In regard to a hot button topic, whether Nazis deserve freedom of speech, in my experience, at least on social media, those who say no have lost faith in the basic power structures of modern American society. They see it as corrupt, oligarchic, and racist/sexist/homophobic - basically, the worst stereotypical conservative beliefs. They look at stuff like police shootings and their lack of consequences, the Standing Rock protest, Trump in office, the health care debate, and so on and see everything from the local police department to the White House being run by Christian whites who don’t care about anyone nonwhite or under the highest tax bracket, who unthinkingly run over the poor and minorities in the single minded goal of adding another few million to the billions held by themselves and their corporate masters.
Unsurprisingly, those people tend to be minorities themselves, and are at least socialist, if not further left.
I think this makes a lot of sense, at least to me; I sort of compare it to the Second Amendment and gun control debates. However, I don’t think we’re yet at the point where this is a majority view. Why not? What gives you faith that either the government and basic power structures in this country do generally serve the common good, or that the public still has power to change things when they don’t? (Those who I’m talking about would answer for you: apathy and blindness, but I’d like to hear what you think.)
At federal level the democracy has long since been lost to the owners of capital.
But you see things like same sex marriage growing from state level, and the fundamental shift in the healthcare debate in a decade (from unamerican/socialised to where you are now), and maybe that is the way forward. Even the War on Drugs has quietly faded, maybe. Grassroots.
My own view is that the one significant hope the USA has is … the internet; the parameters of a debate can no longer be confined and defined as they once were, under 30s look beyond national media and the national borders for context. It isn’t a generation that just accepts ‘exceptionalism’ in that white privileged way.
I honestly think that is what turned around the healthcare debate - remember all those entrenched town hall debates, but I can’t prove a thing.
I don’t know what can be done about the school-age indoctrination into God and Country, and all that singing hand on heart stuff. Viewed from a far, it’s creepy as hell.
Nothing gives me faith in the system. The latest outrage I saw was an article in the New Yorker depicting elder abuse carried out on a massive scale by agents of the state of Nevada. The cops, the courts, special caretakers were all conspiring to get elders declared incompetent and stealing their savings, property, etc.
Then there is the move to deprive the poorest of their voting rights, all in the name of some mythical voting fraud. And gerrymandered. And a Republican Supreme Court whose decisions more or less openly are to support that party.
You might call me an ultra-left wing kook, but I always though of myself as a centrist, an open-eyed centrist. For example, while I admire Bernie as a person, I would not have supported him in a primary.
I’m neither a minority nor a socialist. I’m an Obama-type Centrist. (Ok, “progressive”)
Most of the messy push and pull of factions in our democracy is fine, and probably a feature and not a bug. We make small steps forward and back, but the arch of history is long, and it bends towards justice.
The only thing that has truly shaken my faith in our system is the election (and continued support) of Trump. I’m willing to accept that people like McConnel and Ryan want a different legislative agenda than I do. Fine. But the fact that they will not openly oppose the most incompetent and obnoxious person ever to hold elective office reveals a corruptness so deep I cannot fathom it. The fact that tens of millions of voters simply do not give a shit about this country is so depressing that I don’t know what to think.
It’s not a majority view because the allegations you mention are almost entirely hysterical exaggeration.
The idea that police routinely shoot people without consequence is, you know, not true. There are some abuses and some marginal cases. These are, for the most part, dealt with appropriately. It’s not, IOW, much of a problem, and all the screaming in the world isn’t going to change that. The Standing Rock protest was a bunch of environmentalists and Indians who didn’t want an oil pipeline so they protested to try to stop it. The rest of us decided that we did want the pipeline. “I didn’t get what I want so the system is corrupt” isn’t a strong argument when the majority does get what it wants. Obamacare was sold on the notion that “if you like your plan you can keep it”. That turned out to be a lie - now retaining Obamacare is being sold with “even if you don’t like your plan, you have to keep it”. That’s not a lot better. Etc.
I have already listened to most if not all of the Left’s silly-ass whining about shit that is mostly their own fault. Come up with some new complaints, will ya?
I don’t have any faith in our systems and think that America is becoming a third-world country. We are now completely Balkanized in to two separate cultures and I think each election we will lurch from red president to blue president each of whom will try to undo the work of the previous president. The only government entity that has any legitimacy across the entire political spectrum is the military and we are becoming a nation of wealthy elites and the rest. Any nation that has elected Donald Trump is deeply sick and probably not curable.
In the grand scheme of things, sure. The police only shoot a little over 1000 people a year, and of those, maybe only a few hundred of them were even avoidable shootings. (I’d call a shooting avoidable if the suspect doesn’t have a gun and isn’t actively charging with a knife. It is possible to de-escalate those. Also, shootings where no gun was seen, the officers just felt threatened)
Call it 300 deaths that are excessive. 10 times that many drown in pools.
But of those shootings, the officers involved are almost never punished. We’ve seen many caught on video, and they always find it was a good shoot.
They are almost never punished because the shootings are almost always justifiable. That’s my point. The vast majority of the time, there isn’t any consequence for the police because there shouldn’t be any consequences for the police.
A few years ago, my neighbor across the street was shot and killed by the cops. It was the first police shooting of a civilian in my community’s history. The cops suffered no consequence. Why? Because he was drunk out of his mind, his wife called the cops because he was assaulting her, and when the cops showed up, he went for a knife on the kitchen counter and then tried to get the cops’ gun away from them when they tried to arrest him.
That’s what most police shootings are like, black or white or Asian or Hispanic. The idea that black lives are considered of less worth than white is not true.
Tamir Rice must be the exception that proves the rule. If a 12 year old white kid was shot down after 2 seconds of analysis, I think the cops would have at least been fired.
I’ve always tried to be truthful, not use hyperbole to deceive, look for context instead of taking things for granted, take responsibility when I fuck up, and treat people with respect and dignity unless they really piss me off. It’s not catching on. The most powerful man in the world is the exact opposite of all those things, and that’s how he got to that lofty position. My values don’t make me successful. My model is not influential. Therefore, my faith in the system is zero, but…
No matter how rotten things get, it will eventually subside in a few years, and reset like a fallow field that has to take a year or two to be fit for planting. It’s during those times I feel any measure of faith.
Perspective, the older you get the more perspective you gain. North Korea is a bad situation but it is a backwards state who can’t feed its people or master technology from the 1960s. When I was a kid the USSR had hundreds of nuclear weapons and some of the best missile technology in the world. Why worry about North Korea when we already survived a much worse threat.
This repeats itself in so many ways. So many people with their dresses over their heads running around screaming doom while the world just keeps getting better and better. I remember when Jesse Jackson was running for president and people would joke about how if their ever was a black president he would be assassinated the first week. My parents went to segregated schools. Racial progress has come so fast people have had to invent microaggressions to have something to complain about. Crime is down, unemployment is low, the environment is getting better, there are fewer people in poverty than any time in world history. Despite all of the huge amounts of progress all around us there are people who love to complain and social media has given those people a platform. But if you ignore those complainers and have perspective it is a great time to be alive, probably the best time in world history.
Not just executive, legislative and judicial but also state vs federal, city vs state or federal, ngos and activist groups, the media, factions within the executive (like the judiciary) showing some independence.
Overall though I don’t have a ton of faith. The government is in the hands of the ownership class and voters felt Donald Trump was qualified to be president. The fact that 63 million voters felt Trump was qualified to be president is a sign that we have severe problems as a country. Plus the problems we need to solve (health care, energy, lowered standards of living, etc) will not be addressed because the solutions cut into the power and profits of the ownership class. So all we get is at best, token reform and pablum.
What does five me faith is states willing to stand up to both.
I don’t have faith in it, Empires rise and fall, nothing new and USA is not exempt from that. Nor is it immune to corruption and favoritism. It does introduce some amazing interplay between ruling powers and allows us greater freedom in that ‘disputed territory’. And I do believe that is a major cornerstone of our freedom, not that it is freedom given to us, but multiple ruling powers (both governmental, and non-governmental, secular and non-secular) are competing over the same powers which negate each other and allow freedom. The battle for power is greatly exemplified today in the executive branch with the current president, which seems to be equating to loss of some freedoms, though there is a pushback with the powers of the courts and legislature which re-established freedoms as each one tried to gain control.
I have faith in God and God’s provision for us, though I am greatly saddened by the amount of human suffering that empires cause both inside and to other nations. I do hope that there is a underplay of God’s kingdom (basically be kind to each other in Atheist speak), that seems to be gradually growing which will eventually end the current systems, but it’s not a straight line up, but a very bumpy ride. God bless and help us all.
There are two issues that, in my view, are ticking timebombs.
Economics. Entrenched economic theory was created when there was more work than men, by economists who never imagined it would be othwerwise. The current paradigm does not know how to distribute wealth in a world that has more men than work.
Nationalism. There is an unchallenged global caste system. People, by birth, are consigned to a prospect for life, and only one person in hundreds ever succeeds in rising to a higher caste. Anyone born into the American caste is globally, a Brahmin, and guaranteed well-being unimaginable to billions of Untouchables, identified by nationality at birth, who will live and die in squalor, regardless of personal ambition or merit.
I have some faith in the system, but I also recognize how history works. The “system” is orders of magnitude better now than it was 100 years ago and 100 years from now they’ll be talking about how awful and backwards we were. Things are better now than when I was a young adult in the 90s and things will probably be even better when I’m old and gray in 2050.
I’m not Shodan, but this grabbed me by the eyebrows…
No, no it does not. I identify as a conservative, but I have zero faith in the system. It is my opinion that our government is thoroughly corrupt and has been since at least the late 90s. This has only worsened until it has finally reached its current nadir in the Obama presidency and while the faces have changed we are still wallowing at or near the bottom of the abyss.
I don’t mean to pick on you specifically Leaper, (I get that no offense was intended and was meant to be humorous)but what you said is…well, a just not well thought out thing I’ve heard more than once (mostly not in these forums) that really bugs me about political debate these days.
