But lebanon_tn, guns are scary and you're likely to get hurt if you have one in your house. It's much better to rely on the police to protect you. Why would you ever want to own a gun.
Sadly I can't remember last time that was effective. I remember Occupy Wall Street from a few years back. So was so much excitement and energy there but what came of it? A bunch of arrests mostly.
There were some anti-Trump protests. Right after election remember people blocking hospital exits, and setting cars on fire. At the inauguration, downtown DC, a lot of protestors torched trash cans in the street and blocked people getting the main event. It was very visible, for sure, but did it have the desired effect? I don't talk to Trump supporters but wonder how many saw the burning trash cans or who failed to get to the Inauguration thought "yap, this has convinced me, I am switching sides and will vote against him next time..."?
Vietnam, MLK, Womens voting rights, gay rights, workplace safety, end of apartheid etc.
Plenty of them all over the world. Occupy Wall Street lacked one thing: a clearly defined goal. You can protest social and economic inequality but that's not the same as saying we will continue to protest until we have 'X' where X is some very clear, concrete and achievable goal.
> Vietnam, MLK, Womens voting rights, gay rights, workplace safety, end of apartheid etc.
Exactly. What is the most recent one? It has been so long. Does this tactic even work. I am worried it doesn't.
> Occupy Wall Street lacked one clear thing: a defined goal.
I think Trump opposition is also in trouble for not having a clear goal unless the goal is "remove Trump because I wanted Hillary to win". It has to be like in this case "against extreme vetting from these 7 countries". Or against "building the wall". It has to be a clear message.
Heck, I remember the Vietnam war and the end of it (I was 12 at the time).
Of course it will work. If enough people will get off their well-fed asses that is, and there lies the biggest problem.
> I think Trump opposition is also in trouble for not having a clear goal unless the goal is "remove Trump because I wanted Hillary to win".
No, that would be the wrong goal.
More something along the lines of 'stop this madness or we'll shut the country down until congress presents a working plan on how we're going to:
(1) get rid of Trump
(2) put safeguards in place that limit the power of the Presidency
Way too much power in those executive orders, it should not be possible for a single individual to affect the world this radically on such a short timespan without adequate debate and on-the-record voting by people that can be held accountable.
Republicans are in power, they own this mess, they should solve it. And if they don't perceive it as a mess it is fairly easy to make them see the light if enough people will connect, and I suspect that by now plenty of Republicans see it the same way.
> (2) put safeguards in place that limit the power of the Presidency
> Way too much power in those executive orders,
Makes sense. Coming from Europe and talking to people there, it takes a while to explain to them how the President here has so much power here.
> we'll shut the country down until congress presents a working plan on how we're going to:
> (1) get rid of Trump
But what would be the basis of that? Just people saying "not my president". He was voted in by a large part of the country after all.
Now let's think about Google or Facebook shutting for a day maybe. That would get people's attention. Wonder if that would work... it might. There is no real "Republican leaning" equivalent there for those services. Most technology companies which face the public are left-leaning I think. So yeah, I want to see they try that perhaps.
Damaging America, possibly beyond repair. One person should not be allowed to do that, especially someone who was voted in on the slimmest of margins.
I'm trying to imagine how the Republican congress would have reacted to Hillary Clinton signing any of these executive orders, I don't think they'd be wanting for reasons to impeach in that situation.
> Now let's think about Google or Facebook shutting for a day maybe. That would get people's attention.
Just twitter for a couple of weeks. That would at least stop Trump from putting his foot in it for a while, though I'm sure the narcissist in chief would quickly find some other avenue to keep ramming on the buttons of his base.
Oh, another real problem with the US electoral system: no matter what there is a four year lock-step system, even if the outcome is horrible. Elsewhere governments can fall early and new elections would be called. Such a thing would never happen in the US and I believe this is an important safety mechanism.
> especially someone who was voted in on the slimmest of margins.
How so? He won an unexpectedly high number electoral college votes 304 vs 227. That's not the slimmest margin. Slimmest margin would be having a national recount and so on.
> Just twitter for a couple of weeks.
Shadow ban him! Let him Tweet and if he refreshes the browser he'll see his own tweets. Then add a few "great tweet" comments from some robots, but nobody else see them.
> Elsewhere governments can fall early and new elections would be called. Such a thing would never happen in the US and I believe this is an important safety mechanism
Oh, great point. I forgot about that. I remember it periodically when I read "such and such government has fallen" in the news from Europe and then have to explain to the horrified American what that means (they think it means mass unrest, cats and dogs living together, chaos, looting etc)
> How so? He won an unexpectedly high number electoral college votes 304 vs 227. That's not the slimmest margin. Slimmest margin would be having a national recount and so on.
Lost the popular vote and won because of approximately 100K votes in three states.
The electoral college is a total aberration and should be abolished (fat chance of that happening), if it didn't stop this BS from happening it is patently useless, that was the only reason I thought it might have some use one day.
> Lost the popular vote and won because of approximately 100K votes in three states.
Electoral campaign strategy is endogenous so to speak. Why would he bother campaigning in a state if he was sure he had enough there to win just a bit over the margin.
I understand if it was a single state that flipped but it was multiple states that flipped, and most importantly it seems he knew he needed just enough votes to flip them. And campaigned exactly there in the last weeks before the election.
The other question is why did Clinton campaign in California and never even set foot in some states that flipped? She was the one supposedly having the most experience and stellar team managing the strategy for her.
I think it is important to not minimize or reduce his winning to chance, it wasn't a random and and not a slim margin of error. Consider he didn't even start on equal footing. He was a TV personality with no political experience, with all mass media against him, with the president against him, without all the Wall Street backing him etc. That means he is even less of a random fluke. I think he is a symptom of something. If we don't understand why he was elected we'll have another Trump and another worse one and so on. Not saying I have a clear answer yet why but I think it is worth digging more in there, mostly on the self-reflecting side than blaming and name-calling side, thought I've see more of the later not the former in my circle of acquaintances.
> I hope those electors lose a lot of sleep.
It was sad really. There was so much talk and a small glimmer of hope that electors would flip against Trump and in the end the opposite happened more flipped against Clinton (5).
What exactly is the difference between enforcing morality with law and enforcing no morality with law? Morality is an incredibly subjective thing between differing cultures, I don't think it has a place in the justice/civil law systems.
Because populism leads very quicky to dark places. Most all systems of government, of vested authority and state monopoly of violence, are to address our instinct towards populism. Egging on the mob never ends well.
You're only labeling it "populism" (which is normally defined as 'support for the concerns of ordinary people') because you don't like the outcome. If you liked the outcome you would call it "democratic."
Somehow the idea of being concerned about the outcome for ordinary people has become vilified by American liberals because red state, blue collar, ordinary people are worthless.
What is going on?! Trump wants to be a job protectionist while Democrats want globalization? Aren't you people aware that not that long ago the Democrats were fighting the Republicans against globalization because they claimed that globalization was only good for corporate interests and bad for ordinary Americans?
PS I think Trump is a nut job in many ways so please don't read the above as an endorsement.
The populous isn't always in the best position to think through the long-term implications of their desires.
In this case, Trump rode the anger of voters who want to close the borders to both immigrants and imported manufactured goods, because they perceived that some of their jobs going to illegal imigrants, and other manufacturing jobs had been taken overseas.
How many of those people, do you think, buy everything at Walmart (whether it's all they can afford or not)? How many of those people realize that a 35% border tax and getting rid of our internal slave labor force will lead to commensurately higher prices of goods and services, without necessarily bringing back the jobs that were actually automated away? If they have thought it through, where's the better outcome?
This is why we don't have a direct democracy. These issues are more complicated than one can wrap their head around without making it a full-time job for an industry, and the decisions aren't helped by folks making decisions out of anger and desperation.
Populism is, in a political culture, the appeal to the popular regardless of other interests. It is about simplistic concepts easily chanted, divorced from complex realities. It is about doing what the people say they want regarless of how idiotic that may be, regardless of the fact they probably dont want the thing in the long run. By way if example, tieing NAFTA negotiations to whichever country wins the Stanly Cup would be popular, but it isnt sound leadership. Eliminating the IRS is popular, but no rational person would do it. (Either of those wouldnt shock me if tweeted.)
It's not exactly a citation, but high school culture ("that which sounds cool should be done") doesn't exactly lead to the best of all possible places.
Looking for symmetric universal moral principals sort of does seem to. Though I admit basically no form of government seems to head in that direction, as founding documents post-revolution are not really a form of government in my model.
Be honest, do you not go by journal title when you have to choose whether or not to read a paper? It's an imperfect metric, but it's the one we have. 25 years ago I attended a talk (by a representative from Pergamon) about the future of scientific publishing. It was out of control even then, and when in the Q & A session someone suggested ditching journals altogether this Pergamon (!) guy made the same remark: do you not read the journal title? Pergamon, whose best-known journal was Tetrahedron. Pergamon. Uttered by a Pergamon guy.
In some fields arXiv may have improved matters, but most fields still rely on journals.
Sadly, I did go by journal title, but not the way you think. In antibiotic research and microbiology I finally arrived at the point where I assumed anything published in Nature, Science, or Cell was likely to be so fundamentally flawed that the only reason to read it was so I could explain why we shouldn't waste our time in journal club with it.
Lately I have been questioning whether or not we need large-scale peer-reviewed journals anymore.
For example, if I knew that Leonard Susskind read a paper and cited, shared, liked, or bookmarked it, then that could easily replace my fundamental need of having the paper stamped by a trusted authority. If scientists could share, cite, and discuss papers on an open source platform (like Facebook, but for Academia), I believe that we wouldn't need these gatekeepers anymore, and they would become obsolete. The real authority has always been the scientists who are doing good, promising research, not some contrived group of scientists who are solely reviewing papers for the sake of assessing their quality.
An (possibly flawed) analogy: do need CNN/ABC/FOX when we have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to propagate news?
