Senate The US Politics discussion

So, Trump wants to pay for the tax cuts buy cutting entitlements. I don't recall this being mentioned as he ran for President.

 

He said the opposite, actually.

Railing against the establishment for wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare was part of his campaign stump speech. Then he got elected, and Paul Ryan drooled.

 

Paul Ryan drools when a billionaire rings a bell.

 

shocked that trump would lie. just stunned.

 

You're missing the point, wilfully and in deference to I'm assuming a membership card and its associated membership costs you pay, what, annually?

The issues that lead to Trump are not isolated. They are not confined to the post-2016 election world. The Democrats being in power in either, or both, houses will not facilitate the change necessary to ensure America becomes a more equitable society. And, speaking frankly, I don't think the Democrats care about achieving equality; just about, in true conservative fashion, lowering the barriers to entry to the economy. A bit.

Being a card carrying Democrat you will have to defend your party from "baseless" attacks that its machinery conspired to defeat a social democrat who supported equity and equality. Now, it could be because in his advanced age he, like most Americans, had no ****ing idea what socialism meant. And therefore could have been a bit senile and it was in his, and everyone's, interest not to have an old man losing his mind in power again, hashtagreagan.

What you very apparently need is not something Democrats can deliver on, and that their public rhetoric is less divisive doesn't mean it's an improvement for the country. It's just less awful than the alternative.

 

I couldn't agree with you more--America needs a true socialist alternative. That being said, the way elections in the United States are set up make it very, very difficult for ideas that a significant portion of the country consider "radical"--namely, universal health care, basic income, strengthening the middle class, true progressive taxation, etc--to gain traction outside our traditional two-party system. If you look at your own critique, you have simultaneously identified the problem yet fail to grasp how everyday Americans are working to try and change it. Rather than make accusations of ignorance and blindness, perhaps you could try and see that the only way real change is going to come to the United States is through a takeover of the current political parties by forces that are strong enough to reshape them, beginning at the grassroots. It's the only way to break the establishment.

Though I despise them thoroughly, the Tea Party was the perfect example of this. The GOP was nearly remade by the movement, which was only stopped when it became clear Paul Ryan was not going to out-politic Barack Obama. Now that the 'insurgents' have won again, the battle for the soul of the Republican party is on, and I hope the basest elements of American society don't win out. A similar fight is taking place among the Democrats.

You live in a nation that has a parliamentary system. Third parties (and fourth and fifth) have a real chance. In America, all third parties do (at least outside the local level), is split the vote and generally allow the least desirable candidate to win a general election. What you're ignoring--ironically, in my opinion--is that over here, the only way to truly reform the system is to gain power through it first. It's cynical, but staying home in protest of "the system" simply empowers the opposition. In terms of there being systemic problems with America--again, we are in agreement. What divides us is whether or not it can be fixed. You believe "no", while I still have faith that ultimately, everything cycles and that the US will eventually cycle back to sanity. Yes, the Democrats aren't saints, but they are evolving towards positions that would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago, when President Obama was first elected. Today, we're in a reactionary moment, but in my opinion, that moment had to happen. People with progressive views are finally waking up and making themselves heard, rather than be told they're "too liberal" and to "shut up and back the Democrats." The Democratic establishment is still a bunch of corporate shills, but they are going to have to change, or find themselves permanently relegated to a minority party that hugs the coasts and wins local elections in urban areas. A true American progressive movement could make the Democrats obsolete, but it will take much, much longer than if they are able to successfully take over the party from the ground up. The first post-2016 moves made--such as making Tom Perez head of the DNC--were a blow to those hopes, but the election wins on the ground since then occurred not because of the DNC, but despite them. This gives me hope that the Party can become more representative of its grassroots, and not just a tool of corporate America (which ends up hugging whatever party is in power regardless). The struggle is real, but so are the chances for success. The most important thing Americans can do is to stay engaged, and not give up.

At the end of the day, however, there will need to be a sea change in how many in the American electorate view our place in the world before the United States truly 'grows up.' I'm not sure it's even possible, but one can dream.

 

V03, you make a lot of assumptions. I understand the system is rigged, and there's no social democratic alternative (Which is what I assumed you mean, as you said socialist). You talk about people working for change, but the beast has been lumbering with these wounds in this direction for too long to change course. If only part of your national myth wast about what happened when people had enough of bad governance, then you might have a historic comparison point...

 

I haven’t seen much about this in the mainstream news but there’s a bill working its way through congress that will effectively make the American Disability Act of 1990 useless:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/disabilit...s-disabilities-act-and-undermine-civil-rights

https://www.americanprogress.org/is.../439464/quiet-attack-ada-making-way-congress/

The vote on the bill is supposed to take place this next week so I’m dropping this link here so people can urge their representatives to vote No.

http://salsa4.salsalabs.com/o/51104/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=24265

Send it to your friends too, the more people protesting this, the better. This bill will really set the entire disabled community back three decades.

Of course this is probably a futile effort since our government is in the pocket of big business, and the disabled are often ignored by both parties, but I still can’t just sit by and do nothing.

 

There's also a website here if you want to engage in some social media activism about what the ADA has meant to you and why Congress needs to be hands off on it.

 

Social media activism brought Joseph Kony to trial and stopped Islamic violence in Europe, so it will be meaningful here.

 

Nice Bait.

 

America can't be fixed.

 

It's not a bait. The reason we do social media activism is a variant on "warm glow giving".

James Andreoni, an economist, posited in 1990 or so that the reason people give to charity is becaues of how it makes them feel. "Instead of being motivated solely by an interest in the welfare of the recipients of their largess, "warm-glow givers" also receive utility from the act of giving."

This is the same; instead of being motivated to manage a crisis or issue through direct activism, people use social media as a means of appearing to be engaged without having to expend any energy or time at all. But then again, it's more about tying the "activist" to a cause in the eyes of their friends than it is about affecting change.

i.e. by sharing Kony2012 (the worst example), people engaged in an exercise of participation and brand management, showing their friends they of course were concerned and outraged by the LRA activities. It had no practical effect other than that.

 

It's that, plus a lot of people are lazy and Americans are extremely lazy, myself included. We have the government we have because we're too fat, lazy and stupid to make them give us anything better. We deserve exactly what we have got.

 

Ender, did you think through this criticism of Juliet at all?

Your complaint about a public relations campaign is that all it can hope to do is shape public opinion?

Yes, exactly. That’s how an ACA repeal promised for a decade was sunk: it became too toxic to go through with, despite their having the votes. This is, unsurprisingly, a major tool in representative democracies. Even celebrated efforts like the lunch counter protests of the Civil Rights movement were in significant part just about raising awareness.

Never mind though. A chance to criticize the US and or complain that other people’s altruistic impulses are insincere (certainly not to excuse your own lack of them) was obviously way more important than expressing anything relevant or worthwhile.

 

Or, we're just lazy. Maybe it's what they put in the garbage we eat and drink. Or maybe it's just us.

 

Well, a few points:

1. Warm glow altruism, and the associated acts, aren't my ideas, and
2. ACA ran into opposition because it could be painted as socialist (even though it's ensuring more risk is pooled in the hands of private companies who collect premiums) but to your points above, the fact that socialism is a dirty word - or that basic free anything is viewed as the antithesis of American individualism - is the root problem.

See, as we've said in dealing with J-Rod's fear of red monsters under the bed, the welfare state wasn't really a left wing introduction - it was, in fact, a centre right (mostly) push to ensure rights of citizens were met at the expense of actual socialism's allure. You know this, I'd wager, or have at least read me saying it. If we take this as true then the 'average' American's fear of "socialised medicine" collapses under the weight of facts and logic. And even the broad philosophical objection to collectivism, as the counter to individualism, also collapses when you consider how gun rights are basically expressed unironically as the ultimate individual freedom but they rally together behind the state when it legislates to enshrine those rights further. Basically the whole argument is nonsense and has no merit.

So, ACA - which as a health care package only succeeds by virtue of being less awful than the alternatives, and as a standalone policy is woeful (yes, yes, compromises were made etc etc) - was always going to be in trouble because there was a broad platform of anti-collectivism at the core of the identity and political conscience of most Americans. This is why I keep saying the country can't be fixed - the cult of the individual is too ingrained in everything.

 

That and apparently not even bothering to read the link before he typed his critique out.

 

I read the link. You're to print a sign and take a selfie sharing it. That's exactly what I'm referring to.

 

1. Critiques of socialism aren’t unique to J-Rod, either. But you are both using your respective arguments as lazy, pseudo-intellectual ways to lash out at something you already didn’t like. Which is probably why both cases look particularly dumb.

2. That response had literally nothing to do with the point I was making, which was the role of awareness campaigns on public opinion, and of public opinion as a tool for public policy debates.

3. More bluntly than last time, Juliet was discussing a social policy campaign. The early modern social reformers like Wilberforce—British, so I suppose you’ll want to start prostrating yourself spontaneously—made conscious innovations in social movements to deliberately harvest the dynamics you are disdaining: lapel puns and slogans didn’t free any slaves. They made social desirability and popularity tools to pressure a representative democracy into voting to phase it out of their society.

 

I think Kelly may be in trouble.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mom-2-dies-flu-deciding-152716318.html

America! Freedom!

 

Any other administration Kelly would been gone last week. It’s just that Trump cannot find competent people to work for him at all (again who on earth would want to committee career suicide and work in a place where cynaide pills look like a good way out?) therefore finding a suitable replacement for Kelly is a very difficult if not impossible. Again i would not be surprised at all if Ivanka took the job herself in the hopes that will boost ratings on this quickly failing second season of Celebrity Presidential Apprentice.

And it’s just not anyone’s imagination about turnover in the Trump WH. It’s the highest it has been in decades and will only accelerate more now.

And the Chairman of the GOP in Michigan resigned over Trump today:

http://thehill.com/homenews/state-w...blican-party-resigns-i-could-no-longer-remain

I am sure the Trumpsters will go all off on him and try to destroy the guys life instead of listening to what he is saying. Cult #45 truly is Scientology to a tee.

 

If Kelly gets the boot then you have nothing but the amateur circus freaks (Jarvana conjoined twins) running the Greatest Show on Earth.

 

Now let's be fair, nothing in that article said that she couldn't pay for the medicine. And she was insured.

Last year I had an ear infection. I took my grand daughter's grape medicine she had left from when she had one a few months prior. And the year before I took antibiotics prescribed for my dearly departed dog when she had an ear infection. (I still get them often)

If I had died from complications of an ear infection the headline would have looked very similar.