The 10 Phases of Voting
2556 sats \ 45 comments \ @kepford 8 Nov 2023 meta
  1. Voting is a right and duty as a good citizen
  2. I vote for the lessor of two evils
  3. I only vote on issues I am informed on
  4. Nothing seems to change but voting is vital to our survival
  5. I vote as an act of self defense
  6. I forgot to vote and I feel bad about it
  7. I am disenfranchised and stopped voting
  8. I tell people I don't vote and why
  9. I have no clue about what the two teams are lying about today
  10. I forget about elections
Where are you on this list? Should this go to 11?
Some of you have never even been under the spell of democracy. You are phase zero. Stay on zero.
This was inspired by #308827
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221 sats \ 13 replies \ @td 8 Nov 2023
Why do you not vote? Everyone has a different reason.
Not coming down either way, I don't claim to know the answer, but worth bearing the following in mind when deciding what or what not to do. As per Michael McFaul; seven stages of successful political revolutions common in colour revolutions:
  1. A semi-autocratic rather than fully autocratic regime
  2. An unpopular incumbent
  3. A united and organized opposition
  4. An ability to quickly drive home the point that voting results were falsified
  5. Enough independent media to inform citizens about the falsified vote
  6. A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to protest electoral fraud
  7. Divisions among the regime's coercive forces.
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288 sats \ 10 replies \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov 2023
I started not voting when I realized that never once in American history has any election been decided by a single vote. On top of that, I realized that even if my vote swung an election, that probably wouldn't change anything important either.
It's the epitome of "not worth the effort".
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1005 sats \ 9 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Nov 2023
For several of the elections in the last twenty years, the outcome was decided by a very small number of votes in key places. It's not hard to conclude that a relatively small number of Undisciplined-type people, following the same logic as you, could have changed the results.
In addition to that, voting isn't a one-move game. The consequences of having informed and thoughtful people secede from the process is an informative signal to those who remain -- a kind of evaporate cooling, or iterated prisoner's dilemma.
This logic is extra puzzling to me, coming from you. You said in another comment that you're a vegan because
I believe plausibly sentient beings deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to moral consideration.
I'm guessing that, before you were a vegan, you weren't restricting your carnivorous activities to the animals you killed yourself; which means that the animals you were eating then, and that you could be eating now, were dead, whether you ate them or not. There was no grocery store tracking Undisciplined's consumption of chicken fingers, and your contribution to the destruction of sentient life had an unfathomably small influence on industrial farming writ large. The machine would grind forward, regardless of whether or not you ordered a hamburger.
And yet you don't eat meat.
My guess is that you recognize that your tiny moral act means more than the literal act itself, and that it echoes throughout the culture in innumerable ways, a kind of I, Pencil of conscience. It has symbolic meaning, and it has informational power via the signals that propagate to others.
Am I close? I'm interested in how you'd compare your attitude in regard to the two domains.
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228 sats \ 8 replies \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov 2023
I certainly hadn't put these two things next to each other before. The following line of thinking that you introduced interests me:
In addition to that, voting isn't a one-move game. The consequences of having informed and thoughtful people secede from the process is an informative signal to those who remain -- a kind of evaporate cooling, or iterated prisoner's dilemma.
You're spot on with my reasoning about eating animals. In fact, I mentioned in that thread that I really don't care what happens to an already dead animal, including me eating it. What I'm trying to avoid is adding demand signals to the production of animal products, as well as wanting to add to the demand for alternatives.
On the voting front, my interpretation of the same factors is that the regime incessantly encourages voting and therefore prefers higher levels of engagement. Lew Rockwell makes the case that the regime is most concerned about low turnout because that is a direct implicit challenge to their perceived legitimacy as representatives.
How are you thinking about the iterative dynamics of abstaining from voting?
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504 sats \ 7 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Nov 2023
How are you thinking about the iterative dynamics of abstaining from voting?
The principle thing that I think of is a kind of contagion and a norm creation cascade.
You may have heard about how suicide is contagious. (The finding is well established but I don't have a favorite reference to point you to.) But many acts are contagious, many beliefs. The more people who do the thing, or purport to believe in the thing, the more others get the sense that the thing is true, and adjust accordingly, kind of the intersection between a Keynesian beauty contest and broken windows theory. (This is why I talk about 'belief' and 'coordination' so much in those book club discussions.)
So not voting, or civic disengagement generally, leads to more civic disengagement, which exacerbates some of the things that lead people to disengage (this the evaporative cooling link, above.) Once enough people decide they don't need to follow the law, and get away with it, a lot of other people decide that the law is for suckers. And the truer it is the truer it is. And suddenly you're in Greece, or Argentina, or any other low-trust state. It's a shit hole. Corruption is everywhere. You've helped create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Lew Rockwell makes the case that the regime is most concerned about low turnout because that is a direct implicit challenge to their perceived legitimacy as representatives.
Have you ever had to run something vaguely democratically? Like getting a bunch of stakeholders to agree on some giant strategy? The best possible outcome is when fewer people show up; you don't have to be interrogated, you don't have to negotiate with a bunch of randos, you can play a smaller Game of Thrones. You have a handful of people who know the score and you all have a better chance of getting what you want.
So the Rockwell claim doesn't hold water for me. I understand it logically, legitimacy is certainly important. But it would seem far down on the list of things to worry about if you're a would-be master of the universe.
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152 sats \ 6 replies \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov 2023
Revealed preference is the reason the Rockwell point is important. There is a huge investment in encouraging people to vote. My view is that they do that because the elections only serve the purpose of perceived legitimacy: Emma Goldman's line "If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal." comes to mind.
To your point about civic engagement, I believe voting crowds out real productive civic engagement. As the state has grown civil societies have become almost extinct. People feel like they've done their part by voting. That's socially damaging because they didn't actually do anything. It would be better for people to not vote and seek to do their part in some other way.
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461 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 9 Nov 2023
Revealed preference is the reason the Rockwell point is important.
I could rebut that the same reason that prices in a free market approach the true aggregate value of their inputs, participation in a democracy asymptotes toward what people want and believe. Maybe the process is flawed in the same way that market action is flawed, subject to all the biases we know about, structural issues, etc. But most people don't want to shit-can the ability to transact, especially not around here.
More briefly: if you think there is something to the value of diverse information, and that it aggregates toward a better idea of truth, then you don't need to assume anything sinister about a democracy encouraging citizens to be involved in their own governance.
That's socially damaging because they didn't actually do anything. It would be better for people to not vote and seek to do their part in some other way.
I don't know any reason to believe that this dichotomy actually exists. I mean, it's a story. But is it a defensible story? In the threads today I keep reading the equivalent of "I didn't vote so instead I could start a business in Africa and invent a more efficient rotary engine" but am not compelled that this is anything but rationalization.
Kind of like your stoner friend used to go on ad nauseum about all the amazing industrial uses for hemp. It's like: Ryan, you like weed. It's fine, but you're not fooling anyone.
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228 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 9 Nov 2023
It's like: Ryan, you like weed. It's fine, but you're not fooling anyone.
I'm going to disagree with a lot of what you said, but we agree on that. I am also very skeptical of anyone who claims they did something dramatically humanitarian just because they didn't vote.
At the core of our disagreement is that I do not believe we live under a democratic government (meant in the looser philosophical sense, not the "actually it's a republic" sense). I have often said that all "Democracy" means in American discourse is "rule by Democrats". There are entrenched interests and what they want they generally get.
In every presidential election of my lifetime, the perceived peace candidate has won, and yet America has been at war every single day of my life. Congress has an 11% approval rating. I just don't see a ton of evidence that what voters want matters very much, at least nationally.
Also, conflating voting with being involved in governance is another instance of people feeling like they've done something meaningful by voting. I'm all for people being involved in their own governance, by actually seeking office or directly petitioning an office holder. Since I don't think voting does anything, I don't think doing it is a form of involvement.
It's fine if you don't believe the crowding out story. I certainly don't have conclusive evidence for it. What I have are a lot of first hand experiences of people who tell me that voting is "doing their part" who do absolutely nothing else for anyone. I also know that what I would consider meaningful civic engagement has declined dramatically. I'm connecting those dots, but you don't have to.
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110 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 8 Nov 2023
The myth of authority is the most dangerous superstition
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129 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 9 Nov 2023
This is a great video. Thanks Darth.
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30 sats \ 4 replies \ @DarthCoin 8 Nov 2023
I am at the level 21.... few understand and can get that high level. voting is only for slaves... watch the movie "The Jones Plantation".
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200 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
Jones Plantation https://www.jonesplantation.watch/
Here's the original on YT:
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271 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
Let's just take a moment and recognize that Darth was gonna be way over 11 on this one. Still chuckling about it. There's rarely a week that goes by that I don't think about how communism has shaped the minds of its victims differently than mine. Those of us that have lived under "liberal" democracies that feel the need to hide their malice and evil really do not have the same mindset. Even those of us that think we see the world clearly. I can't imagine what it was like to live under such an evil state.
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
:)
Yeah, "The Jones Plantation" is great. I should have mentioned it.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall 8 Nov 2023
I've just discovered Larkin Rose. I need to check that movie out.
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199 sats \ 2 replies \ @evanbaer 8 Nov 2023
Lol at "stay on zero"
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5 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
I have several friends that are on zero and they mock my level of care/thought on politics. I sometimes envy them.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 8 Nov 2023
ignorance is a bliss.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @JesseJames 9 Nov 2023
"...If Voting Made a Difference, They Wouldn't Let Us Do It..." :-)
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10 sats \ 4 replies \ @Natalia 8 Nov 2023
never voted in my life and won't 😳
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 8 Nov 2023
Then don’t complain
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @Natalia 9 Nov 2023
I never complain - complaining is a waste of time; and I vote with my feet.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 9 Nov 2023
If you complain after voting, you're just a sore loser.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @MastercardMaximalist 9 Nov 2023
low iq answer of the day
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov 2023
I skipped stage 9. Generally, I'm aware of what they're lying about, but I did forget elections were happening. In fact, I only remembered because all NBA games were cancelled on election day.
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361 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
LOL. I saw a hashtag on Twitter last night when I was working on my newsletter. I was like. Huh.
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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @Zepasta 8 Nov 2023
5
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10 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 8 Nov 2023
seriously? Please don't make me say that NGMI reply....
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Zepasta 8 Nov 2023
Things here are really bad, 20+ years of socialism destroyed my country. Major corruption at the highest level for decades.
Our prime minister just resigned yesterday due corruption.
Me voting wont do shit, but i will still do it regardless. People are retard and will elect for more Socialism again, they don't learn. Eventually i will have to escape this shithole.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 8 Nov 2023
why people are still such pussies?
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @MastercardMaximalist 9 Nov 2023
  1. I stop believing somebody else will solve my stuff for me and finally get shit done myself to improve my life
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100 sats \ 5 replies \ @0330830bf9 8 Nov 2023
  1. realizing not voting is what they want you to do, and becoming resolute in making it harder for them.
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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @0330830bf9 8 Nov 2023
Also I can almost guarantee none of the larps too cool to vote have moved to China etc.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
lol, I see where you are coming from now. You think we are centrists.... lol. Nope. Not even close.
Since you mention China. The Chinese know they aren't free. American's think they are free because they can vote for two options. You will never vote your way to freedom.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0330830bf9 8 Nov 2023
No one said voting was wholistic. It's the minimum.
So when are you moving to China?
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
What "they" want is power. What they want is a populace that needs them. If you really want to hurt "them" become ungovernable. Live in such a way that they no longer matter. Become sovereign and free. Build real community. Provide for yourself. Live abundantly. Honestly, as bad as the state is, it has very little impact on my day to day life and that is largely by choice.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @0330830bf9 8 Nov 2023
That's a childish notion, there's always a force greater than your community. That's how this shit came to be.
Voting isn't their game, it's ours. Yes they cheat, so we have to be fierce about it.
Get back to me when you have your own Ohio class submarine and then I'll take you seriously.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall 8 Nov 2023
I'm on 9.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @antic 8 Nov 2023
  1. I moved to system of decentralized governance
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
For anyone that has been following the clown show. Is this the most important election of our life time? Again? Or is this one just a regular one?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 8 Nov 2023
Another resource
https://mises.org/library/democracy-god-failed-1
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