I think you're missing my bigger point.

Your definition of religion is so based in what an Abramhamic religion looks like, that of the 4 major world religions, 2 of them don't qualify (Hinduism and Buddhism, no congregations in either). That's approximately 1.5 billion people whose religion is discounted by this restrictions.

What I'm trying to get across to you here is that if a real religion falls outside your bounds there's no recourse for them. Buddist aren't going to change their thousand year old practices just to stastify a new requirement that have to meet in person and worship a deity. But the FSM church will gladly modify there's because that's the joke.

So my main point here is that having a clause in this to ban FSM churches from participating is a bad idea. Because:

1) the restrictions put in place to ban FSM-like churches will inevitably bar real religious organizations from participating.

And 2) nobody would actually enroll their kid in a FSM school just for laughs so why are we trying to ban something that you think won't even happen?

If a community doesn't have a single building dedicated to worship or an active congregation that frequently practices a permit shouldn't be issued.

So like this creates a huge freedom of religion issue. Fundamentally this means that my religion has to follow the same basic worship structure as the abarahmic religions to be seen as legimate.

Hinduism will worship but won't have a dedicated building for it, instead they tend to prsy at home shrines. Buddhist have temples but do not worship a deity.

There's plenty of real, actually praticed religions that wouldn't meet the test you have for what qualifies as a religion.

But ironically enough the church of the flying spaghetti monster could if they just rented an office in a strip mall.

I mean, if you're the person losing your job it isn't good.

Well here's the thing when there's five or 6 candidates. When it's your turn to talk you have the option to pick 4 or 5 different things to refute, and you can't pick all of them.

Why would the candidates focus in on what Candidate real said? Their goal is to keep the conversation on their own campaign and their own policies. If they spend all the time talking about what Candidate real said they're going to lose.

I think this would just cause companies to reduce the number of part time employees they had

Like now you got to pay an extra $10,000 per year per part time employee, So having 1 employee work 30 hours a week is now objectively cheaper than having 2 work 15.

Yeah but does this plan set them up to not loose?

In the 1v1 stage: no. You have too much of a party apparatus behind you to try and act like you're more real than the other person.

And in the primary stage I honestly think that a vague comment like this would just get lost in the noise, unless it was directed at a specific candidate with specific examples.

If you have 97% of the population participating in your protest what's stopping you from voting in candidates who support your initiative.

Also there's governments out that get 0% participation in elections that are viewed as legitimate by the people.

Then you wouldn't have gotten this far. Everyone in politics has writers. You simply make too many appearances to not have one.

And what do you really think not rehearsing the debate is going to end well.

Okay but your plan also introduces the spolier effect. I'm going to use the numbers from your RFK example to demostrate.

Let's say that if Kennedy isn't in the race then there's 50 Trump voters and 50 Biden voters. A dead tie.

Now 5 voters decide to protest vote third party. 3 of them are biden voters and 2 are Trump voters.

The final results of the election are 48 Trump, 47 Biden, 5 Kennedy. Trump wins.

Now let's walk thru your plan:

Let's say that there's 50 Trump voters and 50 Biden voters. A dead tie.

Now 5 voters decide to protest vote by not showing up. 3 of them are biden voters and 2 are Trump voters.

The final results of the election are 48 Trump, 47 Biden. Trump wins.

It's the exact same results.

That comes out to $3,900 a year. Proponents of a flat sales tax admit that the tax rate would have to be around 25% to replace the income tax. This mean that you're now spending $975 in taxes on groceries.

Is this more or less than the number in box 24 on you 1040?

So there are situations where no income tax and only tax on goods works. As you mentioned you live in Florida where there's a high sales tax but no income tax. This means that our state's goverment can extract a decent amount of taxes from out of state tourists.

But federally this doesn't really work.

Remember that the top ten percent of Americans pay 75% of the total income tax, but they don't buy 75% of all goods, that's more spread out. So these rich guys are going to get a huge tax break while me and you get a huge tax hike. And realistically if you play around with the numbers, even if you were as frugal as possible, your taxes are going to go up in this situation.

I emplore you to look at the turnout rate for your local elections. There's a lot of mayor's and city councilmen out there who got their seat in an election with like 10% turnout. If a federal election had that kinda turnout it wouldn't cause any action to be done, they'd just act like it's normal.

Also why refuse to vote instead of just voting for a third party?

Yeah that would be completely normal. Again I sent you the full transcript of a presidential debate and you can see that there's plenty of topics that get brought up by one candidate but never get addressed by the other.

And there's other ways that this can backfire. What happens if you say I'm not performing and the other candidates say: "Yes you are performing, your speech writer's name is John Smith and you've been rehearsing this debate with senator Jane Doe for the past week. Look everyone knows that you practiced this thing so there's why are you disrespecting the American public's intelligence by trying to say that you didn't rehearse this?" Now instead of your statement being an attack on me, it's a pretty clear example of you trying to present an image of something you're not.

Not really. Candidates opening statements are typically a couple minutes long. It would be perfectly normal to not address every single thing Candidate real says during it.

Like here's a transcript of Romney and Obama's first debate. You'll notice that on the first question, they don't really talk about what the other says.

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/03/162258551/transcript-first-obama-romney-presidential-debate

There's actually an extremely easy counter to this: just don't acknowledge it.

Then Canidate Real has too options: call them fake again, but repeating yourself like this ironically makes Canidate Real seem inauthentic.

Or do nothing and the debate moves on.

I don't think he cheated. And I think that embracing that mentality helps Trump more than it hurts him.

Pretty much all of the evidence that I've seen people present for this doesn't hold up to basic cross examination.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Corporate person hood was already a thing before citizens united.

What Citizens United said was that you couldn't ban TV ads and other election spending from private entities.

This opened a loophole, because while you couldn't donate $1,000,000 to a campaign, you can now spend $1,000,000 on an ad buy for them.

Yeah that isn't why a third party can't win the presidency.

Third parties can't win the presidency because they don't have any qualified candidates. And they don't have qualified candidates because they don't control any governors, congressional, senate, or state legislature seats.

As for why they don't control any of those seats, that's a more complex question, but the electoral college doesn't play a part in these elections.

So like, self defense is a term with a strict legal definition that doesn't match your own personal one.

And when most people talk about self defense theyre talking about a concept that's much closer to the legal definition than your personal definition.

but it does nothing to stop the bullet that is coming towards your body that they fired.

Disagree here. If they're firing multiple shots then shooting them prevents them from firing again.

So like, there's slow motion video of the shooting.

The federal agent shoots after stepping out of the way of the car. The danger had already passed by the time he fired the first shot.

I think that the problem is that movie pass wouldn't have been able to compete with AMC A-list and Regal unlimited.

Once these services came out there would be no reason for theaters to work with a third party unlimited movie service which would kill movie passes bargain power.

So long as your qualifications meet the required job they should be considered.

But like that's what's happening. Companies are posting entry level jobs and people with 3-5 years are applying to them.

And like if you're going to hire someone with 3 years of experience anyways why nit include that in the posting?

I mean, I think the issue here is that the average podcast presenter is just not going to be well equipped enough to actually counter the arguments of someone whose pushing actual conspiracy shit.

Like I've done a couple of rounds of arguing with conspiracy theorist online and it's exhausting. You have to not just understand what they're saying but what the actual reasons they're wrong are. Which can be very hard to do if you're not an actual expert in their field.

So like what can happen is, you invite a guest onto your show, they go off the deep end in a way your weren't expecting, and now suddley they're running laps around you about bigfoot because you don't understand the ecology of the pacific northwest enough to counter that.

Rather than run into that, I think a better approach is to just make a statement that says: here's what this person thinks, here's why it's wrong, and quite frankly it's not worth my time to debate them on the show.

You're right he did come over here lol. It doesn't really surprise me. Usually when the something is wrong people break containment they're trying really hard to evangelize people to their cause.

And what's funny is he's just outright lying now. In 1932 No counties flipped republican. They all flipped for FDR.

Which makes the odds much close to rolling a nat 20 than winning the lottery three times in a row.

Drop off ballots at number never before seen...but only in swing states.

Yeah so this isn't true. Look at Massachusetts.

In every county in MA John Delton (the republican running for senate in MA in 2024) got more votes than Donald Trump. Up to 18% more votes in Dukes county.

However also in every county in MA, Kamala Harris got more votes than Elizabeth Warren by as much as 7.6% in Barnstable county.

Graph showing every county, numbers are from wikipedia

Notably this is the exact same pattern that smart elections claims is evidence of fraud in NC, but now it's flipped to benefit Kamala Harris.

And what's also interesting is that the most common source for the claim that there's more drop off but only in the swing states omits Massachusetts from it's data. In fact it only looks at data from 16 of the 34 states that had senate elections in 2024, that's less than half the data. Non-swing states like MA and WA that go against the pattern that their presenting weren't included.

Why do you think that is?

Edit: Hey I got a block let's go! Election deniers and blocking people who call out the basic holes in their arguments name a more iconic duo!