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Jill Stein and Gary Johnson Debate Online Tonight
Starting at 7 p.m. EDT (4 p.m. PDT), the Green and Libertarian candidates for President are debating on the Independent Voter Network. You can catch it via a Google+ hangout or Youtube both live and afterward (no word on flashless user unfortunately, unless anyone knows how to access youtube live streams). Since the big two candidates got some time here on Slashdot, we figured you guys might want to argue amongst yourselves about the third party platforms too. Note that there will be another debate with more candidates on Tuesday.
They'll have all of 20 views.
People barely care about the two real political parties. What would make you think anyone gave a shit about these guys?
...is kind of hot.
Hey, I'm old.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
They picked the wrong night
The debate starts at minute 40, they have a few technical difficulties in the beginning, but solve them in a couple of minutes.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Clinton: I Thought Obama 'Was Going to Cry'
"Governor Romney's argument is, we're not fixed, so fire him and put me in," said Clinton. "It is true we're not fixed. ...
Ouch. That's the sound bite that matters. The rest is just giving Bill Clinton cover. Makes one wonder if the Cintons have decided Hillary has a better chance running in 2016 as an outsider against Romney instead of as an effective incumbent against whoever.
I bet Obama's having second thoughts about trying to pin the blame for Benghazi on Hillary...
I don't see C'thulu on the list. He belongs there. I'm tired of choosing the lesser evil.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seriously, you'd think with his connections...
OTOH how do you know he didn't serve already, remember the VP during W's terms?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Hey, don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've seen better video streams from the International Space Station. This is borderline unwatchable.
Did he have a long form birth certificate?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Come on guys, this is 2012. Why didn't you setup this days in advance, and practice if they wanted to do this video conference method?
And why couldn't they find a place to hold their own debates? Invite the two main candidates even. Get them on a stage and have people in the crowd...
I would vote for Jill, since her views are more aligned with mine. But, I have to vote for Obama to get him in the White House in order to do a few things I like.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Democrats and Republicans can reliably count on their party line votes, regardless of how they flip flop. That's why they focus more on the "independent" vote, come election time. The only way to influence the major parties anymore, is to show a significant uptick in the third party you most support. At the very least, you can affect the talking points of the next election.
Should change her first name to Beer, then she'd be a little more relevant.
A 'debate' amongst the loser retards. Dumber than the Special Olympics..
This isn't the first 3rd party "debate" I've seen between these candidates, and the one thing I've noticed about all of them is that they never directly address each other. This is lame.
"We have to do something about the gross financial inequality in this country."
FAIL.
*click*
You can divide a sandwich among many men, but you cannot digest it in a collective stomach.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I guess Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J were busy tonight.
I doubt these two candidates sincerity, I am suspicious of their motivation and I encourage their supporters to think very carefully before voting for them.
There is not going to be a third party that breaks into the US political system nationwide. It's not going to happen because it cannot happen. The system is specifically designed for it not to happen, and the sooner supporters of these two lunatics get that message, the better off they will be.
On the other hand, there is certainly a place for political outsiders in the local elections, where they could actually have an impact. Most significantly, by influencing one of the two existing political parties. And it's much easier than you might think. Just about anywhere in the US, an average person could become a party committee member practically just by showing up, and once you've done that, now YOU are one of the people who picks primary candidates and who gets on the ballot and who doesn't. School boards, park district boards, but mainly members of the local party structure is the way to go.
That's how the tea party did it. They started showing up (albeit with corporate money in their pockets) for everything from the local school board to party precinct captains to committee members, and they ended up completely taking over the entire Republican Party and bending every elected Republican to their will. Just like that.
If you don't like the way politics works in the US, there are plenty of ways to approach changing it, but if you think you're going to do it by voting for a Libertarian or Greenie or some other third party candidate for president, you might as well just go jack off in your shoe for all the good it will do you. And that's without the rather questionable agendas of the two candidates named in this story.
Just think: Who stands to gain the most if a bunch of people vote for Ron Johnson? Jill Stein? Do you think that fact is lost on the Republican and Democratic parties? Do any of you believe that either Johnson or Stein is going to be elected president?
You are welcome on my lawn.
If C'thulu was running for president in 2012, he would be the lesser evil.
Have you spend any time reviewing the history of the candidates? Not what they promise but what they have done so far?
Their antics would disgust even a pope.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I hate to say it (because I am more aligned with these candidates than the other two major parties'), but with what I've seen in the last ten minutes, these minor parties will never have their chance on the big stage.
The audio quality of this debate started out horrendous if I wasn't determined I would have left very early. Even throughout, you can hear typing, whispering to people off screen, and shuffling of papers. The Doctor's mic problems were almost laughable if we weren't talking about the presidency.
The video quality looks like they're using home-quality webcams and DSL connections. The governor's webcam cut out right before he was about to answer a question and he was gone for about 10 minutes.
These two candidates are decent, but not polished, speakers. They rarely looked at the camera and were often reading from something, there was poor lighting, and both had ugly backgrounds (was the Doctor in a basement?).
I know these parties don't have the bankroll of the major two, but they can't test and fix these things prior to the debate? Don't they have advisors for marketing and presentation? It's hard to take them seriously.
Don't get me wrong. I WANT these parties to succeed. And I know that the technical and superficial details I pointed out above don't come close to mattering in the big picture. I want a president that can fix our country's issues, not one that has a fancy webcam. Unfortunately, issues like this keep the majority of voters from giving them any consideration.
You mean like when Jill and some random Libertarian candidate faced Mitt Romney for the Massachusetts gubernatorial election?
The Boston Globe called her "the only adult in the room."
I think she should get arrested more often. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you...
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Gary Johnson is a clone of Ron Paul, who is just GOP turned up to 11. He offers nothing new, he just cranks everything the GOP wants up to an extreme level that the party leadership realizes they cannot sell. Unlike the regular GOP brass, however, he manages to pull in a few younger people who don't read the full text of what he wants - or the analysis of what it would actually do to the vast majority of Americans.
Jill Stein, on the other hand, actually offers some new ideas. Unfortunately nobody will take her seriously. Unlike in 2000, however, when republicans ran ads for Nader to pull voters away from Gore, Stein is being ignored outright because if the two main parties acknowledged her then people might realize how little difference there is in action between the republicans and the democrats.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The people watching are the people willing to vote for these people in the first place. So whose minds do they think they are changing? You think a green party voter is going to vote libertarian or vice versa? This is just phony debate trying to get people to think they are actually trying to win. If they were serious they would look ay other methods to get their message out.
Democrats and Republicans and their corporate overlords are ruining my country. Voters could, hypothetically, stop voting for them and initiate a real change in course. But they don't, because dumbasses like you keep telling them that they have to vote for Ds and Rs.
Let me explain something: you don't win a goddamn thing by voting for the candidate who wins. Your job as a voter is to vote for the candidate who will best fill the particular role in government. Your job is NOT to vote how you think the crowd is going to vote. This isn't the fucking stock market. If you vote for sociopaths who are selected and paid for by monied interests, that is all you will EVER get.
Whatever happened to the avid discussions concerning Vote Swapping and Instant Runoff Voting? I liked when those topics were on the forefront because they gave me more hope than any of the candidates for fixing the seemingly impenetrable wall of muffled cries between the citizens' desires and the ruling bodies.
I don't ever want to vote against. I want to vote for.
[Sad face here]
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Nobody in the establishment talks about debt based money and how it systematically conveys the wealth of society, the worker class, to the international bankster fraudulent monetary system engineers. Debt Money Tyranny money flow shows this process graphically: http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/4768883/debtmoneytyranny-6-1-pdf-60k?tr=77 That's the flow chart of the biggest con job ever pulled in human history. That's right, when debt is money, the monetary wealth of the richest people on planet Earth is, by definition, the debt of everyone else. The ONLY way to pay that debt back is if the richest people on Earth gave all their money to pay back our debts. The exact opposite is, in fact, happening. The richest people on the planet are bailing out their front corporations at the expense of society. The net effect of these bailouts is they are bankrupting society even faster! Anyone not talking about this issue is doing you a disservice. Our engineered insolvency is has already started the end game and Greece's current stage isn't that far in our future. Get prepared.
Cthulhu doesn't have to throw himself into the court of public opinion. Whichever candidate gets elected, Cthulhu fhtagn!
20 minutes into the future
The Independent Voter Network stepped in a Texas-sized pile of shit today, showing that they can't manage to host a three-way video chat, or run a debate. I have a 17 year old niece who could have done a better job. From the Jill Stein audio embarrassment to the Where's Johnson? segment, this thing has shown these guys are not ready for prime-time. Frankly, I think if Jim Lehrer watched this, he'd feel a LOT better about how he did as mediator of the first Presidential debate.
If they had any brains at all, they'd have gotten them all together in the same place, and done the debate in a fashion that at least vaguely resembles a professional one. Even if they couldn't they could at least have filmed the debate, then edited it to remove all the time spent waiting for Dr. Stein to figure out how to unmute her computer, and the time spent waiting for Gov. Johnson to get his dial-up connection back up. Or was he using ISDN? The whole thing was a fucking joke, and that's sad, because God DAMN it, this matters, and it would be great if we had a choice beside the Coke-or-Pepsi "choice" of Whateverschmuckthedemocratswanttobepresident or Whicheverassholetherepublicanswanttodestroyamerica. It'll be hard to get someone who might break the cycle of two-party-dickheads getting elected over and over again, if we can't agree on a third person to put up against the billions of dollars who want us to elect one or the other of their puppets, in this case Obama or Romney, and we can't agree if we don't know anything about these people, and GOSH, a debate sure would have helped with that, shame these guys FUCKED THAT UP SO FUCKING BADLY!
By the way, Steve Peace? We didn't land on the moon in 1960. If you're going to reference historical facts, and don't want to sound like Sarah Fucking Palin, it pays to know what you're talking about, or keep your mouth shut so you don't have shit like that popping out of it making you look stupid. ...and oh, BTW Slashdot... as bad as this was, and as few comments as there seem to be about what an absolute clusterfuck this was, seems to me most of you are commenting on this, but must not have actually bothered to watch it. Half this conversation people are trolling back and forth about what the difference is between Libertarians and Tea-Partyers, etc. Let me help you poor bastards out. Here's the difference:
Libertarians see themselves as the ideological descendants of the Founding Fathers (TM), and feel that government should perform those functions that are absolutely essential and that can ONLY be performed by a government, such as national defense, and that laws should be enacted to keep the absolutely most destructive behavior of citizens in check, AND NOTHING WHAT-SO-FUCKING-EVER ELSE!
Tea Party-ers are ultra-right, socioeconomic conservatives who want to revoke the provision of the first amendment of the US constitution prohibiting the establishment of an official religion, and require as a minimum that any person who wants to hold any office of power or enjoys any privilege in the United States as a minimum, swear that he or she, (who am I kidding? HE...) believes in the existence of a Supreme Being (TM), preferably a white one, whose Child, (who is also generally depicted as if he were Caucasion, even though that's absurd for SO many reasons,) was nailed to a tree roughly 2000 years ago as a Sacrifice to "Him" on our behalf. They're essentially the Christian Taliban Party of the United States, whether or not the rank-and-file "Tea Party" member knows this. As further example what kind of people they are, their name is taken from an event in which a bunch of criminals, wearing crude and offensive disguises, sneaked aboard a ship, and committed acts of vandalism and destruction of property not belonging to them, dumping boxes of tea into Boston Harbor.
The act is euphemistically called the "Boston Tea Party." It was not really a party, and not the same kind of party as a political one anyway, making the name even more inappropriate. I
It is the LEFT that is always trying to take things from one person and give it to another person... while demanding credit for being generous and caring
It is impossible to steal from a man who has nothing... this meme that the rich just want to steal from the poor only works on the stupid
The Liberal Democrat line is: "You earned yours, fuck you, I'm taking it and giving it to somebody else... who will then think I am a good generous guy (even though I did not personally sacrifice anything for him... I used your money) and then he will vote for me so have the political power to steal more from you and give it away to buy more mis-placed goodwill. Smile and give me the money voluntarily... if you resist, I will have the government point a gun at you.
Kodos the alien or Kodos the Executioner?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
She has a point.
He's there, just using a pseudonym.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
....why vote for any of their candidates?
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11