3 ms·
Republicans have been getting death threats towards themselves and their families for even looking likely to disagree with the president for years now. They als
by ianai 6y ago
Republicans have been getting death threats towards themselves and their families for even looking likely to disagree with the president for years now. They also had no problem passing huge tax cuts without funding and thus exploding the deficit. I think it’s imperative that the next president start by trying to stem the online propaganda and anything else contributing to those death threats. The US simply cannot tolerate death threats against its elected officials. They’ve affected our politics for years and progress may be impossible until the propaganda is halted.
Edit-On the original topic of getting the two sides to agree on things, I think the fundamental problem is the us/them dynamic between urban and rural communities. I further posit that a large government program to employ these two communities together would go a long way toward building a communal bridge between them. If people in rural America saw the rest of the country building things like high speed rail to make them less isolated they would see promise for better days in the future. Ie make it so that people can live in rural areas and take a train into work in a city in minutes. Property valuations will increase. Crime will decrease through frankly there being better options all around. (Though I still think a revamped drug scheduling system needs to address the source of crime.)
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoRe high speed rail: The problem is, there aren't enough people in the rural area. You wouldn't have a high-speed rail stop in every other town in rural Kansas - if you did, it wouldn't be high speed rail. You're not going to connect all the farmer's kids to Kansas City that way, still less to Chicago.
- ianai 6y agoI’m sure there’s a way around it. Got any ideas?
- pdonis 6y agoOf course there's a way around it. It's this great technology called "cars". Sure, push to make cars more fuel efficient, push for ways to make fuel for cars that's more closed cycle (like biofuel), push to spread more infrastructure to make things like electric cars or plug-in hybrids feasible. But when you have a population that is very, very spread out, there is no such thing as "mass transit", and we just have to deal with that fact.
- ianai 6y agoBullet trains with a way to drive your car into them. Boom, individualized mass transit. Yes they’d have to stop every thirty minutes. Another option is to actually have underground tunnels for vehicles to drive through in tightly controlled settings. That way you take the driver out of it - and maybe can install ways to power vehicles internally. You could take that system any time of day without regard for weather, it could be centrally ran and administered ie little room for accidents, and thus depend on it for quick access to daily duties like work.
- DubiousPusher 6y agoExcept rural people aren't going to agree to that because it would mean an increase in taxes as well as massive amounts of state and federal intervention into their communities. Edit: I do not buy that death threats have anything to do with the present stalemate. We are nowhere near a historic high water mark for pokticial violence in this country. The 1850s, turn of the century and 1960s were all very violent periods and the US government did not find itself paralyzed then. The biggest change is that one party has been over run by a philosophy that the government simply cannot do things well or make them better. You cannot launch a ship when half the crew denies that it will float.