NGR: Be careful going to Rio Tinto. RSL apparently bans historical American flags

Libtard, republitard, trumptard, Odumbo, odummy, barry, Hitlery, killary, SJW, Trumpers, davidhogg. #getwokegobroke, Florida Man, commiefornia, mass shooting, socialist, altright. Altleft, White Nationalists, antifa, fascist, thoughts and prayers, 13/90, NRA, #covfefe, "....but Hillary", "...but Obama", #blacklivesmatter, #alllivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, "...what does BLM have to say about this...", "...but Chicago...", woke, the wall, #fakenews, MSM, tariffs, Clean the swamp, "Lock her up...", #MAGA, Russian troll, Mueller, Moscow Mitch, Kavanaugh, Ginsberg, Obamacare, ACA

....hmmm what else am I missing from the list in today's American political discourse items???

 

I'm not sure all of this political levity is appropriate when those those poor Alabamians are still digging themselves out of hurricane rubble.

 

Our president has issued several dozen tweets explaining why that wasn't a stupid thing to say.

 

Remember, we can only use catchphrases and hashtags in this thread to convey what's going on.

 

Love them, or hate them. Agree or disagree, it doesn't matter, but what America needs more of is this kind of civil and political discourse between it's citizens and would be political leaders.

 

Be civil!!! But yes...ha however, the point is that America needs more of the type of discourse shared between Andrew Yang and Ben Shapiro. These days, everyone just stays in their bubble and echo chamber because they can.

 

I think this thread belongs in the rivalry forum. Civil discourse is so twentieth century.

 

There's a rivalry forum?? I really need to explore BS and get out if the Galaxy echo chamber...ha I think the LAG forum here is pretty good. Likely because it seems the lot of us are on the GenXer and older side and still remember some some decorum in addressing others.

 

While I wholeheartedly agree in a sense, I've become inclined to think that the significant problem with the US is not really political polarization, but poor democracy. I have this conversation with some of my buddies who've gotten really excited about MMT and how it can get people thinking about the economy differently and open them up to ideas like government spending to create jobs. I reminded them that we don't have a jobs program for the same reason we don't have universal healthcare; because the last President the vast majority of Americans voted for who supported those initiatives couldn't get a budget passed through an intransigent Congress.

The vast majority of Americans voted for an African-American president (twice); the vast majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade; the vast majority of Americans favor controlling the most lethal types of guns; the vast majority of Americans favor taxing the super-wealthy more; the vast majority of Americans favor increasing minimum wage; a majority of Americans voted to elect the first female president. The challenge is we don't have a very good democracy (the last point being the most obvious example of that) that actually implements the will of the people, but is instead designed to empower and enrich the largest and most powerful businesses.

 

Actually, we don't have a democracy at all. We have a republic. It was designed specifically to frustrate the tyranny of the majority. It's working exactly the way it was designed to work.

 

I completely agree with 75% of your sentences.

 

I agree that our democracy doesn’t work that well but like Cadaver said it wasn’t supposed to be a direct democracy.

I do think it is a polarization. We have all become so connected online that it has turned to white noise and all we hear is ourselves.

In your post you say the majority of Americans favor controlling the most lethal firearms(which is a weird statement in itself because how can a firearm be more lethal than lethal also I think you are implying AR15’s) but I don’t think that is true. Most of California doesn’t even want that. The thing is most people don’t vote.

I think the biggest problem in politics and voting is that people don’t vote in their best interests. Never vote your rights away. They won’t come back. If you don’t want to exercise your rights fine but don’t vote mine away. When you do you can’t expect anyone to vote for you to keep yours. Then we get stuck in a spiral of voting away anyone’s right to do anything that we don’t personally take part in.

We will end up in a country where you can’t choose to smoke, you can’t throw a football at the beach, you can’t own a gun, you can’t choose to do with your body what you like, you can’t marry who you like and you can’t say what you want.

What we need is to empathize with others choices and stop trying to control and micro manage other people’s lives.

If you don’t like abortions don’t have one. If you don’t like guns don’t buy one. Choosing what other people can and can’t do is what will undo us.

 

I think that in order for a democracy/republic to work effectively, it's citizenry needs to be an educated one. Not saying everyone needs to be a rocket scientist, but should have basic critical thinking skills. Too many emotional and ill-informed voters who vote on cliffnotes and soundbites will be the downfall of this country.

There are still people out there today that snakeoil salesman can have their way with. Way back when, the citizenry were easily had due to a lack of access to information. You'd think that with the advent of the internet, that we'd have a more informed and educated citizenry. However, it's just contributed to more tribalism because people can just stay in their safe spaces. An ill-informed, low educated citizenry do a disservice to this country.

It should be mandatory that a constitutional law class is part of the HS core curriculum. See so many people who have know clue how the law of the land works. It's very sad and frustrating.

 

An uneducated, emotion driven electorate has been a part of our history since before the founding. From reading various online forums, I find very little linkage between the ability to think critically and the ability to apply that skill to politics.

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I don't have anything firm to point to,but it's my sense that tribalism, while still strong is on a long term downtrend. Hopeful signs include the increase in mixed marriages, both racial and religious and more general inclusiveness. As a history major, I don't expect any sudden changes but I think.there has been a significant change in my lifetime of 67 years. Not enough, to be sure, but enough to be hopeful for my eventual grandchildren.

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It used to be mandatory and was called civics. I don't know if it still is.

 

Maybe I am the victim of a classical education and some of my views were formed studying Plato, among others. But he feared an untrammeled direct democracy for a number of reasons, and many of those have pretty direct analogies to current and recent history. I think that people on the left and the right can point to examples.

First, Plato feared the demos who could be misled by charismatic leaders, thus the term demagogue. Who your current demagogue du jur is, is in the eye of the beholder. But I be you can name one regardless of where you are on the left-right spectrum. Some have called this the "Man on the White Horse" phenomenon.

Second, Plato thought that the demos were mercurial and could be induced to adopt policies without thinking thru the ramifications. I would ask that you look at California's experiment with direct democracy, the initiative process. Whether your bete noir is Prop 13 or some other hair-brained idea pushed by a sneakey special interest, I bet you can find examples of where (in your view) "the people" didn't know what the hell they were doing.

I fall back on Thomas Jefferson. That government governs best that governs least. The whole current system is specifically designed to limit the "efficiency" of government, and that is why, for example, its so darn hard to actually amend the constitution.

I have tried (maybe failed) to articulate this argument not as a right or left winger. I have also probably over reached your patience and don't plan on posting further on this topic.

 

First problem - Americans increasingly getting their news from bias-confirming news sources:

From our country's inception through the late-20th century most Americans relied on a common knowledge base to inform their world views. They read the same or similar newspapers. There were exceptions - a subscriber from a large city could choose between a more progressive newspaper or a more conservative one, a Washington Examiner or a Washington Post for example. But even those different approaches to the news were still largely based on a common core of relatively neutral AP & UPI wire service reports, at least for national news and political stories. And starting in the 1950's when TV came along our parents and grandparents all sat down at the end of their work day to watch Walter Cronkite or talk current events with someone who did.

No longer. Today one set of Americans rely on CNN/NYT/WP for their news and possibly watch Maddow and Bill Maher and are enraged by what they see. Another set of Americans sees the world through the lens of Fox News and possibly enraged while watching Hannity, reading Breitbart and listening to Limbaugh or Beck. One set of Americans hears daily stories of a President tearing down the fundamental principles of democracy, lying with impunity, stoking racial animosity, working to aid the already rich and powerful, reinforcing despots and regularly ignoring the bounds of human decency in his treatment of his fellow men/women. Another set of Americans are bombarded with stories and images of a country under invasion by social-service-bleeding and often criminal foreigners, see a country under attack from within by socialists and deceitful elites who want to give their hard earned money to freeloaders, a country where the common man is looked down upon, a country that is rapidly losing its identity and way of life.

A third larger group seldom consume mass media news, but instead are mainly influenced by the predominant views of the people they live around, work with, socialize with, views that are more and more self-selecting into Blue and Red regions of the country.

Add to this a multiplier: Today's media business model is 100% click based. News media no longer have monopolies on ad dollars. If I own a store (probably an online store these days) I don't just automatically buy ad space in the local paper. Instead I pay websites based on the number of people they expose to my product, the number of clicks they get. So now media editors can't just put out the news, they have to put out click generating stories. If you are CNN you can no longer make money just reporting the news. A story about a Trump transgression may be 100% valid but now it's more than that. It will draw clicks and more such stories will draw more clicks. On the other end Limbaugh built an empire based on outrage radio. The Fox network used a softer version of the same playbook, working its way to #1 by feeding one sided stories designed to outrage viewers. This has left the less ideological local media starving for advertising dollars and most have been put out of business.

Most of us claim we want unbiased news but few read UPI, AP or Reuters news feeds. The emergence of the internet has ensured that more extreme stories and viewpoints draw audiences and begin to proliferate.

All of this affects our democracy/republic. Democratic Presidential candidates have to walk a narrower and narrower line to avoid stepping on a line that can be relentlessly attacked by Twitter users hoping to increase their revenue-generating follower population. A bit over a decade ago Republicans and Democrats who worked together to create comprehensive immigration reform legislation were turned into villains by Limbaugh. It took him about two months to transform a popular and widely supported bipartisan immigration bill with a pathway to citizenship into an evil "amnesty bill" and an instant third rail for politicians who dared touch it. Working across the aisle got them all voted out of office, no matter how many years of exemplary service on their resume. Lesson learned - on the eve of Obama's election Republican leaders sat down in a meeting and agreed to oppose any legislation he proposed regardless of content. Democrats weren't that organized but their feet are being held to the fire by popular media driven perception as well - it took all of a week for Franken to be ousted by his own.

Add in the Citizens United SCOTUS decision and we no longer have a republic functioning as it was designed to. The unintended consequences of the internet and how it has sped up the consolidation of power and wealth for mega companies and extremists had changed the world from anything our founders could have anticipated.

Direct democracy isn't the answer - see Brexit and countless other examples. But the internet has made our republics function more like a "direct democracy of extremists and influencers" with Twitter allowing insta-votes on every word or move by a politician, acts that previously got little publicity unless brought up on the campaign trail during the next election campaign. But whatever the form of government, the reality that media can only survive if they publish click generating stories is a major source of the increasing divide in our nation and nations around the world, a divide driven by profitable wedge issues rather than real philosophical differences.

I don't know the solution but it goes beyond what our framers could anticipate. They couldn't foresee the interventions needed by Facebook and Twitter and their regulators. At some point we are going to have to build out on our constitution. Our founders figured out how to guide us for 200+ years, now it is time for us to build on that foundation. We need new founders as we start figuring out how to guide the future in a changed world. Hopefully we will be as wise about human nature as they were when we do so.

 

Prop 13 was also my initiation to the idiocy and dangers of “direct democracy” in practice (I lived in LA when it passed.) A lot of ideas in two-sentence summary form look good at first glance. Taking the time and effort to think through real world complications and counter arguments is the job of a deliberative legislative body, not a person who has seen a few slick TV ads promising that proverbial free lunch. If only we still had “deliberative bodies,” right?

Also - your post was on point and well written. Please don’t quit posting.

 

It was also supposed to be a Republic of slaves. Like, literally -- one of the conditions of signing the Constitution was explicitly ensuring that slavery could not be abolished for at least 30 years. My point being, I'm glad we're not in the business of settling for what America was "supposed to be", which is clearly a pretty shitty democracy.

But how does that result in, say, refugees being putting cages, which nobody wants? Or a 40 year war? Who's staking up those positions and not budging?

Well, a gun that can kill 100 people in a minute is a lot more lethal than one that can kill 5, do you agree? Polls show most Americans agree that there reasonable limits to the 2nd amendment and support restrictions on large mag guns and things like more rigorous background checks. This includes NRA members and gun owners. These are not right or left issues; just sensible, mainstream values. Most people would vote for common sense laws if they had the option. The problem is, the institutions that we rely on to interpret popular will into law have abandoned us, including, for instance, the NRA, which is far more beholden to gun manufacturers than rank-and-file gun owners, the majority of whom are sensible people.

"Polarization" comes from not having institutions and policy that represent our best interests, forcing you to choose from extreme, "best of the worst" options. How do radical policies pushed by the NRA, like arming school teachers, serve the interest of average gun owners? It doesn't; but it forces every school in the country to buy guns, which is lucrative for the gun manufacturers that stuff its coffers.

The fallacy is that you gain rights by voting. You don't. Most groups that have gained rights in this country have done so in spite of the system, not because of it.

I get that you're worried about smoking and owning a gun, but the far bigger problem (IMO) is that Millenials can't start families because they can't find work, buy homes and support kids. Maybe you don't care about that, but economists are predicting we will have trouble maintaining our labor force population just because the next generations will literally be too poor to reproduce new workers.

Our way of life is extremely oppressive and it's not because of people disagreeing online. That is merely a symptom of the powerlessness of our electorate.

 

Yeah that’s a good point. I mean we still have slavery written into the constitution. You just need to be charged with a crime to be a slave. It’s insane. The 13th amendment needs to be changed.

Refugees being put in cages has been happening under Republican and Democrat leaders. I don’t know what the answer is to the influx of people trying to get into the country.

As for war well the government has been giving itself more and more power over time. It’s the reason we weren’t supposed to have a standing army and the reason for the second amendment. The citizens of the country are supposed to be able to defend themselves from a tyrannical government. Like I said we are voting against our own interests. People say the government is locking refugees up and the government is out of control but also we trust the government to be the only one with these weapons. It doesn’t make sense.

What gun can kill 100 people in a minute? And if you are thinking about mass casualties a gun is not the best tool. A bomb would be much better and it wouldn’t take a minute it would be instant. But we aren’t going to take away gasoline and ferrilizer because of crazy people.

I don’t know what polls you are talking about but I was never polled. My friends and coworkers were never polled. I really don’t think what you say about “large” magazines is true. Actually a federal judge in California just a few months ago ruled that a limit on the number of rounds in a magazine is unconstitutional and he overturned California law. If you want these things you are going to have to remove the second amendment. Since that hasn’t been done yet you can assume that it really doesn’t have the support that you think.

I agree that it is not a right and left issue. It is a Libertarian or Authoritarian issue. You say common sense gun laws and that is a phrase that likes to be thrown around but there is nothing common sense about them. You want deeper background checks? They are already as deep as they can get. How can they get deeper? They check your criminal history and if you have ever been adjucated mentally ill. If any of that comes up you are denied. What else can they do?

Also I assume you want to ban AR15’s. Can you tell me the difference between an AR15 and a Mini14? No one has a problem with a Mini14 and yet they shoot the same round and function exactly the same. What is common sense about that? It is actually just emotional reactions. The round that an AR15 shoots is meant for varmint hunting. You really wouldnt even want to hunt deer with it.

In combat it was meant to be less lethal than a larger round. It is .223. Nearly the same diameter as what is the most common smallest round available the .22. The reason it is so small is that it can go further and if it doesn’t kill someone in combat it will remove them from the fight and require medics to spend time fixing them. Instead of killing them now you have removed two people from the fight.

NRA members are sensible people I agree. They just don’t think what you are saying they think. After the 1968(?) Gun Control Act which the NRA helped push through the whole board was voted out and replaced. NRA members know that once you give it away it will never come back.

And I think it’s good to point out that gun control has its history in racism and classism. The 60’s gun control passed because during the civil rights movement Black people started defending themselves and protesting while holding rifles. It was the same thing with the black codes in the south during reconstruction.

I don’t think you gain rights by voting necessarily but you can definitely vote your rights away. At least temporarily. Like the capacity of magazines can be voted on and put into law even though it is illegal to vote on like prop 8 was.

I’m not worried about smoking and guns. I’m worried about giving the government complete control over us. It has already gone far enough. Like I said this military industrial complex needs to start more wars to justify itself. That is terrifying. The government has consolidated power over us and the court systems don’t provide justice. Is this a government, right or left, that you can trust to give away any more rights?

Also I agree that compensation and housing is a problem. We need more and better unions. Our best protection is banding together to defend ourselves from the government and from employers. Only then will we get a fair shake. But just like contract negotiations once you give something away it is gone forever. Protect your rights and alway alway always vote to keep rights.