part of his campaign? He just didn't go far enough or something?
  
  For the record it was before Gore's Inconvenient Truth book and not much was being said about global warming. The reason I voted for Nader was a last minute decision out of frustration. My wife and I both registered Democrats went to our polling place where we had voted in every election only to find out we were no longer on the registered voters list. We were eventually given provisional ballots and because I was frustrated voted for Nader. I mistakenly thought the federal government ran the elections. Later after the shenanigans in Florida I found out the states ran their own for the most part. The economy was so good at the time I didn't think there was a chance Bush would ever get elected
  
  In many ways, the Clinton Administration is when Democrats started giving up the Overton Window to Republicans. The trend of "self-regulating industries" went into full swing with things like the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Not Reagan or the first Bush. Clinton.
  FISA, the court that rubber stamps warrents for wire tapping, became a rubber stamping operation under Clinton. I'd have to dig it up, but there's actually an ancient freerepublic.org thread where they hope Bush undoes this. Instead, Bush ignored it completely while freerepublic.org cheered him on.
  This is all to say that when Nader said both sides are the same, there were a lot of people on the left who agreed.
  Bush then takes less then a year to show how utterly wrong that was, and it didn't even start with 9/11.

Dare you to post this on lemmy.ml
- "Removed: misinformation, imperialism, racism"
  
  "removed: rule 1"

Oof... Al Gore, of An Inconvenient Truth (2006 so he was late to the 2000 party) didn't care about the environment enough...
My head.... :(
- Al Gore had already made climate change a political topic in 1981. He also had a major part in the roll out the early internet. The guy was a visionary and way ahead of his time in so many ways. Thinking about what could have been, hurts indeed.

The system sucks
QFT
- Quantum field theory?
  
  Old internet lingo for "quoted for truth"

Hell, I never vote for. Only against.
-- W. C. Fields

SCOTUS: Yeah... the votes mattered there!

If I was a much better writer, I could have written this. Which is to say, I too regret voting for Nader in that election and will never make that mistake again. My only redeeming thought is that while my state was close, it did go for Gore.
I guarantee there were enough voters in Florida with the same regrets to easily have put Gore in office if they could redo it. Do you think there are any who wish they could have voted Green instead?

Well it likely wouldn't have changed anything on stem cell research. Induced stem cells are a thing and despite plenty of research we're still quite far away from really being able to grow them into whatever we want.
- And yet research was blocked for quite a few years for religious reasons. You may be comfortable with where we are now but what if we were ten years ahead of that
  
  And from what I understand, the methods had to work around the ban. We'd still prefer to use the more straightforward methods if there was federal funding for it.
  
  Me being comfortable with the state of research and the fact that having more cell lines would've likely done nothing for our current understanding are two different things. The frank truth is, we're far from even understanding how epigenetics factor in differentiation between induced pluripotent stem cells and embryonic ones and which one is better for getting the results you want. The expense of the medium to grow the cells and the fact that it takes a month to see results of what you're doing, the economics, is far more impactful on why we haven't seen progress than the availability of cell lines.

Oh, so this is the person who paid the Supreme Court to give the Presidency to the losing candidate in 2000! At last we have the culprit!

Florida was a super close call. Most states won't miss a few votes, or even a lot of votes in some cases. I'm not advising anyone anything, but I know some people will be making this calculation, and I think it may be the only way to get some new cards on the table.
- Are we just supposed to ignore how the Supreme Court handed Bush the victory when Gore won the election anyway?
  Reality often proves liberals wrong but this is just getting ridiculous.