this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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People want policies they like, but fail to understand how a participatory social democracy produces those policies.
They also tend to mistake an "American Idol" ass voting process with participatory social democracy.
"Democracy is when the government offers you two choices and everyone says the choice they like best, weighted by Congressional votes and not including DC/Puerto Rico/Guam residents for some reason" is a thing Americans believe is the bestest, freeist, most liberty-endowing system to ever exist. Unless the wrong person wins, in which case the election was rigged.
This is what bothers me the most. We can't make a rational decision together. It's always sensationalized and simplified and two-sided and full of misinformation and blatant lies and dramatic language.
Just last night I threw out a pound of political mailers. Just took them right out of the mailbox and threw them in the garbage. Totally wasted paper that I didn't bother to read because I know it's just oversimplification and emotional appeals. And it was a pound last week. And the week before that. We waste so much time and money and energy on this shit.
I've gotten seven texts begging for money today alone.
Make it stop.
What mechanism would we even use? There is no real "community self-government". Its all states dictating policy to municipalities which dictate policy to neighborhoods. A handful of individuals are expected to represent hundreds of thousands of people, even at the city council level (my Houston city council has 250,000 person districts plus a couple of "at-large" 2M person districts plus a mayor). There's no realistic method for 2M people to communicate with one another efficiently or collectively govern. But there's ample opportunity to demagogue the public and fleece the treasury.
So much of these elections are just optics - your partisan name tag, your race/gender/sexual orientation, your age, your career. These are the only reliable heuristics. Houston got a slew of black woman democrat judges in 2018 to replace a slew of white man republican judges, because "black woman" is code for liberal and "white man" is code for conservative. Some courts definitely improved (because the primary process in some of these districts selected for the most psycho christian nationalists on the conservative end) but others got a lot worse (because you tossed a bunch of milquetoast moderates with job experience for ambitious politicos who were just gaming the system and couldn't do the work).
How the fuck am I supposed to distinguish a legit civil rights lawyer running to replace a certified bigot versus a clueless young ivy league careerist [dem] running to replace a boring old ivy league careerist [gop] at the family court level? There's no real journalism on these races, and even if there was, I simply do not have time or expertise to weed through dozens of races to sort the wheat from the chaff.
So many of these are nakedly just scams. Like, not even politically affiliated scams. Just the exact same people who were blowing up your phone demanding Amazon gift cards to pay the IRS or cashiers checks to settle a fictitious lien on your car six months ago, pushing a new angle because they know it works.