4 ms·

> The lack of healthcare, kids getting shot in schools, homelessness, increased cost of nearly everything, and now forcing women to give birth are issues .. th

> The lack of healthcare, kids getting shot in schools, homelessness, increased cost of nearly everything, and now forcing women to give birth are issues .. that will also not be solved by the current administration. Or the following administration for that matter. It's not like the stupid app store has been deprioritized in order for congress to deeply lean into the stringent problems affecting America.

dan_quixote 4y ago
It scares me that we all seem to agree that the federal (and state to a lesser degree) government model is no longer going to solve major/existential societal problems. I don't mean the current government - a.k.a. set of legislators - I mean the model will continue to fail after subsequent elections. How many steps away is civil war or revolution?
- jjk166 4y ago
  Well the reason we don't believe these issues will be solved soon is due to the fact that current beliefs on most of these issues are split almost perfectly 50-50. There's been 14 months in the past 42 years that one party had enough seats in the senate to defeat a filibuster. Eventually demographic and socioeconomic changes will shift the balance of power to one end or another and there will be a major realignment, at which point several of the current hot button issues will be dealt with and we'll get a whole new set of seemingly intractable problems.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Well the reason we don’t believe these issues will be solved soon is due to the fact that current beliefs on most of these issues are split almost perfectly 50-50. They aren’t, though. (Support in the least representative house of the federal legislature may be split almost exactly 50-50, but that’s not the same as opinions on the substantive issues being split that way.)
    - jjk166 4y ago
      I guess balance of power would be a better term to use, but the point is the same - for a generation the voices of those saying "A" have been cancelled out by those saying "B" such that neither A nor B is implemented.
  - decebalus1 4y ago
    > most of these issues are split almost perfectly 50-50 between the representatives, not between the people. Couple that with gerrymandering, vestiges of election laws back from the times when the red coats were still a threat and corporate money, it's no surprise that the people are disenfranchised when it comes to these issues. I would go and say this is all intentional, btw. The government is doing a great job at promoting the interests of the entities they're actually representing.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      This has always been the case. There hasn't been a substantive change to how representatives are selected in our country in about a century, but for much of that time we were a functional democracy.
      - decebalus1 4y ago
        > There hasn't been a substantive change to how representatives are selected in our country in about a century And the country and the demographics of the country stayed the same? It's probably easy to figure out what's wrong with this..
        jjk166 4y ago
        My whole argument is that the demographic change is the source of the issue
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > There hasn’t been a substantive change to how representatives are selected in our country in about a century, This is false, by the way; for one significant example the gradual elimination of multimember or overlapping house districts as a means of hyper-gerrymandering for partisan and/or racial purposes (including the law finally prohibiting it entirely) was well within the last century. > but for much of that time we were a functional democracy. Arguably, for much of the past centry even less of a “functional democracy” than today. The combination of the structural duopoly of the electoral system and the unusually long political realignment if the 1930s-1990s where the salient political divides didn’t map to the divides between the two major parties–which produced a lot of bipartisan legislation and gets people to falsely describe it as a time of low political polarization, when it was in fact a time of very high polarization but where the polarization didn’t map well to the major parties–also meant that it was often impossible to have a meaningful voice on salient issues by voting, which contributed to considerable political violence, that really dropped as the new political alignment solidified in the last couple decades of that period.
bastardoperator 4y ago
No executive branch has ever solved a problem because that's not the job of the executive. They can only enforce solutions via legislation or say that the solution isn't viable through veto. I would argue anyone looking to any administration for solutions versus the legislators doesn't understand how the US government works.
- decebalus1 4y ago
  You're splitting hairs about the colloquial usage of the word 'administration' in the American context. I meant 'governing body' in general, including the executive, the legislative and the judicial. I understand it's usually meant to represent only the executive. > I would argue anyone looking to any administration for solutions versus the legislators doesn't understand how the US government works. You latest 2 comments are prime examples of fallacies. You've started with the `Fallacy of relative privation` about what the 'real' problems are, ending with some sort of 'Ad hominem'. To your point about what the executive can do (although that's not what I meant), the executive has influence. The executive doesn't function in an isolated bubble and can 'drive' a solution to any systemic problem through the branches of the government.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    Mean what you say. The term "the administration" is indicative of the executive branch. The "Obama Administration", "Trump Administration" or even the "Biden administration". Never has the term "the administration" referred to senators, house members, or the judicial branch. I would argue the President is the administrator when it comes to cabinets and other administrations like the FDA, FAA, and EPA. Yeah, I'm splitting hairs on comments that simply are not true, or need to be walked back and redefined.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      No, you're splitting hairs on definitions that are irrelevant to any argument being made by anyone.

dan_quixote 4y ago

It scares me that we all seem to agree that the federal (and state to a lesser degree) government model is no longer going to solve major/existential societal problems. I don't mean the current government - a.k.a. set of legislators - I mean the model will continue to fail after subsequent elections. How many steps away is civil war or revolution?

jjk166 4y ago
Well the reason we don't believe these issues will be solved soon is due to the fact that current beliefs on most of these issues are split almost perfectly 50-50. There's been 14 months in the past 42 years that one party had enough seats in the senate to defeat a filibuster. Eventually demographic and socioeconomic changes will shift the balance of power to one end or another and there will be a major realignment, at which point several of the current hot button issues will be dealt with and we'll get a whole new set of seemingly intractable problems.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Well the reason we don’t believe these issues will be solved soon is due to the fact that current beliefs on most of these issues are split almost perfectly 50-50. They aren’t, though. (Support in the least representative house of the federal legislature may be split almost exactly 50-50, but that’s not the same as opinions on the substantive issues being split that way.)
  - jjk166 4y ago
    I guess balance of power would be a better term to use, but the point is the same - for a generation the voices of those saying "A" have been cancelled out by those saying "B" such that neither A nor B is implemented.
- decebalus1 4y ago
  > most of these issues are split almost perfectly 50-50 between the representatives, not between the people. Couple that with gerrymandering, vestiges of election laws back from the times when the red coats were still a threat and corporate money, it's no surprise that the people are disenfranchised when it comes to these issues. I would go and say this is all intentional, btw. The government is doing a great job at promoting the interests of the entities they're actually representing.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    This has always been the case. There hasn't been a substantive change to how representatives are selected in our country in about a century, but for much of that time we were a functional democracy.
    - decebalus1 4y ago
      > There hasn't been a substantive change to how representatives are selected in our country in about a century And the country and the demographics of the country stayed the same? It's probably easy to figure out what's wrong with this..
      - jjk166 4y ago
        My whole argument is that the demographic change is the source of the issue
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > There hasn’t been a substantive change to how representatives are selected in our country in about a century, This is false, by the way; for one significant example the gradual elimination of multimember or overlapping house districts as a means of hyper-gerrymandering for partisan and/or racial purposes (including the law finally prohibiting it entirely) was well within the last century. > but for much of that time we were a functional democracy. Arguably, for much of the past centry even less of a “functional democracy” than today. The combination of the structural duopoly of the electoral system and the unusually long political realignment if the 1930s-1990s where the salient political divides didn’t map to the divides between the two major parties–which produced a lot of bipartisan legislation and gets people to falsely describe it as a time of low political polarization, when it was in fact a time of very high polarization but where the polarization didn’t map well to the major parties–also meant that it was often impossible to have a meaningful voice on salient issues by voting, which contributed to considerable political violence, that really dropped as the new political alignment solidified in the last couple decades of that period.

bastardoperator 4y ago

No executive branch has ever solved a problem because that's not the job of the executive. They can only enforce solutions via legislation or say that the solution isn't viable through veto. I would argue anyone looking to any administration for solutions versus the legislators doesn't understand how the US government works.

decebalus1 4y ago
You're splitting hairs about the colloquial usage of the word 'administration' in the American context. I meant 'governing body' in general, including the executive, the legislative and the judicial. I understand it's usually meant to represent only the executive. > I would argue anyone looking to any administration for solutions versus the legislators doesn't understand how the US government works. You latest 2 comments are prime examples of fallacies. You've started with the `Fallacy of relative privation` about what the 'real' problems are, ending with some sort of 'Ad hominem'. To your point about what the executive can do (although that's not what I meant), the executive has influence. The executive doesn't function in an isolated bubble and can 'drive' a solution to any systemic problem through the branches of the government.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  Mean what you say. The term "the administration" is indicative of the executive branch. The "Obama Administration", "Trump Administration" or even the "Biden administration". Never has the term "the administration" referred to senators, house members, or the judicial branch. I would argue the President is the administrator when it comes to cabinets and other administrations like the FDA, FAA, and EPA. Yeah, I'm splitting hairs on comments that simply are not true, or need to be walked back and redefined.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    No, you're splitting hairs on definitions that are irrelevant to any argument being made by anyone.