It’s a shared illusion, but an effective one. If everyone thinks like you, than the public has no influence. But if everyone believes that they have influence, and protests publicly and actually votes, then they do, in fact, have very great influence.
bolding mine - “Intelligent”? “Congress”? I think I see a problem with your base assumption.
Admitting you support Trump is like admitting you have a social disease around these parts. Even CNN mocks the buffoon. Not that we view Trump supporters as “evolutionally challenged,” we’re above that. We blame the lead paint in their school paste.
I know.
Who you promoted the hell out of in this thread. So much for not getting involved in politics. :rolleyes:
You are simply upset that your very fringe views do not have wide support.
Et voila, that is the democracy, it is not a failing of the democracy that a fringe ideological view is not able to impose itself.
It takes guts to admit you’re wrong, especially about something like this that really matters.
Glad your eyes have been opened on this.
As others have said, don’t forget the 2018 midterms. Not only is Congress up for grabs in 2018, but Arizona, along with most states, has elections for state legislature that year.
And in the meantime, call your Congresscritters about issues that matter to you. Phone calls are the most effective way to let them know how you feel, and a call generally only takes a minute or two. And right now, they’re running scared: they’ve been fantasizing about this moment when they’d drown the government in a bathtub, but we’re ringing their phones off the hook, telling them we actually like having health insurance and national parks and clean water and stuff like that.
If we keep the heat on them, we can at least limit the damage they do, because they’ll be too damned scared of us to tear everything down. And with luck, we can retake the House in 2018 and stop the bleeding.
But you’re not alone. There are a LOT of apolitical people who’ve suddenly woken up and started paying attention. Every political junkie I know has tales of spouses, friends, loved ones who might’ve voted before, but didn’t really follow politics more than casually, who are now turning into activists.
So there’s hope. We’re gonna take our country back, by God.
Here’s a suggestion; try not to call him/her a “congresscritter” when speaking to him/her. In fact, stop using that silly term entirely.
That was very early in the contest. I said many times that I favored a Clinton victory. I wouldn’t say I promoted her though.
Shhh. The adults are talking.
I agree that it is a shared illusion and an effective one. That is why governments are hard to beat.
I don’t seek to impose an ideology, I seek to withdraw from under the boot of yours. Democracy is not effective to that end. It just fools a lot of people into thinking their inconsequential actions determine outcomes. Like the poor OP, he feels responsible for
Trump’s insanity. You people are like the guy who wears dirty socks to help his favorite team win the game.
Is that what you call it when you stand in unison with your hand on your hearts looking up wistfully?
And it can be used for good or evil. A well informed and well meaning public, accepting this shared illusion, can actually move the government towards accomplishing good things. A poorly informed, or not well-meaning public is useful in being manipulated into supporting the accomplishment of bad things.
Paying attention to the news does nothing, in and of itself.
But it’s the first step. If you’re not informed, then you won’t even know that anything worth calling your Congresscritters about is even happening, until after the fact.
And the calls really do make a difference. And showing up at town hall meetings, when they have them, makes even more of an impression.
[ETA: link to town-hall spreadsheet removed; seems to be dead]
Yeah, because we read shit like this…
*(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart that he was ready to send U.S. troops to stop “bad hombres down there” unless the Mexican military does more to control them, according to an excerpt of a transcript of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press.
*
and we wonder how a nation could ever get itself into a position where the Idiot-in-Chief would threaten to invade a peaceful foreign country. Does that idiot not know that that’s an act of war?
I move to substitute in “nominated DeVos” in place of Mexico, because it’s looking like the Mexico thing is a hoax.
If it turns out to be real, then leave 'em both in.
Indeed it is but, although discretion is admittedly the better part of valour, I don’t feel inclined to keep my opinions to myself because they’re unpopular. Besides that what’s the point of a discussion where everyone agrees?
Believe it or not, not every Trump supporter is the stereotypical ignorant buffoon, although I will concede that far too many of them are. But that’s true of the left as well.
I won’t derail Idle Thoughts’ thread any further although I’m quite amenable to taking the debate up elsewhere should you so desire.
Well, ‘Congressperson’ just sounds clunky to me, and I’m not going to use that. Nor am I going to use 'congressman/woman or any similar construction.
I will continue using ‘congresscritter’ as a generic term for ‘person serving in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives.’ And I imagine you will manage to survive the annoyance of having to occasionally see the term.
Looks like someone took an intro philosophy class as an undergrad; so precocious.
Anyway, yeah we have an unhinged madman in the whitehouse and we need to take steps to mitigate the problem.
You keep telling yourself that, and you’ll continue to get the government you deserve. But the reality is that if more people bothered to inform themselves – with real information, not garbage posted on Facebook – about what the hell they’re voting on, and then got their asses out to actually vote, the present disaster would not have happened. If you have the ignorant electing an ignoramus, exacerbated by such stunning collective apathy that nearly half the population doesn’t bother to vote at all, you can hardly point to the result as a failure of democracy, because democracy works just fine in most civilized western nations.
I may not always agree with my federal or local governments, but I’m basically fairly content with them and certainly don’t consider them to be “the shittiest people imaginable”. Not to digress, but I’m happy to have universal public health care, for instance, and so are the folks in every other civilized nation. If you keep electing the shittiest people imaginable you really need to look a little further to figure out why.