Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.
> After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes Not strictly true for presidential elections. My vote cast in CT literally matters more than someone else's vote cast in CA. Yay electoral college!
The brain was not designed for this much bad news
351–360 of 376 posts
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#352Thankfully the recent soccer World Cup is showing the world that America is the greatest country on earth. At least the foreigners will learn the truth (the democrats? That’s another story of perpetual self depression).
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official. Sometimes online and election media d…
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to…
It’s also effectively a referendum on the current Iran mess, gas prices, assaults on free speech by the administration, and the Democratic establishment in general (AIPAC is the #1 single-issue lobby by far).
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
I plan to be informed about causality and effect - and im voting accordingly to put an end to causes that affect me negatively. So understanding something, not mythologizing or idealizing anything, is a absolutly necessary pre-requisit to voting.
There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harris was a known to be bad with respect to the war issue, became very obviously bad when she started campaigning with Liz Cheney. Trump was less known bad, so that difference should certainly have swayed your decision.
Trump had already tried to overthrow the previous election. He could only have been thought less bad if you weren't paying attention.
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#356Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today. Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion. But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, bo…
>these CEOs leading us into >the people benefitting >them What an awful lot of "them". This populist rhetoric is way too easy, not to mention dangerous. The problems are real and as human beings we are all implicated in them. Not just the faceless "them" but also you, me, us .
Didn't think that was needed to be pointed out.
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent I think this is almost the correct diagnosis, but the real problem is adjacent to that: it’s very easy for opponents to capitalize on political decisions that accept risk. It’s not that people love “do something, anything” policy making—rather,…
...except for guns. That topic is off-limits at all levels of government. The problem is never guns, it is mental health, or drugs, or poverty, and the only solution is more police and more people in prisons.
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fascism is a way overused term. Personally I tend to avoid it unless we're seeing paramilitary forces shooting civilians in the face. Other people may have lower thresholds.
What about shooting them in the chest while they drive their car? Or shooting them in the back after they’ve been detained?
Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#359Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news
#360The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality. The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made…
Tolerance is just another word for complacency. I would much rather prefer a brutally progressive system like that of China or Singapore than a society suspended in perpetual lethargy.