This is how you end up turning a chunk of your food supply into fuel to subsidize crops which aren't all that good at being distilled into fuel in the first place...
Elected officials (and some appointed, like SCOTUS) keep changing laws and precedents to allow more and more money in politics. They can't quit all that dark money - without a lot of funding, you don't get elected. Usually the best funded candidate wins.
There was an anonymous oped from a congressman some years back which bemoaned the reality - that 60% of their time was dedicated to meeting with donors for reelection campaigns instead of working on real problems.
The difference matters.
Like who?
Not defending Trump, to be clear, just saying US imperialism and fascism has much deeper roots and that removing Trump is not going to fix any issues the rest of the world has with the USA.
A lot of invective, but nothing in practice that really indicates not tolerating.
Most of the world never tolerated it. Even when western governments tolerated it, the population did not; see also the huge worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq war.
I think the difference in perception is because the european oligarchy is now being effectively treated as was previously the rest of the world, so they're now taking a stance because they feel threatened, whereas they previously saw themselves as aligned with the US government no matter what.
I remember reports at the time on the Intercept and other media about the entire kill chain. If i remember correctly, the policy was to count anyone who was not proved to be a civilian as an active enemy in the body count. There was this DOD/CIA press conference announcing they made a targeted killing and that their target assessment was mostly based on the individual's height.
Then there's of course Obama famously and publicly joking about his children's lovers suggesting they should behave or would get killed by « predator drones ». [2] Let me know if you dig interesting links on the topic!
[1] https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data
[2] https://abcnews.com/WN/president-obama-tells-joke-jonas-brot...
I also think drone strikes exacerbate public outrage much the way mass shootings do: if we want to decrease gun deaths, limiting AR-15s isn't the way to do it because the vast majority of gun deaths are handguns. But mass shootings upset people, so we outlaw the guns that upset them. Similarly with drones, people don't get as upset about tens of thousands killed in a broader war, they're put off by the smaller number of casualties caused by drones.
You would think that if the policy was as flawed as you describe it would be easier to find evidence of it now?
Much of the government including Macron himself are involved in corruption scandals. Others are involved in rape scandals. Others in fiscal fraud. But you're correct they're not as open about it as Trump is.
That's the problem. People don't want to blame the voters because there's no solution. We are grasping for something that is possible to fix that isn't just "Somehow americans are especially bad at doing very basic things for no reason"
I’ve done my part, I have voted for “progressive”/safety net policies and the US has gone in the opposite direction. This isn’t some shrill unthought out plan.
I’m actually in the country now I plan to retire to for six weeks and I’m coming back for a month in the summer, part of the ex-pat community and meeting people, my wife and I have been learning Spanish and I speak it okay and I know the processes for establishing residency here
I’m over dealing with the American people. As a minority, I find the entire attitude outside of the US refreshing even as the only Black couple in our expat group. For reference, my still living parents grew up in the segregated South.
Second, it had nothing to do with the Supreme Court. The theory was that the airwaves belong to the public and the FCC has jurisdiction. It never applied to cable channels like FoxNews
Third, the current FCC is going after broadcast networks for not being fair under the rule
Now most things go over the shared network (InterNet) so that problem should have fixed it self, no?
The Internet is not a limited resource and not owned by the public and licensed to broadcasters. More than one company can lay cable.
Do you really want the government policing what can be said on the internet?
Instead, Australia is best described as pigs at the slops trough.
A nation that seems to only want to vote for leaders who have a public humiliation kink.
This is the same story told by Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine (at the end of the early life section): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Morello#Early_life
Key line: "He had to compromise his entire being every day."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_pres...
* People elect morons because we have been slowly destroying our education system since the 50's and we can barely turn out anyone who can think worth a shit. That's by design, as local elections overwhelmingly swing Republican, and Republicans on balance gain from an ignorant electorate.
* Additionally, we are now bombarded with "information" from wake to sleep every single day, and beyond the actual problems which are already stressful enough, we also have a whole bunch of made up culture war nonsense that mainstream and alternative media loves to discuss, both to fill airtime and because researching and covering nonsense is far less work, less legally actionable, and garners more attention overall. Information overload affects people too and makes them more likely to choose easy/quick things.
* Dark money is also a HUGE issue because it permits capital to influence elections like never before. It's no coincidence all of this shit got turbocharged after Citizens United.
* Gerrymandering is also a huge, huge issue wherein Democrat votes are simply disregarded or packed into single districts, which helps local elections shift further right constantly.
* The courts are also hideously corrupt. The Supreme Court is utterly failing to reign in the Trump administration on everything short of wiping their asses with the constitution, and that's not shocking considering how many of them were appointed by Trump and confirmed by the inept Congress.
And then any time Democrats do manage to acquire something resembling power, they have so many fires to put out that they can barely get us back to an even keel before another "outsider" dumbass comes in and starts screwing it up again.
How is electing Trump any different than George Wallace having a slogan of “Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!”?
There was no ignorance. Everyone knows that the government has a “monopoly on [legalized] violence”. If they can elect people who will turn that violence against people they don’t like, they are doing it with full knowledge.
Voting based on who the (to be) elected hate instead of on actual policy is ignorant towards the serious matter of the art of leading a state (politics). Being malevolent regarding politics would be to sabotage elections or trying to dissolve state organs.
Then in 2008 Mitch McConnel said, literally to reporters, "I will make Obama a one term president" and declared their job was to not let the government do anything.
And just like that, it became Republican Party Doctrine that you do not cross the party line or else you get fired. This was absolutely supported and highly praised by their constituents! As Democrat politicians continued to work their assess off crossing the aisle, finding any way to keep the country functioning as half of the government declared strike (the irony).
But for some reason we aren't allowed to say this. Republicans directly say their plan and strategy and malice to the camera and we get punished for showing their voters exactly what they vote for.
Democrats are still trying to make deals, because half of them are literally just republicans with a (D), but if you ever ever ever ever cross the aisle as a Republican, even to fix a problem your base has spent decades screaming about, you get primaried.
Republican voters have done this. The republican party has chosen to do this. They own this.
As an ex-expat to US, I never could stop smh over how Americans are not making it a number 1 issue for themselves. Private prison, private healthcare, gun industry, all types of small industries keep US government in their pockets and the society, as a whole, in a complete gridlock, unable to meet its actual expectations.
If you have 10 friends and ask them where they want to eat for dinner and six say let’s go to an Italian restaurant and 4 say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, you still have a shitty group of friends.
It only takes one controversy to tip the scales. All governments have a propensity to want more power.
Some governments have more effective checks-and-balances than others. The EU is a much looser confederation than the US, with significantly more power still invested in the member states (many of whom themselves are also loose confederations of semi-autonomous provinces...)
Yeah, just like with Chat Control and such, it takes vigilance and informing people around you in order to deny these sorts of things from happening, but we can take some respite in it not happening. The USB-C regulation changed things for the better by forcing the most obstinate member of the mobile phone ecosystem to adopt the connector. The replaceable battery regulation will force manufacturers to make their devices more repairable, and that is a good thing.
Discounting that because of political mistakes that were only narrowly avoided seems frankly myopic. You can't just argue against all the good things the EU has done with "whatabout Chat Control"