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Comment by glurgh | Hacker News Reader

This pretty much destroyed my engagement with politics

That's certainly your privilege and right but surely you have to recognize it automatically makes any discussion of politics with you impossible or at least, deeply unproductive.

And my point is, very specifically, not that 'if you have misgivings about one side or administration, you ought to have none about another'. It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone? - it's a decidedly unfalsifiable position to begin with.

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There are certainly clear differences between parties, otherwise people wouldn't be fighting each other over who gets elected. I like to think of it via a mental picture though - the American political system is like a line: on one end, you have the republicans, and on the other you have the democrats. Moderates and independents generally fall somewhere on the line between the two extremes. The issue is that the line they all lie upon is actually just a one-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional space (like a plane, to make it simple). My political beliefs lie on that plane, basically equidistant from both of the potential parties. It is therefore basically impossible to get meaningfully closer to what I would like to see by supporting either party, so in that sense "there is no difference between them."

I actually feel empowered by thinking that way though, because it eliminates distractions (politics) in favor of actual meaningful actions I can take in my own community (building things, helping people, etc.). If politics is removed as a tool, then problems no longer look political and you can do something about them that is ultimately much more effective than voting (in my opinion).

"otherwise people wouldn't be fighting each other over who gets elected"

Perhaps you're not familiar with the way campaign funding works. In short, the parties band together to increase funding that, while really only good for making it easier to get elected, and is therefore somewhat self-perpetuating (e.g., I need money to win, to get more money, to win, etc.) - it is still money, and people covet it.

I am familiar with how that works, but that's not what I was talking about in the above quote. Specifically, I had in mind relatives of mine who will get into fisticuffs with each other over which politician is the best. They clearly see important differences and feel strongly about it, and I was attempting to acknowledge that those differences are important to many people. For them, funding is utterly irrelevant except as a means to get their guy in office.

> That's certainly your privilege and right but surely you have to recognize it automatically makes any discussion of politics with you impossible or at least, deeply unproductive.

Why can't he have worthwhile things to say about politics even if he's given up on voting? Actually, I suspect he'll have even better ideas now.

> It's just that lumping them all together as equivalent seems so utterly naive and simplistic and wrong that why even bother discussing politics with anyone?

Tell me, what exactly was the distinction between voting for Obama over Romney? How would life be different now, had Romney won? Would it be better? Worse? Would Romney have done something to actually help with the economy, unlike Obama?

What about jobs then? Would Romney have "created" jobs better than Obama (as if jobs could be created by central planning anyway)?

Lumping Obama and Romney together as roughly equivalent is exactly what someone who sees things for what they are would do.

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