No matter how much we vote, the regime stays the same. More war. More surveillance. Less freedom.

Dude from Florida and founder of /insider-trading.

You're saying that if Harris were elected we would be seeing mass deportation and the deployment of the American military against US citizens?   I'm not interested in "what abouts".  I'm talking about what's going on in LA at this moment.

On the other side, would Gary Gensler have stepped aside and lawsuits against Uniswap, Kraken, and Coinbase have been dropped?

My internet search says that 13 billion was spent on the 2024 election (3 billion in the presidential election alone).  Why spend so much money if the results do not matter?  The answer is they mattered a lot and we're experiencing the consequences.  I'm happy about Gensler being gone, I'm upset about everything else. 

I fear that we're all personally going to find out how different living under a dictator is from living under a flawed democracy.

I can definitely understand the concern. I have the same concern - I’m just not sure voting is how we’re going to solve it. Outside of a very few examples i can think of, voting rarely changes things, except on the margins. Outside of the civil rights act, I can’t think or many examples when voting worked. It usually takes violence, unfortunately.

Also, I’m not so sure all the ar15s are on one side anymore. Certainly they’re more vocal on that side. But I know a lot of liberals and libertarians who pack heat too. Especially in Florida. Damn near everyone i know, regardless of politics is a gun owner.

Churchill ...

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

My fear is that we're in a period of FAFO in the age of the growing centralizing power of AI where the need for the cooperation of people in order to govern is going to zero.    I see the usual remedies of mass protest, boycotts, and strikes as quickly becoming unviable. 

Deploying the power that we have (including voting) while we still have it is the only option that we have considering that one side has all the AR-15's.

Also money in politics works because of disengaged electorate. 

Are there alternatives?

That’s kinda the point though - the money being spent is by the people who have corrupted our system in the first place.

Big business and big government are corrupt from tooth to toe. No, we wouldn’t have seen the same immigration policies - but we would have seen some other horrible big government bullshit. Small objectives would be different - the big stuff would remain the same. We would still be considering war, we would still be spending way more than tax revenues, we would still be sending tax money to other countries while Americans can’t afford food. We would still have lobbyists controlling basically all government from local to state to federal. 

I’m certainly not saying it would have been exactly the same. But the really big stuff that matters the most would be.