If you choose not to decide You still have made a RULE
If you choose not to decide You still have made a RULE
Happy Sunday, or Monday, depending where in the world you are!
45 comments
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the thing is, every time i tune into local or even national politics its always some kindergarten level problem between two or three groups of people who through their kindergardenness should have lost the privilege to rule us on our behalf... but i dont make the rules, so i guess those kiddos can keep throwing shit at each other and not be adults about leading a country and what that should entail... its just laughable, so it is far easier, bequem geradezu, to just look away
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I totally agree, mainstream media is a dog and pony show in most regards. The trick is to educate yourself on political economy, propaganda, and ideologies, so that you can extract underlying meanings behind much of media. For example, by coming to understand the concept of manufactured consent, and the role the private media in the U.S. plays in reinforcing state ideology, you can more clearly see the role that they played in creating support for actions the government intends to take, eg. The rapid spread and use of misinformation and failure to effectively fact check State Dept claims during the lead up to the war on terror. The media was effectively complicit in ensuring that any deviation from the party line they were to hold was sidelined, and even when presented, made into a straw man for ridicule. We can also look to former CIA and FBI officials who publicly acknowledge their use of human assets, either knowingly or unknowingly, to spread false information and create a desired public response.
I could say more, but I just got a video call, so I will have to stop here.
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We need to organize outside of the current framework. They want to play circus then let them, but we are the ones lining up in the front row to watch the show. We can just hang out in the cheap seats and talk amongst ourselves on how to bring the big tent down.
How to achieve this I don't know. That is dependant on your local area. It won't be immediate, and it will take time before there is any sizeable movement to actual begin direct action, but it has been done many times in the past and it must happen again if we are going to see change.
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Ignorance is the cloak of the Privileged.
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There’s no provenance for this actually being from Brecht, but it was originally published in Terra Nossa, a leftist periodical used to communicate Brazilian socialist ideas to English speaking Americans.
So weather or not Brecht, a Marxist, said those words or not: they’re not about voting!
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but it applies to voting, we can argue about the effectiveness of voting as a tactic but people who vote are more politically engaged than the type of person described in the quote
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You’re right, let me get pissed at everything that I have no real legal power to change.
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Yes you absolutely should. Because when you get pissed about those things you will hopefully start to elect the right people who then HAVE the legal power to change them.
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If voting didn't matter, they wouldn't work so hard to make it difficult.
The biggest and best changes have always come because the working class made it so.
Prior to universal suffrage, we had to fight and die for every small gain.
Since then, we have the luxury of just voting and protesting.
And when we look back at how much has been achieved, it's just amazing.
My personal pet peeve is that we haven't gotten around to getting tough with tax avoiders. Gotta start really heavily fining those advisors and enablers. Some probably should be jailed.
That's the key to reducing inequality, which will then make the middle class much wealthier and stronger.
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Yes, get pissed. Feel that shit, but instead of just letting it get the best of you, direct that anger against our oppressors. Live in spite of them. There are small steps you can take to make change, but first just get angry so you can process this.
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The temptation and crucial flaw of a totalitarian mind are that everyone must play a part in a superstructural battle between good and evil. Standing on the sidelines or taking a neutral position on present topics is not allowed; one may not merely observe or ignore the madness played out among the power hungry.
Everyone needs a take; everyone needs to “be informed” on the grand, irrelevant events of our broken times. Everyone needs a flag in their profile picture—a not-so-grand gesture indicating that they support the “latest thing.”
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Yeah, totalitarian minds also think being able to breathe oxygen is a good thing, but you don’t see me out here holding my breath to try to avoid being like them.
Associating ideas you don’t like with people you find detestable is a common tactic of totalitarians too, yet here you are.
Go get informed and stop treating politics as something that is voluntary. In a democratic society, it’s not. If you don’t want to be informed and involved, then you don’t really want a democracy, you just want to be served, and democratic societies can’t function if that’s people’s primary motivations.
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Thank you.
After informing myself too much, always following the news in detail and finally breaking down with the current escalation in the middle east my wife told me something similiar and i finally blocked all "news" pages.
The game is rigged, for we now have a voice, but the daily information we are expected to seek is not only tainted, it is in its very essence to poison our mind. So at the end we make a poor decision begrudingly, while taking responsibilty for
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As long as they don't vote, who cares? It's the imbeciles that vote that cause the problems.
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Everyone eligible to vote who choose not to basically cosign whoever wins. If you didn't vote when you could, you basically gave everyone who did care enough to go to the polls the right to speak for you.
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Now, continue that train of thought. Imagine that the person not voting is one of the politically ignorant mentioned in the quote.
What are they going to do at the polls? Are they going to add signal or noise? What is accomplished by them choosing a candidate at random?
Letting people who are informed make decisions for you happens all the time. Engineers and safety officers determine speed limits. Architects determine how the buildings you enter are constructed. Panels of electricians, firemen, and manufacturers determine the electrical codes that keep your house from randomly catching fire or electrocuting you. Interested people organize community events you attend. What makes politics any different?
My personal ideal would be that only the informed vote. Anyone has the right to become involved, as well as the right to abstain and accept the choice of their peers. Unfortunately, many people form their political opinions in echo chambers and are less informed than they think.
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In some cases, like with climate change, failing to act at all is functionally the same as acting against a solution. Climate change, among other things, is something where statistically we know that more voters would result in more support for preventing climate change, so it's not just a case of "well what if the voters were all idiots anyways?". We've seen that higher voters turnouts trend in a particular direction regarding particular topics. And ultimately less voter turnout and less people being informed to some degree regarding politics is less democratic by nature.
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I'm not arguing against people being informed. I'm arguing against uninformed people being encouraged to vote.
High voter turnout does change the results in many cases, but generally that's simple negative feedback. Average Americans didn't have to be well informed to vote against Trump in 2020, for instance - Trump saw to that when he made an ass of himself publicly on a regular basis. And people notice things like wars and recessions and whatnot. That's not the same as an informed voter base.
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Bring back property voting NOW!
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Turns out being an idiot isn't a barrier to home ownership.
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It's a nice quote, but not from Brecht.
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We need never be afraid of the vote of informed Americans. It is only the ignorant voter we have to fear, ignorant politically, no matter how fine his house or how expensive his schooling. Such people have never experienced democracy; they have merely enjoyed its benefits. It is hard to explain what democracy is; it is necessary to participate in it to understand it.
The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. "We ignored Hitler," he said. "We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all."
They thought of the government as "They." The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.
--Robert A. Heinlein
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If uninformed people couldnt vote things would be less bad.
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Imagine if you were to go outside and walk amongst the teenagers already drinking and the middle aged worn down from lead in the air and water, almost all of them a carrier of some entirely preventable disease of some sort, almost all of them convicted of crimes that could have cost lives in different circumstance such as speeding in cars or assault, imagine for a moment how incredibly stupid the average person is.
Now imagine half of everyone is dumber than that. You want those people to take a stance on socioeconomic structure and foreign affairs decisionmaking? Really, truly?
I, personally, don't see all that much harm in a society where only about a third of adults vote, so long as those educated on issues are willing to vote.
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45 comments