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The Politics Thread
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The producers want someone who Republicans respect but who won’t go along with Trump’s bullshit.
Good luck with that.
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Insider trading if you are in Congress? It’s just the free market.
There’s a big catch to Ms. Pelosi’s “free-market economy” claim: U.S. representatives and senators have access to a lot of confidential, nonpublic information. That gives them an unfair advantage in trading.
Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, put it this way in a tweet: “It’s a ridiculous comment! She might as well have said ‘let them eat cake.’ Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But your average [person] doesn’t get confidential briefings from government experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the price of stocks.”
Pelosi faces pushback over stock trade defense | TheHill
While Pelosi defended the practice of lawmakers and their spouses engaging in stock trades, she stressed that they should abide by transparency laws.
“We have a responsibility to report on the stock,” Pelosi said, “If the people aren’t reporting, they should be.”
Her response didn’t seem well thought out – honestly, it makes her look dumb. She’s benefiting by the millions from her participation in the stock market, so she should have been ready for the question.
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More concerning though, of course, is that the people in charge of keeping the economy alive are basically just lying to us to keep their jobs.
Jerome Powell risks Alan Greenspan’s fate | TheHill
“Had Powell heeded Friedman’s warning that monetary policy operates with a long lag, he would not be as reluctant as he now seems to be to start tightening monetary policy by dialing back the Fed’s aggressive bond buying program and by signaling a willingness to raise interest rates. Instead, by waiting for clear signs of inflation to appear, Powell is more than likely to have waited too long to prevent another period of unwelcome inflation.”
Yeah, like you have to actually be able to see the cliff you’re about to drive off before you hit your brakes.
Powell has been either outright lying or intentionally downplaying inflation until his reappointment was in the bag. You can say anything is transitory. The Great Depression turned out to be transitory, didn’t it? World War 2 was transitory. It doesn’t mean anything.
Now, we can retire the term “transitory” according to Powell who was the one that used it in the first place. How about we retire the term “credibility” as well?
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This heifer:
Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Kwanzaa ‘a fake religion created by a psychopath’
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Short answer: yes. It’s a nightmare for a huge number of people.
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Well, here’s some good news:
Twitter permanently suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account
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Oh, joy:
US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns
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Yes. It is massively fucked up and the government doesn’t give a shit, despite it hitting a good few kids of their core voters.
Yup, essentially a large number of MPs are landlords, it even often becomes a feature of the job because they get a London home in order to attend parliament there and so having at least 2 properties is a feature of the job.
So as Evan says in that video it’s hard to see what is a clearly broken system being fixed. It was pretty clear with Grenfell to me that natural justice says the people who installed unsafe and often illegal cladding should shoulder the responsibility but it has fallen pretty much on the tenants who now have unsafe and unsellable homes. It’s an absolute disgrace but they get away with it.
Evan Edinger’s Youtube channel is pretty good by the way, he’s an American who moved to London and he gives a very even handed view.
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Honestly, for all the blame we load on to “deniers” for all the problems in the world, it has to pointed out that the primary reason people have lost faith in science, politics and economics is because the news media gives them every reason.
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the news media
This is at the top of the list of the causes of most problems today.
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Yep, the news media doesn’t get nearly enough blame for their role in the downfall of society. 100 companies are responsible for 70% of global greenhouse emissions, yet instead of shouting that constantly in their headlines, the news media says “You peasants better learn to like eating dog or dog food if you want to stop climate change because this is all totally your responsibility and certainly there is nothing our gracious corporate overlords can do about it. Now excuse us while we hop on our private jet to go stand outside in a hurricane so you can see how many of your pets you need to eat to prevent this in the future”.
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And a major contributir to this result:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-biden-election-2020-poll-victory
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In the US, the descent began when network news divisions were placed under the entertainment divisions. News was never a money maker for networks – it was more or less a public service. The entertainment divisions are ratings and profit driven. When those factors are now your drivers for a news division, of course it will become a shitshow.
The profit and ratings issue gets exacerbated with the cable news networks. Same problems, but now you have to go 24/7/365. You have to fill all of that time somehow. That’s where the talking heads come in. Give some people a hour each day to express opinions on the news. Now you have people watching the talking heads and think they are news reporters, not a live action op-ed piece.
The internet comes into the picture and shit gones fucking insane. Anyone can post on the web and claim they are “reporting the news” when they are some asshole in his bedroom regurgitating talking head bullshit or something a crazy relative spat out their ass. It’s all confirmation bias. When a source is genuinely trying to be factual, even they are called into question because personal biases and bad reporting have contaminated the well.
I give credit to The Factual. They try to show the biases via ratings and labels and find the most factually-presented stories.
It’s why you have to look at stories from various different sources and be able to recognize inherent opinions and biases in the stories, reporters, editorial, and yourself.
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In the US, the descent began when network news divisions were placed under the entertainment divisions. News was never a money maker for networks – it was more or less a public service. The entertainment divisions are ratings and profit driven. When those factors are now your drivers for a news division, of course it will become a shitshow.
Behind the Bastards had an episode recently that focused on whathisname, Rush Limbaugh, in which they also mentioned how the death of the FCC Fairness Doctrine was kind of the beginning of this process we’re seeing now, and that killing it was a deliberate step by Republicans so there would never be another Nixon again (that is, public opinion actually leading to a president being impeached and the positive role the media played in that because people actually had some trust in the reporting).
It’s not just money-making. I mean, it is, but it’s also a result of a very deliberate strategy by people like Limbaugh and Ailes and Murdoch and Roger Stone and their political allies (who are also making a lot of money of course).
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Today is the one year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol
I don’t usually watch this talk show much, but this video interviewing people on the street just has me smh…
It was Bill Maher who spoke about how stupid this country is. It sounded insulting at the time, but the
more and more you see “interviews” like this (ie. The Daily Show videos at Trump rallies)… well, you know.I mean… there was even a hamburger campaign about a 1/3 pounder that was stopped because people thought it was less than a
quarter pounder. Also, years ago, there was a TV comedy segment question in the street “Should heterosexuals be allowed in office?” and… never mind. -
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Today is the one year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol
I don’t usually watch this talk show much, but this video interviewing people on the street just has me smh…
It was Bill Maher who spoke about how stupid this country is. It sounded insulting at the time, but the
more and more you see “interviews” like this (ie. The Daily Show videos at Trump rallies)… well, you know.I mean… there was even a hamburger campaign about a 1/3 pounder that was stopped because people thought it was less than a
quarter pounder. Also, years ago, there was a TV comedy segment question in the street “Should heterosexuals be allowed in office?” and… never mind.Americans seem to often be very negative about their own country. I think there is a kind of propaganda, coming mostly from the left side of the political spectrum, maybe starting in the 70s, about how Americans are generally stupid, superficial, selfish, rotten. This is mirrored on the right side by propaganda that the US has drifted from its “Christian roots” and is too permissive. I wish there would be more balance and people would point out the good as well as the bad.
I think there are similar currents in society here in Europe but the self bashing is less prominent than it is in the US and I think it is almost non-existent in Eastern Europe. While that mix of Christianity and right wing sentiment doesn’t really exist in Western Europe but you do have it in the East.
edit: Come to think of it maybe that last bit isn’t true, the French still have a staunch right wing Catholic part of the population. I’m not sure about Italy and Spain, but they probably do too. Although in Italy at least I believe that part of the population isn’t very big. And Spain is by some accounts the most pro-gay country in Europe, so how Catholic can it really be.
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It was Bill Maher who spoke about how stupid this country is. It sounded insulting at the time, but the
more and more you see “interviews” like this (ie. The Daily Show videos at Trump rallies)… well, you know.Jordan Klepper did some truly fantastic work this year.
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It could be….sometimes it seems for (a lot of) Americans their country is either the greatest place ever or the worst.
A lot of that rhetoric stems from which side of the political spectrum the peron is and which side is in office.
Yeah I also think it is due to the two party system. With that system, it’s all or nothing, two parties demonize each other and are in no way willing to compromise. (For the record I think the Republicans are more guilty of this than the Democrats: the dems seem a bit more willing to do bipartisan stuff. But I understand it’s tough to work together if the other side is calling you satanic pedophiles…)
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Thanks @Christian for that video
I wanted to post some of them but this compilation video did the job
What is it? Is it a brainwashing? The proverbial Kool Aid drinking? Being severely undereducated?
The people that time forgot?It was Neil Degrasse Tyson who echoed Carl Sagan when he said that the education system failed a lot of people (or they failed the system). I mean other situations like Flat Earthers, Holocaust deniers, moon landing deniers, Covid deniers, anti vaccine, Done my own research, whacky conspiracy theorists… The list goes on and on.
I post the words of Isaac Asimov:
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What is it? Is it a brainwashing? The proverbial Kool Aid drinking? Being severely undereducated? The people that time forgot?
I think, unironically, capitalism. The Trump crowd is mostly disappointed by jobs going away, old industrial cities delapidating etc. And there is a kind of hardening of the culture because of different groups blaming each other. I also think there is a kind of divide and conquer thing being engineered by elites, getting different groups in society to fight each other when they should be working together fighting for everybody’s rights.
I think I’ve seen that Asimov quote a lot of times now. Get new material Al!
The undereducation thing, I don’t know. People who have had little education can still be wise. Many of the hardline Trumpers just strike me as bitter, angry, disenfranchised.
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It could be….sometimes it seems for (a lot of) Americans their country is either the greatest place ever or the worst.
A lot of that rhetoric stems from which side of the political spectrum the peron is and which side is in office.
Yeah I also think it is due to the two party system. With that system, it’s all or nothing, two parties demonize each other and are in no way willing to compromise. (For the record I think the Republicans are more guilty of this than the Democrats: the dems seem a bit more willing to do bipartisan stuff. But I understand it’s tough to work together if the other side is calling you satanic pedophiles…)
With the politicians, there was a willingness to “reach across the aisle” in the past to get things done. They may not have each gotten everything they wanted, but the compromises got them something.
I think things changed when Obama was elected and the Tea Party Republicans came to power. Unlike Old Guard Republicans, the TPs would not compromise and actively blocked progress. They even turned against OG Republicans. The TP then mutated into Trump supporters, who have become even more batshit crazy.
It’s very telling about the state of the Republican Party that at the anniversary recognition yesterday at the House, the only two Republicans present were Dick and Liz Cheney.
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For the record: CRT is actually taught in some law schools in the first year for the students. It was never proposed to my knowledge to be part of the k-12 curriculum. Yet the GOP played it up to the ignorant constituents as a threat to the white well being.
It is pretty easy to just make shit up, keep saying it enough until people believe it.
In the UK the press spent years (including a journalist called Boris Johnson) writing made up nonsense about the EU, that they were banning sausages, bendy bananas, selling pints of beer – none of which was ever true but they told the lie enough times. In the same way now millions of Americans are convinced critical race theory is being taught in elementary schools when it just doesn’t exist.
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but some of it has its own cultish and sometimes racist overtones.
Give examples, please.
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I think, unironically, capitalism. The Trump crowd is mostly disappointed by jobs going away, old industrial cities delapidating etc. And there is a kind of hardening of the culture because of different groups blaming each other. I also think there is a kind of divide and conquer thing being engineered by elites, getting different groups in society to fight each other when they should be working together fighting for everybody’s rights.
I agree.
That’s the thing with conspiracy theories and fascist movements. You can fight them all you want, but the only way to defeat them in the long term is to make sure that people are doing well and living in a society that covers their basic needs. Which is why it is so fucking depressing that most of the alternatives to the crazies are basically economic neo-liberals like Scholz, Macron or Biden (who are all supposed to be on the left in some way, but economically really aren’t).
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No clear examples on why CRT is bad? Gee, what a surprise.
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No clear examples on why CRT is bad? Gee, what a surprise.
I waded into that debate one time, but everybody on this site disagrees with me so I’m not doing that again. Everybody can just make up their own mind.
And of course I didn’t say CRT is bad, I just disagree with a small part of it.
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I just disagree with a small part of it.
What part?
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I am literally just asking what parts you disagree with.
If you don’t want to discuss stuff then maybe shut the fuck up about them in the first place.
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I am literally just asking what parts you disagree with.
If you don’t want to discuss stuff then maybe shut the fuck up about them in the first place.
Fair enough.
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I think the name is a bit of a hindrance. Putting “theory” at the end of anything like this is not going to be taken correctly just as people still criticize the Big Bang as only a theory. I honestly feel that CRT is something its opponents would call it… and it sounds like a venereal disease.
At the same time, it is primarily a very specific set of tenets that provide a good framework for resolving conflicts inside social institutions – especially in the court system – and in regard to taxation and power of government against individuals.
There are difficulties involved in communicating it, obviously. Go to a homogenously white community in West Virginia where they are suffering from unemployment, environmental damage and rampant drug abuse, and it’s not going to sound relevant. Even going to middle class and upper class minority and immigrant communities and there will the same resistance to the perception of it.
A lot of this is because while CRT is a part of the perspective, the bigger problem is the place of the poor in society. Not long before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. started advocating for poor people and even encountered resistance among his own allies in the civil rights movement because his aim was not directly related to race. Focusing only on race is only going to provide greater advantages for some people already succeeding in the current systems but leave the poor people facing the greatest challenges unaffected.
Based on the basic principles:
“First, race is socially constructed, not biologically natural.” Can anyone really disagree with this unless they are White Supremacist or a member of the Nation of Islam?
“Second, racism in the United States is normal, not aberrational: it is the ordinary experience of most people of colour.” To this I would add that a kind of racism is also the experience of most poor people as well. “White trash,” “rednecks,” “inbred hillbillies” and “dumb hicks” are equivalent to racial slurs and poor people in these areas face many of the same sorts of discrimination as poor minorities in the same areas or in cities.
“Third, owing to what CRT scholars call “interest convergence” or “material determinism,” legal advances (or setbacks) for people of colour tend to serve the interests of dominant white groups.” Again, I’d look at the economic status effect as well as “dominant white groups” really means middle and upper class whites. Also, in the U.S.A., you can see how these advances also benefit affluent non-white groups against poor community members – such as the dominance of the influence of Korean business owners compared to the Latino and poor white and black residents in Koreatown here in Los Angeles. Or here in the Western U.S. the conflict between native tribes in regard who is racially pure enough to take part in the profits of Casinos on native lands. If a person of color is a member of the middle and upper classes, they may still experience some racial resistance compared to their white peers, but it is not really accurate to say their experience is anything representative or comparable to the experience of poor blacks or even poor whites in their own communities where the greatest social barriers and setbacks occur.
“Fourth, members of minority groups periodically undergo “differential racialization,” or the attribution to them of varying sets of negative stereotypes, again depending on the needs or interests of whites.” Again, who can really disagree with this? At the same time, it is hard to determine exactly how applicable it can be outside specific cases. In a court case, for example, it should be taken into account, but it is also hard to tell kids to stop pretending to be thugs when the “thug life” is so strongly promoted and not just by whites.
“Fifth, according to the thesis of “intersectionality” or “antiessentialism,” no individual can be adequately identified by membership in a single group” Again, this seems obviously true.
“Sixth, and finally, the “voice of colour” thesis holds that people of colour are uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of other members of their group (or groups) regarding the forms and effects of racism.” This seems a bit in opposition to the previous fifth tenet, so I’d agree to the extent that it can be generalized as much as it can be demonstrated. I’m especially suspect of some extraordinary or exceptional individuals claiming to represent or to be able to speak to the common experience of others in much different economic circumstances.
However, it is not really about education directly – it is about the way institutions and especially governments and businesses change to better serve racial groups (and I would say poor people in general) by broadening and perceiving things more clearly.
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Greens and the social democrat party couldn’t form a coalition without the FDP
We’ve got a similar coalition, although a bit more to the right than yours. It is VVD -our equivalent to your FDP – a Christian democrat party, a more left wing Christian party and one “leftish” neoliberal technocratic party, the D66. The D66 is a weird bunch, and I don’t understand why they get as much votes as they do. They started as a populist party that wanted referendums and more direct democracy in 1966 yet they completely turned around on those ideals, abolished the referendums we had, and fully embracing neoliberalism. It as as centrist a cabinet as it gets.
It is also exactly the same coalition that had to step down because of a benefits scandal before the election. It seems the voters didn’t give a shit about the citizens who got fucked because of this scandal and just voted the same way they did before.
Dutch childcare benefits scandal – Wikipedia
Recently I like our Socialist party (despite its unfortunate roots as a Marxist-Leninist party). They’re very low on the bullshit scale.
Socialist Party (Netherlands) – Wikipedia
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I think the name is a bit of a hindrance. Putting “theory” at the end of anything like this is not going to be taken correctly just as people still criticize the Big Bang as only a theory. I honestly feel that CRT is something its opponents would call it… and it sounds like a venereal disease.
I disagree. The whole thing around Critical Race Theory is a manufactured controversy, to the point that Christopher Rufo, the guy who manufactured it has spoken about doing so openly. It could be called anything, or say anything even vaguely about race and the reaction would be the same.
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I’m not a socialist and certainly not a Marxist (Leninist or Maoist or Juche), but my essential proposition is that if it was easier for people to be poor and working class, most of a society’s problems would be manageable and not continuous crises. If anything, I’m more a Georgist and would rather see cooperatives be the primary expression of capitalism rather than corporations (though I see a lot of benefits to corporate culture contrary to popular opinion).
Well they’re not that kind of socialist really, they’re more the Bernie Sanders like, social democrat party, the marxist leninist phase was in the 70s when lots of left wingers flirted with things like maoism. But they don’t embrace neoliberalism like most other left wing parties here seem to do. They’re mostly about getting better wages for workers, better social security and healthcare, unions, etc. I think they would also support cooperatives instead of the corporations we have now.
Btw their leader in the senate is called Tiny Kox. ;)
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Just to give @johnnyjoseph an example… This is from the Daily Show Jordan Keppler interviews at the Trump rallies:
Also: They are the same people against disposing of Confederate Statues because they say it is an attempt to “erase history”, yet they don’t want CRT at all because…
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That works on both sides though. The left believes its own brand of bullshit.
I’ve said before many times that I’m not sure what people think is ‘left’ or ‘right’ and what it truly means.
In many ways it is a media creation, the culture wars. Jeremy Corbyn was labelled as ‘far left’ in the UK but he proposed tax rates for the rich that were lower than Thatcher’s. There’s no significant difference between Labour’s offering then and Kier Starmer’s ‘right wing’ one now as much as one had a beard and wore a peaked hat a few times and the other looks better in a suit.
The ‘left’ called loudly for cancelling TPP but Trump did it, maybe with different aims in mind but in the end it’s the same result.
Yes there is bullshit on the left, I have called it out here as damaging them, they could generally do better in the ‘keep saying something that doesn’t exist until people think it does’ angle.
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Just to give @johnnyjoseph an example… This is from the Daily Show Jordan Keppler interviews at the Trump rallies:
Also: They are the same people against disposing of Confederate Statues because they say it is an attempt to “erase history”, yet they don’t want CRT at all because…
I think these segments have a dishonest character. They always maximize the foolishness of the people who get interviewed, because that gets the most entertainment value. I suspect if they find a rational Trump supporter who is friendly and doesn’t say anything outrageously stupid they get edited out.
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I suspect if they find a rational Trump supporter who is friendly and doesn’t say anything outrageously stupid they get edited out.
“If” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
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Just to give @johnnyjoseph an example… This is from the Daily Show Jordan Keppler interviews at the Trump rallies:
Also: They are the same people against disposing of Confederate Statues because they say it is an attempt to “erase history”, yet they don’t want CRT at all because…
I think these segments have a dishonest character. They always maximize the foolishness of the people who get interviewed, because that gets the most entertainment value. I suspect if they find a rational Trump supporter who is friendly and doesn’t say anything outrageously stupid they get edited out.
You really don’t live in the US, do you Arjan?
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Rational might be too much to ask, but I think you can find Trump supporters people can at least empathize with. They’re not all monsters or people with a sub 70 IQ.
On the other hand, after Trump’s efforts to reverse the elections results I can understand how people are not willing to find the humanity in their political opponents. He attacked democracy so if people after that still stand by him…OK I can see how people are not willing to “reach across the aisle” and try to see some good in Trump supporters. Maybe I’m being naive here. But I think you have to try, I think the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
I miss Jim’s presence here…he could make that point better than I did.
The problem is that to vote for Trump specifically, and to some degree the Republicans at all you have to be OK with cruelty. Either you support some or all of it or the cruelty they impose on the poor, women, people of colour and LGBT people doesn’t matter to you.
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On that principle I refuse to believe all Trump supporters are just motivated by some innate lust for cruelty. I don’t think humans work that way.
You don’t need to be fueled by a lust for cruelty to turn a blind eye to it.
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Can’t recall when it was, maybe 2015 or 2017, just after a general election, there was a Question Time clip that went viral of a woman going to pieces.
Her benefits were being cut but she’d also voted Conservative. The response from some was: And she expected something different because?
One response is people don’t always know what they are fully voting for – and there’s so few constraints on MPs a vote is practically a blank cheque.
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Her benefits were being cut but she’d also voted Conservative. The response from some was: And she expected something different because?
One response is people don’t always know what they are fully voting for – and there’s so few constraints on MPs a vote is practically a blank cheque.
Yeah, or she voted for the Conservatives because they promised a crackdown on benefits and only expected it would effect the bad people, like that one infamous interview where the Trump supporter was angry because he hadn’t gone after the people they wanted him to.
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people don’t always know what they are fully voting for
Have you ever voted for a candidate you knew little about? do you think it is right to vote for things you know very little about it? I often end up voting negatively because I don’t want to fully research their platforms and just know I just don’t want some yahoo in a position of power.
I think most people can talk out their differences just by going out and having a pizza with a few good beers together. This excludes the fringe, the totally fucked up nazis and tankies and random psychos who are just filled with hate. Most people can agree if they engage in an honest friendly discussion. Most people are good, most people want the best for everyone.
That has stopped happening in the US. Trump supporters and the Right* have determined that rhetoric is evil and only exists to make them look bad. They believe that raised volume and threats of physical violence are their only effective weapons. American conservatives have been led to believe that they have been victimized by everyone else so they no longer believe in the best for everyone and don’t care if they hurt others in their attempts to get what they believe they are owed.
I honestly believe that starting a conversation with a Trump supporter is like pulling the pin on a verbal grenade. They immediately get aggressive and you scramble trying to put the pin back in the grenade before they blow up in your face.
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I don’t know the way forward but the idea that 50 % of the population just can’t be reasoned with is a recipe for despair. Even if it can’t be done I believe you have to keep trying.
Tell that to the Democrats who let the 49% Republicans stop everything they propose.
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Tell that to the Democrats who let the 49% Republicans stop everything they propose.
Even supposedly reasonable Republicans like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins end up voting the party line the majority of the time despite their rhetoric about bipartisanship.
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On that principle I refuse to believe all Trump supporters are just motivated by some innate lust for cruelty. I don’t think humans work that way.
You don’t need to be fueled by a lust for cruelty to turn a blind eye to it.
Well yeah I know…I don’t know the way forward but the idea that 50 % of the population just can’t be reasoned with is a recipe for despair. Even if it can’t be done I believe you have to keep trying.
It’s not 50%, it’s a marked minority who have a disproportionate amount of power because only about half of all Americans vote.
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It’s a lot about the failing of the systems too. The US and UK democracies rely a lot on vagueness and gentleman’s agreements.
The US system in particular is designed for bipartisan agreement but in truth politicians realised you can prosper with obstruction. Trump and later Johnson have just ignored the norms many times.
In truth neither country should have first past the post, it’s a silly system that encourages that kind of division. It disenfranchises people who want to vote outside the two big players. Part of the reason turnout can often be low is in a lot of places voting is rather pointless. Media organisations also have found it more profitable to be divisive, confrontation sells.
It’s hard to undo those things.
Don is right too that I think very few people vote on their local candidate or know much about them, political pundits in the UK estimated that in most cases the sway of the individual candidate affects maybe 2000 votes at tops when most constituencies have around 60,000 votes cast. It’s not much. There are exceptions when some individuals are high profile or controversial but in the main someone voting Labour or Tory is looking at Starmer or Johnson not Dave Smith or Jill Jones who may be standing.
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Since it was asked – Quite often there won’t be that much info on an individual, it’ll be more party policy lines.
I have sometimes gone with actually local candidates than someone 30 miles away. That doesn’t always work though.
The last local election produced an upset with an independent winning on a single issue. Did show voting can have an impact.
Edit:
ITV News has an email from May 2020 inviting over 100 staff at Downing St to a ‘bring your own booze’ party, with 30-40 attending, including Johnson.
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ITV News has an email from May 2020 inviting over 100 staff at Downing St to a ‘bring your own booze’ party, with 30-40 attending, including Johnson.
The only surprise with this government is that they successfully organised a piss-up.
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It’s not 50%, it’s a marked minority who have a disproportionate amount of power because only about half of all Americans vote.
Especially the people that always complain about the candidate that wins. At the same time, when you get screwed no matter who’s elected, doesn’t encourage participation so it is a vicious cycle.
You can see a similar phenomenon from local to national. If a community is in bad enough shape that it needs good government, it will be in too bad shape to actually have a good government. It’s the sort of thing that seems both obvious and counterintuitive in that our times of national prosperity weren’t directly the result of good government, but that we had a society that could support a good government. A bad culture or society can’t simply vote itself better.
The underlying health (or unhealth) of a nation will always be reflected in its politics and leaders.
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It’s a lot about the failing of the systems too. The US and UK democracies rely a lot on vagueness and gentleman’s agreements.
The US system in particular is designed for bipartisan agreement but in truth politicians realised you can prosper with obstruction. Trump and later Johnson have just ignored the norms many times.
In truth neither country should have first past the post, it’s a silly system that encourages that kind of division. It disenfranchises people who want to vote outside the two big players. Part of the reason turnout can often be low is in a lot of places voting is rather pointless. Media organisations also have found it more profitable to be divisive, confrontation sells.
It’s hard to undo those things.
Don is right too that I think very few people vote on their local candidate or know much about them, political pundits in the UK estimated that in most cases the sway of the individual candidate affects maybe 2000 votes at tops when most constituencies have around 60,000 votes cast. It’s not much. There are exceptions when some individuals are high profile or controversial but in the main someone voting Labour or Tory is looking at Starmer or Johnson not Dave Smith or Jill Jones who may be standing.
Here in the states on any given election day, you could be voting on candidiates at the local, county, state, and federal levels. Additionally, there may be propositions to vote on at the local, county, and state levels.
That means you could be voting on literally dozens of candidates and propositions on one single election day. While there are resources available to research who and what you will be voting on, that is still a huge amount of information to process. While some people will perform their due diligence prior to stepping into the voting booth, it should not surprise anyone that people vote straight tickets as a matter of simplicity and convenience.
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The problem is that to vote for Trump specifically, and to some degree the Republicans at all you have to be OK with cruelty. Either you support some or all of it or the cruelty they impose on the poor, women, people of colour and LGBT people doesn’t matter to you.
Exactly. To vote for him, you have to be ok with his bigotry, his grading women from 1-10 and grabbing them by… you know, his on the job training or severe lack of experience, his ignorance, his support by white supremacists and militias, his affairs (why did they go after Clinton so hard),.. I could go on, but you get the point.
Upthread, there was a posting on the evolution of the Tea Party to the modern day intolerable GOP. I take it that at the time, a lot of racists were really p*ssed off at seeing a black man as the POTUS and in charge, so it all evolved into all this.
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So predictably there’s a huge outcry over the new Downing Street revelations, and of course absolutely nothing will happen.
We are scheduled for a General Election in May 2022, and while the government could theoretically call one early, they have absolutely no incentive to do so. It doesn’t really matter to them how much we are all cursing them, they have two more years and we can do literally nothing about it.
There is a mechanism whereby the opposition could call a vote of no confidence, and force an early election, but in practice the government has an 80-seat majority and they are not going to lose that vote.
In the past, no-confidence could and did pass by government rebels voting against their own party. But where’s the incentive for that today? One incentive used to be that if you didn’t like your leader, you could hope he would lose a vote of no confidence and you could swap him out for the resulting General Election, gambling that you would still win the election. But recent years have shown us that the government can overthrow its leader and put a new one in without the need for a no confidence vote and gamble of a risky General Election. So even if some backbenchers don’t like Johnson, they have other avenues to get rid of him, without jeopardising their own seats.
So best result we can hope for from all this nationwide outrage is that the Tories overthrow Boris, puts in his replacement, and carry on exactly as they are now for two more years.
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Yeah, or she voted for the Conservatives because they promised a crackdown on benefits and only expected it would effect the bad people, like that one infamous interview where the Trump supporter was angry because he hadn’t gone after the people they wanted him to.
They can’t be singled out.
It’s been said that conservative poor whites still vote GOP and bitterly oppose the Dem benefits packages that would help them. It is theorized that because the packages would also help the POC groups as well, and since they can’t be singled out to benefit, they spite it all partly because they don’t want the poc groups to advance.
It is why the powers that be did not get rid of welfare for example. If you look at the records, there are actually more white households on welfare than black and other minority groups. (That fact is not mentioned for some reason). If the poc groups were separated by welfare, welfare would have gone a long time ago.
Actually, it was Ronald Reagan in his ’76 Presidential campaign, who took a case of a black woman in Chicago who applied for aid under 2 names. Reagan took that case, exaggerated it, and made her the “welfare queen” etc, and that narrative continues to this day, that all black people are lazy and in the ghetto (originally a term for Jews in Europe) cheating the government of welfare etc.
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We are scheduled for a General Election in May 2022
You gave me a start then, I thought I’d missed some important news. It’s May 2024!
(Although the rate we’ve been having them over the past five years, 2022 feels more likely.)
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While representative of nothing, judging by my Twitter feed this morning Boris Johnson is in a whole world of shit right now.
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