4 ms·

No, I think the better idea is, if the Democrats get power, pack the union, remove the pardon power, and basically send everyone associated with either Trump ad

by BrenBarn 10mo ago

No, I think the better idea is, if the Democrats get power, pack the union, remove the pardon power, and basically send everyone associated with either Trump administration to jail for life (including all House/Senate members who voted against impeachment). It might be necessary to execute some for treason. I don't see any way back to sanity without a Nuremberg-style process in which "conservatism" as we know it is gouged out of the political arena.

AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
This is the exact attitude that got Trump back in office. Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time, with everyone feeling like if they lose the other side is going to damage them on purpose because that's literally what they're saying they want to do. Instead you need to get some adults back in the room and start doing things like prosecuting government officials for corruption regardless of which party they're in, passing the laws that lower the cost of living even over the opposition of the people getting paid the higher costs, and actually enforcing antitrust laws instead of both parties using them as a cudgel to get tech and media corporations to bend the knee politically in exchange for not enforcing them.
- xethos 10mo ago
  Based on my read of "Amusing Ourselves to Death", length and complexity of political speeches by presidents over time, and the current administration: What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room? I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.
  - jacquesm 10mo ago
    > I fully support having adults back in the White House Or what's left of it...
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room? People seem to make this mistake a lot. People want adults back in the room because that's how they get the results they want. Now, are they currently doing the things that will cause that to happen? Obviously not. But "they" is us. There is no external "them" to delegate this to and then blame when it goes wrong. Things get done when someone does them. If you want it done then the someone is you. That doesn't mean you can solve the entire problem yourself, but it also doesn't mean you can't make a contribution. The absence of trying is the presence of failure. Now let's consider how we've gotten screwed in the past. The primary recent mechanism is that nobody likes how things are going, but half the country is convinced that the problem is the other half and vice versa. And then they direct their efforts into having their party "win" even though their party sucks because both parties suck. Which absorbs all the inclination people have to try to fix things and throws it into a black hole as everyone's efforts do nothing more than cancel out the efforts of their countrymen on the other team. If you're being divided into teams then you're playing someone else's game. That makes people think the goal should be to win the game. But the goal should be to change the rules so that people with common interests aren't stuck on opposing teams. Score voting would be a good start.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  This is the exact attitude that got us into this mess. Republicans can talk crazy and act crazy, knowing that the other side will be forced to be the adults in the room, clean up the mess, and get rejected by the voters soon after because no one likes the strict parent.
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    People would like them if they did the things people actually want. People want to be able to own a home and afford healthcare. But to do that you have to step on the toes of the banks and the National Association of Realtors and the trades unions on housing costs and the healthcare companies and the AMA on healthcare costs. Which the rest of the public wants you to do, but that's not how you get paid off, so it's not what they do. Instead they talk a big game but when it comes time to do it, they offer up economic sophism like rent control or medical price controls that not only don't solve the problems but generally make them worse. And then people don't like them because they suck.
- BrenBarn 10mo ago
  It would be great to do that, but we can't do that while the government has a gun pointed at its head. There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything. Thinking that this is just "hyper-partisan" is the kind of both-sides-ism that's a big contributor to the mess we're in.
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything. So then: > Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
    - BrenBarn 10mo ago
      No, because we do need the federal government to do stuff. We just need it to mostly do the opposite of everything that it's doing. We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things, by bringing a sledgehammer down on the factions that want to do those things.
      - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
        > We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things If you define the bad things they're not allowed to do narrowly then they'll trivially avoid the restrictions while still doing bad things. What works better is to define the good things they are allowed to do. But then the good things have to be defined narrowly, because a broad definition makes it easy to get bad things into the tent. So a proposal can either be to prohibit some bad things on paper while not really doing it in practice, or it can be to permit them to do only the things that have to be done federally for some specific reason and define them narrowly enough that it doesn't just let them do whatever they want. Those are the only real options.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  >Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time No, we simply realize that 20 years of compromise for a party blatantly breaking the rules is not working. You can call it "flipping the coin" if you want, but in my eyes we've been trying to continue a game of chess after dozens of illegal moves. Maybe continuing to play the game as if nothing happened isn't the solution this time.
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    That's the thing Republicans say to justify what they're currently doing. Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st: > The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption). Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare providers. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to do, it explicitly constrained them from it. You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that. But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we all end up in a place nobody likes.
    - BrenBarn 10mo ago
      All such arguments about the constitution and federal power are just a waste of time. The constitution is so riddled with flaws that there's little point in attempting to save the good parts. We absolutely should throw out a large proportion of the "rules" in the constitution. The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense. It's just an arbitrary jurisdictional distraction from the substantive content of policies. Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context is like there's a basketball game where fans, coaches, and players are all kicking each other in the nuts and you're worried about calling double dribble.

AnthonyMouse 10mo ago

This is the exact attitude that got Trump back in office. Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time, with everyone feeling like if they lose the other side is going to damage them on purpose because that's literally what they're saying they want to do. Instead you need to get some adults back in the room and start doing things like prosecuting government officials for corruption regardless of which party they're in, passing the laws that lower the cost of living even over the opposition of the people getting paid the higher costs, and actually enforcing antitrust laws instead of both parties using them as a cudgel to get tech and media corporations to bend the knee politically in exchange for not enforcing them.

xethos 10mo ago
Based on my read of "Amusing Ourselves to Death", length and complexity of political speeches by presidents over time, and the current administration: What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room? I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.
- jacquesm 10mo ago
  > I fully support having adults back in the White House Or what's left of it...
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  > What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room? People seem to make this mistake a lot. People want adults back in the room because that's how they get the results they want. Now, are they currently doing the things that will cause that to happen? Obviously not. But "they" is us. There is no external "them" to delegate this to and then blame when it goes wrong. Things get done when someone does them. If you want it done then the someone is you. That doesn't mean you can solve the entire problem yourself, but it also doesn't mean you can't make a contribution. The absence of trying is the presence of failure. Now let's consider how we've gotten screwed in the past. The primary recent mechanism is that nobody likes how things are going, but half the country is convinced that the problem is the other half and vice versa. And then they direct their efforts into having their party "win" even though their party sucks because both parties suck. Which absorbs all the inclination people have to try to fix things and throws it into a black hole as everyone's efforts do nothing more than cancel out the efforts of their countrymen on the other team. If you're being divided into teams then you're playing someone else's game. That makes people think the goal should be to win the game. But the goal should be to change the rules so that people with common interests aren't stuck on opposing teams. Score voting would be a good start.
_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
This is the exact attitude that got us into this mess. Republicans can talk crazy and act crazy, knowing that the other side will be forced to be the adults in the room, clean up the mess, and get rejected by the voters soon after because no one likes the strict parent.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  People would like them if they did the things people actually want. People want to be able to own a home and afford healthcare. But to do that you have to step on the toes of the banks and the National Association of Realtors and the trades unions on housing costs and the healthcare companies and the AMA on healthcare costs. Which the rest of the public wants you to do, but that's not how you get paid off, so it's not what they do. Instead they talk a big game but when it comes time to do it, they offer up economic sophism like rent control or medical price controls that not only don't solve the problems but generally make them worse. And then people don't like them because they suck.
BrenBarn 10mo ago
It would be great to do that, but we can't do that while the government has a gun pointed at its head. There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything. Thinking that this is just "hyper-partisan" is the kind of both-sides-ism that's a big contributor to the mess we're in.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  > There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything. So then: > Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
  - BrenBarn 10mo ago
    No, because we do need the federal government to do stuff. We just need it to mostly do the opposite of everything that it's doing. We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things, by bringing a sledgehammer down on the factions that want to do those things.
    - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things If you define the bad things they're not allowed to do narrowly then they'll trivially avoid the restrictions while still doing bad things. What works better is to define the good things they are allowed to do. But then the good things have to be defined narrowly, because a broad definition makes it easy to get bad things into the tent. So a proposal can either be to prohibit some bad things on paper while not really doing it in practice, or it can be to permit them to do only the things that have to be done federally for some specific reason and define them narrowly enough that it doesn't just let them do whatever they want. Those are the only real options.
johnnyanmac 10mo ago
>Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time No, we simply realize that 20 years of compromise for a party blatantly breaking the rules is not working. You can call it "flipping the coin" if you want, but in my eyes we've been trying to continue a game of chess after dozens of illegal moves. Maybe continuing to play the game as if nothing happened isn't the solution this time.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  That's the thing Republicans say to justify what they're currently doing. Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st: > The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption). Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare providers. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to do, it explicitly constrained them from it. You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that. But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we all end up in a place nobody likes.
  - BrenBarn 10mo ago
    All such arguments about the constitution and federal power are just a waste of time. The constitution is so riddled with flaws that there's little point in attempting to save the good parts. We absolutely should throw out a large proportion of the "rules" in the constitution. The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense. It's just an arbitrary jurisdictional distraction from the substantive content of policies. Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context is like there's a basketball game where fans, coaches, and players are all kicking each other in the nuts and you're worried about calling double dribble.