Anyway, our government isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting, which despite all its flaws does shift inertia.

Even voting within states are completely rigged with gerrymandering and popular vote means nothing in national elections.

Other similar examples of this argument:

"Everyone knows taxes go to corrupt corporations, they are completely useless get rid of them"

"Everyone knows masks dont block 100% of airflow, theyre completely useless!"

Currently, of those 4 seats, 3 are in their high 70s or even 80s and the 4th was appointed by the governor.

I'm in my 30s. My interests are either entirely not, or very very poorly represented in Washington.

Tell me again how my never missing an election has made a difference?

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/...

Even if you live in WA/CA your vote still matters. At the federal level there are 4 elected positions, 14 at the state level, and more at a local level. There are also primaries, so even if your Governor is guaranteed to be a Democrat you can at least pick which one.

The people that do vote have an outsized impact because, like you, most Americans are too lazy to vote.

I do also vote in primaries, those have typically gone opposite to how I voted, or else were a foregone landslide for my pick.

I also never implied I live in WA. Apparently you got confused because I spelled out the name of the capital city of this country.

I see your point that district style voting can feel pointless unless you you're in a swing district. I still think there are smaller positions you can influence over but I agree with you on that.

Possibly because those seats are worth money. I don't know that people competing for them means voting 'works' in any definitive fashion.

Princeton recently released a study (this one[1], I think?) that basically says as much: voting does very little.

1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

You cannot meaningfully vote in the US, you have two options that have similar fascist views of the rest of the world and are unlikely to change anything. That is a false choice, meant to lull the chooser into a false sense of agency.

It is simply wildly untrue to imply that the two major parties don’t hold opposing views on at least a few important topics or that voting doesn’t help determine which party holds the power to realize their worldview. There’s a lot of overlap and a lot of ineffectiveness but this does not make them the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

It's unlikely you wouldn't know someone has disappeared, especially if they were important enough that the government decided to illegally disappear them.

Assange rots in prison, Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment, FBI raids James O'Keefe and leaks his phone data to NYT (which he is suing), and to top it all we have a soviet-style shitshow trial directed by politicians in January 6th Committee.

Now, I will see some awesome mental gymnastics of people explaining how none of these things have any effect on freedom of speech.

Given that Alex Jones has in the last 24 hours been found to be lying under oath repeatedly during his trial, since his lawyers accidentally gave a full digital copy of his phone to the prosecuting attorneys (which they were supposed to have done already during discovery, but did not), this may not be the most effective example.

I recall the debates around banning Jones from YouTube. It was "sold" as an unprecedented step to combat unprecedented violation of basic decency. And here were are a few years later, when simply mentioning some wrongthink words automatically demonetizes your videos, splatters them with warnings and even cuts live streams from air. People are banned from YouTube left and right (pun intended). It's the new normal and brave technologists who posed as defenders of "real" free speech are mostly rationalizing and cheering it on.

BTW, would you care to explain how something that happened in the last 24 hours is relevant to the issuance of default judgment that occurred in November last year?

he putted around with blatant disregard for the trial and cries crocodile tears when he's found lying under oath during the damages hearing...

Alex 'you may be my neighbor but i'll eat your ass' jones is not some Bastian of freedom - he's a snake oil salesman profiting off other's pain and misery. selling 'real' pills his family makes.

He had due judgement - he had 6 months to do literally anything (He didn't raise a finger in this regard).

You don't 'not go to trial' by ignoring it... that's not how this works... not how any of this works.

BESIDES ALL THAT:

I agree with you: platforms are censoring people... that's in reaction to malicious (not just false - but intentionally crafted and designed to cause harm) information propagating through our social networks - mind viruses just like bulimia and anorexia that are shared socially - only far more potent: things like QAnnon.

information is spread not by how true it is - but by how sticky.

if malicious actors infect a network - besides censorship - the alternative is violence - either by inaction allowing the malicious mind virus to flourish - or by taking action against it.

We are in a brave new world - and we don't even know the tools we need to protect ourselves as a species from the existential threat of memetic viruses...

Maybe we just all need to stop sneezing our thoughts out onto the internet letting them congeal into this amalgamations of ideas that seem to have a life of their own.

the life status of biological viruses is suspect. I suspect viruses made of thoughts and memetic imagery can potentially reach agent-hood.

Here's another one: Show me a China documentary that outlines the overreaching adverse effect of state digital surveillance on China population. I can show you at least 5 docs on NSA and Snowden, produced by HBO / published by Harper Collins.

Civilly liable, not “guilty”, and how is that not his own fault?