[ExI] Who has a vote that counts?

[Will Steinberg]

Apathy, disgust with two party system, hopelessness.

It may be harder to understand for older people.

We younger people have very little hope for the future.  While you guys
were excited for the future as kids, young adults, and beyond, we have no
hope.  Geopolitical instability is increasing, there are pandemics, climate
change, and increasingly polarized and violent populations in many
countries.  We are so salty at this that at times we literally no longer
care what happens, and would rather 'watch the world burn' out of spite and
the fact that said burning seems inevitable at this point.  The world is
more fucked up than it was last time there was severe global shake-up
(WWII) but now there are far more nukes and nuclear countries, worse
weather, far worse wealth inequality, more densely clustered living areas
leading to unrest and disease.

So the basic idea is 'it's already fucked, may as well make my
disappointment clear.'

For older people, Trump getting elected or not may determine whether the
entire rest of your life is calm or is full of strife.  For us, strife is
pretty much guaranteed at some point.  In fact, will hastening it in some
way get us out the other side more quickly?  A kind of 'just get it over
with already' perspective.

So--if the thing to avoid is horrible strife at some point in one's life,
we don't see the election of Trump as really having a bearing on that.  It
will come sooner or later.  Even if Biden is elected, it seems easy to
believe that the world will still get worse even during his tenure,
surveillance and wealth gap will increase, more pandemics, more natural
disasters, more war.

John--that's why.  Because when you have 80 more years to live, it can seem
like it doesn't matter either way.

Maybe Trump losing will initiate a renaissance of compassion, technological
improvement for the better of humankind, knowledge-gathering, and wealth
redistribution.  But more likely than not it will just be a brief positive
bump, if even that.  Or just a not-as-bad negative.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 6:19 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 12:19 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> I live in PA, so my vote definitely counts a lot. I actually agree with
>> John not only that voting in safe states will likely matter in what
>> happens, but also that voting for Biden specifically will be more important
>> than just voting against Trump, because Biden will be helped by tallies the
>> same way Trump is hurt by them.*
>>
>
> Good.
>
> *> That being said, I still haven't convinced myself to vote for Biden
>> instead of just not voting this year like I have been planning on.  Idk*
>>
>
> I've tried, I've really tried, but I just don't understand that attitude.
> What on Earth is the downside to voting against a fascist who has put the
> constitution in mortal danger?!
>
>  John K Clark
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