Here are the top few questions, and the responses:
Kismetatron
Hi Jill, thanks for doing this AMA. I have so many questions but first can you address this statement?
“We are not in a position to win the White House. But we do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of MI. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without MI.”
I mean it really, really sounds like your true intent is to get Trump into the White House. Which is weird because I thought the Green Party was for climate action and saving the the environment. Silly me.
Quick question, if you do succeed how do I look my legal immigrant wife in the eyes and tell her she may deported back to her home country simply for being the wrong skin color? Trump guaranteed that this is gonna happen if gets back in office so I really want to hear the mental gymnastics behind why you would cheerlead for this kind of misery.
JillSteinOnReddit
(no response)
LizukaWest
If the intention of the Green Party is in fact to actually be a viable third party, then why is there virtually no effort made at growing power at levels below the presidency? There has not been an elected Green member of the House in years, there are only four mayors in the entire country and there are barely any city or student council members. Wouldn’t focusing on lower stakes, winnable races be ultimately more efficient than doing nothing but running doomed campaigns?
JillSteinOnReddit
Hi Lizuka, the vast majority of Green campaigns are down-ballot campaigns, mostly on the local level. Greens have won over 1500 elections, making the Green Party the most successful independent party in the country that doesn’t take corporate money.
Ballot access rules designed by the duopoly require the Green Party to run for president and other high offices - or lose ballot lines and the ability to run at all levels.
Roughly 60% of US voters believe the 2-party system doesn’t represent us and we need a new party. We don’t have a democracy unless voters have a right to choose at all levels of government.
AsherGray
How many of the 1,500 elections won were in the last decade? I’ve noticed that the green party has zero seats in the senate, zero seats in the house of Representatives, zero state governorships, 0 out of 1,972 seats in state upper chambers, 0 out of 5,411 state lower chambers, and the list goes on.
Why should the American people vote for the candidate of a party that is incompetent at getting elected to smaller divisions of government?
JillSteinOnReddit
(no response)
forgedbygeeks
What did you discuss with Putin and Flynn at the infamous Moscow dinner photo?
TeamJillStein
Jill has answered this before! Here is a link to her answer on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drjillstein/video/7342590195394546987
Jan_17_2016
Yes, she just so happened to get invited to attend the 10th anniversary of a Russian propaganda network, and just so happened to get put at Putin’s table with Michael Flynn, just before she just so happened to siphon enough votes away from Clinton to allow for a Trump victory.
Sure, Jill.
TeamJillStein
(no response)
If the Green party were serious people, they’d have run Jill Stein out of their party after she ran it into the ground.
When did she take leadership?
The first time she was on the Presidential ballot as a Green party candidate was in 2012. As one of the reddit questions pointed out, their presence in any state-level offices has totally dried up since then. I feels like it goes without saying, but they haven’t made any gains in higher offices in the same period.
Initially they were going to go with Cornell West, but West didn’t want to go through the primary process, so he decided to run by himself. It’s a mess, honestly and it would really be better if the left could mount some sort of unity ticket instead of having greens, DSA, WFP, etc.
The left wouldnt be the left without dramatic infighting :p
People’s Party and Green Party are natural enemies. Like leftists and Democrats. Or leftists and tankies. Or leftists and Green Party. Or leftists and MAGA. Or leftists and anarchists. Or leftists and leftists. Damn leftists! They ruined the left!
“You leftists sure are a contentious bunch.”
If any third party was serious, they’d be shouting about ranked ballots at every opportunity.
My coworker told me I “seem like a Jill Stein voter” the other day as a compliment. I sent him this AMA after explaining exactly why that’s not a compliment. I don’t think he knew much about her except that something called the Green Party sounds really great and progressive, right? Except Jill Stein is a fucking shill who has no interest in making this country better for anyone but herself and the people who pay her to be a spoiler.
This is how I felt when people that never cared about politics started being interested in Yang. It was impossibly difficult to not judge them too harshly (and honestly to not take it personally when they couldn’t be convinced he was just a selfish grifter)
Edit: Santa is a robot moderator I made for this community. That is necessary context for this comment, clearly.
Santa removed this comment, because you don’t have a lot of recent participation, and you have some heavily downvoted comments. This is what I’ve been calling the “grey area,” where Santa will judge accounts that it can’t confidently assign scores to extra harshly, in order to protect against throwaway trolls. A couple dozen downvotes can put you into a category where your comments will be removed until you’ve built up a solid track record of comments that gather more of a normal or neutral reaction.
Looking over your history, that’s clearly the wrong call. You don’t have a ton of participation or upvotes, but you have a little collection of both. Definitely enough that a couple of comments that accrued some downvotes shouldn’t exclude you from participating.
I restored the comment, and made Santa less aggressive about sniping comments from users in the grey area in the future. I’m still tweaking this part of the functionality, since it’s hard to test in the abstract, and it only comes up a couple of times a month. Carry on. You’re fine.
Without context, this reads like a really confusing villain’s monologue. Mostly because you’re defying Santa and somehow defeated him.
I read it in context and I have no idea who/what Santa is lol
A bot maybe?
It’s a robot moderator. I added the context, since it sounds like a fever dream or chatbot hallucination otherwise.
I really really appreciate your explanation, patience, and good nature about the humor we found in your unexpected comment.
Thank you for all you do!
How does that take into account users from instances that don’t support downvotes? Also I get drunk and say dumb shit so I’ve probably got some weird swings between upvoted and downvoted posts, so I’m really just posting so you can have another data point.
You can still collect downvotes from other instances. Even if your instance doesn’t accept or display them, they’ll still get federated to the instance that hosts the community.
You’ve got a bunch of negative rank, mostly from the argument under the “Network Switch” post, but you’re fine. If you did that habitually, you’d get banned. It’s hard to get banned for real. The intent, and most of the reality, is that bans are limited to people who go around getting downvoted constantly because they are consistently obnoxious.
does santa have a list of users who’ve been automoderated like that? without user input on whether it’s making the right call, you’ll end up on the hook for evaluating those bans all the time, and at that point you might as well not have the bot
edit: i like the idea though
I don’t watch its every move. I do spot checks of its judgements. I tried posting some of them to !santabot@slrpnk.net to democratize the process, but I think it’s too abstract for people to be all that interested.
Something just clicked for me when you said that, though. I think the way to set it up is for moderators to be able to have Santa to auto-report comments, instead of autonomously removing them on its own.
That would only be of interest in communities where the moderators are interested in removing consistently obnoxious people. For some reason, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s very strange to me that so much moderation on “mainstream” Lemmy is based on an arbitrary set of rules, inconsistently applied, instead of relying to any extent on common sense or realizing when someone’s an obnoxious jackass and getting rid of them.
Post a politics-related web site or tool? A video? Sorry, it’s not an article. FUCK YOU, GET OUT.
Post 72 times per day, every day, and overtake MediaBiasFactCheck as the most downvoted account in Lemmy history? Nothing we can do. We are powerless to do ought but give you a little safe space for your propaganda. If only there were something we could do. But there isn’t.
I don’t think there’s any tool in the world that can fix that.
yang strikes me as opportunistically trying to attain polyical power, but not a grifter (at least in the way alex jones or any of a thousand right-wing pundits are grifters)
Yeah, that’s a totally fair and better characterization. I don’t think he’s all that interested in money either
we do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of MI. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without MI.
God DAMN this comment pisses me off. At least the fucking trumpers aren’t pretending to be anything other than fucking trumpers.
making the Green Party the most successful independent party in the country that doesn’t take corporate money.
Funny, considering her and her husbands investments.
