While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.

America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.

That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.

Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.

There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment

So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.

We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.

TIL updated my post to reflect that

“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.

Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority

Thanks, TheReturnOfPEB for correcting me

Based on your interpretation every group could simply be redefined into illegitimate.

• We are for democracy
• Oh so you think that monarchy is bad and you want to define yourself as excluding loyal subjects of the king! That will never be legitimate.

Leftist think that democracy should extend into the economic realm as well and what we should do with the means of production should be governed by the people and not just whoever happens to own the capital. One way to word that would be anti-capitalist, but another way would be to word it as economic democracy.

So if you require an inclusive definition for something to be legitimate, there you go. Liberals in America do not seek to do away with capitalism, you would be hard pressed to find any that do. If you support capitalism, then by the fact that capitalism’s private ownership is mutually exclusive with democratic control of the economy, you don’t support a democratic control of the economy.

You can’t have a vegan meat eater, not because of any moral assessment on veganism or meat eating, but because those two terms are mutually exclusive.

This part of your post is interesting to me

If more and more people started voting 3rd party, how long would it feasibly take to enact change? 2 election cycles? 4? 10? Does it ever even happen?

Mathematically as long as the system is first-past-the-post, it always tends towards 2 major parties. Let’s say we could solve the prisoners dilemma we find ourselves caught in, it’s interesting sometimes to consider what the results of outlier scenarios would be.

So let’s imagine a world in which you could convince voters to embrace 3rd parties. Pew Research has some voter statistics that are useful https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/

Only 37% of Americans reliably voted in the last 3 elections with a roughly even split between the two major parties. So let’s use 40% with an even split to make the numbers more convenient.

So we have an America where 20% of eligible voters vote for the Democratic Party, 20% vote for the Republican Party, and 60% stay home. Let’s imagine a best case scenario for 3rd party voting where a quarter of the democrats, a quarter of the republicans, and an additional 10% of the population that would sit it out are activated by the new choices these parties represent. This america now looks like. 15% reliably vote for democrats, 15% reliably vote for republicans, 20% are willing to vote for a 3rd party and now only 50% sit out.

Because it’s first past the post voting, there are many ways that the 20% can split amongst multiple parties such that the incumbent major parties still win the plurality. It actually doesn’t take much, 2 third parties splitting as unevenly as 14% of the population and 6% of the population ends up still letting the majority party with 15% of the population win. So we come to find that even with a larger population of possible voters than the 2 major parties, they still have to work together quite a bit to win.

Now let’s further imagine that the third parties are able to hold together they form a new independent party that get at least 16% of the population to vote for them and beat the incumbent majority parties.

Have we freed ourselves from being dominated by 2 parties? No, we just switched who does the dominating. The voters in the democratic and Republican parties will see which way the wind is blowing and shuffle around until there are two parties competing again, because in fptp there is a serious penalty to spoiler votes.

Now maybe it would be worthwhile just to put new people in charge. But the most likely outcome is whoever you elect ends up bowing to the same pressures that make the current 2 parties such trash fires and the donors that wrote checks with elephants or donkeys on them to have their way will be just as capable of writing out those donations to a bullmouse.

I’m all for electoral reform and reform in the government. But make no mistake, people posting on Lemmy that you shouldn’t vote because both options suck aren’t doing it out of a serious concern about legitimizing the process. The process is flawed but there’s no outcome of the election where they go “brave patriots all over this nation sat at home and so it doesn’t count.”

Real reform would require sustained and substantial action from the populace and even if you were to prefer that method of action, it would obviously still be advantageous to vote for the candidate that you think would create policies and laws under which that grassroots action would have the highest probability of success.

I think furniture assembly is more about being able to work together for a common goal and communicate what you need the other person to do and listen to what they need you to do.

For some reason a lot of people struggle to assemble ikea stuff (I honestly don’t know why, I’ve assembled dozens of items and it’s not rocket science). But there’s definitely been moments when I’ve been assembling some shelf and need my wife to assist with a two person step. If the assembly has been frustrating you have a really good test of how well can the two of you communicate through frustration and work together.

So maybe you are great at ikea assembly and don’t have the frustration factor, or you are a wonderful communicator and listener. For a lot of people though it’s that “this is the 12th step, I’m annoyed because I did the 9th step backwards and had to undo some shit, I’ve stripped this fucking screw… I’m gonna slide this piece and you need to guide it past the shelves, past them, you see how it’s hitting the fucking piece of wood, I need it not to do that!!!”

You probably shouldn’t marry everyone you can build a shelf with, but if you can’t effectively communicate when frustrated doing something trivial like building a shelf with someone you should work on that before tying the knot.