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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2024

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  • There’s definitely giant inadequacies in American democracy, but still I fail to see how voting isn’t good enough. If people voted for Gore instead of Nader, American history would be very different. We’d have avoided a giant tax cut for the rich l, withdrawing from Kyoto, and a trillion dollar unnecessary war. Wealth inequality wouldn’t be as bad, there would definitely be earlier progress against global warming, and we could probably afford real universal health care by now.

    Ideally after voting in the right people, we’d fix all the democracy problems. But still I’d say voting alone would make a huge difference. Anything else meanwhile - protests (BLM, Gaza), violence (Matthew crooks, Luigi) has at best accomplished zero, and in reality seems to have done serious damage to the causes they were seeking. The one exception I’d give is boycotts - like the Tesla boycotts that have destroyed their sales numbers.


  • Well yeah, but part of the voter propaganda is telling people both sides are the same. I get that there’s pro capitalist media bias which at its root is caused by extreme financial inequality. But fixing that financial inequality requires government action, and that requires voting. For the people who will do the inadequate version over the people who want to make it worse. Incremental change through pressure + time, just like everything else on earth.


  • Voting caused the problem, it can solve it too. But here’s the thing: for voting to solve the problem, you have to actually do it and play the game.

    Every 20-25 years some rightwing psycho wins and inflicts some horror on us because new voters don’t remember what happened the last time people said “both sides are the same”. You kids know that whole Iraq war and torture thing was avoidable, right? So was Reagan’s annihilation of the middle class.





  • I agree with 0% but disagree there’s any paradox - every choice is just plain old wrong. Each choice cannot be correct because no percentage reflects the chance of picking that number.

    Ordinarily we’d assume the chance is 25% because in most tests there’s only one right choice. But this one evidently could have more than one right choice, if the choice stated twice was correct - which it isn’t. So there’s no basis for supposing that 25% is correct here, which causes the whole paradox to unravel.

    Now replace 60% with 0%. Maybe that would count as a proper paradox. But I’d still say not really, the answer is 0% - it’s just wrong in the hypothetical situation posed by the question rather than the actual question.




  • rational_lib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlJerkoff
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    2 months ago

    Your position would be more sensible and coherent if you were looking to achieve it through a mechanism outside of voting, but to insist on trying to use the tool you recognize as broken to repair itself is an absurdity, it’s completely irrational.

    Your position would be much more sensible if RCV had never been achieved through voting. But it has. And notice the states where it does exist - these are the same places where lots of people vote for Democrats. And the places where it’s banned statewide? Those are the places where lots of people vote for Republicans. We need more of the former, and less of the latter.

    I know I’d be a lot cooler, especially around here, if I just put on the Che Guevara shirt and say revolution is the only answer. But it just isn’t. Because every example of that sort of thing just leads to more fascism under a different name. Voting works, it’s the best choice, and I have yet to see any evidence other than wanting to be cool to convince me otherwise.

    But as for making it a red line for supporting democrats, sure. I mean honestly, credit to you for proposing something that might actually work. I think if there’s a big enough movement to do that, every Democrat would get behind it.


  • Shut the fuck up with your disgusting justification.

    I’m confused as to why you are getting so many upvotes because either though misreading or misplaced focus, you only replied to one half of one sentence of my reply, constructing an alternate reality in which my point was the opposite of what it actually was. And to be blunt, both the reply and the upvotes reflects so much of the knee-jerk hyperemotionalism in online debates.

    As for the rest, I think we can all acknowledge that people in general will take more offense to a paper insulting a powerless minority than the powerful majority. But in this case they didn’t, hence my point that violence is counterproductive to a cause, which you seem to think was the opposite point.






  • It’s not just Republicans, it’s businessmen. Hoover, George W. Bush, and of course Trump were all businessmen. Reagan technically not but he kind of was an adopted businessman with all the corporate friends he had.

    What happens is, people think a businessman would be great for the economy. But what makes someone a great businessman? Not strong knowledge of economics, that’s what makes you a good economics professor. A great businessman is one who is good at fundraising, which basically comes down to having lots of rich friends who you can convince that giving you money will pay off for them down the road. This is why guys like Adam Neumann still raise gobs of money after failing - if people see you as a guy who can raise money, they’re less worried you’ll go bankrupt.

    So anyway, when these Adam Neumanns end up entering the white house, they find that they’ve made many promises to their wealthy friends but don’t know how to keep them. So they try their best, conducting sweeping changes to financial and regulatory systems, but lacking the economic knowledge to understand the often complex effects these decisions have. Inevitably, there’s major economic problems down the road.