[HiYaBarbie]

In every single election throughout the past decades, there have been some people working hard to enact a change for the better.

How's that working out so far? Will it be different next time? Vote the bums out.. so that other bums will take their place?

Voting is fundamentally pointless because: you dropping a piece of paper into a box does not magically constrain what the politician you voted for can do in office.

It's just a piece of paper. It has no magical powers.

In other words, politicians are free to do whatever the fuck they want, and strangely enough, they pretty much always break their promises and make things worse for us.

So no, voting really doesn't matter. Elections are a distraction meant to make us believe that we have a say in how we're governed (through magic paper!), and "governance" itself boils down to coercion.

There's a tiny elite passing laws that we must obey. Any law is just a command to behave in a certain way and we get punished for disobeying them, regardless of whether the laws make sense, or correspond to morals, or even benefit us in any way.

> I may be able to guess that no, you don't do any of the harder stuff, either

In fact, I'm doing the harder stuff right now. Encouraging independent thinking and trying to get people to wake up, and enduring the resulting cognitive-dissonance-induced hostility.

[Frondo]

"How's that working out so far?"

It is working out very well. Where I live, we have a citizen initiative process, which ends up being quite responsive to the will of the people. We also elect politicians who make laws that take the state in a direction I like--not all of them, but enough of them that this place is getting better year by year.

Our politicians are also accessible--you can set up a meeting to talk to them, share concerns, hear the constraints they're under--and it's great. It's wonderful to make that connection with the people who are actually crafting laws.

As for the "harder stuff," not really. You don't sound like you're awake yourself, the stuff you're saying is more or less the faux world-weary cynicism that a lot of people seem to confuse with worldliness or sophistication.

I would like to vigorously encourage you to try civic engagement--if you're into waking up, it could be a useful exercise for you.

[HiYaBarbie]

Oh come on. We all know politicians break their promises and lie all the damn time.

We all know there's massive surveillance everywhere, very much against the citizens' wishes.

We all know politicians don't give a shit about us, as evidenced by their actions.

If you want to claim otherwise, you're either being dishonest or just delusional.

[mercer]

Or capable of understanding that most things are not all bad or all good, and even when thinks are mostly-bad, good can be done.

I'm not saying that you are not capable of this; I don't know you.

What I do know is that I've often expressed blanket-statement cynicism and I regret that now. Once I got to know people who are fighting 'on the inside', I started realizing that things are more complicated, and a lot of good can (still) be achieved. From that point on, I concluded that maintaining my cynicism would be nothing short of laziness or defensiveness, and I decided to either shut up or work toward change.

I'm still a cynic in many ways, but at least I try not to discourage others from fighting battles that I do not fight, whether out of laziness or cynicism. Because I truly think much more stuff can be changed than we think. And besides, sitting around being cynical doesn't help at all.