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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

It seems that US Exceptionalism is what the US people wanted, and they're getting it in spades.

it's not really what we wanted, it's what we were taught. decades of defunding education and not modernizing the system that was originally based on apartheid, the creation of media conglomerates that advocate for anti-intellectualism, all of it just run rampant and increasingly unchecked, the large scale smearing of academic institutions from the outside and the insidious internal replacement of academics by administrators

the current version of the US was orchestrated deliberately by our wealthiest elites (eg Koch, Murdoch, etc) - the pleebs were becoming too powerful and now they're over-correcting

I don't disagree, but you're explaining _why_ they want it, not that they don't want it.

They've, for sure, been manipulated into wanting it, needing to believe it, but that's where the US is at, in a high enough percentage for the current administration to happen. The path of the US hasn't changed direction though, the travel down that path had just been accelerated somewhat by Tmurp.

They sure don't need it though.

(I agree with your comment below, but I'm unable to reply to it, so I replied here via edit)

sure, the why is to explain how it's happening and how to combat it - funding education, modernizing our systems, getting rid of unnecessary middlemen

a flat description is just an accusation that you can do nothing with except feel a kind of anti-social catharsis that doesn't net any progress in the other direction

since when have we been defunding education? over the past 60 years the per pupil spending on education has increased pretty substantially. you can argue that the funds aren't well allocated but it's objectively false that we've been reducing funding for education over multiple decades.

As far as I can tell this is factually true. Do people care to refute rather downvote shooting the messenger?

Some US states seem to spend more per pupil than excellent independent ("private") schools in the UK. That is a lot of money.

Brigading is a real thing and hard to combat, so the votes don't necessarily carry the signal they appear to.

I am not sure its that, so much as people not liking to hear anything that contradicts their politlcal beliefs.

the per-pupil number is a deliberate red herring. spending increases only cover increasingly expensive private contracts, expensive middle-managers who often contribute little of value in terms of actually educating pupils, and liabilities

teacher pay-rate and total comp are better indicators of defunding and they are dismal: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_211.60.a... - this shows pay rates have stagnated since the late 2000s with some trending downwards since

even then the rising costs don't reflect an increase in percent-of-GDP spending - that's actually gone down in the past decade: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_106.10.a...

The % of GDP numbers seem to show, for elementary and secondary schools, rises and falls. It, fluctuates. Except for a dip in the 80s its been between 4.0% and 4.5% since 1967.

> the per-pupil number is a deliberate red herring. spending increases only cover increasingly expensive private contracts, expensive middle-managers who often contribute little of value in terms of actually educating pupils, and liabilities

Is that not just a more detailed explanation of what the comment said? jayglow said

> you can argue that the funds aren't well allocated

You have explained how they have been badly allocated. Its a general pattern in the western world's government expenditure on many things.

Ahem, less than half of us voted for this trash.

Apathy is part of the equation.

No, no... among people who voted, less than 50% of votes were for Trump (49.81%). Harris got 48.34%. I think this is what GP is referring to.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024

This is what I am referring too! Ty.

If you can vote and you don't go to the polls, you vote for the winner.

no you just didn't vote

You voted with your unmoving ass to accept the election results.

No, you actually acquiesce to whatever outcome.

no, apathy is not the same as a "silent agreement", especially when the outcome is not yet known. how can someone who doesn't vote see into the future?

abstaining is a choice yes, but it is not a choice for the eventual winner, it's a choice to not participate. think of it as a secret option on the ballot you can fill in from home.

You're wrong.

While apathy isn't the same, here it's effects are.

When you allow yourself to fall into "apathy", you effectively allow others to decide an outcome.

Explicitly without doing anything against it. Your misleading "option" does absolutely nothing.

Nope. If you're one of four people voting for something, you have 25% of the voting power.

If you decide to abstain, everyone else's vote is now more valuable, at 33.33%. You have given your voting power to other people, it didn't just disappear. And now whatever the outcome, you are participatory in it.

In the U.S. this matters more on a state level, but it still applies.

abstaining doesn't transfer voting power to the winning side, it increases every remaining voters relative share equally regardless of which side theyre on. you can't retroactively attribute abstention to the winner simply because they won.

> it increases every remaining voters relative share equally regardless of which side theyre on

You just restated exactly what I said

> you can't retroactively attribute abstention to the winner simply because they won

Sure you can. If you transfer your share of the vote to everyone else, you are absolutely responsible for the outcome. Being indecisive and giving other people the power to make your own decision for you is a choice. You are participatory in government whether you like it or not. And complaining about the results afterwards while throwing responsibility off yourself is, again, childish.

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”

yes, that choice would be to abstain.

assuming you didn't vote, are you satisfied with your choice?

assuming you did, are you satisfied with the outcome of the process you engaged in?

Seems completely irrelevant? You were arguing that non-voters had no role in a candidate winning, and now you're pivoting to "but was your vote satisfying." Do you have a point or is this just general misanthropy?

People don't vote because it's perfectly satisfying every time, or they expect to win every time. That's a pretty childish way to look at the democratic process. But if you believe the current president is obviously terrible and you wonder, aloud, how he came to power, revealing that you didn't vote is bound to earn you some groans.

i think both questions are irrelevant. why would i be satisfied or dissatisfied with not voting?

i'm not american, i voted for a losing party in my countries election, i'm not pleased with my government, but had i not voted and the situation was the same, i would not feel any differently.

I am also not American, and I also voted for a party that did not win the national elections. However, to put in perspective, the last local elections I voted”strategically” (meaning, not my favorite party but the one I thought had better chances to win in my district and was a lot better than the other party projected to win) - I looked up the numbers after the election and the party I voted for ended up winning by about 40 votes. Had I and 39 other people decided not to vote at all, a much worse party would be governing my district..

Maybe I wouldn't need table as harsh about it were the stakes lower - if things were relatively sane like Clinton, Bush, or Obama (I'm not saying they are perfect, just sane).

When facing the prospect of Trump there is no such excuse as "there were no good options." Yeah, dems are also evil and incompetent, but Trump takes it to an existential level. You're not abstaining, you're leaving the door wide open to the worst of humanity.

And civil war, where we're probably headed, is a much bigger nuisance than voting.

Not caring about the outcome is not the same as wanting the outcome that ends up happening.

two thirds of you didn't think it was worth voting against.

The Americans who saw this coming and stayed home are just as complicit.

AGREED - as a US citizen.

Also, anyone who voted 3rd-party, because that is literally refusing to keep him out of office.

those two thirds living in the wrong states for it to matter, wouldn’t have voted the way you wanted and would have resulted in the same distribution of votes we already have?

prefrontal cortex moment

You don't think an extra 66% of people in any state getting off their asses and voting could affect the vote in a meaningful way?

Correct, the sentiment would have been the same distribution of votes across states. The electoral college distribution would have been the same 312 to 226 and not close at all

The way you talk about things could have easily resulted in California’s 54 electoral college votes flipping to the majority resulting in 366 electoral votes for the winner. Your numbers are spread across where people actually live after all, as opposed to a campaign swing state

Nearly 50 percent of voters have been voting for him for a decade now. The non-voters don't care. Let that sink in.

I said nothing about non-voters. I voted. NOT for Trump and not for Spiderman or some fantastical shit. My point was, of those who voted, near 50% of us DID NOT VOTE for Trump. We, have been for a decade, fighting this monstrous trash fire.

I don't know why I'm getting down-voted by HN oligarchs for saying that over 1/2 of Americans were NOT for Trump and his dictatorial BS. Keep down-voting though, this is par for the course here.

The US' problems won't end when Trump leaves office, and things wouldn't have been much different if he'd not been elected the second time: the wars and calamity have been on the table for a long time.

Nobody cares about Americans having prosperity and happiness when their nation has been dropping bombs on innocent human beings every 15 minutes on average, for the past 26 years.

YES! I agree with you. I am an American standing in opposition to this admin and all government corruption. No one should care about our prosperity when we are acting the same and China, Russia, N Korea et al. Its disgusting and we are propagandized to the hilt.

2/3 of German voters(!) were not for Adolf Hitler[1]. Doesn't change the fact they got 1/3 of their country removed for that choice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_elec...

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