I think it’s important that we don’t settle for just enduring Trump. We need to actively oppose him. We need to send a message to other politicians. It can’t be “It doesn’t matter what you do. You can be as bad a President as you want and you’ll still get the same thing that a good President gets. So don’t bother obeying the rules unless you feel like it.”
We need to re-affirm the message of the Nixon presidency; we need to tell future bad presidents that if they go too far, they will lose their presidency.
We need to send a similar message to other politicians. It’s been the Republicans but the Democrats could someday go bad too, so they need to hear it as well. We need to tell them that they don’t own the government. That you can’t do whatever you want just because you have control of the government. That even when you have control of the government, you still need to uphold some standards. And if you don’t, you’ll be removed from power by the voters.
Oh-oh, asahi AND Smapti here in the same thread, posting relatively close to one another.
(Oh I josh…chill)
(taken from clusterfuck thread but should be fine here):
Let’s see if I feel you, here - Trumpian knuckledraggers need to get rounded up and shipped off to dilapidated hockey rinks or something?
It still sounds so…vague.
Ok then…We’d have to establish NICE (Nice Immigration Chaperones and Encouragers) agents to bust into peoples’ homes and round them up with plastic nunchucks, which would have the least amount of carbon footprint for perp arrest I can think of (well, barring jiu-jitsu).
I’ve always wanted to repurpose and drive a bookmobile on the track, but for street use - why not set up a fleet and dispatch them to various alt-right “klatches” and whatnot.
Each bookmobile would embed itself as close as possible to the establishment (or just
about any tavern) and parked so that the side door (with a “FASHY PIZZAGATE DEBATES INSIDE HERE! YES!!!” sign right above it) is in view. Maybe toss in a couple of hot, bored blondes in bikinis, who just happen to be milling about.
Once there’s enough polo and khaki’ed doofi inside my tricked-out (ha, as it were) TruthVan, a large flat screen tv will show a video of the re-eduction camp they’re about to go to, as a metal bar wall slams down behind them as I drive away in this souped-up monstrosity, partying with said blondes.
Exactly what’s in the video or what’s in store for them at Camp Spork I’ll have to hand the baton off before my buttsploding mind goes on strike or into receivership.
Indeed. And, to reiterate my original, the problem is not that Trump voters were desperately busy and stressed good-faith actors who were just trying to make the best decision with the information available to them. For all his many other faults, Trump has never tried to hide the fact that he’s an amoral, venal, corrupt, ignorant, incompetent, inexperienced, authoritarian, lying conman. The problem isn’t that his voters didn’t recognize it, or even that they didn’t care about it; the problem is that they like it.
A big part of how we got to where we are now has been the right-wing media bubble. When/if the Dems regain control of the government (and it’ll probably need to be all 3 branches), they need to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, and apply it to cable as well as broadcast TV and radio. Fox and Rush and Sinclair and so forth will still be able to say what they say, but other voices will be able to get some time on their channels to rebut their nonsense.
It’ll get some of their viewers to realize that the world isn’t exactly what Fox etc. say it is. I’m not counting on a huge effect from that, but every little bit helps.
I have higher hopes for this: if the occasional shot of a football player kneeling makes them uncomfortable with watching the NFL, the occasional discordant voice on Fox will make it harder for them to watch Fox News continuously.
Also, it’ll make it harder for new people to get sucked into the bubble if the bubble has punctures in it.
Or else you can just wait a few years. I mean, no-one under 50 gets their news from TV any more, so as soon as all the alte kakers die, Fox will collapse.
You’re confusing ‘fairness doctrine’ with ‘equal time.’ The latter only applies to political campaigns.
Besides, MSNBC has already been doing that for years. Scarborough isn’t exactly a leftist.
Not sure what’s so odious about a bit of regulation that wouldn’t restrict what anyone said. It would just ensure that a modest amount of access was given to other points of view as well.
This bit of ‘odious’ regulation applied to broadcast TV and radio for decades (ending in 1986), and somehow the Republic survived those years.
This is false. To view democracy as merely a system where citizens are physically able to vote is trivially superficial and meaningless. It has to be a system where informed citizenry exercise rational self-determination by making informed choices on the issues. A delusional idiot who gets all his information from the voices in his head is not capable of rational self-determination, and neither is a delusional idiot who gets all his information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or his Facebook friends. Compounding the problem of ignorance is apathy, leading to dangerously low voter turnout and therefore undue influence of special interests and motivated crackpots.
This has nothing to do with whether I like the voters’ choices or even if their choices appear to be objectively bad for them. It has to do with the fact that they don’t know what the fuck they’re voting on. Ask any typical Trump voter for an in-depth description of any of today’s major issues to see the truth of this. For that matter, ask Trump himself, someone who has elevated both ignorance and lying to an art form. To quote the motto of the Washington Post, democracy dies in darkness.
…and survive the inevitable court challenge. Without the use of limited public airwaves as part of the government argument legislating content in the press gets difficult.
Ha! It’s cute you think the Democrats haven’t gone bad. In any federal-level election, our two choices are:
Candidate 1. Somebody who is a multi-millionaire and needs to raise tens of thousand of dollars every few days, and whose policies are going to favor big corporations and the 1% while hurting the middle class, and is pro-huge military, pro spying on all US citizens, and pro “tough on crime”
vs
Candidate 2. Somebody who is a multi-millionaire and and needs to raise tens of thousand of dollars every few days, and whose policies are going to favor big corporations and the 1% while hurting the middle class, and is pro-huge military, pro spying on all US citizens, and pro “tough on crime”
Guess which one is D and which one is R? Oh that’s right, it doesn’t matter. Neither one is going to try to solve any of the large systemic problems we have as a country.
I’ll stipulate that R for the last decade or so have been notably worse, because they’ve added a bunch of comic-book-villain-caricature-of-evil things to their platform and have roundly flouted the need for facts, decorum, or any connection at all to reality when being elected, all while putting barely-sentient man-children in charge of our nuclear arsenal.
But let’s not pretend that if we could all just line up and vote the RIGHT, D-flavored multi-millionaire kleptocrat in, everything will be dandy.
It will just be the difference between chained to a wall and set on fire, and then the fire getting put out. Sure, we’re no longer on fire, but we’re still chained to the wall, and that’s not changing anytime soon.
So yes, absolutely we need to vote to put the fire out! It’s a matter of urgency and importance, because we’re all fucked if we don’t, and I completely agree that we should do that. The problem is after that, we can’t vote on not being chained to the wall, due to systemic corruption and the way our institutions are set up.
And that is why a “deep state” is useful. The people who are directing the plane where to go shouldn’t necessarily be the ones flying it. If in mid flight, the passengers all vote that we are going to Hawaii rather than to American Samoa, that’s fine. What shouldn’t happen though, is the passenger with the most votes gets to fly the plane. No, we should have people trained for that.
Politicians should be directing the government, not actually running it. As long as they are not actually part of the functionality of the govt, they are easily replaceable, and term limits would only be a good thing.
Well, we don’t want to cower in the closet with a shotgun, and while I see that future as avoidable, I do see it within our potential future light cone. We need to be aware that there is a future where we are cowing in our closets with shotguns, and seek to avoid that.
It is sometimes hard to tell who is conservative and who is liberal sometimes on this board, but anyone who is not actively advocating for Trump’s removal from office, along with all of the rest of this corrupt administration, by any legal means possible is part of the normalization of what is happening to our country.
Hope is useful. Hope means that there is a way out. Hope does not mean that we will survive this, it only means that it is possible to do so, if things go the right way. If we are in a burning building, we can hope to fight the fire, we can at least hope to get out.
Faith is what is useless. Faith means that we will find the way out. Faith means that we will survive this. Faith means that things will go the right way. If we are in a burning building, Faith means that we expect to be rescued, and will sit on our asses till we die.
We need hope, but faith, not so much.
Republicans like to talk about how incompetent and useless government is, and they want to win elections so that they can prove it.
Yeah, now we have people who are willing to sell out their fellow citizens now, and their own children in the future, for but a few dollars worth of tax cuts.
To be fair, that could actually be an accurate tally of “eligible” voters.
Trump is not the person at the switchboard who has to decide whether the train is going to hit the bus full of nunneries or the bus full of orphanages. Trump is the person who sold off the safety equipment (for pennies on the dollar) that prevents this situation from occurring in the first place.
I get where you are coming from on this, I really do. I don’t know the best way to reach out to people who have already closed themselves off in their bubbles. It seems tempting to break into those bubbles, but I don’t know that that will work. I do kind of like the John Oliver method of paying for advertising on their networks that pops the bubble a bit, but I don’t know if that really works.
One problem with that, is that as soon as it is implemented, suddenly, any talk about global warming needs “equal time” for the opposition. Any talk about evolution needs “equal time”. There are really things that don’t have two sides to them, and requiring equal time and fairness means that people can take issues that are well settled, and give them legitimacy by demanding that they are treated with the same respect and given the same time as the settled science.
When there were 3 national TV broadcasters, and not many more radio, it actually did make sense to make sure that all points of view had a chance to be heard by the public. As our current system has plenty of outlets for all views, that’s less of a problem.
Also, the FCC doesn’t regulate cable because it is not using the public airwaves, and the govt has no regulation on what goes through those little wires. Anything that would regulate what cable sends would be something that can also regulate what ISPs send.
Keep in mind that it is not entirely hands off. The FCC does regulate cable in that the cable companies are not allowed to broadcast, even if that broadcast is due to a malfunction that compromises the cable integrity, and allows signal leakage. When I was an employee, one of our constant jobs was to have leak meter running all the time, and fix or at least report any leaks that we detected, as they got some serious fines for that.
If you were watching MSNBC, and Rachel Maddow was forced to have a young earth creationist on to balance her segment on science, would that keep you out of the “bubble”, or would you just dismiss such nonsense?
Honestly, I don’t know that there can be much done with the media that doesn’t involve serious violations of free speech. The only approach that I can see is that you make a law, similar to the one that requires broadcasters to air an hour of news every day in return for their license to use the airwaves, that also disallows news to be sponsored by advertising during the news broadcast, but is instead funded out of the budget for the rest of the day. Say, x% of advertising revenues are earmarked for news. Then at least, the news is no longer competing for eyeballs to make money from sponsors, I think that would fix some of the sensationalism in the news that does tend to polarize.
It would also make a 24 hours news channel unprofitable by definition.
You can do that. The first is through public access channels, that the cable companies are required to make available for members of the community to be able to broadcast on.
You can also go to the cable company, and ask them to carry your content. If you demonstrate that there is enough demand for your content, they will carry it.
I think I’ve had some good interactions with you, I can’t remember specifically what though. What, more specifically, do you fear is going to happen, and how specifically do you feel people will suffer?
For starters, the Kavanaugh appointment could lead to an overturning, down the road, of Roe vs Wade.
The EPA is no longer carrying out its mandate. The environment, and us, will eventually suffer if such a destructively negligent path is continued.
In case you’re not aware, those smug celebrities don’t do what they’re told. That’s how we roll over here on the free side of things. There is no “THE left” in any sense other than the most general. Our comments are all things we word ourselves other than reading word-for-word identical.
Ran across this quote I’d like to throw into the mix. From almost 75 years ago.
“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity. They claim to be super patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesman for monopoly and vested interests. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” - VP Henry A. Wallace April 9, 1944