Wouldn’t it be great if all the money Musk dumped into this election was wasted? I guess it’s still not that much money for him, but the repudiation of these tactics would be wonderful.
Musk largely dumped the money into the election to prove to everyone he can keep dumping money perpetually into every election. Its a pain to deal with $400 Million this year, but can you imagine 2028, 2030 or 2032? Its going to be a constant onslaught until we figure out a way to mitigate Citizens United vs FEC
Even if Democrats win, Musk has proven that his money is now part of our political system moving forward.
Of course the Supreme Court will change its mind about executive powers soon after the next election, because they are an impartial body dedicated to the abstract intellectual pursuit of discovering the true intent behind 250-year-old sacred documents.
(Judge unconstitutionally refuses to accept appointment of other judges, situation escalates into a proper physical "lock the doors vs storm the building" conflict.)
I assume the /s was implied?
If you think voters’ minds are so feeble that they can be swayed by propaganda, then the problem is the voters, not the propaganda. Anyone so easily manipulated can’t be trusted to decide who is in power. It is incoherent to endorse restrictions on free speech while also supporting universal suffrage.
Total UK spend in 2024 was about £70m or about £1 per citizen. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
> It is incoherent to endorse restrictions on free speech while also supporting universal suffrage.
Even in the US free speech does not allow you to simply sell fraudulent goods and services. There has to be some sort of defense in the system against lying, or the entire process just turns into competing to write the worst fantasy about your opponent.
Both of these examples are nowhere close to the power given to the government before Citizens United: a censor who chooses what people are allowed to read or hear in the months before elections. Unlike copyright or contract law, the punishment was before the fact, not after. And it applied to films people paid to see, not just ads.
> If you think voters’ minds are so feeble that they can be swayed by propaganda
Buddy, advertising works, there is a reason why coca-cola does it.
You're saying you want Trump's FEC to decide what ads can be shown during a football game. Do you really think that would be an improvement?
Firstly, it's not black and white: humans are swayed by propaganda, but not entirely.
Historically:
We tried feudalism, and we have run limited experiments with one-party states.
Classical republics with a citizen class might obviate the fuckwit-voter problem somewhat; but the French Revolution made the idea of a political underclass unpalatable, and I'm not sure the conditions still hold. Classical Athenian education was sufficient to prepare the gentry for the problems of classical Athens; society today has more moving parts.
Benevolent and wise dictatorship would be nice, but the "benevolent" and "wise" parts may be unrealistic expectation.
I like anarchy, but i don't believe it scales to nation size.
I am open to being convinced that some given form of government would be ideal, but i very much doubt that i can be convinced that there's any path to get there, and I'll always be skeptical that the given idea will be as sweet as promised in practice. Revolution tends to pan out badly.
We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.
I like how you put this. I feel the same. Effectively too self-aware and intelligent as a species still hooked into the same primitive nervous system as our ancestors and animal cousins.
I don't think it was that the lower class was disenfranchised, it was that disenfranchising them made the petty nobility comparatively over-enfranchised.
This isn't exactly a hot take. All those memes about good times and weak men resonate for a reason. The British hereditary nobility did better, a little, but also were very much not great.
And of course there's a pretty obvious parallel between these groups of people the the professional managerial class in modern western societies that lack a rigid social class.
Humans are inherently irrational, but that doesn't mean they can't make good decisions as a group [0].
But we can also be convinced to not trust our own eyes, at least in the short term.
[0]The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2004) is a great book covering this idea.
It's not a boolean; if you try to make it one, it is quickly apparent that there's no such thing as a totally rational human being. And I don't just mean amongst the electorate, I mean you won't even find one working as a professor of rational logic in a university of mathematics and philosophy.
So no people are influenced by everything, saying otherwise is preposterous, it's how we found out about PTSD which we didn't even believe at first to be psychological but physical hence the name shellshock.
The question is how much and what are the ultimate effects of the daily exposure to something.
Propaganda works even without free votes, this is why dictatorships still bother with it.
Unfortunately this is a non-trivial problem; I don't know if Hacker News has a size limit on comments, but whole books can be (and have been) written on this topic and its implications for democracies, more for the implications for dictatorships, and yet more for the implications for free trade and capitalism.
Firstly, consider how freaking adaptable humans are. Even though you would hate moving somewhere with really poor living conditions, you would get used to some degree of it within several months or years. People have health problems they… just kinda get used to and ignore (which causes them problems down the road).
My point: it’s part of being human to adapt to your environment.
So here’s the problem: if you have enough money, you can influence other people’s environments. Specifically, their information environments. If your information environment is extremely negative and stressful, you’ll tend to feel more negative and stressed too.
And not to mention, have you heard about how the human brain is so susceptible to addiction when technology manipulates dopamine response? So social media companies are also manipulating your attention by spending money.
This isn’t some personal failing in you or me or anyone else. This is billionaires and tech giants manipulating very normal aspects of humanity to make more money and control politics.
Like, you’re seriously telling me there’s nothing wrong with billionaires buying up and merging nearly all of the media companies and newspapers in America? It’s just our feeble brains that are the problem?
Give me a break. The problem is that because of technology, anyone with enough money can very easily manipulate and influence the information we consume and the media we’re attentive to.
That gives a small number of people frankly too much power in a society. And your argument is that whoever “figures out” this hack of… having a lot of money… should have the right to control elections, because humans can’t be trusted.
I personally find that argument incoherent.
The real question is: why exactly should a society put up with a power dynamic that gives 99% of people less power and worse lives?
Furthermore, we can look at other democracies (Briton, Australia, Canada, France, Germany) and see how their campaign finance laws work in contrast to ours, as well as the level of debate / manipulation that occurs in those countries. Most are in agreement that SuperPACs would be considered full scale corruption in other countries.
Interesting that you ignore everything of substance in the excellent good-faith responses to your comment, especially the actually interesting parts in discussing new information outside your existing worldview. I can't see what picking up on a separate and almost irrelevant point to counter by declaring a non-obvious outcome, without giving any reasoning, achieves.
It's been 100 years since such a view and attitude towards people was popular.
Had Citizens United gone the other way, do you think Trump would have won?
If Citizens United gone the other way, would Elon Musk be contributing $350 million in 2024 and $400 million in 2026?
Super-billionares / Trillionares are now favored by our political class because of Citizens United. Donald Trump, if he won, would have been off the backs of working class people and the whole Elon Musk / DOGE thing, as well as the whole Ukrainian Starlink disruption thing, probably would have never happened.
----------
The person on the throne matters far less than the system that surrounds the throne. Yes the person matters a little bit, but the system forces people into a specific shape. And will continue to force our leaders into that shape as long as we continue this system.
What system? Seriously, there are infinite number of systems, it's not a binary choice despite what the ms media and some politicians are claiming.
Unfortunately a large part of that "wasted" money supports and feeds the underbelly of treasonous madness spewing peopogandist monsters, that also in many cases have kids to feed, college to pay for, and perhaps some ferraris to buy.
The Dems are kind of famous as the consultant class party and New Republic had a very good recent article pointing out what a massive spendy ecosystem this all is! They attribute 73% of all donation money as going to consultants. Not ad spends not staff or travel. https://newrepublic.com/article/216304/consulting-class-eati...
My gut expectation is that maybe it's not quite such a large base of so so many consultant shops, but that the GOP side is even more good ole boy networks with even more grift and even more very very well paid propogandists, willing to spin and spew the ridiculous anti-social fearmongering din they flood us with. This is a hop alway but the GOP has been in full grifter mode for a while now, and I expect the same below as we find above. Kristi Noem managed to spend $220m on a video promoting border security, with way less than a million for the shoot itself and $143m going to the primary, Safe America Media. Or the DHS radically overpaying for warehouse internment camps. https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/prairie-cor... https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campai...
These are bolder grift within the government itself, not SuperPACs which presumable are somewhat more effective. But I feel pretty strongly it's likely the din producing monsters are getting incredibly filthy rich from selling out America to these plutocratic insurrectionist Business Plot monsters. This money is alas fueling hell itself.