I make a distinction between “responsibility” and “blame”:

• Responsibility is when your choices have contributed to the outcome.
• Blame is a responsibility for a bad thing.

If the candidate you supported won, you share in the responsibility for it - but not in the blame because from your point of view there is no blame because it’s not a bad thing.

Not ridiculous - just not sufficiently detailed. The people who didn’t vote are only to be blamed if the candidate they’d vote for if they did vote lost. Basically, if Biden (Trump) wins:

• The people who voted for Trump (Biden) should not be blamed, because they already did what they could - they voted for Trump (Biden). It’s not like they could have voted “harder”.

• The people who voted for Biden (Trump) should not be blamed either - they got what they wanted, and they were within their civilian right to do so.

• The people who did not vote but would have voted for Biden (Trump) should not be blamed because just like the previous group - they got what they wanted. Also, even if they would have voted it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. There is an approach that say this should still be condemned because this was still a risk, but I believe one should not be so quick to condemn a bad practice when it succeeds because if you have to do that that means you were unable to find enough cases where the practice failed (and condemn it there) - which should compel you to consider whether this really is a bad practice.

  Also - we are talking about blaming Trump’s (Biden’s) loss on them, but they would have voted for Biden (Trump), which means that by not voting they gave half a vote to Trump (Biden) - so why blame them for not voting?

• This leaves us with the people who did not vote but would have voted for Trump (Biden). These people are blamable - they did not get their preferred candidate, and they could have done something to increase the odds that he would have won.

Right. Sorry. Was more along the lines of “no one argues with the fact that …”, which pretty much means the same thing as your correction.

Of course the number of votes matter. Not voting affects the number of votes, because if the non-voter would have vote - the number of votes would be different. The responsibility is shared between all the people who get the right to vote. No one argue that this includes the ones who actually voted - the argument is about whether this includes the non-voters.

Alice and Bob. Alice wins. She says that Bob can only blame himself for neglecting his training, but Bob blames Alice and says that if she wouldn’t have ran so fast, he could have won.

Who is right and who is wrong?

While it is true that Bob would have won if Alice was slow enough, it doesn’t mean that Alice should be carrying any blame here. She wanted to win the race. Bob is the one who did something wrong, because he did not want to lose and still didn’t do what he can in order to win.

If candidate A gets elected, his voters don’t need to blame themselves for getting him elected. That’s what they wanted to do. Or, at least, that’s what the realistic option they preferred over the other realistic options.

If he does something they don’t like, and it’s something that the other candidate wouldn’t have done, only then should they blame themselves for getting him into power. And even then - they should balance that against the bad things (in their opinion) candidate B would have done that candidate A wouldn’t.

But for the very act of him getting their candidate elected? They should not feel guilty for that. They should feel pride - or at least, as much pride as casting a vote into a ballot can entitle.

The ones who should feel blame are the ones who wanted candidate B elected and did not vote. They could have done something to contribute to the outcome they prefer - they could have voted. By their inaction, they have contributed to a result they did not want.

Maybe a circular chain (no pun intended) of slavery can work if the circle is long enough? Each slave/slaver will get abused by their master and take out their frustration abusing their own slave. While it’s true that if you go far enough in either direction you’ll eventually reach yourself, there is not much you can do about it - even if you try to order your slave to order their slave to order their slave … to order their slave to free you, by the time that order reaches your own master the incentive to enforce it will be so diminished that they could ignore it without much consequence.

Of course, in order for this to work we need a rule that a master cannot order their slave to give them their slave. Or - to be on the safe side - a master cannot interfere with what a slave does with their own slaves.

all the kiddies with functional brains

It is the job of the education system to root out these potential future threats to social order.

That’s a free-rider problem. As an individual, you don’t want to rent to a convicted criminal. But as a society, we want criminals that served their time to be able to rent, because if they can’t they’ll be forced to squat, which will increase the probability they’ll continue to do more crimes (they already broke the law by squatting), so we do want people to rent to them.

What good will it do for you to avoid contact with landlords? If you need to rent, you have to rent from a landlord. If you can afford to own your own house, you’d prefer to do that to begin with.

Those who are willing to hit themselves in the face with a hammer because of a TikTok trend, deserve to be hit in the face with a hammer.

Because they should be allowed to vote in general, or because felons should only be allowed to vote for other felons?

“man”?

Fascism is more of an approach than a specific ideology. Its only core value is Strength Through Unity - but to achieve that it needs some populist values to unite the people over - which is how you get different flavors of fascism. The original Fascist Party was using nationalism. Racism is also a popular choice (fascism + racism = Nazism), and it seems like rightist values are more prune to it - but leftist values are not safe either, like we have seen in the USSR which based its fascism around socialism.

Conservatism can be a base for fascism, but like all these other values - it doesn’t have to be fascist. The rule is simple:

• If you want The Gays™ to just stop - that’s regular conservatism.
• If you want a strong leader to “stop” The Gays™ - that’s fascist conservatism.

Dragons live even longer than elves. They can’t be bother to properly learn the spelling of all the words every time a human civilization destroys itself and a new one rises with a new language.

The technology that managed to accomplish what NFTs couldn’t.

The advice is directed toward imaginary people that the company conjured out of memes and stereotypes. Yes, there are people struggling, but how many of them fit the “takes a cab every day to eat out and drink coffee” template?

I too drink 3-4 cups a days, which I make at home (or, much more often, at the office. Which means I save more money because I don’t pay for the ingredients. At least not directly), but every now and then - say, once or twice a week - I buy a cup of coffee. Now, it’s mostly a matter of convenience (I don’t go out specifically to drink coffee, I buy it because I’m already out for other matters) but if I was financially struggling I could make that coffee at home (or at the office) and take it with me. But if wouldn’t be that significant. If we use your numbers, that’s about $2-$4/week - or about $156/year (I don’t calculate the price of the jar because I already need it for the 3-4 cups I make myself, and yes I will use them up more often but at this point it’s small change). Not much.

You drink 3-4 cups a day, and because you make them at home you imagine that these people who buy their coffee buy 3-4 cups a day. But is this really the pattern? I mean, I can say that I drink 3-4 cups a day and that I can say that I buy coffee, and both of these statements will be true. So maybe my pattern is the more common one? It would be enough to fill the cafes with people that only drink out once a week…

What “person in question”? There is no “person in question” here. We are not talking about the financial problems of anyone specific. We are talking about the problem in general.

When a person comes to the hospital with a knife popping out, you want the medical crew to focus on taking the knife out while preventing the patient from bleeding to death. When there is a public debate about how so many people are getting stabbed, the debate should be about preventing them from getting stabbed, not about the specifics of how to safely pull a knife out of a living person’s flesh.

So… I’m safe from deep fake?

If you choose RC Cola, you get RC Cola. If picking a soft drink was like the elections, you wouldn’t want to choose RC because you’d still get Pepsi or Coke and you’ll just be throwing away your ability to influence it to be the one with the lower concentration of cyanide.