volkris @volkris@social.cleverlibre.org
Since I guess everything is political these days, I'll identify as extremely liberal but without a home in US politics.
Mainly, there's so much misinformation out there that people in society have trouble even organizing into coherent political groupings. So I'd rather not talk about politics but instead focus on information and education. Nothing else matters until the bedrock of fact is buttressed.
So: Old man yells at clouds is a famous joke from The Simpsons, and it probably fairly describes what we do when venting on social media.
Joined Dec 2022
To state the obvious, not only does #Trump NOT get the peace prize that his supporters believe he deserves, but he likely contributed heavily to this selection critical of Israel, so squarely against the interests of his base.
Their guy screwed them over once again. Just another week in US politics.
They interpret laws, but they don't enforce their interpretations. They can't: they don't have executive authority.
That is core to the US design, keeping enforcement authority out of the hands of those interpreters as a check on their power.
As it was explained: "The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments."
But follow up back one step: if I vote for the representative to acts based on what big money wants him to do, then I'm saying I want a representative who does that.
Apparently I want it that way.
An awful lot of people actually DO want government that's like a WWE match, full of drama and sensationalism. They explicitly say so. Well, you and I might say they're voting for bad governance, but those constituents are getting the BS that they're asking for. They're being served what they want.
For others, they are ignorant as to the details but still get what they ask for. It's like they ordered a meal without knowing it's unhealthy. They still got the meal they wanted, they were still served.
In the end the system isn't failing its constituents. It is putting into office the people they vote for, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.
It's serving the constituents TOO well, if responsible governance was the goal. But it's not. The constituents don't want that.
We always need to emphasize that Trump is a cognitive mess, probably senile, and seems to have no idea what's going on around him.
So yes, along those lines let's say he, and the rest of reality, really IS removed from the mess Trump spouts out on a daily basis.
Tyrants? They have no power other than rhetoric. Some tyrants.
We ask them what they think and they tell us. That's the long and short of the major role of the Supreme Court in the US system, and that was very intentional specifically so that they could not become tyrants.
If we didn't decide to care what they had to say, that would be that, they could yell at clouds all day.
They have no power of their own.
But you can!
We build on knowledge without knowing *why* all the time. Heck, so much of our exploration these days is focused on going back to fill in the why even though we've already built a tremendous amount upon the what.
If nothing else consider basically everything built on quatum mechanics, which is quite a lot for modern society!
A lot of folks seem to treat knowledge almost as if it's witchcraft, as if there's something supernatural attaching to it. This bit of information is only good if it has the right intention or story or incantation behind it.
Sadly, in my experience it all comes down to information.
People would vote differently if they knew what they were voting for, but as a society we just don't have institutions in place to inform the population.
The duopoly doesn't fail its constituents. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, giving them the outcomes they're voting for. But it's the garbage in, garbage out principle: When people vote for bad outcomes, and get bad outcomes, that's a success of democracy. Yay.
There's a constant drumbeat of folks excitedly, actively supporting candidates after being misinformed about what those candidates have done.
Until we as a society get serious about informing the public the system will continue dutifully giving them the crap government that they're asking for.
This SHOULD have been the criticism of Trump the whole time. He might have lost his primary and reelection bid had it been.
Unfortunately, Democrats really pushed into the notion that he was an effective bad guy instead of an ineffective, senile, mush-for-brains.
Even with the example of Biden's dismissal in front of them Democrats chose the wrong strategy.
The people we elect to Congress could also remove him from office.
That they don't do that but we reelect them anyway comes down to us.
Bingo, but we need to emphasize one step back: we elect these congresspeople, and we reelect them, and we should probably stop doing that.
Congress is derelict in its duty? Well, their duty is to represent voters, and apparently the voters like it this way.
One nice thing about the US system is that its elevation of congresspeople means little you and little me don't have to fight the whole country. Rather, we can fight just the others in our states and districts to get better congresspeople elected.
It's an easier task!
BUT it only works if we take hold of that mechanism that's grown dusty over time with outsized attention on presidents, particularly THIS president that feeds on attention he doesn't technically have.
Back to the beginning, sure this is Trump fucking around, as his supporters elected him to do, but he can only fuck around because congresspeople fucked up in granting him the power.
And so many congressmen got elected and will continue to be reelected even as they enable Trump.
The more we focus on Trump the more we support him while shielding the enabling congresspeople from accountability.
Well, when I listen to them it's not so much bloodlust as crusade.
Conservatives constantly talk about childish framings of good guys vs bad guys as they seek to punish the bad for the sake of making the world better.
And there are constant biblical overtones throughout.
The blood is only a collateral consequence of executing those higher goals.
It's not hypocrisy if there isn't a coherent philosophy in the first place.
In other words, it's not contradicting a rule if there is no rule.
That's at the core of contemporary conservatism: conclusion first, finding supportive argument later, and bending facts third. You can hear it playing out every day of the week in Fox News adjacent media outfits.
@katrinakatrinka a quick breaking example:
Just now the Brian Kilmeade show, one of the biggest, was having an exchange about the guy sentenced to death by firing squad, saying it was great because it sends a message to "our enemies" that the US means business.
That's a complete ignorance of law or coherent philosophy, just a bunch of people cosplaying general.
I've always wished there was more attention to this detail:
Constitutionally the President has a duty to find someone that the Senate will approve to fill vacancies. There is no exception for party: if the Senate wants someone the President doesn't like, tough, the President is still required to nominate such a person.
Should the President fail to appoint someone with approval of the Senate he can be impeached over it.
But take another quote from the piece you linked, 'What remains of the “conservative” strands in the public discourse is a primal scream.'
And that "devolving so rapidly" moment was in 2022, not to mention 2018!
The problem is that conservatism has degraded dramatically since the original quote was written. It gives the grouping too much credit as it's no longer nearly so coherent.
Mainstream conservatives today *do not know what law is*. They're so intellectually bankrupt that they're unable to form such a real world structure of in- and out-groups with relation to law.
You could see this in their arguments related to everything from birthright citizenship through Trump's illegal wars.
Today's conservatism consists of old men yelling at clouds... through congressional representatives and executive orders.
Well, a lot depends on what your goal is, or what the priorities are.
Is the goal criticism, sort of academic debate, swaying of the history books, warning to others around the world?
Or is the main goal more practical, looking to actually change things in the US ASAP to fix the direction it's going immediately, not generations from now?
To so focus on grouping and image is great for historiography, but it can be counterproductive for actually addressing the political problems of today.
Don't forget, Trump's folks feed off of reactions like that. So often they cheer it, and it helped get him reelected.
@byteseu because Facebook is not about truth?
It's like complaining about bad physics in action movies or cartoons.
Meh, Savage is yukking it up here and being a bit misinformative.
Yeah, the record apparently shows that neither side wanted to be the female, BUT there are serious and legit engineering reasons for the androgynous approach, as the guide seems to try to highlight.
This sort of thing is why I'm just no fan of #AdamSavage. He takes on serious topics in unserious ways in shows that are supposed to be about real science and engineering.
I mean, he's doing what his people elected him to do. This is why that sort of grant authority should never be left to presidents to decide on.
It's not anything new. For generations folks have been sounding alarms about Congress leaving such authorities to presidents. Don't give them these powers because sometimes they'll use them.
Trump fucking around after his base elected him based on him being "a fighter", like hiring the WWE to the Oval Office.
Since I guess everything is political these days, I'll identify as extremely liberal but without a home in US politics.
Mainly, there's so much misinformation out there that people in society have trouble even organizing into coherent political groupings. So I'd rather not talk about politics but instead focus on information and education. Nothing else matters until the bedrock of fact is buttressed.
So: Old man yells at clouds is a famous joke from The Simpsons, and it probably fairly describes what we do when venting on social media.
Joined Dec 2022
