I don’t have a smart watch both because I don’t really see the point in them and because adding extra things to be on me bothers me, so I wouldn’t even be wearing a regular watch.

As for tablets: It’s just a convenient compromise between a phone and a laptop for basic browsing and video watching. I can comfortably lay in bed with a tablet rested against the wall or propped up on my nightstand. It’s harder to do that with a phone or laptop and obviously the phone screen is also just smaller. I don’t really take the tablet with me unless I’m going on a long trip, but when I am it’s nice to both have the bigger screen and actually have my media device be on a separate battery from the device I need for communication and navigation.

Legally you’re right. But I think it sort of ignores the spirit of what that free speech should be and the reality it actually exists in. There are corporations that have reached a level of size and power comparable to governments. Plus the government in general is an arm of the capitalist class it represents. Most of the speech that happens today is on these privately owned services. To allow those large corporations to act as censors, it makes the protections on speech from government interference largely moot. Generalizing more, the way I put it is in America, you have freedom… if you can afford it. Sure, nobody is able to stop you from saying what you want to say. But you get to say it to a handful of people you know while a rich person gets to say it to millions of people through media channels and advertising. Sure everyone gets one vote, but if you’re rich you can influence a lot more than one vote (and you can probably buy more than one vote of influence with whoever wins.) You may have the right to an abortion, but if you’re poor you might not have the means to actually do it. People have the legal right to due process, but despite that, tons of cases end in plea deals or settlements because people don’t have the means to be adequately represented in a legal case. When the US legally abolished (most) slavery, many of the freed slaves ended up as share croppers, not much better off or free than they were before because they didn’t have the material means to exercise that freedom. Later, the US passed anti-discrimination laws. No more barring black people from living in some towns/neighborhoods. But despite that, the area I grew up in was still heavily segregated. Legal freedoms don’t mean much if you don’t have the economic freedom to exercise them.

Now, there’s clearly a line. It seems obvious that say, if you had some private chat room it would be fine to kick people out of it for whatever reason. And at the extreme end we have these massive platforms acting which perform the role of a public service but in the hands of private interests. There I think there should be limits on what censorship they should be able to do. So where do you make the cutoff along that spectrum? Idk. I feel like a Lemmy instance is probably closer to a private chatroom than a social media corporation. They’re small, they’re not run for profit, and they’re not engaged in any anti-competitive behavior. There’s not that much stopping someone from moving to another instance or even making their own.

Oh god. I was reading through the page and this gem was down in the section on the response from healthcare companies:

Another executive was quoted saying “What’s most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity.”

Says the people who hide behind keyboards, phone calls, employees, doctors, guards, police as they hurt people they don’t know. Talk about losing your humanity.

My point is that something like the New Deal doesn’t just happen because everyone decided to get out of bed and vote one day. There’s a context to understand and that context is that outside pressure and extraordinary events were necessary for it to happen.

Things didn’t get better because just that many more people decided to vote and things didn’t get worse because people stopped voting. The numbers just don’t bear that out. We’ve been stuck in the band of our modern voter turnout rate since before the New Deal. So if the claim is that Democracy works when everyone votes and the example is the New Deal, then it doesn’t support that claim. So if differences in voter turnout can’t explain that outcome, you have to look at other factors.

As for how radical it was. Sure, capitalists didn’t like it. But fundamentally it left power in the hands of those capitalists. The quote is just providing insight on how the people involved thought/talked about it. The evidence is all the history that followed that. They kept their money, their influence over the political system, and given time, they used that to dismantle even something as reformist as the New Deal.

It certainly wasn’t as extreme or successful as the soviet union, but there was a lot of unionization going on during the industrial revolution that was more radical than the tamer bargaining unions we see in the post-war era. And then the depression happened and things got really bad. It’s not hard to see how elites would have looked out at what was happening in the world, looked at the bad economic situation at home, and concluded that something had to be done.

FDR even said that they were trying to reform capitalism to save it.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Transwiki/American_history_quotes_New_Deal

1933 “It was this administration which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.” President Roosevelt, on how his emergency actions in 1933 prevented a revolution and saved capitalism.

Refer to my comment bellow for a more expanded discussion, but specifically talking about the New Deal:

• The voter participation in this period was comparable to what we have today. Minus all the people excluded, but the comment I’m replying to was talking about people deciding to vote, so those without that option, these people aren’t included in the asserted culpability for the success or failure of democracy.

• The New Deal happened with significant context outside of the electoral system. A massive war with another looming on the horizon. A global financial collapse that threatened to incite people against the ruling class. Militant union organizing against violent state and private repression. The rise of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to capitalist hegemony and an example to show workers what was possible.

• The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure. Far from being a democratic revolution, it was a stalling tactic that kept power concentrated and allowed those in power to slowly dismantle outside power structures like unions until such time as they could claw back those gains. The later end of the Keynesian government programs can be better attributed to the weakening of unions than the failure of people to vote or vote correctly at the ballot box. Government policy obviously had a big hand in this attack on unions, but there were also the material factors of automation and globalization that greatly reduced union bargaining power.

Ok, when was this? I tried looking in to voter turnout rates over time. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present

As they say in the article, it’s harder to get good estimates of earlier turnout rates, but for the sake of talking about it, lets take for granted that the numbers are in some reasonable ballpark of accuracy.

It looks like turnout tops out at about 80% (presidential elections) of the VEP in the later half of the 19th century. Before this the numbers were even lower than they have been in modern times. This of course was a time when many people could not vote. It was also a period of growing inequality and monopolization. It took 2 major wars, a lot of militant unionizing, and a global financial collapse to end up with the brief period of relative prosperity for specifically white working class men.

Throughout the 20th century though, the numbers pretty consistently dropped to between 50-70% turnout. Throughout a lot of this many people still could not vote, either explicitly or implicitly through Jim Crow laws. Even post-civil rights and voting rights act, prisoners still do not have the right to vote. Considering that we know that the war on drugs was started to pretty specifically target enemies of the state like minorities and hippies, this is a pretty clear attempt to once again implicitly deny certain people the right to vote. So even through multiple slices of the population being eligible to vote over time, we’ve never really had close to a significant portion of the eligible population voting.

This is also only talking about American citizens. Again, a fundamental tenet of democracy is that it only exercises government power over those who have consented to it. US imperialism, starting with the native Americans and African slaves and only expanding from there, has extended the application of that power to countless people around the world who never got a vote on the US fucking with their country and were often denied the opportunity to participate in their own democracies. Taken from this perspective, the majority of people under US rule/influence have NEVER gotten to participate in the “democratic process.”

This is also all before we talk about the ways that the electoral system and government structure was explicitly designed to not allow the popular will to have proportional influence over the government.

The implication of the assertion that “democracy works when people vote” is that the condition of these millions of people who have been systematically denied the right to influence the government that rules over them is their own fault for not voting anyway. It’s simply ahistorical. It’s as much a call to a mythical glorious past that conservatives engage in.

Rights have never and will never be won through the ballot box so long as the US remains a plutocracy. It has always required people to work outside the system and engage with violence, whether they are doing it or it is being done to them.

This history isn’t just some bad stuff that bad people did in the past. They’re the events that created the world we live in today. We aren’t free of their influence and we haven’t even stopped all of them. You can learn from that or you can keep blaming people. You can’t have both and still be honest with yourself.

Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.

Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”

America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.