Asklemmy

I said if you don’t vote, things will get worse. P->Q doesn’t imply ~P->~Q. Classic fallacy of the inverse.

Just because your linguistic representation of it allows you to frame it this way doesn't mean it matches reality. In politics, you literally cannot have things stay the same. Congress passes an average of 300 laws annually. You are not proposing that we only vote for people who will not make changes. So you're saying if we don't vote things will get worse: ~P -> Q and I say the evidence shows that when we do vote, things ALSO get worse: P -> Q. What this shows is that Q (things getting worse) is independent of P. So you said "If you don't vote things will get worse" but you're not willing to say "If you do vote things will not get worse". At best this is sophistry.

data shows that the boomer generation still votes more than any other generation, and as a result, they always get their way

Misattribution. You show the reality quickly afterward with this:

boomers currently hold more wealth than the rest

That's it. It doesn't even matter that the boomers vote. Musk, Andreesen, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Ken Griffin, David Sacks - not boomers. It's not the boomers, it's the wealth. Boomers vote because they have wealth & the PR directly manipulates them the most. The poorest in EVERY country are the least likely to vote, but in the US it's structural because the powerful deliberately make voting more difficult for poor & nothing has ever been done to fix it. It only gets worse, regardless of who is in power.

if non-boomers showed up at the same rates as boomers 10-20 years ago, we would be in a much better situation

Wild speculation. Bernie is older than a boomer. He was more popular with the young vote than Obama & the Ds deliberately, openly ratfucked him. The reason the youth don't vote is because of the politics. The politics is not the way it is because the youth don't vote. You're victim blaming. The politics was this way BEFORE they became eligible to vote.

It is fundamentally a flawed system, designed by ultra wealthy minoritarians, slave rapists, genocidaires, and ecociders, and they designed it to protect and empower people like them and to disempower the masses. They wrote about it explicitly, they designed the Constitution that way.

I’m very interested in any sources you have for this.

James Madison, who would become 5th president, argued that the purpose of government should be to protect the opulent minority from the interests of the masses, that the Senate should be structured to be the body that guaranteed that. The Senate is STILL structured the way it was designed, specifically to protect the opulent minority from the will of the masses. It's literally built into the design of the system. Voting harder won't fix that.

Sources:

• Federalist Papers Number 10 (Wikipedia)
• Constitutional Convention Debates

The US is not uniquely flawed. Find me a time in human history where none of the crimes against humanity you mention were being committed. But chart crimes over time and I assure you we’re trending better as a species. ... I know you’re capable of seeing that, because in spite of the crimes against humanity committed by the USSR and China, you’re able to see all the good they did too

You and I have a fundamentally different perspective on history. Historians have determined that of the 250 years the US has been in existence, only 21 of those years were peaceful. But when you look at those years, even THAT isn't accurate. 9 of those years were prior to 1865, meaning that the US was actively engaged in the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. It was also actively engaged in ethnic cleansing of the native population. Between the year of abolition and the boarding school system, the US stole 90M acres of treaty-guaranteed land from native tribes and gave it to white settlers. And then the boarding school system started.

You're correct that many of the flaws the US has are not unique, but wrong to say the US is not uniquely flawed. The US inherits many of the bloodlust flaws from its European roots. Europe ALSO has those flaws. The US is a European settler state and has many flaws on account of that. Canada, Australia, & South Africa ALSO have those flaws. But none of the settler states usurped the empire from Europe. The USA is uniquely flawed because it is the only settler state in history to become the seat of the empire that birthed it.

The European empire, which the US is the helm of, is uniquely flawed. It is the only empire that has ever dominated over 80% of the world. It is the dominant hegemonic empire of the last 600 years. It pioneered fascism, first against non-European populations, then it brought that fascism home through the Third Reich, then the US reintegrated that fascism into itself to continue applying it to non-European people. No other people have ever done anything remotely like this. No one.

Your position is equivalent to a "both sides" argument that everyone's evil/terrible & does bad things. But it's just not true. Calling the US flawed is like calling Jack the Ripper troubled. The US isn't flawed. It's designed to be a settler nation that enforces ethnic cleansing against occupied people. It's foundational documents are written specifically to make sure that chattel slavery & native genocide would be able to continue apace, because they were required to build the nation. You can't reform documents like that because it's not the documents or the laws that are the problem. It's not the people who inhabit the seats of power that are the problem. It's the existence and the structure of the settler state itself. There's a reason why the US has been committing atrocities against non-Europeans for 99% of its existence and it's not because it was fighting for a better world for all.

you see why that argument can always be made to justify throwing out an imperfect system, right?

Of course I can. The question is not whether it's possible. The question is whether there is evidence of the fundamentals changing. 250 years, 99% of them deeply genocidal & violent. There's no evidence that there's an alternative that works.

It’s easy to start from scratch

No. It's not. It's extremely difficult. It's so difficult that millions have died from trying to do it. But they chose to do it because they saw no other way. Do you know why Vietnam had an incredibly violent communist revolution? Because it was occupied by the genocidal French for nearly 100 years and as SOON as the French started losing the genocidal Americans stepped in to try to maintain the genocidal occupation. Eventually the Vietnamese won their freedom and established a communist government because it was the will of the people who fought and died to start over because that was preferable to attempting to reform a colonial occupation. USians like me are living inside that genocidal colonial occupation. We may think it's nice for us, but it's a horrible baby killing machine.

It’s much harder to work diligently to make positive, gradual change over time, but historically, we’re doing that

No, actually, historically, the communists are the ones who are doing that. Liberalism has stopped doing it and is instead attempting to use violence to hold on to all the wealth it stole from 80% of the world. Again, the gradual change over time we're experiencing in the USA, specifically of the atrocities, is a change in FORM not in a change in FUNCTION. We don't have chattel slaves, but our prison slaves produce $11B for companies and governments. We imprison and parole MORE of the people living here than we have ever done. It has ONLY gotten worse and never better. Our siege warfare program branded as "sanctions" has killed an average of 800k people ANNUALLY FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS, mostly children, elderly, and sick.

there’s no guarantee that what replaces it will adequately serve the people. So we’ll overthrow that one too?

That's how it's always worked. From the dawn of society. The alternative is letting the death machine kill millions annually.

And what if [...] the government quashes the attempt using violence

That's how it's always worked. From the dawn of society. The alternative is letting the death machine kill millions annually.

I’m not here to say the US is any better ethically than China

China hasn't dropped a bomb in conflict in 37 years. All governments commit crimes against humanity. China is not a settler colony founded on genocide. China's improvements are not gradual in comparison to the West, they are the fastest and largest quality of life improvements in human history.

But I would feel more confident about being able to affect meaningful change both in policy and party in the US than in China today. Though I ernestly hope that one day the Chinese are able to affect similar change there too.

This is because you are in the US and you have been raised to believe that the Chinese are all imprisoned by an autocrat and suffer under brutal authoritarianism. You don't spend any time reading about protests in China and how they system of government adapts to pressure from the people on a rapid and consistent basis. In essence, you are ignorant about the topic and you patronizingly express hope that one day they'll be as free as you are.