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Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

Well, a bit of advice from eastern european dictatures -- the more people try to refrain from politics, the worse politics screws up their lives.

So I ended up respecting politised people, regardless of their views.

For a functioning democracy, everyone must do politics, even if it's unpleasant.

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That's probably partly why certain entities try to make it so toxic. People are more controllable when they're rabid and when they're inert.

Also reasonable people check out when people are running around livid because of false information.

> Also reasonable people check out when people are running around livid because of false information.

The comment you are responding to both recognizes that and is telling you that that is a fact that is deliberately being manipulated by and to the advantage of the people promoting false information.

A major part of the goal of extreme political propaganda, nearly as important as mobilizing unreasonable people, is getting reasonable people exhausted with the political system so that they check out.

This seems like you are restating the same thing I said as if it is contradicting it.

>> For a functioning democracy, everyone must do politics, even if it's unpleasant.

I've been voting and voicing my displeasure regularly for the last year at my governor and elected officials, down the to the local ones, and nothing has changed. Actually that's not true, the majority of the decisions made have changed quite a bit and have further ruined my small business and my children's education.

Can't imagine how much worse it would get if I didn't waste hundreds of hours writing to my officials while they feed my concerns into a shredder.

Try to motivate people you know to pressure the officials. By the way, not sure about US, but I've seen that often you actually need very little votes to register a motion/discussion/voting/etc for expelling an official from their office. Whether that motion is satisfied or not -- official should be stressed about it immediately.

What matters the most is how many people you can motivate to do something, and that is democracy.

72% of the people voted for the official in question. (1MM+)

Sorry, man, I'm gonna just not do politics. There's literally no point.

Here in the US the media effectively controls who people vote for, and the DNC/RNC is quick to "aggressively interject itself" if that tactic fails; so it seems to me that democracy as we know it is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The media stopping opining about politics would not change that, even though it will never happen.

You're being downvoted, because it's an uncomfortable truth that challenges people's beliefs that they, themselves, are not falling for the media manipulation, but you're correct.

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