The modern rhetoric is indeed reductive if you put words in the poster's mouth.
The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works.
Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.
Your optimism and faith in the power of the people is laudable, but I think you misread the comment (see my other replies in this thread).
The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.
And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.
I don't think you understand my position. I don't think I've seen anything like coordinated democratic action attempted in my lifetime (not in the US at least). Everyone doesn't believe it's possible so they don't even try it. People defer the job of organization to their (demonstrably impotent) political party and then act surprised that nothing happens. (Of course I am thinking about Democrats here; actually Trump's rise to prominence is a lot more like what actually rallying people is supposed to look like. Of course it is disappointing for others reasons...)
"Everybody" wants something to stop and yet nobody goes out and takes power and stops it so nothing changes. People experience voting doing nothing and then they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing so it does nothing tomorrow as well.
The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency. It is not hard for a group of coordinated people to win for example a local election. Well, it is hard in the sense that they have to agree to do it and actually put effort in. But it's not hard to get the requisite numbers---very few people are voting anyway. But if they don't believe in trying and instead post memes about how mad they are, of course nothing changes.
If I misunderstood your position, then you indeed misunderstood parent's, as you two (and I) are then arguing for the same thing: the system cannot be changed by following the system's rules, as people are blinded and limited by these rules.
> The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency
Yes, but this also implies a paradigm shift on the subject of this personal agency.
> very few people are voting anyway
There are countries where voting is mandatory (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey): they're not utopias and they suffer from the same polarisation, corruption, inequalities, threats of fascism, and disenchantment as other countries do.
> they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing
Because doing something about it is either against the rules of the system or requires such an effort in coordination that it'd be effectively indistinguishable from a revolution. A tiny example, the EU Commission tries to pass Chat Control every 6 months: when it does pass (all.according to the system's democratic rules), you won't get referenda on maintaining it every 6 months, I assure you. The power imabalance between the 99% and the ruling class is so massive that positive outcomes from voting alone are effectively flukes, not representative of future performance.
1. yes, it will require a widespread shift in people's beliefs for anything to change significantly. So such a shift is necessary.
2. I also personally believe that such a widespread shift is sufficient to fix a lot of this stuff. Nobody has any recent data for this because it hasn't happened in our lifetimes, but there is plenty of further-back historical evidence for it.
3. A prerequisite for the shift to occur is for everybody to believe both (1) and (2), such that they are motivated to try.
4. Anecdotally it seems like most people really believe (1) but severely doubt (2), which unfortunately means they have no motivation, so nothing has any hope of occurring right now.
5. Therefore I would encourage everyone to at least try out believing (2) as well. After all without it we have no data on what is actually possible with it.
And yes, the actual result probably looks like some form of revolution, but it is not required that such a revolution be violent. Of course it might turn out to be, but that is more about how the entrenched power reacts. You need the movement first, and then you can see what the reaction is.
re chat control or similar things---it seems to me that if your system's democratic rules pass it, then things are working as intended. Complaining about the democratic system is rather a joke when it is operating and doing things legitimately (I don't live in Europe, though, so I don't know anything about how legitimate it actually is.) In general one "votes" in this paradigm by actually convincing large groups of people that they should take difference stances on issues, not by casting a single vote themselves. If a person's reaction to political outcomes they don't like is not "campaigns of influence" then they're not really playing the game at all, are they?
And to be clear, such a campaign of influence is not only available to powerful people. In fact they are cheaper to carry out than ever---we even have a new job title for them, "influencer", and it is revenue-positive for many people! So when someone complains about legitimate political systems but they don't personally decide to influence others to change the outcomes... they are just a non-entity in the system, that's their problem.
(I do not have anything charitable to say, however, about illegitimate politics, e.g. the Trumps administration's widespread illegal behavior. That seems like a failure of basic rule of law that might be considerably harder to dislodge. But, as much as I hate it, their winning an election and then fucking everything up on purpose is largely allowed... the underlying problem is that so many people seem to be okay with that. If a country wants to cut its own limbs off itself I guess that's fine at a level of politics. Not so good at a level of morality or philosophy---so I guess it shifts the battle to be at the level of hearts and minds instead of democracy. But the general point still stands: campaigns of influence are how you affect this, not individual votes.)
(edit: i did not, however, reread the other comments here to see if I actually misunderstood anyone. I'm just ranting)
yes, but their argument has nothing to do with that claim, and you are capable of holding it as hypothetically true for the purpose of understanding their point. After all their actual claim is not "it is a genocide and yet nothing happens" but rather "people think it is a genocide and yet nothing happens", so the accuracy of that claim is independent of any debate you want to have over what is or isn't a genocide. And if that still bothers you you are free to substitute any other similar claim in its place in order to engage with the actual point.
Parent is not saying to be apathetic, but to stop trying to change the system while safely abiding by the system's rules. As I read it, it says: once we understand that the system is rigged, we'll turn our attention to those who rigged it (the ruling class), instead of making small useless acts these comments usually call us to do, like using cloth bags or voting for liberals (as opposed to the left).
And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
I agree with most of your reply, but I'd disagree on dark ages and crusades.
The dark ages were indeed a time of cultural collapse: science largely stopped, state capacity was cut massively (one indicator being that the Romans used to field armies of hundreds of thousands and the successor states in Europe would wage war with a few thousand men), large public infrastructure projects disappeared, religion started wielding a stifling influence on all aspects of life and society. Depending on who you ask, people will tell you that things improved for the ordinary people or very much worsened.
History, like other fields in academia, undergoes cyclical periods of rejection of dogma, as new researchers try to make a name for themselves by turning on their predecessors: I see the rejection of Dark Ages in the last decades as largely that, and recently there is more of a reversal, with new Middle Ages researchers turning on those previous researchers.
For crusades: this was not an answer to conquest. Byzantium had lost its crown jewel, modern Turkey, to Turks and then Arabs (a region, by the way, that had been reconquered and lost for centuries). The emperor at the time, Alexios, wanted a few hundred Western knights, to help him reconquer a few cities in the region (Jerusalem was not part of his plans, or at least priorities, religion was very much not a variable in his calculations), but the pope at the time saw a way to increase his own power and stirred up a religious hysteria: when the Western armies arrived to Constantinople, the Byzantines were surprised by the size and the goals of them, conflicts happened immediately, and the entire story of the first crusade is the emperor trying to conquer some revenue-generating lands and distrusting the Westerners, while the Western princes wanted to generate revenue for themselves (on my phone, simplified). Over further crusades, the Byzantines started to hate the 'Franks' (Westerners), as did the 'liberated' cities, for the many crimes and massacres they committed. Religion, and helping the fellow Christians, was simply a weapon wielded by the pope, the emperor, and the princes.
I think the rest of that previous comment is bigotry, but the poster is right about Crusades being a shameful event in the history of Christianity.
Hey mate, I'm glad you could write this, hopefully the few messages of support you got help.
If I had one advice, it would be to find someone who relates to how you feel, because being able to talk about it to someone who's been/is there is the one thing that really helps, in my experience. I don't know where, a friend, a suicide support group, a men's group, but being able to talk about these feelings and be really understood does help.
In the meantime, try just to be around people when it's hardest.
Sorry to not have anything better to offer. Hope you keep going, brother.
You're talking about the party. You're not saying anything wrong, but parent was talking about the voters.
It is true that the issues of people who vote far-right are ridiculed, and they themselves are demonised, which the parent holds, and I agree, is unproductive.
Far-right voters are largely the losers of globalisation/economic growth trying whatever they can to improve their situation: the phenomenon of many of these voters alternating between far-right and far-left from one election to the other is one of many indicators of what their real goal is, ie improving their situation.
Re migration: it does have negative effects on the economically marginalised, which the readership of HN and the talking heads in mainstream media are largely not. Among these are increasing housing costs, downward pressure on salaries, rapid and alienating shifts in cultural (and I mean cultural, not racial) makeup of cities and neighbourhoods: none of this should be controversial.
The establishment parties (so right and "left" like SPD, Labour, PS) have financial incentives to increase migration, which they do (see the Boris wave in the UK).
While migration is not an inherent evil at all, the way it's done by these parties does lead to negative effects, which adds one reason among many to vote for the far-right. So the short-term solution (curbing migration) is the simple and popular answer. The long-term solution (curbing capitalism) is harder and unpopular, so radical left parties unfortunately get fewer votes (except in France, where there's a real chance of the LFI showing a better path).
I believe I attended those rallies you mention: those slogans were anti-Zionist, ie anti-genocide/settler-colonialism/war. I'd bet that a significant minority of the rally attendants were Jewish.
I imagine this fixes the misunderstanding. See you at the next rally, friend!
You have a conclusion that you want to defend and some biases you're unaware of, so you're also not aware how tortured this argument sounds.
Pick some other topic. For example: are people who thinkthat slavery is inherently and always wrong just stupid extremists, compared to people who accept that 'some' slavery is fine?
I feel like you're the type to walk around with calipers.
The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works.
Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.
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