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I can’t even get my friends and coworkers to vote.

jlokier 7y ago
Perhaps they might be persuaded to do other things, whose effects they can see more directly. Also, encourage children in their activism. They are good at making complacent parents take notice at least, if only for social signalling :-) and hopefully some of it sticks when they grow up. Voting shouldn't be seen as the basic thing, which people need to do to show they care in the world. Many people see voting as mostly pointless, and they might even be right compared with other things they can do.
badNews 7y ago
Realistically, voting is an absurd placebo at this point. I don't think opinions about voting, or votes as an expression of opinion work above values of 1,000 in human social systems. If you think about it, this hypothesis holds conceptual water. Head counts in the thousands are the region of sample size where statistics begin to aggregate into commoditized data and spherical cows. Thus, perpetuating the premise of democracy past small town population sizes really only serves as a useful plane of misdirection for social control. No one can realistically be held accountable for democratic blunders that cross large geographies or involve huge voter turnouts. It's essentially fantasy to buy into the narrative. All you need to do is watch 12 Angry Men to catch a glimpse of how and why voting, even with small numbers in extreme microcosms, is really unreliable. And at larger scales, just statistics with manipulated noise. Statistics are simply representative of accidental distributions of facts, monte carlo style. It's certainly blameless, but not well reasoned agency. I'm not saying this to be a cool, edgy pessimist. I'm thinking about everything I've seen happen with my own eyes, plus historical realities. We've avoided world wars since the 1940's like a slug avoids salt. This is not because of governance and democracy, but rather institutional memory. As a meta-organism, we remember the lethal burn of it. It will probably come to the same climactic realization with the biosphere, before this amoeboid sprawl of people recoils in anguish at the experience of disfiguring injury.

Perhaps they might be persuaded to do other things, whose effects they can see more directly. Also, encourage children in their activism. They are good at making complacent parents take notice at least, if only for social signalling :-) and hopefully some of it sticks when they grow up. Voting shouldn't be seen as the basic thing, which people need to do to show they care in the world. Many people see voting as mostly pointless, and they might even be right compared with other things they can do.

badNews 7y ago

Realistically, voting is an absurd placebo at this point. I don't think opinions about voting, or votes as an expression of opinion work above values of 1,000 in human social systems. If you think about it, this hypothesis holds conceptual water. Head counts in the thousands are the region of sample size where statistics begin to aggregate into commoditized data and spherical cows. Thus, perpetuating the premise of democracy past small town population sizes really only serves as a useful plane of misdirection for social control. No one can realistically be held accountable for democratic blunders that cross large geographies or involve huge voter turnouts. It's essentially fantasy to buy into the narrative. All you need to do is watch 12 Angry Men to catch a glimpse of how and why voting, even with small numbers in extreme microcosms, is really unreliable. And at larger scales, just statistics with manipulated noise. Statistics are simply representative of accidental distributions of facts, monte carlo style. It's certainly blameless, but not well reasoned agency. I'm not saying this to be a cool, edgy pessimist. I'm thinking about everything I've seen happen with my own eyes, plus historical realities. We've avoided world wars since the 1940's like a slug avoids salt. This is not because of governance and democracy, but rather institutional memory. As a meta-organism, we remember the lethal burn of it. It will probably come to the same climactic realization with the biosphere, before this amoeboid sprawl of people recoils in anguish at the experience of disfiguring injury.