I feel helpless. In this and in many things that this administration has brought on.
Vote? Yeah, right.
Sign a petition? Yeah, right.
I feel like unless there are real ramifications to the people doing this stuff, nothing we do matters.
Vote? Yeah, right.
Sign a petition? Yeah, right.
I feel like unless there are real ramifications to the people doing this stuff, nothing we do matters.
This will change some day, but today the Republican party has lost its mind and morals.
To be clear, I'm not calling you a dope.
Happy Thanksgiving.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_V._Pai#Career
> In 2011, Pai was then nominated for a Republican Party position on the Federal Communications Commission by President Barack Obama at the recommendation of Minority leader Mitch McConnell. He was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate on May 7, 2012,
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commiss...
> Only three commissioners may be members of the same political party.
Many of the major regulatory bodies work in the same way. At the top of the body, there is a board of political appointees. For the FCC, there are 5 commissioners.
Of these 5 Commissioners, 2 are always Democrats, and 2 are always Republicans. That last one, the chair of the committee is always the current sitting President's choice.
This is done this way, to keep some stability among the various administration heads across washington.
So during Obama's term, a Republican chair opened up on the commission when Meredith Baker resigned to lobby for NBC. That meant a Republican needed to be appointed to the commission, so Obama asked Mitch McConnell for Mitch's recommendation, and Mitch chose Ajit Pai.
When Trump took office, the sitting chair of the commission Thomas Wheeler (Obama's nominee) resigned, and Trump elevated Ajit Pai. Trump then filled Ajit Pai's Republican seat with another Republican, and now the board is majority Republican.
So Ajit Pai was not Obama's recommendation. Ajit Pai was Mitch McConnel's choice for the then open Republican Chair on the FCC Commission. Its a little strange, but this is traditionally how its always been done.
Now as to your other question: this last sentence is just conjecture, but we know from the Russia investigations that Trump had a tendency to demand loyalty pledges from his appointees, so I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised to find that Ajit Pai is marching so steadfastly towards this single policy agenda, despite all of the obvious flack and harm it is incurring on him and the nation in general.
i simply feel an unrelenting despair when engaging in the realm of politics. it's two devils on a stage lording over minions who condemn and pollute the miracle of human life daily with short-sighted greed and a stunning lack of ethics.
a revolution is out of the question because the very tool that was meant to fight back against such sloven corruption no longer disbands after war but simply persists against an invisible Enemy none of us can touch, see or feel. what is this insane existence we find ourselves in where the only choice i have is to acquiesce or ineffectually protest?
No matter what your particular viewpoint is, one of those groups likely aligns with most of it. During primaries, those different groups hash out against each other, and then redirect the party as a whole.
So the key, then, is to find the smaller groups and politicans that more closely reflect your beliefs, and lend your support to them.
Yes, our two party system doesn't allow for second and third choices on a single ballot. But what it does allow for is for you to vote for your preferred candidates (the above caucuses) in primaries as your first choice, and then vote for your second choice in the general if your favorite candidate didn't win or run in a specific primary.
Abandoning politics because you're... too "moral" to deal with such things just leaves the field to those who do not feel that way. Those people you may not be wishing to represent you, eg: the current head of the FCC.
Secondly, yes there are only two parties and a suboptimal outcome, but that's what is happening. Your lack of a vote doesn't help, and in fact hurts.
Thirdly, you don't have to be fully 100% on board with everything, you just have to pay attention to (a) what are you able to do and (b) what are the likely outcomes.
Revolution is hardly a great idea. How would the US civil war work with nuclear weapons? Not well. I have a friend who lived thru a real revolution, and yeah, you don't want that.
The reality is simple. We have gotten to where we are by incremental changes, and we can get back via incremental changes. It's not sexy, it doesn't make for good front page articles. But that's the reality.
Politics doesn't get better if people opt out.
Republicans have been working for decades to foster that feeling of helplessness you are feeling, and they are hoping you will not vote. Don't fall for it.
The housing shortage in San Francisco is democrats too. Maybe with money saved from rents to landlords could be spent on rents to non-neutral ISPs.
It's far from a simple as "always vote democrat". That kind of naive arrogance is why the US has two entrenched parties that both maintain the status quo of terrible things you don't like.
That's not a Democrat thing, that's an American thing.
We don't have enough data to say democrats use drones more than republicans. GW Bush was the first President to have access to drones period, and it was not yet a mature technology nor at the beginning of his term. Obama was the first President to have drones available for his first term, and yes he did use them.
President Trump is using drones just as much as Obama did, and in fact Trump has taken the White House out of the command loop and is giving more authority to the CIA to execute drone strikes! So not just drone strikes, but drone strikes with little accountability, ordered neither by an elected official or the military but instead the CIA. Also, President Trump rolled back Obama's mandate that drones can't be used outside of war zones.
Don't forget that President Reagan signed that drug sentencing act into law.
The housing shortage in SF is NIMBYs, not democrats. It just happens that democrats are overrepresented in SF so you are using a correlation as causation.
> Net neutrality is still more important than all those ruined lives?
It's not a binary decision. But losing net neutrality could lead to some pretty awful social and economic effects 20 years down the line. It can lead to even more class inequality, lower education levels, increased crime, and potentially even a major recession or crash as our tech sector productivity decreases due to the anticompetitive environment.
> It's far from a simple as "always vote democrat".
That I agree with.
And this is why a lot of us feel powerless with this issue. I live in an area where every elected official from local to federal is a Democrat. (obvious exception being the president, a Republican that actually lost the popular vote by 3 million).
Needless to say, my federal representatives strongly support NN.. but they are in the minority.
Hence, why voting feels meaningless for me.
Our government might just need to be completely rebuilt to include more granularity. And we should toss these lossy classifiers that only serve to dehumanize one another.
Are we all dopes if we buy that voting on this issue is going to once and for all solve the problem of corporations continuing to take more control and extract more money from the internet?
This "vote" has come up for discussion every year for a decade at least. Some years I vote and some, I admit, I haven't bothered. But it keeps coming back. No matter how many times we vote no, it keeps re-appearing.
The elephant is the room is privacy & encryption. We're asking elected officials to protect our freedoms for us, when we have the technical means to protect ourselves. ISPs shouldn't have the right to look at the contents of traffic at all. The issue of whether they get to charge more for some routes is a side-show compared to the issue of whether they have the right to look at our traffic.
If we focused on privacy, and built a system that encrypted routing information and blocked it from prying commercial interest eyes like ISPs, we wouldn't need to have a debate, and we wouldn't need to vote.
I'm tired of trying to figure out if contacting my (Democrat) lawmaker will make a difference if they've already signaled opposition anyway. I'm tired of wondering if an angry tweet to a Chairman who clearly doesn't have my best interests at heart anyway will make a damn bit of difference. And anyway, somebody's twitter bot army is already doing the opposite of what I'm doing, times a million, and the FCC comments stuffing is doing far more than I would ever choose to do (legally, morally, and ethically).
More generally, with regards to this atrocious administration, I know the entire point is to just go after everyone who opposes 'them' in the most craven, cynical, and childish manner possible, to wear 'them' down and rub 'their' face in it for daring to suggest they're terrible people, but all of this internet freedom stuff vastly predates most of the people in power.
I read just the other day that, if enacted, this will almost certainly be declared unconstitutional in the courts anyway, so what's the point?
I'm just tired.
I'm half Dutch and went back to the Netherlands with my family this summer and it was so frigging pleasant. The discourse was sane, they actually work together to fix stuff. As painful as it is to form a government there sometimes, I much prefer their system to ours. We look pretty crazy from the inside, we look bat shit crazy from the outside.
You're right, your individual vote isn't remarkable. And yet, voting is the only legal direct action any normal person can take.
If only there was some way you could convince more people in your community to vote with you. Then you might have something.
Both of these are more important than voting (which you should also do).