This is a website for tech and for startup culture, hosted by an incubator. A lot of startup culture is about "disrupting" industries, reshaping society, and streamlining the inefficiencies in the ways things are currently done. But politically, I find the discourse here pretty uncritical of the status quo, aside from a bit of libertarian contrarianness, which doesn't have any ideas that fall that far away from business as usual.
> The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good and maybe we should like try and do something normal
What do you consider normal in American politics? Here's what I think has been pretty normal historically:
- wealth inequality
- war
- corruption
- union busting
- labour exploitation of poor people and immigrants
- racism
- in recent decades: the decline of government spending on public services and investment in infrastructure and other projects that benefit the average citizen (rather than just subsidies to the already wealthy)
- interference in international politics, often for the worse (installing military dictatorships, sometimes only to go back to war with the same regimes, fighting expensive pointless wars against an ideology across the globe, offering unreasonable foreign aid to poor nations which cripple their economies, pressuring privatisation via IMF and other international bodies which cripples economies)
- as with the last point, I would have put this higher on the list but I figured it would make this comment even more unpopular than it already will probably be: genocide
I think many of these normalities of US politics in recent times have sort of inevitably led to the state it is currently in. So the election of celebrities at this point is something which, to me, seems to be more or less a continuation of US politics as normal. The absurdity of it all has just been allowed to go this far.
Saying that you want things to go back to "normal" really says something about how you have been affected by all the above points. It seems, for much of middle class America, that the detrimental consequences of past policy have only just now started to encroach on the parts of society that were previously protected from it.
So now that we are finally upset in this space of tech startups that has so much power and a desire to make radical change in the world, why ask for "normal" again? Why not ask for a radical change to a new kind of politics? Why can't we be critical and wonder whether the current system really is all that good as we're told, or whether the faults in the system are actually much worse than we previously thought?
I don't want another celebrity present. I also don't want anyone like the corrupt warmongers of the past either. I don't see why we'd want a president at all really.
Native Americans used to live in North America, the colonists who became the United states nearly annihilated the native americans, and certainly annihilated their way of life.
> The American political system for all its faults, is pretty good and maybe we should like try and do something normal
What do you consider normal in American politics? Here's what I think has been pretty normal historically:
- wealth inequality - war - corruption - union busting - labour exploitation of poor people and immigrants - racism - in recent decades: the decline of government spending on public services and investment in infrastructure and other projects that benefit the average citizen (rather than just subsidies to the already wealthy) - interference in international politics, often for the worse (installing military dictatorships, sometimes only to go back to war with the same regimes, fighting expensive pointless wars against an ideology across the globe, offering unreasonable foreign aid to poor nations which cripple their economies, pressuring privatisation via IMF and other international bodies which cripples economies) - as with the last point, I would have put this higher on the list but I figured it would make this comment even more unpopular than it already will probably be: genocide
I think many of these normalities of US politics in recent times have sort of inevitably led to the state it is currently in. So the election of celebrities at this point is something which, to me, seems to be more or less a continuation of US politics as normal. The absurdity of it all has just been allowed to go this far.
Saying that you want things to go back to "normal" really says something about how you have been affected by all the above points. It seems, for much of middle class America, that the detrimental consequences of past policy have only just now started to encroach on the parts of society that were previously protected from it.
So now that we are finally upset in this space of tech startups that has so much power and a desire to make radical change in the world, why ask for "normal" again? Why not ask for a radical change to a new kind of politics? Why can't we be critical and wonder whether the current system really is all that good as we're told, or whether the faults in the system are actually much worse than we previously thought?
I don't want another celebrity present. I also don't want anyone like the corrupt warmongers of the past either. I don't see why we'd want a president at all really.