Cool cool, so why does voting vs not voting matter? What actionable alternatives would you suggest and why do those preclude checking a box on a piece of paper?
I’d argue that even an illusory vote has value as a public barometer. If 80% of a voter base is consistently voting against the incumbent party it tells you way more about their discontent than 80% not showing up.
[re-commenting with no instance shaming]
Every Marxist-Leninist user
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Is there a race that is statistically more violent then the others?
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…White supremacists use this argument verbatim against certain ethnicities. It’s literally the poster child for statistic-fluffed racism.
Do I have to link the meme or are going to figure this out on your own?..
Go ahead and list some real “English words” then. Try to form any kind of coherent conversation. A language is defined by the people who speak it; it grows and adapts and doesn’t fit into your neat boxes.
If you’re getting pedantic about what words came from where, we’re just speaking Proto-Indo-European (and all but ~12 root languages don’t exist). But you’re not arguing that, you’re just saying nonsense.
By my logic an English speaker will know what omelette means, they’d be confused if you ordered it with un jus d’orange, s’il vous plaît.
Something like 25-30% of English is native Anglo-Saxon and the rest is borrowed or adapted. By your logic, English doesn’t exist.
That’s why I never order an omelette at my diner. I just say “egg pancake” because they might not speak French.
You’re really dying on a stupid hill, more power to you
Maybe it’s just a guy trying to steal a giant coin
The solution is to aggressively regulate the platforms, not the people posting. Saying dumb shit like “drink horse dewormer” is free speech; providing a platform to push that awful advice to millions of people is not a protected right.
So? How many die in those vs traditional methods? Why pretend to care about harm reduction and then shit on tech that could reduce it?
It doesn’t need to; market forces do that.
I don’t claim to be an economist but I’m doubtful that pulling indirect levers and letting the market regulate itself works. If it did we’d already be 45 years into a Reaganomic utopia.
What I don’t get is the assumption that a fixed stipend of currency will provide for basic necessities.
If the society was committed to universal housing, food and healthcare access then just make that the stated goal and get those funds involved directly in housing/food/healthcare. Just giving someone $1000 doesn’t stop their landlord from increasing rent by $900 to match; a government owned housing alternative does.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I read somewhere a long while back that UBI is a non-solution to wealth inequality. IIRC if you don’t also radically change the rest of the regressive tax structures then the supply of cash still gets funneled upward. Most of the hype is from PR and the inherent good vibes of getting a check in the mail.
I’ve never seen people more mad that a stranger paid a few thousand extra amortized over 14 years.
Would it be possible/easier to slap a Faraday cage around it instead of disconnecting anything?
I think we’ve been spoiled by an extended era where it was possible to be truly anonymous on the internet, which is public infrastructure at its core. In that perspective it’s fundamentally worse than real life for privacy. Everything goes through centralized hardware, making it trivial to log your traffic and digital fingerprint in perpetuity. Imagine if the camera at your local park didn’t just see you enter, but perfectly stored your height, weight, shoe size, eye color, gait, etc…
From that it becomes pretty clear that the only safe way to use the digital space is read-only on socially acceptable platforms with the herd protection of the pseudo-anonymous crowd. And of course, that makes the internet much less interesting and useful, so I might as well go touch grass and talk to my friends in physically private spaces.
Well it was fun while it lasted at least… 🍻
Not if we stop tracking it 🤠
Don’t get me wrong, they signed up to ooh-rah bomb brown people. But it hits a little different when, statistically, a portion of them are literally from these cities. There’s an insular camaraderie in the military and they’re pulled from a diverse background by design. You can’t just drop a battalion on a city and expect them to behave themselves like a Texas National Guard in Oregon.
I’m also not claiming this is a good thing. A military junta doesn’t make for kind and benevolent rulers, but wouldn’t be bad in the same ways as the current administration.
I appreciate the response, thanks for the perspective. From my view, I rarely see this line of reasoning in the wild. The “participation” in elections begins and ends with “Both parties bad. Vote for [the nebulous idea of] a third party”. In my opinion, if you can’t give a concrete name and put in enough effort to get it on the ballot then you’re not actually participating.
As a example: I heard complete silence from this portion of the left during the NYC mayoral race/Mamdani’s campaign. No mention of (let alone stumping for) a more progressive alternative. Now with his win, there’s no discussion about parlaying that turnout into other elections. Only attacks on his international politics (not sure why that matters for a mayor) or projected future failure.
Nothing about that approach indicates any good faith engagement with progressive politics in the electoral space. In that sense it’s completely indistinguishable from the right’s suppression and defeatism.