[ExI] Who has a vote that counts?

[William Flynn Wallace]

We younger people have very little hope for the future.   will

Have you heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy?  Of course you have. My
parents lived through two WWs and a deep Depression.  I never heard them
say that any of that ruined their lives.  You just did what you had to do
and moved on.  We were lower middle class.  Didn't have a lot but bought
new cars and always had food on the table.  And so on.

I hope your attitude doesn't spread.  Last thing we need is a national
emotional depression.  Of course most of us will grieve if the election
doesn't go our way, but honestly, we have lived through the last four years
and could live through four more years - not happy, but surviving and
trying to make our personal lives mean something.  That's all we really can
control:  our own lives.  Don't give up on them.

bill w

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 9:45 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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