"Authenticity" (lemmy.ml)
 

Has anyone noticed how society has become so cynical these days? And how this cynicism is abused by politicians and other political actors? People who are genuinely nice because they have nothing to prove are considered fake, while people who punch downwards and are generally selfish and anti-social are considered authentic. And we all want authentic politicians, so lots of people out there are genuinely fooled into voting for the guy who would drop his pants and drop a massive turd on their plate and then laugh in their face, because we are so cynical as a society, that we now think that the only authentic people are the ones who behave badly without hiding it. And then impressionable young men and middle aged white women think this "authenticity" will translate into politicians that genuinely care about them.

What a sad state of affairs.

I don't blame society completely because the ones on the campaign trail are all snakes. The good ones get rooted out fairly early on. Everyone knows politicians aren't authentic. But if a politician is a selfish asshole to others, that doesn't somehow make him more likely to keep his word when it comes to policies that concern you. A politician can just as well be honest about being a shit person, while also lie about what he is going to do with the economy and how it's going to affect your life.

[–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

By itself this is not that big of an issue. A much bigger issue is the gender imbalance that you find in certain localities due to local governments, universities and companies not taking this gender imbalance into account. But I'm glad that you brought up this issue.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    There is the same kind of special snowflake attitude on here that ruined Reddit. You people only want to have your exclusive social bubble where you can sniff each other's farts. I'm not interested in that.

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Actually the whole of left-wing ideologies is based on the concept of fighting human hierarchies i.e. it literally predisposes the existence of an elite class. Capitalism/Socialism is only a subset of that. I'm not sure how you can be a human adult (?) with and kind of lived experience and claim that it all boils down to the economic system. Have you never interacted with other humans irl?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Can we agree that so far humanity has not manage to create an anti-fragile governing system? We engineer ever more complex governing systems, but humans keep figuring out ways to corrupt them. I cannot envision a system that would be anti-fragile, hence the need for periodic resets. Even my local council ruling over a village of a couple of thousand souls has been embroiled in corruption scandals.

    Going back to the original topic, I don't think it is the priority of the electorate to change the system. First they want to change the people in charge, which is a per-requisite to changing the system anyway.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    My work got me an Macbook M3. After two weeks of dicking around with it, I went back to my Thinkpad. I don't get it at all. I thought at least the hardware would be great, but I hate the hardware too. Too heavy, aluminum case feels fucking cold to the touch, screen still isn't bright enough to work outside, keyboard has that fucked up layout. And although the M-series sets a nice trend, it currently cannot run GNU/Linux without lots of reverse engineering, so fuck that. My 2014 gen Thinkpad is a far better experience. I'm now even more convinced than ever that Apple is just a marketing cult.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    With regards to the voting system, look at Germany. They have 6 parties and the AfD, but really only two choices. Having multiple parties doesn't really make as much of a difference as you think it does. Political parties are formed from the same class of elites so they tend to converge on all political topics that matter. There is only divergence when you have another class of wanna-be elites trying to dethrone them. That would be the AfD or MAGA.

    I think this is the crux of the problem: no matter the government and electoral system, you still end up with a government formed out of a narrow subset of the population, the elites of the day. This is inevitable because each political environment will select for some select few traits. And the only time you get disruption is when a new set of elites tries to dethrone them.

    Now you can conjure some kind of system by which the government is explicitly not formed out of some elite class. Like worker councils or some such idea. However, you then run into a problems such as lack of continuity (governing terms being too short) and lack of expertise. There are also some advantages to having a government run by a (competent) elite class. So you see, it's not so simple.

    But overall the electorate feels excluded when you have a government that is run by people who are so alien to them and who are clearly completely disconnected from the everyday man. And unfortunately the only protest the electorate has is to vote for another set of wanna-be elites in the hope that the resulting political disruption will unset some of the most harmful of the current crop. It's generally good when the elites are in-fighting.

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  • [+] -12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (17 children)

    Left/Right does it actually matter?

    Whether you have a more capitalist or more socialist system, you will still have an establishment, an elite class*. People are disillusioned with that class of people and want to kick them out. If we had a more socialist system we could still be in this same situation, so what does it actually solve? People just want to hit the reset button every so often when the elite become too greedy. That's really all there is to it.

    *Spare me your anarchist fantasies.

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