Get offline. Meet people. Most people want the same thing. This is honestly crazy that we do this to ourselves
The issues arise when folks get distracted from common prosperity.
I meet so many people in the Rockies and New York who are up in arms about some imaginary problem, or a problem they have no influence over and which cannot affect them, one they solely know about due to social media.
Do we achieve common prosperity through regulation or deregulation? Welfare state or trickle down? Fiscal responsibility or speculation? Strong dollar or weak dollar? Free market or protectionism?
The parties (one in particular) can't even keep a consistent policy from year to year, I am not sure how we can hold hands and find the unified path to common prosperity.
Also plenty of politicians have said regulation is literal communism and literal communism makes a lot of people mad.
There are legitimate discussions which can be had about those approaches to achieving that common goal. The discussion is no longer in good faith where partisans deny that common goal or assume evil intent.
(Aside, every western Muslim I've personally met has been chill)
And where you are from matters a lot, you will probably answer very differently if you are from California or if you are from Birmingham UK.
That's why right shovinism is rising in eu
I suspect if you look at it a bit longer you'll see that the issue isn't "Muslim", the issue is "fundamentalism".
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."
So your point "considered a "fundamentalist value" by someone else who doesn't share it" either a) directly contradicts the "No, the issue is wider", or b) you didn't understand what I was saying.
your statements are true and obvious but lack any reasoning as to why it is the way it is; and hence are largely useless. just about anyone can tell you that the sky is blue, what is more important is why.
This is referring to house and senate republicans, not every unsuspecting voter. Not to say there weren't signs and messaging signalling this.
There are well known malign incentives for politicians and the political classes. Generally speaking these involve the expansion of the purview of the state and the time preferences dictated by electoral cycles. These are realist views around the incentives political actors find themselves subjected to. The extent of how much these incentives are perceived to dictate outcomes might correlate with the observer's cynicism. However, presuming that these incentives would only apply to one political party would be naive at best. At worst it would be divisive partisan tilting. The suggestion that it is specific to Republicans and the devolution of this thread is illustrative of the polling data.
How do you square that?
A less partisan view might find that it the actions of the political classes are not unprecedented. It is a progression of the form. Both poles represent false alternatives in this regard. The malign incentives are systemic.
I (embarrassingly) used to believe that it was just people with different ideas of what’s best. But they’re So So open about wanting to hurt people. I came to it reluctantly but it’s really the only explanation
Again, get offline. These extreme positions that have taken over both parties are the result of listening to twitter. Seriously that website is toxic. It causes fear and anxiety and governance by fear is terrible. Online democrats / left leaners seem to fear law enforcement. Meanwhile online Republicans / right leaners seem to fear everyone not exactly like them.
What ends up happening is that the political class ends up fielding candidates that are extreme since the online political class has disproportionate influence over that, and then normal people have to choose the best of two awful candidates.
No one can seriously say last election was a competition between America's best.
- Get money out of politics. Everyone complains about corruption, no one tries to do a constitutional amendment to get rid of Citizens United.
- Strong privacy protections for your online data. Does anyone like the fact that your data gets sold and then used against you by car insurance companies?
- Break up big companies that are taking their power too far. Seriously, take your Syscos, Nestles, AB InBevs of the world and break them up. No company deserves to have that much power over consumer markets, and the centralization of that power definitely makes prices higher. My conservative parents definitely don’t like how when Walmart and Rite Aid came to small-town midewest, all the local drug & grocery stores went out of business.
- Every American knows our private health insurance system sucks. I mean every person you meet either doesn’t have good coverage, hasn’t used it much, or has had had a terrible experience with it.
- We need to do away with police overstep like asset forfeiture, where the government can basically just rob you. I’m not talking defund the police, but you could sit the average American down, and probably come to agree that the police state has too much power and not enough accountability in a couple areas.
There are so many stories along these lines which could get republicans and democrats on a similar page, and it comes down to the frustrations we ALL have with the systems we live in. It doesn’t matter who you voted for, when health insurance starts scamming you out of a procedure you need, it’s frustrating on a deeply personal level. And we all feel like we don’t have much control over federal policy — partly because businesses & moneyed interests can protect their interests while everyone else struggles, no matter who’s in charge.
(And btw, this isn’t a elected officials on both sides are the same comment, more of a “we Americans have a lot of shared frustrations regardless of party”
Oops Americans don’t agree on queer rights and equality oops
- everyone should be treated equally and afford equal protection under the law, regardless of where they were born or what the colour of the skin is or what their genitals look like
Oops oops
Other than that we’re still at the point where most people will at least verbally agree with you that everyone should be treated equally (whether they believe it or not internally is another matter).
This is absurd. You can't just wish away your sex. It's a material fact.
What’s absurd is looking at the world the way it is now, and thinking to yourself, “yes, this is the way it always has been, and must always be.” What a mire to live your life in. Such a pity.
Points 2-5 are all "impactful for the average american" but most people will disagree with how and how far these should be implemented. Why did you signal out asset forfeiture as your example of police overstep but not no knock warrants, stop and search laws or the current ICE street gang situation? The problem with the view that all members of a nation share common struggle and therefore have the same political wants and needs is naive and these seemingly shared frustrations are often oversimplifications that disguise various political interests
I don't believe you. My guess is the demand comes from manufactured consent, not from people who deeply understand the issue.
- "yellow cake uranium"
- "a land without people for a people without a land"
Per Chomsky, the co-authored work is more Herman's than his, and anyhow the phrase and concept is from Walter Lipmann, 66 years before Herman and Chomsky's work with the title inspired by it (and 51 years before their first book on the topic.)
But, no, neither the idea that deliberate propaganda is a major source of political beliefs or the particular manner and mechanisms by which the US media is involved in delivering that propaganda is "projection".
> Very much, 'they don't agree with me but I know what their real interests are so I can speak for them better than they can for themselves' crap
Manufacturing Consent doesn't pretend to be an exploration of what the “real interests” of the public are; it can't be misleading "projection" at doing that, because it doesn't do it at all.
And no, they don’t want to hear about the importance of freedom to communicate being more important boy. I’m just gonna move this road we go do you wanna go out that way okay, because they believe that their communication will never cross these lines, so it’s irrelevant.
“But what if the government turns bad and uses this against you” carries far less weight, in a large part due to its theoretical nature, than “we need to stop this bad thing now”.
Heck, a lot of the governments likely aren’t thinking beyond “we need to stop this bad thing now so people vote for us” either. The immediate leap from governments wanting any form of oversight to “this is all part of the wider plan to subjugate humanity” that often comes up on this site is amusing but ultimately unhelpful and comes across as conspiratorial. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it posits a plan where it’s not very clear there is one. It’s just well intentioned people making well intentioned but poor choices as we stumble our way into mediocrity.
A lot of people want more freedom. It's easy to identify with this, until you get into details. For example:
- Lower taxes.
- Easier access to weapons.
- Lower age of consent.
These are all things that increase freedom, by some definition.