Basically, and people let ‘the enemy of perfect get in the way of good enough’. Progress is incremental unfortunately. That’s just how it is. We can accept that, or we get this crap.
The only way a political party changes is when they stop winning.
If Democrats think they will win by being Republicans who hate the gays a little bit less, then that is what they’ll do. They were just shown that that isn’t a winning strategy, so we’ll see if the party changes tack or doubles down.
“You monster, it is your fault you gave us Trump”
I make my voting preferences known in every primary, state, and federal election. I actively volunteer for candidates I like. The party knows what will earn my vote, if they wanted it. If they make the strategic bet that getting my vote will cost them more from somewhere else, then that is on them.
“That is so entitled, how could you”
Have you ever considered that the reason both parties seem so out of touch with mainstream thought is because they have 10s of millions of people who will vote regardless of policy, thereby preventing the parties from understanding what is actually effective in getting them votes?
You seem to think there will be real elections again rather than the type they have in Russia now that Republicans control all three branches of government.
I’m not sure why. Do you think they will ever willingly give up power?
It is impossible to argue against conspiratorial thinking.
Let’s say Kamala had narrowly won the election, would 2028 be the right time to hold the Democrats accountable for real, useful, policy changes? Or would there be another Republican Boogeyman (maybe Ted Cruz again? Or Desantis?) that would absolutely need to be defeated before it would be proper - in your opinion - to ask these public servants to actually serve me?
According to many commenters here, and I assume many of the downvoters whenever a comment questions the utility of unconditional loyalty to the blue party, the US has been hovering just above an irreversible descent into a fascist dictatorship.
So let me ask you, which of the leaders you voted for reversed that decline? Because the ‘vote blue no matter who’ dogma has given over a decade of historically unpopular candidates who consistently lose to - again according to you - naked fascists.
As I keep telling people, I take W.C. Fields’ advice when it comes to voting: “I never vote for, only against.”
And people like you don’t get that. I didn’t vote for anyone. I voted against Trump because there were only two viable choices.
And this has been true for me for every election in my adult life. Because I do not care about which team you or anyone else is on, all I care about is keeping the worst of the worst out of office.
And that failed, which is why I got the fuck out of America before my daughter was forced into a conversion therapy camp.
I expect, if you’re like others who take your attitude, your next response will be about how I should put the needs of Palestinians over my own child and there won’t be a genocide of queer people despite them being totally open about their intentions.
For starters it didn’t use to be a choice of “who would you rather see killed” - or in other words, nothing was forever lost if one side won instead of the other - and beyond that it has always been a cyclical choice, so it made sense for voters who felt insufficiently catered to, to punish a side on one cycle to try and get it to offer a better deal on the next cycle.
Whether that remains the case - i.e. will Trump make himself dictator for life - is the big question.
That’s true but I didn’t mean it as a choice of who you’d rather see killed, just that the system is set up in such a way that as a rational voter you are forced into a situation where you must act to prevent the worst outcome rather than voting for your interests and what you believe in.
I think I used a wrong methaphor (sorry!) because the whole death thing carries a lot more implications than what I meant to convey.
In a Trolley Problem the A/B choice is fixed, is a once-only choice and its effects cannot be undone. My point is that, unlike a Trolley Problem, even in the US deeply flawed voting system the choice is (so far) not an irrevocable one time only choice - there is a new choice every 4 years, most effects from the previous choice can be undone (the chosen one of the next cycle always has the option to undo most of what the chosen one of the previous cycle did) and the actual choices available at voting time are not fixed and can be influenced before the actual vote (Parties can be convinced to field different candidates).
My theory is that in part Presidential Elections in the US system are a Cyclical Ultimatum Game, in that for each Party a candidate is fielded whose political offerings are a certain approportioning of the “cake” amongst different societal interests and the voters who care about such societal interests can chose to Accept or Reject, and given the cyclical nature of the choice, one can use Reject to Punish a party for fielding a candidate who is offering a specific approportioning of the “cake”, the difference between a mere Reject and Punish being that the latter is done with the intention of affecting the choice of “cake” approportioning of the other side of the game (i.e. the Party whose candidate is being rejected) that they offer on the next cycle.
Or in common language, in the US system it’s a logical strategy to, on one election, reject the candidate of one’s “natural” Party who is offering an unacceptable approportioning of the “cake”, to incentivise that Party to offer a better candidate in the next electoral cycle - the decision tree in the system is a lot deeper than merelly the single unrevocable choice of a Trolley Problem.
Had most Democrat voters actually been following this logic for the last couple of decades, rather than treating each vote as an independent event from all other votes, the situation in the US would be totally different, IMHO, not least because somebody like Trump would be facing Democrat candidates who actually would be trying much harder to appeal to the common people (as they otherwise would be rejected and hence never win).
Further, the mob here claiming that “natural” Democrat voters who refrained from voting Democrat in this election are losing everytime Trump does one of his extreme measures are totally missing the picture - those people did not reject Democrat to get Trump, they Rejected Democrat to get a better Democrat next time around and a Trump presidency was the risk they were taking for it. That choice will only be a “loss” if the Democrats do not field a better candidate next time around (or if Trump somehow manages to make it so that there is no “next time around”).
Thanks for taking the time to come back and clarify your position in detail like that, I think I see where you’re coming from here and I have to disagree with you. I think the trolley problem is still the best analogy and I’d go so far as to say some of the assumptions underpinning your view here are very dangerous.
Firstly, I would say voting is absolutely an irrevocable one time only choice from the simple fact that the past is immutable. Trump will always have been the president from 2016 - 2020 and now he’s going to be the president for another term. No amount of voting in the future can ever change that. Roe v Wade is still overturned for example and the supreme court is still stacked as far as I understand.
Just ask Josseli Barnica’s loved ones how easily the damage of some of Trump’s decisions can be undone.
If someone thinks that the price is worth it for sending a message to the Democrats then that’s up to them. Let’s not be under any illusions though that we can simply change anything in the present day to undo history. That’s why the trolley problem is the more apt analogy in my view because you must choose between two different bad outcomes irrevocably.
I would say that the full picture is somewhere in the middle - generally most actions of a President are not irrevocable but many do have consequences which are irrevocable (for example, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq after 9/11 has as a consequence destroyed many lives and created ISIS and that will never be undone, especially the deaths, even if the president after him had immediatelly pulled the troops out from Iraq).
As you say, Trump might very well turn what was mainly (IMHO) not a Trolley Problem, into much more of one by (in “more likelly” to “less likely” order):
Take a lot more decisions which are hard to revoke.
Take a lot more decisions with irrevocable effects or with more of such effects.
Stop the cyclical nature of the “game” (i.e. change the rules so that nobody but a Republican can ever become President).
The time for Punishing the Democrats to try and influence the approportioning of the “cake” they put forward in the next round of the “game” was before in elections before this one, but that was not done hence the “quality” of the candidate offered by the Democrats. The wisdom of Punishing it in this election was, with hindsight, not so great, but it’s still understandable that some people chose to Punish the Democrats by refraining from voting, even if one thinks their estimation of the associated risks of doing so was very wrong.
I suppose I agree with your original idea that in this cycle the US elections have turned into a Trolley Problem (though I see it as a high probability rather than absolute certainty), though I disegree with the wider portrayal (maybe not by you, but many others) of people who chose to not vote Democrat as responsible for what Trump is doing - I strongly suspect they merelly erred by underestimating the risk they were taking, which is understandable since in the Propaganda Heavy US environment the extreme warnings about Trump coming from Democrats were self-serving and very much a repeat of their propaganda techniques in previous elections, so many simply did not believe they were true or at least that they were not purposeful exagerations (i.e. a “boy who cried wolf” situation).
At this point the trolley problem is "would you like to vote for killing 1000 per year for the next four years or would you like to vote for killing 4000 people this year with the hope that maybe it’ll cause the whole trolley system to self destruct…? (The numbers are purely illustrative).
Edit: apparently it’s not obvious that I think these are both horrible options, and I voted for the limping painfully along for an extended period.
Making things worse based on the idiotic hope that it might somehow magically spark things to get better is the absolute dumbest fucking idea one can have.
If by “trolley system to self-destruct” you mean violent revolution and a new system of government imperfect in a completely different way, yes. Good luck with the wait.
That’s exactly what I mean, and I agree that it sounds awful. It’s like people go into these conversations deciding which side the other person is on based on which they can argue the most with.
People need to accept that the electoral system in the US is just a trolley problem at the end of the day unfortunately.
Basically, and people let ‘the enemy of perfect get in the way of good enough’. Progress is incremental unfortunately. That’s just how it is. We can accept that, or we get this crap.
not really close to ‘good enough’ but least bad
This is exactly the fucking problem, if it’s not perfect enough then people allow it to get worse instead.
The only way a political party changes is when they stop winning.
If Democrats think they will win by being Republicans who hate the gays a little bit less, then that is what they’ll do. They were just shown that that isn’t a winning strategy, so we’ll see if the party changes tack or doubles down.
“You monster, it is your fault you gave us Trump”
I make my voting preferences known in every primary, state, and federal election. I actively volunteer for candidates I like. The party knows what will earn my vote, if they wanted it. If they make the strategic bet that getting my vote will cost them more from somewhere else, then that is on them.
“That is so entitled, how could you”
Have you ever considered that the reason both parties seem so out of touch with mainstream thought is because they have 10s of millions of people who will vote regardless of policy, thereby preventing the parties from understanding what is actually effective in getting them votes?
Elections are an information gathering mechanism.
You seem to think there will be real elections again rather than the type they have in Russia now that Republicans control all three branches of government.
I’m not sure why. Do you think they will ever willingly give up power?
It is impossible to argue against conspiratorial thinking.
Let’s say Kamala had narrowly won the election, would 2028 be the right time to hold the Democrats accountable for real, useful, policy changes? Or would there be another Republican Boogeyman (maybe Ted Cruz again? Or Desantis?) that would absolutely need to be defeated before it would be proper - in your opinion - to ask these public servants to actually serve me?
According to many commenters here, and I assume many of the downvoters whenever a comment questions the utility of unconditional loyalty to the blue party, the US has been hovering just above an irreversible descent into a fascist dictatorship.
So let me ask you, which of the leaders you voted for reversed that decline? Because the ‘vote blue no matter who’ dogma has given over a decade of historically unpopular candidates who consistently lose to - again according to you - naked fascists.
As I keep telling people, I take W.C. Fields’ advice when it comes to voting: “I never vote for, only against.”
And people like you don’t get that. I didn’t vote for anyone. I voted against Trump because there were only two viable choices.
And this has been true for me for every election in my adult life. Because I do not care about which team you or anyone else is on, all I care about is keeping the worst of the worst out of office.
And that failed, which is why I got the fuck out of America before my daughter was forced into a conversion therapy camp.
I expect, if you’re like others who take your attitude, your next response will be about how I should put the needs of Palestinians over my own child and there won’t be a genocide of queer people despite them being totally open about their intentions.
How has voting against worked for you? Given that you fled the country, it doesn’t sound like it got the outcome you wanted.
With the data point, I’ll keep voting for things I want - will let you know if that strategy works better.
Not quite.
For starters it didn’t use to be a choice of “who would you rather see killed” - or in other words, nothing was forever lost if one side won instead of the other - and beyond that it has always been a cyclical choice, so it made sense for voters who felt insufficiently catered to, to punish a side on one cycle to try and get it to offer a better deal on the next cycle.
Whether that remains the case - i.e. will Trump make himself dictator for life - is the big question.
That’s true but I didn’t mean it as a choice of who you’d rather see killed, just that the system is set up in such a way that as a rational voter you are forced into a situation where you must act to prevent the worst outcome rather than voting for your interests and what you believe in.
I think I used a wrong methaphor (sorry!) because the whole death thing carries a lot more implications than what I meant to convey.
In a Trolley Problem the A/B choice is fixed, is a once-only choice and its effects cannot be undone. My point is that, unlike a Trolley Problem, even in the US deeply flawed voting system the choice is (so far) not an irrevocable one time only choice - there is a new choice every 4 years, most effects from the previous choice can be undone (the chosen one of the next cycle always has the option to undo most of what the chosen one of the previous cycle did) and the actual choices available at voting time are not fixed and can be influenced before the actual vote (Parties can be convinced to field different candidates).
My theory is that in part Presidential Elections in the US system are a Cyclical Ultimatum Game, in that for each Party a candidate is fielded whose political offerings are a certain approportioning of the “cake” amongst different societal interests and the voters who care about such societal interests can chose to Accept or Reject, and given the cyclical nature of the choice, one can use Reject to Punish a party for fielding a candidate who is offering a specific approportioning of the “cake”, the difference between a mere Reject and Punish being that the latter is done with the intention of affecting the choice of “cake” approportioning of the other side of the game (i.e. the Party whose candidate is being rejected) that they offer on the next cycle.
Or in common language, in the US system it’s a logical strategy to, on one election, reject the candidate of one’s “natural” Party who is offering an unacceptable approportioning of the “cake”, to incentivise that Party to offer a better candidate in the next electoral cycle - the decision tree in the system is a lot deeper than merelly the single unrevocable choice of a Trolley Problem.
Had most Democrat voters actually been following this logic for the last couple of decades, rather than treating each vote as an independent event from all other votes, the situation in the US would be totally different, IMHO, not least because somebody like Trump would be facing Democrat candidates who actually would be trying much harder to appeal to the common people (as they otherwise would be rejected and hence never win).
Further, the mob here claiming that “natural” Democrat voters who refrained from voting Democrat in this election are losing everytime Trump does one of his extreme measures are totally missing the picture - those people did not reject Democrat to get Trump, they Rejected Democrat to get a better Democrat next time around and a Trump presidency was the risk they were taking for it. That choice will only be a “loss” if the Democrats do not field a better candidate next time around (or if Trump somehow manages to make it so that there is no “next time around”).
Thanks for taking the time to come back and clarify your position in detail like that, I think I see where you’re coming from here and I have to disagree with you. I think the trolley problem is still the best analogy and I’d go so far as to say some of the assumptions underpinning your view here are very dangerous.
Firstly, I would say voting is absolutely an irrevocable one time only choice from the simple fact that the past is immutable. Trump will always have been the president from 2016 - 2020 and now he’s going to be the president for another term. No amount of voting in the future can ever change that. Roe v Wade is still overturned for example and the supreme court is still stacked as far as I understand.
Just ask Josseli Barnica’s loved ones how easily the damage of some of Trump’s decisions can be undone.
If someone thinks that the price is worth it for sending a message to the Democrats then that’s up to them. Let’s not be under any illusions though that we can simply change anything in the present day to undo history. That’s why the trolley problem is the more apt analogy in my view because you must choose between two different bad outcomes irrevocably.
I’m also not from the US.
I would say that the full picture is somewhere in the middle - generally most actions of a President are not irrevocable but many do have consequences which are irrevocable (for example, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq after 9/11 has as a consequence destroyed many lives and created ISIS and that will never be undone, especially the deaths, even if the president after him had immediatelly pulled the troops out from Iraq).
As you say, Trump might very well turn what was mainly (IMHO) not a Trolley Problem, into much more of one by (in “more likelly” to “less likely” order):
The time for Punishing the Democrats to try and influence the approportioning of the “cake” they put forward in the next round of the “game” was before in elections before this one, but that was not done hence the “quality” of the candidate offered by the Democrats. The wisdom of Punishing it in this election was, with hindsight, not so great, but it’s still understandable that some people chose to Punish the Democrats by refraining from voting, even if one thinks their estimation of the associated risks of doing so was very wrong.
I suppose I agree with your original idea that in this cycle the US elections have turned into a Trolley Problem (though I see it as a high probability rather than absolute certainty), though I disegree with the wider portrayal (maybe not by you, but many others) of people who chose to not vote Democrat as responsible for what Trump is doing - I strongly suspect they merelly erred by underestimating the risk they were taking, which is understandable since in the Propaganda Heavy US environment the extreme warnings about Trump coming from Democrats were self-serving and very much a repeat of their propaganda techniques in previous elections, so many simply did not believe they were true or at least that they were not purposeful exagerations (i.e. a “boy who cried wolf” situation).
At this point the trolley problem is "would you like to vote for killing 1000 per year for the next four years or would you like to vote for killing 4000 people this year with the hope that maybe it’ll cause the whole trolley system to self destruct…? (The numbers are purely illustrative).
Edit: apparently it’s not obvious that I think these are both horrible options, and I voted for the limping painfully along for an extended period.
Making things worse based on the idiotic hope that it might somehow magically spark things to get better is the absolute dumbest fucking idea one can have.
If by “trolley system to self-destruct” you mean violent revolution and a new system of government imperfect in a completely different way, yes. Good luck with the wait.
That’s exactly what I mean, and I agree that it sounds awful. It’s like people go into these conversations deciding which side the other person is on based on which they can argue the most with.
At least you’re honest about this half-baked excuse for a plan
Got a better one?
I don’t need an excuse. I voted against the horror that is unfolding right now.
That isn’t how trolleys work.