NN is also good for people and also has bipartisan support (from constituents) but just got repealed. Yes, the sky won't fall but it is now a little darker.
"Too many poor people are showing up to hospitals without health insurance and getting treated for free, driving up the cost for everyone else. We need to FORCE them to buy health insurance or else there is a penalty!"
Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got. Change the way you talk about it, sprinkle in a couple keywords like "affordable", mix in some coverage for pre-existing conditions, and suddenly its more palatable to liberals.
Imho, many solutions don't benefit from a partisan branding. Some things are just good ideas. If research shows it's simply cheaper to hire a bunch of people to offer the homeless free apartments and a simple job no-questions-asked than to keep cleaning up after them, keep designing the city to be anti-homeless and keep paying for the all the police time to deal with them.. Well, you'd have to be pretty damn stupid not to put that idea into law. But if you put a partisan stamp on it (‘We have to help people’ or ‘We need to keep poor people from bothering us’) all of the sudden you have the other camp against you.
I agree that political branding is whats toxic.
IMO Auto Insurance is a lot closer to Dental than Medical.
Assuming that is what you meant: just because that was not true doesn't mean that NN is not important. Granted, there is some fear mongering and worst-case thinking going on, but in the end I think that there is valid reasoning behind NN fears, just like the claims about the ACA were provably exaggerated at the time.
This kind of reminds me how the Iraq war is being used to sow distrust of the intelligence services now. Because there were mistakes made during a republican administration that was hell-bent to go to war in Iraq, we shouldn't trust them now when there is immense agreement about the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.
The pro-NN crowd have turned this complex debate over an imperfect policy to a good-versus-evil battle over flipping a single legal switch and Ajit Pai is completely fueling that.
I do think the market for ISPs has failed. Regulatory patching won't always be able to stay up to date. The government should make it easier to start an ISP.
Like what? You do realize that we're all paying $1 more a month for Netflix because Comcast decided to go "rent seeking" and throttled their traffic until they paid up? Our Netflix bills were increased shortly after. You're being fucked by anti-NN, whether you realize it or not.
What happens when they start doing things you don't like?
- Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously finally.
- Tax cuts are going to destroy the country and impoverish the middle class. In fact, the middle class will see their already staggeringly low taxes go even lower. The lower US corporate income tax rate will finally make the US more competitive with dozens of other major economies, including Britain, Ireland, China, Canada, Sweden, Finland, etc.
- Hillary lost because of Russian collusion with Trump. Over a year later, zero evidence of any of that. The only election tampering that looks to have gone on, is high ranking FBI agents & officials that were looking to throw the election in favor of Hillary. The fact is, Hillary lost because she took voters in the blue wall states for granted and refused to aggressively court them as advisers close to her recommended. It was educated white women that threw the election in Trump's favor.
- Trump wants to be a fascist dictator. No, there's zero evidence of that sort of behavior. He's a jerk, he may be a mediocre President, there's absolutely no indication he can or is in the position to seize more power. He is wildly unpopular both among the majority of polled voters and his own party (which he only joined to run for President). The odds are pretty good he's a one term President, and that one term will deliver the Senate to Democrats and rebalance things in DC.
- Trump's environmental policies are going to get us all killed and make global climate change dramatically worse. No, the few policies he has rolled back from the Obama era, will not in fact do anything meaningful as it relates to global climate change or harming the environment in the US. The dramatic shift from coal to natural gas, will continue to reduce CO2 emissions in the US, and the gradualy move to solar, wind and electric vehicles will continue with or without Trump.
- Don't know enough about tax cuts.
- "Zero evidence of any of that" is a completely ridiculous thing to say. Get out of your bubble. Try to see the world from the other POV, there are many pieces of evidence that point in this direction. If you step back from moment-to-moment politics and try to look at what's already publicly known, from a historical perspective, it's already an unbelievable scandal.
- I don't think he consciously wants to be a fascist dictator, but it's again completely ridiculous for you to say there's "zero evidence of that sort of behavior". He does many things that point in that direction, if only you look. And, concretely, he's destroying norms that keep us not-fascist, barriers are being torn down right now. That degrades our system and populace and will make it easier for future people to transgress further.
- I don't know enough about what regulations he's rolled back. But dropping out of the Paris agreement and simply not taking action for the next four years have a significant impact.
That's actually quite probable, because:
- both countries are openly hostile towards each other
- both have leaders that are mentally unstable and unpredictable.
Its just a self deterrent.
Look, it's not an oligarchy, it is a democracy. It seems to me that everyone thinks that just because Trump won the election that it is somehow not a democracy. I fear that the heavy anti-republican, anti-business sentiment will morph into a call for communism which will absolutely destroy the future of the human race.
This statement is insanely detached from reality. People are "heavy anti-republican" because modern Republican policies tend to be more about throwing humanity (or just poor people) under the bus for a quick money grab under the obviously misleading and fake pretense of family values and fiscal responsibility.
How about the fact that your company can get ripped apart for not having enough employees of certain races, or that conservatives either shut up or get ousted at big co's? There are invincible, roving SJW gangs with Google Sheets filled with names and details of tech workers that have been blacklisted for not being liberals. They enforce the ideology.
Now, on to the republicans. You're saying that they're throwing poor people under the bus, and I think you're right, a lot of their policies are downright dangerous. But I cannot listen to anti-trump, anti-republican statements anymore because the real arguments are lost in the hysteria. I believe that traditional, western values are very important. They are what brought us to the promised land we are currently in - It was our colonialism and christian morals that allowed our society to blossom. I'm not going to budge on that. Now, I do want to receive good criticism from you and to improve my viewpoint, but the problem is that criticism often devolves on the part of the liberals to claims of being a racist, homophobe, transphobe, or xenophobe; that I'm some redneck who's uneducated and does not hold a valid opinion. That's why I'm worried.
Communism worked by throwing anyone "against the state" into gulags, and against the state was a very low bar to pass. You basically had to have an uncommon or "off limits" opinion, which is what most all republicans have from the perspective of a progressive. Taken to the limit, perhaps this means that no republicans are allowed to get jobs at tech companies, they are unanimously attacked in the media, and slowly a mono-narrative emerges: Welcome immigrants, don't be straight, never express your innate male energy and aggression, and of course, if you're a woman, never have children and focus solely on your career. My imagination tells me that will happen, because the flame of that ideology has been lit and it is hard to snuff it out when the people confronted with it all hold tech jobs that they will lose if they speak out.
Now I wish that you and I could have a real discussion about this because I know I haven't adequately addressed your central points, and I know my viewpoint is terribly flawed. But I think that shit gets fucked up a lot faster and a lot harder than any of us think, especially the rich ones of us in the bay.
Good luck.
Also, as other poster mentioned, socialism != communism. Grab a book, read about it.
Good politicians make a difference not the party. And by no means is the President of China a good politician.
I wish. I wish every conservatives fear about socialists / communists actually came true. Unfortunately, I fear the West will quickly slide into fascism waaaay before we actually start taking alternative economic systems seriously.
I know you're mad, and that things aren't going the way you want to, but the truth is that things in USA and Canada are excellent and we should be very careful to get mad and start breaking things because we want to keep our promised land pristine.
You're like a man with a blindfold and a baseball bat, and our democracy is the pinata. You can only do damage by swinging your bat around. You cannot help democracy that way.
2: USA/Canada are great, but that doesn't mean they can't be improved.
3: You whole argument is doing nothing = everything will be fine. That's ridiculous.
But you and I both know this one thing. We both know how to improve ourselves. We know things that we are both doing wrong. I know my problems, and I'm going to fix those before I start tearing down the beautiful, harmonic system that I've inherited.
We as humans are not born to work. That's a false idea being propagated by people who want to use you for their own gains. We are born to find ourselves, to realize our best potentials, to follow our dreams.
Also, USA is the world empire AKA superpower.
(You need to find better people to listen to.)
And when things get bad, what do you expect that will look like? Mad Max-style desert hellscapes?
No: It'll look pretty much like now. Except things will be a little worse. You'll have less money. Less freedom. You'll find yourself making a few more trade-offs and concessions than you were before. Harder work. Less money. And you'll wonder why there's a small ruling class that seems to get all of the gains of society. You'll wonder why things never ever seem to break in your direction anymore. Always towards them.
Oh, and fun fact:
Much of the country is already in this position. Especially in minority communities. You just happen to not be feeling it. But make no mistake that that is the future the Republican Party has envisioned for this country and is currently enacting piece by piece. Breaking net neutrality -- something that will affect the poor and downcast of society much more than it will affect you or I -- is just a piece of the puzzle.
We know the telecom companies were dumping money into the republican party to repeal NN, but I think if the Democrats were in power then Content companies would be dumping money into them. The dems just have the option of playing as sheep because they don't have enough voting power anyway.
I'm cynical that either party cares that much about the public and think that pointing fingers just allows the elites to continue their games.
Then, shortly after Netflix agreed to pay Comcast's extortion money, they had to raise rates by $1 a month. So, we're all paying extortion money to Comcast. Learn some recent history before you form an opinion.
People can bluster all they want about price increases, but this is something that's been a long time coming. Netflix has increased the scope and variety of their offerings over their lifetime, especially the addition of Netflix originals (the real ones, not the per-market-originals). I would expect an increase in price.
NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce.
Not completely applies and oranges, but if you don't think this is very very bad, you're not thinking.
Um, what? That's literally the opposite of NN.
Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse.
I have no reason to believe this is "the beginning of the end" of anything. Life will carry on as normal.
Disproportionate reactions (like HN is doing right now) is not good for anyone. Take a step back from politics. Take a deep breath. Take a walk outside. This isn't the end of the world.