At this point, I suspect that comments like this one are part of an astroturfing campaign by the ruling class.

It’s the same bullshit as “we could stop climate change if only we bothered to bring cloth bags to the store instead of picking up a disposable plastic bag each time”.

“We” don’t have any power. And once you accept that, you can stop blaming yourself and your neighbors for the world you live in, and direct your anger where it belongs.

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chneu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The power is with the people. It only takes about 1/4th of a community enact massive change.

Your take is exactly what keeps people apathetic and reliant on others.

"It's someone else's fault and someone else's responsibility" is what you're saying.

It relieves the individual of the outcome of their actions. 8 billion people matter.

If I were an abuser, I would LOVE to hear my victims say they are powerless. Think about that.

	▲	constantius 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Parent is not saying to be apathetic, but to stop trying to change the system while safely abiding by the system's rules. As I read it, it says: once we understand that the system is rigged, we'll turn our attention to those who rigged it (the ruling class), instead of making small useless acts these comments usually call us to do, like using cloth bags or voting for liberals (as opposed to the left). And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
	▲	p-e-w 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> 8 billion people matter I doubt that even 8,000 people “matter” in the sense of having meaningful power.
	▲	pixl97 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"Please ignore the person above, they are a child abuser and you can look up evidence of it online (posts list of crusty questionable sites that seemingly popped up out of nowhere). Chneu, when did you stop abusing your wife? When did you stop posting racist remarks on reddit on anonymous accounts? Why are you a member of the communist party. Why do you support trans rights? Why do you support the gays. Why do you hate the gays. Why do you hate minorities. Why do you support illegal immigration" The above is just a tiny sample of what will happen to you when you start challenging people with power. You see, powerful "bad" people don't care how many accusations you make against them. They will flood the field with noise so people just ignore it. Now you, because you're a good guy have to be the most perfect little angel or all your followers will run away in disgust. You know nothing about power and how to wield it. There better not be any skeletons in your closet because I will surface them. Hell, it doesn't even matter, I will plant them there. Of course all the above is fictional, I'm not going to do these things to you because I'm not a person with millions of dollars threatened by your actions. But don't think threatening people with billions of dollars comes without cost.

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geraneum 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> direct your anger where it belongs.

Where does it belong?

	▲	alt227 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Where does it belong? Their argument is so generic they would probably say something equally as generic and useless like 'The billionaires"

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iamnothere 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you doubting the power of cloth bags and reusable drinking straws? Ethical consumption matters! I only buy products with green colors and “natural” looking fonts, that way I know that I’m not contributing to climate change. (Oh and although I drive a Tesla, I bought it before Elon went crazy, tee-hee.)

If only everyone would round up to the nearest dollar at checkout, we could end poverty!

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willy_k 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“We” do, we could, if organized. Per your first point, that is the problem today - agreeing on a shared goal rather than infighting about all the peripheral issues.

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alt227 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Whos "We"?

I would hazard a guess theres stuff that I don't agree with you on, and we would want certain laws written differently. Its important to remember that we all vote for what we think is right, based on a system evolved over thousands of years to cater for human fallibility. The modern rhetoric of "us against the billionaires" is simply not how the world works, despite how much people want it to.

	▲	constantius 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The modern rhetoric is indeed reductive if you put words in the poster's mouth. The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works. Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.

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david-gpu 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What looks like a peripheral issue to you is somebody else's central goal. And vice versa.

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colechristensen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>“We” don’t have any power.

<Ned Flanders' father>: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!

People who say this have never tried, do nothing themselves to contribute to improving the problem or to convince others or the government to improve the problem besides perhaps complaining on the internet in a bubble of likeminded people who don't need their minds changed.

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lynx97 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What is the problem?

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colechristensen 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There are many of them, whatever it is you feel needs improvement.

	▲	lynx97 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm pretty much fine, thank you. And I am pretty sure that is true for most HN users. Most of us are not hungry. The rest is a bunch of first-world problems.

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ajkjk 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's the opposite? the person you're replying to is exactly correct... the giant delusion that sustains this whole shitty thing is the public's disenchantment with politics; everything feels bad but no one seems to believe in "passing different laws" as the method of changing it so instead they just vent their frustrations in hopes that someone who already has power will by the goodness of their heart decide to do a better job. when in fact the lever fox fixing things, democracy, still (for the most part) exists, but almost nobody is coordinating to pull it.

causally I think this is because we all grew up watching government operate glacially and so nobody really believes there's an alternative... but I eagerly await the day that millennials realize they can just win every election and fix everything that sucks about their world by basically trying really hard and coordinating with each other.

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constantius 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Your optimism and faith in the power of the people is laudable, but I think you misread the comment (see my other replies in this thread).

The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.

And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.

[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/16/vilificatio...

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ajkjk 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think you understand my position. I don't think I've seen anything like coordinated democratic action attempted in my lifetime (not in the US at least). Everyone doesn't believe it's possible so they don't even try it. People defer the job of organization to their (demonstrably impotent) political party and then act surprised that nothing happens. (Of course I am thinking about Democrats here; actually Trump's rise to prominence is a lot more like what actually rallying people is supposed to look like. Of course it is disappointing for others reasons...)

"Everybody" wants something to stop and yet nobody goes out and takes power and stops it so nothing changes. People experience voting doing nothing and then they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing so it does nothing tomorrow as well.

The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency. It is not hard for a group of coordinated people to win for example a local election. Well, it is hard in the sense that they have to agree to do it and actually put effort in. But it's not hard to get the requisite numbers---very few people are voting anyway. But if they don't believe in trying and instead post memes about how mad they are, of course nothing changes.

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constantius 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If I misunderstood your position, then you indeed misunderstood parent's, as you two (and I) are then arguing for the same thing: the system cannot be changed by following the system's rules, as people are blinded and limited by these rules.

> The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency

Yes, but this also implies a paradigm shift on the subject of this personal agency.

> very few people are voting anyway

There are countries where voting is mandatory (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey): they're not utopias and they suffer from the same polarisation, corruption, inequalities, threats of fascism, and disenchantment as other countries do.

> they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing

Because doing something about it is either against the rules of the system or requires such an effort in coordination that it'd be effectively indistinguishable from a revolution. A tiny example, the EU Commission tries to pass Chat Control every 6 months: when it does pass (all.according to the system's democratic rules), you won't get referenda on maintaining it every 6 months, I assure you. The power imabalance between the 99% and the ruling class is so massive that positive outcomes from voting alone are effectively flukes, not representative of future performance.

	▲	ajkjk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess my stance is that: 1. yes, it will require a widespread shift in people's beliefs for anything to change significantly. So such a shift is necessary. 2. I also personally believe that such a widespread shift is sufficient to fix a lot of this stuff. Nobody has any recent data for this because it hasn't happened in our lifetimes, but there is plenty of further-back historical evidence for it. 3. A prerequisite for the shift to occur is for everybody to believe both (1) and (2), such that they are motivated to try. 4. Anecdotally it seems like most people really believe (1) but severely doubt (2), which unfortunately means they have no motivation, so nothing has any hope of occurring right now. 5. Therefore I would encourage everyone to at least try out believing (2) as well. After all without it we have no data on what is actually possible with it. And yes, the actual result probably looks like some form of revolution, but it is not required that such a revolution be violent. Of course it might turn out to be, but that is more about how the entrenched power reacts. You need the movement first, and then you can see what the reaction is. re chat control or similar things---it seems to me that if your system's democratic rules pass it, then things are working as intended. Complaining about the democratic system is rather a joke when it is operating and doing things legitimately (I don't live in Europe, though, so I don't know anything about how legitimate it actually is.) In general one "votes" in this paradigm by actually convincing large groups of people that they should take difference stances on issues, not by casting a single vote themselves. If a person's reaction to political outcomes they don't like is not "campaigns of influence" then they're not really playing the game at all, are they? And to be clear, such a campaign of influence is not only available to powerful people. In fact they are cheaper to carry out than ever---we even have a new job title for them, "influencer", and it is revenue-positive for many people! So when someone complains about legitimate political systems but they don't personally decide to influence others to change the outcomes... they are just a non-entity in the system, that's their problem. (I do not have anything charitable to say, however, about illegitimate politics, e.g. the Trumps administration's widespread illegal behavior. That seems like a failure of basic rule of law that might be considerably harder to dislodge. But, as much as I hate it, their winning an election and then fucking everything up on purpose is largely allowed... the underlying problem is that so many people seem to be okay with that. If a country wants to cut its own limbs off itself I guess that's fine at a level of politics. Not so good at a level of morality or philosophy---so I guess it shifts the battle to be at the level of hearts and minds instead of democracy. But the general point still stands: campaigns of influence are how you affect this, not individual votes.) (edit: i did not, however, reread the other comments here to see if I actually misunderstood anyone. I'm just ranting)

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frumplestlatz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The only “genocide” in history where the population actually increased.

This is another “if everyone just …”. Everyone will not “just”. We can’t even agree on basic facts like your claim of genocide.