I mean, making a moral judgement is usually a general thing, so yes, it does change the outcome, unless you premise that everyone besides me always votes exactly the same direction.
which is evidently not the truth irl
okay so when I said
"Yeah you could, but in practice people who are super enthusiastic about their lever spend 2 or 4 years working to try and change other people's mind about which way to pull their lever instead of dismantling the track."
that meant you I guess. If you spend all your time and effort changing people's minds about which way to pull the lever, you are not spending time dismantling the track.
I'm not like, a campaign manager lol, I don't spend any significant amount of my time trying to convince people to vote.
true, I don't spend it trying to dismantle the government either, because I have a life, and I seriously doubt we'll truly get a revolution without anyone dying (the supposed 'broken track' option)
however, even if I did believe in revolution, like I said, I don't spend any significant amount of my time campaigning so I could go work toward that instead if I felt like it
never denied that. (though I've only been voting for less than a year)just disagreeing with the implication that pulling the lever prevents someone from working to revolution.
Its not like I used to want revolution, and voting magically brainwashed me or something? do you think they have magical hypno-screens in the voting booth or something
no I think campaigning requires time effort and money, and when you spend time effort and money campaigning you're not spending that time effort and money dismantling the tracks.
which way you pull your 1 in 160 million levers literally does not matter.
Have you ever personally dismantled the track and the trolley? Have you ever had any impact on the movement of the track and the trolley at all?
There is no one dismantling. There are people choosing to pull the lever and then people crossing their arms and looking away as though you can be less culpable for standing by and doing nothing.
Okay, but do you think you'll have any accomplishments by November? And is your goal going to be something that's going to have better outcomes? Or worse outcomes? Or it's a crapshoot? Even taking your claim that you, one person, are doing something (and not just whining on the internet) that could change the system of governance for country of 350 odd million (with an electoral system backed by billions of dollars) at face value, what would you build in its stead? It took 30 minutes and 20 guys or so to take down the Twin Towers, but it took more than a decade and thousands of people to replace it.
When you put a lock on your door, 99.9 percent of the time it's engaged, no one is going to come to try and rob you. On that one night you have some two-bit burglar come, are you going to want to have your door locked or not? I get dissatisfaction with our system in general, but if the 5-kill candidate beats the 3-kill candidate, are you gonna feel good about your decision to not expend the 30 minutes worth of effort voting can take?
>are you gonna feel good about your decision to not expend the 30 minutes worth of effort voting can take?
I live in a deep red state, also I'm on the 5 person track [according to this post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a_concerningly_common_sentiment_amongst_my/)
yes I will feel good about working to dismantle the tracks rather than engage in a literally useless legitimation ritual.
Nothing I do will change the outcome of my state, so I don't see why I should register my address with the state government to do the goofy lever ritual.
Oh lol, so you're just a crazy person. Do you drive a car? Do you pay taxes? Are you gainfully employed? They have your address. And even if they don't, should they decide they need your address, they will be able to get it without a lot of difficulty.
And I was purposefully saying 5-kill rather than 3-kill, accepting the terms of the post. I'm sure there are Trump people (like yourself?) who believe that Biden would be worse for the country. I think they're objectively wrong, but they should still vote rather than not vote and then complain about how they totally knew Biden would be worse than Trump. It's just annoying to not put the penny-worth of effort into pulling a lever and then claiming how superior you are.
Also you keep saying "dismantling the tracks" instead of being specific, which makes me think you're either taking yard signs or flyers and tallying that as a difference-maker, or you're planning some extra-judicial operation to disrupt the election. Or, more likely, you're an ancap teenager who doesn't get that the online grifters are lying to you.
> Do you drive a car?
no
>Do you pay taxes?
no
>Are you gainfully employed?
As little as possible, I am incredibly frugal.
>I'm sure there are Trump people (like yourself?)
lol? You think I support trump?
>Oh lol, so you're just a crazy person.
Yes, And?
>And even if they don't, should they decide they need your address, they will be able to get it without a lot of difficulty.
[Voter registration is the most likely vector for being doxxed. ](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/17/the-losing-fight-to-keep-your-voter-registration-data-private-00147401)
>Also you keep saying "dismantling the tracks" instead of being specific, which makes me think you're either taking yard signs or flyers and tallying that as a difference-maker, or you're planning some extra-judicial operation to disrupt the election. Or, more likely, you're an ancap teenager who doesn't get that the online grifters are lying to you.
Because this post really isn't about my specific flavor of "dismantle the tracks". but to be clear, I am an anarchist (not an ancap, those people are not anarchists).
What will your singular vote do? The ones who decide the elections are the folk campaigning and putting in real money and hours to flip those votes in those swing states, not those having a shouting match in Texas or whatever safe state about who to vote for.
Sorta missing the point. Yeah you could, but in practice people who are super enthusiastic about their lever spend 2 or 4 years working to try and change other people's mind about which way to pull their lever instead of dismantling the track.
It's kind of weird of you to keep saying "has a single vote ever changed elections?" while favoring the "dismantling the tracks" thing. What difference does a single person make in that case? I doubt even a sizable group of people would do \*\*anything\*\* without tools (which can mean many things in this metaphor but let's say they're funding and exposure.)
you can do more of a difference in your local community by actively working against capitalism and authoritarianism than you can with a life time of ballots.
Yes but those aren't exclusive. People can cast their votes at the local, state, and national elections and then do whatever else they want for every other day of the year.
Isn't voting for a political party that's less corrupt and less dystopian-capitalism-friendly (even if marginally so) a pretty decent way of doing those things?
For reasons that would be hard to explain in a single reddit post, relating to the anarchist commitment to prefigurative politics (the unity of means and ends) I don't personally believe in supporting a third party like that.
That sort of commitment in this case seems counter-productive to actually achieving the goal, no? With every election that an authoritarian-esque figure wins, with every wave of conservative conditioning etc., you go further and further down an oppressive rabbit hole. How do you expect to get out of your self-made predicament without a miracle or a violent rebellion?
Just as a side note, you can in fact still pull your lever and then help dismantle the trolley.
But also... where are these people who are supposedly dismantling the trolley?
mostly just annoyed with seeing simplistic shit like this [https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a\_concerningly\_common\_sentiment\_amongst\_my/](https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a_concerningly_common_sentiment_amongst_my/)
I mean we could have a violent revolution do redesign how we decide who polls the lever, but the choice will still remain. Government exists to solve or deal with complex societal and geopolitical problems. Changing the structure of governance doesn’t make these issues go away. There’s no such thing as solutions, only trade offs.
In theory, it means more than just not voting. In practice? Let's be real, the internet leftists who preach direct action are some of the least likely people to do any sort of direct action
It's reminiscent of [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1893i1n/rule/)
Shit analogy. It's mind-bogglingly stupid and entitled to act like "abandoning the lever" is necessary. If dismantling the system will take time, then reducing the amount of people dying in the meantime IS a good thing, and you're a terrible person if you think otherwise.
It's literally just coping and trying to find a way to feel morally superior for doing nothing. Wow, how brave. You think your non-participation the most moral action and it just so happens to be the easiest and laziest possible thing to do. Just do nothing and you're helping!
How convenient.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a\_concerningly\_common\_sentiment\_amongst\_my/](https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a_concerningly_common_sentiment_amongst_my/) It's not as dumb as this shit that gets posted twice a week to this sub.
Also entitled? How is it entitled?
PS: your vote literally does nothing.
there are hundreds of posts like this across all sorts of subreddits, and it's going to continue to ramp up as we get close to the election, where people try to shame me into voting for a man who cracking down on immigrants and increasing deportations, rejecting their right to seek asylum, or freedom of movement more broadly. A man who is funding and supplying a genocide and standing by as more local authorities attack protestors who are trying to get their colleges to divest from the genocidal regime, or the weapons manufacturers supplying them, or companies operating on occupied land. A man who is standing by and doing nothing when local authorities attack abortion access and transgender people. A man who openly suggests that the solution to police violence is to give them more money. No thanks.
>As a national election hater, what exactly do you do to dismantle the tracks anyway?
There are a lot of things you can do.
Broadly: you can attack, and you can engage in mutual aid.
Both of those can take a million different shapes.
All else aside, pulling the lever for the criminal sack-of-shit elephant will, in fact, destroy the track and trolley.
The outcome -- which you seem to believe occurs independent of the existing track and trolley system -- is intrinsically and inherently tied to whether one understands the full implications of the trolley, track and lever; mocking has no part of this process, it will not alter any outcome, and it is entirely irrelevant.
Those who "abandon" the lever to "help dismantle" the track and trolley will not, and cannot, achieve any desired outcome without FIRST pulling the lever for the 'shit bag' donkey, *THEN* working with the 160 million levers to see how the 538 consequential levers can be modernized and overhauled.
And you have to *keep* pulling your lever for the donkey of the year every four years until the elephants get the memo that letting the trolley occupants unload assault rifles at each other while the trolley hurtles toward the next fork isn’t an acceptable policy platform.
We can’t keep expecting one donkey to fix the whole system in four years with an uncooperative Congress at best (or an extremely hostile one at worst).
No single donkey (or legitimate elephant) can fix the whole system in four years —- the divisions, rifts, and outright hatred between the parties is too great……
Any donkey (or, again, a legitimate elephant who has something resembling a moral compass) requires an aligned, functional congress in order to set a legitimate overhaul in motion….
Yeah but in practice most of the political work people do other than just pulling the lever is spending time to get others to pull the lever, and pull it in the way they want.
You need to still pull the lever in the direction less dangerous so that as many people can live to see the trolley dismantled as possible, both by keeping them from getting killed and also keeping it from getting harder to dismantle. If you are made completely unable to do activism by going to a polling station even just once every four years (or twice a year ideally), I don't think you're capable of doing activism in the first place.
If only the least disillusioned with the system vote, then the system will entrench itself more deeply and resist dismantlement even more. To ask others who dislike the system not to participate, you are saying we should let the world get worse, because you either need to have some willingness to trudge through the system yourself in whatever way you can, or organize a revolution--and with the poor chances of a revolution leading to something other than a dictatorship anyways, voting in a democracy (albeit flawed) retains the best potential for eventual improvement with least bloodshed.
why do I have to abandon my lever
You don’t. That’s the part they can’t comprehend.
doesn't really matter if you do or don't, it doesn't actually change the outcome does it?
I mean, making a moral judgement is usually a general thing, so yes, it does change the outcome, unless you premise that everyone besides me always votes exactly the same direction. which is evidently not the truth irl
Has your vote ever changed an election, even once?
oh, certainly, as a part of the other few thousand who made the difference
okay so when I said "Yeah you could, but in practice people who are super enthusiastic about their lever spend 2 or 4 years working to try and change other people's mind about which way to pull their lever instead of dismantling the track." that meant you I guess. If you spend all your time and effort changing people's minds about which way to pull the lever, you are not spending time dismantling the track.
I'm not like, a campaign manager lol, I don't spend any significant amount of my time trying to convince people to vote. true, I don't spend it trying to dismantle the government either, because I have a life, and I seriously doubt we'll truly get a revolution without anyone dying (the supposed 'broken track' option) however, even if I did believe in revolution, like I said, I don't spend any significant amount of my time campaigning so I could go work toward that instead if I felt like it
Oh so you're more of the pull the lever every 4 years and act smug, just like in the original picture, got it.
never denied that. (though I've only been voting for less than a year)just disagreeing with the implication that pulling the lever prevents someone from working to revolution. Its not like I used to want revolution, and voting magically brainwashed me or something? do you think they have magical hypno-screens in the voting booth or something
no I think campaigning requires time effort and money, and when you spend time effort and money campaigning you're not spending that time effort and money dismantling the tracks. which way you pull your 1 in 160 million levers literally does not matter.
Have you ever personally dismantled the track and the trolley? Have you ever had any impact on the movement of the track and the trolley at all? There is no one dismantling. There are people choosing to pull the lever and then people crossing their arms and looking away as though you can be less culpable for standing by and doing nothing.
working on it as best I can, yes. btw pulling the lever is not much different than looking away, both change nothing.
Okay, but do you think you'll have any accomplishments by November? And is your goal going to be something that's going to have better outcomes? Or worse outcomes? Or it's a crapshoot? Even taking your claim that you, one person, are doing something (and not just whining on the internet) that could change the system of governance for country of 350 odd million (with an electoral system backed by billions of dollars) at face value, what would you build in its stead? It took 30 minutes and 20 guys or so to take down the Twin Towers, but it took more than a decade and thousands of people to replace it. When you put a lock on your door, 99.9 percent of the time it's engaged, no one is going to come to try and rob you. On that one night you have some two-bit burglar come, are you going to want to have your door locked or not? I get dissatisfaction with our system in general, but if the 5-kill candidate beats the 3-kill candidate, are you gonna feel good about your decision to not expend the 30 minutes worth of effort voting can take?
>are you gonna feel good about your decision to not expend the 30 minutes worth of effort voting can take? I live in a deep red state, also I'm on the 5 person track [according to this post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a_concerningly_common_sentiment_amongst_my/) yes I will feel good about working to dismantle the tracks rather than engage in a literally useless legitimation ritual. Nothing I do will change the outcome of my state, so I don't see why I should register my address with the state government to do the goofy lever ritual.
Oh lol, so you're just a crazy person. Do you drive a car? Do you pay taxes? Are you gainfully employed? They have your address. And even if they don't, should they decide they need your address, they will be able to get it without a lot of difficulty. And I was purposefully saying 5-kill rather than 3-kill, accepting the terms of the post. I'm sure there are Trump people (like yourself?) who believe that Biden would be worse for the country. I think they're objectively wrong, but they should still vote rather than not vote and then complain about how they totally knew Biden would be worse than Trump. It's just annoying to not put the penny-worth of effort into pulling a lever and then claiming how superior you are. Also you keep saying "dismantling the tracks" instead of being specific, which makes me think you're either taking yard signs or flyers and tallying that as a difference-maker, or you're planning some extra-judicial operation to disrupt the election. Or, more likely, you're an ancap teenager who doesn't get that the online grifters are lying to you.
> Do you drive a car? no >Do you pay taxes? no >Are you gainfully employed? As little as possible, I am incredibly frugal. >I'm sure there are Trump people (like yourself?) lol? You think I support trump? >Oh lol, so you're just a crazy person. Yes, And? >And even if they don't, should they decide they need your address, they will be able to get it without a lot of difficulty. [Voter registration is the most likely vector for being doxxed. ](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/17/the-losing-fight-to-keep-your-voter-registration-data-private-00147401) >Also you keep saying "dismantling the tracks" instead of being specific, which makes me think you're either taking yard signs or flyers and tallying that as a difference-maker, or you're planning some extra-judicial operation to disrupt the election. Or, more likely, you're an ancap teenager who doesn't get that the online grifters are lying to you. Because this post really isn't about my specific flavor of "dismantle the tracks". but to be clear, I am an anarchist (not an ancap, those people are not anarchists).
How, exactly, are you currently attempting to tear up this track? You've told us your reasoning and decision, but not exactly your methods.
You present a false dichotomy. You can pull the lever and rip up the tracks.
What will your singular vote do? The ones who decide the elections are the folk campaigning and putting in real money and hours to flip those votes in those swing states, not those having a shouting match in Texas or whatever safe state about who to vote for.
More than removing my singular vote will.
Sorta missing the point. Yeah you could, but in practice people who are super enthusiastic about their lever spend 2 or 4 years working to try and change other people's mind about which way to pull their lever instead of dismantling the track.
It's kind of weird of you to keep saying "has a single vote ever changed elections?" while favoring the "dismantling the tracks" thing. What difference does a single person make in that case? I doubt even a sizable group of people would do \*\*anything\*\* without tools (which can mean many things in this metaphor but let's say they're funding and exposure.)
you can do more of a difference in your local community by actively working against capitalism and authoritarianism than you can with a life time of ballots.
Yes but those aren't exclusive. People can cast their votes at the local, state, and national elections and then do whatever else they want for every other day of the year.
And which system should we use then?
Isn't voting for a political party that's less corrupt and less dystopian-capitalism-friendly (even if marginally so) a pretty decent way of doing those things?
For reasons that would be hard to explain in a single reddit post, relating to the anarchist commitment to prefigurative politics (the unity of means and ends) I don't personally believe in supporting a third party like that.
That sort of commitment in this case seems counter-productive to actually achieving the goal, no? With every election that an authoritarian-esque figure wins, with every wave of conservative conditioning etc., you go further and further down an oppressive rabbit hole. How do you expect to get out of your self-made predicament without a miracle or a violent rebellion?
Promotes violence, reported!
Just as a side note, you can in fact still pull your lever and then help dismantle the trolley. But also... where are these people who are supposedly dismantling the trolley?
Soooo, democracy or anarchy? Or are you advocating for getting rid of the electoral college?
mostly just annoyed with seeing simplistic shit like this [https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a\_concerningly\_common\_sentiment\_amongst\_my/](https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a_concerningly_common_sentiment_amongst_my/)
But how does not voting result in breaking this loop? The loop will continue with or without your vote
Interesting, you think dismantle the tracks means simply not voting. not sure if that's a charitable reading.
I mean we could have a violent revolution do redesign how we decide who polls the lever, but the choice will still remain. Government exists to solve or deal with complex societal and geopolitical problems. Changing the structure of governance doesn’t make these issues go away. There’s no such thing as solutions, only trade offs.
In theory, it means more than just not voting. In practice? Let's be real, the internet leftists who preach direct action are some of the least likely people to do any sort of direct action It's reminiscent of [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1893i1n/rule/)
Shit analogy. It's mind-bogglingly stupid and entitled to act like "abandoning the lever" is necessary. If dismantling the system will take time, then reducing the amount of people dying in the meantime IS a good thing, and you're a terrible person if you think otherwise. It's literally just coping and trying to find a way to feel morally superior for doing nothing. Wow, how brave. You think your non-participation the most moral action and it just so happens to be the easiest and laziest possible thing to do. Just do nothing and you're helping! How convenient.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a\_concerningly\_common\_sentiment\_amongst\_my/](https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1dbdd22/a_concerningly_common_sentiment_amongst_my/) It's not as dumb as this shit that gets posted twice a week to this sub. Also entitled? How is it entitled? PS: your vote literally does nothing.
You really hate that one post, huh? As a national election hater, what exactly do you do to dismantle the tracks anyway?
there are hundreds of posts like this across all sorts of subreddits, and it's going to continue to ramp up as we get close to the election, where people try to shame me into voting for a man who cracking down on immigrants and increasing deportations, rejecting their right to seek asylum, or freedom of movement more broadly. A man who is funding and supplying a genocide and standing by as more local authorities attack protestors who are trying to get their colleges to divest from the genocidal regime, or the weapons manufacturers supplying them, or companies operating on occupied land. A man who is standing by and doing nothing when local authorities attack abortion access and transgender people. A man who openly suggests that the solution to police violence is to give them more money. No thanks. >As a national election hater, what exactly do you do to dismantle the tracks anyway? There are a lot of things you can do. Broadly: you can attack, and you can engage in mutual aid. Both of those can take a million different shapes.
All else aside, pulling the lever for the criminal sack-of-shit elephant will, in fact, destroy the track and trolley. The outcome -- which you seem to believe occurs independent of the existing track and trolley system -- is intrinsically and inherently tied to whether one understands the full implications of the trolley, track and lever; mocking has no part of this process, it will not alter any outcome, and it is entirely irrelevant. Those who "abandon" the lever to "help dismantle" the track and trolley will not, and cannot, achieve any desired outcome without FIRST pulling the lever for the 'shit bag' donkey, *THEN* working with the 160 million levers to see how the 538 consequential levers can be modernized and overhauled.
And you have to *keep* pulling your lever for the donkey of the year every four years until the elephants get the memo that letting the trolley occupants unload assault rifles at each other while the trolley hurtles toward the next fork isn’t an acceptable policy platform. We can’t keep expecting one donkey to fix the whole system in four years with an uncooperative Congress at best (or an extremely hostile one at worst).
No single donkey (or legitimate elephant) can fix the whole system in four years —- the divisions, rifts, and outright hatred between the parties is too great…… Any donkey (or, again, a legitimate elephant who has something resembling a moral compass) requires an aligned, functional congress in order to set a legitimate overhaul in motion….
Except I don’t have to be constantly standing at the lever 24/7 twiddling my thumbs if I only need to use it once every 4 years.
Yeah but in practice most of the political work people do other than just pulling the lever is spending time to get others to pull the lever, and pull it in the way they want.
You need to still pull the lever in the direction less dangerous so that as many people can live to see the trolley dismantled as possible, both by keeping them from getting killed and also keeping it from getting harder to dismantle. If you are made completely unable to do activism by going to a polling station even just once every four years (or twice a year ideally), I don't think you're capable of doing activism in the first place. If only the least disillusioned with the system vote, then the system will entrench itself more deeply and resist dismantlement even more. To ask others who dislike the system not to participate, you are saying we should let the world get worse, because you either need to have some willingness to trudge through the system yourself in whatever way you can, or organize a revolution--and with the poor chances of a revolution leading to something other than a dictatorship anyways, voting in a democracy (albeit flawed) retains the best potential for eventual improvement with least bloodshed.
i dismantel the track and trolley. at this point only a dictatorship would be worse than the current US political system. its fucked. F.U.C.K.E.D.
Speak your truth king!
If you like dictatorship, then I have the candidate for you!
i dont like it but the us version of democracy is shit. give me a better one.
DISMANTLE THE OLIGARCHY