It is hilarious that liberals have actually appropriated the rhetoric that saying “actually, both sides are wrong” ends up favouring the “evil” side, but they continue to apply this maxim to the USSR and Nazi Germany. An inability to realize that what makes this maxim ridiculous, in the latter case, is that, in fact, it was the Soviet Union that ended fascist barbarism, while the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are two cogs in the same bellicose, anti-democratic, imperialist machine. As long as the choice is reduced to “blue vs. red” (a fake contradiction), the freedom of the human race will remain, at best, a distant dream.
But perhaps what irritates me the most is the overly pedantic use of Jim and Pam memes.
what bothers me a lot about libs is that they get weirdly fixated with a single technical or wonk method of “fixing the system” as if ranked choice voting is this grand innovation that will save democracy
And how the fuck do they even think it’s going to happen? As if the entrenched political duopoly is going to allow any meaningful reform of itself. The reason we don’t have politicians getting assassinated all the time is because nobody’s even allowed to become a serious enough threat to the status quo.
I was this kind of liberal back in like 2015, and my reasoning was, in retrospect, essentially entirely predicated on the assumption that Western countries were logical and meritocratic, and so reforms to the FPTP system would be accepted so long as we could demonstrate its superiority. As if the problem was just that politicians needed to be convinced to introduce a better voting system because ranked choice was wrongfully seen as too complicated or something. Luckily I never became a Ranked Choice Guy™, I was still largely apolitical at that point, but the idea of it sounded good and reasonable and common sense so why not believe it.
It later sunk in that no, actually, the system is specifically designed to work this way and the uninspiring candidates and endless broken promises were a feature, not a bug. Also, Australia having mandatory voting and it not meaningfully producing better results was a pretty big point against that whole theory, leading me down the “okay, so we also have to change everybody’s mind and convince them to vote for good candidates, surely the powers that be would not oppose better political education so people don’t vote for conservative parties that don’t benefit them” ideological cul-de-sac until I realized that that’s liberal nonsense and transitioned to a socialist and then communist outlook.
I love your username