In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusion that the majority of the population of the U.S. deserves the work of engineers and scientists at this point. Now - obviously, you could say "well, they didn't ask for the engineers/scientists help" - but they definitely want the ability to receive some sort of medical care, and if they stop having a new phone to buy every year on the dot... some vocal portion of the populace will be quite unhappy.
Getting into how I actually feel about politics would be pretty irrelevant/pointless. However - I do think the U.S. is at the point where the average HN goer would agree the current government is a shitshow. Making that statement - I obviously agree with it. However, I've reached a point where I truly believe I'd rather have another four years of this administration, in a sincere hope that things keep going downhill and get exponentially worse, just so some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen - either that, or just the U.S. becoming a completely failed nation and engineers/scientists just jump ship to a more competent country.
Not trying to troll in the slightest in posting this. Am I crazy, or does anybody else feel the same way?
That's how we got this administration in the first place. There is no rule that smashing the system has to leave you with a better one.
You talking like, U.S. declaration of Independence, or more/less recent than that...?
While my mind is fuzzier now, I like to think it was a "things change for the better" else - engineers/scientists completely stop giving a fuck about helping the U.S.
And also there's no rule that says it will get worse, either. When you have competent people making the rules, there's a good chance it gets better
Trump said he'd smash the system, and I'll admit I thought he would. That was one monumental lie.
While it may seem daunting, changing the system before a point of no return would historically be the right move.
Historically, the most likely outcome of your strategy is a shift towards more oligarchs and feudalism.
Have a look at Russia, Iraq, China (post ww2), etc.
I don’t think there is any reason to be optimistic about “drastic change” being change for the better. It very well can go both ways, and historically tends to the worse.
Also, at least recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay
And almost all those people are people whose lives will not be affected negatively by 4 more years of the terrible administration, so they get to enjoy moral outrage while others bear the burden of feeding their moral indignation.
On the other hand, people whose lives are actually getting destroyed don’t have the same luxury. On a personal note, I have colleagues whose entire lives have been upturned thanks to this administration, but fortunately they are extremely skilled so they were simply able to recall rate by building their lives elsewhere in a country where the administration is not trying to make their lives miserable. The same cannot be said for the many millions of others who are suffering negatively thanks to the admin (especially the many tens of thousands who will be dead due to COVID who wouldn’t have been in a bare minimum competent admin).
The world is not better by any measure.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. The world is now aware of how painfully unprepared we are for cataclysmic events, like pandemics.
The world now also knows how dangerous China is due to the dangers of offshore supply chains, the disinformation they spread which endangered lives, and the dangerously strong influence they have over the WHO.
These are all good things and we're better off knowing them.
There is no logical link between willfully making our own government incompetent and corrupt just so we can realize how unprepared we are. That sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe you've known it. The people at large did not and now they do. Anti-China policy was often viewed as racist. Don't underestimate the power of common knowledge to influence the political winds.
However, I will fix it for you, zero percent of the US supports Trump or believes he has made the country a better place. There is a zero percent chance he will win the next election. Is that the delutional propoganda you prefer?
Moving to a smaller country, I don't know how I would feel in World War just because of population numbers and physical location. Given the arguments we can see between humans in U.S. states, and knowing how trivial it truly is to something like the ideologies of the CCP... I fully expect serious global conflict within my lifetime. That's the one thing I do atleast think I feel safer with being in the slightly rural MidWest than a smaller country....
Maybe this is getting away from the point of things. But fuck. I've experienced a lot of physical pain in life from my body falling apart, but in my mind, the horrors that could be experienced in war makes it seem like nothing. I'd just not like to die in a horrible way because of dumb fucking shit. However, that's probably stupid of me seeing as how that's how most of human history has been.
I would question that assertion. The number of large scale wars between countries has certainly fallen in the past 75 years (and was falling before then too), and the number of deaths from war has also fallen dramatically, but the number of wars and state-based conflicts has gone up significantly - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-i... - and back in 2014 there were only 11 countries on Earth not officially involved in at least one war - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/world-peac...
Globally, the conflicts we have are smaller and less visible, and kill fewer people, but we have less peace now than we've ever had.
Everyone will be losers but as things currently stand, China would loose the most.
Furthermore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_Chin...
(A variant of a worst case I haven't even considered before is a full nuclear Armageddon, and then Command and Control survives to take nuclear potshots for years afterwards. For instance if one party has still substantial conventional forces but the other manages to from time to time scrounge up another nuke and launch it.)
I could see them have more ICBMs than apparent, but successful SDI I don't think is possible, not against nuclear strike submarines in any case.
I didn't like it that much, but didn't need too much suspension of disbelief to see it as a realistic possibility.
Think of all the televangelists, megachurches, religious fundamentalists and so on. What happens in dire times? People flock to such things. There is no 'rationality" in it, just instinct. Thereby worsening the chance of the outcome you wish for.
I felt the smarter way would be to ridicule these horror clowns as much as possible, so their incompetence would obvious to almost everyone. But somehow that seems to not even matter.
I'm clueless as to why. It does not compute!
(On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)
It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she tried to paint a realistic picture, ultimately Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that falls apart when placed within real-world constructs, especially 50+ years on after its publication.
At the heart of it, what Rand appeared to most argue in Atlas Shrugged was against regulation and governance that superseded the inalienable rights of citizens plus centralized power in an authoritarian state and took away the economic agency of the individual. That doesn't preclude a functioning republic where people can own businesses, own the rights to their creations, and still pay taxes for the benefits of services best provided by government.
Now here's the irony: Rather than coming for our system via communism, which was Rand's concern, instead it was nominal capitalists who came to destroy the system via regulatory capture. I don't see what the right-wing, nominal capitalists in the US have done to be any different than the moochers in Rand's book.
The major difference is that only some insignificant weirdos in the fringes have not agreed that communism is stupid in practice. Brutalist aynrandian ideology is much more prevalent problem and needs to be somehow gotten into same ridiculed state as communism as an actual feasible ideology.
a) You're spot on she didn't want to destroy the govt. She was explicitly a minarchist, and she swapped major arugments and ridicule with the Ancaps of the time (like Murray Rothbard)
b) The communism hate gets floated most, but my read of Atlas Shrugged was that she placed the collectivists at the same evil level as the church, crony capitalists, and postmodernists, to the point of having characters who 1-dimensionally represented each of them (she's literally got a lobbyist character called "Wesley Mouch").
That's why it's always hilarious to me when I see neocon congressfolk saying that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book: she hated the church as much as the government (and would've likely hated those politicians as well).
Poked around some articles after writing some of this, found this one to be pretty neutral and illustrates my point a little better: https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-paul-ryan-ayn-rand...
That may well be ok for you to say but thousands of people have already died as a direct consequence of Trump's presidency. Hundreds of thousands more have been penalised for their race, beliefs, sexuality, etc. Generations to come will suffer because of the regulations they're undoing and the courts they've packed with Federalist wingnuts. Have some compassion, c'mon.
Not making an argument for either side, I just don't think it's whataboutism to argue that the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high.
Bush: thousands dead through incompetence in the USA (Katrina, 9/11) Obama: Trump: thousands dead through incompetence and malice in the USA (ICE, COVID-19)
I've taken out the "overseas wars" because that's shared across all of them.
As someone who has made the transition from teenager to young adult during the Trump era, I feel like I've lost a game I never even had the chance to play. We have clearly gone so far off course but very few seem interested in steering us back to reality (between the impeachment "trial", the primaries, and our handling of COVID-19).
After four years of the disaster that is the Trump administration, any establishment Democrats like Biden elected to office will be praised no matter what they do, simply by virtue of not being Trump. But that's not real progress. They'll continue to neglect wealth inequality / infrastructure / privacy / technology issues.
And Trump isn't the problem, he's just a convenient distraction from the fact that big money controls both parties. It's just that establishment Democrats more or less want to maintain the status quo, while conservatives are using Trump to brazenly roll back regulations.
Four years from now, we'll have even more damning evidence about the true long-term economic/social/environmental damage done during his term (as if it weren't clear enough). If he's not in office long enough, this will all be blamed on the next president, adding more fuel to the fire for a likely 2024 run.
Or worse: Someone more cunning but just as evil comes along, charming voters while more adeptly covering up their true intentions.
Our only hope this that enough voters get really pissed off enough to vote in every local, state, and federal election consistently enough for the next couple decades so that we can start to heal.
Biden's not going to inspire that. Bernie, maybe, had the chance to. Trump will do it. And if we can't survive another four years of Trump, we don't deserve to.
Once the older generation dies out and the younger generation takes over, we'll start to see some real progress. Imagine where we could be if more of our politicians resembled people like Andrew Yang - young normal uncorrupted people who grew up in the internet generation. The problem is that most of our politicians are too old (average Senator is 61 years old) and are completely removed from the real issues facing Americans.
We'll see progress, to be sure (and that's good!), but it won't be as dramatic as you think. It'll likely be similar to the last several generations of progress.
Bernie didn't even inspire people to vote for him in the primary; how was he going to inspire people if he got nominated?
I'm not saying he would've 'won'; it's quite possible he positioned himself as too much 'non-establishment', or perhaps too little. but saying he didn't inspire people to vote for him in the primary is not evident, IMO.
The fact he didn't win is evidence of that, surely?
What pisses me off more the problems themselves in our society (terrible healthcare system that ties healthcare to employment, outrageous university tuition + student debt crisis, homeless crisis) is the fact that we all know and agree these are problems, have known for decades, yet do nothing about it. 9 of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 2005, yet we do little to nothing about climate change. Epidemiologists and public health experts saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in January, yet it takes the crisis actually hitting us to start acting. We get some fiscal stimulus, but the people get relative scraps while most of it goes to wealthy corporations. I still don't even know if I qualify for the COVID checks because the government website tells me "Payment Status Not Available".
For example take tax filing. In most countries, filing taxes is effortless and takes about 2 seconds - log into a government website, verify that the information the government already has on you is correct, and submit. But in the U.S., citizens are forced to waste time manually filling out all these tax forms and pay private companies money (eg. TurboTax, now there is e-filing, but ). It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, or a member of the Nazi Party, we can all agree that making tax filing take as little time and effort as possible is superior to having to take more time and effort. Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy as countries like Sweden, South Korea, etc.
We can definitely improve things significantly by electing better politicians, but that can only go so far within the confines of our current money-driven two-party system. We need a system that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Rank-based voting would enable third parties, liquid democracy would enable citizens to vote directly on issues without having to be beholden to elected officials. Experts should be in charge of their domains of expertise, specially when it comes to science (eg. public health experts in charge of public health policy). Politicians can decide what gets taxed, who gets the money, and vote on laws, but beyond that we need competent people managing what they're competent at, and a system that's proactive rather than reactive.
Too bad it's taboo to even suggest that a system of government devised over 200 years ago when people were riding around on horses may not be the most efficient in the 21st century.
EDIT: Rather than simply downvoting because you disagree (which is not what the downvote tool is designed for by the way), how about taking a second to explain what you disagree with?
As an example; more voters know how much they spend on Netflix or Amazon Prime than how much they spend on government, meaning they are better equipped to hold streaming services accountable than their government, even though the latter costs them (at least) hundreds of times more.
Here in Sweden I receive my tax form pre-filled in a digital mailbox (basically a PDF of the tax form I'd get through snail mail on a website), I can see on the first page the total amount of tax paid, how much I owe or will receive as tax return and then another section with more details about interest I've paid, how much of that was deducted from my taxes, etc.
In about 5 minutes I have an overview of all the taxes paid from my income, how much went to the national, kommun/local government and I'm done.
I don't follow what is the argument about how making this process simple is considered anti-democratic.
The article actually quotes and links surveys proving the point.
Well that's factually false because taxpayers can see all the information and verify it for themselves (that's what they're supposed to do before they verify it). Who exactly is arguing that making tax filing easier is "anti-democratic"? A couple American tax extremists? The Intuit lobby?
If the U.S. can't even make something as simple as tax filing easier, then the U.S. is hopeless when it comes to bigger issues. We're already the only country without universal healthcare and where an undergraduate degree at a public school costs six figures. How can we fix those bigger and more "complex" problems if we can't even fix something as dead simple and bipartisan as tax filing?
having taxes included in the price when I buy something at a store makes lige easier for consumers. I dont need to know everytime I pay some tax exactly how much has been paid.
I honestly read your comments as a sort of astroturfing with your use of 'many' as if to mean a significant number of people, rather than the reality, which is 'some people', indicating a whole lot less people but more than 1.
you are being worked over by special interest groups who are being led on by some rich people who have their opinions and are forcing every one to live by them.
TurboTax lobby officially to make tax filing difficult in the US, they will also spend money under the radar to give voice to the 'individual' who is anti tax because it benefits Turbo Tax not because they align with the individual, but because it helps their bottom line.
Normally I’m all about Hanlon’s razor (assume stupidity before malice), but given the absurd amount TurboTax spends lobbying against any meaningful simplification you can’t fully pin place this on gov’t incompetence.
But ultimately TurboTax doesn't vote on laws, politicians do. By blaming TurboTax, you're alleviating politicians of their personal responsibility.
The voters didn't ask nor vote for our government. The government picked the voters...
I agree wholeheartedly that a democratic government reflects its voters. A largely apathetic, non-voting populace exaggerates the effect of gerrymandering, campaign finance and media manipulation.
Also due to the electoral college and the winner-take-all way in which voting is designed in the U.S, your vote for president only matters if you live in a swing state. If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
I am well aware, but that has nothing to do with the almost half of eligible voters who didn't vote at all. Californians who didn't vote in 2016 (~9m) far outnumber Hillary's margin over Trump (~4.3m). There's only "no point voting for president in California" because 9m Californians don't vote. That's nothing to do with "the system", that's a choice that every single one of those 9m voters is making.
Which brings me back to my original point, which is that voter apathy exacerbates the influence of gerrymandering and campaign spending in winning elections.
Winner-take-all in any state that leans predominantly in one direction means that your vote doesn't matter. Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not. Winner-take-all means all the delegates go to the winner.
It has everything to do with the system. Instead of just preaching that people should vote, maybe take a look at why they aren't. Maybe some don't because they can't get off work and unlike many other countries, election day isn't a national holiday. Or maybe because they don't feel like it makes a difference. If you don't live in a swing state, then one is right to feel like their presidential vote doesn't make a difference because as I just explained, it doesn't, and it shouldn't be that way.
Perhaps if more people voted in places like CA, the discrepancy between the popular vote and the actual winning candidate would be shown to be so absurd that we could actually get a movement going to successfully change how we elect our leaders.
Then again, it's possible (likely?) that would be matched by more people in red states voting such that the margins would end up the same.
Of course, you might mean that you just want the half of non-voters who agree with you to vote, but that's a different thing.
Hell, ignoring the deplorable level to which standards have been lowered by perverse incentives to pass students, the US only has an average of 80 HS graduation rate.
These are your voters. People who struggled to make it through high school have just as much of a day over your governments, your legislation, as you do. Do you expect uneducated and/or ignorant voters to make good decisions?
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-graduation-rate-s...
Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and basic decency, no matter what. Even if they make a mistake. Especially then. People deserve better.
That being said, you seem to be quite active politically and doing more than most in this arena. At what point do you give up and move to where you think you'll be represented? This is assuming you have the means to go elsewhere. Some people operate on moving to where they are treated best, that includes the option of a different country.
I guess it's easy to make those kinds of remarks when you know you won't be the one paying that price, huh?
If I'm not willing to pay the price, I should not expect change.
It's not meant as a flippant comment. Taxes are an exchange from citizens to state, in return for a certain duty of care.
Yes, the system is set up to inflict severe punishment on dissenters - because tax money enables (or disables) government.
But, the more people who rally around your political protest, the more effective it becomes...
No individual can just "rise up and fix the system".
Repeating it over and over in every post you make doesn't make it true. It just shows your callous disregard for humanity, which isn't likely to win you much agreement.
It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."
Start with considering skewed results when an electoral process is skewed by asymmetric warfare of an adversary.
Or consider regulatory capture by small subsets of the society, not visible until the damage is done....
FPTP voting collapses into a two-party system, which ultimately leads to a government and people at war with itself. Under such a system, compromises become impossible, sabotage the norm, and nobody can get anything meaningful done anymore. The loudest man wins.
The cultural baggage comes from the Cold War. If you look at popular media from the time, you'll see a very strong connection between "communism" and "science" (because the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life). American TV, books and movies conflated science and anything "sciency" with commies and conspiracies to enslave the common man, but it's hard to blame them since they were taking their cue from the spirit of the times.
To this day, there are few countries with such a heavy distrust of science as America has. And since the alternatives for explaining complex things are religion, superstitions, and "folksy wisdom", it's no wonder that such people get elected to office. And since it's a two-party system, belligerence is a virtue.
the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life
In all three cases, the leading relief efforts (and vast improvements to Soviet agriculture) were provided by those "anti-science" Americans.
Given what a horribly ignorant "anti-science" place America is, it's baffling that so many of y'all want to go there to live.
My point is that the USSR's fanatical devotion to a flawed religion of "science" had ripple effects to the USA, their sworn mutual enemy. When one side takes on a slogan to rally their tribe, the opposing side must distance themselves from it, which in this case meant that America distanced itself from trust in their own scientific institutions for fear of appearing to support the enemy tribe's position (it was an ideological and cultural war, and everyone was watching). That official distrust of science spread into a cultural distrust that resonates to this day.
Note: I'm not blaming America here; this is the nature of culture (regardless of who it is), and it couldn't have happened any other way in their competition, given Moscow's "science the saviour" position. It's just unfortunate that this is part of the fallout.
To say that we'll run out of competent people to lead is nonsense.
In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government.
For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be.
Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect.
If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.