Tbf, it’s not like physics stuff is always obvious, especially when dealing with relativity or quantum mechanics. It just feels obvious if you’ve already learned about the research that’s already been done.

It isn’t even remotely intuitive that light should have a max speed that can’t be added to by moving its source relative to other things. Plus, light does interact with matter, but it can only be slowed down by it.

So less a stupid question and more just one that isn’t educated about something.

Kafka wrote stories about confusing, impersonal bureaucracies. So people will describe something as Kafkaesque to convey that sense of being lost in a system.

I’ve watched a few older original movies here and there on streaming at home, but I guess the last time I went to the theater for one was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I don’t really go to the theater much in general anymore. Last time I went was for Dune 2 (mostly because I like the director more so than I’m interested in the franchise) and it was so loud I thought it was going to damage my eardrums.

That aside, if I’m gonna go see something, I want some reason that isn’t just brand recognition. A director I like, some good reviews, maybe an interesting premise, etc.

Oh god. I was reading through the page and this gem was down in the section on the response from healthcare companies:

Another executive was quoted saying “What’s most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity.”

Says the people who hide behind keyboards, phone calls, employees, doctors, guards, police as they hurt people they don’t know. Talk about losing your humanity.

The question that is an irrelevant tangent from the original discussion? The one that assumed something about my point that wasn’t anywhere in the text? What do you even want out of this conversation? You aren’t even engaging with the argument.

You haven’t answered my question. You provided a suggested solution, but with nothing to back it up in relation to the question. If all you have to say is “The New Deal was good,” that isn’t pertinent to the discussion unless you can show how it was related to a mass voter movement. Instead of doing that you just started a different argument with an imaginary opponent.

Also for whatever it’s worth:

“Tell me why we shouldn’t have a CCC and a WPA as a start.”

“It’s not like I was trying to say ND programs were bad.”

Assuming your question is “Weren’t ND agencies good? Do you not want them?” Then I answered that. That was never a point of contention in the argument. You’re getting mad at nothing.

Well at this point it seems like half this thread is just people not being clear what they mean or misunderstanding someone else.

I was responding to the assertion that there was some time when most people voted and participated in the system and that time was good because of that. You offered the New Deal as an example of this. I was showing how that didn’t really match up to the voter participation rate.

It’s not like I was trying to say ND programs were bad. Just that they weren’t the product of mass voter mobilization and didn’t change anything fundamental about the relationship between workers, capital, and the state.

That’s all. I’m pushing back against the idea that American democracy itself has somehow fallen from grace from some mythical period of mass democratic participation. That’s just never been what the country was. If you want to get to that point, you have to start by acknowledging that the old system wasn’t what you wanted to preserve. Otherwise you just keep ending up in the same place.

My point is that something like the New Deal doesn’t just happen because everyone decided to get out of bed and vote one day. There’s a context to understand and that context is that outside pressure and extraordinary events were necessary for it to happen.

Things didn’t get better because just that many more people decided to vote and things didn’t get worse because people stopped voting. The numbers just don’t bear that out. We’ve been stuck in the band of our modern voter turnout rate since before the New Deal. So if the claim is that Democracy works when everyone votes and the example is the New Deal, then it doesn’t support that claim. So if differences in voter turnout can’t explain that outcome, you have to look at other factors.

As for how radical it was. Sure, capitalists didn’t like it. But fundamentally it left power in the hands of those capitalists. The quote is just providing insight on how the people involved thought/talked about it. The evidence is all the history that followed that. They kept their money, their influence over the political system, and given time, they used that to dismantle even something as reformist as the New Deal.

It certainly wasn’t as extreme or successful as the soviet union, but there was a lot of unionization going on during the industrial revolution that was more radical than the tamer bargaining unions we see in the post-war era. And then the depression happened and things got really bad. It’s not hard to see how elites would have looked out at what was happening in the world, looked at the bad economic situation at home, and concluded that something had to be done.

FDR even said that they were trying to reform capitalism to save it.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Transwiki/American_history_quotes_New_Deal

1933 “It was this administration which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.” President Roosevelt, on how his emergency actions in 1933 prevented a revolution and saved capitalism.

Refer to my comment bellow for a more expanded discussion, but specifically talking about the New Deal:

• The voter participation in this period was comparable to what we have today. Minus all the people excluded, but the comment I’m replying to was talking about people deciding to vote, so those without that option, these people aren’t included in the asserted culpability for the success or failure of democracy.

• The New Deal happened with significant context outside of the electoral system. A massive war with another looming on the horizon. A global financial collapse that threatened to incite people against the ruling class. Militant union organizing against violent state and private repression. The rise of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to capitalist hegemony and an example to show workers what was possible.

• The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure. Far from being a democratic revolution, it was a stalling tactic that kept power concentrated and allowed those in power to slowly dismantle outside power structures like unions until such time as they could claw back those gains. The later end of the Keynesian government programs can be better attributed to the weakening of unions than the failure of people to vote or vote correctly at the ballot box. Government policy obviously had a big hand in this attack on unions, but there were also the material factors of automation and globalization that greatly reduced union bargaining power.

Ok, when was this? I tried looking in to voter turnout rates over time. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present

As they say in the article, it’s harder to get good estimates of earlier turnout rates, but for the sake of talking about it, lets take for granted that the numbers are in some reasonable ballpark of accuracy.

It looks like turnout tops out at about 80% (presidential elections) of the VEP in the later half of the 19th century. Before this the numbers were even lower than they have been in modern times. This of course was a time when many people could not vote. It was also a period of growing inequality and monopolization. It took 2 major wars, a lot of militant unionizing, and a global financial collapse to end up with the brief period of relative prosperity for specifically white working class men.

Throughout the 20th century though, the numbers pretty consistently dropped to between 50-70% turnout. Throughout a lot of this many people still could not vote, either explicitly or implicitly through Jim Crow laws. Even post-civil rights and voting rights act, prisoners still do not have the right to vote. Considering that we know that the war on drugs was started to pretty specifically target enemies of the state like minorities and hippies, this is a pretty clear attempt to once again implicitly deny certain people the right to vote. So even through multiple slices of the population being eligible to vote over time, we’ve never really had close to a significant portion of the eligible population voting.

This is also only talking about American citizens. Again, a fundamental tenet of democracy is that it only exercises government power over those who have consented to it. US imperialism, starting with the native Americans and African slaves and only expanding from there, has extended the application of that power to countless people around the world who never got a vote on the US fucking with their country and were often denied the opportunity to participate in their own democracies. Taken from this perspective, the majority of people under US rule/influence have NEVER gotten to participate in the “democratic process.”

This is also all before we talk about the ways that the electoral system and government structure was explicitly designed to not allow the popular will to have proportional influence over the government.

The implication of the assertion that “democracy works when people vote” is that the condition of these millions of people who have been systematically denied the right to influence the government that rules over them is their own fault for not voting anyway. It’s simply ahistorical. It’s as much a call to a mythical glorious past that conservatives engage in.

Rights have never and will never be won through the ballot box so long as the US remains a plutocracy. It has always required people to work outside the system and engage with violence, whether they are doing it or it is being done to them.

This history isn’t just some bad stuff that bad people did in the past. They’re the events that created the world we live in today. We aren’t free of their influence and we haven’t even stopped all of them. You can learn from that or you can keep blaming people. You can’t have both and still be honest with yourself.

Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.

Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”

America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.

That’s the neat part, there isn’t!

But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.

Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.

But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.

These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:

• Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.

• Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.

• Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.

• Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.

• A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?

• More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.

In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.

“I know, I know, but it was this or we’d have to stop bombing brown people and tell the poors we’d give them food. It was the politically responsible thing to do.”

Oh so the turnout last time was 100%? I guess someone should go fix the data then.

By “popular vote,” you mean the % of people who voted. I’m talking about the country overall. Which includes people who didn’t get off work, have a handful of understaffed polling places, no good public transportation to get them to polling places, imprisoned people, people screwed my voter registration laws, etc. and that’s not even counting people too young to vote.

Your view only makes sense if you ignore literally everything about the broken US electoral system and all the other systems that touch it.

If you completely ignore how the electoral system works, sure. Back in reality, we have elections which, largely due to voter disenfranchisement efforts, only at best only account for ~60% of the country, only about half of which go to the fascists. So less than a 1/3rd of the country, and even that comes with the caveat that their other option sucks too.

They only get power because the system is set up to favor them and the state needs to use violence to enforce the will of that minority on everyone else. We have the numbers to change things for the better, we just lack the organization to make that happen because of a century of efforts to violently repress those organizations and socially isolate people.

So you can keep being a misanthrope by pretending most of the people aren’t worth saving or you can recognize your fellow humans and work with them to do something about it.

Even if someone wins an election by a lot, the nature of voter turnout in the US means they at best represent like a third of the people. The fascists don’t outnumber us in reality, just in a political system that will allow them into power before even a social democrat.

50% of the time it happens 100% of the time.

The trains were just keeping with the metaphor of the OP. (Although we do need much better trains too.)

Acting like the only thing wrong is train schedules is really reductive. People who insist on voting as THE prime form of political participation will often say that not voting for a lesser evil is a privileged position because you’re not going to be impacted by the stuff the other party will do. But I’d argue there is an inherent privilege to being someone who won’t be materially impacted by US imperialism.

We’ve all been conditioned to view the violence the government inflicts on the rest of the world as normal. Maybe you don’t agree with it, but only as much as you don’t agree with, say, tax policy. It’s an abstract thing. We’re removed from the constant horror it represents. We’d like it if it wasn’t happening, but we don’t have to think about it most of the time and will clearly not do anything about it any time soon if everyone left of Hitler’s position is “vote for the Hitler that’s only going to do the bad stuff to other people.”

In general I take issue with people framing this as protecting democracy from fascism. The US is not a democracy.

• For starters, a constitutional democracy shouldn’t be able to end through a simple vote that doesn’t even include most of the country. If voting in fascists is an acceptable outcome of the system, it’s not a good system.

• From the ground up, the US was built to be as anti-democratic as possible while still technically having voting. Obviously it started with only land owning white men being allowed to vote. It’s expanded slowly over the years, but it STILL explicitly disenfranchises people such as prisoners. The electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the longer, staggered term limits in the senate, and the lifetime term limit for supreme court justices are all mechanisms which were explicitly designed to filter out the will of the masses from influencing government. To bring in a personal example: I live in NY. My vote doesn’t matter. I don’t say that as an excuse for not voting because I know I won’t have an effect of the election. I say that because I don’t even get a vote! Even if there was a candidate I cared about, just because of where I was born I can have zero influence on their election into government.

• Finally, I’d argue that an imperialist country is definitionally not a democracy. The core principle of democracy is that the government rules over only those who have consented to it. An imperialist state such as the US takes actions all around the world in other sovereign countries that have major influences on people who never consented to be subjects of US power. An Iraqi who’s house got bombed didn’t get a chance to vote against Bush. A person in Latin America didn’t get a vote on the US invalidating the vote in their country with a coup. Cubans, Vietnamese, etc. didn’t get to vote on the US making sure they couldn’t trade with the rest of the world.

As a related point to the last point: This is why I think it’s philosophically wrong to vote for candidates who don’t represent you in the US elections. In a democracy you are still considered to have “consented” to being governed even by an opposition party you didn’t vote for because you consented to the process. By voting you are saying that you agree that this is the way we will choose our government and that you will abide by the results even if you don’t get the outcome you want. That’s fine if the process was truly democratic and you can live with any of the outcomes even if you’d prefer something different. But if all outcomes are systematically unacceptable to you and the process itself is flawed, then still casting your vote within that framework is consent to the government and the process that produced it. When you go vote, there’s no box for “I’m only voting for this person because they’re technically better than the other one. I’m not actually ok with them.” You simply vote for Harris and the implicit choice of “I will not try to enact change in any other way.”

If you think Trump represents the rise of fascism and the end of democracy, then you shouldn’t be willing to abide by the results of the election anyway. But could you imagine any of the people telling you to vote against fascism taking up arms to storm the capital to protect that democracy and it’s people? Could you even imagine those people symbolically supporting leftists if they did this? I can’t. Because they didn’t do shit last time. Because they spent years talking about the right wing coup attempt in terms of it being treason rather than it being a problem because they’re fascists. Because civility and rules are more important than anything else to these people. If Trump won, the day after the election the same people who said it’d be the end of democracy will be saying “We’ll get em’ in 2-4 years.”

No. Clearly the solution is to continue to abandon anyone outside the US because they don’t matter. /s

But more directly: HOW are you going to work on it? Who is gonna do that? The capitalist/imperialist who you’ve pledged your vote to unconditionally?