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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

More's the pity--would've been nice to have an excuse to maybe kick all the bastards out of office.

Vote early, vote often.

When you to want reform an institution, you need to make sure you don't replace the bad with the worse.

The main asshat in Congress stirring the pot and helping cause this dissention is a first term senator: Ted Cruz. What we have is a bunch of new regressive "reformers" that are actually being funded by the Koch brothers and people of their ilk, that think destroying the government is a good thing.

Voting is how these people got in office to begin with. The problem is them, and the problem is us.

Exactly, this whole fiasco has really highlighted that there exists some fundamental problem in the system today. Normally the system of checks, and balances actually works so no individual can exploit the entirety... and if they do, they only have a limit time span to cause havoc, at which point the people vote them out.

however there's two flaws. A lot of people are putting emphasis on gerrymandering. Which I suppose is a practical problem that at least has some semblance of possibly being solved. However to me gerrymandering is really just exposing an even deeper problem, which is a large uneducated populous that is not only becoming uninformed but misinformed... and since we all live in our own bubbles, its really easy to gain confidence that the misinformation we have is true. Remember that Ted talk a few years ago about the filter bubble? This is a practical reality of its effects...

The thing that scares me on a personal level, is I have no clue if the information I take for granted is true or not... and i may very well be just as guilty in voting for the wrong candidates.

The fact that it came to this point isn't enough?

Its come to this point quite often and probably will in the future. Both parties use the debt ceiling as a time to try to get what they want. Read each parties statements in the 2000 - 2008 era for a laugh at how they switched (almost word for word) this time.

I don't remember Democrats ever using threats over the debt ceiling. It seems to be specifically right-wing phenomenon [1]. In fact there are some for whom the endgame seems to be to force the government to default and assume it won't be catastrophic for the economy (one wonders if these folks have significant short/call positions).

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/for-many-hard-l...

Look at the run-up to the 2006 bill. 1999 was also a very weird one.

Can you provide some links or analysis? I don't find any threats.

it is. but unfortunately we don't have an alternative..

All the bastards didn't cause this.

It's true, it's true...some merely went along with it.

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