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Every election, while I'm working on filling out my sample ballot, I visit the candidates' websites to see what they claim to stand for. Almost without exceptio
by dehrmann 1y ago
Every election, while I'm working on filling out my sample ballot, I visit the candidates' websites to see what they claim to stand for. Almost without exception, there's never any depth or nuance to their stances, and it's sprinkled with fearmongering dog whistles.
Politics is dumb because the electorate lacks a deeper understanding of policies and tradeoffs, so shallow, partisan takes win elections. The problem isn't that a Dickensian metaphor went over the heads of college literature students; it's that practically all the information most adults consume is intellectual junk food, and people aren't used to challenging their views or taking on different perspective.
- Taek 1y agoI would say it's a different problem. The winner is pretty much always the candidate that gets the most eyeballs. A voting based political structure is fundamentally deeply biased towards visibility, and candidates that can get bigger reach with their message will get more votes independent of how low quality that message is. That has caused all popular vote based politics around the entire planet to converge on simple, viral messaging, and inflammatory messaging tends to be more viral. The other way to phrase it would be to say that popular vote systems hold politicians accountable to the number of eyeballs their antics reach, and we need to switch to a system that holds politicians accountable to the success of their policies.
- Whoppertime 1y agoI'm not sure that Biden had more eyeballs in 2020 but this seems generally true