"Despite being unable to vote I want to know how I would if I could and that's turning out to be difficult."
I find this to be a thought experiment in more ways than one. If you were allowed to vote it would be by virtue of having significant ties to the US, by either birth or lived experience, and therefore being a very different "you" from "you". You'd have an entirely different set of assumptions and beliefs that might or might not make you reach the same conclusions, in the same way as a lot of different people in the US have reached the same conclusion at the ballot box. You'd have skin in the game, and that would probably partly blind you to facts.
I like how you use the experiment to illustrate the one sidedness of reporting, but I also feel that our general tendency to be concerned by things we cannot change detracts from the time we can fruitfully spend sorting out matters much closer to home (and is often a very effective procrastination strategy). Two US elections ago you'd find me glued to news outlets analysing charts with approval ratings to find out whether Trump would indeed be president. It didn't do me any good. The day Biden got elected in the previous election I said if he didn't do a stellar job we'd have Trump again, and left it at that, with some mild concern. Yesterday I got reminded by chance that it was US election day, went in to check the results and got away with a "told ya so" grin on my face, and that's the extent of the time I've spent considering this matter. I am honestly happier - 5 stars on TripAdvisor for not having an opinion on things I am not qualified to have an opinion on (in this corner of the multiverse anyway).
I think the idea of 'lived experience' is doing a lot of work here. In the parallel American me universe I'm perhaps psychologically similar to British me and I think my views are governed by that. What is most personally interesting now is that I'm pleased that Trump won and I can't be blamed if it goes badly. This election has really tightened the screw on my disdain for middlebrow machine leftishism.
Well done on not getting het up. I've loved not really minding what happened.
For me the self and one's lived experience are so interdependent it's not possible to separate them ("yo soy yo y mi circunstancia", Ortega y Gasset). As a meta reflection, perhaps my belief is due to being relatively close(r) to the age of dependence, and in time that might change. Who knows. At the moment the notion that I'd be "psychologically similar" had bombs rained on my childhood home or had I lived in a country that never experienced war within its own borders feels... unlikely. Speaking for myself, 14 years in the UK have changed me fundamentally. But, whatever.
To be honest, other than the "told you so" grin, my only reflection on the outcome is that Kamala not winning is perhaps a good thing in terms of the rampant gender war, given that lots of people would have come out to shout that she only won because she is a woman but she didn't win a primary and therefore had no place in a presidential race (which, fair). But even then, the gender war is a Seldon crisis. All I can hope for is that we resolve it sooner rather than later.
I think you may have more faith in free will than I do. The only way I've really changed (I now realise) is that I no longer care about the personal cost of refuting normative machine leftishism. As for gender warring, I'm sensing that it's entirely a construct of anxious 'intellectuals' seeking a way out from their own heads.
My point is actually quite the opposite. I think often we are driven by circumstances and experience rather than a desire or a plan to be in a certain way. Re gender warring, I was called a "frustrated feminist who wants to bleed men out of their resources" just the other day by someone who, I can guarantee, is far from an intellectual. People feel their role in society is far from defined. Uncertainty creates anxiety and someone must be blamed for this terrible thing called freedom.
"Despite being unable to vote I want to know how I would if I could and that's turning out to be difficult."
I find this to be a thought experiment in more ways than one. If you were allowed to vote it would be by virtue of having significant ties to the US, by either birth or lived experience, and therefore being a very different "you" from "you". You'd have an entirely different set of assumptions and beliefs that might or might not make you reach the same conclusions, in the same way as a lot of different people in the US have reached the same conclusion at the ballot box. You'd have skin in the game, and that would probably partly blind you to facts.
I like how you use the experiment to illustrate the one sidedness of reporting, but I also feel that our general tendency to be concerned by things we cannot change detracts from the time we can fruitfully spend sorting out matters much closer to home (and is often a very effective procrastination strategy). Two US elections ago you'd find me glued to news outlets analysing charts with approval ratings to find out whether Trump would indeed be president. It didn't do me any good. The day Biden got elected in the previous election I said if he didn't do a stellar job we'd have Trump again, and left it at that, with some mild concern. Yesterday I got reminded by chance that it was US election day, went in to check the results and got away with a "told ya so" grin on my face, and that's the extent of the time I've spent considering this matter. I am honestly happier - 5 stars on TripAdvisor for not having an opinion on things I am not qualified to have an opinion on (in this corner of the multiverse anyway).
I think the idea of 'lived experience' is doing a lot of work here. In the parallel American me universe I'm perhaps psychologically similar to British me and I think my views are governed by that. What is most personally interesting now is that I'm pleased that Trump won and I can't be blamed if it goes badly. This election has really tightened the screw on my disdain for middlebrow machine leftishism.
Well done on not getting het up. I've loved not really minding what happened.
For me the self and one's lived experience are so interdependent it's not possible to separate them ("yo soy yo y mi circunstancia", Ortega y Gasset). As a meta reflection, perhaps my belief is due to being relatively close(r) to the age of dependence, and in time that might change. Who knows. At the moment the notion that I'd be "psychologically similar" had bombs rained on my childhood home or had I lived in a country that never experienced war within its own borders feels... unlikely. Speaking for myself, 14 years in the UK have changed me fundamentally. But, whatever.
To be honest, other than the "told you so" grin, my only reflection on the outcome is that Kamala not winning is perhaps a good thing in terms of the rampant gender war, given that lots of people would have come out to shout that she only won because she is a woman but she didn't win a primary and therefore had no place in a presidential race (which, fair). But even then, the gender war is a Seldon crisis. All I can hope for is that we resolve it sooner rather than later.
I think you may have more faith in free will than I do. The only way I've really changed (I now realise) is that I no longer care about the personal cost of refuting normative machine leftishism. As for gender warring, I'm sensing that it's entirely a construct of anxious 'intellectuals' seeking a way out from their own heads.
My point is actually quite the opposite. I think often we are driven by circumstances and experience rather than a desire or a plan to be in a certain way. Re gender warring, I was called a "frustrated feminist who wants to bleed men out of their resources" just the other day by someone who, I can guarantee, is far from an intellectual. People feel their role in society is far from defined. Uncertainty creates anxiety and someone must be blamed for this terrible thing called freedom.