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Comment by zhoujing204 | Hacker News Reader

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Because it seems nigh impossible to actually get the 18-27 crowd to actually go and vote. Doesn’t matter if their life sucks, they just can’t be bothered to go do it. Of course you’ll get people that try and deflect blame and say that “my vote doesn’t really change anything” but these people know it does change things and they still just stay at home on voting day.

tbh I think that vote would succeed, if one happened right now. his approval poll results are abysmally bad.

what do you think the vote would be, though? "we don't like him"? last I checked, change.org-petition-style voting didn't have much of an effect on country laws.

And some percent will say they deserved it

Too many are either disinterested in politics because it's ugly, or mad that their assigned candidate betrayed one of their values (e.g., genocide in Gaza). I think a lot of younger people just don't want to be bothered.

Being against genocide isn't a "value". It's not idealistic, or naive either.

It's a duty. Moral, and legal; domestic and international.

Drawing a hard red line at genocide is damn near the very least any human must demand from their leader; perhaps only exceeded by "don't threaten entire civilizations with nuclear weapons".

Same with prosecuting rapist insurrectionists, and going after billionaire's child-trafficking/murdering blackmail rings. These are not "nice to haves" - ya simply gotta do it.

If you're not "mad" when people fail to do these things, then are you really "interested in politics", or are you simply caught in some kind of us-vs-them death spiral?

A good chunk of America watch "news" crafted by right-wing billionaires and think he's doing a bang-up job.

Because another ~11% of Americans think the Democrats would be worse.

People don't seem really engaged in politics. They find it a frustrating waste of time because the news doesn't bother explaining anything to them, so they don't see the results of elections. They say both sides are the same. They don't take part in local elections. A mix of taught helplessness, learned helplessness, laziness, and the fact that if you're a white guy gas prices might affect you more than foreign wars and death squads

Both factions are filled with criminals that hate America (but LOVE Israel) and solely seek to exploit Americans as tax cows and organ donors. I take the third position: I'm a decline enjoyer and prepper.

Most people on Hacker News aren't ignorant, but they might be biased. You say both fractions are filled with criminals, and while parts of that might be true, it's far from the whole picture. Can you name anyone in the Democratic party who has caused as much damage as Trump? Missiles killing over 100 innocent children, inciting MAGA to storm Capitol Hill on January 6th, using presidential power to increase personal wealth by billions in one year, straining relationships with almost all democratic allies, massive layoffs in federal research institutions, and severe cuts to research funding that could damage the US research system for decades. His insane tariffs led to skyrocketing prices, economic disorder, and possibly a recession.

Yes, most Democrats support illegal or virtually unlimited immigration at a rapid rate which destroys the social fabric of society and leads to a rise in criminality. They are basically the West's version of the NKVD, but instead of the state ordering them to suppress the people directly, the state just selectively allows them to get away with any crimes that have the same effect as what they wished they could order a secret police force to do directly.

They learn which crimes are the approved crimes just how an AI machine learning model learns through stochastic gradient descent. They start out committing crimes basically at random, but over time they pick up on the patterns on what crimes are punished (those that are harmful to the system) and which crimes are NOT punished (beneficial to the system), and this causes them all to gravitate towards becoming system enforcers. They themselves aren't aware of their role in the system. They are just blindly following the path of least resistance the state sets up for them, but the state is aware and sets up this reward mechanism to create a system to suppress the citizens that doesn't rely on direct orders that could be traced back to them.

If they were using a secret police force they would slowly lose the trust of the people and begin losing their authority. By using this stochastic citizen suppression model they are able to keep their hands cleaner. People still know they are here and that they are letting them get away with crimes. This arrangement works as long as people think this is good and nobody can make the connection between selective enforcement and an effective police state where criminals are the police.

If the state was caught using secret police to, for example, suppress voters, perform blockbusting, or engage in generally demoralizing behavior they would need to explain themselves. If the state was caught using letting them in and enabling millions of them to suppress the citizenry then you need to explain yourself since you are now a racist bigot.

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