The Greens are horrible on their own merits. Any third party in the US needs to start out saying the voting system must be changed. If they don't, that's a good sign they're a combination of a grift and useful idiots. The Greens rarely talk about it unless someone else brings it up first, and they quickly try to change the subject after mumbling a few things about it.

Another sign is that they don't try to build up support over time from local and state races. Greens occasionally run candidates for state congress, but for the most part, they show up for a Presidential run every 4 years and disappear.

Their historical anti-nuclear stance has exasperated climate change. They held back something that would have been very useful to mass deploy 20-30 years ago (although I do think the economics have changed, and it's no longer the right option for new rollouts). The German wing of the party is currently cheering on the dismantling of perfectly good nuclear reactors in exchange for much, much dirtier sources.

Nader's campaign in 2000 absolutely did torpedo Al Gore (and no, you don't have to convert every Nader voter in Florida to Gore for this to be true). He kept power out of the hands of one of the most genuine public servants to run in recent history, and gave power to a trainwreck of an administration that was 180 degrees away from their stated goals.

Greens need to get serious or fuck off.

Yes but the problem is despite all their blustering online, people only actually engage at the endgame stage of politics. All these "ideologically pure" leftists are doing jackshit to either ensure progressive leftist ideals win out over liberal ideals in the currently viable sorta left-presenting party or to support independent leftist political parties and groups in down-ballot, local elections, and community policy projects. No, instead these oh-so-great morally-superior "real leftists" instead want to bitch and moan about futility and then opt-out on big voting day while spouting virtues as if their behavior doesn't prevent real progressive change for the better, incremental though it may be.

And to very clear, I'm not taking the "fall in line or get out of the way" democrat bullshit stance here. If you really believe in the policy and values of a third party, please vote for them. I will never accuse an involved voter of throwing a vote away. I'm specifically talking about the large chunk of the left who are only left in theory, not practice, the ideological cosplayers who pretend anything less than absolute is not worth fighting for but who don't put in any effort to ensure that what they want even ever has a chance of ending up on the ballot in front of them.

It's easy to stand on virtue and say you won't support the lesser of two evils, but unless you're actively working on an alternative, the simple fact is that your abstained position enables the worst-case scenario which will have real-world impact. If we believe in leftist ideals, we should believe in reasonable harm reduction where possible. Same applies here.

Bunch of career politician parasites the lot of them.

Their only interest is in getting re-elected. If it can't be fixed in four years, it won't get done because it's the next guy's problem.

I'm extremely keen on politics but have been a paid up member of the third party in the UK. Kind of centrists who have liberal social views. Get so much stick from friends and family for getting involved in politics to come sit on the fence! They never win anything but function a bit like a policy think tank where they adopt progressive policies before anyone else does then one of the larger parties steal their ideas.

IMO most issues have nuance and need to be considered in isolation on their own merits.