8 ms·

The United States of America has become a place where 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge. (40%

by pavlov 4y ago

The United States of America has become a place where 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge. (40% of people are too busy making ends meet to even think about voting, or whether they identify with tribe A or B.) You can't really build anything with that kind of attitude. A democracy can't work if you start imagining half your compatriots are enemies, and you'd rather blow up the entire place than let them decide anything.

leereeves 4y ago
There's a difference between rooting for the country to do worse and acknowledging that it is doing worse, and we shouldn't shy away from the latter out of frustration with the former. And real wages fell 3% in six months [1] (i.e. over the first half of this year, wages fell at a 6% annual rate), so I think it's time to acknowledge that the nation is doing worse, at least for the working class. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216259/monthly-real-average-hourly-earnings-for-all-employees-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216259/monthly-real-aver...
albatross13 4y ago
Amen. Now we just need to take the next logical step into balkanization and we can start making real progress. I have no right voting for federal candidates in my midwest region that can influence legislation that impacts new york, and vice versa. Regionality > Nationality tl;dr america is geographically too big and it's really starting to show.
- pfisch 4y ago
  This would result in worse economic conditions for everyone. Just look at brexit.
  - albatross13 4y ago
    Fine by me- my state grows its own food (both meat and vegetables), exports plenty, and is sparsely populated. I reckon we'd be fine. True to the OP's point: I don't really care what happens to the east/west coasts. These people have been trying to legislate my rights away for decades now, so I am very apathetic to their plights.
    - giardini 4y ago
      I understand the sentiment and I hear your statement but all of us trade with those "other" places (the "east/west coasts") and most of us have friends in those places, too. You know too that, in your heart of hearts, your very humanity would pull you to help were something catastrophic to happen to those places. We're all in the same boat and we have learned the value of rowing together versus throwing others overboard. If that means sometimes you eat crow and other times you serve it up, so be it. I too wish there were more on the menu than crow, but that's why we have scientists: perhaps our grandchildren can eat lobster.
      - albatross13 4y ago
        I fail to see how we couldn't continue to trade with the overreach of the federal government eliminated- why couldn't the midwest region still sell beef to the coastal regions? We've all been duped into believing we need a federal government to maintain what we have, and I very strongly believe we do not. Shit, I would wager that whatever 'economic' distress balkanization would cause could quickly be recouped by the simple fact that we no longer have the feds taking 15-30% of our paychecks and then sending it over seas to eastern europe or israel.
        amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        Without that federal government, most of the black folks in the US might still be slaves. We probably shouldn’t forget all the history that got us to where we are today.
        giardini 4y ago
        You seem to believe that if the federal government disappears then no other entity will take it's place. This is incorrect. Even balkanized countries have levels of governments. In the scenario you envision, the role of the federal government would pass to some other new entity and you'd still be paying taxes or worse. Reason is, if you don't have some government then you cannot protect your property and yourself simultaneously. A local warlord or landowner or one from an adjacent state might take your land. A neighboring state might invade your state. Who would protect you? What rights would you have? What court system would you use to gain redress?
- Clubber 4y ago
  >Now we just need to take the next logical step into balkanization That was the original design with much power belonging to the states. The federal government has gained a lot of power over the last century or so. We're seeing the effects of centralized power over a large and diverse population. Also, many people want the government to solve problems at the federal level, having little to no understanding that other people in other states live their lives very differently and have different priorities.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - misterprime 4y ago
    I'd love to see a change where the federal government was no longer allowed to tax individual citizens (or companies?). Taxation should be done by their State of residence/employment, and the Federal government can tax the State. I'm not sure what else could be abstracted this way so that the citizen wouldn't interact so directly with the federal government. Things like the DoE, and HUD, could probably be eliminated while things like the FDA and EPA really should have federal reach to execute their missions properly (not that they're really doing that).
- juve1996 4y ago
  Middle america would be devastated by this move. The coasts + Texas would be overwhelmingly rich vs the poor flyover country states.
  - albatross13 4y ago
    Life finds a way :)
  - kortilla 4y ago
    That’s an uninformed meme: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-rea...
    - juve1996 4y ago
      Your statistics are a decade old - in the meantime California continued to climb, there's updated numbers. The fact that a state that huge is competitive in GDP per capita with extremely tiny flyover states, is extremely telling.
      - Clubber 4y ago
        California also has a massive homeless population and one of the worse police states in the country, and that's saying something. But hey, a small percentage are really rich!
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - albatross13 4y ago
        That just means the rich elite of facebook could use their money to buy mid western meat for the people :D
        juve1996 4y ago
- mbg721 4y ago
  If the US balkanizes, it won't be geographically tidy. Voters in urban areas in the Midwest are much more left-leaning than say, upstate NY.
  - albatross13 4y ago
    Aye- plus I don't know how we'd handle the military and keep established national boarders. It's mostly a pipe dream of mine. Realistically we'll just continue to limp along, a zombiefied husk of what our country was meant to be, until the banks and tech elite have bled us dry. Then we'll likely just implode. Tis the fate of many an empire.
xnx 4y ago
- nyokodo 4y ago
  You mean I just imagined all those years post 2016 of democrats asserting “Russians stole the election” while wearing “not my president” tshirts? It seems like both parties are just as bad on that front.
  - pydry 4y ago
    At this point I view anybody who enthusiastically supports either of the parties as either naive or malicious.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Yeah, partisan politics are everything that is wrong with our country. It's just a big race to the bottom. "How dare you suggest my party needs to improve instead of fixating solely on The Other Party which is at least 1% worse than us (if you squint)". Too many people putting their party over their country; too much hatred between compatriots.
      - witcH 4y ago
        And then theres this faux-centrist meta hatred of strong opinions, and a general malaise of false equivalence. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the same. There is demonstrably one party that pushes a heavily moderate corporatist populist agenda and one party that pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population is not in favor of, from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.) political position carefully engineered since the advent of the Southern Strategy. Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence. The hatred is flowing mostly from the right, and being enacted into law.
mercy_dude 4y ago
Fair point- but how much of that is due to media do you think? Media has spent last 5 years creating false narratives just because they don’t like the orange guy is that it has built up pretty much disdain in half of the country. I still remember NYT calling for recession when Trump got elected. I think the root cause of this problem is not those 60% or whatever then number is on the other side, it’s lack of objective and trustworthy institutions like media.
- pavlov 4y ago
  If you're going to blame it on the media rather than the people who consume and reward this type of media, then you should remember that the harbinger and main producer of this type of narrative is still Fox News. They've been doing it for decades and remain the top-rated cable network in America. They're the very image and foundation of "lamestream media" as Republicans imagine it, but it's not easy to notice the beam in one's own TV-watching eye, I guess.
  - mc32 4y ago
    you cannot blame people. Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions? Yes, blame the media --all of them they all have abandoned principles of neutrality in favor of ideology and partisanship. It wasn't so during Clinton or Bush's time (not that any of the two were any good).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ratww 4y ago
      > Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions? In general I don't blame Russians for what Putin is doing, but I will definitely blame a Russian that unapologetically supports the invasion of Ukraine, despite having the means to know otherwise. If I tried to give them another perspective and they tell me to go fuck myself, or if they were actively trying to push an agenda (like it's common in USA political discussions), I would definitely blame them.
nyokodo 4y ago
> 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge. What are you basing this statement on? No way is it 60%, more like 6% of the population, but perhaps 0.6%! Whatever it is the voices you hear are a tiny slither of the population skewed to the most disagreeable and combative end of the personality spectrum. So, unless you’ve done some world class polling to determine the answer to that then I’d suggest gaining more perspective.
- president 4y ago
  Doesn't matter what the actual number is if that is our perception, whether that is because of media or peer/cultural influence.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    - nameistaken 4y ago
    - danny_taco 4y ago
      You talk about the figures being meaningful, while you seem to be making up numbers of your own.
      - zmgsabst 4y ago
        mxkopy 4y ago
        >and the rest hate it. Source?
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Corporations “went Woke” because they misperceived that as having popular support while only 8-10% of people supported it — and the rest hate it. > That misperception has lost hundreds of billions in shareholder value, adding up just Disney, Warner, and Netflix. How so? Do any of those companies have competitors who didn't "go woke," and are now profiting off their missteps? Those companies may have lost a ton of value, but I don't think it's because of that cause. > Democrat politicians seem to have similarly misperceived — and now are facing widespread public backlash to their policy. But that may not matter. They're also cultivating a backlash against Republicans, hoping that will counter any backlash against them. IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't even try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their respective activist bases. This is why "democracy all the things" is kind of a shitty system. Primaries push the adults out of the room and give extremists too much say, which then requires toxic behavior to salvage an overall victory.
kcatskcolbdi 4y ago
This means, assuming a roughly even split, only 30% of the country is actively rooting for their country to do worse at any given time. If a 30% negative outlook "prevents you from building anything" maybe your system is bad.
mbg721 4y ago
It's not just imaginary, though. There are very different visions of how the country should work that can't exist simultaneously. If the culture wars were just a fabrication of the media, that would be easier to solve than what's happening now.
- ratww 4y ago
  I don't think you're wrong per se, but I don't think GP is arguing that american "culture wars" are a media fabrication, just that it's meaningless, except for some wackos. The problem is how the media (including social media) amplifies it.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    I don't think it's true that they're meaningless, though; non-wacko people do have deeply-held values and get upset when public policy runs counter to them. The nihilistic viewpoint is more a symptom of getting used to politicians who pay lip-service to those values but break their promises.
    - ratww 4y ago
      Sure, agreed, but the point is that the “deeply-held values” you mention aren’t really the petty “culture wars” stuff.
atomicnumber3 4y ago
[flagged]
- junofan 4y ago
  > then 20% are "democrats" who want the US to have the basic things that Europe has, like social healthcare and so on. Here’s the 2020 Democratic party platform [1]. Social healthcare is not on that list—the party supports a public insurance option. I don’t see anything else on the list that “Europe” has—maybe immigration/criminal justice reform? [1]: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/ https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/
s1artibartfast 4y ago
Wanting the administration to admit it a recession is different than rooting for a recession. If your house were on fire, you would want the public authorities to acknowledge the fact. This is not rooting for the fire
CalRobert 4y ago
I always want the country to do better, but it depends on what you mean by "better". Your local school's funding was cut in half, but the average family owes $2,000 less in taxes in an area with already low incomes. Is that "better"? Gas goes down to $2 a gallon. You probably pay less to commute to work or pull your boat. But your kids (and these days, you) might face crippling droughts and heat waves as an indirect consequence. Is that "better"? I can understand differing views. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/776/i-work-better-on-deadline/act-one-4 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/776/i-work-better-on-deadli...
chiefalchemist 4y ago
60 v 40? Nah. It's closer to 5% v 5% with the 90% in between the extremes just looking to live a semi-happy and uneventful life (i.e., they can pay their bills, love their family, etc.) The politicians and the media (i.e., the 10%) continue to live in a bubble. They have a very biased and incestuous lens. It's groupthink taken to an extreme. Just look at the news yesterday. Pelosi crossed a line in the sand and visits Taiwan. Given all the other things on our collective plate, how was adding more to that pile (of sh*t?) a good use of her time and energy? And taxpayer resources? Who in the 90% wants more on the pile? And who in the 10% is willing to say, "Nancy! You're only showing how out of touch you are with the 90%." I'm not suggesting Taiwan be cut loose. Not at all. Only that the sense of priorities is dumbfounding. But perhaps, rather than talk about the economy (and the 90%'s perceptions and fears) it makes better political and media sense to have news of Nancy in Taiwan? Put another way, it's not the 90% putting the screws to the stability of the democracy. We don't have enough power in hand to do that.
Rackedup 4y ago
hintymad 4y ago
> The United States of America has become a place where 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge. If so, I blame the media for constantly selling their narratives and inciting hatred. Any disagreement is labeled as far this and far that. If a politician makes a move that does not fit a side's narrative, the media will attack the politician's motives and assume the worst. When the SCOTUS make a ruling that the media disagrees with, it must be that the SCOTUS are the worst human beings in the world and they have the most sinister motives. The list can go on. I'd also blame the education system of the US. We are supposed to educate kids to take different views, to seek information instead of merely opinions, to be aware of logical fallacies, especially the damaging ones like attacking one's motive. Yet someone we get generations of angrier and angrier kids.

by pavlov 4y ago

leereeves 4y ago

There's a difference between rooting for the country to do worse and acknowledging that it is doing worse, and we shouldn't shy away from the latter out of frustration with the former. And real wages fell 3% in six months [1] (i.e. over the first half of this year, wages fell at a 6% annual rate), so I think it's time to acknowledge that the nation is doing worse, at least for the working class. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216259/monthly-real-average-hourly-earnings-for-all-employees-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216259/monthly-real-aver...

albatross13 4y ago

Amen. Now we just need to take the next logical step into balkanization and we can start making real progress. I have no right voting for federal candidates in my midwest region that can influence legislation that impacts new york, and vice versa. Regionality > Nationality tl;dr america is geographically too big and it's really starting to show.

pfisch 4y ago
This would result in worse economic conditions for everyone. Just look at brexit.
- albatross13 4y ago
  Fine by me- my state grows its own food (both meat and vegetables), exports plenty, and is sparsely populated. I reckon we'd be fine. True to the OP's point: I don't really care what happens to the east/west coasts. These people have been trying to legislate my rights away for decades now, so I am very apathetic to their plights.
  - giardini 4y ago
    I understand the sentiment and I hear your statement but all of us trade with those "other" places (the "east/west coasts") and most of us have friends in those places, too. You know too that, in your heart of hearts, your very humanity would pull you to help were something catastrophic to happen to those places. We're all in the same boat and we have learned the value of rowing together versus throwing others overboard. If that means sometimes you eat crow and other times you serve it up, so be it. I too wish there were more on the menu than crow, but that's why we have scientists: perhaps our grandchildren can eat lobster.
    - albatross13 4y ago
      I fail to see how we couldn't continue to trade with the overreach of the federal government eliminated- why couldn't the midwest region still sell beef to the coastal regions? We've all been duped into believing we need a federal government to maintain what we have, and I very strongly believe we do not. Shit, I would wager that whatever 'economic' distress balkanization would cause could quickly be recouped by the simple fact that we no longer have the feds taking 15-30% of our paychecks and then sending it over seas to eastern europe or israel.
      - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        Without that federal government, most of the black folks in the US might still be slaves. We probably shouldn’t forget all the history that got us to where we are today.
      - giardini 4y ago
        You seem to believe that if the federal government disappears then no other entity will take it's place. This is incorrect. Even balkanized countries have levels of governments. In the scenario you envision, the role of the federal government would pass to some other new entity and you'd still be paying taxes or worse. Reason is, if you don't have some government then you cannot protect your property and yourself simultaneously. A local warlord or landowner or one from an adjacent state might take your land. A neighboring state might invade your state. Who would protect you? What rights would you have? What court system would you use to gain redress?
Clubber 4y ago
>Now we just need to take the next logical step into balkanization That was the original design with much power belonging to the states. The federal government has gained a lot of power over the last century or so. We're seeing the effects of centralized power over a large and diverse population. Also, many people want the government to solve problems at the federal level, having little to no understanding that other people in other states live their lives very differently and have different priorities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- misterprime 4y ago
  I'd love to see a change where the federal government was no longer allowed to tax individual citizens (or companies?). Taxation should be done by their State of residence/employment, and the Federal government can tax the State. I'm not sure what else could be abstracted this way so that the citizen wouldn't interact so directly with the federal government. Things like the DoE, and HUD, could probably be eliminated while things like the FDA and EPA really should have federal reach to execute their missions properly (not that they're really doing that).
juve1996 4y ago
Middle america would be devastated by this move. The coasts + Texas would be overwhelmingly rich vs the poor flyover country states.
- albatross13 4y ago
  Life finds a way :)
- kortilla 4y ago
  That’s an uninformed meme: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-rea...
  - juve1996 4y ago
    Your statistics are a decade old - in the meantime California continued to climb, there's updated numbers. The fact that a state that huge is competitive in GDP per capita with extremely tiny flyover states, is extremely telling.
    - Clubber 4y ago
      California also has a massive homeless population and one of the worse police states in the country, and that's saying something. But hey, a small percentage are really rich!
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - albatross13 4y ago
      That just means the rich elite of facebook could use their money to buy mid western meat for the people :D
      - juve1996 4y ago
mbg721 4y ago
If the US balkanizes, it won't be geographically tidy. Voters in urban areas in the Midwest are much more left-leaning than say, upstate NY.
- albatross13 4y ago
  Aye- plus I don't know how we'd handle the military and keep established national boarders. It's mostly a pipe dream of mine. Realistically we'll just continue to limp along, a zombiefied husk of what our country was meant to be, until the banks and tech elite have bled us dry. Then we'll likely just implode. Tis the fate of many an empire.

xnx 4y ago

nyokodo 4y ago
You mean I just imagined all those years post 2016 of democrats asserting “Russians stole the election” while wearing “not my president” tshirts? It seems like both parties are just as bad on that front.
- pydry 4y ago
  At this point I view anybody who enthusiastically supports either of the parties as either naive or malicious.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Yeah, partisan politics are everything that is wrong with our country. It's just a big race to the bottom. "How dare you suggest my party needs to improve instead of fixating solely on The Other Party which is at least 1% worse than us (if you squint)". Too many people putting their party over their country; too much hatred between compatriots.
    - witcH 4y ago
      And then theres this faux-centrist meta hatred of strong opinions, and a general malaise of false equivalence. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the same. There is demonstrably one party that pushes a heavily moderate corporatist populist agenda and one party that pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population is not in favor of, from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.) political position carefully engineered since the advent of the Southern Strategy. Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence. The hatred is flowing mostly from the right, and being enacted into law.

mercy_dude 4y ago

Fair point- but how much of that is due to media do you think? Media has spent last 5 years creating false narratives just because they don’t like the orange guy is that it has built up pretty much disdain in half of the country. I still remember NYT calling for recession when Trump got elected. I think the root cause of this problem is not those 60% or whatever then number is on the other side, it’s lack of objective and trustworthy institutions like media.

pavlov 4y ago
If you're going to blame it on the media rather than the people who consume and reward this type of media, then you should remember that the harbinger and main producer of this type of narrative is still Fox News. They've been doing it for decades and remain the top-rated cable network in America. They're the very image and foundation of "lamestream media" as Republicans imagine it, but it's not easy to notice the beam in one's own TV-watching eye, I guess.
- mc32 4y ago
  you cannot blame people. Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions? Yes, blame the media --all of them they all have abandoned principles of neutrality in favor of ideology and partisanship. It wasn't so during Clinton or Bush's time (not that any of the two were any good).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ratww 4y ago
    > Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions? In general I don't blame Russians for what Putin is doing, but I will definitely blame a Russian that unapologetically supports the invasion of Ukraine, despite having the means to know otherwise. If I tried to give them another perspective and they tell me to go fuck myself, or if they were actively trying to push an agenda (like it's common in USA political discussions), I would definitely blame them.

nyokodo 4y ago

> 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge. What are you basing this statement on? No way is it 60%, more like 6% of the population, but perhaps 0.6%! Whatever it is the voices you hear are a tiny slither of the population skewed to the most disagreeable and combative end of the personality spectrum. So, unless you’ve done some world class polling to determine the answer to that then I’d suggest gaining more perspective.

president 4y ago
Doesn't matter what the actual number is if that is our perception, whether that is because of media or peer/cultural influence.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  - nameistaken 4y ago
  - danny_taco 4y ago
    You talk about the figures being meaningful, while you seem to be making up numbers of your own.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      - mxkopy 4y ago
        >and the rest hate it. Source?
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Corporations “went Woke” because they misperceived that as having popular support while only 8-10% of people supported it — and the rest hate it. > That misperception has lost hundreds of billions in shareholder value, adding up just Disney, Warner, and Netflix. How so? Do any of those companies have competitors who didn't "go woke," and are now profiting off their missteps? Those companies may have lost a ton of value, but I don't think it's because of that cause. > Democrat politicians seem to have similarly misperceived — and now are facing widespread public backlash to their policy. But that may not matter. They're also cultivating a backlash against Republicans, hoping that will counter any backlash against them. IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't even try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their respective activist bases. This is why "democracy all the things" is kind of a shitty system. Primaries push the adults out of the room and give extremists too much say, which then requires toxic behavior to salvage an overall victory.

kcatskcolbdi 4y ago

This means, assuming a roughly even split, only 30% of the country is actively rooting for their country to do worse at any given time. If a 30% negative outlook "prevents you from building anything" maybe your system is bad.

mbg721 4y ago

It's not just imaginary, though. There are very different visions of how the country should work that can't exist simultaneously. If the culture wars were just a fabrication of the media, that would be easier to solve than what's happening now.

ratww 4y ago
I don't think you're wrong per se, but I don't think GP is arguing that american "culture wars" are a media fabrication, just that it's meaningless, except for some wackos. The problem is how the media (including social media) amplifies it.
- mbg721 4y ago
  I don't think it's true that they're meaningless, though; non-wacko people do have deeply-held values and get upset when public policy runs counter to them. The nihilistic viewpoint is more a symptom of getting used to politicians who pay lip-service to those values but break their promises.
  - ratww 4y ago
    Sure, agreed, but the point is that the “deeply-held values” you mention aren’t really the petty “culture wars” stuff.

atomicnumber3 4y ago

[flagged]

junofan 4y ago
> then 20% are "democrats" who want the US to have the basic things that Europe has, like social healthcare and so on. Here’s the 2020 Democratic party platform [1]. Social healthcare is not on that list—the party supports a public insurance option. I don’t see anything else on the list that “Europe” has—maybe immigration/criminal justice reform? [1]: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/ https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/

s1artibartfast 4y ago

Wanting the administration to admit it a recession is different than rooting for a recession. If your house were on fire, you would want the public authorities to acknowledge the fact. This is not rooting for the fire

CalRobert 4y ago

I always want the country to do better, but it depends on what you mean by "better". Your local school's funding was cut in half, but the average family owes $2,000 less in taxes in an area with already low incomes. Is that "better"? Gas goes down to $2 a gallon. You probably pay less to commute to work or pull your boat. But your kids (and these days, you) might face crippling droughts and heat waves as an indirect consequence. Is that "better"? I can understand differing views. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/776/i-work-better-on-deadline/act-one-4 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/776/i-work-better-on-deadli...

chiefalchemist 4y ago

60 v 40? Nah. It's closer to 5% v 5% with the 90% in between the extremes just looking to live a semi-happy and uneventful life (i.e., they can pay their bills, love their family, etc.) The politicians and the media (i.e., the 10%) continue to live in a bubble. They have a very biased and incestuous lens. It's groupthink taken to an extreme. Just look at the news yesterday. Pelosi crossed a line in the sand and visits Taiwan. Given all the other things on our collective plate, how was adding more to that pile (of sh*t?) a good use of her time and energy? And taxpayer resources? Who in the 90% wants more on the pile? And who in the 10% is willing to say, "Nancy! You're only showing how out of touch you are with the 90%." I'm not suggesting Taiwan be cut loose. Not at all. Only that the sense of priorities is dumbfounding. But perhaps, rather than talk about the economy (and the 90%'s perceptions and fears) it makes better political and media sense to have news of Nancy in Taiwan? Put another way, it's not the 90% putting the screws to the stability of the democracy. We don't have enough power in hand to do that.

Rackedup 4y ago

hintymad 4y ago

> The United States of America has become a place where 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge. If so, I blame the media for constantly selling their narratives and inciting hatred. Any disagreement is labeled as far this and far that. If a politician makes a move that does not fit a side's narrative, the media will attack the politician's motives and assume the worst. When the SCOTUS make a ruling that the media disagrees with, it must be that the SCOTUS are the worst human beings in the world and they have the most sinister motives. The list can go on. I'd also blame the education system of the US. We are supposed to educate kids to take different views, to seek information instead of merely opinions, to be aware of logical fallacies, especially the damaging ones like attacking one's motive. Yet someone we get generations of angrier and angrier kids.