I've taken to voting the past few election cycles, starting in 2016.
The fact that nothing ever changes and the media just screams louder and louder about their narrative of the week has right about put me off of caring about politics again.
Republicans are conservatives which comes from
> averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.
They don't want to change the system because they like the system (even if objectively the system is bad for them and they've been told it isn't or that Issue A is all that matters, ignore B through Z while we decimate you).
Single Issues are a huge facet of American politics and are used by both sides to divide people who have more in-common with each other than the groups in charge.
From an outsider perspective I frequently wonder why it's not more visible, I certainly see it my countries national politics though not to the same extent.
And even when people do realise there is a problem they then hang around waiting for the perfect single solution to fix it forever which is an ideal opportunity for politicians who don't want the problem fixing.
If I'm been ultra cynical (and I try not to be) as an example, Roe V. Wade been over-turned would be a disaster to the GOP, the promise to try to do so is far more powerful at getting people out to vote than actually doing it - which requires both doing it and then having to promise something else.
Divide and conquer all the way down.
Because the shared values are dressed up in completely different narratives. I find talking to my conservative friend, he shares all of the concerns about problems with the justice system and inequality, but when I roll it together as "racism" he vehemently objects.
We're told the other side sees things dramatically differently, though. Or that the want to kill babies.
If the issue is racism, that means that a fix for the justice system's problems won't affect him. You're implicitly saying that any mistreatment he's experienced at the hands of the police is the way things should be, and that it shouldn't be fixed.
Saying the problem is racism is saying that only a fraction of the US deserves a solution, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people will find that disagreeable.
Therefore if there is both problem with racism and other one, racism can't exist untill all problems touching me are solved first.
I mean, I can see how people who have the other problem would find him obstacle to solution to their problems.
If, instead, police 1. treat people equally when encountered 2. encounter demographics in proportion to the crimes committed by that demographic and 3. african americans commit a significantly higher number of crimes per capita... There wouldn't be a way to make the police less racist - since they already treat people equally - but police reform could be effective at reducing the brutality encountered by everyone. Making things a police racism problem (african americans might commit more crimes due to racism from groups other than the police) then just makes it so that no progress can be made on the "police beating people up and killing them" problem, because the police aren't racist.
The above might not be true! But it's believed by a lot of people, and has a fair bit of academic support. (for instance, there are studies showing that police officers were faster to shoot a white man than an african american man when they were taking the same actions - the opposite of what I'd expect if police treatment differences were driven by racism)
But here, we are arguing about opinions on what is going on and not by "you should understand this person can not accept racism as explanation because he would not be benefiting from it".
There, I was asked to understand that reasoning on itself, if it is not benefiting me it can not be true, which is completely different then this.
On the other hand, "the problem is racism" is very morally easy/acceptable in leftish circles, and saying the problem is anything else often gets a negative response (this thread existing might be counted as evidence here) - providing motivation to call things racism regardless of the truth of the matter... (This is not necessarily the case, of course - just trying to show that motivated reasoning goes both ways)
I was respousing to that particular logic of that particular guy who was much less reasonable then he believed himself. I was not responding to all the possible reasons of all the people in the world.
that's a very good point. Sometimes i fantasize about what changes could have been made if the Tea Party and the Occupy Wallstreet people realized they were two sides of the same coin back in 2009. Both groups were quickly divided and subverted, set against each other, and destroyed out of fear of them coming to that realization IMO.
> One common mechanism was the establishment of an emergency committee— sometimes at the state level, other times at the level of the county or city— to deal with the overwhelming need for organization, communication, and cooperation among individuals, agencies, and organizations.
It's interesting they brought this up because the debate is often framed by the right as the "zippy right wing free market capitalists" versus "the slow and inefficient left." Yet from my perspective as a left-leaning individual, Republicans have tried to halt, sabotage and corrupt reasonable reform until it becomes unrecognizable -- i.e., Obamacare. Or they sabotage attempts to deal with COVID-19 reasonably.
If I'm being fair, it seems like institutional rot goes much deeper than any political ideology.
> It is striking to me how many of the old Silicon Valley builders—people of Andreeson's generation—were social outcasts in their youth. These people felt estranged from the established corsus honorum of American society.
Ironically, they were social outcasts because they spent the majority of their time focusing on stuff that mainstream society didn't understand the value of -- messing around with computers.
Now that internet-based businesses have become so profitable, upper middle class kids with sufficient aptitude are generally encouraged to mess around with computers. Someone tells their grandparents they want to be a software developer, and they're proud of them (thinking of all the people who've gotten rich off the internet), instead of saying "what the hell is that?"