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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Maybe it is because men understand voting isn’t really individually useful?

Your vote will probably never change an election outcome (though, you never know - see Exeter in 1910 and some other examples), margins do matter. A bigger margin of victory will obviously embolden a candidate to be more aggressive in pursuing their policies, and vice versa, so your vote does make an (albeit very small) contribution in that respect.

I'm seeing vote difference in CO-3 district of about 550 votes. Given how close the House results are in general, this seat could (though it isn't now) plausibly be crucial for House majority. So 550 votes would change the course of national politics for at least 2 years. Sure, it's not individual vote, but it's not that far from it. There are even closer races, probably - I didn't check every one, I just noticed this one because Boebert is a figure of some prominence.

Yet 550 votes is not 1 vote.

I would suggest this preoccupation with what might be "individually useful" is symptomatic of the toxic femininity that has come to infect the whole of our intellectual class.

To quote George S. Patton...

An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real battle than they do about fucking. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we're going up against.

All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.

This is a good point. The individually useful thing is the result of a kind of libertarian transactionalism that once learned is difficult to unlearn. You can posit a possibly naive but socially useful state of mind wrt politics before coming into contact with it.

But I'm too far gone now. I can't pretend like I didn't learn it.

There is a stereotype that men like to fix problems; women like to talk about problems. If that is true, voting seems to fall (from an individual perspective) more into the latter category instead of the former. A single man might focus his energy into something that can make a difference.

There is also in your Patton quote a bit of Marx’s alienation of labor. Sure, the cook has to abstract why what he does helps the unit. But at the same time he sees a tangible result (food is made). Voting is more abstract.

Agreed. In my earlier years I was interested in WW1 and especially WW2 eating all the autobiographies of fighter pilots and tankers from all sides. I made extra effort to watch every war movie that was on TV. And then my world was upended when I read Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. His book was all about port capacity, supply line security and throughput and where to open fronts strategically or where to hamper German capacities all with tables and numbers. It really opened my eyes - no amount of heroism on any side could ever made the difference against such a well oiled machine. It did not matter if Germans had "better" tanks or jet fighters or even more experienced troops. They lost the moment US entered the war.

On a kind of related note, this is another thing I find funny about Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship Troopers. Verhoeven famously didn't read the book and basically set out to to subvert what he saw as "some warmonger's manifesto" yet accidentally made a decent enough adaptation that Heinlein's core point about the importance of "doing one's part" even when it may be relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things remains readily legible.

I find it weird to invoke this idea about voting of all things. Old Blood and Guts wasn't exactly elected into the position.

No he wasn't but this is also one of those bits if inferential distance. "Old blood and guts" was "old blood and guts" because he acted in contravention to rationalist conceptions of power rather than accordance with. His degree of success exists as a sort of "fuck you" to the modern academic ethos which is why he is so despised by the modern academic. The grand Irony of course being that Patton was probably more of a "democrat" than any one currently in the democratic party. After all where does the power of an army lie if not in the rank and file? IE "the demos"

Adding my vote (haha!) to this one. Women are just more susceptible to propaganda in general, and this includes "YoUr VoTe MaTtErS!" propaganda.

'Your vote matters' isn't really intended to mean 'your vote might decide the next President/Mayor/legislator', it (at least in my mind) is intended to convey the point that the result of elections matters in more ways than deciding the winner. The more crushing the margin of the winner, the less they have to worry about winning over voters other than their core base, or alternatively the closer the margin the more they have to appease their less enthused voters and potential swing voters voted for someone else.

Now, of course, one vote won't make an enormous difference to the overall perception of the margin, but it is basically true that ever vote matters just a little bit even if you almost certainly won't change the winner. This is especially true because not just margin in isolation, but margin also gets significant attention paid to it. In the 1970 UK election, which saw Heath replace Wilson in No. 10, the average swing to the Conservatives was only about 4% - now some seats only had about 30,000 votes cast (many even fewer), which means that a pretty small number of voters could change the swing significantly.

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