4 ms·

Since you're ignoring the thought experiment, let's see what remains in your reply. It sounds like you are reasoning that harm is fine when it morally shouldn'

Since you're ignoring the thought experiment, let's see what remains in your reply. It sounds like you are reasoning that harm is fine when it morally shouldn't be, regardless of the technical (legislative, executive, judicial) track you're on. I believe that is bad.

SllX 4y ago
You didn’t have a thought experiment, just a straw man. I thought I was clear on that point. Overwriting substantial portions of a law that took effect in 2020 with another law passed in 2020 isn’t “harmful” and doesn’t rank with your hypothetical anti-thumbs bill. > It sounds like you are reasoning that harm is fine when it morally shouldn't be That is exactly what I did not say, that is what you are attempting to reduce my argument to because you believe your position was morally superior and you don’t want to concede the legitimacy of my vote having voted for the losing position. I’m okay with you thinking your position was morally superior—it’s not, never was and we clearly disagree but I was done persuading people the moment the polls closed on November 3rd 2020—but having lost, you don’t have carte blanche to deny the election’s result nor its legitimacy. The “No” voters have exactly the same voting rights as the “Yes” voters, and they were outnumbered by a difference of 2,930,605 votes, nor are either the “Yes” voters or “No” voters morally superior people to each other for having held their positions and voted the way they did. So lacking carte blanche and moral superiority, why under the laws of California and the United States should my vote and the other 9,958,424 people who voted “Yes” on Prop 22 in 2020 be nullified when we have deemed ballot propositions for good or for ill to be a legitimate form of lawmaking in the State of California?
- oneplane 4y ago
  Nobody here is talking about nullifying votes (well except you), and your bad faith argumentation leaves no more room for actual conversation.
  - SllX 4y ago
    Context! This was the question that was posed by the parent: >>> At what point does blatant advertising/propaganda meaningfully undermine human agency? I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of question you ask when you want to question the legitimacy of something, e.g. a vote. There was a lot of controversy around the amount of money spent by the “Yes on 22” campaign that the “No on 22” camp hasn’t stopped complaining about since the election, and behave as if money, not the votes cast by the literal millions of people who cast them with a nearly 3 million vote differential, was the only deciding factor, so it’s not an unreasonable read given context. This was the question I counterposed: >> so do you want to tell me why my vote should be nullified other than you disagree with the outcome? You’re not the parent, but you are the one that picked up the mantle, quoting the end of my argument. This is the question through which all of my comments have been framed. We don’t have to continue, but keep the context in mind if you do, because as I just said, I’m not looking to persuade anyone on Proposition 22 and haven’t been for over two years, nor do entirely hypothetical anti-thumb bills interest me. Prop 22 already passed and it wasn’t even close, nor was the issue anywhere near mass bodily mutilation; but if somebody would like to explain to me why my vote should be nullified other than because they disagree with the outcome, that’s what I’m here for and I said so from the start. Cheers!
    - uoaei 4y ago
      > that’s the kind of question you ask when you want to question the legitimacy of something, e.g. a vote This and similar kinds of assumptions are why you have earned the label "bad-faith" in this thread. You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote" and in the process ruining any attempts at a meaningful exploration of the effects of propaganda on the governance of our society. I am OP, and I stopped engaging because I have learned that when someone wants to push the conversation in ways that you have demonstrated above, there is no point in hoping they may then develop a more considerate approach.
      - SllX 4y ago
        > You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote" and in the process ruining any attempts at a meaningful exploration of the effects of propaganda on the governance of our society. So here’s the thing about that. Advertising, marketing, propaganda are effectively the same words but with different connotations, but more importantly they are at their core information which exists in a competitive information environment and can inform voter’s choices (“inform” in the loosest sense, information does not have to be correct by any definition to be informative) which in turn has an effect on their preferences and feeds back into policy choices and the politicians they vote for who are in turn informed by voter preferences, propaganda, advertising, lobbying, privileged information, etc. in a nice tight feedback loop. As I said at the start: > “Regularly and governments live and die on their ability to advertise their policies and propagate their message in a convincing fashion.” This is a given for governance. But knowing that, can you still question the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome if it follows the laws of the political environment in which it is set? I would say “No”. Going back to Prop 22, it was a three position vote for the text of the Proposition in which the three possible choices were to vote “Yes”, vote “No” and not vote. “Yes” won and I always insist that abstaining is abstaining, but others will tend to boil that down to a vote for the winner or a vote for the loser, whichever is more politically convenient at a given moment of time. So perhaps I was overzealous in my reading of your question as the leading edge of a line of rhetoric which questions the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome—I am open to that possibility—but when the tally is taken at the end of a vote, per our laws, that is the outcome barring a pre-emption issue like in the manner AB5 itself was pre-empted by a Federal law as it applies to truckers who are independent contractors. Pre-emption is a legal issue however, the outcome of a vote is always a political issue and interested parties, Uber/Lyft, DoorDash, me, a bunch of others with similar concerns as me who also weren’t entirely happy with how little Prop 22 did but saw it as an acceptable compromise, we were all competing in the same information space as the “No on Prop 22” (formal and informal) people. All that money only gets you a chance to be heard though, and many never even see the ads or the propaganda and just go by the booklet the State mails out. If you can’t convince a majority of interested voters, you’re still going to lose and it just happened to work out for Uber and Lyft this time. Whether it is the “correct” system, it is the lawful system, one of the two in this State, by which we pass laws. Now if you want to talk about problems with ballot propositions, I’m here for that because it’s not a system I actually like either, but I would also be bringing to the table problems I have with California’s entire political system, not just the ballot propositions.

SllX 4y ago

You didn’t have a thought experiment, just a straw man. I thought I was clear on that point. Overwriting substantial portions of a law that took effect in 2020 with another law passed in 2020 isn’t “harmful” and doesn’t rank with your hypothetical anti-thumbs bill. > It sounds like you are reasoning that harm is fine when it morally shouldn't be That is exactly what I did not say, that is what you are attempting to reduce my argument to because you believe your position was morally superior and you don’t want to concede the legitimacy of my vote having voted for the losing position. I’m okay with you thinking your position was morally superior—it’s not, never was and we clearly disagree but I was done persuading people the moment the polls closed on November 3rd 2020—but having lost, you don’t have carte blanche to deny the election’s result nor its legitimacy. The “No” voters have exactly the same voting rights as the “Yes” voters, and they were outnumbered by a difference of 2,930,605 votes, nor are either the “Yes” voters or “No” voters morally superior people to each other for having held their positions and voted the way they did. So lacking carte blanche and moral superiority, why under the laws of California and the United States should my vote and the other 9,958,424 people who voted “Yes” on Prop 22 in 2020 be nullified when we have deemed ballot propositions for good or for ill to be a legitimate form of lawmaking in the State of California?

oneplane 4y ago
Nobody here is talking about nullifying votes (well except you), and your bad faith argumentation leaves no more room for actual conversation.
- SllX 4y ago
  Context! This was the question that was posed by the parent: >>> At what point does blatant advertising/propaganda meaningfully undermine human agency? I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of question you ask when you want to question the legitimacy of something, e.g. a vote. There was a lot of controversy around the amount of money spent by the “Yes on 22” campaign that the “No on 22” camp hasn’t stopped complaining about since the election, and behave as if money, not the votes cast by the literal millions of people who cast them with a nearly 3 million vote differential, was the only deciding factor, so it’s not an unreasonable read given context. This was the question I counterposed: >> so do you want to tell me why my vote should be nullified other than you disagree with the outcome? You’re not the parent, but you are the one that picked up the mantle, quoting the end of my argument. This is the question through which all of my comments have been framed. We don’t have to continue, but keep the context in mind if you do, because as I just said, I’m not looking to persuade anyone on Proposition 22 and haven’t been for over two years, nor do entirely hypothetical anti-thumb bills interest me. Prop 22 already passed and it wasn’t even close, nor was the issue anywhere near mass bodily mutilation; but if somebody would like to explain to me why my vote should be nullified other than because they disagree with the outcome, that’s what I’m here for and I said so from the start. Cheers!
  - uoaei 4y ago
    > that’s the kind of question you ask when you want to question the legitimacy of something, e.g. a vote This and similar kinds of assumptions are why you have earned the label "bad-faith" in this thread. You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote" and in the process ruining any attempts at a meaningful exploration of the effects of propaganda on the governance of our society. I am OP, and I stopped engaging because I have learned that when someone wants to push the conversation in ways that you have demonstrated above, there is no point in hoping they may then develop a more considerate approach.
    - SllX 4y ago
      > You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote" and in the process ruining any attempts at a meaningful exploration of the effects of propaganda on the governance of our society. So here’s the thing about that. Advertising, marketing, propaganda are effectively the same words but with different connotations, but more importantly they are at their core information which exists in a competitive information environment and can inform voter’s choices (“inform” in the loosest sense, information does not have to be correct by any definition to be informative) which in turn has an effect on their preferences and feeds back into policy choices and the politicians they vote for who are in turn informed by voter preferences, propaganda, advertising, lobbying, privileged information, etc. in a nice tight feedback loop. As I said at the start: > “Regularly and governments live and die on their ability to advertise their policies and propagate their message in a convincing fashion.” This is a given for governance. But knowing that, can you still question the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome if it follows the laws of the political environment in which it is set? I would say “No”. Going back to Prop 22, it was a three position vote for the text of the Proposition in which the three possible choices were to vote “Yes”, vote “No” and not vote. “Yes” won and I always insist that abstaining is abstaining, but others will tend to boil that down to a vote for the winner or a vote for the loser, whichever is more politically convenient at a given moment of time. So perhaps I was overzealous in my reading of your question as the leading edge of a line of rhetoric which questions the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome—I am open to that possibility—but when the tally is taken at the end of a vote, per our laws, that is the outcome barring a pre-emption issue like in the manner AB5 itself was pre-empted by a Federal law as it applies to truckers who are independent contractors. Pre-emption is a legal issue however, the outcome of a vote is always a political issue and interested parties, Uber/Lyft, DoorDash, me, a bunch of others with similar concerns as me who also weren’t entirely happy with how little Prop 22 did but saw it as an acceptable compromise, we were all competing in the same information space as the “No on Prop 22” (formal and informal) people. All that money only gets you a chance to be heard though, and many never even see the ads or the propaganda and just go by the booklet the State mails out. If you can’t convince a majority of interested voters, you’re still going to lose and it just happened to work out for Uber and Lyft this time. Whether it is the “correct” system, it is the lawful system, one of the two in this State, by which we pass laws. Now if you want to talk about problems with ballot propositions, I’m here for that because it’s not a system I actually like either, but I would also be bringing to the table problems I have with California’s entire political system, not just the ballot propositions.