OBJECTION!

Because he’s rich and powerful and laws are just threats made by the ruling class, which he’s a part of. The law is primarily a tool of class warfare and as such is only enforced consistently and in full force against the working class. Very occasionally, one rich person pisses off enough other rich people to be subject to it, but you have to be extremely bad at the game for that to happen. The more rich people are subjected to the law, the easier it is to be subjected to the law yourself if you’re rich, so generally you’re better off looking the other way while they do illegal shit so that you can get away with your own illegal shit. Plus they have the resources to fight you, so it means picking a costly battle.

*You’re

Are you telling me that you consider “no u” to be too low of a form of discourse for you? You were all about it earlier, what happened?

That’s very true, but none of the people who have replied to me are from .world so I don’t see how that’s relevant.

Trolling is when someone disagrees with you for any reason.

I don’t agree that that’s an “of course.” There should be discussion of specific local races in a general politics community. Like I said, presidential votes only matter in a handful of states. If you add up the populations of swing states, I’m sure it’s higher than any individual state, but there are still some pretty big states where millions of people live that that aren’t included in that. And yeah, everyone is affected by the presidential race, but everyone is affected by congressional races too. If you want to say, let’s say 90% of the content should be on the race that’s relevant to people living in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and maybe North Carolina that’s fine, but if the rest of us have to see their content all the time, then they shouldn’t mind if they have to see like 10% of the content relevant to the people who live in some of the other 44 states.

And to be clear, this isn’t something I’m saying about Lemmy in particular. Go anywhere in America, from the deepest red state to the deepest blue state, and ask about the latest story-of-the-week about the presidential race, and people will know about it and have an opinion on it and care about it. Ask them about local races, and they’ll be far less knowledgeable far less invested, and will probably try to fit it into a framework based on the one race they actually care about, even if they can’t affect it in any way.

There would be so much more potential to cut through battle lines if people would go like, “OK, fine, you don’t like either candidate, you don’t have to vote for them. But do you mind if I ask what state you live in? Maybe there’s someone running for congress or governor who’s more to your tastes. I’d be happy to look into who’s running and discuss them with you.”

But nobody wants that shit. We want the battle lines, we want the group identity, the team sports. We don’t want to do research about boring shit nobody cares about, we want a constant stream of engaging news stories and hot takes that we can all experience together, as a culture.

Do me a favor and tell the middle school kid who’s giving you all your quips that if he keeps trying, he’ll get there eventually.

Good talk, very high level and productive. You’ve really given me a lot to think about.

Throwing around a bunch of playground insults and then accusing me of being the troll is a good bit, 7/10.

I’m rubber, you’re glue, what you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

If that’s the level of discourse you operate at, I can join you there, I guess.

No.

By the way, quick question, would you say that you don’t like me based on who I’m voting for in the presidential election, regardless of how I vote down ballot? Because it kinda seems like you’re proving my point here.

Tell you what, if Illinois goes red this election, DM me and I’ll send you $200.

👍

It is in my country lol. Just because I don’t get to meaningfully vote in it doesn’t mean I don’t live here.

“I know you are but what am I?”

Highest level of discourse.

Misinterprets what I said to create a strawman

Is explained to that that’s not what was meant

Repeats strawman.

“Advising people to vote in” is not the same as “caring about” or “paying attention to.”

Is there any mention of specific candidates? Any passionate arguments over the details of specific races? Any discussion of political theory or historical precedent or anything like that in that context? Has anybody called someone a Nazi because of how they’re voting for down ballot?

No. Because what people care about and pay attention to is the presidential race, unless you’re some kind of weird nerd or responsible citizen or something.

I’ve never voted for a major party presidential candidate in my life. It has never cost anyone anything, because I used to live in a deep red state and now live in a deep blue state. There’s a better chance of helping a candidate hit thresholds that would qualify them for things like campaign funding, then there is of Tennessee or Illinois being the pivotal swing state. The vast majority of Americans are in similar situations, there’s only a handful of states where your presidential vote matters at all.

Despite this, and the fact that I’ve voted for Democrats down ballot, liberals hate me, and are always trying to fight me over it. Why? Because the presidential race is the only thing anybody cares about. For all the countless, identical debates over the presidential race, I’ve seen virtually no discussion on here of other elections. Culturally, your take on the presidential race is how your political identity is defined. That cultural tendency is so powerful that it can even bleed into foreign countries.

The more people focus on my presidential voting behavior, which has no potential to affect anything, the more it reaffirms that such behavior is important. The reason that people care so much about my vote is not because they care about the outcome, it’s because they want me to display a sign of loyalty, to bend the knee, to conform to their norms. But if everyone’s going to treat it as an expression of identity, then, all else being equal regarding the outcome, it would be better to define myself according to what I actually believe. The fact that people get big mad over someone voting third party even in an extremely solid red or blue state is all the more reason to do it. My vote doesn’t affect your life at all since it’s totally irrelevant to the outcome, so stop obsessing over what amounts to a personal decision.

Neither does yours.

Of course. That’s why I cited a bunch of actual evidence and examples that aren’t dependent on my personal experience.

It’s only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it’s all for show.

Is it? I don’t recall bringing up my personal experience in that matter at all, or bringing up that matter in the first place. Nothing about my personal experience seems relevant to that question, it’s not as if I have firsthand experience with politicians in Washington that I’m using to determine whether they’re trustworthy or not.

Most people don’t know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don’t really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don’t even know about it?

Now this is just silly. Are you suggesting that performative legislation never happens? It happens all the time, especially during election seasons. Just because not every person hears about ever minutiea doesn’t mean that nobody ever hears about anything or that it can’t influence voters. You’re literally using it right now to try to influence people.

We can talk about whether this particular example is performative or not, but to rule out the entire concept of performative legislation categorically is ridiculous.

It sounds like you’re basing it entirely off personal experience. But your personal experience probably doesn’t give you a representative cross section of Americans.

The Greens also got 1/3 of the votes in 2020 as 2016, both times being about 1/3 of the Libertarian party.

There’s also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd. There was tons of infighting over the speaker and whatnot. Trump himself was obviously controversial, and I mentioned the threat of him running third party. If Republican voters would just line up to vote for anybody, the establishment would’ve never allowed things to splinter to the degree they have, they’d kick people out of the party and the voters would go for whoever they offered instead. I don’t see how any of that is explainable if what you’re saying is true.

I feel like part of that narrative is just seeing the right run shitty candidates and seeing right wingers vote for them, but that’s because the voters have different values and preferences. They still care quite a bit about the things they do care about, and break rank when they don’t get their way, and much more so than people in the left do from the numbers I’m seeing.