Bespoke translation by yours truly. Original articles 1 [A], 2 [A] by Danisch
Why did people actually vote CDU?
This morning I've read a tweet and bookmarked it too. Sometimes, the bookmarking doesn't reach Twitter/X, or the tweet has been deleted again, in any case I can't find it anymore. Because there are also many tweets along the same line and I remember the gist, but not the specific terminology, the search function doesn't help.
The gist of the tweet was that the voters are systematically being deceived and always get the same crap because, out of protest, they just vote for a different party among the bloc parties (that is, always jump back and forth between SPD, CDU, Green) to avoid "extremes", and that is why they don't notice that they effectively always get the same nonsense under different names. Precisely what I always refer to when I write that we have a Leninist uniparty that pretends to have plurality by appearing under different trademarks.
I had two associations on that.
Some time ago, there was a TV program about sales tricks, how to sell stuff to people.
One of the presented tricks was the way IKEA sells frying pans.
Because IKEA never offers just one frying pan. IKEA offers (at least) three frying pans: A very cheap one, that is noticeably cheap in price and also visually, and which doesn't do much. A really expensive one that looks like professional and head chef. And one of medium price and medium quality.
Because you're supposed to buy the medium one. The cheap and the expensive one are only there so you buy the medium one.
Because, that way, they deliver a price and quality reference frame to the brain. You don't look up what frying pans currently cost or whether that one is cheap because you get supplied with the reference frame. Man tends to avoid the extremes and pick the center-adjacent compromise.
Here, he sees: Ah, look, this is qualitatively much superior than the cheap crap.
And: Look, this one is good as well, but much much cheaper than the expensive professional item that I don't need anyway.
So it is a good deal to buy the middle one because I get both: Good quality for affordable price. Even though both, good quality and affordable price, are only suggested because they put both the deterring counter-examples right next to that.
And I have the impression that elections work the same way: You add two deterring examples as a reference frame, look, the lunatic leftists and the Nazi right-wingers, so the citizen votes what is allegedly center and moderate, in every way better than something else.
It reminds me of something else too. Not publicly known.
I once knew someone (no longer alive) who had a kind of paranoia and was deeply convinced that sinister organizations and evil attackers somehow obtained spare keys to his apartment door and did things in his apartment during his absence.
So, every time he had such a panic attack, he replaced the lock cylinder of the door.
So far, so good. You can do that.
But the punchline was that he still had such an old-fashioned door that did not yet have a modern lock cylinder, but a - hardly anyone still knows those today - BKS round cylinder. And even at the time, they were super expensive and hard to get. You had to go to a specialist store. But in exchange, if you knew how to do it, these things are rapidly quick to replace [in the door], much faster than a normal modern cylinder. You can do it in far under 10 seconds. If you try hard, even 5.
Which is why he had exactly two of these cylinders. One in the door, and one lying in the basement. And he switched them in every panic attack, because he said he's still got a reserve lock in the basement. He alternated between these two at least a dozen times. Always exactly those two ones, always one with the other.
I once asked him what good that does, because the lock that he's putting in is the one that he took out just three months ago (and many times before that) because the bad guys had a spare key. They would have both spare keys by now. Whether one shouldn't go and buy a new cylinder.
No, he did not agree with that. They were after his money too.
He wasn't motivated by the logic of whether the bad guys had a spare key for his door, but exclusively that he combated his feeling of threat by switching the lock, the procedure by itself. When the panic attack came, it helped to replace the lock, even if he always just alternated between the two and, from his point of view, both locks should have actually been equally compromised.
He did the same thing with websites. He used the same password everywhere, because it was "his" password, just like he had "his" lottery numbers. And whenever he thought something was off, he changed it - alternating, once with, once without exclamation point at the end.
Apparently, the voter works the same way, by alternating back and forth between SPD and CDU.
On my comment, that unhappy voters always oscillate between SPD and CDU out of protest, a reader sent me a cartoon, for which I am not sure if I'm allowed to put it on the web without paying license fees. But it's on offer here and here and can be seen there.
Of course that's nasty in the US two-party system, you have no choice but to always vote for the other one.
But the Germans could vote differently and - thanks to ARD and ZDF [public broadcasting] - they still don't.
The bloc parties and the frying pan effect
Why did people actually vote CDU?
This morning I've read a tweet and bookmarked it too. Sometimes, the bookmarking doesn't reach Twitter/X, or the tweet has been deleted again, in any case I can't find it anymore. Because there are also many tweets along the same line and I remember the gist, but not the specific terminology, the search function doesn't help.
The gist of the tweet was that the voters are systematically being deceived and always get the same crap because, out of protest, they just vote for a different party among the bloc parties (that is, always jump back and forth between SPD, CDU, Green) to avoid "extremes", and that is why they don't notice that they effectively always get the same nonsense under different names. Precisely what I always refer to when I write that we have a Leninist uniparty that pretends to have plurality by appearing under different trademarks.
I had two associations on that.
The frying pan effect
Some time ago, there was a TV program about sales tricks, how to sell stuff to people.
One of the presented tricks was the way IKEA sells frying pans.
Because IKEA never offers just one frying pan. IKEA offers (at least) three frying pans: A very cheap one, that is noticeably cheap in price and also visually, and which doesn't do much. A really expensive one that looks like professional and head chef. And one of medium price and medium quality.
Because you're supposed to buy the medium one. The cheap and the expensive one are only there so you buy the medium one.
Because, that way, they deliver a price and quality reference frame to the brain. You don't look up what frying pans currently cost or whether that one is cheap because you get supplied with the reference frame. Man tends to avoid the extremes and pick the center-adjacent compromise.
Here, he sees: Ah, look, this is qualitatively much superior than the cheap crap.
And: Look, this one is good as well, but much much cheaper than the expensive professional item that I don't need anyway.
So it is a good deal to buy the middle one because I get both: Good quality for affordable price. Even though both, good quality and affordable price, are only suggested because they put both the deterring counter-examples right next to that.
And I have the impression that elections work the same way: You add two deterring examples as a reference frame, look, the lunatic leftists and the Nazi right-wingers, so the citizen votes what is allegedly center and moderate, in every way better than something else.
The door lock effect
It reminds me of something else too. Not publicly known.
I once knew someone (no longer alive) who had a kind of paranoia and was deeply convinced that sinister organizations and evil attackers somehow obtained spare keys to his apartment door and did things in his apartment during his absence.
So, every time he had such a panic attack, he replaced the lock cylinder of the door.
So far, so good. You can do that.
But the punchline was that he still had such an old-fashioned door that did not yet have a modern lock cylinder, but a - hardly anyone still knows those today - BKS round cylinder. And even at the time, they were super expensive and hard to get. You had to go to a specialist store. But in exchange, if you knew how to do it, these things are rapidly quick to replace [in the door], much faster than a normal modern cylinder. You can do it in far under 10 seconds. If you try hard, even 5.
Which is why he had exactly two of these cylinders. One in the door, and one lying in the basement. And he switched them in every panic attack, because he said he's still got a reserve lock in the basement. He alternated between these two at least a dozen times. Always exactly those two ones, always one with the other.
I once asked him what good that does, because the lock that he's putting in is the one that he took out just three months ago (and many times before that) because the bad guys had a spare key. They would have both spare keys by now. Whether one shouldn't go and buy a new cylinder.
No, he did not agree with that. They were after his money too.
He wasn't motivated by the logic of whether the bad guys had a spare key for his door, but exclusively that he combated his feeling of threat by switching the lock, the procedure by itself. When the panic attack came, it helped to replace the lock, even if he always just alternated between the two and, from his point of view, both locks should have actually been equally compromised.
He did the same thing with websites. He used the same password everywhere, because it was "his" password, just like he had "his" lottery numbers. And whenever he thought something was off, he changed it - alternating, once with, once without exclamation point at the end.
Apparently, the voter works the same way, by alternating back and forth between SPD and CDU.
Ben Garrison on the oscillation between two parties: The March of Tyranny
On my comment, that unhappy voters always oscillate between SPD and CDU out of protest, a reader sent me a cartoon, for which I am not sure if I'm allowed to put it on the web without paying license fees. But it's on offer here and here and can be seen there.
Of course that's nasty in the US two-party system, you have no choice but to always vote for the other one.
But the Germans could vote differently and - thanks to ARD and ZDF [public broadcasting] - they still don't.
