In the 1920s, a British submarine captain in China once faced the Hobson's Choice of either allowing a hijacked river steamer to escape, or allowing the pirates to kill their hostages. He took the third option of sinking the ship. He fired a shot into the waterline, causing the ship to settle slowly, so that the passengers and crew could easily abandon ship, and in the confusion most of the pirates were killed. Since they had blended with the passengers, it was uncertain how many pirates had escaped and how many innocents had died, but the overall solution worked, and the captain was exonerated.
Something similar happened in the English debates leading up to the Canadian parliamentary election in 2006. While future Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper tore then-PM Paul Martin's corrupt Liberal government to shreds, the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Jack Layton, took most of his time to remind Canadians that they "always have a third option," and to vote NDP. It backfired spectacularly, making Layton look like a kid in the back of a classroom, jumping up and down and yelling "pick me!" The media backlash was so large, and the third-option catchphrase repeated so often to tarnish Layton's reputation, that it's the closest thing to Memetic Mutation in the political journalism field.
Jack Layton tried it again in the 2011 election, and was mostly successful.
Mostly successful does not even begin to fully describe it try. For the first time in Canadian history the NDP is the official opposition. He will probably go down in history as the person who changed Canadian politics forever may he Rest In Peace.
However, in the run-up to the 2010 UK General Elections, Nick Clegg repeatedly stressing his own existence went down very well, creating a positive Memetic Mutation called 'Cleggmania'. Just goes to show it's all in the delivery.
Well - it worked out well for the Lib-Dems in the end (so far!), but they actually lost seats in the election.
They did, however, earn more voters.
Since the latest funding cuts in the UK, as well as the move to further privatise British Universities, I'd say they've got little chance of surviving the next election, giving people a choice between Labour, Conservative or one of the even smaller parties.
The Irish commentators have usually labelled the Irish political system has usually being described as a two and a half party system. The Labour Party is the 'half' party, much like the Liberal Democrats in Britain, they are much bigger than smaller parties in the Dáil (Irish Parliament)but smaller than the other two dominant parties Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Historically when Fianna Fáil lost elections Labour would form a coalition with Fine Gael (and once in the early 90's they were in coalition with FF). This seems to have changed in 2011 where Labour gained more seats than Fianna Fáil to become the second largest party, but their involvement in the present FG/Lab Government might undo this advance.
Siddhārtha Gautama took a third option about 2500 years ago — giving up a life of luxury as a prince and rejecting a life of religious Asceticism to try out what he called the Middle Way, which he would later, as Gautama Buddha, expand into Buddhism.
Though very few people know it is prominent in the religious text, being somewhat more familiar with the Viewers are Morons version, The Bible has this as an explicit choice; in a metaphor for different ways of going through life, the correct path in life is the middle path, not the right or the left path.
In the days right before the Roman Civil War, Pompey and the Senate attempted to foist two lose-lose options onto Gaius Julius Caesar: return to Rome without his veteran legions in Gaul and be crucified in court, or refuse to return, which would lead to him being declared an enemy of the state. With Caesar's legions spread across Gaul and the war season rapidly drawing to a close, by the time he could gather all his forces he would have found an overwhelming army prepared against him. Caesar, proving once again that he deserved his reputation for military genius, decided to Take a Third Option. He realized that the one legion he had on hand was more than the zero legions his enemies had mustered so far, and marched one legion into Italy proper. They conquered Rome without a fight and Caesar held the initiative for a good part of the war after that.
In general, politicians in a two party system find success in appealing to the moderates as having found a "Third Way." Bill Clinton was known for such positions (something that branded him as a "waffler" early in his term), and which inspired the concept of "Compassionate Conservatism" in the campaign of George W. Bush (something that sort of went out the window of American political discourse after 9/11).
The political opponents of Tony Blair, one of the politicians to rely on such rhetoric, remarked at the time that he was not the first politician to claim he had found a Third Way between free markets and state control... the slogan "Third Way" was initially used by Benito Mussolini.
The Berlin Airlift. After the Soviets blockaded the western-controlled West Berlin, an enclave in East Germany, the only apparent options for supplying the city were to try and force their way past the Soviet blockade, thus giving the USSR grounds to retaliate and potentially start WW III, or to allow the city to be starved into submission. The chosen solution? Fly in the supplies required by the city's two million plus population. The largest airlift in history followed and it placed the shoe completely on the other foot; the airlift could only be stopped if the Soviets started downing planes.
Fort Sumter. The Union could either send a ship to resupply it, and give the Confederacy an excuse saying they were being attacked to start a war while blaming the Union, or let them all starve. The choice? Warn everyone faaaar in advance that a ship would be sent without weapons solely to resupply the fort, giving the 'blame' for starting the war to the South.
In the early days of the Space Race, the scientists involved were divided into two camps as to how to get to the Moon: the first, Direct Ascent, would build an unbelievably huge rocket capable of launching from the ground, flying to the Moon, landing, lifting off from the Moon, and returning to Earth. Dr. von Braun proposed an alternative Earth Orbit Rendezvous, wherein multiple cargo launches would construct and fuel a vehicle in Earth orbit that would depart Earth, land on the Moon, lift off, and return. In 1961, the various groups got together to hash out which option to use. Instead, the conference resulted in a third option: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. By using a smaller vehicle to shuttle to the lunar surface and back, they avoided the massive cost of carrying the fuel for the homeward journey to the lunar surface and back.
This option was not initially considered because no spacecraft rendezvous had ever been accomplished before; it was considered risky even in Earth orbit, where astronauts could de-orbit in an emergency. The risk of the lander docking with the command module after the surface mission was considered great, but the engineering challenges in building the launch vehicle were relatively minor in comparison. Practicing orbital rendezvous was the whole point of the Gemini program.
This applies to many minor political parties.
The Non-Aligned Movement. Countries like India, Malaysia, Egypt, Tito's Yugoslavia, Indonesia and others chose to join neither the USSR nor USA in the Cold War, making their own alliance instead. This is exactly what "Third World countries" originally meant.
When Anthrocon was debating whether or not a move from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh would affect whether or not people would attend, the majority of those polled Took a Third Option: they didn't care which city it was in because they lived so far away that the move wouldn't really affect travel.
Psychologist Paul Watzlawick gives us a nice example with the Austrian Franzl Wokurka. He did this the first time when he saw a flower bed with a sign forbidding to rip out flowers; conflicted between obeying a law (he didn't like) and crossing it (which might've lead to consequences) he suddenly had an epiphany, thinking "those flowers are pretty nice" and deciding he wouldn't rip them off because he wanted it so. From then on, he lived his life following this philosophy; thus, he became neither a theist nor an atheist, but an agnosticist. Later, he had his Crowning Moment of Awesome, when Those Wacky Nazis flooded Austria with posters stating "National Socialism or Bolshevist Chaos?", which he would comment with "Erdäpfel oder Kartoffeln?" (spuds or potatos?).
A man tells a TV reporter a story about his grandfather and how he refused to be mistreated despite being black in the U.S. deep south back in the 1950s. His grandfather wanted to build a house, and purchased the lumber. The (white) owner of the lumber yard later informs him that he's not going to give him the lumber. So the man wants his money back. Lumber yard owner points out (correctly) that he can get away with not paying him, because even if he sued him, no jury (which would be all-white, in the southern U.S.) would find for a black person. So he's going to keep the money and the lumber. The man then gets angry about it and says that he's taking a third option: either the lumber yard owner refund him his money, give him the lumber he paid for, or he'd kill him. The lumber yard owner then decided that it would be a good idea not to cheat the man, and gave him the lumber he paid for.
Robert Bloch said that, on graduating from high school, he was faced with a choice between working and starving to death. He decided to become a writer, and do both.
During the late 80s and 90s computer users were stuck with the choice of the Mac (easy to use, but more expensive with proprietary ports and an unusual software architecture) or IBM-PC (less proprietary, more manufacturers, annoyingly primitive hardware until the introduction of the PCI bus). Some denied the battle and just bought an Amiga (the first multimedia system; way ahead of its time, but owned by a company with poor management).
The 2010 Australian election looked like it would be between the once popular but flagging Kevin Rudd and the horrifying Tony Abbott. Then Parliament seemed to take the third option and appointed Julia Gillard instead.
A man is in the hospital, due to not feeling well, with his girlfriend. His girlfriend gets a phone call. It's the man's wife, who managed to find his girlfriend's number. The girlfriend asks why the woman on her phone is claiming to be the man's wife. The man responds by losing all color, and collapsing due to cardiac arrest.
Two Libyan pilots were recently given the choice between bombing civilian protesters or facing execution if they refused. Instead, they flew to Malta and applied for asylum.
One of the ideas from Aristotle's philosophy is that every virtue can be represented as the sensible option when presented with two extremes. For example, 'Wittyness' is presented as the virtue of saying just the right amount in a conversation, between the extremes of saying too little and coming across as shy, or saying too much and being thought of as a bore.
In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis argues against the notion that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not divine, on the grounds that the Gospel accounts say that Jesus claimed to be divine, and must therefore be either a "Lunatic" who harbored the delusion of divinity, a "Liar" who falsely claimed to be divine, or the "Lord" who actually was (and is) divine. Critics of Lewis' argument offer the fourth choice of a "Legend" whose alleged claim to divinity was created by others after the fact. Others suggest that the whole setup is a false dichotomy, and that there's no contradiction in being both a great moral teacher and a lunatic, or even in being both a great moral teacherand a liar.
Immanuel Kant, the last Enlightenment philosopher, advocated the "categorical imperative" which, boiled down, meant that an act could be considered "moral" only if it would be reasonable for everyone to act the same way. French philosopher Benjamin Constant pointed out that under this system telling the truth was an imperative (since a society of habitual liars could not function), and a moral person would be forced to tell an inquiring murderer the location of his target. Kant responded in his next essay, pointing out that although it's still wrong to lie to the murderer, that doesn't mean you have to give him the information he wants, either. The system still has critics, but Kant definitely advocated the Third Option to seemingly unwinnable situations.
More moderate/liberal Christian organizations and some churches often market themselves as such, as a third option for those who are not atheist or non-religious but also aren't very conservative or fundamentalist. Emergent churches often do this too as a third option for those unhappy and bored with traditional worship styles between that and not attending.
The celebrated US Supreme Court case of Marbury v Madison. Short version: the Supreme Court was asked to order the Jefferson administration to deliver a letter naming Marbury as a Justice of the Peace, a letter that had been signed under the previous Adams administration with the intention of causing trouble for Jefferson's incoming government. If the Court refused to back Marbury, it'd seem like it was caving in to political pressure; if they did order delivery of the letter and the Jefferson adminstration responded 'make me', it'd expose the fact that the Court had no ability to compel enforcement of its decisions. Instead, the Chief Justice took a third option, stating that Marbury had a right to his commission but that the Court couldn't constitutionally order the administration around in this way: placating both sides, and not incidentally establishing the principle that the Court gets to decide what's constitutional and what's not. Only later in life would Jefferson, who opposed the idea that the Court should have exclusive say on this matter, realize how badly he'd been hornswoggled.
An actual, but lesser known, third option is the "three-state solution" (this involves giving Jordan control of the West Bank and Egypt on Gaza).
The English (later British) constitutional set-up of 1689 was basically this. England (which had been plagued by political instability) had the problem of trying to balance monarchism (which they believed could lead to tyranny) with Parliamentary rule (a form of republicanism which they had tried and believed lead to instability). The solution was a "third way": retaining the monarchy but curtailing the king's powers whilst ensuring that, legally, all power was still derived from the crown even though it was largely (and later entirely) executed by Parliament. Not only did this system work but they believed they had found the perfect system of government. When the American colonies decided to try the republican option again many British observers believed it was doomed to failure as it would "only work with small city states".
In regarding to union issues (particularly the ones in California relating to the entertainment industry), the general rule of thumb is that union members are strictly limited to union work and vice versa for non-union members. Then there is something called the "financial core" option (or "fi-core" for short). It basically allows the said workers to work in both union and non-union environments. In regards to working in a union shop and obtaining the benefits of working in the union, the financial core worker must pay a small union fee. They cannot represent or participate in union activities; but at the same time, the financial core member is not restricted the union bylaws (particularly SAG's "Global Rule Number One"), can work in non-union environments, and continue working if the unions go on a strike. Oh yeah, and mentioning this to SAG and AFTRA is a very bad idea.
Republican or Democrat? Screw it, I'm voting Libertarian.
Apparently that the whole purpose of "third party" groups in politics.
Fluorescent light bulb [1] versus regular incandescent [2]. Third option? LED bulbs. [3]
The origin behind the Eduard "Mr. Trololo" Khil's famous Trololo song. The song he "sings" was actually a famous Russian folk song named “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home”, which had been banned in the URSS due to its lyrics... so when faced with the choice of dropping it from his performances or not, Khil still sang it, but changed the lyrics to unreadable gibberish. And he got away with it.
The Romanian-Jewish gynecologist Dr. Gisella Perl was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau and tasked by Dr. Josef Mengele with the unpleasant mission of checking on female inmates' health. . . and even worse, with reporting any pregnant inmate to him. She could neither refuse (since she'd be found out and killed later, with probably someone else taking her place) nor accept (since the women would be used in experiments)... so she decided to secretly perform abortions on all the pregnant inmates she found instead. It worked well enough for her to save hundreds of women, and she ultimately survived Auschwitz and emigrated to the USA, then to Israel.
↑More expensive and contain toxins, but longer lasting and more efficient
