Well said.

Whenever I hear the “not voting for Trump is a vote for Hillary” argument it does feel as if, as you expressed so well, the speaker thinks I’m wearing the same team jersey as them. Which makes sense, since I wore that jersey for so long. But once they nominated Trump I took the jersey off. And burned it.

We’re in a pickle, to be sure, and it’s very depressing, but free agency feels pretty good.

And neither do I.

Many on the right are so used to demonizing the left that it becomes hard to discern, when it counts, the reality vs hyperbole.

Of course, a further slide leftward is rather bad for this country.

However, shouldn’t we ask, compared to what?

We are so dead set against Clinton that we find it easy to rationalize backing someone because he is “our guy” (wearing our “team’s” colors)?

Does that “trump” all the rest?
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It is hard to express the scale and quality of Trump’s lies (including things he didn’t need to – e.g. his fundraising, and his malleability on issues/policies), and just how much his demeanor way more than thumbs the scale towards Authoritarianism.

Charles Murray does his best, but it still seems to understate the danger…
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435805/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-why-hillary-is-even-worse-doesnt-cut-it

We need to start believing our eyes and ears about Trump.

The nature of this-all is a marked departure from anyone we’ve encountered in our lifetimes. Of course, we don’t want to believe Trump could be really all that bad, so we ignore all the signs, and fall back to our comfortable position/habit of fighting Dems, carrying the ball for “our team”.
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Clinton is still within “normal” political bounds.

Trump is completely unbounded.

Lest we think that is a good thing, that means he is not beholding to anything. Not to principles, not to policies he espouses/flip flops on, not to limits to power. What makes us think he would be accountable to his supporters about anything? One step further, then what is the point of Trump?

If we want to raise the specter of “gulags”, Of the two candidates, Trump seems an order of magnitude closer to delivering on coercion in a brutal way vs Clinton.
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Four more years of slide into “Europeanization” isn’t great, to be sure, but if Trump’s chaos brings Authoritarianism, all bets are off on reviving our country and what it stands/stood for.

So, we want to gamble on Trump, for what? If anyone thinks he will deliver on any imagined “promises”, where’s your proof, that doesn’t also have several counter points (largely from Trump himself)? Is it worth the risk to find out?
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Support Libertarian or third party, and GOP down-ticket (in hopes we have GOP with backbone in Congress to limit whoever gets to power).

If we ALL wait around for everyone else to move, until we see some “momentum” in the Libertarian/third party, it will become a self fulfilling prophecy that there is NONE.

You write:

…all forms of socialism must gradually evolve into totalitarian communism. And communism, to secure itself and then maintain its power, inescapably leads to the death camps/gulags.

That is a conclusion that cannot be proven or disproven, because you can always say “well, even though it hasn’t happened yet in most socialist countries, it will happen, given enough time.”

That’s an article of faith. You may think your logic is unassailable, but I don’t see it that way. If the control can be exerted through other means, the gulag is not only not necessary but can lead to too much backlash. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

The fact is that most socialist countries don’t have gulags and don’t seem to need them to perpetuate socialism, which is done through education and cultural pressures of various kinds far short of a gulag. I don’t see that gulags are either necessary or inevitable.

That’s true, though Muslim immigration into Europe is directly tied to its social welfare system. It cannot be otherwise, so immigration of the young is an inherent operative principle of social welfare systems.

I included the link to the EU’s covert ploy to create its own army to demonstrate the other inherent quality of social welfare systems, an unelected bureaucracy laying the groundwork for the means to control the ‘people’. Always for their own good, of course…

All forms of collectivism are inherently unsustainable because they reject key aspects of the external reality within which we exist and as a necessary compensatory premise, fantasize that human nature is utterly malleable. Thus the insistence that basic human nature is a “social construct”.

Ideological fanaticism prevents objective evaluation, so in order to survive, all collectivist ‘philosophies’ must gradually impose an ever greater degree of political correctness until an end stage is reached, where all thought, speech and behavior is declared by the State to be either forbidden or mandatory. The foremost current example being N. Korea.

Given the above factors and socialism’s ‘reality defiant’ premises, all forms of socialism must gradually evolve into totalitarian communism. And communism, to secure itself and then maintain its power, inescapably leads to the death camps/gulags.

Human nature being what it is, dissent is certain but the end stage totalitarian State cannot tolerate the ‘people’ being aware of individual dissent, thus the need for the gulags and death camps. Once beaten down enough, a population can be controlled with a minimal amount of them. Reeducation for the least recalcitrant, gulags for hard labor, medical experimentation, etc. and death camps for the disposables. It is a methodology that all communist States have employed because… it works.

But what you are describing in Sweden is a different fate than the death camps/gulags.

Sweden, as a representative of Western Civilization, will not exist 20 years from now. Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city has the highest rate of rape in the world and, 98% of it is by Muslims. There are “no go” zones in Swedish cities and they are growing.

Sweden’s birth rate demographics spell out her doom. Her socialist welfare system spells her doom, as it does all of Western Europe because their welfare/socialism is unsustainable.

Off the radar, the EU is clandestinely moving to create an army answerable only to Brussel’s bureaucrats.

“You “rationally” swat down arguments that do not agree with your pessimistic “reasoned” expected outcomes. Talk of slander when criticism becomes sharp” OM

Premise, internally consistent extension of the premise and a logical conclusion are the essence of rationality. Reasoned rebuttal is not “swat[ting] down” an opposing argument but exposing its flaws. “Criticism” that doesn’t address the argument but denigrates the other’s character (“depressive pessimistic”) is slander by any metric.

You “rationally” swat down arguments that do not agree with your pessimistic “reasoned” expected outcomes. Talk of slander when criticism becomes sharp, then return to the same trope. Eeyore was a depressive pessimistic character indeed, don’t be one.

That’s the nub of the matter.

The current situation is crying out for a viable 3rd option, which now is the most realistic that it has been in the modern era.

But the primary litmus test for the Libertarian Party or any other 3rd option is not the meritorious governance-and-leadership quality of the individual candidate, but rather, as Neo points to, the practical competitive quality of the campaign.

A 3rd-option campaign that will compete for real to play to win is the need. An ideal 3rd-option candidate is the want.

A 3rd-option campaign is doable.

It just needs a compelling candidate, a compelling story (narrative), and most of all, the essential character of the campaign must be defined by a zealously vigorous activist mindset and skillset – which is the minimum required to compete for real versus Democrat-front Left activists and Left-mimicking Trump-front alt-Right activists.

The lesson of the 2012 presidential campaign, repeated with the 2016 GOP primary race – that many conservatives and Republicans even now have failed (or refuse) to pick up – is that participatory politics subsume electoral politics, and a social activist movement is required to compete for real against a social activist movement.

To compete for real, Trump read the political market, identified the fundamental market inefficiency, and aligned with alt-Right activists to displace the activism-deficient Right to usurp GOP.

A 3rd option in the 2016 presidential election is realistic.

But the minimum standard for a 3rd option to compete for real is the requirement that alt-Right-displaced conservatives – possibly in a (probably necessary) practical alliance with Left-displaced liberals – collectively adopt the activist mindset, adapt the activist skillset, and commit zealously and permanently to full-spectrum activism. That’s the minimum standard to compete for real.

There’s no choice. You’re backed into a political evolutionary corner. Any less than full activism, and you’re meekly surrendering the nation to your own political obsolescence despite that right now is the time, place, and the opportunity to compete for real for social dominance as an insurgent in the political evolutionary arena. So far, though, displaced conservatives appear to be rejecting necessary activism out of hand and resigning themselves to docile submission to any ‘other’ that fields the activists necessary to compete for real in the only social cultural/political game there is.

Especially in the US, social cultural/political history is and has always been a product manufactured by activists in the arena – just regular people competing as a team applying a prosaic social method – not a divine tide.

Then they tired of them and swung back.

Tired conceits of all the Left being mini-Lenins hides their actual faults.

The only thing that will bring the US an authoritarian government is if the Army want it. In that case, Trump is a much bigger danger.

This forum is about talk, about communication. “Eyeore” is about substituting a lame put down for reasoned rebuttal. I chose ‘Cassandra’ specifically because her predictions were rejected, not as a signifier of accuracy. I’ve been wrong before, will be wrong again and hope that I’m wrong about the republic.

Nor is it profundity that I seek but instead clarity, while knowing that it is impossible to speak so clearly that it cannot be misunderstood.

You have a perfect right to disagree, as do I. Why, when your argument proves unpersuasive, the need to resort to personnel insult?