In this forum that hardly anyone reads?
But wouldn’t voting in that poll violate the premise of this thread?
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I touched on this a bit in post #75 of this thread. I’m happy to chat with you more. Maybe you can give me your take on that post, and that will help us advance our dialogue. If not, that’s OK, I don’t want you to feel obligated to participate in this thread if you don’t want to.
Fellow UnStuckers are in mental anguish. Their trolling is spilling over into other threads. Maybe this thread needs to be thrown under the bus for the collective good of the community?
OK, I voted just to be sociable.
Well…the usual (and good) advice here if someone annoys you a lot is to put them on ignore, and the same goes for a single thread.
This thread isn’t remotely like one asking why women should have the right to say no, or whether climate change is a hoax.
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I don’t disagree with any part of the post… I just think it’s super obvious that the absolute best way to capsize the current system is to get more people to vote not less. The system is designed to discourage turnout for reasons, and all of those reasons have to do with making it easier for politicians to retain power once they’ve gotten it.
Encouraging non participation when the problem is low participation is… kind of perverse and it pisses me off tbh. I don’t think the argument has any validity and I think the people defending sabo are just defending sabo because they’re really on team burn it all down.
I don’t think I’ve ever made a post that was negative about looting. I’m actually massively pro looting because I think it helps to align the incentives of the powerful with the incentives of the population. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the people in power will say pretty words to people who are polite while doing nothing… but destroying big corporate property turns your anger into a real problem that needs to be solved.
I’m just very certain that the right plays here are all of the above, and that telling anyone who isn’t a Trump voter to not vote is insanely toxic.
If we censored everything that 10% of the people wanted to censor we couldn’t post anything here at all. The threshold for that should be more like 90%.
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I think I’ve missed 2 elections, but I find myself agreeing with you that if it was compulsory I’d probably be tempted to stop.
I dislike being told what to do, and the idea of compulsory voting combined with living under any hierarchical system makes me think of when Chris Hitchens was debating some religious person about god and free will. He paraphrased the believer’s position as: “of course we have free will, the man up stairs told us we have it”. Hopefully, I’m making a connection that makes sense there.
If he’s creating angst, stress and disruption in the social fabric here it’s down to people feeling those things to exercise their agency and mute the thread.
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Also +1 to fuck compulsory voting for these near-universally colossally useless, often dangerous twats.
It’s a huge failure of the imagination to think you should be legally compelled to vote for these fuckers.
O really? If 10% were cool joking about the Charlotteville murder, like was the case in the old Baja Politards at 2+2… that should fly here?
We don’t have to chat about anything at all. We’re not solving the world’s problems. We’re conspicuously wasting time around our virtual water cooler. Some topics are, it seems, just “too much” for a significant number of our fellow UnStuckers. It’s a fact, and we should deal with this situtation as such.
Why not just agree to avoid certain topics as a community?
That kinda rule works great in the bars… no politics, no religion, no discussion of Pluto’s status as a planet… those are the three golden rules.
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Thanks for the response. I don’t disagree with most of it but again, I don’t see how less voting will lead to fewer shit sandwiches and douchebags, not more. My evidence for this is the status-quo.
10% don’t want to joke about Charlottesville murders. I’ll buy 50% maybe, but if only 10% are offended or hurt and they can’t get people to support them, it’s more likely to give numbskulls like itshotinlasvegas or Kelhus the ability to come and demand we can’t be mean to Trump or something like that. Still, censorship should require a strong majority imo, and perhaps should not exist other than people deciding to censor themselves.
Well, it’s way over 10% here. Using a WAG of 80 regs, 25% have explicitly indicated literal belief in the Quantum Butterfly Effect ITT alone. Because of the whole “(a lot of proprietary magic that I can’t explain)” component of the Quantum Butterfly Effect… there is every reason to imagine there could be quite a few “shy” additional believers too. There’s absolutely no reason to rule out this Quantum Butterfly Effect being a majority belief among us UnStuckers.
ETA: And remember, it’s not just ITT. This belief in the Quantum Butterfly Effect is pervasive in our community. How many times have we heard the Message Envy Brigade pontificate about fellow UnStuckers poor ‘Message Technique’? They know they aren’t literally Mad-Men gurus hired by their IRL donkeys heroes… instead they also believe in the Qiantum Butterfly Effect combined with the brilliance of their ignorant musings.
Couldn’t we be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here? This thread is causing IRL mental anguish to believers of the Quantum Butterfly Effect. Their trolling is spilling over into other threads. What’s the point of “rigorous debate”… if it causes a schism in the community?
I think we’re talking about two different, yet related concepts when using the word system here. In the first case, the current system to me is the overall structure of society where the oligarchs and plutocrats exert their power to control the politicians who write the laws that govern our lives. The second use of system is describing the method by which we have elections and vote.
To me, the current system is designed to get compliance and obedience from the citizenry, for example laws that ban certain types of strikes or collective action. The electoral system that lies within the broader current system is designed in part to give the illusion of choice–for who can complain if they “choose” their boss. Chomsky touches on this in Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions.
I feel you are identifying a problem, and then in a sense confining yourself to finding answers within our socially constructed electoral process. If we confine ourselves within the limitations of the social constructs that our masters have built for us, our toolbox to achieve positive change is limited–they built it to be limiting. Think of MLK and his use of non-violent direct action to pursue goals. The boycotts and sit-ins and demonstrations that he organized were in many cases outside of what was legally permitted. We are in an MMA cage match vs our masters. We can’t just stay on our feet and strike, we have to consider grappling, submissions, muy thai, karate, everything.
I’m not here to say…guys and gals I’ve found the one simple trick to solve our problems. I’m open to outside-the-box thinking because that kind of thinking and acting has led to change in the past. I see no need to limit our discussions even if you think something is super obvious, just as I see no need for you to limit your discussions even if I were to think it’s super obvious that you’re mistaken.
I’m not on team “burn it all down”. Quite the opposite. The current system is on a collision course with ecological collapse caused by our masters being on team “burning it all down” in the pursuit of more riches for themselves. You and I, and everyone we know should be striving to end that system and stop the inevitable train wreck.
Well, I don’t think anyone reading this forum is “not voting” because they read this thread. And it isn’t about voting for Trump or not in our current POTUS Bowl. It’s about:
I’m not trying to be a smart ass here. But couldn’t we just as easily say: we’ve been voting for ~230 years and we are still choosing between shit sandwiches and douche bags; more voting in elections will not lead to non-shit-sammy/D-bag options. Evidence: the status quo.
Continuing with the shit sammy/d-bag restaurant analogy. Our masters(the restaurant owners) keep offering us a menu(ballot) of shitsammy/d-bag(politicians who are bought and paid for by our masters). Our masters have us convinced that they are the only restaurant, and the only option is to order off of the menu they’ve created. The solution may be that we need to put the masters out of business by not going to the restaurant, or filling up the restaurant and having everyone refuse to order, rather than getting more people to order the shit-sammy or the d-bag, while we hope for a menu change.
I know that no analogy is perfect, including this one. But it seems like we shouldn’t be limiting ourselves as to what options are available to us that would result in no more eating of shit sammys or d-bags.
If this OP is about what I think it’s about, I agonized about this over and over. On the one hand, I’d really prefer NOT to participate because it feels like I’m just enabling the establishment Dems and their bloodthirst for corruption and to maintain the status quo. But here’s what I finally decided and what I’d say to fellow progressives thinking about withholding their vote because they can’t in good conscious vote for Joe…
The battle needs to be won from the ground up, not top down. Even though the majority of our fellow citizens agree with many of the policies we’d like to enact, we just can’t win the top of the ticket yet. For now, the old guard has us outnumbered
But if it’s progresses causes we really care about, we need to ask ourselves which administration do we have a better chance of getting our message through? Biden, while shit, can achieve 3 things immediately. Get us back into the Paris climate accord. Raise the minimum wage. And guarantee all Americans have health coverage. There is zero chance a Trump administration not only does this, but will only make each of these things worse
We should fight Biden, Pelosi, Schumer et.al. harder than we ever fought Trump. 2022 is key and we have the chance to primary the establishment Dems out of office. This alone, is reason enough to cast your vote. That’s assuming you don’t care that a 2nd Trump term will surely end democracy and turn our country into a fascist state
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This is exactly what I was getting at. We can lobby Biden. There’s no shot of lobbying Trump
Also, it appears I did misconstrue what this thread is about