Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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I don't agree with all of what you're insinuating, but overall I think you're onto something. Even if some of these allegations have legs, it's sad that our politics mostly revolves around an endless search for the next something-"gate" instead of really discussing the issues. It's a form of deep anti-intellectualism.

IMHO both sides are guilty of this. Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump were all constantly hit by any allegation anyone could find to throw at them, and many of them were and are over-inflated or outright bullshit.

The campaign is the same. Trump spends more time shitting on other people and trolling on Twitter than talking about what he believes or wants to do, and Biden is basically running as "a dude who is not Donald Trump." Neither candidate is particularly exciting. I'll be once again voting for the least horrible of the two.

Nobody discusses the issues, and nobody ever tries to problem solve.

Personally I think it's a form of bikeshedding. People would rather sling mud than talk issues and problem solve because all the issues we face are really hard and there are huge vested interests who like the status quo and don't want anything "fixed."

Edit: feel like people are knee jerking to this. I am not necessarily claiming there isn't corruption, just that there is not enough focus on actual ideas and too much focus on personalities.

Conspiracies are a means to an ends for agendas, so at the voter level it only matters what the agenda is.

In last iteration, it’s not clear that there is an agenda on the right other than staying in power and tweaking the left. The left does appear to have a strategy and if we believe what the right says, they would agree there is.

Health care is a really hard problem with huge vested interests and what we got is not some weird outlier from those points. But one party did something and another just said NO.

See also the current COVID-19 situation, where the Democrat-controlled House passed a second stimulus bill, while the Republican-controlled Senate... did nothing. No yes-or-no votes, no counterproposals, just McConnell leaving everything tabled indefinitely.

Ah yes, the stimulus bill that was just a rider for budget bailouts for poorly run democratic states and cities.

If you're going to pull the 'poorly run' card, consider that the actual data shows the entire American South getting significant 'bailouts' every year. https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...

Seems we need a system where existing and potential policies and evidence and plans could be noted and assessed, with some form of wiki, consensus, polling and liquid democracy mechanisms, somewhere fit for such purpose compared to platforms that are dire for real debate (let alone policy formation) like Facebook or Twitter. I often wonder if political parties are to scared to actualise an efficient ideation system, least the bottom up contradict the leadership. Opportunity for it to be an outside venture though.

That would be super interesting, but I think moderation would be really important to cultivate a real discourse instead of just endless flame wars...

Maybe a good place to start would be some kind of annotation / wiki overlay for the text of the bills that the legislature publishes.

This is in no way a “both sides” argument. None of the other Presidents actually encouraged the wild conspiracy theories.

When McClain was running for President and one of his supporters started the “birther” bullshit, McCain shut them down. People insist on claiming that what the crazies (the subset not saying all Republicans are crazy) are doing in the modern Republican Party is normal politics. Neither Bush, McCain, Romney or any of the serious Republican candidates for President in 2016 were anywhere near this unhinged.

Edit:

I still don’t understand how it is controversial to say that neither traditional Democrat or Republicans are anything like this. Which side takes this as a negative?

Where did all those traditional Republicans go?

It’s a bit like my southerner friends with Battle Flag bumperstickers calling themselves members of the party of Lincoln.

Same place as the sorts of Democrats who want infrastructure projects and moon shots: they're not getting elected. A Qanon nut just beat out a former neurosurgeon in a Republican primary in Georgia.

We do in fact live in a democracy. It's a dysfunctional one, but it is one. The people get what the people elect.

P.S. In many ways primaries are more critical than main elections. This is particularly true in states that lean strongly toward one party or the other. In that case the primary is the election.

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