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The most staggering thing continues to be that there is not sustained public outrage to a great enough degree to enforce reform. Like, boiling rage that disrupt

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

The most staggering thing continues to be that there is not sustained public outrage to a great enough degree to enforce reform. Like, boiling rage that disrupts you from managing the basic details of living your regular life in a continuous, never-ending, daily manner from the moment of becoming aware of the degree of corruption until forever into the future, to such a degree that even after carefully introspecting about the pros and cons of being that unhealthily outraged, missing out on life’s joys, risking that the outrage never successfully overcomes the corrupt actors perpetrating these moral offenses, even after really thinking about all that and reflecting on the trade-offs of pursuing passions, love, family, whatever, you _still_ are left with absolutely undissipatable astronomical outrage governing your every waking decision and you pedantically boycott every company, protest everything, risk sounding like a crazy kook to normalized masses who somehow can just shrug off the outrage to live a life (which is precisely 100% of the reason why the corruption lives and grows), and your balanced opinion really, really is just that there is no possible reaction but continuous realtime outrage.

PhantomGremlin 8y ago
The most staggering thing continues to be that there is not sustained public outrage to a great enough degree to enforce reform. One of Aesop's fables is The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Here's a recent story that I, and most others, didn't find credible: [1]She also alleged that at some parties, boys lined up by a bedroom to "gang-rape" incapacitated girls and claimed those in the lineup included Kavanaugh and Judge. Even the Democrats finally realized that they had gone too far: "Democrats and the country would have been better off if Mr. Avenatti spent his time on his Iowa vanity project rather than meddling in Supreme Court fights," The point is that if you try to manufacture "sustained public outrage" about everyone and everything, eventually people tune you out. there is no possible reaction but continuous realtime outrage That's not a winning strategy. You will achieve better results if you pick your battles. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/06/politics/democrats-avenatti-swetnick-accusation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/06/politics/democrats-avenatti-s...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
andy_ppp 8y ago
The opposite reaction is small slow steps that you can take today in local government to get less corruption, better services, better law making etc. The outrage unused is you problem here. If we all channel 1% into actually doing things we can effect we’ll feel better and maybe the trumps and Nixon’s will be less relevant. The other option of course is despair.
- avmich 8y ago
  Don't know about despair, but if you're talking about so called "activity of small steps", you might lose if the government does enough big steps often enough to more than negate your activity. I.e. you're trying for months to get a specific regulation passed, and while that regulation gets watered down to have enough holes those in power exploit all available opportunities, reducing the quality of life of electorate, so you end up in arguably worse situation than when you started. Steps can't be too small, and in practice that could mean they have to be pretty large. Here the opposite approach - attacking root causes - can become more productive.
Applejinx 8y ago
Hacker News people tend to be pretty well-off and poorly understand the concept that most people don't have the bandwidth to get disrupted in that manner. Talk of life's joys and pursuing passions doesn't make sense in lives that are completely overwhelmed with the basic details of survival, whether it's keeping up with the dynamic schedule of several 'precariat' jobs or keeping a car on the road or a cell-phone plan alive without the income to properly support it (when the dynamic schedule requires that you're reachable on such a phone). That's just the example off the top of my head but there are many other situations that arise. Having life joys that can be disrupted by this rage is a luxury, and not nearly common enough. I do feel that's a political truism, though: change only happens when problems are serious enough to upset the well-off who have disposable income and time, and who can afford (both materially and existentially) to maintain this sort of boiling rage and do something about it.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Your comment seems fundamentally misguided to me and it’s very telling that your first thought is that somehow the magnitude of lifestyle privilege factors into it in any way (it does not). Even societies in which most people are barely living at a pure subsistence level have historically had revolutions, and in fact subsistence commoners becoming angry to the point of revolution has repeatedly been one way that nature corrects concentrations of power. I’d go even further and say that your argument is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong because it offers an excuse for why a person might not cultivate their indignant rage at the corruption. You invite them to self-pity and woe their poverty as an excuse to not direct that rage at social progress, which is unacceptable even if you’re all the way at true subsistence level poverty (most aren’t, even by world standards). And you also create an excuse for not being upset with other people who fail to act on their indignant rage over this issue too. You can just write it off as someone not “privileged enough” to sacrifice for the sake of acting to stop corruption.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    Much of the west is more in the 'panem et circenses' camp. My co-workers don't follow politics (except what gets shovelled at them by the red tops) and largely don't care as long as they get to go on holiday a couple of times a year and upgrade their car every few. By and large they are comfortable and so they are happy with things as they are.

PhantomGremlin 8y ago

The most staggering thing continues to be that there is not sustained public outrage to a great enough degree to enforce reform. One of Aesop's fables is The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Here's a recent story that I, and most others, didn't find credible: [1]She also alleged that at some parties, boys lined up by a bedroom to "gang-rape" incapacitated girls and claimed those in the lineup included Kavanaugh and Judge. Even the Democrats finally realized that they had gone too far: "Democrats and the country would have been better off if Mr. Avenatti spent his time on his Iowa vanity project rather than meddling in Supreme Court fights," The point is that if you try to manufacture "sustained public outrage" about everyone and everything, eventually people tune you out. there is no possible reaction but continuous realtime outrage That's not a winning strategy. You will achieve better results if you pick your battles. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/06/politics/democrats-avenatti-swetnick-accusation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/06/politics/democrats-avenatti-s...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

andy_ppp 8y ago

The opposite reaction is small slow steps that you can take today in local government to get less corruption, better services, better law making etc. The outrage unused is you problem here. If we all channel 1% into actually doing things we can effect we’ll feel better and maybe the trumps and Nixon’s will be less relevant. The other option of course is despair.

avmich 8y ago
Don't know about despair, but if you're talking about so called "activity of small steps", you might lose if the government does enough big steps often enough to more than negate your activity. I.e. you're trying for months to get a specific regulation passed, and while that regulation gets watered down to have enough holes those in power exploit all available opportunities, reducing the quality of life of electorate, so you end up in arguably worse situation than when you started. Steps can't be too small, and in practice that could mean they have to be pretty large. Here the opposite approach - attacking root causes - can become more productive.

Applejinx 8y ago

Hacker News people tend to be pretty well-off and poorly understand the concept that most people don't have the bandwidth to get disrupted in that manner. Talk of life's joys and pursuing passions doesn't make sense in lives that are completely overwhelmed with the basic details of survival, whether it's keeping up with the dynamic schedule of several 'precariat' jobs or keeping a car on the road or a cell-phone plan alive without the income to properly support it (when the dynamic schedule requires that you're reachable on such a phone). That's just the example off the top of my head but there are many other situations that arise. Having life joys that can be disrupted by this rage is a luxury, and not nearly common enough. I do feel that's a political truism, though: change only happens when problems are serious enough to upset the well-off who have disposable income and time, and who can afford (both materially and existentially) to maintain this sort of boiling rage and do something about it.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Your comment seems fundamentally misguided to me and it’s very telling that your first thought is that somehow the magnitude of lifestyle privilege factors into it in any way (it does not). Even societies in which most people are barely living at a pure subsistence level have historically had revolutions, and in fact subsistence commoners becoming angry to the point of revolution has repeatedly been one way that nature corrects concentrations of power. I’d go even further and say that your argument is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong because it offers an excuse for why a person might not cultivate their indignant rage at the corruption. You invite them to self-pity and woe their poverty as an excuse to not direct that rage at social progress, which is unacceptable even if you’re all the way at true subsistence level poverty (most aren’t, even by world standards). And you also create an excuse for not being upset with other people who fail to act on their indignant rage over this issue too. You can just write it off as someone not “privileged enough” to sacrifice for the sake of acting to stop corruption.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Much of the west is more in the 'panem et circenses' camp. My co-workers don't follow politics (except what gets shovelled at them by the red tops) and largely don't care as long as they get to go on holiday a couple of times a year and upgrade their car every few. By and large they are comfortable and so they are happy with things as they are.