Of course, this raises the related question that if people are considering getting themselves thrown in prison for the food and housing, that says a lot about the state of social services in that country and maybe something else needs fixing more badly.

Generally that’s where I would peg that as a train of thought, yeah. I don’t think you need an incentive to keep people from going to prison. People don’t want to go to prison, generally, it’s not a good thing even in, say, Finland, or whatever other example people want to use. People sticking up a bank for one dollar to get healthcare isn’t a state of affairs that you have if you already have free healthcare. Trying to get arrested to avoid homelessness isn’t a problem if you can already avoid homelessness through normal social institutions. In fact, I’d say that avoiding homelessness through conventional means is greatly idealm considering a shit ton of homeless people interface with the law, and are arrested and processed regularly, and lots of inmates are homeless immediately upon getting out. It’s a whole system, not just in one part, which is what makes it so hard to get rid of or reform away, and perhaps even impossible.

The State should not force the prisoners to work, but it also shouldn’t be the State’s responsibility to provide janitors or cooks to look after them.

You should understand that this represents a logistical problem for the prison. Now they have to ensure that prisoners are certified and trained to handle food, no small feat, and you also have to be conscious of the idea that prisoners could pretty easily stop doing dishes, making food, eating food, as a form of hunger strike, in order to protest the very fact that they’re being made to make food, on top of the fact that they’re being extricated from society, deprived of the right to be a productive member of society, deprived of the ability to socialize with other people that aren’t criminals, deprived of free access to information, really, any freedom whatsoever.

That’s along with the argument the other commenter brought up, about prisoners just organizing themselves into a de-facto government where the most shat on prisoners will have to do everything. If you decide to come up with a constant rotation, a chore wheel, then at a certain level this just devolves into massive levels of prison corruption, where a couple bribes to a couple prisoner guards can change around some labor forms and then suddenly, again, the most shat upon prisoners are doing all the labor.

You don’t eliminate these inefficiencies at any point, either, these inefficiencies rear their heads more the more people you arrest and put into the prison, the more things you criminalize, the higher the recidivism rates. None of these issues resolve magically, they get worse.

This is effectively just the same as advocating for the status quo as it currently exists, with the only minor difference between, say, making license plates or fighting fires, being that instead, they’re just doing domestic labor which is much closer to them in proximity, and easier for you to think of as their personal responsibility to handle. That doesn’t matter so much, what matters in reality here are the numbers.

The idea is that you’re trying to recoup the costs immediately through something like a labor camp, which is what this still is. That’s sort of an option of last resort, or an option that is used, in most circumstances, as it is right now, for members of political opposition or other kinds of outright status-quo threats. You instead should make the calculation in the broad strokes, years down the line. Can these murderers, thieves, and perhaps even, gasp, loiterers, be taught to be functioning members of society? Can they give back more than they have taken from the taxpayer over the course of their life? More than just for the individuals, but can these prisoners do this on the whole?

That’s the way you should be thinking about this, not “Can we save 15 bucks here and there by not paying someone to clean up or cook for the prisoners?”. By framing it like that, you’ve bought into the argument that supports the status quo organization, here.

no no, I think it’s really that she wasn’t horribly racist enough. really, it’s that she didn’t tack hard enough to the right. she should’ve promised to build two walls, one on canada too. she should’ve promised to kill the palestinians even faster, actually, she should’ve resurrected the corpse of kissinger and then sent him to michigan to explain why they needed to die. THAT will solve things.

Oh no, the poor CIA agents. Anyways

Did you even read any of that shit at all, or did you just decide to respond with a catty nothing clapback that preserves your own ego, while also calling me like. I dunno, pretentious, I guess?

Go read through that thread I linked, then read through the politics thread before that, and the thread before that. I dunno, just like, have been on the internet since the year 2000. Maybe even before. This shit, with the same exact responses, happens every election cycle, with the same idiotic arguments trotted out every year about whatever stupid issue decides to crop to the forefront, and nobody can ever elevate the conversation to actually be about what voting actually does, or what activism actually looks like. So the needle never gets moved. It’s all just, totally confined to some spectacular conversation where people decide to removed about politics as though they’re talking about celebrity drama. Nobody ever breaks through, everybody stays in their own little chambers, in their own little boxes, exactly where they’re supposed to be.

All of what I’m saying in that post, which I’ve probably made like, 4 or 5 times at this point, on this website alone, to say nothing of the times I’ve had to make that post on sites before it, is basic, civics 101 level stuff. It’s the basic functioning of the system in which we live, probably shit you should be required to learn before you start voting.

Fuck me, I guess, for being tired of restating myself over and over and over and over and over and over again, drowned out among a chorus of people deciding to actively harm the harris campaign by vote-scolding, like what you’re doing, which measurably, tangibly harms the thing you seem to want to succeed. I guarantee you, we all already know that the third parties are not going to get elected president. We all already know that shit.

I’m gonna lose it

I would like to point out that this is just what robin hood is

No yeah even most people that live here can’t do shit about it. It’s basically celebrity shit, to most people, it’s just that they’re obviously going to removed about it because it maybe tenuously has an effect on their lives. We may be cooked

It keeps happening! I’m losing it!

I dunno about this shit I’m probably just voting PSL.

basically, the US is a one party system, but it has two parties

Yeah this place is definitely just like, getting canvassed hardcore. big rip

You could still probably blow with your mouth if you didn’t have your lungs connected, I imagine it would involve a kind of burping type of action. I think the bigger problem would be that if your nostrils closed up, you wouldn’t be able to breathe, and probably also talking would be a lot harder if your vocal chords and mouth were separate from your main air sacs.

I think the solution is probably just an easily opened and closed internal valve that separates the stomach and the lungs, rather than this bullshit we currently have with two separate valves that lead into both and open for one and then close for the other whenever it’s required. It’s still good to be able to close both when you want to, but you can already close your mouth on command, and another valve with the nose is a notable upgrade in that it keeps everyone from smelling bad smells they don’t wanna smell, and it also doesn’t take any more valves than we already have.

There’s probably some way you could fix this all with enough surgical intervention, I bet…

Do you have any actual argument other than just saying “Bullshit. your vote matters.” though? Anything more to back that up, with a basis in how the system actually functions? Do you think the democrats will legitimately provide a challenge to FPTP voting? To the electoral college? Do you think the republicans will? How would that get overturned, what would that actually look like?

They will do what people voters want.

https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/idr.pdf

In addition to that, I really think Dems want left policy.

ACA, or green energy, or EVs, or union empowerment (inb4), or student debt forgiveness, or Chips act, or Pact act, etc, etc

Romneycare, a 5% token movements towards a correct approach, and also private industry funding, a good single issue, a post-covid handout, and more private industry funding mechanisms.

Yeah, see, that’s why I asked you those questions about what your actual political affiliations are. What is your definition of “left policy”? Economic stimulation by approving more contracts for private industry is not “left policy”, neither are means tested, highly qualified welfare programs. What do you think about the democrats moving to the right on the border, and doing absolutely nothing to combat the insane slew of lies that the republicans have been spouting for, say, the last 30 years? And they are lies, indeed. All this bluster over 3.3%, or maybe 14%, of the population, which is according to every study on the planet pretty much better behaved and provides more in to the system than your average citizen. I have basically never seen a democratic candidate actually give out any statistics to counter that narrative. They have only shifted further rightward.

Yeah you’ve lost sight of the very mechanism of government.

No. I fully understand that outside of a couple gerrymandered swing states that vote for electoral college members which then go on to maybe vote for who they have been told to vote for by the public, votes do not matter. I understand that this is something which is by design.

What you’re doing here with endless questions is what I call fishing. You’re fishing for something that you disagree with me on so that you can comfortably ignore everything I say.

Yes. “This does not help your cause” -Guy who hates your cause

If you don’t agree with the core positions, then we probably need to be talking about those core positions more than we need to be talking about who to vote for.

Honestly you’re pretty much doing the exact same thing. So this will be my only reply. Peace.

Why even engage in the conversation in the first place, then?

The democrats have also drifted rightward on deportation in this election, saying that they’ll be harder on the border than trump was in 2016, which, again, they already had been doing. The cost benefit here is an argument over whether or not one or the other will be like, 5% worse, and some of us, like you’ve just been sent evidence for in the previous comment, aren’t even convinced that the democrats will be any better.

Perhaps there is a third approach here, yes? Perhaps there is something in the specifics of this lack of actual, tangible democracy that exists for people, that means your specific vote is mostly meaningless anyways, which means it’s freed up to be thrown at some third party candidate, yes? Do you live in a swing state? Do you live in a gerrymandered swing district in one of said swing states? Do you live in a state where your electoral college candidate has to obey your vote? If the answer to any of those was no, then congrats, you basically have free reign to vote for whoever actually aligns closest to your beliefs, because your vote doesn’t actually matter.

I think it’s actually mostly a product of the overton window kind of being split, but, not really split in the ways that you might think. It’s not so much that each party is getting more extreme in what their actual beliefs are, it’s just that people are getting more extreme in their rhetoric, more extreme in their isolation. This, if anything, encourages people they disagree with not to vote. You need only look beneath these kinds of posts to see the sheer amount of people that chirp up, disagree at any time, and then totally fail to be convinced.

No, much like underpantsweevil said, this is purely something that’s for the in-group, to make them feel good, to make them feel like they’re doing something productive, and more than any of that, it’s a way for them to work out ideological insecurities and reinforce pre-existing beliefs. Which further feeds into that rhetorical isolation. Keep that running for 30 years online (maybe more like 10 if you’re just considering web 2.0), and you shake out to about where we are now. Continue this for another 10 or 20 years and you’re probably directly headed for some absolutely heinous shit as the gulf gets wider and wider.

The actual incentive that they have should ideally be actual political activism that exercises some real and material form of leverage against their power. Seeing as these movements have all been totally deconstructed, mostly by the federal government, instead, you’ll find that the way you’re supposed to change the party is just by voting harder for them, and then just kind of hoping that they somehow naturally decide to swing left, after you’ve already handed them the keys to the kingdom. It’s pure cope, basically.

this is basically just a long ass history of saying that even when they give the left policy, the left never shows up, so it wouldn’t make any sense basically ever in the future for them to implement any leftist policy at any future point. we have to assume that they’re rational actors rather than idiots, and that they’re going to keep doing the thing that, according to you, makes them succeed. there’s no amount of local grassroots “just vote harder” -ing that is suddenly going to get those left wing voters to suddenly pop up if there isn’t any left wing policy proposals. so the democrats don’t go left because they won’t win, and the left wing voters don’t show up because there’s no left wing policy.

I also like the idea that actual populist, left wing policy implementations only ever cost them, only ever make them lose votes. also, this idea that they’d move left suddenly if they started winning, just, basically for no reason they’d start moving left, is awesome. very cool. by what mechanism would they move left? why? by what mechanism would the left actually have any leverage over them, in that circumstance? sure, they’d lose the votes, but then they’d actually have to implement left wing policy, which means they would totally be fucking over their much more important corporate and media sponsorships, and they’d also be basically eviscerating their own political power. you can see this in the very simple example of “no democrat will ever change the fptp system”, because then they would stop getting elected, because they benefit from that being the voting system. this is basically the same principle by which they won’t, say, do massive amounts of housing ownership reform.

also, what’s your opinion on serious housing reform? what do you think about that, what do you think about, say, eliminating massive rental companies, or nationalizing them, constructing a large amount of housing, and then providing it for free to people, thus making them less dependent on their job and more secure in order to take risks on, say, doing actual forms of political activism? what do you think about the same being done for healthcare? employment? can you see any reason why the people who are currently in power might not want any of that to actually occur? can you think of any possible reason why those people which are currently in power might not want that shit to exist precisely because they have been selected by those systems as a product of their reinforcement of those systems? to break it down more, perhaps, why do you think CEOs tend to be incompetent assholes? is it just because of some like, cosmic trick, or is there perhaps a system there that’s going to reward incompetent assholes over people who actually have beliefs?

also, I find it funny how you’re accusing the guy you’re talking to of having a narrow interpretation of history, that they’re construing everything to work around, but then you’re also turning around and saying “it’s just so simple: the left never shows up, so the democrats will never go to the left!”, and then retroactively giving an incredibly simplified and narrow retelling of history in order to support your point. any mention of the absolute slew of right wing legislation, that any of these people have pushed, which might be a reason why the left might not be showing up for them?

Time is a flat circle, except the cycle comes back around again every second. The same conversations over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Had at such frequency, with such vitriol, it is totally indistinguishable from pure noise. It’s like a root canal for your brain.

Someone brings up wanting to not vote, on some principle. Could be Gaza, could be them not so slowly capitulating to the right on every issue since FDR got out of office, to the point that we’re now running george dubya 2 as president. Then someone says, ah, well, you should vote democrat anyways, because they’re better than republicans. Then we get one of two answers, we either get, ah, well, no they aren’t, or, they aren’t better on this one particular issue that I care about, so fuck it, right. Which is not a super convincing counterargument. Or, we get the real argument, we get the deeper dive into the actual political process, which we all collectively understand to be completely fucked as to basically be unrecoverable, and yet still, somehow, this is a source of constant disagreement. Usually because people who don’t know any alternative have deluded themselves into cynically caping for the same broken system as some form of what is basically escapism.

Ah, not in a swing state? You live in a population center? Seems like your vote doesn’t matter, better luck next time. Ahh, you don’t live in one of like, twelve counties in those swing states? Ahh, well, seems like your vote doesn’t matter, either, because of gerrymandering, so, sucks to suck for you. Ahh, well, guess the electorate decided to pick someone different than what you voted for, so, better luck next time. The democrats lost? Ahh, well, if only the left had turned up to vote. You just gotta vote, and then we’ll be granted such an overwhelming victory that we will be able to implement all of the milquetoast reforms you’ve ever wanted! The democrats win? Ahh, well, time to pull to the right twelve more degrees, since we’ve won the race, and now whatever the voters care about doesn’t fucking matter at all. The democrats win, but then the supreme court decides to veto the recount because the voting system in a single state was so totally and completely fucked? Ahh, well, looks like we gotta go kill a million fucking people in iraq for oil money, champ, sorry about that.

It’s especially fucking insane because the idea of voting for them in the first place is an acknowledgement that we live in a FPTP system where you cynically have to vote for the lesser evil. Every other qualification and quality that the system has, which makes it worse? That shit doesn’t exist. We’re taking the most simplified, common idiot stance, here. It is so insane that I struggle to think that it’s not just bad faith drudgery. Out of the 350 million, only like 5% of that are people who even approach mattering, and, as we also know, it’s kind of dubious even then. So, if those are the only people whose votes matter, and we all FUCKING know that, then why the hell am I inundated with constant removed and moaning and whining about how I just simple NEED to vote democrat or else nooo nooo we’re going to be plunged into literally a hitlerian dystopia like handmaid’s tail? Look around you, look at what is currently happening.

Oh no! Another democratic senator has decided to stand in opposition to this bill, narrowly swinging the votes around and keeping us deadlocked into an eternal hell where nothing except bipartisan things like border spending, foreign policy, spending on the military industrial complex, banning shit like tiktok, and the basic foundational elements of neoliberal economic policy ever get done. Whatever shall we do? Guess the answer is just to vote harder!

If the democrats did actually get an overwhelming victory, you wouldn’t get FDR again. They’ve been very clear about exactly what their policies are, and they’ve calculated that position as a way to push the buck as far in favor of their corporate sponsors and themselves as they can get away with, while both winning, and also presenting a constant war to the public where it’s a struggle to get anything done. The narrowest margin of victory is actually a boon, in that circumstance. It means they can both run on unpopular policy and they can make it look as though they’re trying to get things done and oops whoops they’re just narrowly failing. If they somehow got a massive win on that platform, probably through some absolutely massive unforced error by republicans. I don’t even know what that would look like, at this point. They would probably all have to collectively catch a disease and die simultaneously, and I think that would probably also spell chaos for the nation. You wouldn’t see the dems suddenly run to the left, after that, because the left would have basically no leverage over them, no bargaining power, no hand in their win. You especially wouldn’t see them drift to the left because THAT’S NOT WHAT THEY’RE FUCKING CAMPAIGNING ON. SO THAT CAN’T BE WHY THEY GOT ELECTED. The only way they would get that majority in the first place is basically through them moving to the left to begin with, which as previously described, they will never do, or, worse off, and what they are currently trying to happen, is if like, 40 - 50% of the population suddenly drifted super rightward and became neocons.

No democratic party politician is some secret communist that, ah, once they get an 80% majority, after enough election engineering, enough rightward drift, enough calculations that they can get into power unilaterally, then, suddenly then they’ll become a communist. The most you might see is that republicans, after losing so badly, might make a better run at implementation of actually populist policies, but then that’s kind of obviously a nonstarter for them because they’re ALSO owned by corporate entities and they’re ALSO doing this same exact gambit. The idea of getting a huge win somehow also relies on the utter delusion that you can outflank the republican party from the right, or, outflank them with your competence at right-wing policy. You could maybe outflank them in competence, but that’s both not a good thing, obviously, and it also wouldn’t matter to their core base of delusional evangelical suburban whites that have an outsized amount of voting power and oil money.

The reason some people think this, if they even do, and aren’t just assuming whatever cynical position they have to in order to push things around, is because they’re idealistic and totally delusional about the incentives the system naturally produces. How people in power go through many filters that all but guarantee they’ll be acting in their own self-interest by the time they reach the top. There’s no secret leftist that is going to reach a presidential level of power and then suddenly come down and save us all. I’d love to be proven wrong there, but it’s not fucking happening.

And you know what’s the worst about all this shit? Every election cycle, every single time, at the one time when there is the most political interest flaring up in the population, we are met with this fucking insanely dumb conversation that we have over and over and over and over and over again. It eats up space that could otherwise be reserved for actual serious conversations about strategic voting, how to look into local policies and politicians and how to vote for them, where those resources are, how to organize, how to gain political leverage, how to unionize your workplace, how to stage a protest, participate in a protest, when a protest should even be done and what amount of political leverage such an act might buy you. None of that ever gets talked about. Instead we need like a year out of every four where the only political conversations anyone is capable of having is this repetitive overly simplified bullshit. This ideological poison which totally stymies any serious dialogue. And then turn around and wonder why nobody except the dumbest and most aggressive sacks of shit on the planet, that are obviously just taking out their anger issues actually want to talk to you about this shit, sacks of shit like me. It’s insane. I don’t understand how we keep falling down the stairs. I don’t understand how this keeps happening.