The mindset of "Well we need to keep the other guy out of the White House!"
The idea that what candidates say has any bearing on what they will do (nevermind what they have already done).
The fact that the major news media benefits financially from the policies that the major parties push (or that the news outlets are owned by corporations that benefit from those policies).
The fact that people assume the Democrats are liberals and the Republicans are conservatives (and the failure to understand that both are fascist).
The failure to recognize that there are more issues than what the media focuses on.
The assumption that some things are not even matters of politics (the war on drugs, the existence of a standing army, the student loan system, etc.).
Yeah, and by using Slashdot, you have shown that you know how to use a computer to view images and web pages. Therefore, I suspect you are downloading child pornography...
Way to go! Instead of using your vote to keep out the worst possible outcome for everyone (Romney), you're throwing it away
What I find hilarious is that the Obama supporters I have spoken to, including people who are out canvassing for Obama's campaign, cannot come up with a better argument than this: "Well at least he's not Mitt Romney!" What kind of a reason is that to vote for a someone? Oh, and, newsflash: Obama is a terrible candidate. Here is what Obama's administration has done:
Increase paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California.
Give military aid to the government of Honduras
Promote trade agreements that attack the Internet
Protect the revenue of wealthy corporations
Promote the system of starting people out in life with inescapable debts, and increase the effort to extract money from people who cannot repay those debts (or offer them 20 years of indentured servitude)
Assassinate American citizens without a trial
Prosecute people for watching Youtube videos for the wrong reasons
Maintain, promote, and expand the lawless TSA; fail to demand that the TSA follow the law or court orders
Threaten the NSA for developing software internally and not buying software from corporations
Crack down on whistleblowers (while promising transparency and open government)
Yeah, that really sounds like someone we need in the white house. Sure, Romney is not going to do things differently -- so why even pretend there is a difference? Anything you can say Romney would do that is bad, there is something equally bad that Obama is doing right now.
So on the one hand, you can watch the major party candidates lie as easily as they breath. On the other hand, you can spend those 90 minutes reading about what Obama did as president and what Romney did as governor. Oh, and you can also read about the third party candidates, and what they did previously.
Why listen to lies, when you can uncover the truth?
Of course, he has not been charged with any crime, so "if so" would be an overstatement. I might as well say, "nurb432 decapitated a 12 year old girl and drank her blood? If so then that would be crossing the line."
(But you probably would not face as severe a punishment for that crime as for running something like TBP...)
Copyright is an intensely moral issue for two reasons, first it is immoral to profit from some one else's work while allowing them to starve to death, but second, copyrights can only work to the extent that people see them as moral.
The moral issue with profiting from another person's work while that person is starving is by no means limited to copyrights. That trend can be seen in basically every industry. My university has people working for it who are not even paid enough to live in the town where the university is located.
Hardly anyone views copyrights as a moral issue. Most people would be uncomfortable walking into a house, even if the door is wide open and nobody is around, and taking something that is not theirs (desperate people might do it just to survive, but beyond desperation, most people would feel wrong doing it). Yet most people will download music, movies, and software illegally without a second's hesitation. The copyright lobbyists know this, which is why they are pushing for systems like this one: systems that appear to be pushing a moral argument for obeying copyright, but which are actually designed to punish (without any expensive legal process) anyone who violates copyright.
Spotify pays me.01 for ever 10 listens
The way I see it, musicians should be making money from merchandising, live performances, and contract performances (e.g. a performance given for an event, a special recording for a movie, etc.). The Internet could have been a way for musicians to advertise themselves and their upcoming performances, by using peer to peer networks to eliminate the cost of distributing recorded music and by building software into those music players that shows listeners when and where a musician is playing (and perhaps where to get t-shirts etc.). It requires a different view of how to monetize music, one in which recording is not the primary source of revenue, but at least we would not be expecting ordinary people to analyze issues that judges are supposed to deliberate on.
Copyright is, and always was, a moral issue, and the present system is breaking down precisely because it is immoral.
The present system is breaking down because it is based on theories about the distribution of information that are laughably out of date. It is breaking down for the same reason that the system of scribes copying books broke down: new technology.
Copyrights were never meant to help artists; they were meant to ensure that the public could access books, music, etc., by promoting the businesses which distributed such things. Today, we can distribute such things without those businesses; all that remains is to create a better way to utilize such technology. The law needs to be updated to ensure that the new, better way to distribute information is protected and promoted -- even if it means the death of the businesses that were promoted under the previous systems. The payment of artists is an orthogonal issue to the distribution of their works -- one that is going to require a different approaches for different kinds of work.
Except that copyrights were never a moral question. Never, not in their entire history, have copyrights been a law based on any sort of moral code. Copyrights have always been about business. They are no more a matter of morals than loading zone parking restrictions.
Copyright infringement is about as serious a matter as parking in a loading zone.
Guess that gives me something of a moral high ground if I do get a letter
In what universe do you get the moral high ground for supporting businesses that would rather attack PCs and the Internet than update a business model that was antiquated by the technological developments of the 1980s? I think you are confusing "moral high ground" with "well Disney told me to behave this way!"
Hushmail is still going, for anyone who wants to trust a service that can be cracked by court order.
Or by any Hushmail employee, or by anyone who can hack Hushmail, etc., etc., etc.
Actually, in theory, point to point encryption can also be cracked by court order
In which case at least one of the two parties is aware that the secret was leaked. In the case of Hushmail, neither the sender nor the receiver of the message would know.
How many times will subscription approaches to crypto have to fail before people understand that it does not work? It failed with Hushmail, and it will almost certainly fail here.
Well then it is a poorly written law, and I suspect that it would fail a constitutional challenge if it were applied to people using Coursera from their homes. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable for a state to say that accredited schools cannot give credit for completing unapproved curricula or teaching methods (although I personally disagree with such an approach, as I think that teachers and professors should have the right to decide how to teach and what material to use).
The problem of this being an overly broad law is separate from the purpose or application of the law.
Do Coursera's courses actually educate students? Do they educate students at least as well as classes at an accredited university?
The answers are, "Nobody knows" and "Nobody knows." Minnesota residents are not forbidden from visiting Coursera; Minnesota's schools are forbidden from using Coursera in lieu of classroom instruction.
most currencies are at odds because they want to be a store of value
Currencies only need to store value long enough for people to actually decide how to spend that money, and to engage in the transaction. That is why some inflation is acceptable for the economy (it discourages stuffing your money into a chest and burying it -- which is just as bad for the economy as destroying that money). When money is not needed right away, the only way for it to be useful for the economy is to be used by someone else (e.g. by investing it in a business or more generally loaning it to someone).
A better store of value is an ETF or mutual fund -- something that will generally track the rate of inflation, so that (unless things go horribly wrong) you will have the same value when you liquidate the investment as you did when you started.
Any scientist knows that the answer is "absolutely yes." I still sometimes worry that there is something (non-specific) waiting to attack me when I turn out the downstairs lights before going to sleep. I am an intelligent adult, and even when I start to feel that instinctual fear, I know in my concious mind that if ther e was nothing there when the lights were on, there will be nothing there when the lights are off. Somewhere, our brains are wired with "just to be safe" notions that at some point in our evolution gave us the best chance to surviving long enough to reproduce -- most of those "just to be safe" mechanisms run counter to basic logic, let alone scientific results.
When I received my religious education as I child, my rabbi taught me about the Documentary Hypothesis -- not to deny it, but to show me that the torah was not always what it is today. What are your thoughts on this sort of religious education i.e. religious education that is not based on denying or avoiding scientific or historical realities?
No fear from Democrats, they love Johnson. He may help them win North Carolina.
Yeah but he may hurt them elsewhere, because he supports legalizing marijuana, which is a popular sentiment among young, college-educated voters -- the very group that Obama's campaign has been getting support from.
The thing is, big issues like Gay Marriage
Gay marriage is not a big issue; it is an issue, but one that has been played up as a convenient distraction that candidates can use to pretend they are more right or left wing than they truly are. Gay rights was the big issue several decades ago -- you know, back when men were legally prohibited from dancing with each other at New York City night clubs. The end of sodomy laws (nearly a decade ago) marked the end of the major gay rights battles in America; gay marriage is worth considering, but it is hardly as serious an issue as earlier gay rights struggles.
That will only happen if it is something some of their supporters care about
Thus explaining why Obama's administration stepped up the number of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries (more in half a term than in all the Bush years combined), why Obama failed to veto the NDAA bill allowing for indefinite detentions without a trial, why Obama continued the warrantless wiretapping program, why Obama has increased the use of drone strikes (including against Americans), etc., etc., etc. These are things that large numbers of Obama supporters were opposed to, things that the Bush administration was harshly criticized for by many of those same Obama supporters.
Obama's administration has a TSA that is operating in violation of the law, yet Mitt Romney has not bothered to call him out on it -- despite the fact that many Obama supporters and many Romney supporters (those with libertarian leanings) are opposed to the body scanner program.
What you are confused about is the difference between the Democrats of 50 years ago (who were left of center sometimes) and today's Democrats (who are right of center always). Today's Democrats will do things like this:
What we need is digital cash that reflects the realities of currency, which includes having a central authority. The economic and technical problems that Bitcoin has stem primarily from the lack of an issuing authority. I have argued this point in the past; the summary is this:
On the technical side, digital cash without an authority that can issue fresh tokens will be unable to support offline transactions securely or will be forced to have tokens that grow at least linearly in the number of transactions they are used in (that is a logical "or").
On the economic side, central authorities create (by fiat) the demand for currency. That is why you only see US dollars being used in the United States, and why you don't need to go further than Toronto to find stores that won't accept US dollars and will only accept Canadian currency. Ultimately, it is the legal system that creates the demand for a nation's currency: tax law, torts, bankruptcy and debt laws, civil fines, etc. Bitcoin is left trying to play up the demand for secure, anonymous electronic payments (but its technical issues severely weaken its ability to satisfy that demand) and the demand for anarchy (which scales poorly).
I think an equally good question would be, is it the goal of a currency (or the currency controllers) to avoid deflationary spirals?
That is certainly a goal of currency, but I think it is indirect in the sense that avoiding deflationary spirals is necessary to satisfy other, more immediate goals of currency. The purpose of currency is to facilitate trade of some kind -- it is not useful if it cannot be spent, and the most useful currency would be one that can only be used for this purpose (there are other views, of course). Thus hoarding (and deflationary spirals) make money less useful, or in the worst case, totally worthless.
I have argued in the past that Bitcoin is actually not useful as currency, and that it will ultimately fail for economic reasons before it fails for technical reasons.
a women's right to do what she wants with her body affects over 50% of the US population
Well, a women's right to do what she wants with her body affects over 50% of the US population, so I'd say that affects a hell of a lot more people than warrantless wiretapping every day
Except that the right to choose abortion does not affect 100% of women, it affects only the very small minority who have an unplanned pregnancy and who cannot or are unwilling to raise a (new) child. The warrantless wiretap program violated the rights of all Americans, simultaneously; a small percentage might have been directly affected. Here, however, is a policy that is not only supported by bother Democrats and Republicans (and is vigorously pushed by the Obama administration) which directly affects (in a
harmful way) vastly more Americans than abortion rights:
So you see, while I fully support the idea that gay people should have the right to marry those that they love (as opposed to only civil unions), I am far more concerned about the fact that paramilitary police are called in when people exercise their right to protest:
It takes a very selfish person to state that only the causes that they think affect them directly are important
Which is irrelevant, since:
No SWAT team has ever attacked me
I have never stepped foot in a free speech zone, and prefer to exercise my rights with a keyboard rather than a bullhorn
I do not use telephones (and therefore the phone tapping program could not have affected me)
gay marriage is one of those self-evident inalienable human rights
Nonsense; marriage is and has always been a legal construct, since the first marriages were performed. See, where you are confused is that you think that gay marriage is equivalent to the striking down of sodomy laws. Sodomy laws are dead; gay men can dance together and have sex without fear of being arrested. That the issue now is whether or not the government will recognize a gay marriage beyond recognizing a civil union, that the difference between the two boils down to technical details, is proof that gay rights are not the most pressing civil rights issue facing us.
Remember, the Constitution was designed to describe the limits of government, not exhaustively list the rights citizens have
It does explicitly list our rights, and those are rights are being violated.
The problem with that reasoning is that the candidates have no reason or incentive to address major issues when people are willing to vote for them as a "compromise." The fact that millions of Americans living in communities that have been hardest-hit by the war on drugs voted for Barack Obama only proved to the Democrats that "business and usual" will not lose any votes for them. The fact that millions of fiscal conservatives vote for Republicans only proves to the Republicans that "business as usual" will not lose any votes for them. The fact that the same people who decry the loss of constitutional rights publicly endorse the major parties removes whatever incentive those parties had to reverse that trend.
If you need more evidence, consider the fear amongst both Democrats and (especially) Republicans over Gary Johnson (note that I do not actually plan to vote for him -- I am not a libertarian):
Let's not forget the outrage over Ralph Nader in 2000, and the way the Democrats blamed him for Bush's victory (rather than saying, "Gee, maybe those people that support us want something other than what Gore had to offer").
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and by using Slashdot, you have shown that you know how to use a computer to view images and web pages. Therefore, I suspect you are downloading child pornography...
You could support neither; we actually have other choices.
Way to go! Instead of using your vote to keep out the worst possible outcome for everyone (Romney), you're throwing it away
What I find hilarious is that the Obama supporters I have spoken to, including people who are out canvassing for Obama's campaign, cannot come up with a better argument than this: "Well at least he's not Mitt Romney!" What kind of a reason is that to vote for a someone? Oh, and, newsflash: Obama is a terrible candidate. Here is what Obama's administration has done:
Yeah, that really sounds like someone we need in the white house. Sure, Romney is not going to do things differently -- so why even pretend there is a difference? Anything you can say Romney would do that is bad, there is something equally bad that Obama is doing right now.
That is about as likely to happen as a third party candidate being allowed to sit in the audience.
So on the one hand, you can watch the major party candidates lie as easily as they breath. On the other hand, you can spend those 90 minutes reading about what Obama did as president and what Romney did as governor. Oh, and you can also read about the third party candidates, and what they did previously.
Why listen to lies, when you can uncover the truth?
He is in prison for aiding copyright infringement by running a torrent site. How does that raise suspicion of him hacking into anything?
No, he made millions of dollars allowing other people to download music/movies/games/software that other people made and own the rights to
Hm...made millions of dollars on creative work that other people made and have copyrights on...where have I heard that before...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Funny how there was no torture^H^H^H^Hsolitary confinement for the people responsible for that.
Oh, he was a brazen prick while he did it, too
Otherwise known as a hero:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_jobs
Of course, he has not been charged with any crime, so "if so" would be an overstatement. I might as well say, "nurb432 decapitated a 12 year old girl and drank her blood? If so then that would be crossing the line."
(But you probably would not face as severe a punishment for that crime as for running something like TBP...)
Copyright is an intensely moral issue for two reasons, first it is immoral to profit from some one else's work while allowing them to starve to death, but second, copyrights can only work to the extent that people see them as moral.
Spotify pays me .01 for ever 10 listens
The way I see it, musicians should be making money from merchandising, live performances, and contract performances (e.g. a performance given for an event, a special recording for a movie, etc.). The Internet could have been a way for musicians to advertise themselves and their upcoming performances, by using peer to peer networks to eliminate the cost of distributing recorded music and by building software into those music players that shows listeners when and where a musician is playing (and perhaps where to get t-shirts etc.). It requires a different view of how to monetize music, one in which recording is not the primary source of revenue, but at least we would not be expecting ordinary people to analyze issues that judges are supposed to deliberate on.
Copyright is, and always was, a moral issue, and the present system is breaking down precisely because it is immoral.
The present system is breaking down because it is based on theories about the distribution of information that are laughably out of date. It is breaking down for the same reason that the system of scribes copying books broke down: new technology.
Copyrights were never meant to help artists; they were meant to ensure that the public could access books, music, etc., by promoting the businesses which distributed such things. Today, we can distribute such things without those businesses; all that remains is to create a better way to utilize such technology. The law needs to be updated to ensure that the new, better way to distribute information is protected and promoted -- even if it means the death of the businesses that were promoted under the previous systems. The payment of artists is an orthogonal issue to the distribution of their works -- one that is going to require a different approaches for different kinds of work.
Except that copyrights were never a moral question. Never, not in their entire history, have copyrights been a law based on any sort of moral code. Copyrights have always been about business. They are no more a matter of morals than loading zone parking restrictions.
Copyright infringement is about as serious a matter as parking in a loading zone.
Guess that gives me something of a moral high ground if I do get a letter
In what universe do you get the moral high ground for supporting businesses that would rather attack PCs and the Internet than update a business model that was antiquated by the technological developments of the 1980s? I think you are confusing "moral high ground" with "well Disney told me to behave this way!"
Hushmail is still going, for anyone who wants to trust a service that can be cracked by court order.
Or by any Hushmail employee, or by anyone who can hack Hushmail, etc., etc., etc.
Actually, in theory, point to point encryption can also be cracked by court order
In which case at least one of the two parties is aware that the secret was leaked. In the case of Hushmail, neither the sender nor the receiver of the message would know.
How many times will subscription approaches to crypto have to fail before people understand that it does not work? It failed with Hushmail, and it will almost certainly fail here.
Well then it is a poorly written law, and I suspect that it would fail a constitutional challenge if it were applied to people using Coursera from their homes. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable for a state to say that accredited schools cannot give credit for completing unapproved curricula or teaching methods (although I personally disagree with such an approach, as I think that teachers and professors should have the right to decide how to teach and what material to use).
The problem of this being an overly broad law is separate from the purpose or application of the law.
Do Coursera's courses actually educate students? Do they educate students at least as well as classes at an accredited university?
The answers are, "Nobody knows" and "Nobody knows." Minnesota residents are not forbidden from visiting Coursera; Minnesota's schools are forbidden from using Coursera in lieu of classroom instruction.
With the default choice (you know, the one users click on when they do not bother to read what they are clicking on) being, "No thanks."
most currencies are at odds because they want to be a store of value
Currencies only need to store value long enough for people to actually decide how to spend that money, and to engage in the transaction. That is why some inflation is acceptable for the economy (it discourages stuffing your money into a chest and burying it -- which is just as bad for the economy as destroying that money). When money is not needed right away, the only way for it to be useful for the economy is to be used by someone else (e.g. by investing it in a business or more generally loaning it to someone).
A better store of value is an ETF or mutual fund -- something that will generally track the rate of inflation, so that (unless things go horribly wrong) you will have the same value when you liquidate the investment as you did when you started.
Any scientist knows that the answer is "absolutely yes." I still sometimes worry that there is something (non-specific) waiting to attack me when I turn out the downstairs lights before going to sleep. I am an intelligent adult, and even when I start to feel that instinctual fear, I know in my concious mind that if ther e was nothing there when the lights were on, there will be nothing there when the lights are off. Somewhere, our brains are wired with "just to be safe" notions that at some point in our evolution gave us the best chance to surviving long enough to reproduce -- most of those "just to be safe" mechanisms run counter to basic logic, let alone scientific results.
When I received my religious education as I child, my rabbi taught me about the Documentary Hypothesis -- not to deny it, but to show me that the torah was not always what it is today. What are your thoughts on this sort of religious education i.e. religious education that is not based on denying or avoiding scientific or historical realities?
No fear from Democrats, they love Johnson. He may help them win North Carolina.
Yeah but he may hurt them elsewhere, because he supports legalizing marijuana, which is a popular sentiment among young, college-educated voters -- the very group that Obama's campaign has been getting support from.
The thing is, big issues like Gay Marriage
Gay marriage is not a big issue; it is an issue, but one that has been played up as a convenient distraction that candidates can use to pretend they are more right or left wing than they truly are. Gay rights was the big issue several decades ago -- you know, back when men were legally prohibited from dancing with each other at New York City night clubs. The end of sodomy laws (nearly a decade ago) marked the end of the major gay rights battles in America; gay marriage is worth considering, but it is hardly as serious an issue as earlier gay rights struggles.
That will only happen if it is something some of their supporters care about
Thus explaining why Obama's administration stepped up the number of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries (more in half a term than in all the Bush years combined), why Obama failed to veto the NDAA bill allowing for indefinite detentions without a trial, why Obama continued the warrantless wiretapping program, why Obama has increased the use of drone strikes (including against Americans), etc., etc., etc. These are things that large numbers of Obama supporters were opposed to, things that the Bush administration was harshly criticized for by many of those same Obama supporters.
Obama's administration has a TSA that is operating in violation of the law, yet Mitt Romney has not bothered to call him out on it -- despite the fact that many Obama supporters and many Romney supporters (those with libertarian leanings) are opposed to the body scanner program.
What you are confused about is the difference between the Democrats of 50 years ago (who were left of center sometimes) and today's Democrats (who are right of center always). Today's Democrats will do things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Iraq_(December_1998)
Spend money on things like these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_combat_aerial_vehicle
And lie to Americans about this sort of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACTA
We can find a nice bijection with Republicans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA
Oh, sorry, that last one has some overlap (but so does ACTA).
I think an equally good question would be, is it the goal of a currency (or the currency controllers) to avoid deflationary spirals?
That is certainly a goal of currency, but I think it is indirect in the sense that avoiding deflationary spirals is necessary to satisfy other, more immediate goals of currency. The purpose of currency is to facilitate trade of some kind -- it is not useful if it cannot be spent, and the most useful currency would be one that can only be used for this purpose (there are other views, of course). Thus hoarding (and deflationary spirals) make money less useful, or in the worst case, totally worthless.
I have argued in the past that Bitcoin is actually not useful as currency, and that it will ultimately fail for economic reasons before it fails for technical reasons.
a women's right to do what she wants with her body affects over 50% of the US population
Well, a women's right to do what she wants with her body affects over 50% of the US population, so I'd say that affects a hell of a lot more people than warrantless wiretapping every day
Except that the right to choose abortion does not affect 100% of women, it affects only the very small minority who have an unplanned pregnancy and who cannot or are unwilling to raise a (new) child. The warrantless wiretap program violated the rights of all Americans, simultaneously; a small percentage might have been directly affected. Here, however, is a policy that is not only supported by bother Democrats and Republicans (and is vigorously pushed by the Obama administration) which directly affects (in a harmful way) vastly more Americans than abortion rights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
gay marriage, immigration reform, and affirmative action are obviously less than 50%, but the same applies
Yes, the same does apply. Here are some additional issues that affect Americans on a wider scale and more directly than any of the above:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting
So you see, while I fully support the idea that gay people should have the right to marry those that they love (as opposed to only civil unions), I am far more concerned about the fact that paramilitary police are called in when people exercise their right to protest:
http://www.bluevirginia.us/diary/6140/peaceful-rally-for-womens-health-dispersed-by-swat-team-in-richmond
Or the fact that we are expected to "speak freely" in designated areas that are nowhere near the people at whom are speech is targeted:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/4/free-speech-zone-proves-audience-free/?page=all
It takes a very selfish person to state that only the causes that they think affect them directly are important
Which is irrelevant, since:
gay marriage is one of those self-evident inalienable human rights
Nonsense; marriage is and has always been a legal construct, since the first marriages were performed. See, where you are confused is that you think that gay marriage is equivalent to the striking down of sodomy laws. Sodomy laws are dead; gay men can dance together and have sex without fear of being arrested. That the issue now is whether or not the government will recognize a gay marriage beyond recognizing a civil union, that the difference between the two boils down to technical details, is proof that gay rights are not the most pressing civil rights issue facing us.
Remember, the Constitution was designed to describe the limits of government, not exhaustively list the rights citizens have
The problem with that reasoning is that the candidates have no reason or incentive to address major issues when people are willing to vote for them as a "compromise." The fact that millions of Americans living in communities that have been hardest-hit by the war on drugs voted for Barack Obama only proved to the Democrats that "business and usual" will not lose any votes for them. The fact that millions of fiscal conservatives vote for Republicans only proves to the Republicans that "business as usual" will not lose any votes for them. The fact that the same people who decry the loss of constitutional rights publicly endorse the major parties removes whatever incentive those parties had to reverse that trend.
If you need more evidence, consider the fear amongst both Democrats and (especially) Republicans over Gary Johnson (note that I do not actually plan to vote for him -- I am not a libertarian):
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/us/politics/gary-johnson-the-libertarian-partys-presidential-nominee-worries-republicans.html?pagewanted=all
Let's not forget the outrage over Ralph Nader in 2000, and the way the Democrats blamed him for Bush's victory (rather than saying, "Gee, maybe those people that support us want something other than what Gore had to offer").