Arguing for Equality
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The "Braver Angels" organization in the US put together basically a focus group consisting of adherents to the so-called "Democratic" and "Republican" parties (I will argue, if asked, why both of those names are lies). This group was supposed to address the reasons that many of the citizens of the US feel that their vote doesn't count. The deliberations concluded with a report that talked about voter ID and having election day off from work and so on, mechanical issues only. So I wrote to them as follows:
A voter should be the one to determine which candidates her or his vote supports and opposes. Your committees claimed to be addressing the reasons that the general public has no power in the voting booth, but they ignored the elephant in the room, which is the non-respect of this right. In an N-candidate election for a single seat or office, voters who want to oppose fewer than N - 1 are told to lump it. They are denied the right to cast a vote that reflects their political judgment. But other voters, the ones who want to support exactly one candidate and oppose the rest, get to cast the vote that reflects their judgment. So the system denies the voters equality of influence, one voter to another. This creates a Prisoner's Dilemma that gives people the false impression that they have an incentive to support a "lesser evil" that has money support or fame. The false impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The false impression commands mindshare via the effects of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). It is described over and over again as "realistic" and "math". This can all be defeated by providing equality in the voting booth, one voter to another, which should be provided anyway because it is a right in a representative republic. Even for someone who doesn't grasp how the PD distorts people's mentalities and social interactions, the question should remain relevant, of what grounds there are to tell someone what vote to cast instead of leaving it to the voter. What grounds are there to accept some voters' votes they way they want to cast them, but tell others, no, you can't vote the way you feel or judge. You have to choose from options that don't correspond to your political stance. This is not more moral than excluding some voters because of their color. It's a different rule of discrimination, but it is still an immoral form of discrimination.
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Yes, there’s nothing democratic about the Democrats. That’s why I never speak of the “Democratic” primary, for example, but rather just call it the “Democrat primary”.
“Republican” is from Latin for “People’s Thing” or “People’s Affair”, which of course the Republicans don’t support any better than the Democrats do.
Gore Vidal pointed out that we don’t have a 2-party system. We have 1party with 2 right wings.
The Republicratic Party.
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@michaelossipoff as close as you get get to fascism without fascism lol
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Yes, if we’d ever had democracy, things would never have reached the silly, comic-book-preposterous way that they are now.
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@cfrank said in Arguing for Equality:
lol
I wish it were a laughing matter. I judge that this exact PD has caused political decisions that put the state of humanity, the state of the artifacts that some humans control, and the state of the environment such that an analogy of a train speeding toward a bombed-out bridge over the Danube holds true, and the momentum may be such that no measures that can possibly be recruited will suffice to save anyone.