mozz

For anyone not acquainted with Things I Won't Work With

And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. "Oh, no you don't," is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal

As far as I know (and I could be wrong), they use an electoral-college type deal -- you don't vote directly for the leader, but instead for your district's MP in a FPTP vote, and then as you said the majority in parliament decides on the prime minister. They were trying recently to switch to proportional representation because it's clearly better, but as far as I could tell it didn't work.

So yes, just like in the US, her voting Green Party won't change anything aside from strengthening the conservative party, unless she happens to be one of a couple of districts where the Greens have a competitive race. I actually voted third party in many elections in the US (in elections where Hitler wasn't on the ballot), so I won't say I think it's throwing the vote away... I also however traded votes with family members a few times when one of us was in a competitive state and the other wasn't, and I wanted them to vote third party while I was doing an establishment-party vote in a race where the outcome was more uncertain.

I thought about it. Like create a Truth Social account as be all vocal about “Yay Trump” and “The election is rigged fuck voting I don’t care” and talking up RFK and Qanon and accusing different people of crimes against conservatism if they don’t agree with me.

I decided (1) I’m not quite sure how to go about it or even good strategies, it seems like you need an army of people making 8 rubles an hour or whatever to really make an impact (2) I’m not a whore; just doing destructive lying all day doesn’t seem honorable or fun.

i have to fall in line behind them

This is another of the talking points / common misleading framings I see a lot

Just wanted to highlight it -- I feel pretty comfortable with what I already laid out otherwise

Makes some amount of sense. And sure, I have no idea if you're telling the God's honest truth about all this stuff or if you're exactly what I'm accusing you of being. (My server for some reason showed the wrong age for your account, so strike that one.)

But, the fact remains -- I am not lying when I tell you I predicted exactly a bunch of the features of your account, and more or less what you were going to say in the post (the talking point that people are trying to pressure you into voting for the less-harmful candidate when you emotionally don't want to, and that you're taking a principled stand against it by refusing and voting for a third party instead, which is an incredibly common shill talking point) just from reading the few words. If it's pure coincidence and you just happen to hit all those shill boxes by accident then I apologize, but honestly, I doubt it.

Such as?

I'm saying that they check a bunch of the boxes of a shill account.

Okay though, sure. My response to the content is contained in the OP meme: Even if we posit that Gaza is 100% Biden's doing and he's a lesser evil, which I don't agree with, but even positing that, this "oh boo hoo I have to swallow my pride and vote for the person who doesn't want to impose 30% inflation on Iran for no fucking reason and 'finish the job' in Gaza and separate Hispanic kids from their families and do mass deportations, I don't want to, that would mean swallowing my pride, so I won't and you shouldn't either" viewpoint is childish, incredibly destructive, and probably not a sincere point of view, but instead a deliberate deception to produce an incredibly destructive result in US politics that may do quite a lot of harm to quite a lot of people.

It's born -- if it is sincere -- out of an incredibly selfish and entitled mindset. There are people in the world who don't have the luxury of deciding to do things they do or don't want to; there are hungry families in Iran, dead Kurds, dead Ukrainians, Honduran kids who will never see their families again, who absolutely don't give the slightest shit what you do or don't feel like voting for, or whether you're emotionally motivated to take a single trivial action that you can do that might help keep their families alive. They don't have the luxury of looking at things that way.

That's as it's applied to the US. I'm not really familiar enough with UK politics to say the details of how it applies in the UK -- but the logic is universally bad. For example if someone was saying not to vote against Boris Johnson for the same absolutely bad-faith and horrifyingly wrong reasons, I would feel free to disagree with them firmly in exactly the same way.

Almost as if someone was trying to specifically engineer that type of result

I'm gonna start my own little Alex Jones show where I'm convinced everything is a conspiracy

IYKYK

Both users show a degree of logic in their arguments: User A’s concern about the need for a fairer voting system and User B’s point about the necessity of working within or outside the system to enact change. However, the conversation seems to falter in terms of constructive engagement and empathy towards each other’s views. Each response escalates the emotional charge and distance between their positions, reducing the potential for a reasoned, good-faith discussion. The mutual misunderstanding—highlighted by User A questioning if an LLM (language model) wrote User B's response—suggests a breakdown in communication where the logic and intentions of the arguments might be overshadowed by their emotional expressions and rhetorical tactics.

• I'm not even from the US: Check
• Claim of LGBTQ identity: Check
• Lots of the content posted by the user is just generically-relatable memes: Check
• Account was recently created: Check
• Emotional framing ("left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for"): Check

I actually guessed that most of those would be true, and the point of view that the message would express, the instant I read "Speaking personally as a brit" and before I expanded the message.

Because it works 😕

I believe that the effective growth of this kind of stuff, coupled with the decay of "objective" journalism whatever its significant faults might have been, is behind the surge in authoritarianism worldwide in places that used to be democracies. Reduced to the core, the price of a machine that turns money into public opinion has been going down, down, down, to the point where all you need is like 30-40 people working 40 hours a week at it, in order to create a significant change in electoral results anywhere in the world you'd like to create one.