Senate The US Politics 2.0 Discussion Thread

I guess this is the sort of thing people whose families hate them get up to during the Christmas season. I wish eternal misery upon everyone involved in this "MAGA civil war."

 

I agree. Biden should not have appointed this coward. He waited too long to appoint a special council to prosecute Trump's various crimes.

 

Trump is apparently taking the side of the tech boys... as it stands at 11:46pm ET today. Where he'll be in 5 minutes, who knows. Mars?

 

His position changes based on whomever‘s latest post on X made him laugh the hardest.

 

Yesterday, Leon was quoting Leo Grossman. Today:

https://bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lehuuiydqc2o

 

Jimmy Carter has passed away. RIP

 

Jimmy took one look at living and then dying under another Trump presidency and went "forget that" therefore check out.

 

Oh lord.....

Respect to my 1st president. Condolences to the family.

 

Watching the TV coverage, I know his achievements were underestimated but I'm surprised I didn't know some of them just from my own reading.

Maybe some of it is because, when I originally heard, it seemed like the inevitable drumbeat of progress, but now we see how uncertain it all can be.

Using political capital to get vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, I didn't know the Panama thing was actually that controversial back then, had a plan in his second term to make major investments into solar energy and electric cars, etc.

 

RIP the 1st Centenarian President.

It's going to be a busy few weeks in Washington. I wonder if they'll forego having him lie in state at the Capitol and just do the funeral.

 

Im just waiting for Trump to post what a horrible President Carter was, because well, thats what Trump does.

 

Well, even without Trump weighing in, "terrible president" is trending on Twitter with people ripping into Carter for various things including but not limited to the hostage crisis, his support for Palestine recently, and his handling of the Panama Canal.

 

Neoliberalism and maintenance of empire made him terrible. At least he tried to stay out of hell after he left office, instead of ****ing around buying mansions on Martha's Vineyard and releasing playlists or whatever.

 

@jcgoble3 Wouldn't expect anything less from X. Bluesky at least showed some respect like the Empire State Building did:

https://bsky.app/profile/margareterosali.bsky.social/post/3lehz7wwd6c2g

And I guess now Jimmy can go back to answering questions with Walter Cornkite:

 

"Trump" was surprisingly kind to Carter. I say "Trump" because "he" made two posts about 1-2 hours apart that have nothing to do with each other and seem like the first time "he's" reacting.

 

Whatever criticism you can make of Carter as the leader of a global superpower for 4 years, he led his out of office life according to good principles, brought attention to a lot of worthy issues and helped a lot of people as a result, all when he could have just retired. That’s a lot more than can be said for most former heads of government / state, or even most people with the means to create change.

 

Yep. All US Presidents have done or approved of bad things, because America is (and always has been) an evil country.

 

I feel like you’re one global history seminar away from becoming an anarchist, Appleseed.

 

Been thinking: Vivek and Elon want to couch their position of exploiting foreign engineers with talk of Americans having the wrong priorities. America goes wrong by praising the prom king and the football star instead of the math Olympiad and science fair winners. That's an easy argument for the probable high school dorks Vivek and Elon to make. But let's look at some harder arguments, ones that might make Vivek and Elon squirm. We want to talk about the wrong priorities, let's talk about an economic system which dumps heaps of money onto the laps of people who do finance and sales while giving more modest paychecks to those who do scientific research. Sure, no one is saying engineers are poor; they get a decent salary. But they don't get paid like Harvey Specter. We want to have a society that rewards the math nerd, right? But the highest rewards go to someone who already has a lot of money, invested it in the right business, and gets back 10x what they put in. The act of inventing doesn't make you true money; it makes your financier true money. But something tells me that Vivek and Elon don't want to talk about that misplaced priority.

 

I’m not even sure how you would solve that though, at least beyond softening some of the hard edges by having a generous public sector investment. Any invention inherently requires a lot of capital to get going. That capital investment often comes from the private sector. What usually happens is that capitalist economies are better at investing in consumer goods, whilst many of the more fundamental technological changes (wifi, radar, GPS, the internet, vaccines), come from public sector investment. The issue is that we need both of these types of innovation so we still requirement the framework for private investment. That means people who ‘bet’ on emerging technologies are going to have the chance to win big and make massive amounts of money. They also are going to going to need other services, like lawyers, sales and financial advisors to keep investment high.

That’s not to say that any of this is without excesses of course, or that there aren’t people who bring very little value to the economy but make a lot of money from it (stock brokers, some types of real estate, etc). Nor does it mean there shouldn’t be greater government efforts to close loopholes and capture true taxation on earnings. But some of the things in the system you describe are inherent when trying to allocate resources for innovation in a sector like consumables. The private market has proven to be a much more reliable driver of innovation than centrally planned investment in that space.

 

Mostly I'm misanthropic. Nothing sums up humanity more to me than the incredible suffering of Jewish people during the holocaust, then Isreal turning around and doing similarly evil stuff. Today's victims can easily be tomorrow's villains, and I feel most people are bad.

 

It's even easier than that.

The GOP wants to not educate the populace and have been doing everything possible, for decades, to make that happen.

 

This.

Or to say it another way:

It is a moral failing of capitalism that a select few are allowed to reach dizzying heights when the overwhelming majority whose efforts have propelled them into that rarified air can barely stay afloat, let alone get ahead. I’m perfectly OK with someone making $1 billion, as long pay at least a third (if not more) of that in taxes to support basic human needs such as healthcare, ending food and housing insecurity, free education up through and including college, etc. Until we solve that problem, I am also perfectly OK with their being no billionaires.

Our society is also set up in a way that tends to shame anyone who isn’t super-rich into thinking that is the rightful place, and any attempt to move beyond it should result in self-flagellation.

Example: our hospital has a yearly fundraiser. Our medical director sent an email to all the physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners in our group asking for donations. He then subsequently stated that “if the doctors don’t give at least $100, we are reinforcing the stereotype that we are a privileged and disconnected class“. Given how healthcare workers are treated nowadays, that is 1000% the wrong approach and managed to insult pretty much everyone in our group (he also used ChatGPT to write the email as it did not sound anything like his usual narrative voice).

Now, most people have zero sympathy for doctors, and I get that (although we do commit suicide at twice the rate of the general US population). But if people as far up the economic ladder as myself are being so openly shamed and disrespected, I cannot imagine what less-skilled workers go through on a daily basis. It’s unsustainable and will reach the point of collapse. History has proven this again and again.