Great, now set everything on fire to represent climate change? 🔥
Somehow those old movies where villains wanted to reduce the population of the planet are actually happening irl... 😞
yes everything is on fire and track 1 has a few extinguishers but not enough.
track 3 has an indeterminate amount of fire hydrants because i think it depends on which party actually gets the seat.
track 2’s extinguishers have gasoline in them 😭
Also, 95-99% of the time your vote doesn't matter for... "reasons". Including other votes (e.g. a liberal President paired against a conservative Congress), older votes (especially Supreme Court appointments), and non-votes (corporations are in control regardless of who or which party "wins"), etc.
One lever pull event barely scratches the surface - we did not get ourselves into this mess in a day or even a decade, and it would take even more effort to get ourselves out.
And somehow, even knowing that, the Democratic party went all-in on Hillary fucking Clinton, smh. Americans are basically responsible people, and we can count on everyone to eat their veggies, r-r-right!? Even without bothering to campaign, R-R-RIGHT!?
Trump did not even want to win - he was as much a symptom as he later fed that forward to become a cause himself.
Therefore I think that "we", the people who put effort into thinking things through, deeply, need to wake up and stop wishing and hoping that things will work out as we all hope and dream. Except that despite me saying "we", that's as far as I've gotten, so really truly it does not include me, who is merely a backseat onlooker hoping for my favorite team to win but offering little help along those lines to cause it:-). I don't know what the next step is regarding the latter, but I offer kudos for trying to get people to understand regardless:-).
Not in picture: a burning freight train is hurling towards our trolley and will overtake us if we loose any momentum from running over the children.
Is your assumption that third parties solve all our problems if they win?
The problem is the system, not the Individual actors involved. Yes there are some differences, but not enough to fix our current disasters.
For the sake of the model and steel-manning my would-be opponents I make that assumption, yes.
But you are correct, I heartily recognize this assumption is quite silly in reality.
This. If we're bringing math into this, then it's mathematically impossible for not voting / 3rd party to change anything in the same way calculus may not be 0 but near-zero enough to be indistinguishable. Combine FPTP with Electoral colleges with the power of existing political parties and the only way you're going to make change is by either one or both of the following things:
-
Supporting one party so greatly you eradicate the other party, creating a vaccuum (eg, send GOP the way of the Whigs). In this situation, Democrats likely reconstitute themselves as the predominant center-right party while we get something of a social Democrat or true Green Party in their original place. A rubber-banding of the Overton window, if you will.
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Utilize an existing party to change the system. This means evolving the party, which for anyone old enough, recognizes how much Democrats have changed in the last 2 decades relative to the Republicans who have actually somehow managed to only get worse.
These are the only two proven methods to work. Third parties, Independents do not work until the system changes. And in order to change the game you need to first play by the rules of the game.
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The world would literally be a paradise by next tuesday if Vermin Supreme was president
The problem is the system
And how do we change the system
Political organizing and pressure campaigns. I don’t personally see any of the prominent parties, including third parties, as good vehicles for this, and it will take far more than voting. So I would like to see a movement built outside of the political system that demands systemic change towards more and better democracy.
Sure, except the third party track loops back to the R track because we live in a 2-party system.
Correct, I have this expressed with the line:
Track 3 promises no death at all, but if collaborative action fails, track 2 wins due to a more cohesive bloc and everyone has to watch their children die.
...This, honestly, sounds like less of a trolley problem and more of a prisoners dilemma. As in, if
everyoneenough people defect, you get track 2, if enough people don't defect, you get track 3, and track 1 is if it's in between.Of course, the problem, then, is that it would imply the people aiming for track 2 will defect, people aiming for track 3 won't, and people aiming for track 1 would try to convince people not to defect, while defecting themselves.
Wanna pull your hair out?
Republicans are technically the third party in terms of registration numbers.
It's just that registered independents don't mobilize as a political unit, so the fact that they jostle with the dems for first and second place in registrations doesn't matter because the Republicans have the organization and systemic rigging to negate being in a position in America in terms of actual popularity more comparable to Canada's NDP or Bloc Québécois.
me rn: 👩🦲
Now this is my kind of meme; it actually gets into the details and complexity of the scenario it's discussing - while still making fun of it and keeping the meme feel - rather than just simplifying it to the point where it looks straightforward, killing most of the important discussion.
i disagree this meme sucks i hate having to think when i look at memes much less read 🙄
Memes have a will of their own. We are their pawns. The memes demand creation, who are we to deny them?
The meme had to be made and I agree with you on the premise. It sucks, but it is reality. We have to first accept reality and accept how our system works. THEN we can start making changes to it.
The problem with the people that get angry with Biden over genocide and declare they aren't voting for him is that they are ignoring all the thousands of steps preceding an election. Laws, local elections, campaigns, funding, primaries, etc.
To use a metaphor, we are on a cruise ship and we've been heading straight at some rocks for several hours and they show up 5 seconds before we crash they throw their hands up in frustration. Yeah, we need to be changing course WAY earlier than an election year.
No lies detected.
Unfortunately, this setup is not in practice different from the simplified model we usually work with, which is why we work with it.
yeah i find nuanceposting is valuable 90% because it makes the petty pedants shut up by not giving them a shred of ambiguity to fang on to
i consider it a personal victory that no one has accused me of being a genocide supporter in this thread yet, for example. unfortunately not the story for those who’ve posted more simplified models
this is possibly the best summary for US politics
i know and i want to scream, thank you for the feedback
You don't need 46% to defeat 48%. If you strategically target specific cities you can win the presidency with just
20,000 votes22% of votes.How
The American electoral system is turbofucked.
Sorry, I misremembered. It's 22% of the vote. CGP Grey explains how
BRUH the children are ALREADY dying!
bruh i agree you are correct no need to shout
Portrays the other parties as all rainbows and kittens. Particularly that libertarians would be about fighting climate change, which they would not be in any vaguely effective way.
However, I'll grant that ranked choice voting would be an excellent way for people to feel better about their vote, be pragmatic, and one day lead to more viable "parties" (though not immediately, the third parties are a self fulfilling prophecy of unlikely candidates to most voters)
Correct and this was on purpose, see this thread for reasoning :)
This is much better than the earlier version that just called everyone stupid.
alright i like this one better
I like the meme because of so many reasons.
Let's start with, if I am not misinformed, technically 21% of the levers could win against the rest of levers. Let's ignore the fact that those 21% levers are historically generally in favor of more genocide. And let's assume those 21% levers all go for third parties. Then they would still probably lose because they haven't voted for the same third party. So let's say those 21% are all committed to the cause and vote for the same party. In 2020, the biggest third party got 1.18%. but let's assume all previous third party voter unite and then there would be 1.72% third party voters. Now obviously those aren't part of the relevant 21% that we have been talking about but let's act as if. Now only 19.28% of all voter need to change their vote to third party. That are only 29 884 000 voters. Believe!
Ok now do one that shows nice long tracks. And where if you vote to destroy the country, they stop sending weapons around the world to kill everyone when there is a local civil war happening.
Now how many people outside the US borders are being murdered at a point in the future?
Finally a realistic trolley problem!
The trolley has breaks the conductor can push at any time, though even if they're pushed their efficiency depends on side levers next to every lever, and some levers are worth much more than others.
trying to figure this out, is this about local government?
And the House and Senate. The levers that are worth more are the electoral college like you pointed out and fucked up districts
What's a trolley?
No clue because my country removed all meaningful mass transit to support corporate interests.
Motoring! What's your price for flight?!
Other names are "street car" and "tram".
There's a community here dedicated to photos of them.
Track 3 promises no death at all, but if collaborative action fails, Track 2 wins
Except this is not what happened in 2016. Even if every single Jill Stien voter had gone to Clinton, she still would have needed 50% of Gary Johnson's voters to win.. It's safe to say that most people voting for the Libertarian Party candidate would have picked Track 2.
The post is primarily about 2024? It just references 2016 as an example of the electoral college screwing things up. Also the left leaning vote split thing literally did happen in 2000 so like what are your goals here lol, you can make your own post yknow.
This post is citing data from 2016? So it's referencing something that didn't happen. Also, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes. Sure, if Nader hadn't run Gore would have won, but you could just as easily blame the loss on the Florida GOP, "accidently," purging thousands of legitimate voters by, "mistaking," them for felons, or on the Butterfly Ballot that caused an untold number of voters to select the wrong candidate. I guess my goal here lol is to point out when people are blaming their preferred candidate's loss on a mostly statistically insignificant portion of voters, and if you don't like hearing what other people have to say you don't have to post yknow.
So is next election cycle the one to support a third party? Or the following? Will there ever be a time when it's OK to support one other than the lesser of two evils for the rest of our lives?
The minute you have to make up new rules to it- is the minute you admit you don’t understand how it works.
It’s not a moral dilemma if you can go outside of its confines to solve it.
The trolley problem is limited to the ethics of sacrificing one person to save the lives of many. Anyone using the Trolley problem to describe complex scenarios like this is just having a bit of fun.
mostly i just made the post as a reaction to others making similar posts with far less nuance
at this point it’s no longer about the original trolley problem but about using popularly readable memetic symbols to convey a simplified model of reality efficiently
so maybe i’d encourage you to take a step back and reevaluate with this in mind :) it’s possible this post isn’t for you and that’s fair too
If you hadn't skipped half your classes you'd know that adding new rules/complexity to the trolley problem is literally half the point of it
The accuracy of your graphic can be summed up in one fact. You have Trump up against Clinton somehow. So, if you can't even get that right, it's no wonder the rest is a confusing mess.
“your representation of the real life confusing mess that is US politics was also a confusing mess. downvoted for not simplifying it into something that fits my worldview.”
hilarious and sad. :( genuinely lives are on the line and we can’t put effort into reading a few sentences.
Did you actually read the text of the meme? The 2016 graph is to show that the electoral college can invalidate the popular vote.
There are 155 million levers. The plurality of the levers might win, but sometimes 46% of the levers is enough to beat 48% (this happened in 2016 due to the electoral college, see above) ---->
big arrow pointing to the 2016 election resultsSleep is important. Get some today.
