Collegiate Times

Now I am interested in knowing by which metric are you claiming that the US is not the greatest country in the world. If you go by our power, either militarily or economically we are still number 1 by a long shot. I would have liked to have seen your justification for that statement because it is not something you should expect your audience to accept without any kind of evidence. That though is but one concern I have with this piece.

My second concern is the fact that you believe that neither candidate is worthy of the office of the President based on their campaign behavior. Fair enough you are entitled to an opinion, the problem is however that you earlier state that you are campaigning for Obama. So that makes you a hypocrite, you are a willing cog in the political process that you disparage and you are trying to get a man, that by your own admission is unworthy of the office, elected.

Then you also ignore the fact that there are two other candidates running for president that have so far not devolved into the kind of tactics that you so hate. A quality thorough opinion piece would have mentioned Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. That type of ignorant thinking is what helps perpetuate the illusion of there only being a two party system.

Speaking of missed opportunities a big American flaw you missed was the countries lessening of economic freedoms as it implemented shades of socialism these last two presidential administrations. We nationalized and gave back a banking system without fixing the issue that caused the crisis in the first place. We wasted trillions to "fix" an economic system that is just going to collapse again because the root problem is still there. But national attitudes are what's important apparently not a fundamentally flawed economic system, you're right Jason Campbell.

I found to be one of the best pieces ive read in the collegiate times. I absolutely agree, the political atmosphere is lame, and elections have turned into blatant power struggles between democrats and republicans. The fault is the majority of America, which is unfortunately less qualified to vote than a kindergartner. I think the only way we can really get our country back on track is to publicly denounce lies in politics, the second they happen (not later in some fact checker). It's the fault of the American people for letting the bastards slide by with their false accusations and lies. In Europe there have been numerous riots over banking scandals and the like. In Iceland they put out warrants for bankers arrests. In America....the Doj has said they cannot prosecute Goldman Sachs, and now we've nominated a presidential candidate who is just the kind of person that raped our country for profit.

I think the author meant we are not the greatest in philosophical, moral and ethical terms. Basically by or political system. Who cares that we can nuke every country to oblivion if our rights, and our country itself is just up for grabs to the highest bidder??

As for Gary Johnson, he can't win, you know that, I know that and he knows that. In time we can break the two party system, but it has too be done bureaucratically....he has to get into debates first. Voting for him is nice (I wrote in Ron Paul last election) but realistically it does no real good......and Romney as president is just a ridiculous notion.

Actually voting for Gary Johnson does a lot of good even if he doesn't win. That's a fallacy in thinking that it doesn't matter if you vote because your candidate isn't likely to win. All Gary Johnson has to do is make a good showing. If he pulled in 5% of the popular vote that would send a powerful message. The better he places in the polls the more attention is drawn to the party and his platform. Third parties wont get in the big debates by asking nicely but if they start significantly detracting from the big two then they start gaining the clout to get access. So voting for him does a lot of good and if don't vote for him just because its unlikely that he'll win then you've missed the big picture here. Your vote always matters and you can't have such a narrow view of elections.

I was most definitely not iMplying that asking nicely would get him into debates, especially since when he was a republican candidate, they didn't tet him in!! But if what makes you think the media will bother reporting on a 5% vote? Or a vote for gay Johnson period? There is much more work to do before voting for Gary Johnson will do any good.

And if you could point out what part of my argument in fact contained a fallacy if be grateful. Fallacy doesn't just mean an argument is wrong you know.....it is a specific indicator that an argument is wrong. Based on the fact that most people do not know who Gary Johnson is, while most people do know who Romney and Obama are. I can say with a great amount of certainty that he will not win. And since any attention he gets will be miniscule compared to the rest of the post election coverage he will be forgotten by the next election cycle. Which means that voting for him in THIS election, unfortunately is pointless. This conversation here is a better way to get the word out even

Johnson 2016, lets get enough done to make him relevant

You're thinking too short term here. Every vote for Gary Johnson sends a message that X many Americans support his policies and party. News agencies, corporations and even the two main political parties see that this is a significant portion of the country then the wheels start turning. Cable news channels show what they think people want to watch and if there is a growing voice for a third party that can be clearly shown in a strong election finish then programming will start to be made for that target market. If Fox thought they would make money by showing libertarian views then Gary Johnson would have the media coverage he needs and libertarian pundits would come on the air and libertarian opinion shows would pop up but we can't get that by remaining silent. Voting for someone is a lot like buying a product, you don't just get the product you also send a message that you want more of that good. So even if Gary Johnson doesn't win voting for him sends a powerful message that there's a portion of voters out there that demand a libertarian approach to government.

Now to address your fallacy, its what you might call the Adhesive Slope Fallacy, because it's just the reverse of the Slippery Slope Fallacy. In the adhesive slope fallacy, we instead find a slope that is slippery, and assert that we can have our cake and eat it too. As Epicurus said, "water drops (given enough time) can hollow a stone;" we generally assume that extremely small acts have no macro-consequences, hence we fall into fallacy.

Of course, if only one person refuses to vote for Gary Johnson because they think it wont matter, the effects really are minuscule. So the fallacy isn't made obvious at the individual level; it manifests when one universally generalizes.

1. One person's vote doesn't matter.
2. Which person it is is irrelevant; the person is arbitrary.
3. The person not voting because they don't think it will make a difference could be any person. So, it could be every person.

The fallacy occurs because the unimportance of voting is conditioned upon precisely how many other people vote, and who all those people support. Voting occurs in a dynamic system; one can't simply extrapolate that since one person's vote is irrelevant when there are hundreds of thousands of other voters, that all of those hundreds of thousands of votes are also irrelevant independently.

Whether there's also a fallacy occurring at the individual level itself, independent of whether one generalizes from 'I shouldn't do X' to 'Any old person shouldn't do X,' depends on one's moral theory. Here we're dealing more with self-delusion and rationalization than with any discrete fallacy. We rationalize the easy decision because we don't assign proper weight to possibilities like:

(a) Even if my current action isn't important, it might help cultivate habits in myself that, over time, will be important.
(b) Even if my personal actions aren't important, they might prompt others to follow my lead, which can have a nontrivial snowball effect.
(c) Even if there's a lot of harm being done, my own added harm may be nontrivial. For instance, there are lots of starving children in Africa; but while this lessens the relative suffering that any one child is going through, it dose not lessen the absolute suffering of any child. So my obligations to any one arbitrary child are not lessened by increasing the need. Here, the psychological effect is a form of psychic numbing associated with the identifiable victim bias.

I thought the electoral college was suppose to account for the citizens' ignorance and instantaneous gratification. That even if the public voted for the candidate who offered free candy, some educated body would override their decision to make that candidate president.

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