Several blue states have free college now, including California. Healthcare is tougher because it isn’t run by the state but a private for profit industry.
Progressives have one problem, they don’t have any clue how to fund their wild ideas. The best they can do is say tax the rich but really they mean tax the middle class.
I believe Democrats will at least make proposals to improve healthcare coverage and free college. More importantly, there has been significant progress over the last four years or so.
Democrats’ only real incentive is to be better than Republicans. Since that bar is so low, it makes it easier to make much less progress and still be more electable than the Republican alternative. Also, because it’s important to get elected and garnering at least some Republican votes is often necessary, then they have more incentive to play it safe.
If Republicans got their heads out of their asses and started making progress, instead of pushing for regression, then Democrats would have more incentive to push harder on their policies.
I am voting for people who support changing it. Ranked choice voting is definitely being pushed where I live, which would be great because many Democrats have to use their votes in a way that does not accurately represent their actual preferences.
Additionally, since Republicans have a closed primary (which is scummy as fuck) many Democrats have to register as Republican just to have any say in who will run our government.
There is no 3rd party. Voting for a third party candidate is no different than just not voting at all. The only message that you are sending is that you are fine with whoever actually ends up winning.
You want to voice your dissatisfaction with the system? Then vote vote more, not less. The reason you get nothing but shit candidates is because you aren’t voting in the elections that actually matter the most… the small, local elections determine who is running your schools, who is running your elections, they determine who is at the base of the power pyramid. It may seem like taking out one bit of support here or there does nothing, but one drop of water doesn’t make a flood. It takes constant, repeated drops to saturate the earth and let other drops build up.
Venice is sinking into the mud. The ground it sits on is unstable and slowly shifts out from below it, and it continues to sink. They are fighting to keep it up. They poor tons of money into jacking it up and trying to stabilize it, but it just keeps sinking. You want change? Be the sifting sand. Liquify the particles around you and remove the base that supports these shitty parties. And, you can’t do that if the people you vote for don’t win.
Dems and Reps aren’t the only groups that can get things done, and I’m not talking about voting third party.
Electoralism is purely harm reduction for leftists, no leftist policy will get through in a 2-party Capitalist state. Instead, change must happen at the grassroots level.
Democrats’ only real incentive is to be better than Republicans.
I disagree with that…their only incentive these days is to NOT be Republicans. They’ve taken up traditional right leaning republican policy at this point and are getting away with it. For example: The ACA is terrible, we NEED universal healthcare, however, the D’s are content letting big health insurance continue to rape the US. The D’s have also strongly backed off climate protections, and honestly, it’s too late for climate change so that’s maybe moot.
The point is, they don’t have any incentive to actually push policy…they just need to point and say “Republicans are bad” and the donations roll in.
I feel like if our voting system wasn’t skewed so heavily toward Republicans (between the Electoral College, gerrymandering being legal, and a general “states can run their elections however they want” to allow Republican-controlled states to make whatever changes they want to favor themselves), we’d see a lot more progress. Instead, it’s harder and harder for liberals to vote, the votes count for less and less, and we’re barely scraping to just vote out fascists (if possible).
Fix the voting system, and we might get something worthwhile out of Democrats other than undoing some of their predecessors terrible actions and giving just enough to their supporters to whet their appetite without ever leaving them satisfied.
What chides me the most is the underlying origin of the Republican Party, the very much needed fiscal conservatism, is now missing. It’s been traded for saboteurs rigging things to fail so they can gut chunks of government.
Was “fiscal conservatism” the origin of the Republican party?
From wiki:
The new Republican Party envisioned modernizing the United States, emphasizing expanded banking, more railroads and factories, and giving free western land to farmers (“free soil”) as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best properties. It vigorously argued that free market labor was superior to slavery and was the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism; this was the “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” ideology.
Fiscal conservatism is just a GOP invented MacGuffin to give them cover when they employ their advisorial antigovernance strategy. Every time we put a conservative in charge they blow the deficit up and funnel money to their backers.
Then they cry fiscal conservatism when a DEM takes power and say we need to cut social programs. Fiscal conservatism is a lie people continue to believe in because they hate anyone getting a break that isn’t themselves. Themselves or wealthy white men who they project their own ambitions onto.
I see this sentiment expressed more often by tankies, enlightened centrists, and Krazy Konservative Kommenters than mainstream media sources. Usually in reference to economic policy (and in fairness, the differences there are pretty subtle if we're looking at the mainstream).
What I'm seeing in media is an attempt to listen to "both sides." It's just that one side has grown more and more detached from reality, so airing their crazy unchallenged alongside a more normal perspective makes it look like the sides are on equal rhetorical footing. It's like what you get in a debate with Donny T and Biden.
Biden: Normal liberal policy ideas, maybe we leave the queer folks alone, maybe we do a little something on climate, etc.
SmallHandsOrangeBoy: Incoherent frothing about the immigrants, the gays, the "woke mind virus"
Reporters: And here are the candidate's positions, clearly no further comment or observation is required. Best not question the froth lest we be accused of bias!
Feels like a lot of reporters are either unused to dealing with a rising fascist bloc, hampered by corporate meddling, or complicit.
It’s not the purpose of the media to faithfully report “both sides”. That’s the problem in a nut shell. The idea that there are always two sides to every issue and that they are equal. That they are always equally legitimate. Media treats it like a sporting event, like a debate club. That is a total warping of journalistic principles.
The job of journalists is to report truth. To find truth and inform the people.
The media always wants two people with diametrically opposed ideas and opinions in their tv debates. Like with climate change debates. Instead of inviting 2 people of the 99% of scientist who generally agree about human made climate change but disagree on the details they invite the disgraced 1% “scientist” with a fringe opinion who’s clearly in the pocket of big oil or a professor who isn’t even a climate expert.
One side wants to break up families, abolish free speech, trans kids and make everyone attention slaves to big companies. The other side just wants freedom and happiness
(I dont accually believe this, just how the opposite side would make the same tweet) You cant believe the world is this black and white 💀
I honestly thought you were still talking about Republicans who brag about wanting to break up families, abolish free speech and trans kids, and make everyone slaves to corporations
I really don’t like that you’re getting downvoted for this. There are obviously people on the right who do feel this way - but the political spectrum is called a spectrum for a reason and just tarring every conservative with the same brush leads to people like Trump coming to power.
Yeah I was too brief and didn’t expand on my point.
What I mean to say is that, in my opinion, a contributing reason to why trump won an election is because everyone who was tempted to vote for him was driven underground in large part because they were being written off by people basically saying they were all these extreme things.
When such people are driven underground they no longer engage and so not only are they now lost to the left because they are not in the conversation…they’re also going to surprise the shit out of us when they turn up and vote for that lunatic.
If instead the left recognised that some people only agreed with some of what he said, and they weren’t all fringe lunatics with reprehensible ideas, perhaps we could engage with them on common ground and win them over - show them the real evil of Trump.
The bigger issue is that all countries are fairly right wing. They’re all capitalistic and nationalistic, putting them on a crash course for war and suffering. Exploitative systems just can’t work like they used to. It’s too easy for disadvantaged people to cause apocalyptic damage to those that exploit them.
But there are extremist leftists, and disagreeing with them doesn’t make you a rightist nor a fascist as they so often claim - just like disagreeing with right-wing extremism and trumpism doesn’t make you a tankie/commie/whatever extremist).
Plenty of left-leaners disagree with the far left and plenty of right-leaners disagree with the far right.
As someone who is not from the US I have to say: this “meme” is very biased and one sided. Most of you do not even understand how one sided it is. You are taking your moderate opinion and comparing it with the most extreme opinion of the other side. If the other side did this they would say:
One side just wants that they stop killing babies
The other side wants to brainwash children into mutilating their own bodies.
Except the right is actively pushing to make women property, working with nazis and nazi sympathizers, undermining the education system, undermining social services, undermining workers rights, ect.
The (by comparison) left certainly doesn’t have clean hands, but they aren’t brainwashing or mutilating children.
And it’s not like the “just want to stop killing babies”. If that were the case they would be supporting social services and social safety nets for families. They would show SOME kind of care for the children AFTER they’re born too.
It isn’t biased, it’s just accurately describing reality.
The challenge is, especially in the US, the moderate side of the right arguments don’t seem to be made anywhere. All the party is pushing are the extreme views so it does appear to be exactly this in the media (which is where the majority of people are influenced by regardless of it’s right or not).
Then all you have to do is point at scientific evidence showing no children is mutilating their body, nor “babies are being murdered”. Right wingers reject empirical evidence. Your example holds no water at all and completely misrepresent what even the left advocates for. And keep in mind that abortion is even popular on both sides of the aisle.
Ok, except the US right literally has an out in the open plan for implementing a fascist dictatorship called project 2025. You can go read it yourself. This is not some small wing of the party. Basically every single Congressperson and senator is backing this.
The OP is a bit exaggerated, you’re right, but it not too far from the truth: Trump, the president that started a coup, is running for president stating only he can fix the problems the US has which would include removing all the leftist vermin (extremely fascist). White supremacists and nazis don’t make up a majority of his support, but most if not all of them do support him (bringing back nazis and bringing back “slavery” in the form of giving power to white supremacists). Trump likes to use dog whistle showing his support for them, while also not rebuking those same groups of people. The crazy things the far left wants to do is… help trans kids using procedures backed by science and supported by most major countries(and to clarify, by procedures I mean non-permanent hormone treatment, rather than permanent surgeries). We’re basically talking about the right trying to prop up a treasonous authoritarian, who utilizes the help of Nazis, white supremacists and religious zealots who want to take away women’s rights vs the left that is trying to help kids.
You’re comparing a bad faith manipulation of policy descriptions to objectively stated goals of both sides
Killing babies and brainwashing children are known shock and scare rhetorical isms within the US, in the US the Left wants to institute healthcare, and the Right wants to, in brief, repeal the 20th century and a decent chunk of the 19th too.
I would never want to be a part of a revolution. I would only ask the same things the founding fathers fought for. Representation. Anyway you slice it, my voice will never be heard because I am not a part of the wealthiest people in this country.
I recently noticed something interesting while reading one of the federalist papers for a US government class:
“A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the union, than a particular member of it” -James Madison, the guy who drafted the constitution
They more or less tried to rebuild every part of the society the way a butthurt drunk corporal would consider best.
Ah, and their economic successes were in large part result of a few Ponzi schemes and just theft. That “restoration of economy” of theirs wasn’t sustainable, because nobody would give them any more money.
They were led by a group of people, some very much noblemen and officers, and some well-educated and competent people.
The criterion for success was being defined by the corporal, because in some sense German conservatives of the Weimar republic times turned pessimist of their nobility, their upper and middle class, and, a bit like Russian narodniks would look for rebirth in the way Russian peasants lived (knowing nothing of that), they were looking for rebirth in the propaganda picture of some patriotic and depressed corporal, and they’ve found one.
I’m not sure, but I think I’ve read that various fraudulent schemes built on the German state’s remaining credibility made a bigger input.
Murder of sick people, sterilization of gays, concentration camps, robbery and murder of minorities and whoever else - it was all not as much for practical gain as it was for making robbery and murder normalized in their society. Nazis were really philosophy-driven. Their state was an attempt at deconstructing (can’t find another word) morality, “return” to a picture of some barbaric tribe living off conquest. Where the “weak” would perish and the “strong” would drive evolution.
Eroding culture and morality was their intention, as a means to turn Germany into some tribe which will conquer many parts of the world and change it forever. They were very appreciative not only of their ancestors in late Antiquity, but also of Mongol, Turkic invaders in history.
That doesn’t quite work the same way as a corporal would imagine, though.
Almost like they kicked significant parts of the railway work force out and sent them to death camps in the name of opening those jobs up for mediocre “ubermensch”
I mean, I would love that, but unfortunately it will be easier and cheaper for the US to adopt electric airplanes than trying to build several tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail to create even 2 transcontinental lines.
Electric airplanes don’t exist, and making one long distance while still being fast isn’t feasible with current battery technology. Battery technology is rapidly advancing though.
And yet, China has already made enough high speed rail to go fully across the United States 10 times, East to West. (Which is predicted to increase to 16.5 US widths (43k miles), in 12 years!)
Electric jet turbines exist, this dude just followed the designs that MIT made. They just need investment, and aren’t cheaper than jet fuel.
Also China has laid a lot of rail on their east coast. You’ll notice that they aren’t laying high speed rail into the center or western portions of China, but then authoritarian countries can do infrastructure projects easier than democratic countries.
I actually watched that video when it came out. You misunderstand how it works, it actually burns butane gas and produces carbon dioxide. The reason he calls it electric is that it uses a fan instead of a turbine to speed up the air before the combustion.
The reason why we can’t make electric planes isn’t because we don’t have the engines, its because batteries are just too heavy to fit on something that needs such light weight and high energy.
And if you want to know the real reason why China can make so much rail, RM Transit on Youtube has some great videos on the topic, iirc it was mainly because other countries contract way too much out, work at very small scales, and stop and start construction often, preventing skill and momentum from building up. And in the U.S. general just bad management is another big factor.
I always find it funny when the US is called “the centre of the free world” or the “defender of democracy” when they don’t even defend their own democracy. They need to make some massive changes:
preferential voting (should slowly erode the two party system)
taking executive power away from the president and giving it to Congress (i.e. having an executive government of ministers and a Prime Minister)
having Congress appoint the president based on merit instead of popular vote (since the last point gives them ceremonial duty only)
either ban or severely cap political advertising
improve education standards for the poorest Americans
abolish conscription
misinformation laws (though a very difficult topic to cover)
put Donald Trump in jail - he’s done the crime, make him do the time - in a real democracy the rich can’t just get away with serious crimes
House expanded to 1 seat per state for every 50k permanent residents of that state, arranged in districts of no less than 5 and no more than 9 representatives allocated along municipal and zip code divisions, then along shortest split line divisions where that results in especially population packed districts.
Senate expanded to 27 senators per state, 21 senators to every county level division with a larger population than any state, and 15 senators to every indigenous nation (even if they don’t have a reservation) and labor union of 5,000 or more members.
House elects the ministers of the executive, including the chief executive, as well as the next four “back-up” ministers who receive the same briefings as the minister themselves, Senate elects the president and shadow ministers to each department, again all who get the same info as the appointed minister.
The “president” has the power to call the Senate to a veto vote on legislation that’s passed the house, which has to pass by the nearest margin to the passing margin in the house rounded up.
The “president” also gets the power of pardon still BUT the house can by simple majority veto any individual person in any given group of pardons, and can also veto awards presented by the “president”
All elections take place every 4 years all at once, no primaries no divergent election years at state and municipal level no shorter term lengths, if it needs to be replaced more than every 4th year make it an appointed position, congressfolks are elected every 4th year, senators are elected every 12th to fit to the scheme.
All elections are multi-seat STAR
Drafts are banned unless in the case where the US is being directly invaded or legally considered to have been invaded via mutual defense treaty, and only if Congress and the Senate in a combined session vote to authorize it after 5% or more of available forces to the theater in question have been lost in a span of less than a month.
Constitutional amendments have to be proposed and approved by different bodies, if the House and Senate jointly propose, the States have to approve, if the States propose, a national referendum has to approve, and if a national referendum proposed a combined session of the House and Senate has to approve, if the body proposing does so by simple majority, it has to be approved by a 2/3rds majority, and if it’s proposed by a 2/3rds majority, it only has to pass by a simple majority to be approved.
Not misinformation laws, but false expert laws, presenting of information as if you are an authority on a subject without possessing a license from the government or a nationally accredited organization of the experts you are accused of pushing yourself off as having the authority of or superior authority to. Would go a long way in going after fake medicine at least, if the US press ever formed a licensing organization it’d also allow prosecution of fake news outlets without actually posing a threat to press freedoms since the press itself can protect anyone by just granting them a license
Adoption of IB education model nation wide, year round schooling, multi-teacher classrooms, and rotating classrooms, abolition of private education below the university level at least, and rotating teachers among all schools within commuting distance of them. Also, no funding schools with any local taxes, it all comes from the federal level, only thing that is allowed to change locally is the inclusion of indigenous language and culture classes specific to the local indigenous nations of the area.
Not just locking Trump up, but establishing a specific trial process that deals entirely with illegal acts carried out by public officials that’s rigidly built to be free of influence from anyone who could stand to benefit personally from the results of the trial going one way or the other. Also the same thing but for cops specifically and with undercover agents in the police.
To a certain extent that is basically what I just proposed, the only thing kept over is the Haudenosaunee Confederation style of how a matter is decided on, arguably it actually conforms more since the second house being able to propose a matter is a significant deviation from how the Haudenosaunee do it, for them the roll of the second house is for the smaller member nations to be able to have their say after the two biggest nations have already come to agreement on the issue at hand, and to be able to send a matter back to them to reconsider so that the big guys can’t just gang up on the smaller nations.
Historia Civilis did a pretty sweet write up of it all and honestly the Senate being a conditional block as opposed to a generator of legislation on its own feels more like how a “bicameral” legislative system should actually be designed to work properly.
I like these ideas but the Senate electing the shadow government wouldn’t be very effective if the same party held power in the House and Senate. However, I do think that recognition of a Shadow Government is important, given that it has access to all the same information as the government.
They’re the official shadow cabinet so that the opposition parties don’t take credit for anything they aren’t doing just because they have a guy who they swear would be doing a better job.
The important thing is you corrected someone. You all right in my book. You good people. Salt of the earth as far as I’m god damned concerned! And I’m VERY concerned.
This is very cherry-picked issues they’ve included here though. Yes, of course no one with a brain is thinking of these issues specifically when they say that. Both sides are bad, both are hypocritical, both break rules and want their rule breaking to be ignored when it’s to their advantage. One side is worse, doesn’t mean both sides aren’t bad.
Add comment