I moved here from reddit because I feel like every time you try to open your mouth there about how important it is to vote, you get absolutely mobbed by so-called leftists who “just can’t reconcile their values with voting for biden” as if they are helping the world and their brave stance is going to help people.
Seriously, between this issue and the “bear VS men” debate, I just can’t anymore, I can’t deal with people, I have no idea what super-villain has irradiated the population with a density-ray, but people right now seem almost surreally ignorant, like I always knew it was bad, but I’m beginning to finally see after four and a half decades how bad it really is out there. And it’s far, far worse than any of us ever imagined.
I had a terse argument with someone in RL the other day who didn’t know what lava was. Like, the molten rock that comes out of volcanos? They never in their lives questioned what a volcano was, and just assumed all the “red goo” that comes out just has to get cleaned up after it cools, and that the government should try to plug volcanoes. It turned into an argument because he didn’t believe my “mainstream science” explanation.
It’s okay to be dumb out there, dumb is actually good, dumb can be fixed. What’s terrifying me for our future is the doubling-down on ignorance, the weird pride in “choosing your own truths.”
Trump may get elected again and this fact alone should terrify all of us. Not just for what Trump will do in office, but what it means for our population that there are enough people who have chosen an entirely separate set of axioms and truths about the world, and just fukkin discard actual, verifiable facts. Now we have AI exploding into the world and distorting things worse. We’re in a lot of trouble.
You know what terrifies me? Even if I vote for “Bad” it just takes a few thousand people in some other state to completely negate me doing the right thing and we get “Worse.” And then we’re just supposed to accept the results. Because them’s the rules. Oh well…
It’s a stupid system of government and I don’t blame people for checking out. I wish I could just ignore it, too.
My point isn’t that people shouldn’t vote - because clearly Worse is worse than Bad - but that we don’t get to vote for Better. For that we need to protest and agitate and get our skulls cracked in by thugs and possibly killed. Our history proves that nothing improves in America without violence.
This feels like semantics. There is “bad”, and there is an option that is “better”. I don’t know why folks feel like they need to use “bad” and “worse”, other than to build pessimism. The things people are upset about can’t easily fixed by presidents anyway - we need a large base of like minded representatives to do things like housing policy and universal healthcare and education reform and climate change. It’s a lot easier to break things than to improve peoples lives, which is why it’s critical not to elect people intent on breaking things.
I moved here from reddit because I feel like every time you try to open your mouth there about how important it is to vote, you get absolutely mobbed by so-called leftists who “just can’t reconcile their values with voting for biden” as if they are helping the world and their brave stance is going to help people.
Seriously, between this issue and the “bear VS men” debate, I just can’t anymore, I can’t deal with people, I have no idea what super-villain has irradiated the population with a density-ray, but people right now seem almost surreally ignorant, like I always knew it was bad, but I’m beginning to finally see after four and a half decades how bad it really is out there. And it’s far, far worse than any of us ever imagined.
I had a terse argument with someone in RL the other day who didn’t know what lava was. Like, the molten rock that comes out of volcanos? They never in their lives questioned what a volcano was, and just assumed all the “red goo” that comes out just has to get cleaned up after it cools, and that the government should try to plug volcanoes. It turned into an argument because he didn’t believe my “mainstream science” explanation.
It’s okay to be dumb out there, dumb is actually good, dumb can be fixed. What’s terrifying me for our future is the doubling-down on ignorance, the weird pride in “choosing your own truths.”
Trump may get elected again and this fact alone should terrify all of us. Not just for what Trump will do in office, but what it means for our population that there are enough people who have chosen an entirely separate set of axioms and truths about the world, and just fukkin discard actual, verifiable facts. Now we have AI exploding into the world and distorting things worse. We’re in a lot of trouble.
You know what terrifies me? Even if I vote for “Bad” it just takes a few thousand people in some other state to completely negate me doing the right thing and we get “Worse.” And then we’re just supposed to accept the results. Because them’s the rules. Oh well…
It’s a stupid system of government and I don’t blame people for checking out. I wish I could just ignore it, too.
My point isn’t that people shouldn’t vote - because clearly Worse is worse than Bad - but that we don’t get to vote for Better. For that we need to protest and agitate and get our skulls cracked in by thugs and possibly killed. Our history proves that nothing improves in America without violence.
This feels like semantics. There is “bad”, and there is an option that is “better”. I don’t know why folks feel like they need to use “bad” and “worse”, other than to build pessimism. The things people are upset about can’t easily fixed by presidents anyway - we need a large base of like minded representatives to do things like housing policy and universal healthcare and education reform and climate change. It’s a lot easier to break things than to improve peoples lives, which is why it’s critical not to elect people intent on breaking things.
I don’t need to build pessimism. I’ve been aware of politics since the late 80s, and voting since 2000. I’m plenty pessimistic already.