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Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't work when Russians manipulate our elections (as eye-witnessed by the Dutch: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/report-dutch-spie...) and receive zero punishment for doing so (as almost unanimously sanctioned by both houses of Congress which the President has actively refused to enact sanctions on, defeating the rule of law in this country: http://www.newsweek.com/trump-refuses-impose-new-sanctions-r...). Also doesn't work when the ruling party does everything in its power to dismantle fair elections like gerrymandering, disenrolling voters and passing anti-voter laws.

System's broken, agents at the helm don't want it fixed. And people refusing to act on the actual facts in front of them are what continues to break the system down.

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Our culture is what's broken. No longer do we think about doing the right thing or helping others, we think about winning. We no longer consider debate and discourse signs of humanity and intelligence and civilization.

What are your thoughts with regard to how we would go about fixing that? (serious question, because I honestly don't know)

Not sure why my last comment was flagged. All I said was that in order to fix this problem we are going to have to kill Vladimir Putin.

It is important to remember that culture can be influenced by incentives due to design of the system. It's a loop: both are causes, both are effects.

Example: The U.S. has a culture of "horse-race" politics and "winning". This may be traced to the two-party political system, which may be traced to "first past the post" voting rather than proportional representation. If we had started with a different political system, likely the current culture would be totally different.

To change the system, we have to change the culture and values. But to change the culture and values, we need a system that encourages us to do so.

Trying to win isn’t the problem. Here’s how to do it well:

If you think you can win while doing the right thing and helping others, you’re good. Just do it.

If you think doing the right thing will cause you to lose, go into R&D mode and find a more creative strategy where you can win without hurting people. That’s the time to get ahead of the scam.

The Russians didn't force ~45% of eligible voters to be apathetic, nor did they force the DNC to rig the game against Bernie Sanders or make people protest vote against Hillary Clinton. The system is fucked in all kinds of ways but the only people responsible for that particular mess are the non-voters themselves: they gave the 55% a much louder voice. The rest is the kind of influencing that happens everywhere, when every country is trying to serve its best interests.

Russia, Mexico, immigration, capitalism, Democrats/Republicans...all of these are to some extent scapegoats so the people of the US don't have to take a deep look at themselves and realise that the change needs to come from within. As the saying goes, if everybody else is the problem...

> The Russians didn't force ~45% of eligible voters to be apathetic

They didn't "force" anyone to do anything, but it's a mistake to characterise what they do as aggressively pushing for a single candidate. Making people believe that the political system is not worth engaging in is absolutely a valid goal. I'm not saying that 45% of the US didn't vote because of Russia, I'm just saying it's also not 0%.

It's a fair point. Most intriguing to me is the reaction to even the allegation of external meddling, where there seems to be an element of surprise or disbelief. Many Western governments have meddled and interfered in the name of their own imperialistic foreign policies yet it appears unthinkable to some that it could ever be returned in kind.

It's certainly not a mentality unique to the US (with Brexit you can swap Russia for Europe and get a similar result, for example). I choose to see it as a lack of self awareness, where being apathetic is good when everything happens the way you like it, but is everybody else's fault when it takes a turn for the worse.

These issues are a concern, but, you're acting like there was some major political landslide against rational thought when in reality the majority of voters in USA voted for Clinton.

Trump only won due to an anachronistic loophole, taking the election by a few thousand votes at max. All it would've taken is a small increase in participation and the statistical weight in favor of a Trump loss would've guaranteed that outcome.

I could provide a laundry list of issues facing society even if only limited to civics. However, we'd not be in this predicament right now if 1% more voters went to the polls.

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