There's no magical "back in the day" when everything was better. It's up to us to make things better, lamenting changes or new technology and longing for a lost past that never was won't help.
Long before we had "fake news" vs "real news" we had "no news" and hearsay from a dude in a bar. Same shit, different day.
The other side is most people aren't doing well financially.I know tons of people who work all the time, and are just too exhausted/demoralized by the end of day for anything but tv and beer.
The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming.
Setting: 2016 US Election
- Everybody is screaming in my ear all day every day "YOUR VOTE COUNTS, GET IN THERE AND VOTE"
- Tons of people go to vote
- The candidate with the lesser number of votes wins the election
All I know is, simply put, my vote feels worth nothing and so I now deafen myself to politics as much as possible. Much more worthwhile to focus energy on building businesses and making money that I can donate to charity rather than wasting away in my armchair yelping about politics proven to be outside my control.
It's frustrating to be surrounded by those who think conservative media is not only flawless, but the only source of truth, who feel cornered to vote for a candidate that they don't believe in because they feel beholden to our two-party system. If we could simply make those individuals feel confident in the ability of their vote, we would get right out of the two-party system.
As bleak as things are, though, I haven't given up. To do so would be to give up my liberty to these idiots, without a fight.
Whether or not your city closes/opens drug/alcohol treatment centers or homeless shelters will affect your life much more than Trump boasting about how he's going to build a wall.
Heck, the town supervisor from my hometown lived on the street right behind us. Growing up, it would be possible to hop across the fence in the backyard and be in his yard. Talk about access to your representatives.
Too much emphasis is being placed on the federal govt., which I believe is a terrible trend for all of us Americans. Trump made a huge wave of anger after withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but there is nothing stopping my home state from making their own ad-hoc agreement (of course, states do not have authority to engage in international diplomacy, but I'm speaking about the principle of, say, NYS committing itself to a zero-carbon emission pledge within XX years, and setting goals for all the towns and cities to help contribute).
Even without considering the lives lost, both American and foreign: The Afghan & Irak war have cost $5 trillion over the years. That's $60,000 for every US family of four that could have been put to other uses if those wars had been limited to a fast and cheap campaign against the Taliban government.
Don't forget China holds elections, but that does not mean people's votes count.
If local elections really "mattered", I'm sure the two party system would have found a way for the people of Florida and or Ohio to "elect" them for me.
Local election seem to matter to RWA/"conservative" types who want to include intelligent design, anti climate change in their school books or put 10 Commandments monuments in public spaces.
(Insert an observation about Alabama here)
The republican primaries had 31M votes. The presidential election had 137M. In the primaries voters also get a wider selection of candidates to choose from.
I don't know if there is anything preventing voters from participating in both the democrat and the republican primaries. If it's allowed I'd just pray that two great candidates win in the primaries and not fret to much about the presidential election.
There's no such thing as the "alt-left".
That said, yes, you might see a fall out of government not working. But rebuilding a welfare state will take generations. If you don't fix the political system this will fail too.
> Usually you judge whether something is broken when it fails to meet your expectations
Most Americans I talk to say that they want their government to help people who needs help: mentally ill, uninsured people with medical conditions.
Even conservative Americans agrees that people in need should be helped. How else would you call yourself a Christian.
Nevertheless, I see people in desparate need of help on American streets every day. Are you saying this is a new thing, and that it haven't been broken for 20-30 years?
How do you measure it cross-culturally? It’s a farce metric that’s used by politicians because they can make it bend however they want. Ecuador is happy too, maybe we should be more like them? If Zimbabwe was happy would that be evidence we need to be more like Zimbabwe?
http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/
If people only care about politics when the system is broken, why do 80-90% vote in elections.
My point is that people don't vote because the system is broken. People are more likely to vote if they believe it to make a difference.
People in the US have lost faith in democracy. This is unlikely to cause more people to vote. I'm not offering a solution. Just that things are not magically going to become better because people are going to start voting when things are this bad.
As a scenario and extension to your theory, what if the period of people largely not caring results in an entirely different class of politician being more successful, where partisanship and political maneuvering are more useful than actually achieving useful change? When "stuff breaks down and people start caring again", what if those politicians aren't up to the job of actually fixing what's breaking?
I'm not sure that necessarily explains our current status, but it is a morbid line of thought.
Or maybe a better explanation is that the will of the people is actively surpressed? Be it voter ID laws surpressing Democrats, or the democrats themselves surpressing the voices of progressives through superdelegates and closed primaries, there are serious issues with our democracy.
Throw in a populace that's been the victim of a failing education system for decades due to candidates who slash taxes (and thus budgets).
And now, when the problems are so acute, I find it very interesting that the narrative becomes that all these issues are the fault of the lazy voters. A convenient, and false narrative.
Now, getting to the DMV to apply for an ID card can be a hardship on people given the hours that the DMV operates and the fact that you usually need to set aside several hours to deal with waiting in line and such. If you hold 2 or 3 jobs, and missing part of a shift means getting fired, you probably don't have the time to go to get an ID. (Hell, you probably also don't have the time to actually go to the polls to vote, but that's another issue.)
And what if you're homeless? Getting an ID is probably very low on the list of things you can afford, even at $8. Also how do they mail it to you if you don't have an address?
At any rate, isn't this fixing a problem I don't think we don't have? Where is the evidence of rampant voter fraud that would recommend even an ID requirement?
If you look at the people affected it's clear that it is racial disenfranchisement under a different name.
Requiring IDs and then denying IDs to a particular race would be racial disenfranchisement. Simply requiring an ID isn't.
And in the end, I think it makes a lot of sense for an ID to be required in order to place a vote.
Because there are barriers, and expensive fees for many, intentional or not. The article above gives a couple stories of the issues people face trying to get ID for voting.
Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting, these are new versions of poll taxes.
And yet, no politician campaigns for that because it would actually resolve the issue.
A politician who campaigns for that will be beset upon by the right wing as it heaves into a fit over they're spying on us, they're trying to track us. Because in actually solving the nonexistent problem, they threaten the true reason for the problem being posed.
But you decided to take only the slice of the problem that fit your talking point, and that is the real problem.
My "talking point", such as it is, is that one political party is actively disinterested in democracy (while the other is more or less ambivalent), and that nobody in that actively-disinterested party is going to let the ambivalent party make this happen. Because it empowers them for it to not happen. It's not rocket science.
Yes. The argument is pretty straightforward: explicitly mentioning race would be blatantly illegal, so legislators are targeting a variable that correlates with race and using that as a proxy instead. Old-school disenfranchisement laws did much the same thing, using the voting eligibility of one's grandfather as the condition for exemption from poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on (whence we get the term "grandfather clause").
In person voter fraud is extremely rare[1], this is why requiring photo ID to vote has been struck down as voter supression in many states[2]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/03/he...
[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693...
IDs should be required but they should also be very easy to obtain. The government should go out of its way to make it as easy a possible. Being undocumented is not useful to any citizen, it creates an underclass. People should have IDs and we should care about voter fraud, whether its 1 vote or 1 million.
That the parties won't do this shows that both sides have something to gain by keeping things the way they are, they just want to win, regardless of the sanctity of the vote or the well-being of the people.
There's nothing inherently wrong with existing as a living being without declaring your existence (or, realistically, asking permission for your existence) to the government.
Nobody is complaining about animals roaming the world freely without documents. In fact birds routinely cross borders without being stopped or even noticed.
Why do people need to be monitored?
You don't have to mandate it for anything but voting. But if you do want one, they should be easy for anyone to obtain. If the poor can't prove who they are, they can't do a lot. They'll always be poor.
Do you have a source to support this claim?
As I previously pointed out, voter fraud is incredibly rare[1] practically non-existent.
Creating laws and administering laws both take time and resources. Can you support your claim identification is needed with any sort of rational, data based arguments or are you operating on emotion?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/03/he...
Of course it would take time and resources, but to make it easy for people to obtain IDs would be one of the cheaper things we can do as a nation.
You need an ID to get a lot of jobs, get funding for school, etc. If it's not easy for people to get IDs, we are limiting them anyway, so by argument we should be making them easy to obtain. That's my datapoint. It's a very natural way to empower people.
The source of the source you link to kind of backs up OP's point. It's not an unbiased source. So why do they think ID's should not be required?
I mean just thinking about, verifying who a person is before they vote seems like 101 common sense to me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/05/ho...
This stuff isn't accidental.
The other side would like to keep this same group (who can't be arsed to get IDs) from voting by whatever means necessary. Drug laws and felony disenfranchisement are likely part of this same scheme.
I'm not pleased with political shenanigans in general. And objectively I think if IDs are required they should be very easy to get and cost free even. That's the real problem.
But saying we don't need to verify who a person is before they vote is just f'n fishy as hell. Shenanigans. All cries about "disenfranchisement" aside. Washington Post (and friends) put this stuff out because they are clearly in first group.
Now, getting to the DMV to apply for an ID card can be a hardship on people given the hours that the DMV operates and the fact that you usually need to set aside several hours to deal with waiting in line and such. If you hold 2 or 3 jobs, and missing part of a shift means getting fired, you probably don't have the time to go to get an ID. (Hell, you probably also don't have the time to actually go to the polls to vote, but that's another issue.)
If this statement can be made in this same thread and upvoted as an argument for why IDs are too difficult to get for voting purposes, surely that's an unnecessary hardship irrespective of voting and should be fixed.
But it still would be a ridiculous argument.
ID's should be easier to get, yes, but the fact it's an inconvenience for some small minority of people shouldn't undermine the principals of one person one vote nor make it difficult to verify eligibility.
ID is required to vote—remember that we're talking about which kinds of ID are to be accepted.
So the argument should be, how much assurance do you need to allow a citizen to vote? No security is perfect, and increased security usually decreases usability.
https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-har...
If you started expanding something like social security numbers to be a real ID system with photo ID and digital 2FA, then maybe in 10-15 years you can make it a requirement.
That's how long time adopting of such systems takes in other countries... With much smaller populations
Establish a universal ID first and eliminate any access bias then we can talk about requiring it to vote. Given that there is no evidence of any real problem that it actually solves in voting, it's more important to avoid creating new problems than to rush into it as a solution for speculative potential future problems.
So I go into the DMV with my expired ID and expired passport and a stack of mail with my current address and a stack of debit and credit cards and my social security card. They will not do anything without my birth certificate. Crap.. Lost that when my basement flooded. I will head over to vital records.
Then the lady at the DMV told me that they closed down the vital records office in Eugene and my only option was to go to Portland. So right here I have to spend 60 bucks on a round trip to get to Portland two hours away.
So I get the bus the next day and go to vital records. Again more expense for the Max. So I get them to print out a birth certificate. I had to pay 40 bucks for them to do it. Then they want to see my ID. Wait it is expired. They will not accept it.
I am told my options are to have a parent or sibling come in to vouch for me. Difficulty.. Parents are dead and my sister at the time lived on the east coast.
So here I am stuck. I know, I will have my sister get on a plane to come out here. It will cost but it needs to be done. So she does. So now I need to pay for a last minute ticket for her. And shit, it will be a while so I need to get a hotel for the night. And I should probably cover my sisters lost wages for a few days.
In the end I got my birth certificate. Off to the DMV where I paid 40 bucks for a state issued ID.
This all was fantastically expensive.
And really.. They closed the vital records office in a city that has 200,000 people. The only option for the entire state is Portland. One office for 4 million people and Oregon is a physically large state.
So yes.. Getting a state issued ID can be incredibly hard and expensive. Even if everything was perfect and I was able to easily get the documents it would still be 80 bucks to just get a ID card.
I otherwise agree with your point, if it is that ID is too expensive to require for voting. It amounts to a poll tax.
Better to make it the job of a federal agency. Let's call it the Federal Elections Commission. ID is free, and they track you down to issue it, kinda like the census. Then I might be able to support requiring the ID for voting.
It's a chicken and egg problem. I understand and respect why they want to make it hard to get the birth certificate since we've made it the key to the kingdom. It used to be quite easy to get when I was younger, I for some reason have three copies of mine from over the years.
Not everybody is so lucky unfortunately.
https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-har...
I understand that it's important to protect our poor and all that, but requiring proof of citizenship to vote seems pretty important to me in our democracy, and is an incredibly low bar that nearly everyone is already capable of meeting.
https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Brennan_Center_for_Justice#Bias
edit: Why am I being downvoted for doing research on citations? It's kind of important to be critical of these kind of things.
"A portion of the population without a drivers license – whether valid or not – will have a photo ID, but without an analysis by race and location, it is not possible to estimate that population. "
The question here isn't whether or not they have valid drivers license, it's whether or not they have a valid photo ID good enough to vote with.
Thank you for providing that link, though. It's less biased than the others so far.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-drivers-licen...
There's a lot of people who live in the "fringes" of society who don't have an ID.
My uncle, for example. He lived with my grandma his whole life and didn't have a driver's license, car, or a job other than to run errands for my grandma.
I also have a friend who does not have an ID. Her husband takes care of everything and she doesn't drive.
It's unusual but not illegal to live like that.
http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/do...
I'm sorry you live in a bubble and can't see past it.
So we're at an impasse.
See, my deal is, you want to make this whole system more complicated at several steps, and for what benefit? To solve what problem?
I'd rather keep the system as simple as possible--cheaper, easier, less can go wrong that way, and more people get to vote and participate in governance.
Or, to put a finer point on it: some people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "violent protesting", but they abhor being seen to personally enact violence more than they want change. Other people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "becoming involved with politics", but they abhor being seen as a politician more than they want change. Etc.
There are problems people want solved, but the same people that want the problems solved have things they not only care about, but which society expects them and tells them and perhaps in some senses brainwashes them to prioritize over their own needs. Everyone in the modern world is afflicted to some degree with a social anxiety telling them that their families and friends would disapprove of their doing anything so outré as actually fighting for change (rather than preaching-to-the-choir about change), especially when that could hurt or endanger said family and friends. As the thinking goes, you're just not supposed to risk the people you love for something as silly as bettering democracy.
(And yes, that's even true when a person's family and friends are outwardly exactly the people who claim to want change, and who hold forth about the change that needs to happen, and disapprove of the people who don't similarly hold forth. The people who spend their time signalling that they care about change, are some of the least interested in associating with the people who actually enact that change.)
Modern Western culture seemingly has entered a failure-mode unprecedented in history, where we have nobody willing to go first, to stand out, to do what needs to be done, to enact the changes everyone else wants. We've run out of empathetic iconoclasts—people who see the suffering of distant/distributed others, and for whom that aggregate suffering outweighs the risk that might come to the comfortable-life-in-obscurity of all their closer companions. The people with hearts that bleed for their fellow citizens, but then don't shrivel back at the thought of their companions being the ones who end up bleeding.
> You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.
> Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nobody is, per se, afraid of low-probability high-impact events like being shot (otherwise nobody would join the military.)
But everyone is afraid of high-probability low-impact events, like being shunned by your community for committing a faux pas.
So, if actually acknowledging an elephant-in-the-room issue—or actually trying to get that issue fixed in a way that steps on people's toes, instead of endlessly debating how to get the issue fixed without stepping on anyone's toes—is considered such a faux pas; if it's considered something that gets you branded as low-status even by the people you're working to help, rather than something that gets you branded, at least in some small community, a hero—then the human mind just seems to say "fuck this strategy." We need acceptance—not from everyone, but at least from the people we are most trying to help. Without that, we see no reason to help them.
tl;dr: MLK Jr. may have had to choose to be a hero, but he never had to choose to be Batman. It's seemingly impossible to choose to be Batman. (Well, at least with normal human psychology. But even outside of that—even assuming benevolent schizoid folk who think Batman is a great life-path—we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.)
If people were worth saving they wouldn't need saving. I need acceptance from myself, to be able to look myself in the eye, and I have that, by now. I made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I don't regret any instance of doing or trying to do the right thing, not to get gratitude or recognition from any external source, but because I consider it the right thing. Looking at just about anyone around me, it seems that much harder than never giving in is having given in, being broken or tamed, and then reclaiming yourself. And even suckier is never reclaiming yourself, now that is suffering. I wouldn't want to swap with any conformist or even just "average person who isn't rocking the boat" I know. They generally seem unhappy, slow, and boring even to themselves. I have my worst times behind me, they have their worst times still to come.
> we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.
Can't really confirm that for myself. You know how they say when you get into prison you have to not shirk the inevitable fight, or you're going to be the toy of others for the whole stay? Life is like that, too. I don't care what "random person who happens to be my contemporary" thinks of me, if anything, I would care what people like Sophie Scholl or Hannah Arendt would think of me. But more than that, what are the things you would think or say or do even if the whole world was against it? Because only that is really yours and really you. The rest doesn't hold water and will leave you in the ditch inevitably.
There are tens of millions of people in the US that really want <X> to change, for a lot of <X>. However, without acting as a unified group they don't matter because they're dwarfed by equally disorganized and apathetic people who don't care. There are many examples from around the world of people getting what they want when they are numerous and well organized. Don't even need to look far, NRA is an example of this collective power (to some extent) in the US itself.
There is a social engineering solution to this somewhere, just like the current situation is a result of deliberate social engineering, not some inevitable evolution of democracy.
Depending on what Congress does, they don't even need to wait for the policy to be enacted before it could be affecting their sales, stock prices, and executive compensation.
In contrast, there aren't any companies who are so directly financially tied to the First Amendment. Oh, sure, it's a public good, but you can't sell free speech the same way you can sell guns.
If you want to know how prohibition happend just look at the low point for voter participation.
I guess what I'm asking is that if things are rotting upstream of these positions, then maybe they are "rationally vacant"?
How you make people care? Unfortunately it might be crises makes them care. No crises, no consequences, no confrontation with the alternative? Then people find something else to care about, rather than care about what seems to be a non-issue that doesn't involve or affect them and isn't interesting anyway.
When everything is important and urgent, nothing is.
I didn’t know HN had guidelines specifically disallowing all forms of yelling.
The same control of education as a tool to shape the common public mind was also exerted on media, which is why I say when people start arguing about Huxley and Orwell, that its a brave new world, until you resist... Then its 1984.