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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2024

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  • rational_lib@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldDo the research
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    24 hours ago

    What annoys me is that “doing your own research” actually makes sense in a lot of contexts. Our modern politics driven news is 90% bullshit and you’re better off fact checking everything they say by looking at reliable sources and tracing the origin of dubious claims. But these people have ruined that by acting like “do your own research” means “blindly trust some guy with a podcast who tells you what you want to hear.”


  • There’s definitely giant inadequacies in American democracy, but still I fail to see how voting isn’t good enough. If people voted for Gore instead of Nader, American history would be very different. We’d have avoided a giant tax cut for the rich l, withdrawing from Kyoto, and a trillion dollar unnecessary war. Wealth inequality wouldn’t be as bad, there would definitely be earlier progress against global warming, and we could probably afford real universal health care by now.

    Ideally after voting in the right people, we’d fix all the democracy problems. But still I’d say voting alone would make a huge difference. Anything else meanwhile - protests (BLM, Gaza), violence (Matthew crooks, Luigi) has at best accomplished zero, and in reality seems to have done serious damage to the causes they were seeking. The one exception I’d give is boycotts - like the Tesla boycotts that have destroyed their sales numbers.


  • Well yeah, but part of the voter propaganda is telling people both sides are the same. I get that there’s pro capitalist media bias which at its root is caused by extreme financial inequality. But fixing that financial inequality requires government action, and that requires voting. For the people who will do the inadequate version over the people who want to make it worse. Incremental change through pressure + time, just like everything else on earth.


  • Voting caused the problem, it can solve it too. But here’s the thing: for voting to solve the problem, you have to actually do it and play the game.

    Every 20-25 years some rightwing psycho wins and inflicts some horror on us because new voters don’t remember what happened the last time people said “both sides are the same”. You kids know that whole Iraq war and torture thing was avoidable, right? So was Reagan’s annihilation of the middle class.





  • I agree with 0% but disagree there’s any paradox - every choice is just plain old wrong. Each choice cannot be correct because no percentage reflects the chance of picking that number.

    Ordinarily we’d assume the chance is 25% because in most tests there’s only one right choice. But this one evidently could have more than one right choice, if the choice stated twice was correct - which it isn’t. So there’s no basis for supposing that 25% is correct here, which causes the whole paradox to unravel.

    Now replace 60% with 0%. Maybe that would count as a proper paradox. But I’d still say not really, the answer is 0% - it’s just wrong in the hypothetical situation posed by the question rather than the actual question.






  • Fundamentally the problem is that the US is just too rich. That creates incentives, like:

    • A strong incentive to use media to control the abundance of resources for personal benefit
    • Valuable advertising, leading to corporate propaganda that exploits our emotions, and hyperemotional, fluffy news coverage designed to grab our attention rather than inform
    • A near-monopoly on extremely wealthy people, which leads those people to spend directly on promoting pro-stratification candidates

    This creates a catch-22. To fix the media and government, we need to spread out wealth to dilute financial power. But to do that would require policy changes that require fixing the media and government.