Because believing it’s unfixable relieves people of any pressure to act.
People look at the current mess, hear bad things about all sides, don’t have the time and background education and logical mindset to work out an approximation of where problems actually come from, then throw up their hands, declare it “unfixable” and stop voting.
Because fixing it would be *hard*. But if it’s unfixable, no guilt.
Because both parties suck, and republicans are just sucking worse lately. Doesn’t help when the media is pushing towards a candidate independents despise.
Both parties have, at different times and places, promoted this kind of fallacy of moderation, that both sides are awful, to keep people at home in disgust when it benefits them.
Also, which candidate “the media” is pushing towards depends on what media you’re consuming. I’ve seen a pretty wide spread across my own media consumption.
“The President in particular is very much a figurehead — he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had — he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Trump, of course, provokes outrage in anyone of an Enlightenment mindset.
Hillary provoked similar levels of outrage due to a carefully calibrated media campaign (probably helped by the fact that she’s got two X chromosomes and worked for Obama).
Obama provoked similar levels of outrage because he has lots of melanin in his skin.
In the alternate universe where Douglas Adams was actually talking about the U.S. political system, the degree of racism in the U.S. can be calibrated by how thoroughly excellent and unimpeachable Obama was in every other way than his skin tone.
(Of course, in our current universe, the President does wield power. He can use his power to incite wars, stir up hatreds, cancel treaties…)
Well unimpeachable except for the prison camp he didn’t close and the thousands of drone strikes on questionable targets.
I say this as someone who wishes Obama would run for Senate and replace Mitch McConnell before we amend the Constitution so he can be President for Life.
Oh, and then the Afghanistan quagmire he did nothing to get us out of. And let’s not forget his illegal wars in Libya and Syria. And failing to get Congressional approval for the Iran nuclear deal, thus enabling the current Commander in Cheeto to trash it.
Might want to look to Congress and its nigh-decade-long hissy fit about some of those things. Obama was willing to respect how the process is supposed to work, but he had too much faith in Republicans to act like adults. Or at least like they cared in any way about America.
We were actually discussing Obama … see Chris Phoenix’s comment above. Speaking for my own gripe, yes, Obama inherited the wiretapping program; but he did nothing to rein it in, and he made misleading statements about it.
Really, I don’t think it matters whether a president inherited something. If they do nothing to fix it, they own it just as much as their predecessors.
And, even more importantly, I would argue… Primaries. The lack of turnout for primaries is the key reason that major party candidates are either bland, lackluster centrists with no ideology whatsoever, or extremist whackaloons (or at least people willing to entertain the actual whackaloons in the electorate).
Yes, primaries tend to favor the annointed candidate of the party’s national committee, but that’s also because people can’t be bothered to turn out to vote in them, or participate in the caucuses in the established fashion. (See: Berniebros, who thought that all they had to do was show up at the party. No, it’s more complex than that, and you have to understand the system before you can participate in it.)
This is your reminder that “*sigh* Neither side is perfect, no point in going out and voting” is the exact tactic the Russian propaganda blog campaign that was rooted out after the last election took in places that were deemed left-leaning.
“If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)
Well the “Russians” didn’t exactly work from whole cloth.
All that crap was already in the air, they just added a few more fans to whip it even higher and further than those who shovelled it out in the first place ever planned for.
Yeah. If you want to change the options, you have to be willing to take the long view. I remember the Before Times, when there was a group of nutjobs listening to a frothing right-wing radio host, dubbed ‘Dittoheads’ because they would call in and just say ‘Ditto’ to whatever inanity he pushed forward.
Then, in the era of Clinton, they became more energized, targeting Republican primaries, making sure candidates they wanted got onto the ballot down-ticket. And when Billzo couldn’t keep his bent penis in his pants long enough to see the country through his eight years, and when the Democrats in Congress made sure he wouldn’t be convicted on the articles of impeachment, they got motivated, hard enough to elect Dubya, mainly by suppressing the vote in battleground states (Historical Fact, at least in living memory: the better the turnout, the more likely the progressive candidate wins.)
They were actually largely quiescent during the Shrub’s years in office, though they continued working the primaries and down-ballot offices.
Then, when Obama came into power, they merged whole-heartedly with the racist segment of the electorate and forged the Tea Party.
Meanwhile, during all this time, the Greens would run a boutique candidate every four years to draw votes from the Democratic candidate for President, and completely ignore the down-ticket races.
And now the Dittoheads have a Presidency, and the Greens are still a joke.
If you want to change the two-party system (something that will require many things, but first and foremost the abolition of the Electoral College), then you need to get a major party candidate who wants to undermine that system, and to do that, you have to participate in the process in early days, not just every four years.
I just checked, out of curiosity: apparently, the last time someone who was neither Democrat or Republican got elected as POTUS was in 1850 (Millard Fillmore, of the Whig party).
The most recent POTUS who wasn’t in a political party at all, incidentally, was George Washington.
Technically, the last time someone neither Democratic or Republican was elected was Zachary Taylor in 1848. Fillmore was his vice-president and succeeded him in 1850, but didn’t win election in the 1852 race.
Not coincidentally, the first time a Republican was elected POTUS was in 1860. The Republican Party emerged after the Whigs collapsed in the late 1850s during the slavery crises that led up to the Civil War. Many Whigs and Northern Democrats switched into the new Republican Party.
It has always been a two party system, except for brief periods where one party dominates and multiple others compete to become the new other major party.
The last times a 3rd party candidate won any states and thus any electoral votes were George Wallace and Strom Thurmond in 1968 and 1948 respectively. Both essentially ran as segregationist Dixiecrats and won only in the Old South.
If you don’t like 45, my fellow Americans, VOTE FOR THE PERSON WHO WILL STEP INTO OFFICE WITH ACTUAL POLITICAL CAPITAL TO SPEND AND ALLIES IN CONGRESS READY AND WILLING TO BACK THEM UP. Yes, even if that person is not ideologically the best. As long as their record proves them to be capable of shame, or of reacting to sustained public pressure, VOTE THEM IN.
45 and all of his various remoras and manipulators out. OUT. That is the primary goal. If you vote for purity you vote for nothing.
And furthermore: If you want to see a third-party president in power, vote for third-party congresspeople, governors, mayors, judges, sheriffs, service district commissioners, and school board members. Or run for a minor office yourself if you can and there’s nobody you want to vote for. Build a base for a future third-party president to rise from. And remember: The president is not supposed to be the one supreme boss pope of fixing everything from the top down. That’s not what democracy is for.
Actually it’s only in some jurisdictions, and it’s more “vote against.” In Alaska, for example, you’re supposed to check each judge’s record before the election (as compiled by an independent observer) and arrive prepared to vote either “Retain” (doing a good job” or “Dismiss” (fire ’em).
I know quite a few people that still do. I mean the assumption is that if they didn’t want either candidate at the time, they wouldn’t change that stance just because one of those 2 choices they didn’t like got chosen.
Well, I mean… we’re quickly speeding to the Point Of No Return, and in about 50 years or so our planet will become too toxic for us to exist and rising CO2 will boil us to death. Our species will be doomed to a slow, painful, drawn out extinction. And what are our choices? On the one hand, we have literal cartoon supervillains who every day slowly turn our civilization into a hellish corporate dystopia like something from the 80’s but with less neon and cyborgs simply because they only see short term profits and think they can ride out the half-dozen apocalypse scenarios in their fortified underground bunkers; and on the other, a pack of spineless cowards who just let the supervillains get away with absolutely everything, time and time again, and only ever show any teeth at all when it comes to eating their own.
There is no future for the human race. We’re all fucked.
In the face of insurmountable odds, I can’t really condemn anyone for feeling just a little bit apathetic.
This is like my mental background radiation, except I think it’s more like 25 years and we’re past the point of no return. Something like a dozen positive feedback loops, from methane released from permafrost to oceanic CO2 solubility levels?
And that’s only one of a few different ways humanity could be wiped out. It never ceases to blow my mind how many ways that could happen, and how we do effectively nothing about that.
I’m-a need you to stop talking about my imminent death. I already spend every night staying awake losing my mind over the incredible fear of dying. I don’t need this rattling around in my brain.
Oh, for crying out loud. Yotomoe, you can sleep at night. We are not 25 years past the point of no return. Any time we wanted to we could use nukes to put enough dust in the air to move the needle as far as we wanted in the direction of nuclear winter. In fact, we won’t do that. What we will do is dump some reflective chemicals with limited lifespans into the upper atmosphere that will slightly reduce the energy reaching earth’s surface. There are several different candidates. Any major industrial nation, say France or higher, could start the process right now. They aren’t going to. The major industrial nations all benefit from increasing access to the resources of the polar regions and most benefit economically in other ways. Russia, for example, needs ports that don’t freeze over for the winter. When it actually starts hurting in ways that “mater” then we’ll do something about it.
I have faith that eventually we will come up with a way to kill ourselves off, but global warming isn’t it. If you wan’t to keep yourself awake at night, decide to worry about something like run-away nanotechnology and AI.
That’s all theoretical, especially the bit with the chemicals, and it’s nice to believe that’s true but it doesn’t make it true. There are plenty of economic downsides like drought, fire and hurricanes that have definitely offset any increased resource access but that doesn’t matter if governments aren’t rational actors who properly attribute this cause/effect.
And using nukes to combat global warming isn’t really going to make the earth any better. Deliberately using nukes to throw dust is increasing the fallout of the blast – all that dust becomes irradiated, and coating the upper atmosphere with radiation…will probably make more if us dead rather than less.
Nanotechnology, ai and engineered viruses are all much scarier than nukes, I’ll grant you that much.
The other problem with using nuclear winter to counter climate change is that nuclear winter is a short term solution – lasts a couple a years, while the greenhouse effects of carbon are a generational problem.
Deliberate use of nuclear weapons to kick dust into the atmosphere on a regular basis doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Yeah, nukes are not a good solution, though it is possible to design them to maximize dust and minimize radioactives. Chemicals that would act as a radiation shield in the upper atmosphere aren’t just theoretical, though putting them there is, because we aren’t doing it – not even in test amounts to calibrate the effect, which we would be doing now if we were at all serious about controlling global warming. Yes, we would have to keep doing it, that’s the point of choosing chemicals that would break back down. Nor does it solve all the problems associated with carbon, like acidification. But it’s a long way from “We’re all doomed.”
I guess what I meant by “theoretical” is “nobody has ever tested it in a meaningful way (in the actual atmosphere) on a meaningful scale”, which, I think, is about the same thing for complex engineering.
The point of no return is not well known, best estimates put it at 10 years at current emissions rates. That’s not the point when things go down the toilet though, the absolute scariest, most cynical estimates peg that at the 2040s to 2050s – the feedback loops take time.
To clarify, that would be the absolute worst case. Most likely it will be a bit longer. It’s an important distinction to make too because these numbers are currently the biggest sticking point for so called “sceptics” who assume that because they can’t see the world ending in only 10 years therefore the whole thing is a hoax.
And I don’t trust that the worst case scenarios you reference haven’t been deliberately watered down by constant political pressures, or incorporate all the latest variables – the ocean seems to be much warmer than we thought as of January or so, and that’s 75% of the planet and one of our major heatsinks.
Only there are a few problem with all these estimates.
They pull their numbers from somewhere dark and moist.
The models are linear and the world is not linear.
There is a critical point where the system shifts in it’s characteristics and you get a chain reaction of some sort.
Arctic water warms and expands – the cold arctic current no longer flows under the warm gulf current – The ocean streams shift – Western Europe weather turns into Northern Ontario and the US eastern seaboard is cold and under water.
There are definitely potential tipping points that are at least uncertain.
Melting leading to frozen methane releases being one of the big ones. We know about it, but I don’t think we’ve got good predictions for how much or how fast.
I get my information from The Onion – America’s Most Trusted News Source. A couple of years ago they reported that we’re fine as long as we take care of global warming before 2006. So everyone just relax.
There’s a difference between bad and extinct. Earth has had all the carbon in the atmosphere before, it’s not going to be uninhabitable. It will be unpleasant, and it won’t be able to carry the same size population than if we’d done better. Assuming a doomsday, whether supernatural or ecological, is bad for decision making.
Yeah, and nuclear wars won’t leave us /technically/ extinct either, just scrabbling around in the remaining farmlands with 16-1700s era technologies and a society likely even more backwards. And no one would suggest that’s not a doomsday.
Quibbling over the degree of doomsday is just that, quibbling. Rationalizing that it’s not technically a doomsday because the idea is uncomfortable is bad for decision making.
But there’s still a choice between someone who might give us at least a snowball’s chance of survival, and someone who wants to pour all the gasoline tankers onto the fire. I choose snowball.
But I’m certainly pessimistic enough to not want to have children, because I feel it’s highly unethical to have kids that are unlikely to make it to middle age, and if they do make it to adulthood will inherit a burning hellscape.
I grew up going to high school with a few people that weren’t going going to have kids because we were going to kill ourselves off in nuclear war and life would be horrific for the few survivors. Many of those same people have grandkids now.
The difference is, they were afraid of what people *might* do. Here, the danger is what people *aren’t* doing. It’s very easy to just continue to do nothing, which worked out well for the danger of nuclear destruction, but not so well when the danger is precisely that “doing nothing”.
I would agree with you, but there’s still some candidates and politicians who aren’t willing to just let the cartoonish supervillain types get what they want. And I’m hoping with those candidates and politicians in power we can slow and maybe even reverse the bad stuff the supervillain types have been doing. It may seem weird, but I still have some hope for humanity yet. I might lose that hope if the 2020 elections in the US go as bad as 2016 went though.
Eh, I’d describe myself as a cynical misanthrope, yet I still seem more optimistic than most people I talk to. Come visit the real world, I tell them, it’s really not so bad here.
Look, i normally don’t comment, just read the strip and a few comments and leave. Your personal feelings are your own, and are valid, but i could not disagree more with this idea that things being bad justifies inaction. Preaching this kind of despair doesn’t help things. Yes, things are awful, and yes the climate is looking really, really scary, but we can sit back and cry about how fucked we are after fighting with every tooth and nail to prevent it! Even if things are exactly as bad as you say they are, id take the spineless cowards over the actively evil buffoons any day of the week. especially when the spineless cowards have people like AOC and Bernie Sanders who are fighting hard every day to make things better.
I don’t mean to come off like im angry at you or trying to attack you specifically. I’m not. its just that reading your comment made me feel full of despair, and its exactly that kind of attitude we need to fight against. A few years back i watched a powerful documentary about climate change that made me cry. It predicted a lot of the same things you are talking about. Despite having such a scary message it ended on a note of hope. Urging people to keep trying to make things better. It used a phrase they had heard “Its better to light one candle then to curse the darkness” as a way to sum up that point. Thats the kind of attitude we need to have right now. We need to get active. We need to get out there, to fight as hard as we can. If we dont have any candles find a match. If we dont have any matches find a way to make one.
I understand the desire to throw our hands in the air and say “theres no point, we’re all fucked.” i really, really do. But we cant give into that temptation. Ultimately its just a justification to sit around doing nothing. Now more then ever we really have to keep trying.
I shared this excellent quote above; but Imma share it again:
“If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)
If you can’t find someone to vote for, then at the very least find someone to goddamned well vote against!! As someone said above, it may be a choice between “bad” and “worse” rather than “good” and “better”.
But I’ll take “bad” over “worse” any day of the week, given no other choice, and we’ve already seen how much worse “worse” can get.
If you can’t vote for someone, find someone else to vote against. But either way, VOTE!!
I have good news for you if you’re being literal; which being text, i can’t tell. Every claim you made is wrong or exaggerated for effect. Humanity will survive the next 100 years. Quality of life is likely to trend downwards for the majority though.
You are instead contributing towards the efforts of said ‘supervillains’ by trying to encourage apathy. Knock it off. kthxbai!
Are we really sure it’s not? They run and cry like little babies at the slightest hint of in-person aggression. Is it so much of a stretch to think we might be able to beat them into the ground, if enough people really put their minds to it?
Much of that apparent “pack of spineless cowards who just let the supervillains get away with absolutely everything, time and time again, and only ever show any teeth at all when it comes to eating their own” is due to an actual lack of power, not to cowardice. It’s not at all clear to me what Democrats could do in the short term to stop the supervillain from getting away with it. Our government has long run on norms and traditions and the expectation that voters would punish politicians that broke them. Trump has the support of roughly half the voters and they enthusiastically back him breaking those norms and traditions. And the GOP controls the Senate and backs him with the support of those same voters.
That rules out the obvious solution, impeachment, doing anything but influencing the vote in 2020. It’s not a short term solution. Nor can Democrats pass laws that might hold him in check, thanks to the Senate.
Investigations continue and will build towards impeachment, despite unprecedented obstruction. Democrats have won several recent court case, with scathing opinions from the judges about the Trump gang’s legal arguments. That will continue.
Let me make it clear what any politician can do: take a side. Take a stance! Take any kind of position at all that isn’t “helping us bend over for the nice rich rat-eating arseholes”.
Great. Who hasn’t done so? On something important. At least once.
I don’t know what actually would count for you, so it’s hard to come up with specifics. I could say that the GOP tax give away to the rich would never have passed this Democratic House (not a single Democrat voted for it), but maybe you’d respond that doesn’t count and nothing less than a 70% top marginal rate* would be enough so they’re not taking a stance.
*proposed in various forms by several Democrats.
Ahh. I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, since the comic started in early September 2010 and they’re only now inching towards Halloween. Which means that’s a HELL of a lot of shit going down in less than two months.
thats one of the problems with sliding timescale comics. A LOT of stuff happens in a very short amount of time, sometimes an unbelievable amount of stuff. But that doesn’t make the comics bad, just the time frame is always super wonky.
How could you not? 2016 featured the stupid candidate from the evil party running against the evil candidate from the stupid party. (I’ll let you decide which was which. ) And yet the vast majority of those who voted, still voted for one of those two. It’s kinda hard to swim against that tide of stupidity.
Well, one candidate would have been a run-of-the-mill-to-shitty president, and the other has been an existential threat to the country and the world at large since.
I can still hear the words of P.J. O’Rourke endorsing one of the 2016 candidates: “She’s wrong about everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
It’s not even by design. It’s a design failure. It’s inherent in our system, which was designed by people who worried about “factions” in democracy, but couldn’t design a way to stop it. And promptly broke into two factions as soon as the government was formed, because it’s inherent in the system.
It’s not that the average voter is too apathetic or uninformed, it’s that there is no other way, short of rewriting the entire system. Third parties don’t work in US politics and voting for them is essentially not voting.
Vote in primaries. That’s how you get better candidates. And vote in mid-term and local elections. That’s how you get better people who can rise to national prominence.
I’m not sure it would make much difference. Maybe you’d get better candidates? It won’t suddenly catapult third parties to prominence. If it somehow managed to do so with one, it would replace one of the existing two, rather than become a stable three or more party system. That has happened before.
Maine has adopted a ranked choice voting system. They used in 2018 elections with no problems and as far as I know, no huge surge in 3rd party wins or votes.
I’d settle for a significant bump in voter turnout, especially for mid-terms and off years.
Making it possible to reasonably vote for third-party candidates means they’d instantly get a ton more votes. And over some years they could actually compete–they’d start putting forth better candidates since they’d be real actual candidates, too. Probably.
No, it’s not. The comic is set in the current year. Quite aside from it being in the FAQ, there are quite a few reference (mostly pop-cultural) that preclude it being set in 2010, such as Lucy’s love of Teen Titans Go, a series that didn’t start until 2013, the fact that several characters have Switches, which were released in 2017, or Jacob wearing an Into the Spider-Verse T-Shirt, which movie came out in 2018.
I’ve seen some of it. It’s a style of humor aimed at kids that I hated even when I was in the target demographic, and I was really disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any kind of actual superhero story to it at all.
County.
Although, I gotta say, at this point;
ALL HAIL DOOM!
(He actually IS a strong, decisive and competent leader, you know. I’m not just saying that because of the Doombots.)
Naw, DOOM! can lead decently enough. He’s an egotistic megalomaniac, but he DOES care for his people. Luthor can be like that, too, when they’re writing him well.
Voter apathy.
The philosophy that voting is a choice between ‘The Lady and the Tiger’ — and the Lady is weilding a chainsaw…. and so is the Tiger, so why bother?
You’re screwed either way.
I always just vote for the person who seems like I’d rather hang out with. If you don’t seem like the kinda guy I can have a soda with, then I don’t want you in power.
My rule is similar, but is more “vote for the person who considers me a human being”. I don’t really like it when people who consider me less than human or a second class citizen are in power.
That’s… not a bad standard to have. Especially if you’re like me and ‘treating lower-class, caucasian, cis-male, pansexuals as people’ is the bar to clear. It SHOULD be a low bar to clear… but they still surprise me.
“All politicians are selfish and care only about themselves!”
“All lawyers are cheats and crooks!”
“All doctors are quacks who take bribes from Big Pharma!”
etc, etc, etc.
Instead of doing the research on an individual person, it’s so much easier to just label them all as bad and call it a day.
No, they’re really all self-centered jackasses with only as much empathy as they need to get votes. That doesn’t mean I’m not voting for the least-scummy candidate. Don’t tell me I’m “making excuses”, like you’re assuming I won’t take action and vote when I need to.
I would still say that the Republicans would only consider you human if you’re at least moderately wealthy. Otherwise, they might pander a bit for your vote, but then they’ll immediately turn around and try to hurt you with their legislation.
Really? I always look at them like a bank manager I’m hiring.
I really don’t give a fuck if I would ever want to have a beer with them. I actually don’t care if I find them sort of greasy and socially awkward, with a voice like a squeaky clarinet.
I’m hiring them to run my bank, not to be my friend. Are they competent at that? Do they make good hiring decisions? Do they treat the employees fairly? What’s their HR department like? Are they trying to just keep introducing more and more fees while paying less and less interest because they’re prioritizing making as much money for the shareholders as possible even at the expense of screwing over the customers and workers, or are they willing to find a compromise that treats everyone fairly?
I have to admit, I’ve never gotten that concept that political leaders ought to be someone one can personally relate to. I just need someone who is good at the job, which requires high levels of diplomatic skills, the ability to recognize and promote competent, experienced department heads, and the ability to listen to and judge arguments for and against various tactics and stances based on facts and reason, rather than emotion and bribes.
They don’t have to know everything!! But they do have to be able to recognize who is the expert in the fields related to the question, and to be able to competently weigh the information and advice they’re provided to come up with a reasoned, forward-looking plan of action.
I’ve gathered that radio was the first thing to start to change that. When all you could tell about a candidate was what the newspapers said, read their quotes and platforms without tone of voice or body language or charisma (or the lack of it) getting in the way, it was easier to judge candidates based on merit. But once you can hear their voices, their stutter, or their smooth talking, it becomes harder to separate their persona and charisma from their ideals and platform and voting record. And television only made it worse, of course.
I mean, whether or not you like or would vote for Trump, one has to admit that, on paper, his literal, unpolished quotes don’t read nearly as well as–well, anyone else’s. They’re word salad garbage, just a hot mess. But speaking you can at least grasp what he’s going for, and it becomes much harder (or rather, it’s even more obvious in raw print) to see how confused and irrational his thinking is.
Sorry that was so long. But yes, TL;DR: judge them as one would a management-level-or-above employee one was hiring, not as a drinking buddy. Because we’re hiring them to do a job, not hang out with us.
And don’t vote for someone with a history of stripping away human rights, wtf!!
I get what you’re saying. But going with your metaphor, I’m an animator. Nobody would EVER put me in charge of hiring someone to run a bank because I simply don’t know what goes into running a bank. I don’t know the ins and outs of that profession, I don’t know how to spot red flags, I don’t know what makes someone qualified at all other than “can count money and can manage other people to count money” So knowing what a person is like (or pretends to be) is a better indicator for how they’ll help me. I mean, I probably wouldn’t grab a lunch with someone who’s politics vastly contradict mine anyway. Even if they’re the nicest person ever if we fundamentally disagree on issues I care about it’s just gonna be a super awkward lunch.
The trouble is that this is literally the standard that got George W. Bush elected. (Well, “elected.” THANKS SUPREME COURT.) Just swap out “soda” for “beer.”
A good personal philosophy is to always vote for the lesser evil when it comes down to the final choice. Things will only get better if we keep choosing the Lesser Evil until that lesser evil becomes a greater good.
. . . .Man that felt weird to type. As if it was typed/worded weirdly.
Something I’ve always maintained is that wanting to be in a position of power is, by it’s very nature, something that is corrupting. Now you may have good intentions but you’re inevitably gonna have to climb over some corpses and treat people like objects for the sake of votes. I mean hell. Look at Dorothy. Who is a nice girl. And yet all of her presidential desires tend to alienate her from her friends or cause her to be distant as a human being.
I’m not saying you can’t be a good person and a politician. What I’m saying is that “politition” is an inherently evil class. You get dark vision and +10 to Charisma and Persuasion.
Oh, for sure, you’d never win without making some nasty compromises. And you’d never pass any bills without nasty compromises either. I would bet you can’t serve as president without being responsible for the death of quite a few innocent people along the way.
But you’d also never change anything about how the world is now, which is obviously crap, and in dire need of fixing. So is wanting the power to reject the current hellscape so bad?
Maybe. Most villains don’t think they’re the villain. This is part of why it’s designed to be so hard for modern governments to do anything without compromising with the other side(s).
I really don’t think your opinion of politicians can be fairly applied to Obama. I’m not saying he was The Greatest President Ever, but on a personal level, he was pretty very awesome. I’ve read accounts of him having long conversations with random service-job people he’d just met. He was/is well educated, thoughtful, and gracious toward everyone. He seems to have a genuinely good character; I’ve never heard anything even suggesting otherwise.
I loved Obama with my whole heart, and I’m still 90% sure he’s got some skeletons in his closet. That said he far surpasses my expectations of “would grab dinner with” so I’d keep voting for him.
Every presidential election in the US is between Merrick Garland and Bret Kavanaugh.
So is every state election. So is every local election. Read your goddamn voters pamphlet all the way down to the local school board and vote accordingly.
Yeah, along with the above “vote for the person who considers me a human being”, how about “Don’t vote for the one the Nazis and the Klan are backing”?
I just don’t get “both sides are the same.” 20 years ago you could almost make that argument, though it was bullshit then as we found out with Bush. Now, we’ve got the most corrupt and incompetent President ever in office, with the full support of his party and we’re still getting it?
Look, I can understand people who like him, who like this direction for the country. I despise and fear them, but I can understand them. This? This baffles me.
Sadly true. This actually explains much of our current polarization. US politics have degenerated into tribalism, and it’s more important to beat on the other tribe than to push your own tribe to do better.
*thumbs up*
So many people are more Us vs. them than y’know…us AND them. It really feels like people are losing their ability to have empathy. Or maybe we never had it.
Heinlein tells us ‘If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for … but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.’
Indeed.
Or just drive the fuck home and miss a day of classes. I did that once – and I was registered in a different State, to say nothing of County. It was a nine hour drive one way.
… in the snow, uphill both ways… (added because that last line made me sound crotchety)
IU students can register to vote in Bloomington even though their permanent residence is elsewhere. Mind you, the GOP in Indiana tried to pass a law preventing that which was defeated in court because, believe it or not, the SCOTUS already ruled on this sort of thing years ago.
I know, it is hard to believe that the GOP would pass a law that the SCOTUS had previously ruled unconstitutional. It is not like they do that all the time…… Oh wait.
To expand on that: In Indiana, you only need to have lived in a precinct for 30 days before the next election in order to register to vote there. Living at a college campus for a few months while you attend school there is more than adequate to fulfill that requirement.
TL;DR: If you’re a US citizen going to school in Indiana, you absolutely can register to vote there.
Some states are really lacking in that department. Tennessee (mine) had a stipulation that you had to be disabled, elderly, and/or out of the country to get an absentee ballot, for example.
The real beauty of an absentee ballot is sitting at home while filling it out and carefully researching all the candidates you didn’t already know. So much better than a polling station.
Yes, but on the other hand if you are in some sort of situation of an imbalance of power, such as work, renting, marriage, worship, living with parents it lets your employer, landlord, spouse, pastor, or parents insist on seeing your ballot and apply coercion.
We had this trouble before William Boothby invented the official printed ballot that is issued only at the polling place and marked in secret. We know what happens.
Anyway, the way that Congressional districts are drawn, it could very well be that Grace’s county is outside Robin’s district. The county I live in is split between two districts, and I’m sure it’s the same for a great many thanks to gerrymandering.
As a member of more than one vulnerable population who has voted in every Presidential Election (and a good portion of midterms as well, but not all) since I turned 18, I will say that voting is one of the more important ways to make my population LESS vulnerable in the future.
It’s technically, but normally not just ANYONE can get access to it. That’s why when a bunch of states refused to turn over voter registration data to the federal government, it was shady and the feds don’t normally have access to it all
In Indiana, there is a master state-wide database. Indiana sells access to it to the 3 major parties (the Indiana Democratic Party, the Indiana Republican Party, and the Libertarian Party of Indiana). The parties make a good chunk of change re-selling access to that database to people running for office and to companies that provide services for people running for office. Usually when they re-sell to a candidate, that candidate will only have access to the relevant precinct(s).
Anyone who has access to the state-wide data either works for one of the state parties, or is buying it from one of the state parties. However, if you want the data without going through one of the parties, you can still get county-level data from the county clerks.
The provincial election before I was old enough to vote, we’d been discussing politics in my Sociology class (as one does), and I was very adamantly NDP, based on their platform. Mum usually voted SoCred (Canada has a number of political parties, usually at least five at the provincial and national levels); but was getting really disillusioned and apathetic with them all, and wasn’t going to bother voting. “They’re each as bad as the other” and all that.
So since I felt strongly in favour of one party but wasn’t allowed to vote, and she didn’t and was, I persuaded her to go in and cast a ballot for the NDP for me.
And in the end the NDP won, because their platform really was better than the other guys’. And no, once in power they didn’t fully stick to it, but my point still stands: If you’re too young to vote, find an apathetic voter and see if you can’t persuade them to go in and cast a vote for you.
Not the ideal way to get a say; but hey, if you have someone who wants to vote but can’t, and someone who can but doesn’t want to, the solution seems obvious. 😛
Since I think the readership of this strip has a lot of left-leaning people who dislike the Democratic Party, may I use this strip to remind you all of the concept of ~*primary elections*~?
They’re less sexy than regular elections, but primary elections are often where your vote is most powerful, especially if you live in a solid red or blue state. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez didn’t beat a Republican to get to Congress, she beat a Democrat in a primary! By voting in primaries and being a solid Democrat in the general, you can convince your rep that they don’t need to fear a general election but need to be afraid of a primary challenge, and they’ll become more responsive to your desires. This is the method by which conservatives took over the Republican Party, so it’s tested and proven to work.
If you live in a deep red district, consider voting for the least terrible candidate in the Republican primary; you’re under no obligation to vote for them in the general, and it’s a way for you to punish Republicans for going too conservative. Voting for a Republican, even in a primary, may not be pleasant, but I assure you the alt-right is doing it, and you’re vote can help be the difference that prevents a statewide abortion ban.
Primaries. They seem like the least important elections, but they’re often the most important. Go vote in them.
It’s not always possible. Some states restrict primaries to registered members of the party.
My home state has open primaries by law, and holds the presidential primary months earlier than the primaries for state-level offices, so when the Democratic nominee is a foregone conclusion, there’s no reason not to vote on the Republican ballot instead. I voted for Ron Paul in the 2012 primary, because I figured he was a) unelectable, and b) the most entertaining possible hand grenade to give delegate power and toss into the RNC.
@ ESM Problem with primaries, at least Presidential primaries, is you’re not always voting for a candidate but rather for someone who will vote on your behalf. They don’t always even say which candidate they support, and even if they do they don’t actually have to vote for that candidate when they get there. Every state makes up their own rules so there is no consistency. Not trying to say you’re wrong, in fact I agree with you, just pointing out it’s not always quite so straight forward.
Is that practically true in any state? I mean, it’s technically true that you vote for delegates who will later vote for a nominee at the convention, but is there actually a state where you vote for a specific delegate rather than vote for the Presidential candidate? In fact, are there even any states that award delegates based on individual votes? Many are winner take all. Others award proportionally on a state wide basis. I don’t know of any where delegates are elected directly.
And for every Presidential primary campaign in modern history, it’s been a formality. We know long before the convention who’s going to be the nominee, because the votes are tallied and allocated when the primaries (or caucuses) occur.
This seems to me to be much more of a theoretical problem than a real one. I’ve followed primary politics pretty closely for at least the 20 years and I don’t recall any talk of even confusion based on voting for delegates, much less the outcome not being clear in terms of which candidates got how many delegates. Some potential about what happens with delegates awarded to a candidate who later dropped out of the race.
Even in cases where that’s true, voting in the primaries still accomplishes a lot more than not doing it.
Just look at the new crop of Democrats that got elected in 2018. Overall they’re MUCH further to the left than their predecessors, and a LOT younger and less old, white, and male.
We still need to primary the fuck out of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and replace them with people who will actually USE the authority they’re given, but there’s drastic improvements when more people are involved in all parts of the election process
I’m not so sure about that. Especially Pelosi.
I might be proven wrong, but I think she’s playing a long game here with a very weak hand and doing it very well.
It’s easy to want more immediate drastic action and there are arguments for it, but there’s a good case to be made that what she can actually do to stop Trump quickly is very limited.
My state has a caucus, not a primary. I didn’t go to it in 2016 because I had to work at the time when it was held, but I’m planning to attend the caucus next year even if I have to take the day off work to do so.
I like these two designs. It surprises me how Willis can have such a varied cast of characters, but I guess making webcomics for forever will help you build up a portfolio. Still, I like how I can look at these two and have zero doubt they’re not anyone in the main cast.
In that case, it’s an amazing show of restraint for Willis to deprive his main characters of so much panel time just to focus on all these side characters!
I’m pretty sure the existence of fanfic in general and Real Person Fanfic in particular is proof positive that actual real human beings can spend a remarkable amount of time fantasizing about other people banging, and to a remarkable level of detail. 😛
Yeah, I don’t she’s fantasizing about either of them at all right now, but monogamy isn’t why. Becky may well think they’re attractive, but I don’t see anything to suggest she’s got horny fantasies on her mind right now
Wow. Coming to the comments section was a real mistake tonight. I just feel my blood pressure rising. And that’s from reading people who are, generally speaking, on “my side”. Yeesh.
I’ve been assuming Robin was the bad choice until she tried to live with Leslie for a day or two and Becky got control of her twitter account. And if I remember correctly Robin’s district is gerrymandered to heavily favor the Republican candidate (which is Robin by the way).
Robin isn’t the Good Choice. At this point Manley is way ahead of Robin in the polls, which is why Mandy doesn’t think that her one vote for him will matter. Grace is saying that that attitude is how someone like Robin could end up winning. If enough people decide that Manley is a sure thing and don’t bother to vote, Robin might just pull off an upset.
And Grace is definitely right, or at least not wrong. There’s a reason that no campaign will ever stop with their get out the vote efforts until the pols close.
You can vote as a temporary resident when you’re in college. I imagine this is a federal thing and not an Illinois thing. It’s been a thing since at least (at the very least) 2016 primaries. My friend was from Michigan and I was from a county over but we still were able to vote just dandy.
There’s also absentee voting and early voting. But it just now occurs to me that if Grace utilized one of those options, she still wouldn’t be voting for or against Robin. But if she means she’s not voting in general, she has at least 4 possible and legal ways of doing so.
This may be technically true, but how many hoops you have to jump through to vote locally depends on where you are attending college. In some precincts, it may be extremely difficult for college students to vote locally; in others, it may be easier, but you can’t assume.
For that matter, you can’t assume even if you aren’t a college student. Now that disenfranchisement has been weaponized by A Certain Political Party, you need to double-check and triple-check your voting status.
Yeah. When I was in college, it was just a matter of going in to the polling station with some picture ID and a utility bill in my name to prove I was living locally, and then I was able to vote. And my vote was put into a sealed envelope, so they could double-check with the area I was registered in to see if I tried to vote there too, and if not, the envelope would be unsealed and my vote added in.
They’ve got print-outs of everyone’s name and address at the polling station, alphabetical by last name, and they find you on there and cross you off when you come in to get your ballot. But there’s provisions for if you aren’t listed on there for whatever reason. At the very least, a voter registration card is mailed out to everyone before the election, in the name of the last registered voter for that address, and if, as is likely in a college town, they aren’t at that address anymore, you still just bring it in with you and they update things from there.
Mind you, this in Canada, so, you know, YMMV big time.
You Americans think your two party system is chaotic? Here in Mexico we have neoliberal assholes that fucked our economy and human rights for almost half a century; conservative Christians whose second president caused a war on drugs that caused thousands of deaths; far left wing politicians that promised change but now that they are in power they are incompetent and do popular polls instead of taking responsibility and leading the country.
The USA and Canada benefitted from exchange with Mexico, but Mexico is still suffering from intervention of the USA, and our national coin has devalued in recent years.
In Australia parties get funding on how many votes they get. It’s maybe less compelling without preferential voting, but voting for the slow horse gets them money to buy a better chance next time.
git oot an vote
I’d say it’s a pretty damn good thing that one can’t declare themself the head of the puppy-kicking party and get equal funding, even before we get to trickery.
Though I’ve seen some systems where you need to get a certain amount of support: percentage of vote in the last election or a certain number of small donations, for example.
That rules out the creating a party just to get the funding, while still giving equal support to anyone with some reasonable chance.
Of course, in the US it’s all been fucked by Citizen’s United allowing independent groups funded by billionaires to basically run the campaign for you.
Think you’ve got it bad? I live in KENTUCKY where Mitch McConnell and Governor Bevin have resulted in 200,000 children being food insecure (its closer to a million). It’s also the Reddest State in the Union after Mississippi so it’s almost completely pointless to vote otherwise as a Goth Anarchist Liberal Christian. Its not even votes that are the problem it’s that the districts are gerrymandered, the television stations owned by the GOP, and the poor can’t stop work to go vote even if they want to.
Honestly at this point, there are a couple of candidates for the Presidential primary who if they won I’d only go vote for them next year because Matt Bevin has personally made my life hell and I want to do everything in my extremely limited, chronically ill power to make him suffer.
There are actually a number of elections where a candidate won by a very small margin, and even some where there was a tie between the top two candidates.
I suspect that what Becky is about to learn is that many people’s personal politics is not only stranger than she imagines but stranger than she can imagine!
It’s funny how american this discussion turned out. Usually I find several people from Europe too, but at first glance we are quite under represented today. Are we fed up with talking elections few days after the EU voting? 😀
In Hungary, we were kinda wishing for more apathy this time, because more people voting meant lower chances for opposition parties to reach the threshold of 5%.
What if we were allowed to actually vote against people, like when we went into the booth we could choose either to vote for one candidate or take away a vote from one candidate. So the candidates had to try to have a stance people actually like or lose to someone with a large supportive extended family who nobody realized was running.
I’m now picturing an alternate universe in which the 2016 US election ended with 30 total votes for one candidate and 31 for the other. The candidate with 31 votes still lost because something something electoral college.
One reason to always vote is that every registered voter who fails to show up come election time, becomes a blip in the database of disaffected voters, and it is that database that attracts election workers to knock on your door and find out what might be done to get you back to voting (presumably for their candidate)
So, can voters in the US not just register to vote somewhere else if they move?
If Germany didn’t have absentee ballots, I would never have voted in a German election yet — I move and travel a lot internationally, so I was never around at the time. And now I’m no longer a registered German resident.
(Luckily it’s easy to do postal vote in Germany, although I would prefer to vote live in person.)
Oh, yeah, in Germany, you also don’t register to vote, unless you have no German residence — you’re automatically registered as a voter wherever you’re registered as a resident.
Of course that only works in countries where municipalities actually have to register all their residents.
You can, but some places try to not let college kids count as resident, on the grounds they’re not year round permanent addresses, but really because young voters trend liberal.
It varies state-by-state, but in Indiana you only need to have lived there 30 days before the election to register to vote there. So if Grace is still registered in another county, it’s either because for whatever reason she would prefer to vote in that county, or because she missed the deadline to update her registration for that election (28 days before the election, plus-or-minus some shenanigans with weekends/holidays?). Or she didn’t realize how easy it is to update your registration.
That is to say, they are designed to let a rich white minorities elect representatives for poor, non-white majorities that are counted in the census and get representative apportioned to them, but do not get to vote.
Loading ...
how the fuck can anyone have voter apathy after 2016
HOW
If people didn’t care enough to vote then, then some of them might not care enough now?
Agreed.
I have absolutely no idea.
Because believing it’s unfixable relieves people of any pressure to act.
People look at the current mess, hear bad things about all sides, don’t have the time and background education and logical mindset to work out an approximation of where problems actually come from, then throw up their hands, declare it “unfixable” and stop voting.
Because fixing it would be *hard*. But if it’s unfixable, no guilt.
Or, as it was put in a very good novella: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/346096-now-there-s-this-about-cynicism-sergeant-it-s-the-universe-s-most
Yes!
Because both parties suck, and republicans are just sucking worse lately. Doesn’t help when the media is pushing towards a candidate independents despise.
Both parties have, at different times and places, promoted this kind of fallacy of moderation, that both sides are awful, to keep people at home in disgust when it benefits them.
Also, which candidate “the media” is pushing towards depends on what media you’re consuming. I’ve seen a pretty wide spread across my own media consumption.
“just sucking worse lately”
Please vote.
“The President in particular is very much a figurehead — he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had — he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Trump, of course, provokes outrage in anyone of an Enlightenment mindset.
Hillary provoked similar levels of outrage due to a carefully calibrated media campaign (probably helped by the fact that she’s got two X chromosomes and worked for Obama).
Obama provoked similar levels of outrage because he has lots of melanin in his skin.
In the alternate universe where Douglas Adams was actually talking about the U.S. political system, the degree of racism in the U.S. can be calibrated by how thoroughly excellent and unimpeachable Obama was in every other way than his skin tone.
(Of course, in our current universe, the President does wield power. He can use his power to incite wars, stir up hatreds, cancel treaties…)
Well unimpeachable except for the prison camp he didn’t close and the thousands of drone strikes on questionable targets.
I say this as someone who wishes Obama would run for Senate and replace Mitch McConnell before we amend the Constitution so he can be President for Life.
Oh, and then the Afghanistan quagmire he did nothing to get us out of. And let’s not forget his illegal wars in Libya and Syria. And failing to get Congressional approval for the Iran nuclear deal, thus enabling the current Commander in Cheeto to trash it.
Might want to look to Congress and its nigh-decade-long hissy fit about some of those things. Obama was willing to respect how the process is supposed to work, but he had too much faith in Republicans to act like adults. Or at least like they cared in any way about America.
And the domestic wiretapping stuff we still wouldn’t know about if not for Edward Snowden.
And all that and more is legacy stuff from well before ol’ cheeto.
Who want facts when there is outrage?
We were actually discussing Obama … see Chris Phoenix’s comment above. Speaking for my own gripe, yes, Obama inherited the wiretapping program; but he did nothing to rein it in, and he made misleading statements about it.
Really, I don’t think it matters whether a president inherited something. If they do nothing to fix it, they own it just as much as their predecessors.
There’s also congress to vote for, and state representatives
And, even more importantly, I would argue… Primaries. The lack of turnout for primaries is the key reason that major party candidates are either bland, lackluster centrists with no ideology whatsoever, or extremist whackaloons (or at least people willing to entertain the actual whackaloons in the electorate).
Yes, primaries tend to favor the annointed candidate of the party’s national committee, but that’s also because people can’t be bothered to turn out to vote in them, or participate in the caucuses in the established fashion. (See: Berniebros, who thought that all they had to do was show up at the party. No, it’s more complex than that, and you have to understand the system before you can participate in it.)
This is your reminder that “*sigh* Neither side is perfect, no point in going out and voting” is the exact tactic the Russian propaganda blog campaign that was rooted out after the last election took in places that were deemed left-leaning.
“If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)
Well the “Russians” didn’t exactly work from whole cloth.
All that crap was already in the air, they just added a few more fans to whip it even higher and further than those who shovelled it out in the first place ever planned for.
Then vote third-party. You’re not locked into Dems and Reps.
In America “third party vote” means “abstaining from voting, but on a soapbox”.
So. Much. THIS.
Yeah. If you want to change the options, you have to be willing to take the long view. I remember the Before Times, when there was a group of nutjobs listening to a frothing right-wing radio host, dubbed ‘Dittoheads’ because they would call in and just say ‘Ditto’ to whatever inanity he pushed forward.
Then, in the era of Clinton, they became more energized, targeting Republican primaries, making sure candidates they wanted got onto the ballot down-ticket. And when Billzo couldn’t keep his bent penis in his pants long enough to see the country through his eight years, and when the Democrats in Congress made sure he wouldn’t be convicted on the articles of impeachment, they got motivated, hard enough to elect Dubya, mainly by suppressing the vote in battleground states (Historical Fact, at least in living memory: the better the turnout, the more likely the progressive candidate wins.)
They were actually largely quiescent during the Shrub’s years in office, though they continued working the primaries and down-ballot offices.
Then, when Obama came into power, they merged whole-heartedly with the racist segment of the electorate and forged the Tea Party.
Meanwhile, during all this time, the Greens would run a boutique candidate every four years to draw votes from the Democratic candidate for President, and completely ignore the down-ticket races.
And now the Dittoheads have a Presidency, and the Greens are still a joke.
If you want to change the two-party system (something that will require many things, but first and foremost the abolition of the Electoral College), then you need to get a major party candidate who wants to undermine that system, and to do that, you have to participate in the process in early days, not just every four years.
I just checked, out of curiosity: apparently, the last time someone who was neither Democrat or Republican got elected as POTUS was in 1850 (Millard Fillmore, of the Whig party).
The most recent POTUS who wasn’t in a political party at all, incidentally, was George Washington.
Technically, the last time someone neither Democratic or Republican was elected was Zachary Taylor in 1848. Fillmore was his vice-president and succeeded him in 1850, but didn’t win election in the 1852 race.
Not coincidentally, the first time a Republican was elected POTUS was in 1860. The Republican Party emerged after the Whigs collapsed in the late 1850s during the slavery crises that led up to the Civil War. Many Whigs and Northern Democrats switched into the new Republican Party.
It has always been a two party system, except for brief periods where one party dominates and multiple others compete to become the new other major party.
The last times a 3rd party candidate won any states and thus any electoral votes were George Wallace and Strom Thurmond in 1968 and 1948 respectively. Both essentially ran as segregationist Dixiecrats and won only in the Old South.
where’s the fricking like button
If you don’t like 45, my fellow Americans, VOTE FOR THE PERSON WHO WILL STEP INTO OFFICE WITH ACTUAL POLITICAL CAPITAL TO SPEND AND ALLIES IN CONGRESS READY AND WILLING TO BACK THEM UP. Yes, even if that person is not ideologically the best. As long as their record proves them to be capable of shame, or of reacting to sustained public pressure, VOTE THEM IN.
45 and all of his various remoras and manipulators out. OUT. That is the primary goal. If you vote for purity you vote for nothing.
And furthermore: If you want to see a third-party president in power, vote for third-party congresspeople, governors, mayors, judges, sheriffs, service district commissioners, and school board members. Or run for a minor office yourself if you can and there’s nobody you want to vote for. Build a base for a future third-party president to rise from. And remember: The president is not supposed to be the one supreme boss pope of fixing everything from the top down. That’s not what democracy is for.
…You don’t actually vote for judges in the States do you?
I’ll be over here, adding to my ‘horrified Canadian screaming’ list.
Yes, local and state judges are sometimes elected positions (always? I don’t know).
Mostly a joke, since the local judges are often running unopposed. I counted 21 unopposed races on my 2016 ballot iirc, and 10 on my 2018.
I marked nothing down for those races, since they are such an obvious farce.
Sometimes. On a state by state basis.
…Not as bad as I was worried about but STILL.
Actually it’s only in some jurisdictions, and it’s more “vote against.” In Alaska, for example, you’re supposed to check each judge’s record before the election (as compiled by an independent observer) and arrive prepared to vote either “Retain” (doing a good job” or “Dismiss” (fire ’em).
*more often
“lately” since 1933.
You must be very old.
Well, arguably since the 60s, depending. I ain’t defending the Dixiecrats.
But yeah, “suck worse lately” is such an incredible understatement, it’s really hard to take it seriously.
One is often disappointing, the other a serious threat to the life and well-being of not only minorities and the non-rich, but to our democracy.
I know quite a few people that still do. I mean the assumption is that if they didn’t want either candidate at the time, they wouldn’t change that stance just because one of those 2 choices they didn’t like got chosen.
Well, I mean… we’re quickly speeding to the Point Of No Return, and in about 50 years or so our planet will become too toxic for us to exist and rising CO2 will boil us to death. Our species will be doomed to a slow, painful, drawn out extinction. And what are our choices? On the one hand, we have literal cartoon supervillains who every day slowly turn our civilization into a hellish corporate dystopia like something from the 80’s but with less neon and cyborgs simply because they only see short term profits and think they can ride out the half-dozen apocalypse scenarios in their fortified underground bunkers; and on the other, a pack of spineless cowards who just let the supervillains get away with absolutely everything, time and time again, and only ever show any teeth at all when it comes to eating their own.
There is no future for the human race. We’re all fucked.
In the face of insurmountable odds, I can’t really condemn anyone for feeling just a little bit apathetic.
This is the bleakest comment I’ve read all day and I’m very upset that I read it.
This is like my mental background radiation, except I think it’s more like 25 years and we’re past the point of no return. Something like a dozen positive feedback loops, from methane released from permafrost to oceanic CO2 solubility levels?
And that’s only one of a few different ways humanity could be wiped out. It never ceases to blow my mind how many ways that could happen, and how we do effectively nothing about that.
I’m-a need you to stop talking about my imminent death. I already spend every night staying awake losing my mind over the incredible fear of dying. I don’t need this rattling around in my brain.
Imagine how I feel.
Then stop adding to it.
Oh, for crying out loud. Yotomoe, you can sleep at night. We are not 25 years past the point of no return. Any time we wanted to we could use nukes to put enough dust in the air to move the needle as far as we wanted in the direction of nuclear winter. In fact, we won’t do that. What we will do is dump some reflective chemicals with limited lifespans into the upper atmosphere that will slightly reduce the energy reaching earth’s surface. There are several different candidates. Any major industrial nation, say France or higher, could start the process right now. They aren’t going to. The major industrial nations all benefit from increasing access to the resources of the polar regions and most benefit economically in other ways. Russia, for example, needs ports that don’t freeze over for the winter. When it actually starts hurting in ways that “mater” then we’ll do something about it.
I have faith that eventually we will come up with a way to kill ourselves off, but global warming isn’t it. If you wan’t to keep yourself awake at night, decide to worry about something like run-away nanotechnology and AI.
That’s all theoretical, especially the bit with the chemicals, and it’s nice to believe that’s true but it doesn’t make it true. There are plenty of economic downsides like drought, fire and hurricanes that have definitely offset any increased resource access but that doesn’t matter if governments aren’t rational actors who properly attribute this cause/effect.
And using nukes to combat global warming isn’t really going to make the earth any better. Deliberately using nukes to throw dust is increasing the fallout of the blast – all that dust becomes irradiated, and coating the upper atmosphere with radiation…will probably make more if us dead rather than less.
Nanotechnology, ai and engineered viruses are all much scarier than nukes, I’ll grant you that much.
The other problem with using nuclear winter to counter climate change is that nuclear winter is a short term solution – lasts a couple a years, while the greenhouse effects of carbon are a generational problem.
Deliberate use of nuclear weapons to kick dust into the atmosphere on a regular basis doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Yeah, nukes are not a good solution, though it is possible to design them to maximize dust and minimize radioactives. Chemicals that would act as a radiation shield in the upper atmosphere aren’t just theoretical, though putting them there is, because we aren’t doing it – not even in test amounts to calibrate the effect, which we would be doing now if we were at all serious about controlling global warming. Yes, we would have to keep doing it, that’s the point of choosing chemicals that would break back down. Nor does it solve all the problems associated with carbon, like acidification. But it’s a long way from “We’re all doomed.”
I guess what I meant by “theoretical” is “nobody has ever tested it in a meaningful way (in the actual atmosphere) on a meaningful scale”, which, I think, is about the same thing for complex engineering.
The point of no return is not well known, best estimates put it at 10 years at current emissions rates. That’s not the point when things go down the toilet though, the absolute scariest, most cynical estimates peg that at the 2040s to 2050s – the feedback loops take time.
To clarify, that would be the absolute worst case. Most likely it will be a bit longer. It’s an important distinction to make too because these numbers are currently the biggest sticking point for so called “sceptics” who assume that because they can’t see the world ending in only 10 years therefore the whole thing is a hoax.
I said 25 years, which puts us to 2044-2045.
And I don’t trust that the worst case scenarios you reference haven’t been deliberately watered down by constant political pressures, or incorporate all the latest variables – the ocean seems to be much warmer than we thought as of January or so, and that’s 75% of the planet and one of our major heatsinks.
Only there are a few problem with all these estimates.
They pull their numbers from somewhere dark and moist.
The models are linear and the world is not linear.
There is a critical point where the system shifts in it’s characteristics and you get a chain reaction of some sort.
Arctic water warms and expands – the cold arctic current no longer flows under the warm gulf current – The ocean streams shift – Western Europe weather turns into Northern Ontario and the US eastern seaboard is cold and under water.
you don’t think scientists also know that stuff
There are definitely potential tipping points that are at least uncertain.
Melting leading to frozen methane releases being one of the big ones. We know about it, but I don’t think we’ve got good predictions for how much or how fast.
I get my information from The Onion – America’s Most Trusted News Source. A couple of years ago they reported that we’re fine as long as we take care of global warming before 2006. So everyone just relax.
Thanks, I needed a little more fuel for my suicidal thoughts.
Did you, uh, recently add the Ryan background to your gravatar?
Nope. Opacity +5% daily. June is coming.
Same. Its getting harder and harder to argue back when there seems like no hope.
There’s a difference between bad and extinct. Earth has had all the carbon in the atmosphere before, it’s not going to be uninhabitable. It will be unpleasant, and it won’t be able to carry the same size population than if we’d done better. Assuming a doomsday, whether supernatural or ecological, is bad for decision making.
Yeah, and nuclear wars won’t leave us /technically/ extinct either, just scrabbling around in the remaining farmlands with 16-1700s era technologies and a society likely even more backwards. And no one would suggest that’s not a doomsday.
Quibbling over the degree of doomsday is just that, quibbling. Rationalizing that it’s not technically a doomsday because the idea is uncomfortable is bad for decision making.
But there’s still a choice between someone who might give us at least a snowball’s chance of survival, and someone who wants to pour all the gasoline tankers onto the fire. I choose snowball.
But I’m certainly pessimistic enough to not want to have children, because I feel it’s highly unethical to have kids that are unlikely to make it to middle age, and if they do make it to adulthood will inherit a burning hellscape.
I grew up going to high school with a few people that weren’t going going to have kids because we were going to kill ourselves off in nuclear war and life would be horrific for the few survivors. Many of those same people have grandkids now.
The difference is, they were afraid of what people *might* do. Here, the danger is what people *aren’t* doing. It’s very easy to just continue to do nothing, which worked out well for the danger of nuclear destruction, but not so well when the danger is precisely that “doing nothing”.
I’m saddened I agree with everything you just said.
I would agree with you, but there’s still some candidates and politicians who aren’t willing to just let the cartoonish supervillain types get what they want. And I’m hoping with those candidates and politicians in power we can slow and maybe even reverse the bad stuff the supervillain types have been doing. It may seem weird, but I still have some hope for humanity yet. I might lose that hope if the 2020 elections in the US go as bad as 2016 went though.
Man it’s weird having a Mike avatar and posting more optimistic comments
Eh, I’d describe myself as a cynical misanthrope, yet I still seem more optimistic than most people I talk to. Come visit the real world, I tell them, it’s really not so bad here.
Look, i normally don’t comment, just read the strip and a few comments and leave. Your personal feelings are your own, and are valid, but i could not disagree more with this idea that things being bad justifies inaction. Preaching this kind of despair doesn’t help things. Yes, things are awful, and yes the climate is looking really, really scary, but we can sit back and cry about how fucked we are after fighting with every tooth and nail to prevent it! Even if things are exactly as bad as you say they are, id take the spineless cowards over the actively evil buffoons any day of the week. especially when the spineless cowards have people like AOC and Bernie Sanders who are fighting hard every day to make things better.
I don’t mean to come off like im angry at you or trying to attack you specifically. I’m not. its just that reading your comment made me feel full of despair, and its exactly that kind of attitude we need to fight against. A few years back i watched a powerful documentary about climate change that made me cry. It predicted a lot of the same things you are talking about. Despite having such a scary message it ended on a note of hope. Urging people to keep trying to make things better. It used a phrase they had heard “Its better to light one candle then to curse the darkness” as a way to sum up that point. Thats the kind of attitude we need to have right now. We need to get active. We need to get out there, to fight as hard as we can. If we dont have any candles find a match. If we dont have any matches find a way to make one.
I understand the desire to throw our hands in the air and say “theres no point, we’re all fucked.” i really, really do. But we cant give into that temptation. Ultimately its just a justification to sit around doing nothing. Now more then ever we really have to keep trying.
and please fucking vote.
I shared this excellent quote above; but Imma share it again:
“If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)
If you can’t find someone to vote for, then at the very least find someone to goddamned well vote against!! As someone said above, it may be a choice between “bad” and “worse” rather than “good” and “better”.
But I’ll take “bad” over “worse” any day of the week, given no other choice, and we’ve already seen how much worse “worse” can get.
If you can’t vote for someone, find someone else to vote against. But either way, VOTE!!
I have good news for you if you’re being literal; which being text, i can’t tell. Every claim you made is wrong or exaggerated for effect. Humanity will survive the next 100 years. Quality of life is likely to trend downwards for the majority though.
You are instead contributing towards the efforts of said ‘supervillains’ by trying to encourage apathy. Knock it off. kthxbai!
Now if only treating “supervillains” like supervillains and beating them all to hell was at all feasible.
Are we really sure it’s not? They run and cry like little babies at the slightest hint of in-person aggression. Is it so much of a stretch to think we might be able to beat them into the ground, if enough people really put their minds to it?
Much of that apparent “pack of spineless cowards who just let the supervillains get away with absolutely everything, time and time again, and only ever show any teeth at all when it comes to eating their own” is due to an actual lack of power, not to cowardice. It’s not at all clear to me what Democrats could do in the short term to stop the supervillain from getting away with it. Our government has long run on norms and traditions and the expectation that voters would punish politicians that broke them. Trump has the support of roughly half the voters and they enthusiastically back him breaking those norms and traditions. And the GOP controls the Senate and backs him with the support of those same voters.
That rules out the obvious solution, impeachment, doing anything but influencing the vote in 2020. It’s not a short term solution. Nor can Democrats pass laws that might hold him in check, thanks to the Senate.
Investigations continue and will build towards impeachment, despite unprecedented obstruction. Democrats have won several recent court case, with scathing opinions from the judges about the Trump gang’s legal arguments. That will continue.
Let me make it clear what any politician can do: take a side. Take a stance! Take any kind of position at all that isn’t “helping us bend over for the nice rich rat-eating arseholes”.
Great. Who hasn’t done so? On something important. At least once.
I don’t know what actually would count for you, so it’s hard to come up with specifics. I could say that the GOP tax give away to the rich would never have passed this Democratic House (not a single Democrat voted for it), but maybe you’d respond that doesn’t count and nothing less than a 70% top marginal rate* would be enough so they’re not taking a stance.
*proposed in various forms by several Democrats.
Doesn’t this series technically still take place in 2010?
No. The comic is set in the Eternal Now, which means that it’s currently set in 2019 and will be set in 2020 next year.
Ahh. I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, since the comic started in early September 2010 and they’re only now inching towards Halloween. Which means that’s a HELL of a lot of shit going down in less than two months.
thats one of the problems with sliding timescale comics. A LOT of stuff happens in a very short amount of time, sometimes an unbelievable amount of stuff. But that doesn’t make the comics bad, just the time frame is always super wonky.
DoA does use 2010’s calendar to line up the days of the week, though.
“Today” is Sunday October 17th, “this year”.
It’s based on Willis’ life and IRL experiences, and as we all know, Willis is in fact the lord of time (and lesser duke of hasbro-related merchandise)
It is always set in the current year.
The answer to that is in the FAQ! 6), to be more specific. To summarize: “Just assume the strip is always set in whatever year it is right now.”
Ah, thanks. I don’t think I ever got around to reading the FAQ. My bad.
I think of it as being like Brigadoon. Every night when the characters go to bed, they vanish, and they reappear the next morning two months later.
Seriously.
How could you not? 2016 featured the stupid candidate from the evil party running against the evil candidate from the stupid party. (I’ll let you decide which was which. ) And yet the vast majority of those who voted, still voted for one of those two. It’s kinda hard to swim against that tide of stupidity.
Well, one candidate would have been a run-of-the-mill-to-shitty president, and the other has been an existential threat to the country and the world at large since.
I can still hear the words of P.J. O’Rourke endorsing one of the 2016 candidates: “She’s wrong about everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
Our simplistic first-past-the-post voting system inevitably leads us to a “lesser of two evils” decision, and the average voter is too apathetic or uninformed to understand how to do it any other way. This also feeds our natural tribalist “us vs them” mindset, further entrenching the fallacy that this is the way things “should” work. This is all by design, because the powers that be want to continue being.
It’s not even by design. It’s a design failure. It’s inherent in our system, which was designed by people who worried about “factions” in democracy, but couldn’t design a way to stop it. And promptly broke into two factions as soon as the government was formed, because it’s inherent in the system.
It’s not that the average voter is too apathetic or uninformed, it’s that there is no other way, short of rewriting the entire system. Third parties don’t work in US politics and voting for them is essentially not voting.
Vote in primaries. That’s how you get better candidates. And vote in mid-term and local elections. That’s how you get better people who can rise to national prominence.
In my dreams, we have ranked choice voting and people who have the free time and motivation to research individual issues themselves.
Stupid dreams, always outclassing real life by miles and miles.
I’m not sure it would make much difference. Maybe you’d get better candidates? It won’t suddenly catapult third parties to prominence. If it somehow managed to do so with one, it would replace one of the existing two, rather than become a stable three or more party system. That has happened before.
Maine has adopted a ranked choice voting system. They used in 2018 elections with no problems and as far as I know, no huge surge in 3rd party wins or votes.
I’d settle for a significant bump in voter turnout, especially for mid-terms and off years.
Making it possible to reasonably vote for third-party candidates means they’d instantly get a ton more votes. And over some years they could actually compete–they’d start putting forth better candidates since they’d be real actual candidates, too. Probably.
I don’t care
I think 2016 gave many people MORE voter apathy. Understandably, to me.
How can people have voter apathy after an election where the candidate who allegedly received the majority of the people’s vote lost?
I mean, I was personally apathetic long before that, because no candidate that I would vote for would get elected anyway.
I prefer mediocrity to fascism, personally. By a wide margin.
Wide enough that I can’t find indifference between them anything but evil.
Ana Chronistic – the comic is set in ~2010. That train wreck of an election hasn’t happened to these characters yet.
No, it’s not. The comic is set in the current year. Quite aside from it being in the FAQ, there are quite a few reference (mostly pop-cultural) that preclude it being set in 2010, such as Lucy’s love of Teen Titans Go, a series that didn’t start until 2013, the fact that several characters have Switches, which were released in 2017, or Jacob wearing an Into the Spider-Verse T-Shirt, which movie came out in 2018.
Or, on the political subject, Joe making a “presidential” crack about Trump to Dorothy.
Okay, those must not’ve clicked in my head when I saw them.
Also, Lucy? Boo.
Doubt you’ve even seen an episode of it. Idiots on the internet just deciding things suck because it’s different. It’s not for you dude let it go
I’ve seen some of it. It’s a style of humor aimed at kids that I hated even when I was in the target demographic, and I was really disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any kind of actual superhero story to it at all.
You’re not wrong, but people can just dislike it.
Well, if they live in California their vote isn’t going to be needed.
Is the other country Latveria?
She said county, but I’d totally be down for Grace being a devotee of DOOM.
County.
Although, I gotta say, at this point;
ALL HAIL DOOM!
(He actually IS a strong, decisive and competent leader, you know. I’m not just saying that because of the Doombots.)
Naw, DOOM! can lead decently enough. He’s an egotistic megalomaniac, but he DOES care for his people. Luthor can be like that, too, when they’re writing him well.
Also the Black Panther spirit (begrudingly) judged Doom to be pure of heart and intention.
DOOM/Namor 2020
Voter apathy.
The philosophy that voting is a choice between ‘The Lady and the Tiger’ — and the Lady is weilding a chainsaw…. and so is the Tiger, so why bother?
You’re screwed either way.
Cyanide or Strychnine, you’re dead either way.
Recently it’s been more of a case of ‘Cyanide and Global Thermonuclear War as a penis-measuring contest’.
I always just vote for the person who seems like I’d rather hang out with. If you don’t seem like the kinda guy I can have a soda with, then I don’t want you in power.
My rule is similar, but is more “vote for the person who considers me a human being”. I don’t really like it when people who consider me less than human or a second class citizen are in power.
That’s… not a bad standard to have. Especially if you’re like me and ‘treating lower-class, caucasian, cis-male, pansexuals as people’ is the bar to clear. It SHOULD be a low bar to clear… but they still surprise me.
True I need them to treat my race with respect…GAMERS… No anti-gamer Rhetoric here!
It’s too bad there’s not a single politician in America who sees anyone but themselves as human.
The issue isn’t that they don’t see any one else as human. They just see themselves as BETTER than Human.
Feels like a combination of both, honestly.
Oh that’s just an excuse to not think.
“All politicians are selfish and care only about themselves!”
“All lawyers are cheats and crooks!”
“All doctors are quacks who take bribes from Big Pharma!”
etc, etc, etc.
Instead of doing the research on an individual person, it’s so much easier to just label them all as bad and call it a day.
No, they’re really all self-centered jackasses with only as much empathy as they need to get votes. That doesn’t mean I’m not voting for the least-scummy candidate. Don’t tell me I’m “making excuses”, like you’re assuming I won’t take action and vote when I need to.
It’s a good rule, though it doesn’t really work for me, since I’m a straight white cis guy. They all basically consider me human.
OTOH, one party does consider a bunch of my friends subhuman and I’ve got empathy, so fuck them.
I would still say that the Republicans would only consider you human if you’re at least moderately wealthy. Otherwise, they might pander a bit for your vote, but then they’ll immediately turn around and try to hurt you with their legislation.
Really? I always look at them like a bank manager I’m hiring.
I really don’t give a fuck if I would ever want to have a beer with them. I actually don’t care if I find them sort of greasy and socially awkward, with a voice like a squeaky clarinet.
I’m hiring them to run my bank, not to be my friend. Are they competent at that? Do they make good hiring decisions? Do they treat the employees fairly? What’s their HR department like? Are they trying to just keep introducing more and more fees while paying less and less interest because they’re prioritizing making as much money for the shareholders as possible even at the expense of screwing over the customers and workers, or are they willing to find a compromise that treats everyone fairly?
I have to admit, I’ve never gotten that concept that political leaders ought to be someone one can personally relate to. I just need someone who is good at the job, which requires high levels of diplomatic skills, the ability to recognize and promote competent, experienced department heads, and the ability to listen to and judge arguments for and against various tactics and stances based on facts and reason, rather than emotion and bribes.
They don’t have to know everything!! But they do have to be able to recognize who is the expert in the fields related to the question, and to be able to competently weigh the information and advice they’re provided to come up with a reasoned, forward-looking plan of action.
I’ve gathered that radio was the first thing to start to change that. When all you could tell about a candidate was what the newspapers said, read their quotes and platforms without tone of voice or body language or charisma (or the lack of it) getting in the way, it was easier to judge candidates based on merit. But once you can hear their voices, their stutter, or their smooth talking, it becomes harder to separate their persona and charisma from their ideals and platform and voting record. And television only made it worse, of course.
I mean, whether or not you like or would vote for Trump, one has to admit that, on paper, his literal, unpolished quotes don’t read nearly as well as–well, anyone else’s. They’re word salad garbage, just a hot mess. But speaking you can at least grasp what he’s going for, and it becomes much harder (or rather, it’s even more obvious in raw print) to see how confused and irrational his thinking is.
Sorry that was so long. But yes, TL;DR: judge them as one would a management-level-or-above employee one was hiring, not as a drinking buddy. Because we’re hiring them to do a job, not hang out with us.
And don’t vote for someone with a history of stripping away human rights, wtf!!
I get what you’re saying. But going with your metaphor, I’m an animator. Nobody would EVER put me in charge of hiring someone to run a bank because I simply don’t know what goes into running a bank. I don’t know the ins and outs of that profession, I don’t know how to spot red flags, I don’t know what makes someone qualified at all other than “can count money and can manage other people to count money” So knowing what a person is like (or pretends to be) is a better indicator for how they’ll help me. I mean, I probably wouldn’t grab a lunch with someone who’s politics vastly contradict mine anyway. Even if they’re the nicest person ever if we fundamentally disagree on issues I care about it’s just gonna be a super awkward lunch.
The trouble is that this is literally the standard that got George W. Bush elected. (Well, “elected.” THANKS SUPREME COURT.) Just swap out “soda” for “beer.”
Why do I feel Becky stumbled right into an ongoing argument?
Honestly I get the impression Mandy and Grace have been arguing since August.
They need a head cheerleader in residence.
How did Billie put it. “Lovers spat”
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/inevitable/
this comic reminded me that I need to re-register to vote now that I’ve moved counties, thanks!
Voting is good because it increases your demographic voter statistics, which makes politicians weigh your opinions more heavily.
But then the apathy sets in and you think ‘no, they still wouldn’t’.
A good personal philosophy is to always vote for the lesser evil when it comes down to the final choice. Things will only get better if we keep choosing the Lesser Evil until that lesser evil becomes a greater good.
. . . .Man that felt weird to type. As if it was typed/worded weirdly.
Sometimes voting is less about what you want and more about what you don’t want.
Every Election is between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich.
Is it? Or do we only think all the candidates are crap because both sides spend inordinate amounts of money to portray each other that way?
Also, there are way more elections than just the presidential one, so…there should be someone worthwhile in several thousand candidates.
Something I’ve always maintained is that wanting to be in a position of power is, by it’s very nature, something that is corrupting. Now you may have good intentions but you’re inevitably gonna have to climb over some corpses and treat people like objects for the sake of votes. I mean hell. Look at Dorothy. Who is a nice girl. And yet all of her presidential desires tend to alienate her from her friends or cause her to be distant as a human being.
I’m not saying you can’t be a good person and a politician. What I’m saying is that “politition” is an inherently evil class. You get dark vision and +10 to Charisma and Persuasion.
Oh, for sure, you’d never win without making some nasty compromises. And you’d never pass any bills without nasty compromises either. I would bet you can’t serve as president without being responsible for the death of quite a few innocent people along the way.
But you’d also never change anything about how the world is now, which is obviously crap, and in dire need of fixing. So is wanting the power to reject the current hellscape so bad?
Maybe. Most villains don’t think they’re the villain. This is part of why it’s designed to be so hard for modern governments to do anything without compromising with the other side(s).
I really don’t think your opinion of politicians can be fairly applied to Obama. I’m not saying he was The Greatest President Ever, but on a personal level, he was
prettyvery awesome. I’ve read accounts of him having long conversations with random service-job people he’d just met. He was/is well educated, thoughtful, and gracious toward everyone. He seems to have a genuinely good character; I’ve never heard anything even suggesting otherwise.I loved Obama with my whole heart, and I’m still 90% sure he’s got some skeletons in his closet. That said he far surpasses my expectations of “would grab dinner with” so I’d keep voting for him.
Every presidential election in the US is between Merrick Garland and Bret Kavanaugh.
So is every state election. So is every local election. Read your goddamn voters pamphlet all the way down to the local school board and vote accordingly.
Even that choice matters; look at how emboldened assholes have been since Turd Sandwich won.
“Both sides are the same” is a fallacy that is gleefully embraced as a tool to lower turnout.
Yeah, along with the above “vote for the person who considers me a human being”, how about “Don’t vote for the one the Nazis and the Klan are backing”?
I just don’t get “both sides are the same.” 20 years ago you could almost make that argument, though it was bullshit then as we found out with Bush. Now, we’ve got the most corrupt and incompetent President ever in office, with the full support of his party and we’re still getting it?
Look, I can understand people who like him, who like this direction for the country. I despise and fear them, but I can understand them. This? This baffles me.
Don’t vote FOR, vote AGAINST! It’s much more satisfying.
Sadly true. This actually explains much of our current polarization. US politics have degenerated into tribalism, and it’s more important to beat on the other tribe than to push your own tribe to do better.
*thumbs up*
So many people are more Us vs. them than y’know…us AND them. It really feels like people are losing their ability to have empathy. Or maybe we never had it.
The beauty of it is that you can’t override an emotional response like that with logic. Thanks, lizard brain!
Heinlein tells us ‘If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for … but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.’
…Absentee ballots, people. I managed to not miss an election when I was in college, it’s not that hard.
Indeed.
Or just drive the fuck home and miss a day of classes. I did that once – and I was registered in a different State, to say nothing of County. It was a nine hour drive one way.
… in the snow, uphill both ways… (added because that last line made me sound crotchety)
When I was in college “driving the fuck home” would have taken about 20 hours each way, and I didn’t have a car.
I voted absentee.
Easy to get in some states, not so easy in others. Depends on where you live.
IU students can register to vote in Bloomington even though their permanent residence is elsewhere. Mind you, the GOP in Indiana tried to pass a law preventing that which was defeated in court because, believe it or not, the SCOTUS already ruled on this sort of thing years ago.
I know, it is hard to believe that the GOP would pass a law that the SCOTUS had previously ruled unconstitutional. It is not like they do that all the time…… Oh wait.
To expand on that: In Indiana, you only need to have lived in a precinct for 30 days before the next election in order to register to vote there. Living at a college campus for a few months while you attend school there is more than adequate to fulfill that requirement.
TL;DR: If you’re a US citizen going to school in Indiana, you absolutely can register to vote there.
Some states are really lacking in that department. Tennessee (mine) had a stipulation that you had to be disabled, elderly, and/or out of the country to get an absentee ballot, for example.
The real beauty of an absentee ballot is sitting at home while filling it out and carefully researching all the candidates you didn’t already know. So much better than a polling station.
Yes, but on the other hand if you are in some sort of situation of an imbalance of power, such as work, renting, marriage, worship, living with parents it lets your employer, landlord, spouse, pastor, or parents insist on seeing your ballot and apply coercion.
We had this trouble before William Boothby invented the official printed ballot that is issued only at the polling place and marked in secret. We know what happens.
*proud of living in the country that invented the secret ballot*
There, you do have them. So do it.
I’m choosing to believe Grace means she’s not voting in Robin’s race so I don’t break into this comic and strangle her with my bare hands.
Today’s strip is sponsored by Husqvarna lawn tractors. Ready When YOU Are.
Anyway, the way that Congressional districts are drawn, it could very well be that Grace’s county is outside Robin’s district. The county I live in is split between two districts, and I’m sure it’s the same for a great many thanks to gerrymandering.
Fun fact: voter registration rolls are publicly searchable and can be used to find your address and phone number and so forth.
I don’t really begrudge anyone who’s a member of a vulnerable population for not voting.
As a member of more than one vulnerable population who has voted in every Presidential Election (and a good portion of midterms as well, but not all) since I turned 18, I will say that voting is one of the more important ways to make my population LESS vulnerable in the future.
Your population sure, but like. Some people can’t afford the personal risk, and that’s okay.
They’re not, actually?
It’s technically, but normally not just ANYONE can get access to it. That’s why when a bunch of states refused to turn over voter registration data to the federal government, it was shady and the feds don’t normally have access to it all
*It’s technically public
There’s not some master database, federal or state-wide that just any random person can search
Sure, but as with any public record, it’s a matter of filling out the right forms.
In Indiana, there is a master state-wide database. Indiana sells access to it to the 3 major parties (the Indiana Democratic Party, the Indiana Republican Party, and the Libertarian Party of Indiana). The parties make a good chunk of change re-selling access to that database to people running for office and to companies that provide services for people running for office. Usually when they re-sell to a candidate, that candidate will only have access to the relevant precinct(s).
Anyone who has access to the state-wide data either works for one of the state parties, or is buying it from one of the state parties. However, if you want the data without going through one of the parties, you can still get county-level data from the county clerks.
It’s a similar situation in most states.
Ow, the hovertext. I did not vote for Obama in 2008 because of that mistake (I’ve voted pretty consistently since, though)
Can’t you mail your ballot to your hometown?
I was simply not old enough. I voted in 2012 tho.
Ditto. Got into an argument with a coworker back in 2008 (when I was 16) and got told to go to hell. That was fun.
The provincial election before I was old enough to vote, we’d been discussing politics in my Sociology class (as one does), and I was very adamantly NDP, based on their platform. Mum usually voted SoCred (Canada has a number of political parties, usually at least five at the provincial and national levels); but was getting really disillusioned and apathetic with them all, and wasn’t going to bother voting. “They’re each as bad as the other” and all that.
So since I felt strongly in favour of one party but wasn’t allowed to vote, and she didn’t and was, I persuaded her to go in and cast a ballot for the NDP for me.
And in the end the NDP won, because their platform really was better than the other guys’. And no, once in power they didn’t fully stick to it, but my point still stands: If you’re too young to vote, find an apathetic voter and see if you can’t persuade them to go in and cast a vote for you.
Not the ideal way to get a say; but hey, if you have someone who wants to vote but can’t, and someone who can but doesn’t want to, the solution seems obvious. 😛
I got shit on and guilted by adults for not voting for Obama. I was 14.
Since I think the readership of this strip has a lot of left-leaning people who dislike the Democratic Party, may I use this strip to remind you all of the concept of ~*primary elections*~?
They’re less sexy than regular elections, but primary elections are often where your vote is most powerful, especially if you live in a solid red or blue state. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez didn’t beat a Republican to get to Congress, she beat a Democrat in a primary! By voting in primaries and being a solid Democrat in the general, you can convince your rep that they don’t need to fear a general election but need to be afraid of a primary challenge, and they’ll become more responsive to your desires. This is the method by which conservatives took over the Republican Party, so it’s tested and proven to work.
If you live in a deep red district, consider voting for the least terrible candidate in the Republican primary; you’re under no obligation to vote for them in the general, and it’s a way for you to punish Republicans for going too conservative. Voting for a Republican, even in a primary, may not be pleasant, but I assure you the alt-right is doing it, and you’re vote can help be the difference that prevents a statewide abortion ban.
Primaries. They seem like the least important elections, but they’re often the most important. Go vote in them.
It’s not always possible. Some states restrict primaries to registered members of the party.
My home state has open primaries by law, and holds the presidential primary months earlier than the primaries for state-level offices, so when the Democratic nominee is a foregone conclusion, there’s no reason not to vote on the Republican ballot instead. I voted for Ron Paul in the 2012 primary, because I figured he was a) unelectable, and b) the most entertaining possible hand grenade to give delegate power and toss into the RNC.
@ ESM Problem with primaries, at least Presidential primaries, is you’re not always voting for a candidate but rather for someone who will vote on your behalf. They don’t always even say which candidate they support, and even if they do they don’t actually have to vote for that candidate when they get there. Every state makes up their own rules so there is no consistency. Not trying to say you’re wrong, in fact I agree with you, just pointing out it’s not always quite so straight forward.
That’s how the presidential general election works, too. The real vote among the delegates is in early December.
Is that practically true in any state? I mean, it’s technically true that you vote for delegates who will later vote for a nominee at the convention, but is there actually a state where you vote for a specific delegate rather than vote for the Presidential candidate? In fact, are there even any states that award delegates based on individual votes? Many are winner take all. Others award proportionally on a state wide basis. I don’t know of any where delegates are elected directly.
And for every Presidential primary campaign in modern history, it’s been a formality. We know long before the convention who’s going to be the nominee, because the votes are tallied and allocated when the primaries (or caucuses) occur.
This seems to me to be much more of a theoretical problem than a real one. I’ve followed primary politics pretty closely for at least the 20 years and I don’t recall any talk of even confusion based on voting for delegates, much less the outcome not being clear in terms of which candidates got how many delegates. Some potential about what happens with delegates awarded to a candidate who later dropped out of the race.
Even in cases where that’s true, voting in the primaries still accomplishes a lot more than not doing it.
Just look at the new crop of Democrats that got elected in 2018. Overall they’re MUCH further to the left than their predecessors, and a LOT younger and less old, white, and male.
We still need to primary the fuck out of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and replace them with people who will actually USE the authority they’re given, but there’s drastic improvements when more people are involved in all parts of the election process
I’m not so sure about that. Especially Pelosi.
I might be proven wrong, but I think she’s playing a long game here with a very weak hand and doing it very well.
It’s easy to want more immediate drastic action and there are arguments for it, but there’s a good case to be made that what she can actually do to stop Trump quickly is very limited.
My state has a caucus, not a primary. I didn’t go to it in 2016 because I had to work at the time when it was held, but I’m planning to attend the caucus next year even if I have to take the day off work to do so.
4am brain took “less sexy than regular elections” and just fucking ran with the concept of sexy presidential elections I’m going the hell to sleep
I like these two designs. It surprises me how Willis can have such a varied cast of characters, but I guess making webcomics for forever will help you build up a portfolio. Still, I like how I can look at these two and have zero doubt they’re not anyone in the main cast.
Mandy and Grace are the main characters and you can’t convince me otherwise.
In that case, it’s an amazing show of restraint for Willis to deprive his main characters of so much panel time just to focus on all these side characters!
Okay, just to break up the politics talk, a question to ponder:
On a scale of 1 to 10, how much is Becky fantasizing about banging Mandy and Grace at the same time?
Eight, with a deducted one point each for both imaging straying from Dina and getting it on before marriage.
0, because she’s not been shown to be anything other than monogamous.
This will no doubt create an entirely different conversation that I won’t have the stamina to keep up on, but…
You can be monogamous and still fantasize about other people. The difference is acting out on it.
Legit question: do people actually do the ‘fantasizing about other people banging’ thing in RL? I always figured it was a literary trope.
I’m pretty sure the existence of fanfic in general and Real Person Fanfic in particular is proof positive that actual real human beings can spend a remarkable amount of time fantasizing about other people banging, and to a remarkable level of detail. 😛
Yeah, I don’t she’s fantasizing about either of them at all right now, but monogamy isn’t why. Becky may well think they’re attractive, but I don’t see anything to suggest she’s got horny fantasies on her mind right now
So, like…2 or 3 on the scale?
(Keep in mind my comment was never meant to be serious.)
Wow. Coming to the comments section was a real mistake tonight. I just feel my blood pressure rising. And that’s from reading people who are, generally speaking, on “my side”. Yeesh.
Gonna go away now. Goodnight y’all.
“Voter apathy is how bad politicians win.”
…. wait, how bad is Manley that Robin is the GOOD choice?
Robin wants to make candy mandatory for every meal of the day. Manley wants to make Lima Beans Mandatory.
Then I’d vote for Manley. Unless he’s more of a scumbag than most politicians.
Hmm. We don’t really know much about Manley, do we? I mean, aside from knowing via SP! that he’s a Robin-parallel.
I’ve been assuming Robin was the bad choice until she tried to live with Leslie for a day or two and Becky got control of her twitter account. And if I remember correctly Robin’s district is gerrymandered to heavily favor the Republican candidate (which is Robin by the way).
I’m shocked that any of these people might consider Robin the good choice.
Becky doesn’t.
Robin isn’t the Good Choice. At this point Manley is way ahead of Robin in the polls, which is why Mandy doesn’t think that her one vote for him will matter. Grace is saying that that attitude is how someone like Robin could end up winning. If enough people decide that Manley is a sure thing and don’t bother to vote, Robin might just pull off an upset.
And Grace is definitely right, or at least not wrong. There’s a reason that no campaign will ever stop with their get out the vote efforts until the pols close.
I’m digging the hell out of how strong Mandy’s eyebrow game has gotten in the past week.
It is pretty sweet. Heck yeah, art evolutiooooon!
I think Willis said on Twitter (or Tumblr?) that he’s been trying to scoot Mandy away from looking like Carla’s player 2 pallet swap.
I’m gonna vote for Leorio! He punched Ging that one time.
You can vote as a temporary resident when you’re in college. I imagine this is a federal thing and not an Illinois thing. It’s been a thing since at least (at the very least) 2016 primaries. My friend was from Michigan and I was from a county over but we still were able to vote just dandy.
There’s also absentee voting and early voting. But it just now occurs to me that if Grace utilized one of those options, she still wouldn’t be voting for or against Robin. But if she means she’s not voting in general, she has at least 4 possible and legal ways of doing so.
This may be technically true, but how many hoops you have to jump through to vote locally depends on where you are attending college. In some precincts, it may be extremely difficult for college students to vote locally; in others, it may be easier, but you can’t assume.
For that matter, you can’t assume even if you aren’t a college student. Now that disenfranchisement has been weaponized by A Certain Political Party, you need to double-check and triple-check your voting status.
Yeah. When I was in college, it was just a matter of going in to the polling station with some picture ID and a utility bill in my name to prove I was living locally, and then I was able to vote. And my vote was put into a sealed envelope, so they could double-check with the area I was registered in to see if I tried to vote there too, and if not, the envelope would be unsealed and my vote added in.
They’ve got print-outs of everyone’s name and address at the polling station, alphabetical by last name, and they find you on there and cross you off when you come in to get your ballot. But there’s provisions for if you aren’t listed on there for whatever reason. At the very least, a voter registration card is mailed out to everyone before the election, in the name of the last registered voter for that address, and if, as is likely in a college town, they aren’t at that address anymore, you still just bring it in with you and they update things from there.
Mind you, this in Canada, so, you know, YMMV big time.
“come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens!”
t. Doug (Tom Hanks)
*Hugs my compulsory-voting-in-Australia close to my chest*
*hugs you so it can be close to my chest too*
Also: being able to vote from any polling place in the country on election day rather than the one closest to your registered address.
Also: sausages.
And if you are lucky a cake stall!
There were no sausages where I went to vote! Also, my compatriots returned Scummo. Democracy sucks.
Sadly it does not negate an evil media dominion and people just being jerks *sobs*
My electorate returned Barnaby Joyce. I’m so sorry, country.
You Americans think your two party system is chaotic? Here in Mexico we have neoliberal assholes that fucked our economy and human rights for almost half a century; conservative Christians whose second president caused a war on drugs that caused thousands of deaths; far left wing politicians that promised change but now that they are in power they are incompetent and do popular polls instead of taking responsibility and leading the country.
Sounds like same shit, different country, eh?
And, sorry to say, neighbors to the north who have been mucking about in your internal politics for the better part of two centuries…
The USA and Canada benefitted from exchange with Mexico, but Mexico is still suffering from intervention of the USA, and our national coin has devalued in recent years.
The US benefited in the sense that US companies benefited. US workers, not quite so much.
But yeah, we certainly screwed over Mexico in the process.
I can’t decide who’s prettier: Grace, or Billie.
In Australia parties get funding on how many votes they get. It’s maybe less compelling without preferential voting, but voting for the slow horse gets them money to buy a better chance next time.
git oot an vote
I’d say that it is sad that they don’t get equal amounts of money but systems like that tend to just get subverted via corruption and tricks.
I’d say it’s a pretty damn good thing that one can’t declare themself the head of the puppy-kicking party and get equal funding, even before we get to trickery.
Though I’ve seen some systems where you need to get a certain amount of support: percentage of vote in the last election or a certain number of small donations, for example.
That rules out the creating a party just to get the funding, while still giving equal support to anyone with some reasonable chance.
Of course, in the US it’s all been fucked by Citizen’s United allowing independent groups funded by billionaires to basically run the campaign for you.
Think you’ve got it bad? I live in KENTUCKY where Mitch McConnell and Governor Bevin have resulted in 200,000 children being food insecure (its closer to a million). It’s also the Reddest State in the Union after Mississippi so it’s almost completely pointless to vote otherwise as a Goth Anarchist Liberal Christian. Its not even votes that are the problem it’s that the districts are gerrymandered, the television stations owned by the GOP, and the poor can’t stop work to go vote even if they want to.
Honestly at this point, there are a couple of candidates for the Presidential primary who if they won I’d only go vote for them next year because Matt Bevin has personally made my life hell and I want to do everything in my extremely limited, chronically ill power to make him suffer.
Even if I don’t think it will make a difference I at least vote for spite.
Well, I’d say Grace has a rock-solid excuse here!
Meanwhile, I think that this is a conversation that Grace and Mandy have had before. A lot of times. Probably quite loudly.
If I ever have this concentration with someone I’m going to point out that in 2017 an MP in Scotland was elected by a plurality of just 2 votes.
There are actually a number of elections where a candidate won by a very small margin, and even some where there was a tie between the top two candidates.
What, you don’t have absentee voting there? If you’re not in your home area, you can’t vote at all? What sort of use is that?
Okay, I’ve found out you do. I should bloody hope so.
It’s useful for voter suppression, mostly.
I suspect that what Becky is about to learn is that many people’s personal politics is not only stranger than she imagines but stranger than she can imagine!
Mmm.
The oligarchy runs the country and voting is a placebo for those that think we have any control over the government
Sorry Mario, you can only vote in another castle
The American voting system is wild. Here in the Netherlands, we don’t have to register to vote, and you vote in the municipality you live in.
pokemon go vote please for the love of democracy do your damn part if you are of age and able to get to the polls
It’s funny how american this discussion turned out. Usually I find several people from Europe too, but at first glance we are quite under represented today. Are we fed up with talking elections few days after the EU voting? 😀
In Hungary, we were kinda wishing for more apathy this time, because more people voting meant lower chances for opposition parties to reach the threshold of 5%.
I’m calling it.
Robin will be the next RA.
If you’re only registered in your hometown, 👏YOU👏CAN👏RE-REGISTER👏AT👏YOUR👏COLLEGE👏ADDRESS👏
What if we were allowed to actually vote against people, like when we went into the booth we could choose either to vote for one candidate or take away a vote from one candidate. So the candidates had to try to have a stance people actually like or lose to someone with a large supportive extended family who nobody realized was running.
I’m now picturing an alternate universe in which the 2016 US election ended with 30 total votes for one candidate and 31 for the other. The candidate with 31 votes still lost because something something electoral college.
One reason to always vote is that every registered voter who fails to show up come election time, becomes a blip in the database of disaffected voters, and it is that database that attracts election workers to knock on your door and find out what might be done to get you back to voting (presumably for their candidate)
So, can voters in the US not just register to vote somewhere else if they move?
If Germany didn’t have absentee ballots, I would never have voted in a German election yet — I move and travel a lot internationally, so I was never around at the time. And now I’m no longer a registered German resident.
(Luckily it’s easy to do postal vote in Germany, although I would prefer to vote live in person.)
Oh, yeah, in Germany, you also don’t register to vote, unless you have no German residence — you’re automatically registered as a voter wherever you’re registered as a resident.
Of course that only works in countries where municipalities actually have to register all their residents.
You can, but some places try to not let college kids count as resident, on the grounds they’re not year round permanent addresses, but really because young voters trend liberal.
Voter suppression helps you win!
It varies state-by-state, but in Indiana you only need to have lived there 30 days before the election to register to vote there. So if Grace is still registered in another county, it’s either because for whatever reason she would prefer to vote in that county, or because she missed the deadline to update her registration for that election (28 days before the election, plus-or-minus some shenanigans with weekends/holidays?). Or she didn’t realize how easy it is to update your registration.
(I’m not sure how close the election is in-comic; IDK if Grace’s deadline has passed)
MOTHERFUCKING US VOTING LAWS.
…going back all the way to the Three-Fifths clause, and with largely the same intent.
I repeat: Motherfucking US voting laws.
That is to say, they are designed to let a rich white minorities elect representatives for poor, non-white majorities that are counted in the census and get representative apportioned to them, but do not get to vote.
“registered in another county” America, ffs