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Comment by garte | Hacker News Reader

What I'm wondering these last few years is whether American "politics" has anything actually political to discuss like ensuring the pension system is still intact in 30 years, improving access to a solid education (and even more so: what does that mean?), drug prevention, transparent election processes, tax and debt management... Over here in Europe you only hear about "US politics" like guns and cars or DEI ... stuff that you could bicker over after all the actual politics were decided upon.

Is there actual politics? Or is it all for show?

(This is relevant to corruption because I think a populace is a lot more receptive to ignoring corruption if the politics is emotionalised and people are entrenched and you don't talk about stuff that actually would benefit you but you have to decide on how to act on it)

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It doesn't event attempt to address any of those issues or anything real. American politics is all about keeping the working class distracted and pointing fingers at each other while the ownership class rapes (literally) and pillages.

Yes, there is a lot of "actual politics". For instance, the Protect College Sports Act is currently being intensely debated. It centers on the idea of amateurism in college athletics and what that means for things like college football and the Olympic sports. Americans love dominating the world at the Olympics every few years and that's because of the NCAA and college athletes, so people care about it.

> Over here in Europe you only hear about "US politics" like guns and cars or DEI

This is because Europe, and everyone else in the western world, is obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.

Protect College Sports Act not even on the radar for most people.

It's wild that a law that is more or less transparently about limiting player pay for their participation in a blatantly commercial activity gets cheered on by "fans".

It's clear that you don't even know what the act is about since it has very little to do with paying players. That has already been explicitly allowed.

It's about the prevention of forming mega conferences and funneling all the money and talent to the top.

Judging from your response, if you actually knew what the PCSA was you would probably support it.

Why should the money get spread around? It's a business, pay the people that earn it.

I understand what is in it and wouldn't take any of it as long as it is combined with caps on player pay. Where's the cap on media revenues or stadium ticket prices?

There are no caps on player pay....

The Supreme Court already explicitly forbid that.

There is an antitrust exemption and a direct cap on school to athlete payments. Sure, third parties that aren't associated entities can still make payments to players, but its transparently the intent to lower the share of revenue going to the players.

> This is because Europe, and everyone else in the western world, is obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.

Either you're an American which would prove the "most Americans are ignorant about their imperialism and their own militarized society" or you aren't and aren't watching that many news the last 10 years... either way that's not a very... thoughtful comment.

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

> The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

There arent any real politics by design. Most people in this country agree on most issues, those issues are the things that you will never hear or see mentioned by any party politician.

The parties only maintain their power by making you vote against your own interests they do this by playing parties off each other. They pick the most divisive topics they can and they run on that. They will run polls to learn what people disagree about the most, like abortion. Then they will run the entire election on abortion. So the democratic candidate says you get abortion up until the week after birth which is literal baby murder which no sane democrat actually supports but it enrages republicans and makes them want to vote against the dems so the reps run someone the exact opposite and run on banning abortion entirely which is mostly supported by the extremely religious. So now instead of voting on numbers and plans and policy your voting entirely on emotion and fear and you have to choose between killing babies and the handmaids tale.

Party politics is designed to force every election into these awful games of would you rather instead of thinking about options and then choosing the best one.

All we have to do is put country above political party but thats asking way too much of your average american who actually believes in all the silly scripted political theater nonsense. If your an american and you only blame one party then your not just part of the problem but the whole entire problem. Your the girl who always cries about her abusive ex but absolutely refuses to leave them.

And i get it i totally do, your party is very good at saying exactly what you want to hear and when they tell you next time will be different you really want to believe. When they blame the other party you really want to believe and give them another chance.

Maybe your party actually does some things that you like. I just dont think its worth selling out the entire country for the crumbs they toss out.

>So the democratic candidate says you get abortion up until the week after birth

I see you're trying to illustrate your point with an example, but in this case, no politician in history has ever proposed something like that, which makes it hard to take the rest of your comment seriously.

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