8 ms·

> They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. Just like all the consumers buying all that stuff and just like all voter

> They have so much power over the world and don;t give a fuck about next generation. Just like all the consumers buying all that stuff and just like all voters not voting for politicians that would change something? Yeah but sure, it's always "the elites" fault.

akudha 5y ago
Do you realize the amount of money poured into propaganda/brain washing of the electorate? Even if all voters suddenly become super informed overnight, it is still hard to vote for good politicians (the very few) because of issues like gerrymandering etc? Yes, voters should take responsibility. But too much destruction comes from the elites. But feel free to support them. When this planet is ravaged by the effects of climate change, no elite will help you. They have their bunkers built and ready to move in.
- j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
  Gerrymandering is only a problem (with respect to climate change) if around half of the voters don't care about climate change. As you said, there are good politicians. Its us that do not vote for them. In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections, the Green party have really nice results in polls. However, when it comes to the election, people prefer reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing the climate. People DO know about climate change. There IS good information available online. Its not that people have no idea what's happening. They just don't care to do something themselves - there's enough other people to fix it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one feels responsible to reply. > But feel free to support them. I never said I support them. I said we could easily get rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by them.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Gerrymandering can give a great deal of power to ~26% of the population. It takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759 people has exactly as much power as California with 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number of voters it needs to please would avoid California. After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and who cares about anything else.
    - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
      > t takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 I don't follow. I assume turnout would have to be taken into account? Also, I was specifically saying "voters", not "population" (more by luck, though) ;-) > The US senate is even more extreme. Yeah that's very true. Weren't some of the sates basically only created to give a certain party the majority? Forgot where I read or heard that though.
      - whoooooo123 5y ago
        Suppose there are 100 seats in parliament. To gain political power, you need to win 51 seats. So in theory you could get (50+epsilon)% of the votes in each of 51 seats, and 0 votes in any of the other 49 seats and hold power, despite only getting ~25% of the overall vote (assuming the population is evenly distributed among the seats). Actually you don't even need to get that many votes. Depending on the electoral system you might not need to win a majority of the votes in any constituency, you just need more votes than anyone else, which could be a very low percentage if the opposition is split enough ways. The current governing party in the UK holds a comfortable majority of seats despite only winning 43% of the vote in the last election. And in fact, this was the highest vote share received by any party in decades. Labour in 1997 won more seats on a lower vote share. > Weren't some of the sates basically only created to give a certain party the majority? I've read that the reason Dakota Territory was split in two (North and South) upon statehood was mainly as a cynical ploy to get two extra senate seats for the favoured party.
        j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
        > So in theory you could get (50+epsilon)% of the votes in each of 51 seats, and 0 votes in any of the other 49 seats and hold power, despite only getting ~25% of the overall vote Ah ok, got it. However, probably an unlikely scenario even in a "segregated" (republicans vs democrats) country as the US. But yeah - the reality right now that 40, 45% of the votes are enough for - in the case of the US - the republicans to win is pretty bad already. > Depending on the electoral system you might not need to win a majority of the votes in any constituency, In Germany we have two ways to get into the Bundestag (national parliament) - the one is a "Direktmandat" (the candidate with the most votes in one county county gets the seat), the other is via the party ticket. The parties have lists of candidates, and depending on their percentage of the total vote, the first X candidates get a seat. That system tries to balance between each county getting the representative in they favor, but also representing the relative votes via the party ticket.
  - waihtis 5y ago
    Is the green party in Germany really a primarily green party or is it like the Finnish green party, which is simultaneously green and hardcore leftist? Asking because that is why voting for the green party may be a huge turnoff for many (like myself.)
    - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
      Luckily, nowadays they pretty much got rid of their fundamentalist/leftwing arm. They kinda turned "conservative", but in a positive sense. In my opinion, them being a possible choice for conservative voters keeps our conservative party from doing too much rightwing crap, as they will know they'll loose voters to the Greens. We'll see how stuff goes in September (national elections). Under the hood, there's still lots of rightwing tendencies in our conservative party, unfortunately.
      - waihtis 5y ago
        What do you constitute as rightwing crap, out of interest?
        j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
        For example, appealing to voters of this party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany Its an officially extremist party (observed by the "Verfassungsschutz" [or: "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution"], that traditionally kind of ignored the far-right), one of their leaders can officially be called a fascist (court ruling), and another leader says the 3rd Reich was kind of not that big of a deal.
        waihtis 5y ago
        Figured since we can observe the same phenomena everywhere in EU. Regardless, by this point I think it is inevitable some of the hardcore right wing politics will enter mainstream; we (as in Europe as a whole) took too many immigrants without any consideration of how to manage them. Lest anyone try to throw the nazi card my way it should be stated that this is a failure born from rigid top-down management structure of the EU which does not even remotely have the flexibility required to manage external shock events like this. Same reason why the joint debt mechanism being forced on the excuse of COVID is a horrible idea and will end in tears for many.
SyzygistSix 5y ago
This is a very good summation of the problem. People do not want to change their consumer habits and their voting choices reflect that.
me_me_me 5y ago
Look at those stupid surfs not wanting to have land and freedom. Sucking up to their lords. > Yeah but sure, it's always "the feudalism" fault. M'kay.
- refurb 5y ago
  Are you arguing as a consumer you have no control over the products you buy or the energy sources you use? Because that’s not true.
  - Forbo 5y ago
    Consumers don't have as much choice as you make it out to be. I can't choose the sourcing of my power utility's generation. Nor can I choose to get an EV because my home doesn't have the ability to support charging. So I'm stuck with buying renewable energy credits from a third party in order to attempt to offset the dirty power generation sources and driving an inferior hybrid car.
    - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
      But we don't even make use of the little choice that we have. And for example in Germany, you can choose electricity providers that only use renewables.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Because people have neither time nor money for any of this. Most of the population worries about short-term things like "having food on the table", "keeping that job", "keeping myself healthy", "giving my children a better future, so that their lives aren't as hard as mine". We've just signed a new contract with our electricity provider in Poland. Renewable usage didn't even enter the discussion - none of us even realized there's a choice there. Only when reading the details of the agreement I realized the provider is committing themselves to deliver electricity from renewable sources. So now, I'm powering my computer with green energy, and so is likely my entire neighbourhood. Not because any of us made that choice - it's because the power company did. Systemic incentives are what's needed to save us. Getting a power company to go green is much more cost-effective than trying to make an equivalent number of consumers to switch individually.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Rich people naturally hold more power, proportionally to their wealth. They're also likely to have played a part in technology which create pollution. Because we have a government which uses threat of violence to exert extra power even if they don't have money, it's natural to blame them as well. If we were living in complete anarchy, we would definitely hold the polluter accountable for polluting the world and demand some retribution, possibly using a private court system and some underlying threat of violence (which can be externalised through agencies specialised in that). Right now we can blame government officials and the rich people who benefited from pollution and paid them.
- zepto 5y ago
  > Rich people naturally hold more power, proportionally to their wealth. This ends up being a cop out. Everyone consumes, and rich people consume less than poor people relative to their wealth. Generally rich people get rich by selling stuff people want. > Right now we can blame government officials and the rich people who benefited from pollution and paid them. And we can also blame poor people for putting those rich people in power and consuming their wares.
  - makomk 5y ago
    > Everyone consumes, and rich people consume less than poor people relative to their wealth. Which, of course, means that all this talk about blaming the rich are a distraction from one unavoidable thing: since most of the consumption comes from ordinary people and not the rich, any substantial decrease in consumption has to come from them too. It's the ordinary masses that will lose the ability to travel abroad (and probably be limited in their ability to travel within their own country), who won't be able to see their friends and family so much anymore, who will lose a lot of the daily comforts of life. Blaming the rich can't change that. Guardian headlines about how "just 100 companies" are responsible for most emissions based on counting all emissions from the fossil fuels produced by them as their emissions, regardless of whether they're being burnt in everyone's cars and to heat everyone's homes, won't change that either. All it does is hopefully distract blame from the activists trying to take things away from everyone.
orthecreedence 5y ago
This argument assumes even distribution of wealth, which is a remarkably bad assumption. Most consumers are put in the position of having to choose between different variations of economic survival and weighing in options like carbon-neutrality is often completely out of the question in favor of other products that are cheaper (granted, they're only cheaper because "the elites" have found a way to externalize the costs of their production onto the rest of society). So yes, when the distribution of wealth is enormously skewed towards the elites, and production follows capital, it is absolutely the fault of "the elites." Don't give me astronomically less voting power than others and then blame me for not saving the world with my vote.

akudha 5y ago

Do you realize the amount of money poured into propaganda/brain washing of the electorate? Even if all voters suddenly become super informed overnight, it is still hard to vote for good politicians (the very few) because of issues like gerrymandering etc? Yes, voters should take responsibility. But too much destruction comes from the elites. But feel free to support them. When this planet is ravaged by the effects of climate change, no elite will help you. They have their bunkers built and ready to move in.

j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
Gerrymandering is only a problem (with respect to climate change) if around half of the voters don't care about climate change. As you said, there are good politicians. Its us that do not vote for them. In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections, the Green party have really nice results in polls. However, when it comes to the election, people prefer reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing the climate. People DO know about climate change. There IS good information available online. Its not that people have no idea what's happening. They just don't care to do something themselves - there's enough other people to fix it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one feels responsible to reply. > But feel free to support them. I never said I support them. I said we could easily get rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by them.
- Retric 5y ago
  Gerrymandering can give a great deal of power to ~26% of the population. It takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759 people has exactly as much power as California with 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number of voters it needs to please would avoid California. After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and who cares about anything else.
  - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
    > t takes just over 1/2 the seats in a congress to control legislation, and ~1/2 the voters in those locations. 1/2 * ~1/2 ~= 1/4 I don't follow. I assume turnout would have to be taken into account? Also, I was specifically saying "voters", not "population" (more by luck, though) ;-) > The US senate is even more extreme. Yeah that's very true. Weren't some of the sates basically only created to give a certain party the majority? Forgot where I read or heard that though.
    - whoooooo123 5y ago
      Suppose there are 100 seats in parliament. To gain political power, you need to win 51 seats. So in theory you could get (50+epsilon)% of the votes in each of 51 seats, and 0 votes in any of the other 49 seats and hold power, despite only getting ~25% of the overall vote (assuming the population is evenly distributed among the seats). Actually you don't even need to get that many votes. Depending on the electoral system you might not need to win a majority of the votes in any constituency, you just need more votes than anyone else, which could be a very low percentage if the opposition is split enough ways. The current governing party in the UK holds a comfortable majority of seats despite only winning 43% of the vote in the last election. And in fact, this was the highest vote share received by any party in decades. Labour in 1997 won more seats on a lower vote share. > Weren't some of the sates basically only created to give a certain party the majority? I've read that the reason Dakota Territory was split in two (North and South) upon statehood was mainly as a cynical ploy to get two extra senate seats for the favoured party.
      - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
        > So in theory you could get (50+epsilon)% of the votes in each of 51 seats, and 0 votes in any of the other 49 seats and hold power, despite only getting ~25% of the overall vote Ah ok, got it. However, probably an unlikely scenario even in a "segregated" (republicans vs democrats) country as the US. But yeah - the reality right now that 40, 45% of the votes are enough for - in the case of the US - the republicans to win is pretty bad already. > Depending on the electoral system you might not need to win a majority of the votes in any constituency, In Germany we have two ways to get into the Bundestag (national parliament) - the one is a "Direktmandat" (the candidate with the most votes in one county county gets the seat), the other is via the party ticket. The parties have lists of candidates, and depending on their percentage of the total vote, the first X candidates get a seat. That system tries to balance between each county getting the representative in they favor, but also representing the relative votes via the party ticket.
- waihtis 5y ago
  Is the green party in Germany really a primarily green party or is it like the Finnish green party, which is simultaneously green and hardcore leftist? Asking because that is why voting for the green party may be a huge turnoff for many (like myself.)
  - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
    Luckily, nowadays they pretty much got rid of their fundamentalist/leftwing arm. They kinda turned "conservative", but in a positive sense. In my opinion, them being a possible choice for conservative voters keeps our conservative party from doing too much rightwing crap, as they will know they'll loose voters to the Greens. We'll see how stuff goes in September (national elections). Under the hood, there's still lots of rightwing tendencies in our conservative party, unfortunately.
    - waihtis 5y ago
      What do you constitute as rightwing crap, out of interest?
      - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
        For example, appealing to voters of this party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany Its an officially extremist party (observed by the "Verfassungsschutz" [or: "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution"], that traditionally kind of ignored the far-right), one of their leaders can officially be called a fascist (court ruling), and another leader says the 3rd Reich was kind of not that big of a deal.
        waihtis 5y ago
        Figured since we can observe the same phenomena everywhere in EU. Regardless, by this point I think it is inevitable some of the hardcore right wing politics will enter mainstream; we (as in Europe as a whole) took too many immigrants without any consideration of how to manage them. Lest anyone try to throw the nazi card my way it should be stated that this is a failure born from rigid top-down management structure of the EU which does not even remotely have the flexibility required to manage external shock events like this. Same reason why the joint debt mechanism being forced on the excuse of COVID is a horrible idea and will end in tears for many.

SyzygistSix 5y ago

This is a very good summation of the problem. People do not want to change their consumer habits and their voting choices reflect that.

me_me_me 5y ago

Look at those stupid surfs not wanting to have land and freedom. Sucking up to their lords. > Yeah but sure, it's always "the feudalism" fault. M'kay.

refurb 5y ago
Are you arguing as a consumer you have no control over the products you buy or the energy sources you use? Because that’s not true.
- Forbo 5y ago
  Consumers don't have as much choice as you make it out to be. I can't choose the sourcing of my power utility's generation. Nor can I choose to get an EV because my home doesn't have the ability to support charging. So I'm stuck with buying renewable energy credits from a third party in order to attempt to offset the dirty power generation sources and driving an inferior hybrid car.
  - j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
    But we don't even make use of the little choice that we have. And for example in Germany, you can choose electricity providers that only use renewables.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Because people have neither time nor money for any of this. Most of the population worries about short-term things like "having food on the table", "keeping that job", "keeping myself healthy", "giving my children a better future, so that their lives aren't as hard as mine". We've just signed a new contract with our electricity provider in Poland. Renewable usage didn't even enter the discussion - none of us even realized there's a choice there. Only when reading the details of the agreement I realized the provider is committing themselves to deliver electricity from renewable sources. So now, I'm powering my computer with green energy, and so is likely my entire neighbourhood. Not because any of us made that choice - it's because the power company did. Systemic incentives are what's needed to save us. Getting a power company to go green is much more cost-effective than trying to make an equivalent number of consumers to switch individually.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Rich people naturally hold more power, proportionally to their wealth. They're also likely to have played a part in technology which create pollution. Because we have a government which uses threat of violence to exert extra power even if they don't have money, it's natural to blame them as well. If we were living in complete anarchy, we would definitely hold the polluter accountable for polluting the world and demand some retribution, possibly using a private court system and some underlying threat of violence (which can be externalised through agencies specialised in that). Right now we can blame government officials and the rich people who benefited from pollution and paid them.

zepto 5y ago
> Rich people naturally hold more power, proportionally to their wealth. This ends up being a cop out. Everyone consumes, and rich people consume less than poor people relative to their wealth. Generally rich people get rich by selling stuff people want. > Right now we can blame government officials and the rich people who benefited from pollution and paid them. And we can also blame poor people for putting those rich people in power and consuming their wares.
- makomk 5y ago
  > Everyone consumes, and rich people consume less than poor people relative to their wealth. Which, of course, means that all this talk about blaming the rich are a distraction from one unavoidable thing: since most of the consumption comes from ordinary people and not the rich, any substantial decrease in consumption has to come from them too. It's the ordinary masses that will lose the ability to travel abroad (and probably be limited in their ability to travel within their own country), who won't be able to see their friends and family so much anymore, who will lose a lot of the daily comforts of life. Blaming the rich can't change that. Guardian headlines about how "just 100 companies" are responsible for most emissions based on counting all emissions from the fossil fuels produced by them as their emissions, regardless of whether they're being burnt in everyone's cars and to heat everyone's homes, won't change that either. All it does is hopefully distract blame from the activists trying to take things away from everyone.

orthecreedence 5y ago

This argument assumes even distribution of wealth, which is a remarkably bad assumption. Most consumers are put in the position of having to choose between different variations of economic survival and weighing in options like carbon-neutrality is often completely out of the question in favor of other products that are cheaper (granted, they're only cheaper because "the elites" have found a way to externalize the costs of their production onto the rest of society). So yes, when the distribution of wealth is enormously skewed towards the elites, and production follows capital, it is absolutely the fault of "the elites." Don't give me astronomically less voting power than others and then blame me for not saving the world with my vote.