> half the voting population of the 50 states of the union keep making a conscious selection of bad policy

Which half?

The half that is wholly uninterested in effective governance. The half whose main issue is making sure other people are suffering. You know which half.

I’m not sure either side is invested in making sure people are suffering. I do think both sides have differing opinions on what the role of government should be in Americans lives. Neither side is wholly consistent, which is okay. Demonizing “the other” is the root issue. Everyone should stop doing that.

> I do think both sides have differing opinions on what the role of government should be in Americans lives.

I think everyone seems to largely agree that the government should definitely have a big role in Americans' lives, but they differ significantly on what issues they think the gov't should be involved in. Relatively few people seem think the gov't should largely leave people alone (although it is popular for some folks to say they feel that way while simultaneously agitating for the opposite).

I actually don't believe this anymore. I think that up to the Bush years, you could argue the sides were just taking different paths to achieve the same goals. As bad his policy ended up being, I think Bush and Cheney and their cohort were really trying to do the right thing. I also genuinely think that Trump and his enablers are people with bad intentions. Their intentions range between callous self-interest and downright nativist authoritarianism. They would harm democracy and their perceived enemies in America to further their goals. That's maybe not 100% of the political right but I have very little pushback against it.

Yes, total agreement. If the other half of people wouldn't make bad policy selections, we'd all be better off.

ah yes, the good old binary worldview. Such a delightfully simple algorithm.

    def decide_position(position)
      case position.party do
      when GOOD_PARTY
        cheer()
        return true
      when BAD_PARTY
        boo()
        return false
      else
        shutdown()
        raise InvalidPartyError.new "Warning: Logically impossible situation detected. There are only two parties, and one is good and the other is bad.  System shutdown initiated to avoid potential memory corruption"
      end
    end

I have some thoughts on this code:

1. Why is decide_position returning a boolean? The function signature, even without types, doesn't really indicate that it should return a true / false value. Perhaps a better name would be "is_position_good"?

2. Why would the memory get corrupted? Most operating systems should be able to handle such a case.

3. Why do we shut down the entire application? Surely there's a better method rather than killing the entire application due to a single boolean check.

It's funny that this is the exact opposite of what I said. I said "vote for policy". As it stands one party is at least on the right side of most major policies and one is on the wrong side. You'll never get 100% alignment but the two main parties are generally pretty good and aligning with the sensibilities of major blocs.

Voters aren't voting for policies at all. They're voting for candidates who come as a package deal, and often have to make tradeoffs among their own policy positions as no single candidate aligns with them on all issues. On top of that voters are casting their votes in an electoral process rife with gerrymandering, wedge issues, exaggerated or fabricated crisis rhetoric, party-line voters, and other distortions.

The idea that the behavior of the government is ever a consistent reflection of the aggregated intentions of the electorate is something of a fantasy. No one is intentionally voting for bad policy -- they're getting bad policy in one area as a consequence of voting for good policy in another.