this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 105 points 23 hours ago (6 children)

"Kamala Harris is not the perfect progressive candidate in every way. How can I possibly vote for her? I'll sit this one out. That'll show 'em!"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Trump won because the people that voted for him actually like him, they aren't choosing the lesser of two evils or whatever nonsense. The democrats message of "at least we aren't as bad" was awfully inspiring.

Hey democrats, if you win what will you do with that power? Change nothing? Cool!

Blame the democrats for getting tight lipped about literally anything anyone cared about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

You didn't listen - they talked about corporations buying houses, the middle class disappearing, being unable to live on minimum wage, expanding medical for people that need it.

The idea that a political party will change just because they lost because they weren't exactly where you wanted is also ignorant. That's never a guarantee. Otherwise we would currently be living in utopia. Maybe it will cycle back, by the time we're all dead

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 hours ago

They honestly spent too much time talking about tax credits to start a business. Starting a business? Lady, I'm starting to look seriously at fleeing the country in hopes of finding one that hasn't lost its collective mind.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 23 hours ago (10 children)

People need to accept that the electoral system in the US is just a trolley problem at the end of the day unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 22 hours ago (33 children)

Basically, and people let 'the enemy of perfect get in the way of good enough'. Progress is incremental unfortunately. That's just how it is. We can accept that, or we get this crap.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Not quite.

For starters it didn't use to be a choice of "who would you rather see killed" - or in other words, nothing was forever lost if one side won instead of the other - and beyond that it has always been a cyclical choice, so it made sense for voters who felt insufficiently catered to, to punish a side on one cycle to try and get it to offer a better deal on the next cycle.

Whether that remains the case - i.e. will Trump make himself dictator for life - is the big question.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

That's true but I didn't mean it as a choice of who you'd rather see killed, just that the system is set up in such a way that as a rational voter you are forced into a situation where you must act to prevent the worst outcome rather than voting for your interests and what you believe in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 44 minutes ago* (last edited 38 minutes ago)

I think I used a wrong methaphor (sorry!) because the whole death thing carries a lot more implications than what I meant to convey.

In a Trolley Problem the A/B choice is fixed, is a once-only choice and its effects cannot be undone. My point is that, unlike a Trolley Problem, even in the US deeply flawed voting system the choice is (so far) not an irrevocable one time only choice - there is a new choice every 4 years, most effects from the previous choice can be undone (the chosen one of the next cycle always has the option to undo most of what the chosen one of the previous cycle did) and the actual choices available at voting time are not fixed and can be influenced before the actual vote (Parties can be convinced to field different candidates).

My theory is that in part Presidential Elections in the US system are a Cyclical Ultimatum Game, in that for each Party a candidate is fielded whose political offerings are a certain approportioning of the "cake" amongst different societal interests and the voters who care about such societal interests can chose to Accept or Reject, and given the cyclical nature of the choice, one can use Reject to Punish a party for fielding a candidate who is offering a specific approportioning of the "cake", the difference between a mere Reject and Punish being that the latter is done with the intention of affecting the choice of "cake" approportioning of the other side of the game (i.e. the Party whose candidate is being rejected) that they offer on the next cycle.

Or in common language, in the US system it's a logical strategy to, on one election, reject the candidate of one's "natural" Party who is offering an unacceptable approportioning of the "cake", to incentivise that Party to offer a better candidate in the next electoral cycle - the decision tree in the system is a lot deeper than merelly the single unrevocable choice of a Trolley Problem.

Had most Democrat voters actually been following this logic for the last couple of decades, rather than treating each vote as an independent event from all other votes, the situation in the US would be totally different, IMHO, not least because somebody like Trump would be facing Democrat candidates who actually would be trying much harder to appeal to the common people (as they otherwise would be rejected and hence never win).

Further, the mob here claiming that "natural" Democrat voters who refrained from voting Democrat in this election are losing everytime Trump does one of his extreme measures are totally missing the picture - those people did not reject Democrat to get Trump, they Rejected Democrat to get a better Democrat next time around and a Trump presidency was the risk they were taking for it. That choice will only be a "loss" if the Democrats do not field a better candidate next time around (or if Trump somehow manages to make it so that there is no "next time around").

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