I prefer bringing up that in US “democracy” some votes count more than others. When trump won, more people voted for Clinton and for some reason yanks seem to be totally ok with this.
We are not ok with this, but changing the way it works is a herculean task. The people that it currently works for are very invested in keeping it that way.
Because it’s easier for people to pretend already being busy (focusing on and protesting nonsensical and completely irrelevant shit) vs actually focusing on the primary and relevant things that are actually impacting their lives.
The media has done a pretty good job convincing the vast majority of Americans that we are the pinnacle of democracy and any change to that is either fascism or communism. Wanting a better system is intentionally painted as un-American.
“The media” sounds like a convenient scapegoat. Who gives a fuck about how things are painted? Do you really just go “well, I guess I better waive my right to having my vote count equally, don’t want the neighbours to think I’m un-american” or is that just an excuse for lethargy? I don’t mean to antagonise you but I think you should ask yourself some tough questions once in a while.
You have a great points, though your scenario is a bit too simple.
It’s not that we’re so fat and lethargic that we can’t be bothered to get off the sofa long enough to effect meaningful change. It’s that “the media” is gargantuan and goes far beyond the synthesized news cycles and reports. The OG social media outlets like churches, work culture, family structure, regional Identities, and every other socialized structure you can think of manifests itself into these ideals that have been pummeled into our head since the first time we stood up in preschool and recited the pledge of allegiance.
Making it more complicated is that our real concerns like, paying our bills, feeding our families, getting Timmy to soccer practice, protecting our kids, being a good employee so we don’t lose our job, being a good dad, being a good son, keeping our relationships healthy, etc., etc. is condensed into an infantesimally small amount of time. When you finally get to stop you’ve only got the bandwidth for bullet points. It’s not laziness, it’s exhaustion. It’s not lack of self-reflection, it’s overclocking. We have an entire backbone population that’s absolutely exhausted and still feeling like failures because somehow the American dream is feeling like a greasy, over-hustled nightmare that we’re constantly struggling to live up to.
This cycle does lend itself to your headlines of gun violence, gladiator arena us v. them politics, and on, and on. The system with which we now live is a constant grinder that no longer leaves time for, nor praises individualism and ideas. It’s a finely tuned revenue machine built on an overhauled slavery model that instead praises corporatism, classism, ruling parties, and residual monthly income… with a smiley face of nationalistic exceptionalism posted on the packaging.
Apologies for being so long winded, but some sympathy for the devil might be in order. We’re largely not a bad people. Most of us are kind, optimistic, and try very hard to change the things we see out of place. The problem is we’re becoming more and more just white noise in the background. A sort of spectre of idealisms past.
You make it sound like you’re just a cog in a machine with no agency and I do believe that’s what it feels like (other countries are in late capitalism, too) but you’re not if enough of you band together. You’re not forced to watch your life pass before your eyes, you choose to play along with the machine’s game. Hell, you even got the guns to take what should be yours and you just use them to shoot at little paper targets.
I don’t think of you as fat and lazy or the devil. It’s just frustrating to see your potential go to waste like that.
Great argument. Now instead of preaching to the choir, which is to say someone who already understands and agrees with you, why don’t you elevate your message to all 400 million of us? You know, really get to the ones who don’t understand they’re being manipulated?
No? You won’t do that? Don’t you care about our right to vote and this democracy? Maybe you feel like it’s just not your job. I don’t know, sounds like another way to say you’re just too lazy.
I don’t mean to antagonize you, but you’re the one insinuating that it just takes one person being unhappy about the system to change it. So you should ask yourself the same questions about why you can’t do it yourself. Even if you don’t live in the US, you have about the same resources as I do.
You took a comment that addressed noone in particular a bit personal and now pretend it was meant to start a revolution on a very niche corner of the internet. Not quite what I consider worth my time.
I don’t mean to antagonise you but I think you should ask yourself some tough questions once in a while.
You wouldn’t consider this addressing me in particular? Looks a little like you’re avoiding a response because you don’t have a good answer.
In any case, have fun preaching to people who live in a complex system about changes you don’t really understand. For what it’s worth, entertaining the naive notion of
well why don’t you just ask yourself some hard questions and it’ll all be better
That sentence upset you to the point you feel the need to insult my intelligence, misrepresent what is written, forget that “you” can mean people in general and ignore any clarification. That’s regrettable as I’m sure you do actually understand what I’m trying to say here but can’t address it over a perceived slight.
That sentence doesn’t make sense addressed to people in general. No one says, “I didn’t mean to antagonize you” to a large group of undefined people. Antagonize is pretty specific to a single subject.
Also, what clarification? The only response you made was to dutifully inform me that my challenge to your logic was beneath replying to.
Lastly, it’s pretty clear what you were trying to say. That if only people realized that being un-American isn’t the end of the world, maybe systemic changes could start happening.
What I’m saying to you is, about 150 million of us are so brainwashed and vehemently against opening their minds to that sort of change that they regularly float the idea of rounding up the rest of us to execute.
That’s what our media does to us. And by “media”, I don’t mean the boogie man you decided that I meant, I mean conservative outlets like Fox News that captivate millions of our population and constantly send the message that the people actually trying to change things are evil and corrupt. That advocate for locking up the poor and shooting the protesters.
If you really think that can be overcome by a plurality of us “asking ourselves the hard questions”, you’re woefully naive about the actual situation.
If you want to paint me as the type to be offended at a perceived slight, understand that the slight in question is proposing an overly simplistic solution to a gargantuanly complex problem half a century in the making like we just “forgot” we can change the system.
Isn’t that true for any representative democracy especially when gerrymandering is allowed? In Aus you can easily have a party win more than 50% of the vote but not get in because the votes were concentrated in vast-majority seats.
No, that’s not an example of votes not counting equally…? Am I misunderstanding your example?
You don’t need some mathematical proof to just count all the votes and see which candidate got more votes. It’s how most elections throughout the world work.
In Europe, the countries i know of at least, count each vote equally.
What i meant was that it doesn’t mean it’s a perfect system if your goal is democracy.
Other factors can totally break the purpose of counting votes equally altogether and end up with a unsatisfying result. And my exemple is as such.
(I live in France, we have equally counted vote but with this issue, and some other neighboring countries have it too. If you’re interested i can explain more what the issue is…)
(I guess Australia, for the user you were replying to originally, have it’s own issues too, not that i’m familiar with them.)
Mathematicians worked on how different suffrage creates different results.
There are plenty like the majority judgement but one that i particularly like is Condorcet’s method to solve the problem.
Failed:
After trying to kill multiple innocent people while gambling with his right hand angel, God drowns all of humanity during a temper tantrum.
You find yourself on a ship filled with one family and two of each animal.
What do you mean ‘till the price of oil plummeted"? The whole world plummeted in the 08’ crash. Sure the price per barrel plummeted in 2009 but the price of oil has since gone up to those early 2000’s levels…
Venezuela is an example of a petrostate, where the government is highly dependent on fossil fuel income.
Petrostates are vulnerable to what economists call Dutch disease, in which a government develops an unhealthy dependence on natural resource exports to the detriment of other sectors.
The oil price plunge from more than $100 per barrel in 2014 to under $30 per barrel in early 2016 sent Venezuela into an economic and political spiral, and despite rising prices since then, conditions remain bleak.
(Source: Council of Foreign Relations)
So yeah, socialism didn’t kill the Venezuelan economy, over-reliance on fossil fuel did.
Bruh, Venezuela has some of the dirtiest crude on the planet and lacks the ability to refine it themselves relying on American refineries which have had an embargo against importing Venezuelan oil till last year, you are so out of yout depth in global economics is laughable.
Just do it now, you won’t regret it, or install mint in a virtual machine and full screen it and get use to it, you’ll find yourself using windows less and less every day. My personal go to is Kubuntu, because I like the customization capabilities and lower memory footprint than Gnome. I hate tiling windows managers, so don’t recommend those please.
Unpopular opinion: Linux Mint sucks ass and there are so many great distros to choose from, which aren’t Linux Mint. It looks like Windows XP and functions like Windows XP. Still uses X11, which doesn’t even have proper support for 1:1 touchpad gestures and handles multiple displays with different scaling factors and refresh rates in a way that is, well, hacky and janky at best or non-functional at worst.
I get that Linux Mint is easy to use because it’s made specifically to be as convenient as possible to users coming from Windows but jeez, it looks and feels like something from 2005, especially on a laptop…
I’ve just started to daily drive Mint, after finding Fedora confusing and Ubuntu somehow slow and stuttery.
Every few years I try out Linux desktop and this is the first time I’ve found it usable enough for me. For the first time I’m not delving into forum posts from last decade to get simple stuff working.
What distro would you recommend that does desktop usability better than Mint?
It’s s gateway drug. It’s ok to let them come in on Mint and Ubuntu, they’re scared and confused. Give them creature comforts. Once they’re warm and fuzzy, they’ll get inquisitive and branch out.
Regale to the Mint users the virtues of your better choices, but tell the windows users come on it and use whatever they’re comfortable with.
Linux Mint might look outdated but it’s stable as hell. Especially LMDE. Any time I mess around with arch/arch-based derivatives or any rolling release distros I’m quickly reminded why I chose to run Mint as my primary OS. I’m long past my distro hopping days so having something that works without question and doesn’t require any mucking around is huge for me.
I’ll take something from 2005 as a compliment to Linux Mint. Having installed it in 2006 you are absolutely correct. It’s shockingly boring lack of constant UI paradigm shifts almost makes me forget about the OS completely. I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I see slow adoption of new things as good. I accept others have setups that mint does not work for, but I would wager there is no Linux DE better suited as a first suggestion to try depending on the newness of the hardware. If you have 5 monitors of differing resolutions and frame rates then sure, there are better DEs.
I used Mint when I first started playing around with Linux about a decade ago and it was pretty good. But I recently tossed it on a laptop that I primarily just wanted to run a web browser and have minimal faffing about and I’ve been extremely impressed with how it’s matured.
The DE is snappy and unobtrusive with extremely sane defaults. The software center is extremely usable and has very nice flatpak integration, their replacement desktop utilities for the Gnome utilities they once used are very full featured and don’t get in your way, and in most cases where Canonical built their own tool that nobody else uses, Mint has already swapped it with the standard tool. If your goal is to just get a Linux desktop going with minimal faffing about Mint has really become a brilliant choice to do so with
It’s like Windows is devolving into really, REALLY early Linux, where a single Control Panel application is broken up into a half dozen separate parts and scattered throughout the interface in a dozen separate sub-sub-sub menus.
You should NOT have to hunt for the “print” button in a freaking word processor.
I’m trying to remember but some Microsoft Office product did something entirely unexpected when I hit Ctrl+P to print. I wish I could remember the details but it was absolutely soul crushing seeing even basic keyboard shortcuts remapped
The CIA secretly discovered and then raised from the seabed fragments of a lost soviet submarine in the 60s, in order to obtain soviet nuclear secrets and warheads. Some bodies were recovered with the wreckage.
Even though it was a super secret operation and the middle of the cold war, the CIA put together a respectful and moving funeral ceremony for the soviet submariners onboard the recovery ship, and they were then buried at sea. The ceremony was filmed and later, after it was declassified, the ceremony was shared with the soviet leadership and the known families of the submariners.
I wish home and pro version influenced the setting panes. I get what they’re trying to do with making it look like OSX and Linux and why the “network interface and adapters” probably isn’t helpful for many home users, but I just wanna manage my interfaces here.
Back when I was 6, in 1983, my uncle who worked in the oil industry told me about global warming.
I could totally have been a real radical environmentalist, but I was 6.
A second time around that talk would have an impact, and with some foresight for the next 40 years. I think no one would be surprised if I devoted everything to fixing global warming - they might be surprised at my success in the stock market.
I have a solution for the gun violence problem in schools. Print simple steps on common causes and solutions to the underlying social and mental contributors. Put these up in every door, hallway and classroom in every schools. Then these poor misguided kids would have troubleshooting.
Often enough little more than conceit, but you technically can’t immigrate to a place you’re already a citizen in. Brought my immigrant family with me though, so I’m happy enough to be called an immigrant along with them.
It’s bewildering to me that, after decades of getting (deservedly) dunked on by Europeans for our shitty systems, not only are American leaders still giving the whole flaming garbage heap the five finger salute, but European leaders are now saying “well, yes, the American system is awful, but we swear it’ll work for us.” And people are believing them. Unreal. I can’t even imagine the frustration you must feel.
We’ve talked about moving to Denmark or NL, but we’re just not there yet, and with NL getting their own dollar store (there’s a Dutch joke in there somewhere) Trump, I’m not so sure if we ever will be.
Happening in Canada too. For the last decade, virtually every province has been led by Conservative governments (except BC and that was just half a decade ago). Healthcare and housing has been slowly falling apart.
Looking at the polls, what’s amazing is that most Canadian voters seem to think the problem is insufficient conservatism!
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