Positive rights vs negative rights & how that may or may not apply to our current situation

wrath
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Doesn’t that mean that the Democrats in office were actually responding to the desires of their constituents? And also, to complete the equivalence battle, how did Republicans vote who were up for election? The most concrete way currently to establish yourself as a Democratic voter vs. a Republican voter, and thus either one who has to be pandered to in an election year by voting against or for war, respectively, didn’t voting then still affect the outcome?

If your argument is that the Democrats up for election wouldn’t have necessarily voted against the war if it wasn’t already a foregone conclusion, I don’t see why that’s essentially less crystal-ball-y than Cowicide’s assertions.

In the end , it seems like we just need to let our representatives know that our memories are sharper and longer than they think, and that an immediate upcoming election shouldn’t be their only concern. Perhaps when we go in to vote, we need it to be more like a customer survey. “I’m NOT re-electing you because of the following reasons:”

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Seeing as the big sharks start off as little minnows, we ought to nip 'em in the bud locally first, mind.

(ETA: and continue to do so as they grow)

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It’s useless to cite the actual events where voter preference changed policy. The entire thesis of these new monarchists is that the voters are necessarily going to choose an option that is evil and stupid. That criteria is in the mind of the bias, not subject to the record. Such has always been the case with monarchy.

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He has no right or ability to force you, but you know he has every right to tell what he thinks ought to be done. You have the same right, and have done so in the past, advising people on the virtues of not voting. If that was all with a better demeanor, well – instead of just complaining about the reception, you should take a look at what you actually jumped into.

Cowicide had provided not just an opinion but what I would consider good evidence about the effects of voting on a national level; the rest has been defending it against someone waving it all aside, saying they don’t want any evidence except the axioms they select. A number of us are already quite done with evidence-free dismissals.

In that context just jumping in and casually skipping everything that was given and said, without bothering about backing up your contrary assertions, isn’t just voicing another opinion; it’s shoving over everyone above who provided evidence or argued for its importance. I expect it was inadvertent disregard, but now you’re caught up and know why it came off so badly.

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Well, in case it hasn’t been said, let’s all remember here that we agree on some pretty fundamental shit.

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Of course in most elections it makes negligible difference if any one individual votes. It’s like recycling, or saving water, or boycotting something. My understanding was that the question is if the voting in aggregate had value – based, you know, on actually having followed the topic. How such matters split up into individual responsibilities is another thing.

I don’t see where I’ve said people shouldn’t have a choice on voting, or anything remotely jingoistic, or even that voting in local elections isn’t more important than in national ones. All I’ve said is the latter does make important differences in outcome, and expressed frustration with people dismissing that without evidence, and pointed out that since you came in seeming to do so you shouldn’t be surprised you got a bad reception.

But sure. I’ll settle for the second class troll certificate, valued according to the signature being someone who said he didn’t read the thread but still felt self-important enough to complain about its tone, but a good reminder about trying to talk when I can tell nobody’s listening.

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They also tend to have a reasonable eye and ear for bullshit, and vote accordingly. Even when their ideas are wrong they tend to be a wrong that is less wrong than even random chance or even the “conventional wisdom” currently being plugged by the media. Your “mathematical” argument only holds true if your fifty-thousanth-point vote is the only vote out of fifty thousand that is “best for everyone”.

(and… cities often have over 50,000 active voters, so does your argument invalidate local elections too? are you really so clueless as to go back on your initial declaration?)

How else do you expect the direction of national decisions to be set?

And here we get around to the real bugaboo for monarchists: getting them to admit that their preferred form of government, after a short period of anarchy, is an enlightened daddy-oligarch with nothing so limiting as legislative or judicial checks on their economic power, political power, militia power, or power to censor.

/thread2
begin zombie thread3…

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I’m back.

Your problem is that nobody has stood up to your ludicrous bullying.

Aside from the fact that’s hilarious considering how much I’m bullied, my real problem is you jumped into this thread without reading it, then insultingly blurted that my actions are worthless and then went on to compare my efforts to clinging to sacred dogma while proudly anouncing you couldn’t be bothered with reading the thread.

Let’s see, now I see you’ve gone on to refer to @chenille and myself as “numbskulls” along with “Colossal trollies”, jingoistic (um, what?), inept at your obtuse math nonsense, etc.

Sometimes, my friend, the bully is you.

Also, “jingoistic” may sound like a cool word and all, but you should probably arm yourself with the knowledge of its proper definition before shooting it all over the place like an illiterate Rambo.

You have NO right to tell me who or who not to vote for, or whether or not to even vote, if I should so choose.

I wasn’t aware Kim Jong-un took over the United States and declared free speech rights dead.

I will refrain from providing further suppositions based upon evidence that hurts your fragile, limited, stunted sensibilities, my ruler.

I don’t need even one fact to back me up on that.

Well, I wouldn’t want you to break any trends for yourself…

You can take your opinions and shove them up your backside or your frontside or your Cowiside

Well, if it’s up to me, I choose all of the above… I want all my holes filled.

Still waiting for your evidence.

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For sure, local voting is vital.

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Come on with the calling people trollies.

I would say that’s a very weak mathematical model unless you are living in a proportional representation system. With first-past-the-post you can’t just divide by the number of people to figure out how effective your vote is. It scales with the number of people, but I don’t think it’s linear. (Suppose 11 people are voting and each has a 50% chance to vote either way, clearly that means there is a 50% of each side winning, but suppose we set one vote in advance - that is, one person chooses to vote A - now A wins 62.1% of the time, a gain of 12.1%. If we do the same thing with 51 people, then setting that one vote makes A win 55.6% of the time. That’s a gain of 5.6%. The one vote is almost half as good with 5 times as many people)

But generally the size of the purse that people play with is somewhat proportional to their voter base, and effectiveness of dollars spent doesn’t scale linearly either (a dollar is a cup of coffee, a million dollars is a lot better than a million cups of coffee). People rightly perceive that the decisions made by the top levels of government are higher impact decisions than those made by local government.

That being said, obviously you are right that the decisions made by local levels of government have local impact. The president may make huge decisions but they are distributed across the whole country. Local governments make small decisions that are local. If everything was nice and linear then, sure, it would be obvious the local votes counted far more. But look at the slums of US cities - do you think that any vote for mayor or council will undo the damage of the war on drugs? I’m really big on the impacts of urban planning, but there are some things you can’t land-use-plan away.

You are arguing that we should vote locally and arguing against the idea that we should vote in national and state elections. Your math is far too simplistic to support that.

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I agree with you now that you’ve clearly explained yourself minus all the insulting snark, grandstanding and over-broad statements. Would have been nice if you could have been that way from the start and saved a lot of us in this thread a lot of unnecessary grief, misunderstandings and wasted time.

I don’t necessarily agree with you that national voting is “overrated” considering a vast amount of Americans still don’t even bother to vote nationally (~40%). However, I do agree that voting on a local level can drastically affect what a President can do (for example).

I’ve said for years on these forums that there needs to be vastly more attention given to localized elections and mid-terms.

For example, I’ve repeatedly mentioned how the American public really screwed up by expecting their elected President to magically bend to their will while at the same time not bothering to previously vote in the mid-terms to thwart oppositional filibusters against their elected candidate. On the part of the general public, it was a frustratingly naive, critical and uninformed mistake that caused shitty repercussions for a host of reasons.

I am saying that local things will affect you in your face daily a lot more than national things.

Sure, and the list you gave are great examples. But, some of those things in that list are also greatly affected by federal funding (or lack thereof).

Like I’ve said, voting locally is vital and voting nationally is vital. And, both affect each other in many intertwined and complex ways. Not voting nationally can hinder the benefits of voting locally and vice versa.

national politics constantly dominates the news. It’s out of proportion.

Agreed! I think that’s a horrible side affect of media consolidation as well. Local news has been showing less and less local news over the years because of it and I’m sure that negatively affects local voter turnout as well. It’s a problem that desperately needs to be addressed.

As far as which is more important (local or national)? I think they are both so complexly intertwined that it’s just best to do both with relatively equal vigor. However, I do agree with you that there needs to be much more impetus to get more people to vote locally as there’s a tragic dearth of local voting (as there is with national voting).

There! We can agree on things!

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84

This is essentially like “believing” in one’s employer. Perhaps belief is not what you need to get from voting. Voting in general can be both necessary for society to continue while the specific questions themselves are not the eschaton some (you) seem to feel can be the only justification for elections. You seem unsatisfied that elections are not a referendum on your issues. And by unsatisfied I mean a kind of tantrum-throwing narcissistic rejection of the whole process. I’m unsatisfied too, but I also know that it isn’t about me.

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What you didn’t do was quote my very next three short sentences…

This was supposed to indicate to you that, while I appreciate that elections are supposed to be about the greater good, they also stand at the crossroads of what one personally can back or not.

If voting were not about you in some regards, then why would you ever do it? Is someone holding a gun to your head? Did you believe everything they told you in elementary school? Did your mommy make you cry because you said you didn’t like the candidates?

That is the kind of extremism I am railing against. Nobody is making you vote. You ought to do it of your own free will and conscience. And if you cannot marshal the free will and conscience, then it’s time to examine why.

The act of voting is about me. And you. And everyone else, individually. It is a completely personal choice. I go to the precinct. I write the ballot. I hand it in. It is an utterly selfish act.

Elections are always a referendum on my issues. They come with an invisible box next to every line item; that invisible box says, “I don’t want to vote on this.” You can check all of those invisible boxes by staying home, or you can selectively check them when you’re standing there reading the ballot. It’s your choice.

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Well, that works both ways, buddy.

I didn’t come into this thread with an insulting attitude from the start saying your actions were useless, a farce and dogmatic. That was you, unfortunately.

I said what I had to say right at the beginning, but just had to repeat myself six different ways until the message sank in.

Now you’re implying anyone who didn’t understand where you were coming from was too dense to understand your higher intellect. Nice.

You didn’t repeat yourself, genius, you corrected yourself (HINT: You barged in and first said that national voting was useless and later corrected yourself), then you finally vastly clarified yourself in that post I just replied to.

If I was the only person having trouble with your message, that would be one thing, but several others took issue with your over-broad, insulting, hypocritical tone and confused, overbroad messages as well. But, if it makes you feel better to point your finger at everyone else, then so be it.

The other thing to say about the national races is what to do if you don’t like either candidate. As in, either candidate causes a jolt of severe revulsion to run down your spine and make your toenails angry. If you are in that position, then, goddammit, don’t believe the hype.

When the evidence shows that even the candidate you hate will cause much less human suffering than the only realistic alternative, it’s not “hype” in my opinion to vote in that lesser evil, it’s called human compassion. It’s also called strategy if you have any desire to unseat the system down the road and introduce third parties in the long term you don’t hate.

Don’t feel like you HAVE to vote in the nationals. No, you don’t and you should not feel guilty about it.

You could say the exact, same thing about local elections and you’d be wrong there as well. When people choose not to vote in national elections and it ushers in more Republicans and more wars, worse health care and other negative effects on society at large – they very well should feel guilty. Then again, I suppose ignorance is bliss in some cases.

I voted for Obama both times.

So did a lot of other people, but they made the critical mistake of not voting in the mid-terms leading up to his first election. I assume you did, but too many others did not and we’re all suffering the consequences for that colossal blunder today.

Also, it’s great that you voted the lesser evil, but if you were expecting many short term gains after this unmitigated disaster, then I think you set yourself up for disappointment. There is only going to be long term change – expecting short term change isn’t rational, in my opinion.

I knew Obama would disappoint ( :arrow_backward: 06/24/2008) before he was elected and I knew it would be exacerbated by the lack of proceeding mid-term election support he was going to need to push through most anything left-of-center beyond the filibusters.

That said, even with my lower expectations, I’m still very disappointed in Obama as even just a lesser evil. I had heard and hoped he would sneak in more progressive agendas in his second term, but I was wrong. That said, he did push us forward in ways that the Republicans would have most certainly sent us backwards, and I’m at least thankful for that (as is all the people and their family members they care about that are still alive today and/or not suffering as much).

Would I vote for Obama today? Hell no. I would not. Nor would I vote for a Romney or McCain or whoever else they want to shove down America’s throat.

I assume that means (correct me if I’m wrong) that knowing what you know today, you wouldn’t have voted for Obama because of drone strikes, attacks on whistleblowers, etc. even though you were glad to see ACA, marriage equality, etc. from an Obama administration.

That’s where I feel like logic fails you. If you and others hadn’t voted (or thrown away your votes on someone who had no hope of winning) that would have only made it more likely that McCain or Romney would have won.

With a McCain/Romney win, we’d have drones strikes, attacks on whistleblowers and all the evil things Obama is doing without the ACA, etc. All the negatives (and much worse) without any of the positives. For example, we’d also be very likely at war with Iran and Syria by now.

You may be different, but for me I’m willing to put aside my anger, disappointment, etc. and still do my small part to keep greater evil at bay within an evil system. Especially when by doing so it makes slow change for the better more likely down the road than near impossible. And, saving some lives and human suffering in the process…

I wish there was an alternative to Obama that would have followed through on progressive promises. I wish at the time of his election, the USA was more evolved and could have done better. But, it wasn’t and thank Gawd we at least didn’t end up with crazy McCain and even more death and suffering in this world.

There’s no one to believe in.

Welcome to reality.

“It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams

I’m not going to throw away my time and effort on someone who will disappoint.

Then I don’t think you should vote for any humans… ever, that’s for sure. :smiley:

If you’re going to bother to vote, do it intelligently and with an unencumbered heart.

Agreed!

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barged in

It’s the Internet, Goaticide. Everyone is barging

I meant it in the sense that you didn’t read the thread and were kind of rude. Hey, you changed my avatar name. That was very clever.

Go read some YouTube comments and weep.

I wouldn’t say you’re quite as bad as YouTube commenters. Give yourself some slack. :wink:

No, because I lived in a state that makes not one iota of difference electorally. I didn’t have to vote. Now I’m in a state where my vote will make not one iota of difference because it is so red they hand out those little books to the schoolchildren. The logic is situational, so your blanket statement doesn’t apply.

Well, if you read the thread and my posts within it, you’d see where I addressed that. :smile:

I know one thing I would do differently: I wouldn’t have given him $50.

You would have given him $500?

Electing Democrats doesn’t stop wars! It just delays them for a while.

If we elect Democrats consecutively into Presidential office for once in modern history, we may get a different result. But, we’ve never tried it…

Some of these men above initiated vastly more extensive open wars than others.

Of course, I’d rather see someone who wouldn’t take us into any fruitless wars (big or small) at all, but the leftist status quo won’t have him just yet, in my opinion.

So in the meantime, I’ll continue to push for the lesser evil for long term, progressive change that can eventually lead to more substantial change for the better with third parties, etc.

And, of course, support things like this:

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This is definitely all about you, then. Or, at least, this weird hijacking of the thread is, anyway.

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Or, at least, this weird hijacking of the thread is, anyway.

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@Cowicide and @awjt Both of you cut back on the insults and snark or you’ll be having a break.

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I just did a bunch of analysis on Canadian elections (since I’m Canadian) and was a little surprised [you won’t believe these N amazing results about elections!] by how undetermined the future is by the past. Sure, incumbents won a little over 80% of the time, but that’s 20% of the time they lost and about 40% of those losses (so 8% overall) were to parties that had come in third or fourth in the previous election. There is one case in recent years where someone who won with 70% of the vote went on to lose the next election to a party that came in third in the previous election, 39.8% to 39.1%. Basically anyone doing analysis based on the past would have said the riding was not worth voting in, but it turns out to be one of the closest races in the country.

Obviously Canada and America are very different. Having three or four viable parties running in a riding creates pressures that two parties don’t. Also, I understand the gerrymandering has gone wild down there and some districts (is this what they are called?) look like proofs of the Banach-Tarski Paradox, but I wonder if the past really predicts the future so strongly. We have a region up here that looks a locked up as some of your decided states, but it’s only been locked up for the Conservatives since 1971, before then it was locked up for the Liberals.

Everyone who has ever had a come-from-behind or surprise win has done so precisely by winning in places that others didn’t think they would win. Mostly we know who will win ahead of time, except when we don’t, and that seems to happen every few elections.

Does anyone know if/where I could download spreadsheets or .csv’s of american election results? I’d be interested to do some of the same analysis and see how entrenched things are.

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Bbbbbbbut we are getting along now?

@Falcor knows it’s a tenuous peace accord at best.

I don’t see this anywhere

My mistake, it was in the first part I linked to at the top of this thread that was continued here.

If you are not in a battleground state, then your vote is worth very little… or to use my oft-repeated phrase: worthless. But go ahead, enlighten me as I know you will.

Prepare for enlightenment! :smiley:

Depending on the situation, a vote can still be a symbolic gesture with real world results. Democrats tend to (not always, of course) lean further right with less support even if they win. And, Democrats who lose by wide margins tend to adjust their positions even further right due to a lack of perceived support.

Even a Democrat who truly wants to push forward a progressive agenda will take stock at some point if they can’t even get into office at all or just barely made it into office for the first term. By not showing support, Democratic voters often shoot themselves in the foot by putting candidates into a position where they believe they need to bend further right in order to at least get some progressive agendas put forward in their second term.

At the very least, instead of abstaining it would have been better to vote for a far-left third party candidate if one was available. At least the Democrat who lost can look at those votes (if there was enough of them) and figure she or he should have offered a further left platform. Then again, that can backfire if there weren’t very many votes for the third party and the Democrat will simply shift right as I explained in my previous paragraph.

Voting is a barometer for politicians. You may not like it, but it’s a side effect of human nature and a struggling representative democracy within our republic.

I love the guy, he can’t be President. And it’s not for the reasons you probably think I’m gonna say.

Vermont has had a strong countercurrent of progressive politics for decades. Bernie has done extremely little to shape the message, corral the resources and mount a group offensive. Vermont has had strong progressive candidates, including for Governor, and yet Bernie’s coalition-building activity has been lackluster. Progressives continually fall flat on their faces in Vermont, the one place where they would be likely to get in, if they had good backing and better organization. Do I blame Bernie? No. But neither has he helped much.

Right, that’s basically what the article said that I linked to when I mentioned Bernie.

If he ever got on the Presidential ballot, I’d gladly throw away my vote on him!

I’d do one better – I’d do everything in my power to support his campaign and give him a chance to win. If in the end, he falls flat and can’t win despite everyone’s best efforts, I’d vote for a lesser evil instead to prevent more wars, less health care, human suffering, etc. Sometimes less is more.

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