Late Stage Capitalism

engage the rest of us on the subject.

you're not owed engagement on any topic. their claim stands on its own merits on its face.

Right now your behavior makes me think you’re not discussing this in good faith and your intent is malicious not collegial.

That's because the only outcome you will ever accept is lesser evil voting. You imagine that anyone who is against lesser evil voting is either misinformed or malicious.

Just because you don't want to face the possibility that your voting strategy doesn't work doesn't mean that people who point it out are bad faith actors.

You’ve replied with an uncharitable and inaccurate summarization of my comment

That wasn't my intent. My intent was to take your words and show you a very common situation in which your words did not accurately reflect reality. Gerrymandering is a thing specifically because it is not true that every time you vote you move things towards a better outcome. I didn't take your words uncharitably, I took them as your wrote them and then applied them to the realities of voting in the US.

I was just surprised that your comment in general is just a word cloud and doesn’t actually elevate your claim into a “point” by supporting it or expanding on the thought. Your contributions to this thread continue to be an incoherent gish gallop mess.

I disagree, but I'll see what I can do.

Voting, in general, is powerless to change the power structure in the United States of America. It was designed this way by the founders for the explicit purpose of preventing the masses from having influence over the power structure of the country. This is why the founders debated so much. They needed the support of the masses, so they had to create a system that gave them legitimacy, but they refused to allow the masses to actually determine the direction of the country. Madison, 5th president, is most famous for writing and speeches on this position. The Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and many other structures were designed explicitly to remove the risk of voting changing anything that really mattered. This is the legacy of our country.

Today, that legacy has only been enhanced. Because the masses have never been in charge, and never gotten power, they have never been able to undo the deliberate disempowerment from the founding. Instead, the power elite have been in charge the entire time, and every time the masses have approached more power, it has been the power elite in position to either appease or dominate and then immediately act to remove whatever mechanism the masses were able to use to gain power.

We see this with the Civil Rights movement, where the expansion of Civil Rights was won by black people and white people getting together and rioting in the streets. The response was the War on Drugs, targeting both the drugs used by white people most likely to collaborate with black people, and targeting the drugs use by black people. Both D and R have participated in the drug war, maintained the disenfranchisement, maintained the mass incarceration from it, and maintained the justification of police violence and constant police expansion.

Voting hasn't done a single thing about it. Civil rights was won by violence in the streets and voting hasn't stopped any of the elite processes used to erode what was won.

We see the same thing with labor rights. It was unionization and Marxism that won us weekends, 8-hour work days, unemployment insurance, social security, and so many other things. Is it any wonder that immediately after these things we see Red Scares, purges, and union busting? Is it any wonder that both parties did these things collaboratively and continued them across many administrations? Labor didn't win by voting, they won by fighting. And then all of the mechanisms they used to win were stripped away by both parties.

Do you understand what I'm saying? The point is that voting is designed to aesthetically give the appearance of being an avenue for change for the governed, but it is designed mechanically to explicitly not be an avenue of change for the governed. The point is that the administration of the country is shared between the two parties who have shared interests against the masses, and the elite have always had this unbroken shared interest since the founding of the country. They have always collaborated to stop the masses from expressing their power. The evidence for this is that every single expression of power done by the masses historically resulted in appeasement followed immediately by bipartisan collaboration to dismantle every mechanism used by the masses during that expression of power.

Still bad faith and malice?