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I'm happy this reversal occurred, but I am exhausted by the continuous flip-flopping of legislation depending on which party is in charge. Feels like we're stagnating as a nation by going in a circle rather than finding commonality to go forward.

Maybe it's always been this way though and I'm just getting old enough to be bothered by it?




It's partly what happens when such important rules are determined by who is appointed at an executive agency, rather than requiring an act of Congress. The former can be trivially gamed by the party in power after each election, whereas getting Congress to take action on something can be difficult and requires you to first get them motivated to do so at a given moment.


This is the tyranny of minority rule. When congress is not representative of the electorate and the minority doesn’t have to compromise to get things done to gain political favor and power, nothing gets done.


Exactly, we never voted any of the people making these decisions into office, they didn’t have to campaign or explain their policies to the public. Having a layer in between these regulators and the public (the politicians who appoint them) removes power from the common people.


I'd flip it and say its what happens when Congress has been dysfunctional for over a decade. It's not even possible to get a house bill with net neutrality passed without it included 99 other things that will inevitably get the bill punted on forever.

Congress could have drafted this anytime if they had seen fit, but they are "too busy" fighting ideology wars.


To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill.

The reality is, they just don't care about net neutrality. I'm still mad that they haven't passed the bill that gets rid of DST (or rather, gets rid of standard time). Everyone wants it in both parties. Just get it done.

Even more annoying is the whole Section 174 debacle. Completely killing the field of software engineering in the US.


“Congress avoided two government shutdowns” is like saying “I avoided pooping in my pants twice today.” It’s factually true and objectively a positive thing, but there’s nothing really commendable about it.

The debt ceiling is Congress’s own creation, and Congress itself approves the budgets that cause the increase in debt. There isn’t another parliament on the planet that behaves so absurdly, fighting shadow puppets set up by itself.


There are plenty of countries with legal debt ceilings, some of them even in the constitution. That said, I'll grant you that I don't know of any that behave so absurdly about it. The trick is to stay clear very far from the limit, which is something that recent US governments are simply unwilling to do.


There are plenty of dysfunctional/autocratic/kleptocratic governments based on constitutions that are somewhat democratic in nature. The US is just a high profile example of government structure slowly sliding into one of these failed states (faster if Trump gets another term).


> (faster if Trump gets another term).

I didn't keep track and don't have a good list, but a guess is that Trump did push through a lot of regulatory changes. If the media would publish a well documented list ...!!

From all I've seen, I like Trump, but apparently a lot of people don't. I wonder where am I going wrong.

Why do some people not like him? A guess is the now old collection of video clips from the MSM (mainstream media) still at

https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908

Sooo, recently I watched several videos (still at YouTube) of episodes of Trump's old TV show The Apprentice. (1) From the business world I've seen, this guy was definitely, uh, different! In a way, tough to criticize since apparently he was very successful. (2) A surprise was the propensity of mess ups, in fighting of the apparently carefully selected candidates. When I think back, yup, I did see a lot of that but guessed it was incidental and would go away and wasn't too bad -- I was wrong, and Trump's TV show was closer to right. How Trump handled (2) was good to see, although maybe some of it was just "TV".


Kindly read or listen to any long-form work by Sarah Kendzior.

But I don't know if the statement you quoted is correct either. Trump isn't the politician who has people tracking their stock trades because they so consistently outperform the market (that would be legislators, including Democrats, who trade on insider information, but face no consequences because the arbiters of such judgment are... themselves). Unfortunately, I'm not sure that even a second Biden term will save us.


> Kindly read or listen to any long-form work by Sarah Kendzior.

This is the first I've heard of her. So, just did a Google search on her: She has written a lot of stories for the "news" on a lot of subjects. Maybe ~10% of the stories are about Trump.

There were some lists of story titles with URLs, but the URLs didn't point to the stories -- apparently were old and now broken.

Her stories on Trump I could find didn't seem like they were on important issues. Then I saw her story on the "Russia" issue. Sorry, I long ago concluded that Trump did nothing wrong and, instead, the whole Russia Gate issue was a cooked up, made up, pile of nonsense trying to get Trump.


If you'd actually read her long-form work (specifically, her books Hiding In Plain Sight and They Knew)... Humor her for the length of those, then see how you feel.

Her thesis is that "Russiagate" wasn't cooked up; that Trump is, in fact, simply an agent of a class of wealthy oligarchs who don't have loyalty to anything but their own money; that people are drawn to him because their correct instincts about the dysfunction in DC are being misdirected to him as a savior, in a way that is identical to the way autocratic, kleptomanic strongmem have been put into power in the past in other countries.

Give her work a chance. If you come out of it still supporting Trump, then I suppose you've made the right decision. But see why she's come to her conclusions first; I personally think that they're compelling. Otherwise, it's kind of weird to disagree with an argument you don't even understand.


> Her thesis is that "Russiagate" wasn't cooked up;

...

> weird to disagree with an argument you don't even understand.

To me, from all I have seen, the "cooked up" part was real and well documented. If not cooked up, then some of the media did a really big trick on me, after trying at first to do the big trick of trying to convince me that Russia Gate was real. Peeing in the bed with women in a Moscow hotel??? Naw.

> in a way that is identical to the way autocratic, kleptomanic strongmem have been put into power in the past in other countries.

Hmm .... Tough to take that very seriously when I disagree with the not cooked up assumption. But, interesting, fits some of what is easy to see about Trump: He is a strong personality. He is rich and powerful. He is not, "leading from behind", waiting until the polls says he should take action X but, instead, looking at X well in advance and making decisions then -- so, e.g., he is not merely representing the voters but is charging in some directions he likes and, if not a nuts strongman, competently thinks will be good for the US and that voters will like.

It's a judgment each US citizen has to make: Is he nuts???? For an answer, that's part of why I watched some of his TV series The Apprentice.

From some that's easy to see about him, even if he is nuts, he works hard to appear not to be and, instead, to take actions to appear to be sympathetic, empathetic, generous, etc. with people in need. E.g., in The Apprentice he flew the Rhodes Scholar candidate down to Pennsylvania for a family funeral. That said, maybe working for him could be tough, need 25 hours a day, 8 days a week, and a quart of sweat an hour.

And as voters, we can see that we have to be careful, i.e., once a POTUS is in office, super tough to get him out, no matter what the heck he does.

But for Trump, we do have 4 years of his time as POTUS. There I didn't see a nut case. It looked like in business he was a darned good CEO and as POTUS was the same as it can be appropriate for a POTUS instead of a CEO to be.

We will see in November and, then, likely again, starting in 2025.

Thanks for the book review: "autocratic, kleptomanic strongmem"??? Naw.... Watched him for 4 years, Naw.


No one's arguing that Trump isn't forceful. It's to what end. The "kleptomanic" part is important, exemplified publicly (at the very least) by the way he changed the tax code to advantage wealthy individuals and businesses, while middle class and working class Americans have seen their tax bills rise. (Again, Biden is not so good on this either, as he didn't repeal Trump's changes).

Of course, the books go into more detail. Unfortunately, if you don't read them, your opinion that the issue was "cooked up" remains baseless and bereft of value. :)


> From all I've seen, I like Trump, but apparently a lot of people don't. I wonder where am I going wrong.

Are you being sarcastic? Did you miss the part where he waged an attempted coup against the US government to remain in power?

I mean... he was just found by a court to have committed rape. You don't see why people don't like him? Be for real.


> Are you being sarcastic? Did you miss the part where he waged an attempted coup against the US government to remain in power?

I never understood that: I watched his speech. All I saw looked reasonable, appropriate, prudent. It seemed he was careful to advise no violence. That there was an "attempted coup" makes no sense to me. I watched his speech and saw nothing wrong.

> I mean... he was just found by a court to have committed rape.

I didn't and don't see that.

But, if what you say is correct, then that would explain why some people don't like him.

From your post, it looks like there is some deep bitterness about Trump. I don't see why, but okay. For one explanation there is that old collection of media video clips

https://youtu.be/f1ab6uxg908

Apparently the media was totally convinced that those clips would doom Trump; maybe those clips are why some people don't like him.

Watch the clips -- if anything, by now they are entertaining! They have much of the largest of the MSM (mainstream media) doing a big gang up, pile on of "bombshell", "done, no question about that", etc. that never happened.

Maybe in low level town and city politics nearly everyone interested in politics at all has some really strong reasons to like the Democrat Party. If my startup works, maybe I'll discover that the local Democrats will do good things for me but the Republicans won't. Hmm.


I watched your video -- it's media personalities babbling.

You should probably inform yourself about the coup, the speech wasn't it. Here is some actual info to start:

The J6 commission report: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-REPORT/pdf/GPO-J6...

The Federal indictments: https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/08/trump-i...

The Georgia indictments: https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/08/CRIMINA...

The Arizona indictments: https://mcusercontent.com/cc1fad182b6d6f8b1e352e206/files/fa...

The finding of rape: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ... Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”


> I watched your video -- it's media personalities babbling.

Yup, but maybe it and related media stuff is responsible for much of the anti-Trump opinions there are. I thought the collection was outrageous, insulting, and dirty politics but settled on it being entertaining.

> rape

A NY jury found Trump guilty of WHAT with his fingers?

If Trump entered Carroll's dressing room, she was supposed to scream loudly enough to blow the roof off the store. Every girl over the age of 12, 9, ..., 5 knows this.

I just looked quickly via Google and found:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-car...

with

"Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse."

and the article quotes some judge saying that the act really was rape. Hmm. If we are going by a jury trial, then it's "sexual abuse". If we are not going by a jury trial, then it's made up, cooked up, porn star and Democrat Party political dirt to "get Trump" -- Trump with a "porn star". Naa .... While married to Melania??? Naa!! While planning to run for POTUS, take a risk of being extorted??? Whatever Trump is, he's NOT bonkers, brain-dead stupid. Besides, in US culture, what happens between a male and female alone is unknowable, and that's why US females over the age of 12, 9, ..., 5 are strongly advised never to be alone with a male. So, likely we can never know for sure about such things.

As I recall, there is a document signed by Carroll that no rape ever happened.

Uh, maybe Trump was guilty of the bad judgment of being in the women's department of a high end NYC department store ....

Or, maybe it's about "defamation" of a porn star?

Maybe it's about getting $130,000 to keep quiet.

> Arizona

Seems to have to do with Kelli Ward and nothing directly with Trump. As I recall, Ward has been fighting in Arizona.

> Georgia

I would trust any homeless person in a plastic shelter on a street in NYC more than the Georgia legal system.

> J6

Maybe some day we will have access to and an objective review of all the actions of and evidence presented to the J6 committee. (A) From watching Trump's J6 speech, I don't believe he did anything wrong on J6 -- he didn't even have an opportunity to do anything wrong. (B) The J6 committee looked like a kangaroo court, not at all objective, just to sow doubt about Trump. It was not a real court and was just a committee of Congress, and apparently they are permitted to do whatever they want. So, they wanted to dump on Trump -- we can believe that.

> Federal

That's a bunch of DC stuff saying that, yes, Trump has rights, e.g., 1st rights, but still from his words within those rights did something illegal. Nonsense. On troops for J6, there are claims that (a) that decision is up to the Speaker, Pelosi, (b) within plenty of time Trump offered a big force from the military, (c) the Mayor of DC also turned down both Trump and the DC Chief of Police. Besides, what I saw of J6 was (a) US citizens legally petitioning Congress for redress of grievances, (b) some guy in a Buffalo costume, (c) a police officer assuming his "tactical stance" and killing some citizen for no good reason, (d) some small fraction of the people misbehaving in ways that should get them arrested.

As I saw the 2020 election, in some of the "swing states" (a) the local Democrats had a long standing, non-trivial, and effective machine to create votes, at least as mail-in ballots, as necessary and, in a close election, sufficient and (b) the state governments declined to exercise their authorities to investigate the situation. Sounds like machine politics.


> A NY jury found Trump guilty of WHAT with his fingers?

Rape. I linked to the court's opinion stating this. What the judge makes clear is that "rape" as a matter of law in NY is with a penis only. That Trump raped was with his fingers does not make his rape any less rape.

  The jury’s unanimous verdict in Carroll II was almost entirely in favor of Ms. Carroll. The only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had “raped” her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law – a section that provides that the label “rape” as used in criminal prosecutions in New
York applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible, unconsented-to penetration of the vagina or of other bodily orifices by fingers, other body parts, or other articles or materials is not called “rape” under the New York Penal Law. It instead is labeled “sexual abuse.”

Do I need to make this more clear? Putting a part of your body into another person's body without their consent is rape. A court found Trump did that, and now people don't want him to be president for that among other reasons. Not hard to understand.

> maybe Trump was guilty of the bad judgment

No. The jury found he's guilty of rape, not bad judgment. Trump is a rapist.

> Seems to have to do with Kelli Ward and nothing directly with Trump

Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment, so it relates directly to him. The acts under indictment are the various frauds the defendants underwent in service of Trump's coup plot. They are also Trump campaign surrogates. This is another reason people don't like Trump -- he surrounds himself with people willing to commit crimes, and asks people to commit crimes for him.

> I would trust any homeless person

You don't have to Trust the legal system, you have to trust Georgia's Republican SoS and Republican Governor, who felt so pressured by Trump to overturn the election that they started recording and leaking calls with him doing exactly that. Another reason people don't like him.

> he didn't even have an opportunity to do anything wrong. (B) The J6 committee looked like a kangaroo court, not at all objective, just to sow doubt about Trump.

See, this is how I know you didn't read any of the information I linked to nor did you watch the hearings. Because if your had you would know the speech was not the coup. That you keep trying to deflect to it shows me you didn't even consider the vast array of evidence laid out by the committee. They show the effort that went on months beforehand which culminated in the J6 insurrection was the coup attempt.

> Besides, what I saw of J6 was...

This has been litigated in court for years. The opportunity to petition was prior to December 14, the date states certify their elections. Trump, appropriately, brought 60+ challenges in court and lost all but 1 due to lack of evidence. Since then, he has not brought any proof of fraud. He had none at the time, and after plenty of forensic audits in the intervening years, fraud at the alleged scale has not been found in any of the disputed states.

So it was all a lie at the time, and we know that now. By Dec 14, since Trump did not have that evidence, he should have dropped his challenge.

> As I saw the 2020 election, in some of the "swing states" (a) the local Democrats had a long standing, non-trivial, and effective machine to create votes

This is not what happened at all. What really happened was that many states had affected CVOID emergency measures to allow people to vote by mail who wouldn't usually have permission to. In my state, PA, it was Republicans who passed a measure allowing no excuse ballot access in 2019.

But either way, state governments have not in any way declined to exercise their authorities to investigate the situation. All elections have been audited several times by now with no anomalies on the scale alleged detected. Nevada results were even opened up to a third party, the Cyber Ninjas, who were a right wing group intent on proving that some ballots came from China by examining the paper they were printed on. They found nothing. Actually what they found through their audit was Biden had more votes on their recount.

Anyway, it seems you have a very cursory and surface-level understanding of these matters and of US politics generally. I linked you those sources so that you would read them, in the hope that you would become more informed. Since you can't discuss these topics past your casual observations, I would suggest just read some actual primary sources before instead of spending hundreds of words replying to me with confident ignorance.


I'm still trying to evaluate Trump and understand the anti-Trump people.

Thanks for your references and remarks.

Okay, from some of the news, I concluded that the J6 issues were from what Trump did on J6 and some role for him in the disturbance that day at the Capitol building. But your claim is that, instead, the issue is about some things Trump did in 11/5/2020 to 1/6/2021 as claimed by the J6 committee and that constitute an attempted "coup". (A) I can't trust the J6 committee even for the time of day. (B) If Trump did something illegal (jay walking doesn't count) in 11/5/2020 to 1/6/2021, then we should have some actual credible legal actions instead of just the J6 committee of Congress. (C) Just from common sense, tough for me to believe that Trump intended anything like a "coup", but is dreaming of a "coup" itself actually illegal?

Trump may have strongly suspected that (a) he actually won the the 2020 election, (b) the election was stolen by illegal means, and (c) he wanted to defend himself. Sounds reasonable, okay, and not surprising or at all illegal. He has a right to defend himself? Right?

For the DC lawsuit, the PDF file seems to make clear that (A) Trump said some things that were well within his rights of freedom of speech but (B) as in the first actual charge in the PDF, Trump was still being charged with some consequences of that free speech? Looks like law-fare.

For Carroll, if Trump did something she didn't like, she should have, was supposed to, scream in which case there would be lots of objective, credible witnesses from that department store.

As I understand the legal results, Trump was convicted of "sexual abuse". Inserting fingers, sure, would be a case of sexual abuse, but just breast fondling may also be. All we have from the jury is "sexual abuse" and that's not necessarily "rape". That Trump is a convicted rapist seems to have poor support; seems to be false.

Also a porn star who did not scream is not credible; that is, if not consensual, then scream. That Trump, married, running for POTUS, and not stupid did anything wrong with Carroll is not credible.

NY AG Letitia James, out to "get Trump", and Judge Engoron and his 1/2 $billion fine are not credible and instead, just obvious via common sense, look like Democrat Party law-fare. Trump's loan application had a disclaimer, and the loan companies are all happy. The area in square feet of part of Trump Tower or the value of Mar-a-Lago seem irrelevant; claiming that those two are relevant looks like more law-fare.

(A) NY DA Bragg's many felony charges based on some goofy issue about some tiny accounting issue past statute of limitations and some goofy accusation about Federal campaign law and (B) Judge Juan Merchan and his efforts to keep Trump in court and quiet look like kangaroo court, election interference law-fare.

In Georgia, Fulton DA Fani Willis and her boyfriend got, what, $600,000 reasons to go after Trump? Looks like more Democrat Party law-fare.

There is a pattern here: Democrat Party law-fare against Trump.

Sorry, so far I don't see anything seriously wrong with Trump and don't understand the anti-Trump people.

We will have to agree to disagree and look forward to the election.


This rape stuff makes no sense: Before seeing your quote, I saw it myself when I looked at the PDF, and it sounds like Trump was convicted of finger rape. But then there is the statement I referenced:

"Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse."

So, sounds like the jury didn't say "rape", with either penis or fingers and only "sexual abuse".

Finally, the whole Carroll thing, I don't believe it -- Trump is not that stupid. What I believe is the $130,000.

For Georgia, sure, in principle and thankfully, it is up to the Georgia Secretary of State and the Governor, in principle. But it sure looks like that hate Trump prosecutor and her boyfriend are 99% of the reality there.

For the Arizona case, right, there are the charges that somehow near the end of his term, he went around the country doing something illegal complaining about the integrity of the election. So, he went around complaining. And maybe he had some coffee with Kelli. That should be no crime. And, with the Judge Merchant and Bragg case, there is a lot of lawfare going on. Trump did something illegal in Arizona???? Naw.

Again, the J6 committee was 99 44/100% Democrat propaganda.

The recounts, etc. -- if it was just counting again some crooked ballots, then that doesn't mean anything. The Chinese paper thing, then the changes for Covid thing, all looks like maybe something valid. I saw more accusations, e.g., trucks of fake mail-in ballots arriving late at night, but the information is too thin to take seriously. So, if there was cheating, I don't know how it was done.

Maybe the bottom line is "Politics is dirty business" and differs mostly only in how dirty. At this point, with the lawfare, the Democrats look like the dirty ones and look especially dirty since 2020.

Thanks for your materials. Apparently you believe those materials mean more than I do, but maybe they mean something.

For the 50:1 case outcome, looks like NO ONE in power wanted to open that possible Pandora's Box.

With the current lawfare Florida to Maine, it looks like the Democrats are going after Trump any way they can. That makes the legal cases you referenced questionable. The Democrats have a lot of power and money, and they can file lots of lawfare cases, and it looks like that's what they have been doing. I expect that some judges will retire, some higher courts will jump in and hose out the crap, some lawyers will be disbarred, and Trump will win all the cases. Why? In the lawfare, the main goal is not to convict Trump but just to tie him up in court, cost him a lot of time, money, and energy, sow doubt among some voters, and keep him off the campaign trail until 11/5/2024. The Democrats are calling the fire trucks. For that there doesn't have to be a fire or even smoke, and there isn't.

For 2024, Trump promises to have enough lawyers, poll watchers, etc. to have high election integrity. Maybe we will get some more information on how the Democrats try to cheat.

Look, there is something in this whole mud wrestling ring more certain and wrong than any of the actual legal accusations against Trump -- the Democrat's lawfare attack on Trump.

I was glad to get your references -- the DC one is a riot, a scream: As the PDF explains, he was fully within his rights to object to the 2020 election BUUUUUT: They are going to charge him anyway with, what, confusing the politics, the public????? Gads. That's not even up to the kangaroo level.

There is nothing to stop the Democrats from executing lawfare, but we don't have to grant that the objections are valid or that Trump did anything wrong. The Bragg case is a new low in the US justice system. Same for the 1/2 $billion fine.

As sometimes said in courts, there is a "pattern" here.

Actually, Trump is not even accused of doing anything seriously wrong.

Good to see, I'm not making a serious error in judgment liking Trump.

Thanks.


So much cope. It doesn’t matter what you believe. You didn’t hear the evidence. You didn’t sit through the trial. You have no idea what you are talking about to the point you can’t interpret the NY law, the jury instruction, the verdict, and the judge’s ruling.

Sorry but it’s your critical thinking that’s impaired here.

This is a nation of laws, and under the law, Trump is a rapist. If you refuse to admit finger rape is rape, which it is, then you at least have to admit that Trump was found guilty under NY law of sexual abuse. Are you saying sexual abuse is not seriously wrong?

If you think you have good judgement for supporting a convicted sexual abuser, well, good luck to you dying on that hill.

Have a nice life.

PS: you seem like the kind of person who needs to have the last word so I’ll let you have it. But you should answer this: so you don’t trust the judicial system, and you don’t trust democrats. Fine. But why then is his former VP not endorsing him? He’s not a leftist liberal out to get Trump. He’s ride or die Trump. And yet he’s not endorsing, and had this to say:

  I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again
This is what Pence said about Trump. Why is he saying that? What does he mean when he says that he feels Trump put himself ahead of the constitution and asked others to violate it?

Is your opinion of Trump as well informed as his?


> They have avoided 2 government shutdowns

You mean they passed a bill that was necessary for them to get their paychecks. I fail to see how this is even remotely surprising.


I think their congressional salary is probably not where most members of Congress are deriving their main income. I think the paychecks their 'other' employers are cutting are more lucrative.


It’s true but “keep the government from grinding to a halt due to pure inaction” is kind of the absolute minimum bar for congress that I don’t think it’s reasonable to call it a win.


And it only grinds to a halt because of rules they created.


The US trialed permanent DST in 1974. In the first 3 months, public support dropped from 79% to 42%. It was ended prematurely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_...

Of course, there's no difference between permanent DST and abolishing DST but having everyone agree to shift their schedules forward by 1 hour. So abolishing DST altogether isn't really a better option.

I used to think DST was stupid. Now I think it's actually the best we can do.


People aren’t going to shift an hour. When I’ve argued this with friends it seems to idea is wholly incomprehensible.

Standard time is what we should be on. Anything else makes it way too cold for kids in the morning in the winter, it’s better for our sleep cycles (especially teenagers), and it just makes sense as far as the sun’s position. If you want to go into work an hour early so the “sun is still up when I go home at night,” feel free.


The linked Wikipedia page about the 1974 experiment says "some schools moved their start times later" in response. I agree that trying to get the entire population to shift everything on their schedules at the same time would be inconsistent at best. But many institutions would adjust to the seasons as they see fit. And you want to minimize the inconsistencies; people would pick different cutoffs, different shift amounts, etc. That's the whole point of why it was regulated in the first place.

And DST is demonstrably good during the summer. It lowers crime and improves mood and productivity. It's just not good in the winter, because people in northern latitudes wake up in the cold and dark. It kinda does make sense to have seasonal shifting.

So, unfortunately, the best solution in my opinion is in fact to just lie to ourselves about what time it is for half the year. AKA Daylight Saving.


It could be much worse and end up with a system with smaller timezones with 30 minute offsets instead of DST. Or a single timezone for the continental US.

DST is annoying but it's far from the worst.


> They have avoided 2 government shutdowns.

My what a low bar


"They didn't trip on their own feet"


> Even more annoying is the whole Section 174 debacle. Completely killing the field of software engineering in the US.

Elaborate?


all expenses, in theory, incurred in connection with software development must now be amortized. Many technology and software companies will face significant increases in their taxable income because they are no longer allowed to deduct certain expenses

https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...


> To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill.

The euphemization in this subthread is a bit out of control. In fact these are 100% partisan issues. The "pro shutdown" and "anti aid/infrastructure" camps who had been blocking progress are uniformly sitting on one side of the aisle, and the progress you are celebrating happened when their party split under duress and aligned with the other side briefly.

That's not "congress" doing some work. That's a "pro work" and "anti work" partisan argument whose answer flips due to intra-GOP drama.


>To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill.

That's just three different ways of saying, "Wrote checks to fill the pockets of monied interests, the bill for which will be paid for by the generations which explicitly oppose such policy."

Talk to me when they pass Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, and a border/immigration bill that finally puts that issue to rest. Until then, it's just another round of avoiding addressing the issues that are easiest to run on if they haven't been fixed in a prior term.


>Talk to me when they pass Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, and a border/immigration bill that finally puts that issue to rest. Until then, it's just another round of avoiding addressing the issues that are easiest to run on if they haven't been fixed in a prior term.

You do realize that half (and maybe a little more than that) of the elected folks in Congress do not support such things. That those folks represent less than half of the electorate is a different discussion -- but until you have clear majorities that support those initiatives (I and those I voted for certainly do), clamoring for everything all at once is a waste of time.

The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face.

That's not to say we shouldn't have better governance and more focus on making the world a better place rather than maintaining power. We definitely should. But asserting that unless all our elected representatives support our own beliefs/policy ideas and pass them post-haste is both unhelpful and not very realistic.


>The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face.

It's weird that you would put those words in my mouth when the actual reason for the dysfunction

>That those folks represent less than half of the electorate

is readily apparent to you.

The point is that Congress is terminally dysfunctional. Avoiding shutdowns and passing grift doesn't change that. I don't want to hear all the reasons why things can't be done (perhaps the most unhelpful thing to do). I just want them done. And I have every right to be pissed abot the state of things until that happens.


> They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

Aaaannnndd?... You're just going to leave out the banning of TikTok while claiming a victory for sending my money to other nations for wars I do not want to fund?

And another thing </Andy Rooney>, government shutdowns are problems created ENTIRELY BY CONGRESS for never operating under a proper budget since 1997. All they're doing is fighting each other over a massive shell game of sending the right amounts of money to their donors' interests to guarantee reelection.

"Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built.

They're doing work alright, just not any that I want. Our system is nakedly and brazenly corrupt, and we don't seem to be able to do anything about it.


>"Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built.

This is the most baffling one. Everyone seems to forget that they also failed to pass the bill that contained the provisions that most working and middle-class Americans wanted. I've had multiple conversations where the counterargument was, "Well, at least they got part of it passed." No, that's actually worse. We got all of the expensive giveaways without any of the mitigating funding and policies. We literally would have been better off if nothing had passed.


> we don't seem to be able to do anything about it.

I thought that, with our democratic structures, it would be really easy "to do" a lot about it, but you seem right:

I don't get it and have been guessing that

> It's always just a massive kickback scheme,

is correct.

A first problem is some basic vote counting: A politician does something, e.g., a "kickback scheme", that pleases < 10% of the voters by essentially stealing from > 90% of the voters. Soooo, at the next election, the politician should lose by at least 9 to 1, but apparently not and I'm wrong and the politician, correct?

Uh, maybe the politician partitions the voters into 10 parts, has 10 schemes, and for each of the 10 steals from the other 9 to please the one, and everyone is happy even though everyone gets stolen from 10 times?

My guess was, if a good majority, 80%, maybe as low as 55%, of the voters would write their Members of Congress objecting to the scheme, then Congress would STOP it, in a few minutes. But, nope. Apparently tough to get > 20%, maybe > 5%, of the voters to write their Members of Congress about even a "brazen" scheme.

In simple terms, Congress is awash in powers, e.g., that massive one, "power of the purse". So, I have to believe that in any 10 minutes, Congress could have gasoline under $2 a gallon and falling, but Congress declines to do that.

The blame is the media that wants eyeballs for ad revenue and, thus, creates divisions, grabs people emotionally, avoids exposing the schemes??? Or the voters are "apathetic"??

Politics is goofy, inscrutable, and the media is right? Uh, ABC, CBS, CNN, ... WaPo are short on money so are not really "right"?

Back to something that makes sense.


While I agree Congress is quite dysfunctional, the sheer difficulty with which to get a bill written, passed, and signed into law is by design. Legislation is supposed to take a large amount of deliberation, agreement, and time.

Also consider that this works both ways: If something is passed into law by Congress, it's going to take monumental effort to undo it just like getting it passed was. An example of this is Obamacare, where getting it passed was difficult and revoking it has been difficult.

Likewise, the flippant nature of orders authorized by the Executive Branch is also by design. Such orders are meant primarily to address short-term concerns requiring immediate or expedient attention, not long-term concerns that require thorough deliberation.


> the sheer difficulty with which to get a bill written, passed, and signed into law is by design

No, the 118th Congress was not how anything was designed to operate. This is hand waving mixed with Founding Father fairytales.


> Congress could have drafted this anytime if they had seen fit,

Congress as a whole does not support net neutrality, and the reason they have not drafted a simple house bill to do it that doesn't include 99 other things is because they had no desire to. It has nothing to do with "ideology wars."


Have no desire because they've been bribed, I mean lobbied.


because nobody wants single subject bills, it would semi make them accountable.. remind me, who in congress is for single subject bills, who is against? (and its very few individuals FOR, so not super hard)


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There are de-facto one party systems in many cities, counties, and some states. They all suffer from getting nothing done. “Both sides” is a legitimate observation by those who recognize politics as upper class nobility vs the peasants. They run in the same social circles. We’re still primates at our core.


And when the House Speaker won’t even let it get to a vote in the first place, no one has any motivation to even draft such a bill. But yeah let’s ban TikTok because in theory they could do something bad that every US-based company already does. Way to represent the will of the people, House.


Congress was destined to this fate when they eliminated earmarks. Earmarks, or pork barrel spending, were derided as gov't waste, but in reality they were the grease that kept legislation moving. A representative could go back to their voters and say, "I voted for this thing you might not like, but I did it to ensure this crucial local project got done."

Without earmarks there is no incentive to compromise. Compromise is actually a liability now, because there is always someone who will challenge you in a primary and promise to be more "ideologically pure." Without the ability to point to money and public works to defend yourself both during a primary and an election the best you can do is point to a record without compromise.


Earmarks are back. They were against the House's rules for 10 years, but the 117th Congress started allowing them again in 2021.


And the past three years have seen the return of friendliness and comity unseen for a decade /s


I'm glad we've established that the absence of earmarks isn't the problem.


Not wanting to compromise comes largely from the two-party system. If a politician had to worry about losing votes to a more moderate party, they'd end up with less extreme voting records.

Multi-party governments function largely because some subset of the parties agrees to compromises to gain a combined majority on a specific topic; none of them can do anything in isolation.


You're absolutely right IMO. When there is no reason to compromise and compromise can only hurt you, no one compromises and nothing gets done. Earmarks shift those incentives in the right direction, and their cost is a small price to pay to have a government that governs.


There are still bill riders on many congressional votes. I don't think this is true (regarding elimination of earmarks)


I think the results are mixed and the lessons aren’t clear to me.

Perhaps earmarks were the result of an electorate that wanted more purity in decision-making (at the cost of stability). In other words, earmarks didn’t break cooperation. Corrupted cooperation led to the end of earmarks.

Earmarks probably do grease the wheels, but it’s important to remember a step existed before the compromise: a member of the congress could hold out until they received something, often unrelated to the matter at hand. That is wasteful and, to some, dishonest.

Now, did a removal earmarking result in more financial efficiency? Surely not. The budget deficit continued to grow, mostly because of Obamacare, Covid, wars, tax cuts.

So what of compromise? One might think compromise is dead, and yet we live in a world where Ukraine aid is tied to social media ownership.

Shruggy dude.


The supreme court has a long history of overturning its rulings years, or decades, later

https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-overru...


An implicit assumption of the American political order is that a body that makes policy also has the ability to unmake that policy. I think that's good because otherwise there would be a land rush to create policies that are irreversible or have a higher bar for reversal than enactment. These policies would inevitably become out of date and reversing them could be politically impossible.

The big exception to this was the drafting of the Constitution itself, which arguably was easier to ratify than it is to amend. The problem of the practical impossibility of undoing past policies applies very much here.


The Constitution was very difficult to get ratified. For one thing, it was recognized that it had to be unanimous. Don't forget it was replacing an existing political order of the Continental Congress + state governments.


Its always been this way, but the internet sure has amplified the effect of Edward Bernay’s theories. So much free PR copy is created on your behalf by your army of sheep active on the internet. Used to be that stuff was put on car windshield wipers and promptly thrown away, now people are engaging with it online now that there’s a mechanism to talk back to it.


Unfortunately, if you have a contentious issue which is decided by fiat of one of the sides being in power and not by mutual compromise, there's no reason for the other side, coming in power, to not change it back. Since, fortunately, we still have a functioning democracy in the US, the sides in power change. Since, unfortunately, there seems to be not enough will to reach a workable compromise satisfactory to both sides, flip-flopping will likely continue in the foreseeable future, until either societal consensus moves firmly on one side of the issue to the point that makes other side's position untenable, or some mutually agreeable compromise emerges.


> Unfortunately, if you have a contentious issue

At it's core, it is a technical issue - primarily network management. Under NN framework, ISPs would adhere to minimal straightforward rules that would disallowed them from prioritizing, throttling, capping, purposefully degrading, etc wireline networks. For most of 2 decades, this is where NN lived.

In apparent response to NN becoming reality, ISP funded representatives began echoing the talking points of ISP lobbyist groups and contention was born.


I don't think it's a technical issue. The implementation is technical, but the implications are societal. Is the state allowed to restrict ISPs from certain forms of network management? How far the governmental control over ISP actions can go? Does such restriction benefit the society? I'm sure a lot of people have opinions on these questions, but it's not a technical issue and not one that has an obvious correct solution. It's not like "is quicksort better than bubble sort" (even that is not 100% clear cut but let's not get into the weeds) where you can make mathematical arguments and tests to establish the conclusion. It's a matter of values and policies, and as such, it's bound to produce disagreement. I don't think it's also useful to frame it as "it all worked super awesome and then greedy capitalists stole it from us by their dirty tricks". It's usually not how it works and it's not what happened in this case.


We are flipfloppimg because the legislature is paralysed, so only the executive can function.

This is a fundamental issue with the American form of government. Parliamentary systems which have the executive made up of members of the legislature have way less flip-flopping, finger-pointing, and paralysis.

The governments they produce are more reflective of current public sentiment, end up with more than two parties, and are thus less stable. Minority rule and coalition rule is very common... which actively forces either compromise, or a new election.


This "paralyzed" legislature just passed, by large margins, a large amount of foreign aid and a very significant provision on a popular social media platform.

Before that it spent billions of dollars on covid aid.

Throughout that time it has appropriated billions of dollars to keep the government running.

This "paralyzed" narrative is something the press and politicians like to push because it serves their ends, though for different reasons. It's false.


> Throughout that time it has appropriated billions of dollars to keep the government running.

In no other country is it considered an accomplishment for a government to debate a budget, agree on it, pass it, spend it, and then three quarters of the way through the year refuse to pay for the spending it agreed on, manufacturing a crisis that sometimes gets resolved at the eleventh hour, and sometimes results in a multi-week disaster and government shutdown.

If a company had a department that ran that way, every single director and manager in it would be fired after the first time it happened. It has so far happened three times (Including once when the Republicans fully controlled congress), and has been threatened every year.


> three quarters of the way through the year refuse to pay for the spending it agreed on,

At no time did this happen.


That’s what the debt ceiling arguments are about: members of Congress don’t want to take the heat for actually canceling something so they don’t remove it from the budget but then refuse to pay without some kind of token win for their campaign ads. The real debt problem is that you either need to restore taxes to pre-Bush levels or cut popular programs, but there’s no way to do either of those without being willing to negotiate and that’s currently politically untenable for one of the major parties.


The two-party system in the US is equivalent to a multiparty coalition system, just with the coalitions negotiated before the election instead of after it.


It used to be the case that Congress actually passed laws. And pre-Chevron, the regulatory agencies actually constrained their rule making to be within the law, and so laws were more specific.

The problem started IMHO with Republican obstructionism under Clinton, but got out of control with Obama’s shift to using executive orders over legislation after the affordable care act nonsense. It’s definitely a both sides issue.


The Supreme Court is poised to decide a case this term, Loper Bright, which should help restore more finality to decisions like this.

Because agencies receive considerable deference to their interpretation of the law, even when that interpretation flip-flops every four years, we never get a definitive ruling on what the law says. The Court seems likely to greatly reduce this deference, leading to more consistency.


This would be an OK way of running things if we had a court with any legitimacy. Unfortunately partisanship has ruined any hope of that. (And actually, it would be better if laws could be interpretable by normal people without an SC case, but that would be too sensible).


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The overruling of Chevron is not about stripping power from federal agencies, it's about determining who should resolve ambiguities in regulations. Should it be the agency itself, or should it be the branch of government whose job it is to "say what the law is"?

That being said, I don't think Chevron deference has a part to play when it comes to Net Neutrality flip flopping all the time - these are not ambiguous regulations. In that sense I don't agree with the person you're replying to - Loper Bright won't help here. Now, if you want to say that the FCC doesn't have the authority to issue this rule, that's something that was always reviewable by the courts.

The concept that would actually attempt to strip power from agencies is the nondelegation doctrine. While I suspect that has support among a few justices, it would be a very radical change and there is no case on the horizon that I'm aware of that would be a vehicle to implement it.


Hard to see how reducing deference could lead to less consistency. You are literally commenting on a post about the FCC reinterpreting their authority to regulate internet broadband years after the lawsuits over the original Net Neutrality laws concluded.

If Loper Bright had been decided ten years ago we would already know today whether the FCC possessed this authority or not and it would be settled. Instead, we are about to embark on another round of litigation because the FCC just unsettled expectations again.

Case 1: agencies reinterpret the law ever four years in each new administration until the end of time.

Case 2: we figure out what the law means once and apply it going forward until Congress changes it again.


Case 1: Changing after clear notification is not ambiguous.

Case 2: Waiting until every single individual aspect of every single law is litigated means for years to decades the actual meaning is ambiguous until each court case finishes.


Perhaps it's getting worse, but it has always been this way to a degree. What few people seem to realize, is that while democracy and the separating of powers seem good in principle, they also have innately dysfunctional qualities to them. The more divided or opposed things are, the more dysfunction there is.


Hard problems are considered unsolvable by today's Congress (except for military funding bills), so they focus their energies on 'red meat' for the voting base (abortion resrictions, affirmative action), or for wealthy donors (tax cuts, SC nominations).


Your comment inspired me to make this: https://net-neutrality.vercel.app/


Proportional representation, multiple parties, and parliamentary system (no legislative executive divide) can fix this.


Proportional representation is a terrible idea, in that it entrenches the role of parties per se, but ranked-choice balloting in SMDs would be a massive improvement over the status quo.


Nope nope nope. Political parties are good. 2 incumbent political parties in a permanent grapple is what is bad. Politics is a "team sport", by which I don't mean it must a facile context practiced by west-wing-loving weirdos, but that is is a fundamentally collective effort.

Americans love to think political parties are inherently bad, but seriously when are mere individuals reliable? How the hell am I supposed to tell who all these down-ballet no-names are and what they actually believe in? Much of the rest of the democratic world functions fine with parties that are not all 150+ years old and ship-of-theseus-ed beyond recognition.


Nah, parties are bad. They perfectly exemplify the adage about people dedicated to the ostensible mission of the organization vs. those dedicated to the organization as an end it itself. With formalized parties, we often see the strategic concerns of the party as an organization eclipse any coherent policy goals that are the ostensible reason for the party existing in the first place.

Multi-party in particular democracy has some significant pitfalls, including the tendency of marginal and extremist parties to play kingmaker. The historian Hannah Arendt made some salient points about how the multi-party structure of Weimar Germany contributed directly to the radicalization and eventual total control of the state by the Nazis.

Politics will always involve factions forming around shared interests or values, but in a situation without those factions being calcified into formal organizations, or even identities, we'd expect them to be much more fluid and ephemeral, and for politicians to be much more willing to reach across ideological divides without worrying about institutional discipline or being ostracized by the party establishment regardless of their constituents' opinions.

Ranked-choice balloting wouldn't eliminate parties per se, but it would reduce their influence in the electoral process significantly.

> How the hell am I supposed to tell who all these down-ballet no-names are and what they actually believe in?

I'd expect a reasonable voter to investigate the actual candidates on the ballot and make an informed choice, and not merely rely on party affiliation as the only criterion for casting a vote.


> They perfectly exemplify the adage about people dedicated to the ostensible mission of the organization vs. those dedicated to the organization as an end it itself.

The same argument cuts both ways. Individuals can be corrupted by personal ambition versus sticking to a mission too.

> With formalized parties, we often see the strategic concerns of the party as an organization eclipse any coherent policy goals that are the ostensible reason for the party existing in the first place.

This is because there is no marketplace of parties. There is are just two, and we are stuck with them --- they are more akin to coalitions to parties in a multiparty than individual parties in a multiparty system. The monopoly/incumbency problems this creates are the same ones we see in commerce when there is a dearth of firm creation/failure, and the zombies live on.

> Multi-party in particular democracy has some significant pitfalls, including the tendency of marginal and extremist parties to play kingmaker. The historian Hannah Arendt made some salient points about how the multi-party structure of Weimar Germany contributed directly to the radicalization and eventual total control of the state by the Nazis.

There is that risk, but it is not like the US's system has protected us well from extremism either. When politics as usual gets discredited, we see both the rise of radical non-partisanship and parties shifting to the extreme.

I would not expect multiparty democracy to protect us from stupid as colossally stupid as the Treaty of Versaille, and neither should Hanna Ardent. US policy towards West Germany and Japan is the much better model of dealing with defeated enemies.

> Politics will always involve factions forming around shared interests or values, but in a situation without those factions being calcified into formal organizations, or even identities, we'd expect them to be much more fluid and ephemeral, and for politicians to be much more willing to reach across ideological divides without worrying about institutional discipline or being ostracized by the party establishment regardless of their constituents' opinions.

Again this all sounds nice in principle, but we are not seeing that in any extent political system. Large parties and small parties both have plenty of rhetorical dogmatism and inflexibility. But at least small parties can outflank large incumbents, bringing together constituents in hitherto unexpected ways. Stuff like YIMBYism, for example, which doesn't neatly fit into either US party is really screwed over by having to win through the "long slow march through the primaries", rather than create a nimble new party with cross-spectrum appeal.

> Ranked-choice balloting wouldn't eliminate parties per se, but it would reduce their influence in the electoral process significantly.

You need to provide more evidence for this. Campaigning is expensive. The returns on consistent messaging increase with scale (e.g. ingraining strains of through, moving the Overton window, etc.)

> I'd expect a reasonable voter to investigate the actual candidates on the ballot and make an informed choice, and not merely rely on party affiliation as the only criterion for casting a vote.

With enough work, one can learn about individual, but what enforces that those individuals are consistent? Firstly. The incentives for politicians, especially minor ones, are to avoid making enemies more than make friends --- they don't want you to know how they feel. Secondly, and more importantly, they have zero incentive to consistently feel anything as the political landscape and space of compromises shape-shifts.

You talk about reaching across the aisle as an unvarnished good thing, but as a voter there some deals are really worth it, and some deals are not worth it --- not all deals/compromises are good.

When individuals are fickle and nebulous, there is no way to vote on individuals that adequately conveys this sort of information. We can say "vote for good character", but that is feel-good dribble.


The issue is that it isn’t legislation. It’s a regulation. Laws are both harder to get passed and harder to overturn


Part of the reason some one like Modi came into power and has been able to maintain it (amongst many other reasons) is people were disgusted by the continuous reversal of administrations and their policies. Nothing ever progressed to completion. That malcontent is generally settling into the west as well and strongmen are looking more and more attractive. The auth option in the US is a regressive dummy, but India, China and several African, Latin American and South East Asian countries have competent people filling those roles.


IIRC with Modi a big factor was that the previous prime minister was seen as effectively a spineless puppet, kind of like how Biden is seen by many. Modi came in promising to try literally anything rather than just sitting by and doing nothing unless ordered to by the political dynasty leading the party, and has largely delivered on that promise.

It has meant lots of controversial legislation being forced through, but to many that's better than just letting the issues simmer for decades. Especially since many of those issues had no uncontroversial solution.

Trump came in promising similar action, but in hindsight did absolutely nothing besides further divide the country. Unfortunately at the moment neither side seems to have a candidate that's actually willing to do something similar. Biden will continue to make excuses about not being able to do things, and Trump will continue to focus more on PR and dominating the news cycle than actual work.


Manmohan Singh was seen as exceptionally spineless (because he pretty much cowtowed to whatever the Gandhi family said). That’s not how Biden is perceived. At all. Biden has installed more justices than Obama and Trump combined. He has done it without the right freaking out about it. He has been incredibly effective if you delve past the surface.


In right wing circles Biden is often perceived as a puppet for 'elites', too old and senile to make his own decisions. Every other tweet about him seems to get people joking about how he had to go to bed early or how they had to drag him out to make a speech. I was a bit young to carefully follow Manmohan's term, but I recall that one of the comments I often heard from adults were that he was clearly too old for office.


It's funny how his speech is an indicator that he is too old for office, when his opponent's speech is so frequently and completely unhinged[1], that it sounds like a self-parody.

---

> [1] I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.


Yep, it's pretty ironic, the only difference between the two (in terms of showing their age) is that Trump is more energetic (animated?), but energy doesn't translate to coherence.


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Voters aren't voting for policies at all. They're voting for candidates who come as a package deal, and often have to make tradeoffs among their own policy positions as no single candidate aligns with them on all issues. On top of that voters are casting their votes in an electoral process rife with gerrymandering, wedge issues, exaggerated or fabricated crisis rhetoric, party-line voters, and other distortions.

The idea that the behavior of the government is ever a consistent reflection of the aggregated intentions of the electorate is something of a fantasy. No one is intentionally voting for bad policy -- they're getting bad policy in one area as a consequence of voting for good policy in another.


> half the voting population of the 50 states of the union keep making a conscious selection of bad policy

Which half?


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I’m not sure either side is invested in making sure people are suffering. I do think both sides have differing opinions on what the role of government should be in Americans lives. Neither side is wholly consistent, which is okay. Demonizing “the other” is the root issue. Everyone should stop doing that.


> I do think both sides have differing opinions on what the role of government should be in Americans lives.

I think everyone seems to largely agree that the government should definitely have a big role in Americans' lives, but they differ significantly on what issues they think the gov't should be involved in. Relatively few people seem think the gov't should largely leave people alone (although it is popular for some folks to say they feel that way while simultaneously agitating for the opposite).


I actually don't believe this anymore. I think that up to the Bush years, you could argue the sides were just taking different paths to achieve the same goals. As bad his policy ended up being, I think Bush and Cheney and their cohort were really trying to do the right thing. I also genuinely think that Trump and his enablers are people with bad intentions. Their intentions range between callous self-interest and downright nativist authoritarianism. They would harm democracy and their perceived enemies in America to further their goals. That's maybe not 100% of the political right but I have very little pushback against it.


Yes, total agreement. If the other half of people wouldn't make bad policy selections, we'd all be better off.


ah yes, the good old binary worldview. Such a delightfully simple algorithm.

    def decide_position(position)
      case position.party do
      when GOOD_PARTY
        cheer()
        return true
      when BAD_PARTY
        boo()
        return false
      else
        shutdown()
        raise InvalidPartyError.new "Warning: Logically impossible situation detected. There are only two parties, and one is good and the other is bad.  System shutdown initiated to avoid potential memory corruption"
      end
    end


I have some thoughts on this code:

1. Why is decide_position returning a boolean? The function signature, even without types, doesn't really indicate that it should return a true / false value. Perhaps a better name would be "is_position_good"?

2. Why would the memory get corrupted? Most operating systems should be able to handle such a case.

3. Why do we shut down the entire application? Surely there's a better method rather than killing the entire application due to a single boolean check.


It's funny that this is the exact opposite of what I said. I said "vote for policy". As it stands one party is at least on the right side of most major policies and one is on the wrong side. You'll never get 100% alignment but the two main parties are generally pretty good and aligning with the sensibilities of major blocs.


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> when half the populations entire political identity is “whatever we think will make the other side angry”?

I assume those are the guys who are voting for the party opposed to one you're voting for, correct?

> actively stifling progress is not actually funny

Another thing that is less than funny is assuming that there's some universal definiton of "progress" and those who disagree are just doing it out of stupid stubbornness, unwilling to concede the obvious truth.

> It is not possible for me to base my legislative direction on “everyone that is not cis white is bad”.

It's not possible to anybody. Literally nobody does that. It's a crude caricature. By perpetuating this caricature as if it had any bearing to reality, you are a major part of the problem.


> I assume those are the guys who are voting for the party opposed to one you're voting for, correct?

Except that it wasn't the same way one or two decades ago. And the republicans have changed a lot more than the democrats on that front.


> And the republicans have changed a lot more than the democrats on that front.

Only if you're looking at it from the Democratic perspective. From the Republican side they look at Democratic policies from the last decade and see a group that suddenly decided to throw all previous social norms out the window and upend social order. They see themselves as reacting to that change in the Democratic Party.

I think the truth is that both parties simultaneously escalated, but that perspective usually gets shouted down pretty hard by both sides who each really want to perceive themselves as the consistent one.


> a group that suddenly decided to throw all previous social norms out the window and upend social order

That's a different front, though.

Even if it's a response to those things, the level of "don't cooperate even on issues where you agree/used to agree" has not been the same between parties.


Well, OP was responding to this:

> when half the populations entire political identity is “whatever we think will make the other side angry”?

The idea here is that Republicans are somehow out to spite the Democrats more than vice versa, and I frankly don't see it. Both sides believe the other to be acting in bad faith, and honestly from my perspective it certainly looks like both sides are acting in bad faith.

We've had more than our fair share of close calls to government shutdowns the past four years, but let's not forget that Congress actually did fail to fund the government twice during Trump's presidency. The current Congress flirts with the line but has always ended up actually finding something that can pass.


Spite is only one kind of bad faith, and when it comes specifically to spite it doesn't seem to me like it's balanced between the parties.


Except it was. The parties have been calling each other every dirty word in the book since forever. You can sample how it looked like about 150 years ago: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/11/running-for-governor....

> And the republicans have changed a lot more than the democrats on that front.

Of course, your team have always been standing for the common sense but the other team is just crazy now. Long gone are the times of Bush presidency, where the parties lives in almost perfect harmony, and the worst thing the President could be called by the opposing politician is "this esteemed and honorable man is sometimes mistaken". If only would could go back to those golden times.


> The parties have been calling each other every dirty word in the book since forever.

I don't know why you think this is relevant to what I'm saying.

> Of course, your team have always been standing for the common sense but the other team is just crazy now.

That's not what I said at all. I said both teams used to be more similar in a specific way.

And neither one was very good.


Perhaps one commonality is that we all seem inclined to assume the other half makes political decisions out of spite.


I find the only commonality is that after the right wing does something, both sides say “this is going to hurt so many people”. It’s just that one side is laughing when they say it.

I visit alt-right circles A LOT, and I have literally never once heard “the other side does these things out of spite”. The vast majority of the time, they don’t have anything to say on a topic beyond repeating some stupid meme.

Additionally, I would also like to point out that people on the right actually demonstrably DO have zero conviction for their beliefs. It is a tested fact that on the whole people on the right will absolutely flip flop on a topic the moment they find out that the left supports it (some 90% of right wing voters in tests), however, on the whole, people on the left are *far* less likely to flip flop (only some 10% of left wing voters flip on a topic upon learning the right supports it).

That the right actually votes out of spite is not just something people assert, it’s a tested fact.

Mitch *blocked his own goddamn bill upon finding out that dems supported it*.


You obviously haven't been in any right-wing circles.

They're constantly saying that the other side "hates you and wants to destroy the country", exactly the same thing left-wing circles are constantly saying about them. If they're laughing when they're saying it, it's either because you're failing to read the room and arguing with someone who's just sharing an edgy meme rather than actually talking politics (I see this very often on the fediverse), or they're doing it in a cynical "haha, we're so screwed" manner.


> The vast majority of the time, they don’t have anything to say on a topic beyond repeating some stupid meme.

You from earlier:

> It is not possible for me to base my legislative direction on “everyone that is not cis white is bad”.

Both sides are totally guilty of repeating stupid memes instead of engaging in intelligent discourse. You just don't recognize your stupid memes because they seem like factual statements since you've heard them so much from your circles.

You hear someone say something that you disagree with and you immediately interpret it using the memetic pigeon hole that you've adopted for that "kind of person" instead of actually listening to what they have to say. Get out more and actually listen (really listen!) to what conservatives have to say. Why do they repeat the memes that they do? What do those memes say about their inner life?

As a rule, conservatives are no less thoughtful and caring than you are, they just have a very different set of axioms governing their ethics. Until you understand those priors their words will sound as irrational and foolish to you as your words do to them.


The data suggests that "both sides" isn't really the case here.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17457289.2019.15...

"these results suggest that Trump was able to leverage populist anger for political advantage in ways that other candidates were not and that such anti-elitism played an important and underappreciated role in explaining the outcome of the [2016] presidential election."

*Edit - added year in brackets for clarification.


Not going to pay 50 bucks to read that article, but if the term "populist anger" is used there in its common meaning, it's not about "other side" at all. It's mainly about people feeling supposedly representative government has abandoned any pretense of representing the population and their interests, and that understandably makes some people feel bad about it. It's not about pissing off some imaginary opponent, it's about making the persons taking decisions hear what the population is concerned about. And yes, a lot of people supported Trump because they thought - and think (correctly or incorrectly) that Trump is more attentive to these concerns than the alternatives.


You're trying to say that policy and representation is the broad concern. The studies say otherwise. The whole of government is one part of the elite that conservative America wants to tear down.

Do you think "owning the liberals" is a completely made up thing? How do you think it compares to the phrase "owning the conservatives", a phrase nobody uses nor seemingly aspires to?


No, it's not the specific policy. It's the general feeling that there's no representation at all happening. And yes, people would certainly would want to tear down the elites that don't even bother to listen what their subjects want - it's exactly how it happened all over history, once the elites forget the population exists and has needs, the revolution is brewing in one form or another.

> Do you think "owning the liberals" is a completely made up thing

No, I don't think it's completely made up. I think it's by far not the main driver, and claiming like everything the right does, or even most significant driver for what the right does is this is nonsense.

> "owning the conservatives", a phrase nobody uses nor seemingly aspires to

A brief search (not using Google since their results are garbage now) provides ample proof otherwise. But my point is that spite in not a primary motivation neither for the right nor for the left. Since the right is by its nature more reactionary (I don't use it here as pejorative but as a description of action caused by another action), their actions can looks spiteful in more cases, but that's not the primary motivation, whatever the forum trolls say. For the trolls, on both sides, yes, this is a primary motivation, sure, and they obviously exist, but they are not the main or the only force by far.


> ... I am exhausted by the continuous flip-flopping of legislation depending on which party is in charge.

By design, Congress is unable to do anything. It's either one party (always the same party) being completely obstructionist, even other presidential appointments, or if a rotating villain who defects and stops any meaningful legislation.

Power has moved to the courts and to the states. Again, entirely by design. In the current term, there is an inocuous sounding case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo [1], which is expected to overturn a longstanding (~40 years) precedent called Chevron [2]. This would gut Federal agencies. Chevron set a precedent that in areas of ambiguity courts would give deference to Federal agencies. The argument for this is that Congress has to be explicit but Congress cannot possibly explicitly regulate, for example, salmon quotas and inspections. The goal here is deregulation for profit. That's it.

For the last 30+ years, every president issues an executive order on day 1 either banning or allowing recipients of foreign aid to provide counselling on abortion, depending on the party.

The real question here is why did this take 3 years into Biden's regime for the FCC to act? The FCC is an appointed position. This could've been done in 2021.

> Maybe it's always been this way though and I'm just getting old enough to be bothered by it?

No, it's now more obstructionist than it ever has been but it's always been more difficult to make changes than not. Previously there was more respect for institutional norms. For example, if the president nominated someone for a position, that person would always get a Senate hearing regardless of who controlled the Senate. There is no law that required that but people previously accepted the president had a mandate for appointments. Now? It's way more scorched earth.

[1]: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/loper-bright-ent...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....


> The real question here is why did this take 3 years into Biden's regime for the FCC to act? The FCC is an appointed position. This could've been done in 2021.

FCC commissioners must be approved by the Senate. Biden nominated Gigi Sohn in 2021. Republicans blocked her. Biden nominated Sohn again. I don't think he said why. But other Democrats believed Republicans would block anyone who would restore net neutrality. Republicans blocked Sohn again. Democrats took control of the Senate in 2023. Joe Manchin said he would block Sohn. Sohn withdrew. Biden nominated Anna Gomez. The Senate approved her in September. The FCC started the process for this vote a few days later.


> Biden nominated Gigi Sohn in 2021

Democrats controlled the Senate in 2021. Republicans didn't block the nomination. Democrats allowed the Republicans to block the nomination. The process by which that block happened could easily have been eliminated by a Senate rules change. There were attempts to do this on other issues (eg voting rights) but the rotating villains of the Democratic Party at the time (ie Sinema, Manchin) blocked it.

Joe Liebermann was previously the rotating villain. He is singlehandedly the only reason why 55 year olds can't buy into Medicare to get health insurance coverage.


The Senate was split evenly in 2021 and operated under a power sharing agreement. And you can't change rules easily or not when you don't have the votes.

I reject the rotating villain conspiracy theory. 1 scapegoat would have been enough. Sinema's choices ended her Senate career. Manchin and Lieberman didn't change suddenly.


> By design, Congress is unable to do anything. It's either one party (always the same party) being completely obstructionist, even other presidential appointments, or if a rotating villain who defects and stops any meaningful legislation.

Don't pretend like the Democrats wouldn't be just as obstructionist if it suited their political objectives.

What we actually have is lack of consensus, and excessively polarized factions that are unwilling to budge to create a consensus (or rather waste their energy making a great deal of noise on non-consensus issues and nonstarters and bickering with each other).


> Don't pretend like the Democrats wouldn't be just as obstructionist if it suited their political objectives.

So if someone throws a stone at you, you might reasonably be tempted to throw a stone back. If called up on this, you might be tempted to say "he started it". Legally speaking, that might or might not be a defense.

What if instead you throw a stone at someone and justify it with "he was going to throw a stone at me"? Would you consider that a sound defense?

Take it further. Your defense becomes "he would've thrown a stone at me if he had the option so I had to throw the stone at him". No reasonable person would respect that argument.

So why is the hypothetical "Democrats would block a Supreme Court nomination if they had the chance" reasonable to you?


> Don't pretend like the Democrats wouldn't be just as obstructionist if it suited their political objectives.

And this is exactly what they did when Trump was in office! Their motto was “#resist” for crying out loud. Sheesh, right now TikTok is on the verge of being banned, something that they were completely against when Trump wanted to do it. Bad idea when Trump wants it, good idea when Biden does.

Just be honest folks, it’s truly a “both sides” thing. And honestly, political gridlock is a good thing. Most of the people here on HN quickly forget how valuable it is when it’s the side YOU don’t like ramming legislation through.


Please enumerate the Supreme Court justices that Democrats refused to seat during Trump's term.




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