It’s kinda annoying how quickly he’s been forgotten. If we’re just looking at policy, Trump was a bog standard Republican. Dubba redefined national and international policy for every administration to follow.
All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…
Upholds the modern nation state and is thus against monarchy (against whom the first liberals rebelled against)
Upholds capitalism and market economies, and with it property rights
Upholds electoral parliamentary systems of governance
Usually believes in some version of the social contract or similar theory from which the legitimacy of the nation state and capitalism is derived.
This describes the bulk of the Democrat and Republican parties. US politics doesn’t have a left-wing as it is understood in the rest of the world, our center is between two right-wing ideologies.
If this were a parliamentary system, sure. But our constitutional framework does not produce overwhelming, consistent victory. Like, ever, in its history.
May I remind you after the Bush administration, Obama won both the primaries and the overall election by campaigning from the left, not the center. And he won by a very wide margin.
The meme oversimplifies what is happening. Our politics has been drifting further to the right with each election and the people in power are fine with that, regardless of whatever party they’re a part of.
Biden isn’t running against an incumbent, he is the incumbent. You want him to run from the center against an incumbent, OK. But then what? Run from the center again? That doesn’t make sense.
Again, “consistent, overwhelming” victory is a fantasy. Control of the executive and legislative branch exchanges hands every few terms. That’s just how this rule-set and this electorate play out.
It’s stripping out the copper wiring for cash. Buy a game studio, fire all the employees. Now their paychecks can be served up as profit to shareholders. Move all the files to your servers, it’s your “Intellectual Property”. Sell off the computers and the desks and anything else not nailed down. Do they own the building? Great, sell that too! Or, better yet, rent it out!
affordable for senior citizens and Medicare patients (medicare is for people 65 and up)
Marijuana reclassified from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3
Something that needed to be done, but it’s still falls short. We have miles of lead pipe that’s going unaddressed and population centers with contaminated drinking water.
These are half-measures, tinkering at the edges of problems.
The insulin is especially glaring. They had the will to pass a bill and chose to ignore most of the population. I’m not saying that it’s not a net positive… buuuut, it’s a pretty damn small positive. Compared to the harm insulin prices cause every day? It’s, like, an exponential difference in scope.
For marijuana, they have the presidency. They could higher staff and dedicate a workforce exclusively to generating the paperwork needed to pardon marijuana convictions. I’m not certain, but I think the executive can also just… decide not to prosecute in the first place. They reclassified it for the sake of a headline that sounds nice, not because they’re serious about this.
Like, the last time democrats had the executive and legislature, we got the Affordable Healthcare Act – which, yeah did help some people. But didn’t change any of the underlying rot in our healthcare - 12 years on, we’re still having the same conversations about the same problems.
Vote, it’s the least that can be done. But don’t kid yourself about what that does. Our problems require far more, far more citizen participation and far more work than merely voting.
Are you certain of that? In a country where half of the population consistently, chronically, for decades, doesn’t vote?
Every election brings with it the chance of loosing. Seems to me that something radical is what tips the scales. What gets that checked out population to sit up and take notice. Play too conservatively (with a lowercase ‘c’), and they stay checked out.
The Overton window is a cultural measurement, not a tally of recent political victories. It is a range determined by our media and our history, the sum of what people talk and think about, what they experience in the political economic and artistic worlds. It is a crude way of describing what is collectively believed to be possible. The spectrum doesn’t just shift to the right because “conservatives won”, it shifted to the right before Trump won – that’s how he was able to win. And the preceding administration played a big role in that shift.
After the recession, people felt like they had been left behind. The banks and the auto manufactures got a huge bailout, but there was very little help for the individuals and families caught in the downturn. Nearly all the economic growth through the recovery was happening for top earners, not median households. People’s lived experiences didn’t match the story of recovery that was described in the news and by politicians…
…which is why Trump’s victory caught so many established Democrats off guard. They didn’t notice the window shift, they thought it was still the same place it was four years ago when Obama won his second term.
…with everything that has happened recently, I have this dreadful sense of the familiar. Young people see lives being taken in Palestine and are angry. Old people see us lurching toward another conflict in the Middle East and are weary. Everyone is grumbling about the price of groceries. Democratic leadership keeps insisting that things are fine and actually getting better. Does that seem like a recipe for consistent, overwhelming victory?
I’m not saying election wins don’t affect it, I’m saying how our elected officials behave while in office affect it even more, both intentionally and unintentionally.
If your opponents are talking about and implementing far-right nonsense, you push against the opposite edge of the window – staying in the cetre just lets them push more to the right. Democrats always running to the center is primarily how we got here in the first place. You are inadvertently arguing that we follow Republicans further to the right as they continue to push against the edge of the window.
I never said I wasn’t voting, or that others shouldn’t.
Or maybe because they obstruct fucking everything. JFC. And then they can stack the courts.
Or maybe because the Dems still try to reach across the aisle. While the GOP doesn’t.
This is what I’m saying! Democrats keep trying to meet Republicans in the middle, and Republicans just push further and further to the right. That is, regardless of intention, enabling! I feel like you are asking the world of voters, when the party itself won’t even play hardball with the fascist nutjobs they’re supposed to be opposing
It’s the collaboration of the state and private contractors in documenting everything to computers. The process started around the 1970s - mostly with police departments using crimes of the past to, er, “predict” where future crimes will happen (ie, they put the number of incidents in a calculator and did an extrapolation).
Half a century latter, there’s a lot of documentation. So much. In private databases, federal databases – plus everything that’s accessible online. It’s impossible for a person to actually sort through, so we automate the sorting. It’s like extrapolating from incidents, but also adding in keyword sorting and evolutionary trial-&-error algorithms.
Does it need to be instinctual, for some people’s brains to be “wired different”? Seems to me that this phenomenon is more easily explained as learned behavior. Since people’s behavior changes the environment, it creates a feedback loop; societies form a semi-artificial environment where people learn that domination is successful behavior, and are rewarded for continuing it. Thus, the behavior is propagated across generations, no instinct required.
…and neuroplasticity doesn’t really fit well with the idea that people are “hard-wired” to certain behavior. The only thing we really seem to be pre-programmed for is language and communication.
neuroplasticity is limited to what our genetics will allow
sorry, what do you mean by this? Surely the benefit of a learning and growing brain is that it can respond and adapt to situations faster than germ-line genetics ever could. Why would there be a genetic limiter, what purpose would that serve?
Ah, I see, you just meant that other species don’t share our capacity for learning and adapting. Although, why do you continue to describe exploitative behavior as an instinct if you agree that it is a learned trait?
Chinese police hunting international corruption targets were allowed into Australia by the federal police and subsequently escorted a woman back to China for trial, in a major breach of Chinese-Australian police protocols....
Someone stop the ride, I want to get off (midwest.social)
Oops! (lemmy.world)
Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 75% of threads retract in 1st (arstechnica.com)
Very nuanced issue (lemmy.eco.br)
It's okay, tankies love fascism, so they're not put out by the result (lemmy.world)
Rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
bUt BoTh SiDeS dA sAmE (lemmy.world)
But but... If gun owners are tracked, we can be targeted! 😭😭😭 (lemmy.world)
Anon hates his neighbors (sh.itjust.works)
Single Issue Voters will save the world! (lemmy.world)
Growth as an end (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Chinese police were allowed into Australia to speak with a woman. They breached protocol and escorted her back to China (www.abc.net.au)
Chinese police hunting international corruption targets were allowed into Australia by the federal police and subsequently escorted a woman back to China for trial, in a major breach of Chinese-Australian police protocols....