And yet so many people don’t vote. And even more people don’t vote in primaries.
Like, I genuinely believe that if everyone just voted on the primaries (incl. for local govt) we’d be fine. That’s where the problem really lies IMO. We get shit candidates because nobody shows up to vote for the good candidates in the primaries.
Voting will not save us, huge numbers of problems stem from fundamental imbalances in power, power which the political class require in order to impose their will (or that of whomever they serve further up the chain), even when their will is genuinely benign.
Voting just decides which people (with already powerful people/structures frequently playing an outsized role in exactly who you get to choose between) get into power, then this power both alters their brain and causes their lived experiences to diverge from those of the electorate.
Our solutions need to include a fundamental redistribution of power or we are just maintaining the conditions (a key component being the concentration of power centres, which has been dramatically accelerating for the past few decades regardless of how people have voted) that will lead us right back here. This redistribution is not going to come from people who, however pure their intentions, require power over others to fulfil these intentions.
I won’t discourage voting,* but we have to stop pretending that we just need the right rulers and everything will be fine, voting is not enough.
*Although I do understand people; particularly in FPTP safe seats; who choose not to play their part in the theatre of pretending that we are granting them some kind of justified authority over us- if not one single vote was placed, they would just choose how to distribute power amongst themselves after all, they wouldn’t leave the seats empty to reflect the outcome of the theatre, because that isn’t where their power actually comes from. This becomes clear when you consider ideas such as designated survivors, they collectively assume power over all of us and have a clear delineation of the rulers and the ruled.
If a primary motivation is fear of the ‘wrong’ people getting into power, that structure was not built to serve you.
That was a whole lot of words without actually providing a single recommended course of action. I continue to hear a lot of general have waving and dissatisfaction from people who say we need a new system, but fail to describe that system in any meaningful detail, or how we will transition to that system without significant bloodshed.
This country has changed a lot over the past 250 years and most of it happened through protest and voting at various levels of government.
You know what the crazy thing is? We have a means to overthrow Congress. We just don’t have the state and local leaders to do it. A second Continental Congress is what we need if we want a massive system overhaul. And for that you need state and local governments in sufficient numbers to act without the approval of the Federal Congress.
Voting fucking matters. The likes of MLK are a once in a century deal. Everything else happens through protest and voting at a variety of levels.
The problem is that people hear “go vote” and all they think about is federal level general elections.
We are going to have bloodshed no matter what, when state power feels threatened it will lash out violently, we don’t get to decide this.
There is already bloodshed, and there always was, states fundamentally rely upon violence to enforce their interests both domestically and internationally. The point is to finally stop this cycle.
Personally, I feel that our best hope lies in parallel power structures, so the best place to start with that would be in trying to organise members of your community to get together and sort x problem yourselves. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, it’s fine to start anywhere, it just seems to me that an important step is in people realising how much power they have when they work together.
Everything else happens through protest and voting at a variety of levels.
That is just simply not true, unless you use a very broad definition of protest which goes up to and including the Coal Wars, but given the general sentiment I expect you have calmly marching along and begging for your masters to consider you for once in mind.
Even if it was true, you still haven’t attempted to address the power problem that I discussed at length (that being the point of my comment, not the broad solutions that you appear to deem a requirement), I have fulfilled your arbitrary demand, now please answer what I actually said.
Edit: Also, to respond to a comment centred on voting not being a solution due to the fundamental structure this takes with “actually, you just need to vote more”, without even mentioning a single point I raised, is incredibly obnoxious.
No thanks. You’ve just admitted your position that you expect, and welcome, bloodshed as a necessary part of progress.
I have no interest in engaging with an anarchist who won’t even consider peaceful progress as an option to pursue.
Nor am I interested in further subsidizing the wealthy by digging even deeper into my paper thin emotional and financial reserves to support the welfare of my community any more than I already am through taxes, charity, and personal outreach to people in need. I am already completely tapped out. And any further subsidy is a tacit admission that the wealthy will never pay their share.
So yeah, hard pass on whatever arguments you want to make.
Have a great day/night!
EDIT: No disrespect, btw. You are welcome to your opinion. I just consider the discussion a waste of time because our fundamental goals are too dramatically different.
That’s a complete misread of what I said, I said that bloodshed will be inflicted upon us, I said it already is. You are ignoring that in the name of ‘progress’.
Okay, but stop pretending that you are offering anything more than burying your head in the sand, it’s embarrassing.
I would argue you’re the one buying your head in the sand, as you offer “community recycling” sized solutions to an “industrial pollution” sized problem. You play into the hands of the very authorities you claim to oppose.
I recommended a place to start, I am not naive enough to think that jumping to the end is any way viable, and that was just to make you happy so that you might engage with what was actually being said. My aim has always been to encourage people to think for themselves, not to tell them what to think or do.
It is also worth noting that you haven’t offered any solution yourself, just saying ‘vote’ doesn’t mean anything unless your whole recommended course of action is just to vote (blindly? Blue no matter who?) and wash your hands of it. That is also known as a capitulation.
You also recommended thinking more locally, it’s almost as if you acknowledge that proof of concept on smaller scales empowers people to try it for themselves in other contexts, including those same people as they suddenly find themselves with a group of people to start from. Honestly, I appreciate that it sounds a bit airy-fairy, but experiencing such things for ourselves can have a transformative effect upon you and your perspectives.
Why argue when you won’t actually argue the point? Trying to pretend that you are being polite whilst dismissing someone out of hand without the decency to explain why (beyond a few common sidestepping soundbites that don’t) is just condescending. Especially to not suggest any proposal for stopping the bloodshed that hitherto has gone hand-in-hand with the structure that you are publicly throwing your support behind, I thought bloodshed was important to you, or does it only feel real when it has a perceived chance of pointing at you?
People’s first reactions are most often fears of things that already happen getting worse, because we desperately crave stability and force ourselves into a sunk cost fallacy (prisoners dilemma, if you prefer) on that basis. This is unfortunately a huge misdirect on ourselves- if you have the conditions for something to already exist or happen, the subtle changes in condition are usually what lead to this getting worse (often cumulatively as a misdirect itself from where power actually lies, immigration is a great example with its consequences currently laid bare). Plus, it is already happening, if we can’t bring ourselves to care just because it doesn’t directly affect us, we probably shouldn’t be proposing any societal solutions or paths of action as we are clearly unable to operate adequately on a societal level.
Apologies for how worked up I have got at a couple of points, absolutely nothing personal, I just feel passionately about these things and have seen decades go by where we have loudly shouted what will happen only to be ignored and later asked (rhetorically, of course) ‘how could this have happened?’ over and over again… It’s hard not to get frustrated, but none of that is your fault, so I’m sorry.
I’m just as frustrated as you and that is where your emotions are misplaced.
The point of this post was “people who don’t vote because they object to all candidates are silly and short-sighted”. It sounds like you agree with that. Nobody said “only vote” just the same as you didn’t say “only do local”. That was kind of my point, in a roundabout way.
We need to vote local. We need to work with our communities to find and elevate good candidates. That involves exactly the kinds of grass-roots activities your describe but that doesn’t justify not voting.
To quote Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, “Decisions are made by people who show up.” If you don’t show up to the table where the decisions are happening, no matter what else you do, you’re giving your choice to someone else, because he decisions still get made, except now it is by people you had literally, voluntarily no say in choosing.
I will never support the idea of “we shouldn’t vote for the better candidate because they’re not good enough”. We’re not going to overthrow the government next month. So we should exert whatever influence we can wherever and whenever we can.
And yet so many people don’t vote. And even more people don’t vote in primaries.
Like, I genuinely believe that if everyone just voted on the primaries (incl. for local govt) we’d be fine. That’s where the problem really lies IMO. We get shit candidates because nobody shows up to vote for the good candidates in the primaries.
Voting will not save us, huge numbers of problems stem from fundamental imbalances in power, power which the political class require in order to impose their will (or that of whomever they serve further up the chain), even when their will is genuinely benign.
Voting just decides which people (with already powerful people/structures frequently playing an outsized role in exactly who you get to choose between) get into power, then this power both alters their brain and causes their lived experiences to diverge from those of the electorate.
Our solutions need to include a fundamental redistribution of power or we are just maintaining the conditions (a key component being the concentration of power centres, which has been dramatically accelerating for the past few decades regardless of how people have voted) that will lead us right back here. This redistribution is not going to come from people who, however pure their intentions, require power over others to fulfil these intentions.
I won’t discourage voting,* but we have to stop pretending that we just need the right rulers and everything will be fine, voting is not enough.
*Although I do understand people; particularly in FPTP safe seats; who choose not to play their part in the theatre of pretending that we are granting them some kind of justified authority over us- if not one single vote was placed, they would just choose how to distribute power amongst themselves after all, they wouldn’t leave the seats empty to reflect the outcome of the theatre, because that isn’t where their power actually comes from. This becomes clear when you consider ideas such as designated survivors, they collectively assume power over all of us and have a clear delineation of the rulers and the ruled.
If a primary motivation is fear of the ‘wrong’ people getting into power, that structure was not built to serve you.
That was a whole lot of words without actually providing a single recommended course of action. I continue to hear a lot of general have waving and dissatisfaction from people who say we need a new system, but fail to describe that system in any meaningful detail, or how we will transition to that system without significant bloodshed.
This country has changed a lot over the past 250 years and most of it happened through protest and voting at various levels of government.
You know what the crazy thing is? We have a means to overthrow Congress. We just don’t have the state and local leaders to do it. A second Continental Congress is what we need if we want a massive system overhaul. And for that you need state and local governments in sufficient numbers to act without the approval of the Federal Congress.
Voting fucking matters. The likes of MLK are a once in a century deal. Everything else happens through protest and voting at a variety of levels.
The problem is that people hear “go vote” and all they think about is federal level general elections.
We are going to have bloodshed no matter what, when state power feels threatened it will lash out violently, we don’t get to decide this.
There is already bloodshed, and there always was, states fundamentally rely upon violence to enforce their interests both domestically and internationally. The point is to finally stop this cycle.
Personally, I feel that our best hope lies in parallel power structures, so the best place to start with that would be in trying to organise members of your community to get together and sort x problem yourselves. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, it’s fine to start anywhere, it just seems to me that an important step is in people realising how much power they have when they work together.
That is just simply not true, unless you use a very broad definition of protest which goes up to and including the Coal Wars, but given the general sentiment I expect you have calmly marching along and begging for your masters to consider you for once in mind.
Even if it was true, you still haven’t attempted to address the power problem that I discussed at length (that being the point of my comment, not the broad solutions that you appear to deem a requirement), I have fulfilled your arbitrary demand, now please answer what I actually said.
Edit: Also, to respond to a comment centred on voting not being a solution due to the fundamental structure this takes with “actually, you just need to vote more”, without even mentioning a single point I raised, is incredibly obnoxious.
No thanks. You’ve just admitted your position that you expect, and welcome, bloodshed as a necessary part of progress.
I have no interest in engaging with an anarchist who won’t even consider peaceful progress as an option to pursue.
Nor am I interested in further subsidizing the wealthy by digging even deeper into my paper thin emotional and financial reserves to support the welfare of my community any more than I already am through taxes, charity, and personal outreach to people in need. I am already completely tapped out. And any further subsidy is a tacit admission that the wealthy will never pay their share.
So yeah, hard pass on whatever arguments you want to make.
Have a great day/night!
EDIT: No disrespect, btw. You are welcome to your opinion. I just consider the discussion a waste of time because our fundamental goals are too dramatically different.
That’s a complete misread of what I said, I said that bloodshed will be inflicted upon us, I said it already is. You are ignoring that in the name of ‘progress’.
Okay, but stop pretending that you are offering anything more than burying your head in the sand, it’s embarrassing.
I would argue you’re the one buying your head in the sand, as you offer “community recycling” sized solutions to an “industrial pollution” sized problem. You play into the hands of the very authorities you claim to oppose.
Good luck with that!
I recommended a place to start, I am not naive enough to think that jumping to the end is any way viable, and that was just to make you happy so that you might engage with what was actually being said. My aim has always been to encourage people to think for themselves, not to tell them what to think or do.
It is also worth noting that you haven’t offered any solution yourself, just saying ‘vote’ doesn’t mean anything unless your whole recommended course of action is just to vote (blindly? Blue no matter who?) and wash your hands of it. That is also known as a capitulation.
You also recommended thinking more locally, it’s almost as if you acknowledge that proof of concept on smaller scales empowers people to try it for themselves in other contexts, including those same people as they suddenly find themselves with a group of people to start from. Honestly, I appreciate that it sounds a bit airy-fairy, but experiencing such things for ourselves can have a transformative effect upon you and your perspectives.
Why argue when you won’t actually argue the point? Trying to pretend that you are being polite whilst dismissing someone out of hand without the decency to explain why (beyond a few common sidestepping soundbites that don’t) is just condescending. Especially to not suggest any proposal for stopping the bloodshed that hitherto has gone hand-in-hand with the structure that you are publicly throwing your support behind, I thought bloodshed was important to you, or does it only feel real when it has a perceived chance of pointing at you?
People’s first reactions are most often fears of things that already happen getting worse, because we desperately crave stability and force ourselves into a sunk cost fallacy (prisoners dilemma, if you prefer) on that basis. This is unfortunately a huge misdirect on ourselves- if you have the conditions for something to already exist or happen, the subtle changes in condition are usually what lead to this getting worse (often cumulatively as a misdirect itself from where power actually lies, immigration is a great example with its consequences currently laid bare). Plus, it is already happening, if we can’t bring ourselves to care just because it doesn’t directly affect us, we probably shouldn’t be proposing any societal solutions or paths of action as we are clearly unable to operate adequately on a societal level.
Apologies for how worked up I have got at a couple of points, absolutely nothing personal, I just feel passionately about these things and have seen decades go by where we have loudly shouted what will happen only to be ignored and later asked (rhetorically, of course) ‘how could this have happened?’ over and over again… It’s hard not to get frustrated, but none of that is your fault, so I’m sorry.
I’m just as frustrated as you and that is where your emotions are misplaced.
The point of this post was “people who don’t vote because they object to all candidates are silly and short-sighted”. It sounds like you agree with that. Nobody said “only vote” just the same as you didn’t say “only do local”. That was kind of my point, in a roundabout way.
We need to vote local. We need to work with our communities to find and elevate good candidates. That involves exactly the kinds of grass-roots activities your describe but that doesn’t justify not voting.
To quote Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, “Decisions are made by people who show up.” If you don’t show up to the table where the decisions are happening, no matter what else you do, you’re giving your choice to someone else, because he decisions still get made, except now it is by people you had literally, voluntarily no say in choosing.
I will never support the idea of “we shouldn’t vote for the better candidate because they’re not good enough”. We’re not going to overthrow the government next month. So we should exert whatever influence we can wherever and whenever we can.