Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light?
Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopic produced by Russian production house?
Anyway, our government isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting, which despite all its flaws does shift inertia.
Even voting within states are completely rigged with gerrymandering and popular vote means nothing in national elections.
Other similar examples of this argument:
"Everyone knows taxes go to corrupt corporations, they are completely useless get rid of them"
"Everyone knows masks dont block 100% of airflow, theyre completely useless!"
Currently, of those 4 seats, 3 are in their high 70s or even 80s and the 4th was appointed by the governor.
I'm in my 30s. My interests are either entirely not, or very very poorly represented in Washington.
Tell me again how my never missing an election has made a difference?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/...
Even if you live in WA/CA your vote still matters. At the federal level there are 4 elected positions, 14 at the state level, and more at a local level. There are also primaries, so even if your Governor is guaranteed to be a Democrat you can at least pick which one.
The people that do vote have an outsized impact because, like you, most Americans are too lazy to vote.
I do also vote in primaries, those have typically gone opposite to how I voted, or else were a foregone landslide for my pick.
I also never implied I live in WA. Apparently you got confused because I spelled out the name of the capital city of this country.
I see your point that district style voting can feel pointless unless you you're in a swing district. I still think there are smaller positions you can influence over but I agree with you on that.
Possibly because those seats are worth money. I don't know that people competing for them means voting 'works' in any definitive fashion.
Princeton recently released a study (this one[1], I think?) that basically says as much: voting does very little.
1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
You cannot meaningfully vote in the US, you have two options that have similar fascist views of the rest of the world and are unlikely to change anything. That is a false choice, meant to lull the chooser into a false sense of agency.
It is simply wildly untrue to imply that the two major parties don’t hold opposing views on at least a few important topics or that voting doesn’t help determine which party holds the power to realize their worldview. There’s a lot of overlap and a lot of ineffectiveness but this does not make them the same.
It's unlikely you wouldn't know someone has disappeared, especially if they were important enough that the government decided to illegally disappear them.
Assange rots in prison, Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment, FBI raids James O'Keefe and leaks his phone data to NYT (which he is suing), and to top it all we have a soviet-style shitshow trial directed by politicians in January 6th Committee.
Now, I will see some awesome mental gymnastics of people explaining how none of these things have any effect on freedom of speech.
Given that Alex Jones has in the last 24 hours been found to be lying under oath repeatedly during his trial, since his lawyers accidentally gave a full digital copy of his phone to the prosecuting attorneys (which they were supposed to have done already during discovery, but did not), this may not be the most effective example.
I recall the debates around banning Jones from YouTube. It was "sold" as an unprecedented step to combat unprecedented violation of basic decency. And here were are a few years later, when simply mentioning some wrongthink words automatically demonetizes your videos, splatters them with warnings and even cuts live streams from air. People are banned from YouTube left and right (pun intended). It's the new normal and brave technologists who posed as defenders of "real" free speech are mostly rationalizing and cheering it on.
BTW, would you care to explain how something that happened in the last 24 hours is relevant to the issuance of default judgment that occurred in November last year?
he putted around with blatant disregard for the trial and cries crocodile tears when he's found lying under oath during the damages hearing...
Alex 'you may be my neighbor but i'll eat your ass' jones is not some Bastian of freedom - he's a snake oil salesman profiting off other's pain and misery. selling 'real' pills his family makes.
He had due judgement - he had 6 months to do literally anything (He didn't raise a finger in this regard).
You don't 'not go to trial' by ignoring it... that's not how this works... not how any of this works.
BESIDES ALL THAT:
I agree with you: platforms are censoring people... that's in reaction to malicious (not just false - but intentionally crafted and designed to cause harm) information propagating through our social networks - mind viruses just like bulimia and anorexia that are shared socially - only far more potent: things like QAnnon.
information is spread not by how true it is - but by how sticky.
if malicious actors infect a network - besides censorship - the alternative is violence - either by inaction allowing the malicious mind virus to flourish - or by taking action against it.
We are in a brave new world - and we don't even know the tools we need to protect ourselves as a species from the existential threat of memetic viruses...
Maybe we just all need to stop sneezing our thoughts out onto the internet letting them congeal into this amalgamations of ideas that seem to have a life of their own.
the life status of biological viruses is suspect. I suspect viruses made of thoughts and memetic imagery can potentially reach agent-hood.
Here's another one: Show me a China documentary that outlines the overreaching adverse effect of state digital surveillance on China population. I can show you at least 5 docs on NSA and Snowden, produced by HBO / published by Harper Collins.
Civilly liable, not “guilty”, and how is that not his own fault?
Kick out the hostile state. That's not hypocrisy.
Kicking out the hostile state solves the immediate threat from China. But what about threats from our own (current and/or future) government?
All you need to do is look at wealth inequality over time:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Wealth_i...
Because when power is unevenly distributed a few people can make boneheaded decisions that create misery for the many.
To point to the Russian experience the Tsar made the bad decision to take an odyssey the long way around Asia (and Africa for some ships) to attack Japan and they got their asses handed to them in a few hours. That was the first time Lenin and company tried a revolution and ultimately they made this feature film about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin
A few months back we had the spectacle of Elon Musk possibly buying Twitter (maybe he was in the running for asshole-in-chief) but I think he got some sense scared into him and he is keeping his head down these days.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?url=http://web.hks....
Also there are quite alot of ideals at work, for example when it comes to free trade. Anybody can sell his product and ideas in the us, meanwhile alot of beligerents, have walled of their societies from free discours and sabotage any external market contenders.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...:
> But the picture changes markedly when all three independent variables are included in the multivariate Model 4 and are tested against each other. The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level. Clearly the median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.
> […]
> When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a policy it has an even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed policies consist primarily of tax increases). At the other extreme, high levels of support among both interest groups and affluent Americans increases the probability of adopting a policy change, but a strong status quo bias remains evident.
While still in the wrong, how seriously should China or Russia take the country that lead the invasion and occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan for 20 odd years when it offers it's condemnation of their own ambitions?
To be frank, how can we expect anyone to take our condemnation seriously when we are currently doing the same things or have let the same things go unpunished in recent memory. We refuse to hold our own torturers and war criminals to proper account.
A relative handful of people made all the torture decisions for us. I don't think I want them hiding behind the flag, or me.
Personally it varies depending on the official. I think at some level we do bear some responsibility for those who represent us, I don't necessarily believe that crosses into guilt as much it does a call to action. The corrupt and unethical rely on a combination of apathy and normalisation in order to get away with their actions.
> A relative handful of people made all the torture decisions for us. I don't think I want them hiding behind the flag, or me.
I want them pushed out from behind the flag and into a jail cell.
Understatement of the year. We also currently don’t outlaw homosexuality or religion or engage in genocide and we elect our leaders democratically among other things.
Republic is about how the vertex of government is structured.
Democracy is about where the executive/legislative power comes from.
The US is both, you could argue that Canada is not a republic as they have a recognized queen, but it would be a stretch as she has essentially zero power there.
The electoral college is an abstraction so that the states in the United States are able to have a check and balance on federal power. Having a direct democracy of 300 million people would be a bad idea, a lot of political philosophy has been written on why.
If you build on a library that builds on library using AGPL license, you are still bound by the AGPL license, no matter how abstracted. If your country ultimately derives for the people, you are democratic. It is just that the USA is technically a democratic Republic, and intentionally so.
Rather than a boolean, democratic is better understood as a numeric value.
"How democratic are you?" not "are you democratic?"
Dictatorships do exist.
Sometimes power is held by a small group of individuals that control the military and can make dissenting voices disappear.
Sometimes there are elections but the ruling class can simply throw out unwanted votes with impunity.
In both cases power is derived form people, but not The People.
My question for you would be, do you know of a country that IS a democracy by your definition?
Now I am by no means a fan of the electoral system and I think one van argue that the US fails to live up to being democratic in practice for several reasons (I consider the electoral college a very minot part of the issues), however saying that it can not be democratic by principle or definition it can not be a democracy. I mean let's remember that in Athens (where the term comes from) only a minority of male citizens was allowed to vote.
Unfortunately, that kind of rebalancing has zero political support. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, while not as good a solution in my opinion as it doesn't fix the underlying problems with citizen representation, is probably more politically feasible in terms of fixing presidential elections.
Currently it is perfectly possible to win the entire EC minus 2-3 states with less than 50% of the popular vote.
Actually in the US the election of the president is remarkably linear.
In Italy the actual head of state is elected by the parliament (with no underlying direct vote) and then during national elections 1) the people elect a new parliament (with a complex mixture of proportional/non-proportial seats) 2) the parliament proposes various governments to the head of state 3) the head of state selects (and makes suggestions for modifications) the government (the actual executive branch).
And surely there are democracies that follow a more complex process.
The main difference between the US and most other countries is that the US counts votes for the president federally and not nationally, and the difference would almost completely disappear if more states would follow Maine and Nebraska example and drop the Firts Past the Post election style.
Democracy means that the legitimacy of the state is given by the people, not blood, not military, not religion, not oligarchs.
There's an old game, Anachronox, that does a wonderful job of making fun of this when the player is on the planet Democratus. Worth a play if you haven't.
When one group is actively trying to absolve its sins of the past, and the other doesn’t even recognize them while doubling-down, the claim that “everyone has sins” an abdication of the idea that behavior matters.
According to google "Nestlé Pure Life is a brand of bottled water". What's so morally bankrupt about selling bottled water?
But no idea what’s specifically bad about this brand in particular.
There are some serious concerns about bottled water in the US, particularly with how the manufacturers (like Nestlé) often get the water for free or at preferential rates, then sell it with a huge markup, and how some of it is (from what I've read) sourced from places like California, which need the water very badly.
There are also very serious concerns about Nestlé in particular as a company; the big one I always remember (because it's been going on basically as long as I've been alive) is how they aggressively push baby formula on mothers in developing countries despite knowing that the water in their area (needed to reconstitute the formula) is unsafe to drink. There are a number of other problems with their business practices, but I don't recall what they are off the top of my head.
It's kinda crazy that we do this with wireless spectrum but not with resources like water, oil, gas, etc.
Even land should probably work like this. Rather than a property tax, you pay a yearly rent on the land, afterall the US gov is spending quite a bit to protect it from forceful seizure by other nations.
It's from 2012 but I suppose Nestlé hasn't changed much since.
https://www.mashed.com/717227/nestles-water-controversy-expl...
Okay but people have to drink somehow right? It's not like if nestle stopped operating that the demand for water would evaporate. It'll just cause another waterway to be depleted instead.
The other point raised in the article seems to be that nestle is taking water, which it pays little to nothing for, and charging $1/bottle or whatever. This sounds outrageous on the surface, until you realize that water in a well or whatever isn't really useful. You still need to bottle and transport it, which is where most of the value-add is. If people only needed water they'd get it from their tap, not buying $1 bottles. When they are buying bottles, they're paying for the convenience of water being available right then and there.
For a long drawn out analysis: https://youtu.be/R1gcipAvplY
I don't know why though. It should be clear by now that nobody in the west cares about hypocrisy, democracy, standards or corruption.
After action reports, critical evaluation with a goal towards improvement, great. Apathy, the world sucks, give up? F that.
In the 90s the USA had the developed world's worst infant mortality rates. But if you look at the way we gather our statistics, it is different from all other countries. Why? Because unlike others we didn't manipulate the metrics because it was more important to us to have actual data to help save/improve lives. So who sucks? Who is failing kids? The country who is willing to make itself look bad with the worst metrics so that it can change things, or those not honest enough to be willing to look bad or make self examination?
Yeah, America sucks, but it's 10x better than it was when I was a kid in the 70-80s, or most places I have traveled. I would rather have public suck that can be addressed than the general apathy that this poster has.
Where is it that you live that you fought and won the good fight so handily that you’re able to criticize us from afar?
I see the claim that nobody cares about democracy as another piece of right-wing propaganda.
This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground.
What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1]) is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt.
We're in a bind because the kind of medicine that would fight the even more sophisticated Chinese tactics now would also hurt our own corporations and agencies. But we must take it. Targeted advertising and domestic surveillance must go if our values are to survive in the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov