Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.
I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.
The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.
Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.
I simply want a sane democratic voting process.
And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.
From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.
I don't know man, I think people disappove of voting fraud and sockpuppeting rather unilaterally.
> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.
[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable
I read their comment a bit differently; I interpreted what they wrote as a combination of a number of things:
- what you're saying: that people will happily distort the meaning of words and events given enough desperation and/or interest in doing so - i agree
- that people do this commonly with these two topics: i do not see that at all, not from this framing at least - i think if people asked themselves if they disapprove of these things, they'd generally say yes. i think people generally do genuinely believe they are against these.
- that people are doing this maliciously (~ this is exclusively or near exclusively interest driven rather than desperation): i just plain don't think so. i think those who suspect election fraud do by and large legitimately believe it happened or happens. same for your example.
And so what I was more pushing back on was #2 and #3. Like it's not that I don't think the phenomenon of semantic distortion isn't real, I just find focusing on it and framing things around it this way in this context is reductive and asinine, and it overplays it; it implies en-masse intentional malice without evidence. I could do this to their comment just as easily: I could start opining about how they're intentionally publishing divisive ragebait, when maybe they 100% just fully believe what they wrote and have just reached the (a?) boiling point after reading the above article and vented. I cannot actually know.
Long story short, yeah, people do be acting ill faith from time to time, but hyperfocusing on that doesn't make anyone's day better, nor does it help against it. It just plays right into it. That's the whole problem with it in the first place, it's anti-social. I'm pretty sure they could have picked a less instigating framing at least - your comment delivers the same idea but in a much less inflammatory manner, for example.
It now appears that we took the understanding of democracy, the scientific process, and other basic tenants of our modern society for granted. But, it was a good run.
It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.
It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.
Plenty of people were pointing out that voting machines had poor security for about two decades. Even before that, there was the mechanically disastrous Bush vs Gore Florida ballot.
America being what it is, with endless Voting Rights Act lawsuits required to keep the southern states running vaguely fair elections, it was impossible to get a bipartisan consensus that elections should actually be fair. And so the system deteriorates.
> if the post were about ballot stuffing by the Democrats with irrefutable evidence like I've seen
That's incredible. You're not even American, and have seen irrefutable evidence of "the Democrats" participating in blatant electoral fraud? Why haven't you shared this? There's no shortage of literal billionaires who'd reward you handsomely for such proof!
Beyond this, why I constantly make fun of "both-sides!" guys is because they tend to ignore degree. To a vegetarian, eating hamburgers is wrong (some might even call it evil). But you'd be hard-pressed to find one who'd consider hambuger-eaters and murderers basically the same. You'd rightfully consider someone with such beliefs insane. Between murderers and hamburger eaters, one is considerably worse than the other.
You gotta hand it to the Democrats, they're a lot more subtle about their corruption and malevolence. The Replublicans are comedically bad in contrast and it gives plenty of fuel to Democrats to claim that they're Different.
A good example is how Trumps taxes are viewed versus the blatant insider trading that the Democrats engage in.
You’re doing the thing. The Democrats are both: different in magnitude of corruption than Republicans, and absolutely imperfect and worthy of criticism.
For your example, 7 of the 10 congress members with the highest cap gains in 2024 (including the #1 spot) were Republicans. The previous democratic president and a significant number of Democratic members of congress support banning members of congress from trading stocks. The parties are not the same.
My source shows an even 5/5 split for best performance in 2024. And 7/10 of the worst performers are Republicans (lol they can't even insider trade without messing up).
> The previous democratic president and a significant number of Democratic members of congress support banning members of congress from trading stocks
So why didn't they do it when they were in power last term. See this is what I mean, they do a decent job of sounding less corrupt whereas it's like the Republicans aren't even trying. But the outcome is the same, and it just fools people into thinking there is some significant difference.
In my country there are way bigger differences between the parties compared to the states, and even so I and a lot of other people still consider them mostly the same. So when people talk about massive differences between D & R I think they're just zoomed way in.
No. We’ve got masked goons kidnapping people and sending them to international labor camps. We’re indiscriminately bombing small fishing boats in distant international waters based on accusations of being drug smugglers, we’re stripping people of the already internationally recognized pathetic health insurance we have, we’re trying to hide as much information we can about our president’s close friendship with the most famous underage sex trafficker to have ever lived, we are illegally, unilaterally, tariffing our allies, we’re withholding release of basic economic reports, we’re openly accepting bribes from foreign actors …
But your insight is that American Football is precisely the same as basketball because: they both involve balls, there’s passing, there’s 2 teams, and hell, they both have field goals, and stadiums filled with spectators! Any fool who sees a difference is just looking too close. Thanks for sharing such wisdom. V helpful.
The only evidence of Democrats doing ballot stuffing is they also royally failed to get the majority last time around. Therefore they must have done it since they’re good at failing (/s).
It was known to the Attic Greeks that democracy had a fatal bug: a system that entrusts ultimate authority to the masses will predictably privilege persuasion over knowledge, passion over judgment, and populism over excellence.
It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now. Thanks, Mark and Elon.
Politics isn't Newton's Third Law of Motion. Prior to Musk's takeover, there absolutely and unequivocally was no "equal but opposite" deliberately biased system in place like there is now.
This is a classic playbook in U.S. politics. Conservative media gins up a conspiracy theory (e.g., Hollywood is biased, universities are biased, mainstream media is biased, social media is biased, etc. etc.) and then they use these imaginary foes as justification for actual retribution. There was no purposeful and systematic bias at Twitter under Jack Dorsey (himself, a pretty conservative character, having backed Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr in the past election, both of whom both now work in the Trump administration).
No, mass media had been around much longer than just a couple years.
But also, that bug is why our government was initially set up with the structure it was. And why you'll occasionally see complaints about parts of the structure being "undemocratic".
It was set up the way it was because the founders didn't trust voters. Voters don't always make optimal choices. Nobody said democracy was perfect. It's just a lot better than every other system we've ever tried. Benevolent dictatorship is good in theory, but quite rare in practice.
> Nobody said democracy was perfect. It's just a lot better than every other system we've ever tried.
This has bugged me for a long time: Why do people repeat this ?
I mean this on the fundamental core of it: not on the merit of the argument[0], or whether people deeply believe it, but on making the argument in these terms in the first place.
I don't remember people running around saying Christianism isn't perfect, but better than every other religion _we tried_. Or using the same rhetoric for Object Oriented programming. Or touting as a mantra that frying chicken isn't perfect but better than every other cooking method we tried.
IMHO we usually don't do that kind of vague, but short and definitive assertion. The statements would usualy be stronger with specific limitations, or an opening for what we don't know yet. Why did it take this form in particular for political system? (I am aware of the starting quote, but it wouldn't have caught on if people didn't see a need to repeat it in the first place. I think it hit on a very fundamental need of people, and I wish I knew why)
I feel understanding that would give insights on why we're stuck where we are now.
[0] We're two centuries in western democracies, and many other regimes lasted longer than that. I personally don't think there is any definitive answer that could bring such strong statements, but that's not my point.
> The statements would usualy be stronger with specific limitations, or an opening for what we don't know yet. Why did it take this form in particular for political system?
It's claiming an empirical fact, rather than pure opinion (cooking preferences) or a fact with a well-characterized theory behind it (OOP, anything physics, ...).
The phrasing is way too blurry for it to be a reasonable fact. The original quote came from a politician, and how people convey it today are as vague as it was initially.
For instance, thinking for a minute about "who". Who are we talking about and who is judging the results ? When did the experiments happen and what do we actually know about it ? On the "what", What other forms are we referring to ? What period are looking at ? etc.
It would be the same for the theory. Which well know political theory do you see related to this ? Political science doesn't deal in "better" or "worse", and I'm not even sure there is any consensus on the different systems.
IMHO, the more you think about it the stranger it becomes. I invite more people to get on the journey.
Again: yes, of course. But mass media wasn't enough. See also the other comment about religion. That wasn't enough to bring it down, either. Democracy was still viable -- still the best way forward -- despite the best efforts of preachers, popes, and publishers.
But it can't survive social media, which has turned us into an archipelago of competing cults.
Most of the population was disenfranchised in those examples. Peasants, slaves, urban poor and women generally weren't allowed to vote. Some very brief exceptions aside, universal suffrage only really emerged about 100-200 years ago (like you said). But clean elections without some kind of elite manipulation have arguably been nonexistent or extremely rare.
Really? Are those the elections to which even TikTok admitted there was an organized meddling? [0]
> We proactively prevented more than 5.3 million fake likes and more than 2.6 million fake follow requests, and we blocked more than 116,000 spam accounts from being created in Romania. We also removed:59 accounts impersonating Romanian Government, Politician, or Political Party Accounts +59,000 fake accounts+1.5 million fake likes+1.3 million fake followers
Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.