151–160 of 747 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that a platform of pro-worker, anti-war, anti-censorship, which used to be central tenants of the left (and I would say the best of the left), now make up the core of Trumpism.
trump isn't pro-worker or anti-censorship though. He's anti-censorship of himself/his people, but he's completely pro censorship of everyone else as can easily be seen on his twitter clone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. Since 1992 there have been 8 presidential elections. Republicans only won the popular vote once (2004) but also won the presidency in 2000 and 2…
> One other note, the equal-number-of-senators-per-state is the one thing that the Constitution explicitly forbids changing by amendment, the last clause of Article V. It doesn't forbid it, it just requires states losing equal representation to consent to the change. Of course, it also doesn’t limit, say, reducing the powers of the Senate, including transferring them entirely to either the House of Representatives or…
Ok, fine, it forbids it in this Universe then.
"Seventy-two per cent of Republicans think that the Constitution is basically fine as is; seventy-two per cent of Democrats disagree." Of course this has nothing to do the actual Constitution. It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. The optimist in me wants to believe that even in this polarized culture politicians could compromise and find a middle ground on man…
The tool (i.e. The Constitution) is fine. The problem is at this point it's being used as a hammer and it's a screwdriver. Ya can't blame the tool for those who insist on misusing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As somebody not from the US, the mainstream "left" seems very right wing. When compared to the rest of the world, there is no left wing political party in the United States.
Wow, please give some examples.
* nationalized health insurance
* higher upper marginal rate income taxes
* expanded public transportation
* higher corporate taxes
* unions/employee members of corporate boards
* longer parental leave
* more vacation time
These and many other policies are common across other democratic nations' left-ish parties, and are actual policy in many of those nations.
At this point, is the difficulty in amending the Constitution actually a bug? Seeing the polarization, I could see our Founding Fathers deciding that's actually a feature right now because it prevents one side from getting the upper hand and telling the rest to stuff it.
I think the Founding Fathers pictured the government as being democrats and republicans versus problems, not democrats versus republicans.
a republic, if you can keep itI think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. Today it is a mediacracy undergoing a violent phase transition from tv and newspapers traditional media control to social media and search algorithms. At the root of the problem is that the media is owned by very few oligopolies, and they answer to no one…
This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker, I made the classic error of assuming that others could not easily be duped, and would actually do their own research on the issues. Boy was I wrong. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we cannot survive as a Democracy if the citizenry believe they a…
I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. Today it is a mediacracy undergoing a violent phase transition from tv and newspapers traditional media control to social media and search algorithms. At the root of the problem is that the media is owned by very few oligopolies, and they answer to no one…
This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker, I made the classic error of assuming that others could not easily be duped, and would actually do their own research on the issues. Boy was I wrong. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we cannot survive as a Democracy if the citizenry believe they a…
Democracy is nothing about facts or opinions.
You are the one impacting democracy by saying we cannot survive if we keep current democratic rules.
You can have the best argument for improving society by limiting who is allowed to vote, what things you're allowed to vote on, and what facts you are allowed to talk about. It can even be a true argument that would make everyone better off. But if it's less democracy, then it's anti-democratic. If you care about minorities and people generally, that's good, if you care about democracy, that's bad.
The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting.
The intelligence of the population has nothing to do with it.
With a few exceptions (the prohibition is the biggest one that springs to mind), the trend line has generally been progressive.
We stopped making meaningful changes around the 1960s, read into that what we may. Regardless, our governmental institutions have proven to be fundamentally unmalleable (brittle?) in the last 60 years, which is a huge break from the norm.
The only other period comparable to this was the three generations leading into the American Civil War, which went 60 years without a federal amendment. But that period saw tons of “progress” at the state level, whereas this period has none.
I don’t have any conclusions, just food for thought.
"Seventy-two per cent of Republicans think that the Constitution is basically fine as is; seventy-two per cent of Democrats disagree." Of course this has nothing to do the actual Constitution. It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. The optimist in me wants to believe that even in this polarized culture politicians could compromise and find a middle ground on man…
It's not about party success. Conservative values generally mean trying to keep things the same. A hard to change set of rules supports this. Progressive values generally mean trying to make changes [to improve society]. Being able to change rules supports this. We should therefore expect conservative people to want a hard to amend constitution and progressive people to want a easy to amend constitution, regardless o…
So I think you are technically correct on the definition of progressive and conservative but I would take issue that the progressive side is always trying to change things to better society. After all prohibition, legalized lobotomies, and eugenics we're a big part of the progressive policy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, of course so we're things like labor laws, income tax and other more ambiguous things like the direct election of senators.
My point is not all movement is forward movement.
I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. Today it is a mediacracy undergoing a violent phase transition from tv and newspapers traditional media control to social media and search algorithms. At the root of the problem is that the media is owned by very few oligopolies, and they answer to no one…
I think these men were more aware of it than possibly anytime in history. One of the biggest reasons that the US was able to become independent was because of the ability of people to spread their ideas through the mass media of newspaper that had recently become something that pretty much anyone could get access to. Or would you argue men who saw the power of the word with Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" or made their arguments to the people through the nationally published "Federalist Papers" really were unaware of the power available when people could freely communicate ideas.
To pretend that mass media is a new phenomenon is to ignore that there have always been massive changes and shifts in society as media has evolved from the printing press to the radio each one marked a period of turbulence, and each time we have adapted and moved forward. To pretend that we are uniquely privileged in all of history as inherently understanding more than our forefathers merely because we can do it faster, is in my mind, the height of arrogance.
No person thinks they are the intellectual superior of Newton at physics just because we have relativity, I don't know many who would argue they'd surpass Turing as a Computer Scientist just because we have structured languages, I think we could assume that there is at least some wisdom in those who revolutionized (no pun intended) their field?