5 ms·

Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence. I'm sure some idiot will tell me

Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence. I'm sure some idiot will tell me to vote, because that'll change the systemic corruption and nightmare that has taken hold of US power. Did voting in nazi Germany help? No because they were voted in, voting only legitimizes a political system completely captured by insiders and corporate juggernauts. These people only response to power and will not hesitate to kill you, imprison you, or otherwise destroy your life. But go on, tell us how voting matters. Lol.

grandalf 11y ago
Voting for a major party candidate does not matter, since both major parties strongly support the status quo. I'd say 80% of the power structure influencing US politics strongly agrees with the status quo. It follows that anyone who can get elected president has essentially promised to continue the status quo. However, I do think that voting for 3rd party candiates could help over time. If even 10% of Americans voted for a 3rd party candidate in a presidential election, things would start to change. If there were two viable 3rd party candidates things would change faster. It seems that the 50% of eligible citizens who choose to vote very much prefer to vote for a major party candidate. This goes along with the general herd behavior of animals like us, and also makes sense in light of the massive amplification of differences between the parties. So much money is spent to magnify (and dignify) the smallest differences between candidates/parties so that the average person can come to think that his/her vote for one of those parties (and for the status quo) mattered. The main reason we don't have much dissent is because of the vast efforts by the powerful and the media to focus on the delegitimization of nearly all institutions other than the US Government. NPR will cover nearly any story but never ask questions about the trustworthiness or legitimacy of any part of the US Government. The occupy movement helps disempower private institutions, the NY Times stories about China flooding helps alienate us from other humans who live in China. And the presentation of the third world is much, much worse. There is a massive bias toward government institutions over private ones... Occupy is nowhere near as hard on the corrupt regulators as it is on the firms. All this helps squash dissent. The Intercept seems to be one of the first efforts to offer the mainstream media consumer an alternative view. The internet has (so far) made it easier for powerful interests to shape opinion, but that may start to change as groups like The Intercept have the budget to do the kind of high quality reporting that can be tough to ignore. But with so much money riding on continuation of the status quo, there will always be lots of influential people (academics, politicians, pundits, business leaders) who will completely ignore things like this in favor of focusing on one of the many silly issues covered by mainstream television and newspapers. As a case in point, Zuckerberg would absolutely never make a public statement supporting this reporting, since his interests are already quite closely tied to continuing the status quo. Similarly, Bezos now owns the WaPo but would never syndicate this coverage. So more than voting, the issue is lack of dissent. As an aside, the most telling aspect of this is when the US president suffers through a (very rare) interview. The journalist simply will not ask tough questions and the atmosphere is one of utter groveling and supplication. Of all things, I can't believe we are willing to live in a society where this happens... but it's considered such a rare honor to do a one hour on-on-one with a president that of course only the most ingratiating journalist (if one can call them that) would ever get the chance.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Some alternatives to voting that come to my mind: - Figure out the real reason why the US is at war with "terrorism", and do everything to help develop and popularize technology that will make that reason obsolete. Is it because of oil? Then become a Tesla evangelist. - Keep talking, writing, shouting about the issue, shaming and blaming everyone even tangentially related to drone strikes. It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy. We need to turn aiding the program to be Worse Than Hitler, no matter the dronesplaining and hellfireblaming they're doing. - Help develop counter-drone tech and make sure it becomes widely distributed among people in the affected areas. Warning: this will likely paint you as a valid target. - If you know anyone over at Hollywood, pitch for turning the problem into a movie. Not a documentary, but a good action movie. Big productions with top actors have a way to influence public around the entire world much stronger than anything a news station could ever tell. Get a good writer for the script and make sure the protagonist personally suffered from the strikes - say, his entire family was killed in a strike that targeted them because over at the US nobody gives a shit about confirming intelligence anymore. - Put your money where your mouth is. It's easy to talk, much harder to do anything meaningful if it costs you something, but the latter is what really sends a clear signal. Put a "do no drone strikes" clause in your software license. If you own a shop or a restaurant, refuse to serve Air Force / Intelligence officers until they get their shit together. Yes, you'll probably affect directly everyone but the parties responsible - but this is a situation where guilt by association actually works. They will be talking about you over at watercooler or shooting range. Maybe someone higher up in hierarchy will start thinking about it and push feedback upwards. Yes, you'll lose some customers to competition that won't follow suit, but you already know they're greedy cowards, don't you?
- dmansen 11y ago
  > It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy. lol really impressed you managed to pull stuff about feminists in here
aikah 11y ago
I guess people usually vote on domestic issues. Unless a war has direct consequences on the domestic level(draft,too many soldiers getting killed,cost of war...), they don't care. The problem is not voting. Voting is a right but also iMHO a duty. The problem is usually the political offer. You have 2 parties on the national level, they agree on almost everything except minor stuff like gay marriage so voting for one or the other has very little impact on foreign policies. On the federal level, it looks like democracy actually work better and independent candidates can win elections.
mladenkovacevic 11y ago
Voting in the US reminds me of that old parenting tactic of an illusion of choice for kids who don't want to go to sleep: "Do you want to wear the blue pajamas or the red pajamas?" Feeling empowered by having a say in the completely unimportant choice of pajamas, he is going to sleep whether he actually wants to or not. Ina similar manner, whoever you vote for, some foreign country is getting invaded and bombed for strategic or political reasons.
DasIch 11y ago
The argument that democracy doesn't work because Nazis is a really bad one. The only thing that argument shows is that you have a embarrassingly superficial knowledge of German history.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Democracy doesn't work because it's obvious that it doesn't work. It takes like five minutes of concentrated thinking to figure out its basic problems. The best thing you can say about democracy is that it's the system with least bloody failure modes out of the systems we know. Belief that it "works" is just a propaganda all of us are constantly exposed to since primary school.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I think representative democracy and then specifically representative democracy with FPTP has been shown not to work, primarily because of the principal-agent problem and also the spoilt vote effect which in turn ensures a two-party system (i.e. Duverger's law). Direct democracy with smaller electoral districts and a saner voting system could be more efficient, or at least have much higher response times. Of course you're still stuck with the self-fulfilling bottleneck that voters will seldom pick anything outside their cultural zeitgeist, but then it keeps the electoral system well contained and lets people focus more easily on actual activism.
  - xixi77 11y ago
    I agree that there are times when it fails, although I am not so sure we would agree on when exactly that happens. But it's a bit of a stretch to say that anything not perfect does not work -- particularly since there isn't that much agreement about how it should work.
  - DasIch 11y ago
    That depends on what you consider "working". I would certainly consider most modern democracies to work, some slightly better than others. Certainly all modern democracies are stable and not threatened with catastrophic failure. The democracy in the Weimar Republic didn't work by any reasonable definition because it was horribly designed. If the Nazis hadn't happened, someone else would've almost cetainly destroyed it sooner rather than later.
rayiner 11y ago
Voting, by design, won't change something the majority of people want to keep happening: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-strikes-118372 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-str... ("Fifty-eight percent of respondents expressed approval of U.S. drone strikes, while only 35 percent disapproved. This included nearly three-fourths of Republicans, slightly more than half of Democrats and 56 percent of independents."). "Insiders" and "corporate juggernauts" are a red herring. The problem isn't them--it's your family and friends and coworkers. The problem is the people you walk past on the street every day, your kids' teachers, maybe even the guy at the grocery store register. The problem is us and our moral justifications for these sorts of interventions abroad. NB: I don't support drone strikes.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Most of whom don't know anything or don't have time to care. The aggregate will of majority is bullshit - the votes are not boolean, but have a third, undefined state, which happens also to be default. This also means that if you make people care, turn the issue into a hot topic that people start tying to their identities, they'll eagerly vote your way.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    What information do you think is missing? If you look at the poll, half of Americans are "very concerned" about civilian casualties from drone strikes, another 30% are "somewhat" concerned about them. Yet, 60% still support them. That doesn't strike me as ignorance, it strikes me as a broadly-shared value judgment.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Well, I know that there are children starving in Africa, and can say this is sad and I am "very concerned", but otherwise it has close to zero emotional impact on me. It's an abstract issue. I actually feel about drone strike victim stronger, because I've seen the pictures, read the stories, seen the math. The point is, this issue is totally disconnected from the lives of most people. You need to get them invested emotionally. Make a blockbuster movie. Harry Potter and The HellFires of Voldemort. Or something. Invite the Pakistani that lost his arm, leg and half of the family to US drone strike. And then keep pounding at people with the topic. If we can't get people to care about this more than they care about "slut shaming" or Ferguson or Comcast, we truly have failed as a civilization.
Gravityloss 11y ago
Voting certainly helped Nazis, though they did other things too. If you read up on my country, the popular support for fascist movements fizzled in 1930, but before that the country was in some danger. Many politicians and military men had their plans aligned for different scenarios, depending on where the popular opinion turned. I think general philosophy, values and leadership play a huge role there. People sense that kind of stuff, and it turns into actions by the masses.
knowaveragejoe 11y ago
Just curious, are you this upset because it's the US or because you genuinely care that those responsible for the problems get away "without consequence"?

grandalf 11y ago

Voting for a major party candidate does not matter, since both major parties strongly support the status quo. I'd say 80% of the power structure influencing US politics strongly agrees with the status quo. It follows that anyone who can get elected president has essentially promised to continue the status quo. However, I do think that voting for 3rd party candiates could help over time. If even 10% of Americans voted for a 3rd party candidate in a presidential election, things would start to change. If there were two viable 3rd party candidates things would change faster. It seems that the 50% of eligible citizens who choose to vote very much prefer to vote for a major party candidate. This goes along with the general herd behavior of animals like us, and also makes sense in light of the massive amplification of differences between the parties. So much money is spent to magnify (and dignify) the smallest differences between candidates/parties so that the average person can come to think that his/her vote for one of those parties (and for the status quo) mattered. The main reason we don't have much dissent is because of the vast efforts by the powerful and the media to focus on the delegitimization of nearly all institutions other than the US Government. NPR will cover nearly any story but never ask questions about the trustworthiness or legitimacy of any part of the US Government. The occupy movement helps disempower private institutions, the NY Times stories about China flooding helps alienate us from other humans who live in China. And the presentation of the third world is much, much worse. There is a massive bias toward government institutions over private ones... Occupy is nowhere near as hard on the corrupt regulators as it is on the firms. All this helps squash dissent. The Intercept seems to be one of the first efforts to offer the mainstream media consumer an alternative view. The internet has (so far) made it easier for powerful interests to shape opinion, but that may start to change as groups like The Intercept have the budget to do the kind of high quality reporting that can be tough to ignore. But with so much money riding on continuation of the status quo, there will always be lots of influential people (academics, politicians, pundits, business leaders) who will completely ignore things like this in favor of focusing on one of the many silly issues covered by mainstream television and newspapers. As a case in point, Zuckerberg would absolutely never make a public statement supporting this reporting, since his interests are already quite closely tied to continuing the status quo. Similarly, Bezos now owns the WaPo but would never syndicate this coverage. So more than voting, the issue is lack of dissent. As an aside, the most telling aspect of this is when the US president suffers through a (very rare) interview. The journalist simply will not ask tough questions and the atmosphere is one of utter groveling and supplication. Of all things, I can't believe we are willing to live in a society where this happens... but it's considered such a rare honor to do a one hour on-on-one with a president that of course only the most ingratiating journalist (if one can call them that) would ever get the chance.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Some alternatives to voting that come to my mind: - Figure out the real reason why the US is at war with "terrorism", and do everything to help develop and popularize technology that will make that reason obsolete. Is it because of oil? Then become a Tesla evangelist. - Keep talking, writing, shouting about the issue, shaming and blaming everyone even tangentially related to drone strikes. It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy. We need to turn aiding the program to be Worse Than Hitler, no matter the dronesplaining and hellfireblaming they're doing. - Help develop counter-drone tech and make sure it becomes widely distributed among people in the affected areas. Warning: this will likely paint you as a valid target. - If you know anyone over at Hollywood, pitch for turning the problem into a movie. Not a documentary, but a good action movie. Big productions with top actors have a way to influence public around the entire world much stronger than anything a news station could ever tell. Get a good writer for the script and make sure the protagonist personally suffered from the strikes - say, his entire family was killed in a strike that targeted them because over at the US nobody gives a shit about confirming intelligence anymore. - Put your money where your mouth is. It's easy to talk, much harder to do anything meaningful if it costs you something, but the latter is what really sends a clear signal. Put a "do no drone strikes" clause in your software license. If you own a shop or a restaurant, refuse to serve Air Force / Intelligence officers until they get their shit together. Yes, you'll probably affect directly everyone but the parties responsible - but this is a situation where guilt by association actually works. They will be talking about you over at watercooler or shooting range. Maybe someone higher up in hierarchy will start thinking about it and push feedback upwards. Yes, you'll lose some customers to competition that won't follow suit, but you already know they're greedy cowards, don't you?

dmansen 11y ago
> It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy. lol really impressed you managed to pull stuff about feminists in here

aikah 11y ago

I guess people usually vote on domestic issues. Unless a war has direct consequences on the domestic level(draft,too many soldiers getting killed,cost of war...), they don't care. The problem is not voting. Voting is a right but also iMHO a duty. The problem is usually the political offer. You have 2 parties on the national level, they agree on almost everything except minor stuff like gay marriage so voting for one or the other has very little impact on foreign policies. On the federal level, it looks like democracy actually work better and independent candidates can win elections.

mladenkovacevic 11y ago

Voting in the US reminds me of that old parenting tactic of an illusion of choice for kids who don't want to go to sleep: "Do you want to wear the blue pajamas or the red pajamas?" Feeling empowered by having a say in the completely unimportant choice of pajamas, he is going to sleep whether he actually wants to or not. Ina similar manner, whoever you vote for, some foreign country is getting invaded and bombed for strategic or political reasons.

DasIch 11y ago

The argument that democracy doesn't work because Nazis is a really bad one. The only thing that argument shows is that you have a embarrassingly superficial knowledge of German history.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Democracy doesn't work because it's obvious that it doesn't work. It takes like five minutes of concentrated thinking to figure out its basic problems. The best thing you can say about democracy is that it's the system with least bloody failure modes out of the systems we know. Belief that it "works" is just a propaganda all of us are constantly exposed to since primary school.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I think representative democracy and then specifically representative democracy with FPTP has been shown not to work, primarily because of the principal-agent problem and also the spoilt vote effect which in turn ensures a two-party system (i.e. Duverger's law). Direct democracy with smaller electoral districts and a saner voting system could be more efficient, or at least have much higher response times. Of course you're still stuck with the self-fulfilling bottleneck that voters will seldom pick anything outside their cultural zeitgeist, but then it keeps the electoral system well contained and lets people focus more easily on actual activism.
- xixi77 11y ago
  I agree that there are times when it fails, although I am not so sure we would agree on when exactly that happens. But it's a bit of a stretch to say that anything not perfect does not work -- particularly since there isn't that much agreement about how it should work.
- DasIch 11y ago
  That depends on what you consider "working". I would certainly consider most modern democracies to work, some slightly better than others. Certainly all modern democracies are stable and not threatened with catastrophic failure. The democracy in the Weimar Republic didn't work by any reasonable definition because it was horribly designed. If the Nazis hadn't happened, someone else would've almost cetainly destroyed it sooner rather than later.

rayiner 11y ago

Voting, by design, won't change something the majority of people want to keep happening: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-strikes-118372 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-str... ("Fifty-eight percent of respondents expressed approval of U.S. drone strikes, while only 35 percent disapproved. This included nearly three-fourths of Republicans, slightly more than half of Democrats and 56 percent of independents."). "Insiders" and "corporate juggernauts" are a red herring. The problem isn't them--it's your family and friends and coworkers. The problem is the people you walk past on the street every day, your kids' teachers, maybe even the guy at the grocery store register. The problem is us and our moral justifications for these sorts of interventions abroad. NB: I don't support drone strikes.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Most of whom don't know anything or don't have time to care. The aggregate will of majority is bullshit - the votes are not boolean, but have a third, undefined state, which happens also to be default. This also means that if you make people care, turn the issue into a hot topic that people start tying to their identities, they'll eagerly vote your way.
- rayiner 11y ago
  What information do you think is missing? If you look at the poll, half of Americans are "very concerned" about civilian casualties from drone strikes, another 30% are "somewhat" concerned about them. Yet, 60% still support them. That doesn't strike me as ignorance, it strikes me as a broadly-shared value judgment.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Well, I know that there are children starving in Africa, and can say this is sad and I am "very concerned", but otherwise it has close to zero emotional impact on me. It's an abstract issue. I actually feel about drone strike victim stronger, because I've seen the pictures, read the stories, seen the math. The point is, this issue is totally disconnected from the lives of most people. You need to get them invested emotionally. Make a blockbuster movie. Harry Potter and The HellFires of Voldemort. Or something. Invite the Pakistani that lost his arm, leg and half of the family to US drone strike. And then keep pounding at people with the topic. If we can't get people to care about this more than they care about "slut shaming" or Ferguson or Comcast, we truly have failed as a civilization.

Gravityloss 11y ago

Voting certainly helped Nazis, though they did other things too. If you read up on my country, the popular support for fascist movements fizzled in 1930, but before that the country was in some danger. Many politicians and military men had their plans aligned for different scenarios, depending on where the popular opinion turned. I think general philosophy, values and leadership play a huge role there. People sense that kind of stuff, and it turns into actions by the masses.

knowaveragejoe 11y ago

Just curious, are you this upset because it's the US or because you genuinely care that those responsible for the problems get away "without consequence"?