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> (rural growth, working/middle class jobs, wage stagnation, skyrocketing college, health costs, etc) This sounds like a Biden campaign ad. I don’t find takes

> (rural growth, working/middle class jobs, wage stagnation, skyrocketing college, health costs, etc) This sounds like a Biden campaign ad. I don’t find takes where the Professional Twitter Opinion LoudPeople are “the left” and “the right” are very interesting. Picking an extreme/outlier take and saying “look what the left/right thinks! aren’t they crazy!!” is exactly why the political discourse is so dumb. What are we supposed to do about it? I think Twitter is dumb

coldtea 6y ago
Personally I think both parties should be dissolved, and new parties should be created. With real grassroot expression and representation (up to the minute), not decades or centuries of fossilized party lines. And this should begin by absolutely banning any kind of donation above, say, a small dollar amount per person (with very strict criminal penalties for bypassing this in any way). Want to get funding as a party? Find more persons to fund you -- as opposed to non-representative parties being pushed forward by large donors. Then again, it's your parties, do as you wish with them. But no real political discussion is ever gonna come out of those...
- hairofadog 6y ago
  I’m not gonna disagree that campaign-finance reform would be a good thing, but the problem is that there’s no mechanism for dissolving the parties and enforcing campaign finance reform. It’s in the interest of the people currently in power (both politicians and the people donating high dollar amounts) to maintain the current system because that’s the system that put them in power. Your comment makes me imagine a person in a room somewhere with the ability to change everything all around, but they just haven’t seen that they need to do it. The truth is that there are lots of people dedicating their life’s work to improving the system, but the system is complex – it has billions of people with competing priorities – and even pretending someone has the correct answer about how the system should be rearranged, implementing that system would be a task akin to moving oceans.

coldtea 6y ago

Personally I think both parties should be dissolved, and new parties should be created. With real grassroot expression and representation (up to the minute), not decades or centuries of fossilized party lines. And this should begin by absolutely banning any kind of donation above, say, a small dollar amount per person (with very strict criminal penalties for bypassing this in any way). Want to get funding as a party? Find more persons to fund you -- as opposed to non-representative parties being pushed forward by large donors. Then again, it's your parties, do as you wish with them. But no real political discussion is ever gonna come out of those...

hairofadog 6y ago
I’m not gonna disagree that campaign-finance reform would be a good thing, but the problem is that there’s no mechanism for dissolving the parties and enforcing campaign finance reform. It’s in the interest of the people currently in power (both politicians and the people donating high dollar amounts) to maintain the current system because that’s the system that put them in power. Your comment makes me imagine a person in a room somewhere with the ability to change everything all around, but they just haven’t seen that they need to do it. The truth is that there are lots of people dedicating their life’s work to improving the system, but the system is complex – it has billions of people with competing priorities – and even pretending someone has the correct answer about how the system should be rearranged, implementing that system would be a task akin to moving oceans.