Property destruction is not violence in any substantive sense. To use the same term for vandalism as direct physical brutality is an Orwellian pollution of language that cheapens real violence and suggests that people are equivalent to things. Obviously destroying people’s inert possessions is usually not ethically justifiable — but the bar is much lower than with real violence. Civil disobedience, like blocking a port, can incur costs in the millions of dollars, while other actions widely accepted as ‘non-violent’ like pouring fake blood over draft cards or mortgage records can amount to incredibly costly direct property destruction. Breaking cheap windows may look scarier to some, but appearing intimidating is hardly an atrocity.

— William Gillis, You Are Not the Target Audience

I'm distraught at the Trump win. It shouldn't have happened, and America and the rest of the world is in a worse place for it. The best we can hope for now is that the resistance will be strong and swift.

I wish more people had voted for Hillary, not because she'd have been my first choice of candidate (though I'd have voted for her, were I American), but to keep Trump out of office first and then get to work on fixing the systems that allowed him to reach the prominence he did. It would've been nice to have elected a woman too, just for the principle of it.

But when I now see people *literally blaming 3rd party voters and non-voters for electing Trump*, I get squirmy. The only people who elected Trump were Trump voters. Saying that people who didn't vote for him caused his rise to power is bullying people into accepting the non-democratic premise of a 2-party system and robbing people of their democratic voice. It is literally saying "Trump is so dangerous that we need to compromise on democratic principles to ensure he doesn't get elected." Where does this slippery slope end? Would you blame people who live in red states for not moving to swing states before the election, too? To me, it makes at least as much sense to blame a Hillary voter for not doing more door-to-door and community service work for her not getting elected, than to blame a Gary Johnson-voter or Jill Stein-voter or a non-voter for Trump. "You could've done more for your candidate" is a more coherent accusation than "you should have compromised on your integrity and the integrity of the democratic system and fallen in line behind someone who's not your candidate."

Ask yourself this: if you knew that democratic principles would cause Trump to get elected, but you and you alone could pull a lever to put Hillary in his place, would you do it? If not, don't complain about people voting (or not voting) their heart. If you would, then you likely gauge a Trump presidency to be more dangerous than the hollowing out of the democratic process. That's a fair opinion to hold, but recognize and own that you hold and preach it.

And yes, the democratic process in the US is broken. It is stacked so strongly to support only two monolithic parties whose economic policies and establishment ties are very similar that it's virtually impossible to affect change by voting for anyone else. It is gerrymandered to the point that Trump won by 122% over Clinton despite losing the popular vote. Most people's votes simply do not count at all based on where in the country they live. That is an enormous problem, which Canada is affected by as well - its very system of electing those who would govern is fatally broken, so how can we treat those elected by it as legitimate governors?

Every party in Canada, save the amalgamated Conservatives (read: US Republicans) who had been in power for the previous two election cycles, treated wide-reaching electoral reform towards some form of proportional representation as a crucial topic for their campaign. The Liberal party, the party fiscally closest to the Conservatives in Canada and the counterpart to the US Democrats, were elected in a landslide. A year later, electoral reform was no longer as crucial as it once had been, and maybe we could continue making do with First-Past-The-Post for a bit longer...

America, if you want to fix your broken electoral system, you cannot put your faith in one of your two parties which benefit from it to do so. If you want to play what-ifs, consider the what-if you and your predecessors hadn't bullied and shamed people into voting for one of the two mainstream parties every election cycle, but actually allowed people to show how broken it is, allowed people to lose faith in its ability to represent them, allowed the political crises and the lack of mandate to incite electoral reform. That way, when Hillary won the popular vote in 2016, she'd maybe have also won the presidency.

If we're going to play the blame-game, I'm going to blame Trump voters. If you're going to blame non-Trump-voters, I am additionally going to blame you, for being complicit in the perpetuation of the corrupt and broken 2-party First-Past-The-Post electoral system that ended up electing Trump.

— Mikael Andersson on Facebook