THis is a must-read-and-share rant over at Juan Cole’s place. Here’s a taste:

Dear young progressives,

If recent polls are to be believed, younger progressive voters like you are either preparing to vote in unusually large numbers for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or planning to stay home. If you’re going to stop reading now because tl;dr, the takeaway of this article is the following: please don’t do this. This is a very bad idea. If I had to rank-order all the bad decisions available to you in the universe it would go: 1) Any of these 3 options 2) Everything else.

You need to vote for Hillary Clinton or you may die in a fiery apocalypse that will make the plot of The Walking Dead seem like a story you tell to small children to comfort them and help them fall asleep. Voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, or writing in Bernie Sanders, or staying home, will contribute materially to the Armageddon which will follow. This article will explain why.

Let’s take the low-hanging fruit first. Gary Johnson is a bizarre choice for young progressives to consider. I know the Libertarians promise to get the government out of your weed stash and your marriages, which is dope. But they also believe a lot of really preposterous and regressive things that would functionally obliterate modern society. The Libertarian Party platform explicitly calls for abolishing or repealing the following things: income taxes, Social Security, public education, the Environmental Protection Agency, Obamacare as well as and I quote, “all federal programs and services not required under the U.S. Constitution.” Since the U.S. Constitution does not really call for very many federal programs at all - it being a shortish document that establishes the rules of political order rather than a draft of the federal budget for a country of 319 million people in the year Twenty-Sixteen - that pretty much covers most of them except the military. These delusional fabulists are allowed to run around blabbering about their absurd fantasy of stripping the modern state down to its pre-industrial shell because none of them will ever get within a million miles of actual power and thus will never be held accountable for any of it. That their hilarious platform now exists on the Internet - a thing that was invented by government researchers, using a method (government-funded partnerships with universities) that Libertarians would abolish—is an irony beyond their grasp. On top of that, Gary Johnson himself appears to be high as a skyscraper 24 hours a day and has the general demeanor of someone who can’t quite remember what happened yesterday but thinks maybe he left the oven on. In short: libertarians are not serious people with well-thought-out plans for how to grapple with the many challenges of modernity. You should not vote for them in general. You definitely should not vote for this one.

Jill Stein, I suppose, makes a bit more sense for you. She seems like a nice, idealistic woman, and she clearly cares and has poured her heart into her activism, some of which has been quite effective. But I would argue that this is not enough to be considered presidential material. The sum total of her experience in government is serving a term-and-a-half on a small-town council in Massachusetts, a position she quit to run for governor. She has since run a series of campaigns for higher offices and has never come close to winning any of them. This isn’t about what she has or hasn’t said about vaccines. There is a reason that you do not invite someone from the U.S. Senate to analyze your MRI or pilot your next flight, just as there are very good reasons why we should not plunge total political neophytes directly into the highest political office in the country. Government is not neuroscience but it does require some basic expertise and experience. Barack Obama’s four years in the U.S. Senate are something that should be considered a bare minimum.