We can debate pluralities til the cows come home to roost, but I think rather than ranked voting, the better option is to immediately and all at once cancel the Ponzi scheme of a shenanigan passing for our electoral processes, abolish the parties, freeze the federal government and revert temporarily to the old Continental Congress model until Plato’s Republic can be installed. Anything short is ideologically on par with saying “Well, the rapist is already in progress so we may as well let the monstrosity run its course.” That’s where I’m coming from in this. I’d love to know how so many constitutional fetishists got the idea that impairing or otherwise infringing upon the civil or basic human rights of others is somehow itself a civil or basic human right. I mean, does anyone who is not an egomaniac believe that the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee for pursuits of happiness had sadism in mind, or profit as a prerequisite?
Political partisanship is brand loyalty is celebrity idolatry is religious extremism, it’s all one and the same, a guise appealing to those with no merits of their own as much as to persons made obligated by fate or by circumstance to sell themselves short. A necessary and insanely-overdue discussion is in effect, regarding reparations to be made by the federal government to its African-American citizens. Not to intentionally be blunt or controversial, but economic equality is a nonsensical argument when economies function through exploitation and extortion. Realistically, reparations would come from further cuts to welfare programs, with increased taxation on the same working classes already paying most of the nation’s taxes. Millions of people would be receiving bills from the Federal government, for the checks they’d be getting from the Federal government.
Capitalism being the final form of religion, calls for economic reparations come from the same spiritual place as do the democratic socialists who believe without cause that ending Capitalism will amount to any variety of a free ride. Awareness of the pain doesn’t magically make all of our choices wise. Half the national revenue comes from selling arms, half the national expenses go to denial of freedoms and full-on destruction through funding channeled to law enforcement, the military and black budgets out the wazoo. Half the economy is focused on death, on denying liberty foreign and domestic. Canceling that would nullify the need to generate the revenue it lives and breathes for. The trillions missing from the economy through debt and through hording was accumulated through exploitation and extortion, by not capping maximum wages that enable overcharging and price-gouging. Ending it is necessary for survival, but it means far less money to work with.
There is no ethical way to accumulate money or power. Sadism and masochism are both forms of codependency, and believe it or not it is quite possible to exist without being either one. Restitution is owed, but replacing the beneficiaries of exploitation and extortion only allows exploitation and extortion to continue. There will still be widespread victimization. We can be working much less while living much more comfortably, but the majority of our industries today codependently use and abuse people, from the human capital of overworked and underpaid employees to customers goaded into living beyond their own means for the blessed, compulsory sake of buying things they do not need. Financial equality is thinking waaay too small. Reappropriating the billions from modern slave-masters does nothing for the labor working itself to death to generate said billions. A better world isn’t one where everyone can grasp the whip, a better world has no whips. I don’t call for the abolition of the USA government for it preventing rational problem-solving, for preventing any problem-solving unless there’s profit in it for somebody somewhere, but because it creates the problems. Creating these problems for the profit in it for somebody somewhere.
And there is a real world difference between reaching for actual equality and just wanting a piece of the action. Protesting at the transgressor’s convenience is as productive as meeting a murderer or rapist halfway. If we want or need real justice in our short lives, we have to bring it ourselves. It’s not about taking anything. The concept that cutting checks pardons the price of everything is how these problems came to be. It’s just more fighting fire with fire, serpent suckling its own tail bullshit, destroying everything but the fire, the serpent’s end.