This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off.
In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government.
For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be.
Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect.
If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.
Quite tired and ill right now so I'm unfortunately not going to be able to write this out even slightly well... but for some reason, I want to post the thought anyway so I will. (Note: I'm a U.S. citizen)
In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusion that the majority of the population of the U.S. deserves the work of engineers and scientists at this point. Now - obviously, you could say "well, they didn't ask for the engineers/scientists help" - but they definitely want the ability to receive some sort of medical care, and if they stop having a new phone to buy every year on the dot... some vocal portion of the populace will be quite unhappy.
Getting into how I actually feel about politics would be pretty irrelevant/pointless. However - I do think the U.S. is at the point where the average HN goer would agree the current government is a shitshow. Making that statement - I obviously agree with it. However, I've reached a point where I truly believe I'd rather have another four years of this administration, in a sincere hope that things keep going downhill and get exponentially worse, just so some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen - either that, or just the U.S. becoming a completely failed nation and engineers/scientists just jump ship to a more competent country.
Not trying to troll in the slightest in posting this. Am I crazy, or does anybody else feel the same way?
You talking like, U.S. declaration of Independence, or more/less recent than that...?
While my mind is fuzzier now, I like to think it was a "things change for the better" else - engineers/scientists completely stop giving a fuck about helping the U.S.
That's one example of something totally different. In order for this to be the same thing, someone would have to platform on removing the constitution or something
And also there's no rule that says it will get worse, either. When you have competent people making the rules, there's a good chance it gets better
Trump's election reflected a popular belief that rule by establishment experts was so intolerable, literally anything else would be better. It was the same passionate, desperate anger, the same "fuck it, let the world burn" strategy, just pointed in the opposite direction.
I think your sentiment is understandable given the state of affairs. Have you spent time reading about past societies that have undergone collapse?
While it may seem daunting, changing the system before a point of no return would historically be the right move.
Historically, the most likely outcome of your strategy is a shift towards more oligarchs and feudalism.
Have a look at Russia, Iraq, China (post ww2), etc.
I don’t think there is any reason to be optimistic about “drastic change” being change for the better. It very well can go both ways, and historically tends to the worse.
And almost all those people are people whose lives will not be affected negatively by 4 more years of the terrible administration, so they get to enjoy moral outrage while others bear the burden of feeding their moral indignation.
On the other hand, people whose lives are actually getting destroyed don’t have the same luxury. On a personal note, I have colleagues whose entire lives have been upturned thanks to this administration, but fortunately they are extremely skilled so they were simply able to recall rate by building their lives elsewhere in a country where the administration is not trying to make their lives miserable. The same cannot be said for the many millions of others who are suffering negatively thanks to the admin (especially the many tens of thousands who will be dead due to COVID who wouldn’t have been in a bare minimum competent admin).
30 millions jobs lost and counting.
70,000 deaths in the US alone.
No international cooperation.
No organized plan to contain the pandemic, or even demonstrate confidence. to the markets.
The endless stream of scandals before that can only be dismissed if you buy into the endless propaganda machine.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. The world is now aware of how painfully unprepared we are for cataclysmic events, like pandemics.
The world now also knows how dangerous China is due to the dangers of offshore supply chains, the disinformation they spread which endangered lives, and the dangerously strong influence they have over the WHO.
These are all good things and we're better off knowing them.
We've known all this before and could have done something about it if there was a collective political will more mature than that of self obsessed child.
There is no logical link between willfully making our own government incompetent and corrupt just so we can realize how unprepared we are. That sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe you've known it. The people at large did not and now they do. Anti-China policy was often viewed as racist. Don't underestimate the power of common knowledge to influence the political winds.
I don’t know why you are trying to convince me or why you think providing figures will change the fact that a large portion of the country feels one way. You can’t argue your way out of that fact.
I'm not, my reply wasn't meant for you. I think that deceptive propaganda like yours shouldn't go unchallenged or else it seems like it has more credibility than it deserves in the eyes passersby on forums like this.
As a person that does not support Trump I find it hard to believe that I am creating deceptive propaganda.
However, I will fix it for you, zero percent of the US supports Trump or believes he has made the country a better place. There is a zero percent chance he will win the next election. Is that the delutional propoganda you prefer?
Great, and how are they going to vote in the upcoming elections? The parent was not discussing Trump's popularity wrt to the world because frankly, that doesn't matter, what matters is changing public opinion within the US.
I'm a software engineer and have given considerable thought to leaving the US because I am struggling to come to terms with how my taxes are spent and politics in general here. It's universally bad. I'm considering Finland, Sweden, Norway, or Switzerland. They all rank high in happiness, high in democratic representation, and low in corruption. All are difficult to immigrate to but I basically feel a moral obligation to explore the option
Switzerland is difficult to immigrate to, wouldn't say the same about Finland, Sweden and Norway though, quite the contrary if you are a software engineer.
The only issue I do have with leaving is the war thing. The past few years, I've really been telling myself we're probably at the point that China really does have the U.S. militarily beat if it comes down to it... but despite how many of us HN'ers are aware of some frivolous military budget spending (like literally doing something, tearing it down, and doing it again to spend the budget) - some of those hundreds of billions of dollars are definitely going into tech capable of destroying human life in ways really can't imagine. Plus, if it would somehow come down to large amount of humans actually fighting... the arrogance many Americans have is quite helpful for that.
Moving to a smaller country, I don't know how I would feel in World War just because of population numbers and physical location. Given the arguments we can see between humans in U.S. states, and knowing how trivial it truly is to something like the ideologies of the CCP... I fully expect serious global conflict within my lifetime. That's the one thing I do atleast think I feel safer with being in the slightly rural MidWest than a smaller country....
Maybe this is getting away from the point of things. But fuck. I've experienced a lot of physical pain in life from my body falling apart, but in my mind, the horrors that could be experienced in war makes it seem like nothing. I'd just not like to die in a horrible way because of dumb fucking shit. However, that's probably stupid of me seeing as how that's how most of human history has been.
The only reason we've had relative peace since WW2...
I would question that assertion. The number of large scale wars between countries has certainly fallen in the past 75 years (and was falling before then too), and the number of deaths from war has also fallen dramatically, but the number of wars and state-based conflicts has gone up significantly - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-i... - and back in 2014 there were only 11 countries on Earth not officially involved in at least one war - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/world-peac...
Globally, the conflicts we have are smaller and less visible, and kill fewer people, but we have less peace now than we've ever had.
Don't you have the missile silos in rural Midwest. A truly global conflict with existential fear in major powers, will get hot. But currently the US could absolutely devastate China atomically, but China would only be able to take swings at major US cities.
Everyone will be losers but as things currently stand, China would loose the most.
Oh yeah, someone will technically "win" a full exchange, I'm sure. The brass may see high survival rates. But the infrastructure will be bombed away. It will take decades to rebuild. One can't even compare to anything before and extrapolate. There have been local disasters and rebuilding, but we have never seen a complete national system bombed away and what will come after.
(A variant of a worst case I haven't even considered before is a full nuclear Armageddon, and then Command and Control survives to take nuclear potshots for years afterwards. For instance if one party has still substantial conventional forces but the other manages to from time to time scrounge up another nuke and launch it.)
I could see them have more ICBMs than apparent, but successful SDI I don't think is possible, not against nuclear strike submarines in any case.
I didn't like it that much, but didn't need too much suspension of disbelief to see it as a realistic possibility.
Think of all the televangelists, megachurches, religious fundamentalists and so on. What happens in dire times? People flock to such things. There is no 'rationality" in it, just instinct. Thereby worsening the chance of the outcome you wish for.
I felt the smarter way would be to ridicule these horror clowns as much as possible, so their incompetence would obvious to almost everyone. But somehow that seems to not even matter.
Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely because he did not want those.
(On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)
(I don't want to get into a pedantic fight over Any Rand / objectivism / Atlas Shrugged, I simply want to share an alternative viewpoint)
It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she tried to paint a realistic picture, ultimately Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that falls apart when placed within real-world constructs, especially 50+ years on after its publication.
At the heart of it, what Rand appeared to most argue in Atlas Shrugged was against regulation and governance that superseded the inalienable rights of citizens plus centralized power in an authoritarian state and took away the economic agency of the individual. That doesn't preclude a functioning republic where people can own businesses, own the rights to their creations, and still pay taxes for the benefits of services best provided by government.
Now here's the irony: Rather than coming for our system via communism, which was Rand's concern, instead it was nominal capitalists who came to destroy the system via regulatory capture. I don't see what the right-wing, nominal capitalists in the US have done to be any different than the moochers in Rand's book.
To me both communism and right-wing (brutalist aynrandian) capitalism are the same in some sense. Both are somewhat nice ideologues in naive theory. But if you bring them to real world, communism brings you Soviet Union and right-wing capitalism brings you regulatory capture moochers or warlords, depending a bit on your flavor of capitalism.
The major difference is that only some insignificant weirdos in the fringes have not agreed that communism is stupid in practice. Brutalist aynrandian ideology is much more prevalent problem and needs to be somehow gotten into same ridiculed state as communism as an actual feasible ideology.
Hopefully not getting too lost in the pedantry, and I'm absolutely not a Rand supporter (though I had my 16-year old Atlas Shrugged phase where I actually read the whole damn book).
a) You're spot on she didn't want to destroy the govt. She was explicitly a minarchist, and she swapped major arugments and ridicule with the Ancaps of the time (like Murray Rothbard)
b) The communism hate gets floated most, but my read of Atlas Shrugged was that she placed the collectivists at the same evil level as the church, crony capitalists, and postmodernists, to the point of having characters who 1-dimensionally represented each of them (she's literally got a lobbyist character called "Wesley Mouch").
That's why it's always hilarious to me when I see neocon congressfolk saying that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book: she hated the church as much as the government (and would've likely hated those politicians as well).
This really resonated with me. I am very sad to say that I agree with you. I'm a PhD student elsewhere now, but did my undergrad at UPenn in the States and was absolutely disgusted by the framing of science/learning/academia in the country in general (as well as the country's general level of media discourse). Of course, school itself was wonderful, and I'm blessed to have had such humbling peers there; that stood as such stark dichotomy with the country as a whole. The social moment very much felt like I imagine being a Soviet biologist watching Lysenko come to power would. I worked so hard for social good in the US, but it all felt futile. I chose a respectable opportunity at a program in my home country (Canada) over higher-ranked options in the US because of it. I know a number of friends who similarly chose foreign programs over previously more desirable American ones.
Trump 2020 only since it seems not enough people think we haven't learned sht and hell, think we are somehow a better country because of him. Let it burn and maybe AOC can start with a clean slate in 2024.
That may well be ok for you to say but thousands of people have already died as a direct consequence of Trump's presidency. Hundreds of thousands more have been penalised for their race, beliefs, sexuality, etc. Generations to come will suffer because of the regulations they're undoing and the courts they've packed with Federalist wingnuts. Have some compassion, c'mon.
Thousands in the Middle East died from Obama's presidency. At a certain point you start to think that the "lesser of two evils" strategy just shifts the playing field to be ever-increasing in its evil across the board.
And thousands in the Middle East died from Bush's presidency. And millions died during Reagan's because he bungled AIDS. You can whataboutism all day but it helps no-one.
Absolutely. I don't mean to make the issue a partisan one, but to point out that it is distinctly non-partisan (at least between the Democrats and Reuplicans).
I don't think it's whataboutism if the argument is about whether The Other Guy will also end up being responsible for the death of thousands (or more) from some other event (planned or unplanned).
Not making an argument for either side, I just don't think it's whataboutism to argue that the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high.
> the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high
Bush: thousands dead through incompetence in the USA (Katrina, 9/11)
Obama:
Trump: thousands dead through incompetence and malice in the USA (ICE, COVID-19)
I've taken out the "overseas wars" because that's shared across all of them.
I've had the same thought and it sickens me that we've come to this point.
As someone who has made the transition from teenager to young adult during the Trump era, I feel like I've lost a game I never even had the chance to play. We have clearly gone so far off course but very few seem interested in steering us back to reality (between the impeachment "trial", the primaries, and our handling of COVID-19).
After four years of the disaster that is the Trump administration, any establishment Democrats like Biden elected to office will be praised no matter what they do, simply by virtue of not being Trump. But that's not real progress. They'll continue to neglect wealth inequality / infrastructure / privacy / technology issues.
And Trump isn't the problem, he's just a convenient distraction from the fact that big money controls both parties. It's just that establishment Democrats more or less want to maintain the status quo, while conservatives are using Trump to brazenly roll back regulations.
Four years from now, we'll have even more damning evidence about the true long-term economic/social/environmental damage done during his term (as if it weren't clear enough). If he's not in office long enough, this will all be blamed on the next president, adding more fuel to the fire for a likely 2024 run.
Or worse: Someone more cunning but just as evil comes along, charming voters while more adeptly covering up their true intentions.
Our only hope this that enough voters get really pissed off enough to vote in every local, state, and federal election consistently enough for the next couple decades so that we can start to heal.
Biden's not going to inspire that. Bernie, maybe, had the chance to. Trump will do it. And if we can't survive another four years of Trump, we don't deserve to.
I agree, but at least it seems like we're incrementally moving in the right direction, even if at a glacial pace. The fact that a 27-year old AOC was elected shows that people are fed up with establishment politicians and change is possible (prior to being elected she was a bartender with no money or connections, who ran on a grassroots campaign of being fed up with politicians taking corporate money and serving corporate interests over their citizens, and beat a Democrat who'd been in power for ~15 years).
Once the older generation dies out and the younger generation takes over, we'll start to see some real progress. Imagine where we could be if more of our politicians resembled people like Andrew Yang - young normal uncorrupted people who grew up in the internet generation. The problem is that most of our politicians are too old (average Senator is 61 years old) and are completely removed from the real issues facing Americans.
The problem is that when the older generation dies out, the younger generation is no longer young, and their attitudes have changed. Not quite to the same exact conservative/anti-progressive place that their parents and grandparents occupied, but definitely more conservative than they were when they were younger.
We'll see progress, to be sure (and that's good!), but it won't be as dramatic as you think. It'll likely be similar to the last several generations of progress.
That's true to an extent, but I think this time is different because the millenials have had to endure so much obvious hardships as a direct result of the baby boomers' incompetence (eg. student debt), and because millennials grew up with the internet and all the information that gives one access to. Politicians like Bernie and AOC are more in line with how millennial stand (my Boomer dad doesn't understand what they're so angry about), and if those policies were implemented, that'd be a massively different society than today.
Bernie had the main-stream media + the entire DNC apparatus against him. That's a ton of power and influence.
I'm not saying he would've 'won'; it's quite possible he positioned himself as too much 'non-establishment', or perhaps too little. but saying he didn't inspire people to vote for him in the primary is not evident, IMO.
I feel like there are many more folks that would vote for Trump in spite of Biden "winning" the Democratic nod. 1000% agree that the next president is going to be left holding the bag of sht and get blamed for everything so might as well let it be Trump.
Are you referring only to the current administration? Aren't prior administrations also guilty since they did not prepare for an electrical grid collapse either?
As op predicted, there is always one that tries to derail the discussion into the false distinction between parties, administrations or what have you. As opposed to working towards solutions that may save lives, let's spend the next decade or two throwing blame and arguing. Classic use of what-aboutism to muddy the waters.
The problem is largely the democratic system itself. The average U.S. Senator spends 2/3 of their time fundraising during the last 2 years of their term. Half of Congress are millionaires, their salaries are in the 95th percentile ($174k/yr), and they receive world-class healthcare. The electoral college means Trump and Bush get elected despite losing the popular vote. We're limited to a two-party system because third-party votes count for nothing, limiting the spectrum of ideas. American satisfaction with their own government is ~34%.
What pisses me off more the problems themselves in our society (terrible healthcare system that ties healthcare to employment, outrageous university tuition + student debt crisis, homeless crisis) is the fact that we all know and agree these are problems, have known for decades, yet do nothing about it. 9 of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 2005, yet we do little to nothing about climate change. Epidemiologists and public health experts saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in January, yet it takes the crisis actually hitting us to start acting. We get some fiscal stimulus, but the people get relative scraps while most of it goes to wealthy corporations. I still don't even know if I qualify for the COVID checks because the government website tells me "Payment Status Not Available".
For example take tax filing. In most countries, filing taxes is effortless and takes about 2 seconds - log into a government website, verify that the information the government already has on you is correct, and submit. But in the U.S., citizens are forced to waste time manually filling out all these tax forms and pay private companies money (eg. TurboTax, now there is e-filing, but ). It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, or a member of the Nazi Party, we can all agree that making tax filing take as little time and effort as possible is superior to having to take more time and effort. Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy as countries like Sweden, South Korea, etc.
We can definitely improve things significantly by electing better politicians, but that can only go so far within the confines of our current money-driven two-party system. We need a system that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Rank-based voting would enable third parties, liquid democracy would enable citizens to vote directly on issues without having to be beholden to elected officials. Experts should be in charge of their domains of expertise, specially when it comes to science (eg. public health experts in charge of public health policy). Politicians can decide what gets taxed, who gets the money, and vote on laws, but beyond that we need competent people managing what they're competent at, and a system that's proactive rather than reactive.
Too bad it's taboo to even suggest that a system of government devised over 200 years ago when people were riding around on horses may not be the most efficient in the 21st century.
EDIT: Rather than simply downvoting because you disagree (which is not what the downvote tool is designed for by the way), how about taking a second to explain what you disagree with?
Many people dislike the 'easy verify and submit' system of taxes, because they think it basically hides taxes from the public. There are similar objections to employer deduction of taxes. Additionally, the current system of many different taxes on different things makes it very hard for a voter to understand what their total tax burden is (especially if there are VATs which are included in prices). For these reasons, many think 'simplified' taxes are anti-democratic.
As an example; more voters know how much they spend on Netflix or Amazon Prime than how much they spend on government, meaning they are better equipped to hold streaming services accountable than their government, even though the latter costs them (at least) hundreds of times more.
How can "easy verify and submit" hide taxes from the public?
Here in Sweden I receive my tax form pre-filled in a digital mailbox (basically a PDF of the tax form I'd get through snail mail on a website), I can see on the first page the total amount of tax paid, how much I owe or will receive as tax return and then another section with more details about interest I've paid, how much of that was deducted from my taxes, etc.
In about 5 minutes I have an overview of all the taxes paid from my income, how much went to the national, kommun/local government and I'm done.
I don't follow what is the argument about how making this process simple is considered anti-democratic.
While the discussion of direct vs indirect taxes is interesting, the article just flatly asserts that Swedes are unaware of their tax burden without a shred of proof. That’s not convincing.
> because they think it basically hides taxes from the public
Well that's factually false because taxpayers can see all the information and verify it for themselves (that's what they're supposed to do before they verify it). Who exactly is arguing that making tax filing easier is "anti-democratic"? A couple American tax extremists? The Intuit lobby?
If the U.S. can't even make something as simple as tax filing easier, then the U.S. is hopeless when it comes to bigger issues. We're already the only country without universal healthcare and where an undergraduate degree at a public school costs six figures. How can we fix those bigger and more "complex" problems if we can't even fix something as dead simple and bipartisan as tax filing?
"many people dislike"... Could you find even a sizeable proportion of the population that felt this way? as with the re-open states protests these things are easily gamed by interested parties and it takes a vocal minority, which is amplified by media voices, such as Fox news, where it aligns with their owners beliefs to make it seem more of an issue than it is.
having taxes included in the price when I buy something at a store makes lige easier for consumers. I dont need to know everytime I pay some tax exactly how much has been paid.
I honestly read your comments as a sort of astroturfing with your use of 'many' as if to mean a significant number of people, rather than the reality, which is 'some people', indicating a whole lot less people but more than 1.
you are being worked over by special interest groups who are being led on by some rich people who have their opinions and are forcing every one to live by them.
TurboTax lobby officially to make tax filing difficult in the US, they will also spend money under the radar to give voice to the 'individual' who is anti tax because it benefits Turbo Tax not because they align with the individual, but because it helps their bottom line.
I get what you're saying, but you're essentially doing the same thing as the person you're replying to: you're asserting, without evidence, that, if there's some group of people who want taxes to be more in-your-face, then it must be a small, vocal minority. I agree that the parent should provide sources to back up their claim, but you must do the same if you want to be taken seriously.
> Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy
Normally I’m all about Hanlon’s razor (assume stupidity before malice), but given the absurd amount TurboTax spends lobbying against any meaningful simplification you can’t fully pin place this on gov’t incompetence.
I don't think GP was blaming TurboTax. They were arguing for blaming this on government malice instead of government incompetence (i.e. the reverse of Hanlon's Razor).
This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate).
The voters didn't ask nor vote for our government. The government picked the voters...
The 50% of people who didn’t vote in the last election are equally responsible for the current President as those who did (and every president prior, too).
I agree wholeheartedly that a democratic government reflects its voters. A largely apathetic, non-voting populace exaggerates the effect of gerrymandering, campaign finance and media manipulation.
Also due to the electoral college and the winner-take-all way in which voting is designed in the U.S, your vote for president only matters if you live in a swing state. If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
I am well aware, but that has nothing to do with the almost half of eligible voters who didn't vote at all. Californians who didn't vote in 2016 (~9m) far outnumber Hillary's margin over Trump (~4.3m). There's only "no point voting for president in California" because 9m Californians don't vote. That's nothing to do with "the system", that's a choice that every single one of those 9m voters is making.
Which brings me back to my original point, which is that voter apathy exacerbates the influence of gerrymandering and campaign spending in winning elections.
> If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
Winner-take-all in any state that leans predominantly in one direction means that your vote doesn't matter. Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not. Winner-take-all means all the delegates go to the winner.
It has everything to do with the system. Instead of just preaching that people should vote, maybe take a look at why they aren't. Maybe some don't because they can't get off work and unlike many other countries, election day isn't a national holiday. Or maybe because they don't feel like it makes a difference. If you don't live in a swing state, then one is right to feel like their presidential vote doesn't make a difference because as I just explained, it doesn't, and it shouldn't be that way.
> Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not.
Perhaps if more people voted in places like CA, the discrepancy between the popular vote and the actual winning candidate would be shown to be so absurd that we could actually get a movement going to successfully change how we elect our leaders.
Then again, it's possible (likely?) that would be matched by more people in red states voting such that the margins would end up the same.
As someone in predominantly blue state, I make a point to vote 3rd party. 15% of the popular votes means they get to be in the debates. At least it's something....
What makes you think non-voters would vote much differently than voters? To me it seems like voting is something like a survey, and we have about fifty percent of the population responding. If all non-voters voted, I'd expect roughly equal electoral results.
Of course, you might mean that you just want the half of non-voters who agree with you to vote, but that's a different thing.
As a DC resident, it does feel really frustrating, at a time when the nation's politics feel especially important, to not even have a representative to speak with/pressure. Especially when the chief argument against DC statehood has been that it'll tip the Senate to the left. BS.
You miss the applicability of the saying because you drastically overestimate the capability of the average American.
Hell, ignoring the deplorable level to which standards have been lowered by perverse incentives to pass students, the US only has an average of 80 HS graduation rate.
These are your voters. People who struggled to make it through high school have just as much of a day over your governments, your legislation, as you do. Do you expect uneducated and/or ignorant voters to make good decisions?
You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve, or you can complain about and do nothing else, and in that case you'll end up with the leader you deserve.
This is more of the same sanctimonious toxicity. You don't know me. I already donate to act blue. I already go to political rally's. I already help get friends to go vote. I already am a member of local political groups. I am still not represented. No state or federal ballot I have ever cast has counted.
Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and basic decency, no matter what. Even if they make a mistake. Especially then. People deserve better.
Disclaimer that I use similar remarks to the quote you disagree with. This is with the understanding that the price that needs to be paid will literally take lives at times, and that there is little to no fairness at who bears that cost.
That being said, you seem to be quite active politically and doing more than most in this arena. At what point do you give up and move to where you think you'll be represented? This is assuming you have the means to go elsewhere. Some people operate on moving to where they are treated best, that includes the option of a different country.
> Disclaimer that I use similar remarks to the quote you disagree with. This is with the understanding that the price that needs to be paid will literally take lives at times
I guess it's easy to make those kinds of remarks when you know you won't be the one paying that price, huh?
Repeating it over and over in every post you make doesn't make it true. It just shows your callous disregard for humanity, which isn't likely to win you much agreement.
You guys are showing a callous disregard for reality. Read about all the societies that have succumb to tyranny, it has happened many times. America is no special exception, and it's making all the same mistakes. Keep singing Kumbayah and see where it gets you.
You're right that nobody is blameless. But we can't abandon everyone to destructive whims of the minority. In the US only about 23% of the possible voting public won the last presidential election.
It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."
The issue in America is split between cultural baggage and the first-past-the-post voting system.
FPTP voting collapses into a two-party system, which ultimately leads to a government and people at war with itself. Under such a system, compromises become impossible, sabotage the norm, and nobody can get anything meaningful done anymore. The loudest man wins.
The cultural baggage comes from the Cold War. If you look at popular media from the time, you'll see a very strong connection between "communism" and "science" (because the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life). American TV, books and movies conflated science and anything "sciency" with commies and conspiracies to enslave the common man, but it's hard to blame them since they were taking their cue from the spirit of the times.
To this day, there are few countries with such a heavy distrust of science as America has. And since the alternatives for explaining complex things are religion, superstitions, and "folksy wisdom", it's no wonder that such people get elected to office. And since it's a two-party system, belligerence is a virtue.
the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life
Perhaps you need to read some history. USSR socialist "science" resulted in a horrendously mismanaged economy and multiple famines (1920s: 5+ million dead; 1930-33, another 5 million; 1946-47: over 1 million dead).
In all three cases, the leading relief efforts (and vast improvements to Soviet agriculture) were provided by those "anti-science" Americans.
Given what a horribly ignorant "anti-science" place America is, it's baffling that so many of y'all want to go there to live.
I'm well aware of what happened in the USSR. What they believed and what actually happened are entirely different things.
My point is that the USSR's fanatical devotion to a flawed religion of "science" had ripple effects to the USA, their sworn mutual enemy. When one side takes on a slogan to rally their tribe, the opposing side must distance themselves from it, which in this case meant that America distanced itself from trust in their own scientific institutions for fear of appearing to support the enemy tribe's position (it was an ideological and cultural war, and everyone was watching). That official distrust of science spread into a cultural distrust that resonates to this day.
Note: I'm not blaming America here; this is the nature of culture (regardless of who it is), and it couldn't have happened any other way in their competition, given Moscow's "science the saviour" position. It's just unfortunate that this is part of the fallout.
My point was that there are a lot of competent people. Take a look through any HN thread and you'll find scores of highly intelligent, very wise, and uncorruptible individuals who would certainly do better than many in power today.
To say that we'll run out of competent people to lead is nonsense.
In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government.
For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be.
Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect.
If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.