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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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The trolley problem is usually a useful tool and nothing more, but it's actually a great analogy for voting. You have two choices. Let the trolley continue or change its path. You may have different reasons for your choices, but those are the only two real choices. You can leave a note on the lever expressing your displeasure, but it still doesn't get pulled. Not pulling it is as much a choice as pulling it. You're a participant either way.
You're a participant on the same ethical extent as a jigsaw killer victim. Someone else making fucked up circumstances around you doesn't morally implicate you for anything.
Except there's not really a correlation between me pulling the lever in the voting booth and something happening.
Even if I vote as hard as I can the more bad thing can still happen because our system has big problems.
When people say "both sides are the same" they're coming from a point of frustration with the system in general.
Signed,
An anarchist who's had to pull the lever for a capitalist in every election he's ever voted in.
Honestly, if leftist spaces on the internet weren't so infested with insufferable ML campists, I feel like we could actually move the Overton window a bit more among progressive liberals. Libertarian left ideas are pretty popular when presented in the right context. The thing which turns your average person off is the historical association with autocracy and oppression that MLs cling to for some reason.
I have been pretty vocal about this, but I just run into a sectarian wall over and over again. I wish more like-minded people would spend more time challenging ML orthodoxy and less time bashing liberals. I honestly feel like most liberals aren't nearly as far gone as your average Lenin simp.
I always say, and I'm fairly confident it's true, they're more pro-autocracy than they are pro-leftist. They will defend a dictator when they harm people before they back the people being harmed. That's not leftist. Leftism is on the side of the people being oppressed. They absolutely do more harm than good by making people think being left they have to agree with that group, but they're a very loud minority.
While I don’t disagree that MLs online cause harm, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the root of the issue is decades of intergenerational indoctrination during the cold war that anything democratically socialist was directly equivalent to autocratic communism. There is a deep, cultural cognitive dissonance that occurs in the US about things like socialised medicine and welfare that I just don’t think tankies online influence as much as you think they do.
That's true. I guess you could expand the analogy to a very heavy lever that needs a lot of people to pull, and if not enough people pull it the right way the other thing happens. That's really butchering the analogy though and I don't think it's required. The point is to show that "not participating" is still a choice and still has an effect, so you are still playing a part just not one that's useful.
Considering that someone can win the presidency without winning the popular vote, and that the Senate gives states with tiny populations equal power, and that the House should have over a thousand members if we kept the same ratio, sometimes it doesn't matter if more people are pulling along with yout.
There's so many undemocratic things built into our government - mainly to appease slaveowners - it's really hard for me to work up any enthusiasm that my vote will do anything at all.
I can empathize with the people who have given up on voting, because I was at that point many times. Now I've lowered my expectations and given up hope, and I just vote because it means I don't get told I'm not allowed to complain.
Totally agree with everything. Voting is pretty quick and easy though. I absolutely agree with people performing other actions that can possibly be more effective as well, but those take much more time and effort. Everyone should vote because, even if it doesn't have much effect, the amount of effect it has compared to the amount of effort it takes is high.
Now that I can vote by mail I agree that the effort is worth the effect. But if I had to stand in line for hours just to see the Supreme Court or electoral college or Congress or a bunch of states jam the trolley handle in the other direction I don't think I could bring myself to do it if it didn't also mean I'm allowed to complain.
What bothers me, and I've seen expressed in other comments, is that the response to "voting doesn't matter" or "both sides are the same" is immediate dismissal, as if nobody should have any problem with the way things work.
Even the line "If you don't vote you can't complain" is mean and dismissive.
You keep talking about every vote not mattering in a vote that was won by 200-some-odd people with over 3000 write-ins. That person who can make a measurable impact wouldn't have been in the position to do anything if just a few hundred more people had believed it was hopeless and just stayed home. So how do you justify that with your beliefs?
I get that the presidential election is broken on many levels, and many people's votes have little or no bearing on the final outcome, or that any likely outcome will even be ideal, but the implausible has happened before, depending on how people vote.
The one thing that has never improved the outcome is to shrug your shoulders and do nothing.
If one person would have stayed home they would have won by 199 votes instead of 200. It would have taken 200 people staying home for it to be a tie. An individual vote only matters if the margin is one vote.
And the neat part is that even with that victory the other branches of government can mean that even this 200 vote victory doesn't do anything. Whose to say the state legislature doesn't impeach him for not doing his job and enforcing the law? Whose to say localities don't take it upon themselves to follow the law and arrest women getting abortions? Not only does one vote not really do anything, there's all kinds of checks built into the government to prevent action.
My point isn't that people should sit at home and do nothing, it's that they should be realistic in their expectations of voting being a way to take action. Yes, it's nice that in this one instance one guy is doing the right thing. The rest of the government will put a stop to that soon I'm sure.
If you want to really take action, create a list of demands and start vandalizing expensive things until they're met.
Ah yes. Every drop thinks it's not to blame for the flood.
Tell me you didn't read the entire post without telling me you didn't read the entire post.
I've seen my very important and influential vote made meaningless by other parts of our government too many times to think it really helps. But I'm allowed to complain about that because I voted so that's nice.
I did read the post, but I really stopped caring when you said, to paraphrase, "I love democracy, but why can't we do what I want, regardless of what other people want." Yes, one vote matters very little. No, democracy doesn't always mean you get what you want. Yes, democracy depends on large groups of people actually putting in the effort to get their wishes heard. Yes, violent revolution is an option to achieve change, but adults prefer that as a last resort since violence often leads to death. As the old saw goes, soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box. You seem to have a great fondness for the first and the last, a grudging willingness to use the second, and a complete lack of awareness of the third.
Okay so you read it but you didn't understand it. Gotcha.
Yeah, and the bad outcome isn't happening because there wasn't enough votes against it. It happens because the votes do nothing at all and are just a strawman for the actions of the powerful.
You have more than two choices. Stop giving false information.
You really only havw two choices (for most elections) though. You can vote for the side you agree with more or not. Sure, there are lots of ways to do the latter, but it's that. I guess you also have the choice to vote against the side you agree with more, but that's not really a choice. In this case, it isn't a false binary.
You can also participate in many other things outside of voting, but that's totally separate and you can always do more separate things for anything. You can always follow a choice with other choices, but it doesn't change the effect of the first choice.
ftfy
not effectively, you don't.
Yeah, you could vote for someone who isn't going to win (voting this way helps Trump win)
I call bullshit on voting that way helps Trump win.
Ok. You're wrong, but you do you I guess