I lost my wife before they developed sickle cell treatments recently. Knowing the pain she went through everyday, makes me grateful that children soon will not have to know that pain. Thank you for sharing your story.
When I see sub 40 percent approval rate for both parties in congress… we’ve almost reached the moment where a majority of people believe both democrats and republicans have a negative view yet the 3rd parties will remain elusive due to gerrymandering districts.
Third parties are nonviable in most of the US due to our voting system.
In order to make it mathematically possible for a third party to compete, we need to switch to something with more nuance than single vote, first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections. Ranked Choice Voting has some momentum right now, and AFAICT is no worse than any of the other options (they all fail in certain edge cases, I believe; it's just a matter of which ones).
As I understand it, Ranked Choice Voting is still winner-take-all, and that's the real problem. There's still only one winner, and that person is rarely anybody's first choice.
People might appreciate having had the chance to express their first choice, but when they're forced to settle for their second, third... hundredth choice, I'm not sure they'll be any happier.
There are ways to do away with the single-winner system, such as party lists. They, too, have drawbacks, but they'd at least be different drawbacks.
Changing the voting method is much easier than changing to proportional representation, or any other means of avoiding a single winner. The former is something that's under control of the states. I...think the latter would require an amendment to the Constitution for Congress, and changing the nature of the Presidency definitely would.
Even just allowing people to provide more than one vote means that people can support third-party candidates without that vote effectively robbing their preferred major-party candidate of a vote. (eg, if you're broadly left-wing, and like the Green Party, you can rank their candidate first, then the Democratic candidate second—and then if the Green Party candidate doesn't win, your vote counts for the Democrat) That's a big, big change.
This is because very few people have even an extremely rough understanding of the difficulties our nation (and world) are facing. This is an very difficult situation for a democracy. When people are confused about important matters, the most reassuring thing is to be told that there is a fairly simple and understandable solution, and that they should just let the adults get in there and solve it. People will always vote for people who say these things. The reality is that we've gotten ourselves into knots upon knots upon knots.
Congress' approval ratings are always under 40%, and have been for as long as they've been taking data.
And yet most actual Congressmen have a high approval rating within their district. Incumbents have an extremely high return rate.
The problem is never your Congressperson. It's always because Congress is filled with other districts' Congresspeople.
I don't think you'll fix that by un-gerrymandering. If anything, I bet you'll get even higher approval ratings for the incumbents, since you'll have fewer "cracked" districts (boundaries drawn to make a group a minority in two districts instead of the majority in one).
Ending gerrymandering might get a Congress that better reflects what people want. But mostly, what people want is for "the other guys" (whoever is not in your party) to win.
I’ve asked myself why my grandparents did not try to overthrow their Nazi regime. They were not the most immoral people on the surface, they just viewed their actions happening as the only way of survival. I think the answer lies in seeing what really happening instead of what’s portrayed as happening on their propaganda outlets. Articles like this start to transition people away from supporting fascism if they are believed.
I will say that, having grown up in the 80's and 90's far removed from the fascist states of yesteryear, it was always baffling how Western nations succumbed so completely to authoritarianism.
I’m seeing it happen in real time and am still baffled. I realize now there are groups of people with perceptions of reality so different from mine they are basically akin to an alien species.
The mass migration has been going since before 1986, when Republicans gave amnesty to illegal immigrants, on the promise of getting better border control [1]. They didn't get it, nor was legal immigration reduced in any way, nor did the Republican party itself fight too hard for either. No surprise voters felt betrayed. California passed a referendum to stop literally funding illegal immigration, only for it to be judicially overturned [2].
Again and again and again, any kind of limit on immigration, no matter how popular, was rejected. Is it any surprise it came to this?
No need to be any more specific. The only mass migration into the country over the past decade that appeared to be facilitated by the last admimistration was an illegal one.
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.
I think it's entirely different arresting people who overstay their visas or people on student visas that disrupt academic life. The UK regularly arrests citizens for offensive memes. There have even been cases where someone got a harsher sentence based on a tweet about sexual assault than the person who actually committed a sexual assault.
You can feel any way you'd like about free speech in America, but let's not conflate the two as being equal.
I'm far more worried that America will stop me at the border and mistreat me for something I wrote online than I am about the UK. Heck, I'm more worried about visiting the US than China at the moment. The America effort to suppress free speech is very real.
Meanwhile palantir is training AI models that assassinate journalist. Ethics are a major part of tech, we can make decisions that distribute billions in relief or execute millions.
Maybe this will finally encourage us to move away from centralized services and create truly decentralized social networks outside of our own governments reach.
It'll need to be developed extraterritorially, otherwise they'd just pick up the people developing it. They'll ban the original website, so you'll have to get it through dodgy means, which means they can insert backdoors for you (unless you're able to verify the code and compile it for yourself).
Have you heard of the hush-hush over Chat Control, a recurring theme on this site? It's getting to the point that they could shoehorn that with age verification push.
Yes, but they have to fit it around the judgements of the different European courts, and they really can't do it, so they try to say 'Oh, this is totally voluntary' and then when realise that that won't work they decide to go after companies, etc.
They have some political power, but they don't have all of it and they are quite constrained.
