I'm done engaging with the election doomers here. They're indistinguishable from an influence operation, except that they're more smugly self-satisfied wallowing in their own fatalism.
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@mattblaze not saying places like Australia with compulsory voting have a better system (many flaws here too) but it reduces the value of the "why bother" narrative. And traditionally we get a sausage sandwich as part of the ritual, which imo makes it a far superior system!
@mattblaze I don't think I'm usually very conspiratorial, but I can't belief believe you haven't already written off your various packs of naysayers and detractors as 100% a concerted, organized sabotage. You give them too much credit by even engaging with them.
A thoughtful critique is one thing. A pack of emotive salience grinders is another.
I mean...I can feel despair at the state of my country *and also vote and volunteer*. Sometimes people feel despair and that's okay. Saying "the GOP is going to do some fuckery" does not include the words "don't vote" anywhere in it, in fact it should motivate you to vote even harder to vote the bastards out.
I dunno, I can't speak for anyone, but I don't think people being scared is unreasonable given the circumstances, and...well...Mastodon has a lot of fatalists. Not saying it's healthy.
Not asking you to put up with it, either; I appreciate your work.
I get that it's exhausting, but I do think characterizing them as a foreign-influence operation is, sometimes, being a bit unfair to people who are truly scared, not that that helps the tenth time you've seen it in a day.
@rk @mattblaze @tartley
The professionals can remain calm because they think they can see past the chaos monkey strategy of flinging feces everywhere - the strategy of no strategy but simply looking for an opening to appear from the ensuing mess.
What I don't know is how resilient the system is, especially faced with people who just want to see the world burn. We're like people living on the 50th floor of an apartment building in an earthquake zone ... the engineers have done the calculations and it should be safe but ...
@PeterLudemann @rk @tartley Wow, you sure seem to know what’s going on inside my head.
Actually, what I said was:
- That a specific headline was misleading, and that the Court decision didn’t actually do what the headline implied.
- That I didn’t know (and no one knows) what would ultimately happen, because sometimes the courts have been ruling for the administration, while other times they rule against.
@mattblaze
I suppose the communication disconnect is that those of us without your detailed knowledge and analysis have no good way of properly evaluating it.
It's like when I've designed computer systems and haven't been able to say anything more reassuring than "trust me, this system will do what you really want even though you don't know what you really want" ... I've been right 9 times out of 10 and I'm hoping Professor Blaze is right 999 out of 1000, especially as the system (which has since been improved) has shown some spectacular failures (eg, Gore vs Bush)
@mattblaze I'll vote on Election Day. Not sure what else I can do.
