I'm not entirely sure. I know that's what people think, but I think it's very simplistic to think that you have power simply because you're able to elect people who enter a given office once every X years.
In an ideal state, election power would be sufficient. But in practice, it isn't, and it isn't anywhere, which is why everyone who ends up in office ends up doing basically the same thing.
First of all, your choices are very limited. As the Machiavellians wrote, those who have a chance are those who are championed by organized minorities - i.e., people with power.
Secondly, there are the pressures of office. Just how much power do you wield with your one vote every 4 years, when there's an army of lobbyists trying to sway the politician the other way and has an unlimited budget? That's just one thing. There's also the bureaucracy. There's the party. There's the donors.
All this just means that ordinary people have zero influence on what happens, found by the Princeton study in the US and by some other studies in European countries.
I actually had almost instantly deleted my comment because it was largely repeating what you'd already stated previously.
As for your follow up comment, I wasn't exactly referring to power through democratic measures so much as power that people as a group actually have. Power that they seldom care to employ. Not alluding to any specific kind of action either, because public engagement on just about anything has nearly ground to an absolute halt.
Which is understandable given how the methods and tools employed have left people almost totally demoralized and nearly impotent. (IE, an almost totally corrupt media industry and the ever expansive reach of tech companies)
In some ways I think democracy was a bandaid fix, repeated desperate attempts to curtail the issues of power, only to be mired in a convoluted and bureaucratic mess. Which both serves as a useful delay in how power can be abused but also makes it easier for creeping abuses of power to sneak in with minimal detection and almost zero effective response.
Modern Democracy was a form of pacification to discourage violent and - sometimes necessary in the course of human events - uprisings of the people to overthrow their government. Instead the rulers can engineer a set of problems and solutions and let us think we are making the choice. Whatever the result, there's a sense of collective ownership. If we don't like it then "well the people voted for this" and "we just gotta vote harder next time."
In the US we had two large revolutionary uprisings. The second one failed and the Northern states imposed "American Democracy" on the losers forever. (though many of its worse aspects weren't put in place until the 1960s) Elements of this pacifying force were borrowed to create the "Liberal Democracies" of Europe. Neither form has anything to do with liberty or less tyrannical forms of governance.
So all I'm adding to your comment is that the implementation went the other way. The US Constitution wasn't perfect but it already solved many problems of government. Increasing the scope of "Democracy" as a bandaid to fix problems was itself an adaptation of the State to prevent a real cure to our ills from being pursued.
Out of those 4, 2 of those have been settled to the point running on those alone will net you little votes (Affirmative action and climate change), pride is experiencing the kind of backlash that has momentum so there's no way to stop the ball rolling.
The only one that might turn out the votes is student loans but given how worthless higher education has shown to be unless you go to STEM fields, I think that's waning too.
I'd be more concerned with what they censor instead, I expect A LOT of fuck ups from the dems especially Biden from here till election so let's see how well they can cover them all up.
Hopefully the people banking on loan forgiveness realize that Creepy Joe deceived them and stay home next November (no way they'll admit their mistakes and vote Republican). If only we could capitalize on that by solving the fraud problem.
The only redeeming quality of the sign-up is that you just have to stay up-to-date on your current contact information until 26, at which time you can stop updating it. Women, naturally, never ever have to do this and get everything a man is prevented from getting, barring his sign-up, free of any service.
Exactly. If it ever actually takes effect, people would be just hard-headedly stupid not to take advantage of it, even if you’re against it on a theoretical level.
It’s a mass transfer of wealth from middle and working class peoples to university-indoctrinated leftists. The people who vote for “student debt forgiveness” are actually voting to save their leftist indoctrination centers at the expense of the tax payer.
But yeah, take the money if they let you. Better that it helps even one red pilled white man than none at all.
I'm sitting on my last $20k of debt, all of which is due to losing my scholarships via college Dear Colleagues bullshit. If that went away tomorrow, I take my next month's debt payment and buy the biggest LET'S GO BRANDON flag and a 40' pole to fly it on.
On a straight fiscal argument, I am against debt forgiveness. On the other hand, Brian Niemeier, one of my favorite NewPub authors, makes the argument from Catholic morality that these loans are usury targeted at young adults via fraudulent statements. Plus, debt jubilees would reduce the power of the megabanks.
Plus, debt jubilees would reduce the power of the megabanks.
Said megabanks wouldn't hand out loans to every dipshit out of high school if they weren't federally guaranteed by the government. They're getting paid regardless, whether it's monthly checks, garnished wages, or the money printer.
That said, the government benefits nicely from this racket, indoctrinating an army of brainwashed midwits and keeping them on the plantation with the carrot of loan forgiveness.
If we're talking about loans for undergrad the government makes most of those directly now. There are still private loans. I don't know if the government guarantees them, but I believe you cannot discharge the debt in bankruptcy so it's still protected by them.
Loans for secondary trade school like law, medicine or business are still often private, however those grads generally make money...
Brian Neimeier has one of the best arguments for debt forgiveness, and one of the best arguments that normie right wingers really worship Mammon. It took me 7 years to pay off my loans and I never wound up in the field for my degree. I have no debt now, but no house or family of my own either. I understand the idea of the debt jubilee, and the right has got to come to grips with universities being a waste of time for the majority of people.
The only things I got out of college were debt, a few network connections, and the realization that I no longer really wanted to be out in the wider world.
The public have no power. That is the real problem.
But let's say that they do have power. Then the problem would be that the media decides what people's views are.
I'm not entirely sure. I know that's what people think, but I think it's very simplistic to think that you have power simply because you're able to elect people who enter a given office once every X years.
In an ideal state, election power would be sufficient. But in practice, it isn't, and it isn't anywhere, which is why everyone who ends up in office ends up doing basically the same thing.
First of all, your choices are very limited. As the Machiavellians wrote, those who have a chance are those who are championed by organized minorities - i.e., people with power.
Secondly, there are the pressures of office. Just how much power do you wield with your one vote every 4 years, when there's an army of lobbyists trying to sway the politician the other way and has an unlimited budget? That's just one thing. There's also the bureaucracy. There's the party. There's the donors.
All this just means that ordinary people have zero influence on what happens, found by the Princeton study in the US and by some other studies in European countries.
I actually had almost instantly deleted my comment because it was largely repeating what you'd already stated previously.
As for your follow up comment, I wasn't exactly referring to power through democratic measures so much as power that people as a group actually have. Power that they seldom care to employ. Not alluding to any specific kind of action either, because public engagement on just about anything has nearly ground to an absolute halt.
Which is understandable given how the methods and tools employed have left people almost totally demoralized and nearly impotent. (IE, an almost totally corrupt media industry and the ever expansive reach of tech companies)
In some ways I think democracy was a bandaid fix, repeated desperate attempts to curtail the issues of power, only to be mired in a convoluted and bureaucratic mess. Which both serves as a useful delay in how power can be abused but also makes it easier for creeping abuses of power to sneak in with minimal detection and almost zero effective response.
Modern Democracy was a form of pacification to discourage violent and - sometimes necessary in the course of human events - uprisings of the people to overthrow their government. Instead the rulers can engineer a set of problems and solutions and let us think we are making the choice. Whatever the result, there's a sense of collective ownership. If we don't like it then "well the people voted for this" and "we just gotta vote harder next time."
In the US we had two large revolutionary uprisings. The second one failed and the Northern states imposed "American Democracy" on the losers forever. (though many of its worse aspects weren't put in place until the 1960s) Elements of this pacifying force were borrowed to create the "Liberal Democracies" of Europe. Neither form has anything to do with liberty or less tyrannical forms of governance.
So all I'm adding to your comment is that the implementation went the other way. The US Constitution wasn't perfect but it already solved many problems of government. Increasing the scope of "Democracy" as a bandaid to fix problems was itself an adaptation of the State to prevent a real cure to our ills from being pursued.
What about abortion? i know that was a whole year ago, but now they can claim to actually want to do something about it.
Too many Current Things ago for the NPC braIn.
Out of those 4, 2 of those have been settled to the point running on those alone will net you little votes (Affirmative action and climate change), pride is experiencing the kind of backlash that has momentum so there's no way to stop the ball rolling.
The only one that might turn out the votes is student loans but given how worthless higher education has shown to be unless you go to STEM fields, I think that's waning too.
I'd be more concerned with what they censor instead, I expect A LOT of fuck ups from the dems especially Biden from here till election so let's see how well they can cover them all up.
Hopefully the people banking on loan forgiveness realize that Creepy Joe deceived them and stay home next November (no way they'll admit their mistakes and vote Republican). If only we could capitalize on that by solving the fraud problem.
There are ways to get out of it. The most popular was being a student during Vietnam, which is why Boomers push college so hard.
The only redeeming quality of the sign-up is that you just have to stay up-to-date on your current contact information until 26, at which time you can stop updating it. Women, naturally, never ever have to do this and get everything a man is prevented from getting, barring his sign-up, free of any service.
Exactly. If it ever actually takes effect, people would be just hard-headedly stupid not to take advantage of it, even if you’re against it on a theoretical level.
It’s a mass transfer of wealth from middle and working class peoples to university-indoctrinated leftists. The people who vote for “student debt forgiveness” are actually voting to save their leftist indoctrination centers at the expense of the tax payer.
But yeah, take the money if they let you. Better that it helps even one red pilled white man than none at all.
I'm sitting on my last $20k of debt, all of which is due to losing my scholarships via college Dear Colleagues bullshit. If that went away tomorrow, I take my next month's debt payment and buy the biggest LET'S GO BRANDON flag and a 40' pole to fly it on.
On a straight fiscal argument, I am against debt forgiveness. On the other hand, Brian Niemeier, one of my favorite NewPub authors, makes the argument from Catholic morality that these loans are usury targeted at young adults via fraudulent statements. Plus, debt jubilees would reduce the power of the megabanks.
Said megabanks wouldn't hand out loans to every dipshit out of high school if they weren't federally guaranteed by the government. They're getting paid regardless, whether it's monthly checks, garnished wages, or the money printer.
That said, the government benefits nicely from this racket, indoctrinating an army of brainwashed midwits and keeping them on the plantation with the carrot of loan forgiveness.
If we're talking about loans for undergrad the government makes most of those directly now. There are still private loans. I don't know if the government guarantees them, but I believe you cannot discharge the debt in bankruptcy so it's still protected by them.
Loans for secondary trade school like law, medicine or business are still often private, however those grads generally make money...
Brian Neimeier has one of the best arguments for debt forgiveness, and one of the best arguments that normie right wingers really worship Mammon. It took me 7 years to pay off my loans and I never wound up in the field for my degree. I have no debt now, but no house or family of my own either. I understand the idea of the debt jubilee, and the right has got to come to grips with universities being a waste of time for the majority of people.
The only things I got out of college were debt, a few network connections, and the realization that I no longer really wanted to be out in the wider world.