> At what point does blatant advertising/propaganda meaningfully undermine human agency?
Regularly and governments live and die on their ability to advertise their policies and propagate their message in a convincing fashion. There were plenty of us that didn’t need to be advertised to to put a bullet through AB5’s heart in a manner humiliating to the Bill’s chief sponsor despite the deficiencies in Prop 22 for getting the entire job done, so do you want to tell me why my vote should be nullified other than you disagree with the outcome? In whichever way campaigning influenced the outcome, the vote was the vote and the vote followed the laws of California and the United States.
Prop 22 was a garbage giveaway to Uber/Lyft passed at the height of Covid when a whole bunch of people had zero work except for Uber/Lyft.
Uber/Lyft basically blackmailed everybody threatening to pull out of the state, spent a hideous amnount of money on propaganda, and even sent text messages and emails to Uber/Lyft users threatening to pull out (which Uber/Lyft should have been fined viciously for).
> In whichever way campaigning influenced the outcome, the vote was the vote and the vote followed the laws of California and the United States.
While that might be technically true in the absolutist way, bad things are still bad, even if it followed all the technicalities.
If we play "the vote was the vote and the vote followed the laws" and it ends up making it mandatory for everyone to cut off their thumbs, do you really think the population would just go "oh well" and grab some pruners?
We’re talking about the difference between W2s and 1099s, so I feel pretty good that my vote isn’t up there with literal bodily mutilation so you can put away the straw man; and if I thought AB5’s supporters and the “No” vote had the moral high ground, I wouldn’t have voted the way I did. I would in fact have voted the complete opposite of what I did, so keep that in mind.
Do you want to try a different line of argument for why my vote should be nullified? There’s no “because someone on Hacker News thought it was bad“ exception in our democracy, so I’m kind of looking for something more here.
Since you're ignoring the thought experiment, let's see what remains in your reply.
It sounds like you are reasoning that harm is fine when it morally shouldn't be, regardless of the technical (legislative, executive, judicial) track you're on.
You didn’t have a thought experiment, just a straw man. I thought I was clear on that point. Overwriting substantial portions of a law that took effect in 2020 with another law passed in 2020 isn’t “harmful” and doesn’t rank with your hypothetical anti-thumbs bill.
> It sounds like you are reasoning that harm is fine when it morally shouldn't be
That is exactly what I did not say, that is what you are attempting to reduce my argument to because you believe your position was morally superior and you don’t want to concede the legitimacy of my vote having voted for the losing position. I’m okay with you thinking your position was morally superior—it’s not, never was and we clearly disagree but I was done persuading people the moment the polls closed on November 3rd 2020—but having lost, you don’t have carte blanche to deny the election’s result nor its legitimacy. The “No” voters have exactly the same voting rights as the “Yes” voters, and they were outnumbered by a difference of 2,930,605 votes, nor are either the “Yes” voters or “No” voters morally superior people to each other for having held their positions and voted the way they did.
So lacking carte blanche and moral superiority, why under the laws of California and the United States should my vote and the other 9,958,424 people who voted “Yes” on Prop 22 in 2020 be nullified when we have deemed ballot propositions for good or for ill to be a legitimate form of lawmaking in the State of California?
This was the question that was posed by the parent:
>>> At what point does blatant advertising/propaganda meaningfully undermine human agency?
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of question you ask when you want to question the legitimacy of something, e.g. a vote. There was a lot of controversy around the amount of money spent by the “Yes on 22” campaign that the “No on 22” camp hasn’t stopped complaining about since the election, and behave as if money, not the votes cast by the literal millions of people who cast them with a nearly 3 million vote differential, was the only deciding factor, so it’s not an unreasonable read given context.
This was the question I counterposed:
>> so do you want to tell me why my vote should be nullified other than you disagree with the outcome?
You’re not the parent, but you are the one that picked up the mantle, quoting the end of my argument. This is the question through which all of my comments have been framed. We don’t have to continue, but keep the context in mind if you do, because as I just said, I’m not looking to persuade anyone on Proposition 22 and haven’t been for over two years, nor do entirely hypothetical anti-thumb bills interest me. Prop 22 already passed and it wasn’t even close, nor was the issue anywhere near mass bodily mutilation; but if somebody would like to explain to me why my vote should be nullified other than because they disagree with the outcome, that’s what I’m here for and I said so from the start.
> that’s the kind of question you ask when you want to question the legitimacy of something, e.g. a vote
This and similar kinds of assumptions are why you have earned the label "bad-faith" in this thread. You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote" and in the process ruining any attempts at a meaningful exploration of the effects of propaganda on the governance of our society.
I am OP, and I stopped engaging because I have learned that when someone wants to push the conversation in ways that you have demonstrated above, there is no point in hoping they may then develop a more considerate approach.
> You have not honestly attempted to understand the thrust of the conversation, instead imposing some kind of victimization complex at the behest of "your vote" and in the process ruining any attempts at a meaningful exploration of the effects of propaganda on the governance of our society.
So here’s the thing about that. Advertising, marketing, propaganda are effectively the same words but with different connotations, but more importantly they are at their core information which exists in a competitive information environment and can inform voter’s choices (“inform” in the loosest sense, information does not have to be correct by any definition to be informative) which in turn has an effect on their preferences and feeds back into policy choices and the politicians they vote for who are in turn informed by voter preferences, propaganda, advertising, lobbying, privileged information, etc. in a nice tight feedback loop.
As I said at the start:
> “Regularly and governments live and die on their ability to advertise their policies and propagate their message in a convincing fashion.”
This is a given for governance. But knowing that, can you still question the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome if it follows the laws of the political environment in which it is set?
I would say “No”. Going back to Prop 22, it was a three position vote for the text of the Proposition in which the three possible choices were to vote “Yes”, vote “No” and not vote. “Yes” won and I always insist that abstaining is abstaining, but others will tend to boil that down to a vote for the winner or a vote for the loser, whichever is more politically convenient at a given moment of time.
So perhaps I was overzealous in my reading of your question as the leading edge of a line of rhetoric which questions the legitimacy of a vote’s outcome—I am open to that possibility—but when the tally is taken at the end of a vote, per our laws, that is the outcome barring a pre-emption issue like in the manner AB5 itself was pre-empted by a Federal law as it applies to truckers who are independent contractors. Pre-emption is a legal issue however, the outcome of a vote is always a political issue and interested parties, Uber/Lyft, DoorDash, me, a bunch of others with similar concerns as me who also weren’t entirely happy with how little Prop 22 did but saw it as an acceptable compromise, we were all competing in the same information space as the “No on Prop 22” (formal and informal) people.
All that money only gets you a chance to be heard though, and many never even see the ads or the propaganda and just go by the booklet the State mails out. If you can’t convince a majority of interested voters, you’re still going to lose and it just happened to work out for Uber and Lyft this time. Whether it is the “correct” system, it is the lawful system, one of the two in this State, by which we pass laws.
Now if you want to talk about problems with ballot propositions, I’m here for that because it’s not a system I actually like either, but I would also be bringing to the table problems I have with California’s entire political system, not just the ballot propositions.
No, I’d expect that people would wake up, seek and gain a stay of the law, and repeal it in the next ballot measure cycle. (For the right price, I’d literally bet my own thumb on that being the outcome.)
Ought we or ought we not consider the lopsided information access of voters in elections? Ought we be doing something to limit or counteract the propaganda? As opposed to, crudely, "it is the way it is because laws", which is of course an entirely normative claim.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but my intuition tells me you're possibly under-estimating the proportion of voters who routinely vote against their self-interest without realizing it.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if that was >30% of voters. Assuming that number I just made up was correct, just for the sake of argument, the parent comment's question is very interesting: what does that say about voters' agency?
It's worth considering that you're not really talking about their own self-interest. You're talking about what you think they should want.
For example, anyone who likes the non-employee status of Uber driving will vote against it. Anyone who wants to be an employee is voting for lower wages, although higher benefits. They may prefer that, but not everyone does.
By that same token, we're all only talking about what people think they should want, and not necessarily what will really benefit them. By extension, the argument becomes that it doesn't matter how well people are informed, only that they act on the limited information they have. I prefer to emphasize efforts to inform the public better, rather than leaving them out to dry when their hopes are not reflected in the outcomes of such things.
I followed the news at the time, did you? Swaths of people who voted for Prop 22 were interviewed after it passed, and asked whether 1) they understood what was in the bill and 2) if they appreciate the changes that took place once it was in effect. The responses generally ranged from "I thought my job was going to get easier" to "I can no longer afford to feed my family".
It has been known for a long time. There were laws. Y'all need to rollback Citizens United and have sensible caps on political spending before all your state constitutions have been rewritten for you.
A related necessary measure is for courts to assess the "effective cost" of someone using a bullhorn they own, like an app, to promote a specific electoral position so that full page interstitial on a widely used app isn't considered cost-free but self-dealing political ad-spend that could exceed the cap and be illegitimate interference in an election.
To summarize, the law is extremely simple. Remove the line "the government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting." from the California constitution.
It was a No vote with 57.23 % and yes with 42.77. Now, that's not to interesting. Until you look at who supported the bill! It's to many to list! But you have Pelosi, Sanfrancisco, LA, San Jose, Oakland, Stockton Mayors. Pretty much every D reprsentative, Pete Buttigieg, former state senators, the CA Democratic Party, multiple government entities. AirBnb, Blue Shield of California, Facebook, Instacard, Kaiser Permanente, PG&E(Local Power company), Uber, Twitter, 49er's, Giants, Reddit, United Airlines, Oakland A's, Multiple unions, daughter of MLK. And there list goes on for people who supported it.
Now, here's who opposed it. Two republican State Senators, 3 former representatives, the Republican Party of California, Ward Connerly(Who got the anti discrimination line added in 1996, and 5 organizations you've never heard of. Financing was 25.13 million for Yes, and 1.7 million for no. With only a asingle donor on the No above 50,000, while the Yes vote had Kaiser donating 1.5 million, ACLU with 1.331 million, California Teachers assocation with 3.5 million. And multiple others above a million.
So with over 20 million more in funding, or almost 200%, a long list of who's who fortune 500 and politicians, it still got struck down. I think we can have more faith in the voter and stuff like this shows it.
Congratulations, welcome to the effects of a direct democracy.
This is why I am opposed to the abolition of the Electoral Collage, you are going to end up with the same sort of effects where the many will have outsized power over the few.
People vote as they vote. Part of giving people free agency in their choice is allowing them to post a convincing message. They aren't allowed to outright lie, but convincing people is a natural thing to do.
And naturally the losers of any vote always say "they're voting against their own interest" and "advertising and propaganda did X". So there is no information value in claiming that. P("advertising and propaganda manipulated people into this vote" | "I supported the opposite position and lost") is approximately 1.
