No surprise people vote selfishly / and base their opinions on what's fed to them.

Hence the need for an educated voting populace. And the need for voting at all assumes that democracy is the least bad system.

If there is any slim hope for marginally improving things, there will need to be some structural changes. Eliminating all the money from politics and public campaign financing might be a start.

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That makes sense.

Although, this fellow was into poker instead. I think part of it was the thrill he got out of it, in which the game has been made into a sort of televised sport.

People don't believe **** about ****.

Millions of years ago, political polls were based on the assumption that people rationally assessed platforms. Pollsters would ask likely voters for their opinions on a number of issues, and use those answers in order to predict the result of elections. It didn't work. At all. It turned out that the vast majority of likely voters gave absolutely zero thought to any issue, prior to when they were asked to share their opinion at the time of the poll. Instead people chose political candidates largely at random, and chose aspects of those candidates with which to self-identify. Political discussions become heated largely on the basis that people subconsciously understand criticism of their chosen candidate to be criticism of their own person.

Democracy is the worst possible system of government. And anybody who insists that it is your "civic duty" to vote, whether you have an opinion about the issues or not, is a slobbering imbecile and directly responsible for the on-going decay of our entire culture.

Well, as human beings we can't be maximally productive all the time. You could argue that he wasted the time and energy it took to buy the ticket and check the winning numbers. However, humans aren't machines, and there is always some downtime for things like this, if only for our sanity (certainly, buying a lottery ticket is much less stressful than his job).

Honestly, what you just described sounds a lot like the actual idea of representative democracy. The theory goes that the populace shouldn't vote on the issues themselves, but on the character of the person who will 'represent' them. The problem with this theory is that there is zero chance that the candidate (or proposition) will represent anybody but the highest donor.

hurr lets draw our future leaders out of the statistical noise of whoever showed up on TV, the night before election, during viewers' post-masturbation oxytocin rushes.

Okay, you have a point.

At least Sarah Palin never became president.

The theory behind representative democracy is that the populace would vote for the best-qualified person who most accurately represented their interests, in order to avoid the utter pandemonia and tyranny of direct democracy. The theory is not that most people are entirely absent of all personal ideology, wildly swinging between incompatible opinions and philosophies dictated largely by the mood they are in when the candidates are first announced.

Swing voters liked her more than McCain. She probably would have, if they switched places.

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We already live in a meritocracy.

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Democracy and capitalism are both meritocratic. All meritocracies are fundamentally broken, because any system which rewards based on any vague heuristic of personal value will always be exploited.

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Considering all of the times I have ranted and hurled abuse about eugenics, social darwinism, the Canadian and Israeli apartheids, the decline of the social safety net, discrimination in a broad sense, and the need for the upper class to care for our collective wellbeing, I very clearly do not support national socialism.

"Privilege" is merit.

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because it's a meritocracy controlled by humans and not robots. As Jon'C said, exploitation?

I would answer that humans preclude the possibility of an ideologically pure system.

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As someone who has felt this way forever, I may as well ask: how do you keep from drinking yourself to oblivion or jumping off a tall bridge when you know that a good 2/3 of people have the self-awareness/intelligence/resistance to brainwashing of a boulder? I honestly don't think I can take any more mouthbreathers telling me that the only problem with this country is that I don't vote. Trying to talk to these people isn't worth it. In the time that you have elucidated your view and failed to engender in them an original thought, they have already produced ten more just like them. The only solution is to isolate yourself from them, but that comes with its own host of problems.

This is also why I can't believe it's 100% nurture. There is no way that my sister, for example, raised in the same environment I was, turned out to be a jingoistic, impulsive fetus-warmer unless there is some element of nature to it.

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I think that's true about swing voters who actually decide the election. Party line votes do support platforms, but they aren't rationally assessed. These people have more of a sport fan mentality and will convince themselves that what ever policy their platform craps out are the correct one's regardless, because that's who've they've been cheering for.

Every time I go into the polls I realize that all the top issues are things that either don't matter or are only semantically different between the two candidates. So I then vote for some crappy third party out of spite and go home. Maybe I'll just do a blank ballot instead. I don't know.

The proper way to run an economy, which is more or less very similar to extreme-scale Keynesian stimulus, e.g. The New Deal, and I called it "basically fascism without all of that racist stuff". Because I know most of you don't really learn about these things in school, so the concept of there being a third position absent recent historical conflict might be quite shocking.

America is a meritocracy, where those with the greatest wealth are considered the most meritorious.

What else would "true merit" be, if not wealth? Hereditary titles, like the nobility of old? Skin color? Intelligence? No matter what definition of merit you use, it is not something you can ever earn on your own - it is something given to you by virtue of being born to those with merit.

"True meritocracy". How absurd.

It's not that simple. It isn't an imaginary difference.

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You didn't grow up in the same environment. Your sister doesn't read my posts.

yw.

The sports fan mentality is exactly the problem.

The ~30% of people who are well-informed on issues and profess to have a personal ideology vote very consistently and in lines with compatible platforms, and are much less likely to adhere to a single party. People who blindly support political parties are the same exact thing as the swing voters, except they personally identify with the party brand instead of a specific representative.

It would save everybody a lot of time if they'd just stop showing up to vote.

I got into a bad fight with a couple of friends because they supported a political party and couldn't answer even the simplest questions I had about their platform.

BUT AT LEAST THEY VOTED, RIGHT?

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OLD GUY WITH TERMINAL CANCER FOR SUPREME LEADER.

Woo! FOUR! MORE! DAYS! FOUR! MORE! DAYS!

I have a good number of friends who i differ with completely on ideology and politics. They are going to hold to their beliefs and vote accordingly(if they do vote, i have no idea) regardless of my frustration over it, so i can... A: probably ruin our friendship trying force them to see my point of view. B: decide that there is nothing i can do really to change their mind, then hang out and have drinks and probably a good time. or, maybe C: run away from the situation.

of course it is not an imaginary difference, but the good news is that you get to decide for yourself how you will handle that situation.

I can at least respect someone who can explain to me why they hold fast to a particular ideology. I'm not talking about those people.

That attitude pisses me off. Everyone gets so excited about it being your civic duty to vote, and how wonderful it is if people vote even if they haven't thought through any of the positions. It all ends up just been a thin veneer of bull**** to disguise campaigns to get politically homogeneous demographic to the polls. Like when the Democrats pretend to care so much about black voter enfranchisement every four years even though they are basically just trying to drum up guaranteed votes from people who don't feel like it makes a difference anyway. (it doesn't) Both parties do this to their core demographics and it's nauseating. I think I'd like to see a voter abstinence campaign.

Well i mean if it's THAT big an issue then sure, just walk away and save yourself a lot of headache.

For me, historical perspective helps. 2/3 of the population were unaware boulders 50 and 100 years ago, yet civil rights and basic quality of life (there's caveats there and it's a terrible meaningless metric but you know what I mean) have improved drastically. 100 years ago both me and my S.O. would be criminally prosecuted for our sexual orientation and lifestyle choices. By and large people were just as dumb then as they are now yet there are obvious improvements throughout society. They aren't going to change any time soon and they aren't going to go away. Being cynical and throwing a fit about it isn't exactly going to solve the problem, so I try not to expend any effort being frustrated over it.