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> This Isn't About Politics > I'm a veteran. I served under both parties. I don't care which side of the aisle fixes this. The idea that there are things enti

• bwb 8mo ago
  It will have to get a lot of worse in order to get better. Voters have to be in a lot more pain to give the non-crazy party control to actually fix fundamental problems. Note: I'm an independent, but the current administration is incompetent on an embarrassing level.
  • Veliladon 8mo ago
    The electorate does give control but they get bored after a few years and want to wreck everything all over again. It's goldfish levels of political memory in this country.
  • FranklinJabar 8mo ago
    We're going to need to, at the very bare minimum, fix campaign finance before we are able to produce a party that will fight for a stable democracy. Tbh, I don't see any way going back to democracy and rule of law is possible without completely rewriting our constitution.
    • chii 8mo ago
      > without completely rewriting our constitution. there is no need to rewrite it, because it's fine. What's not fine is people not observing it, and defending it with their lives, and making sure that violations are actioned with penalties, social stigma and disdain.
      • FranklinJabar 8mo ago
        > because it's fine. You are blind. The senate and electoral college and lack of clearly distributed powers have meant that we have never functioned as a liberal democracy despite our lofty rhetoric claiming otherwise.
        • allknowingfrog 8mo ago
          Everyone acts like the electoral college was a blunder. The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy. You were supposed to be involved in local politics, where you could actually know and evaluate your representatives. Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president. I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
          • mastax 8mo ago
            Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.
          • Marazan 8mo ago
            The Electoral College is part of the slavery compromise and the slavery compromise was a blunder.
            • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
              That doesn't really fit the math. At the time of the founding the largest colony was Virginia and of the original 13 colonies, 9 were in the North and only 4 were states that ended up in the Confederacy, i.e. it was the slave states that were underrepresented in the electoral college and the Senate.
    • bwb 8mo ago
      I agree with you, but I don't see these things as possible. Maybe the D party will enact campaign finance rules if they got a super majority. Given gerrymandering I'm not sure that is ever possible though.
      • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        People really need to understand the math here instead of listening to what politicians themselves self-interestedly complain about. The modern balance of power remains on a razor's edge and constantly flips because both parties have learned to run data-driven campaigns. That would be as true if neither party did gerrymandering as if both parties do as they do now. Whatever the district which is closest to being flipped, that's the one where they would concentrate their resources. If one party started to get significantly more than 50% of the seats and the other significantly less, the loser would change some of their positions until they were back in the running because getting some of what you want with 51% of the seats is better than getting none of what you want with 39% of the seats. The actual problem is not the electoral college or gerrymandering or The Despicable Other Party, it's first past the post voting, because that's what creates a two party system. Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
        • esseph 8mo ago
          > Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens. There have been ongoing efforts to ban things like ranked choice or other options at the state level and now it's being pushed federally (Make Elections Great Again act MEGA).
          • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
            Ranked choice voting sucks anyway, and that section doesn't seem to prohibit score voting. You're not "voting" for more than one candidate, you're scoring all of them; you're not "ranking" candidates, you're scoring them (and you could e.g. give two candidates the same score); you're not reallocating votes from one candidate to another, you're electing the candidate with the highest score. It's also not clear that bill is going to pass. It seems full of other things Democrats have a major incentive to filibuster. It's not even clear that Republicans have any reason to prevent score voting. One of the failure modes of ranked choice is that you can end up with more radical candidates winning where one party already had a majority because it allows the majority party to run a radical candidate next to a moderate one, but then if the radical candidate gets more votes from their own party, the race becomes the radical vs. the minority party after the majority party's moderate candidate got excluded, and then the radical candidate wins. They saw what happened in New York and didn't like it. But Democrats should have exactly the same concern -- what do you think that does if you adopted it in the South -- and in general ranked choice makes polarization worse. Ranked choice actually does suck. Whereas score voting does something else. If you run a radical, a moderate from the major party and a minority party, the moderate from the majority party wins because there is no run off election, they just got the highest score because they scored better among the minority party than the radical and better among the majority party than the minority party candidate. And when more candidates than that run, the most likely to win is the one that best represents the entire district, which reduces polarization, and that's to the benefit of everybody.
  • expedition32 8mo ago
    There have been competent Republican administrations. Take for example Eisenhower. Or Nixon who won the cold war with his China switch. But the GOP turned into the MAGA cult.
    • FireBeyond 8mo ago
      I mean Eisenhower was the Republican President immediately leading up to LBJ signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 64-65 (i.e. the inflection point of the D/R "switch") and would realistically be considered a Democrat president: - Accepted the New Deal - Championed the Interstate Highway system (massive federal spending) - Pushed for higher marginal tax rates - Supported a regulated mixed economy - Warned against the military-industrial complex.
  • kenjackson 8mo ago
    It’s not just the incompetence, it’s the meanness. If this administration were simply incompetent, it would be bad but not alarming or scary. It’s the fact that they want to hurt a portion of the population that worries me greatly.
  • paxys 8mo ago
    Look around at the politics of the majority of countries on the planet. Voters being in pain doesn't mean they suddenly start making the right choice. Quite the opposite in fact. There's a long way to go on the path the USA is currently on. Ask anyone from India or Russia or Argentina or Egypt or Nigeria how democracy actually works.
    • bwb 8mo ago
      Sometimes they do, but yes, I am worried about the flip side as well.
• perfmode 8mo ago
  I think you're technically right but missing what the guy is actually doing. When he says "this isn't about politics" he's not making some naive claim that governance exists outside of politics. He's saying "please don't retreat into the red team blue team thing here." And that's a legitimate move. The word politics has basically split into two meanings that we swap between without noticing. There's the original sense, the art of navigating collective decisions, how we share power and resources. That version is unavoidable and actually kind of noble. Then there's what the word has come to mean in practice, which is identity-driven team sport. My side versus your side. Performance and signaling. When you say "it is, in fact, about politics" you're technically correct in the first sense but you're activating the second sense, which is exactly the frame he's trying to get people out of. He's trying to create a space where people engage with the substance without immediately sorting into camps. That's valuable even if the distinction is a little artificial. It's kind of a trap honestly. The escape hatch from tribal politics has itself become a political move, so you can always say "well actually that's political too." True, but not very useful if you're trying to get anywhere.
  • deaux 8mo ago
    > I think you're technically right but missing what the guy is actually doing. When he says "this isn't about politics" he's not making some naive claim that governance exists outside of politics. He's saying "please don't retreat into the red team blue team thing here." And that's a legitimate move. We've got a great term for the latter, and everyone is already familiar with it. Add the adjective "party". Done.
    • luplex 8mo ago
      continuing off the tangent, "party" is a noun, not an adjective. In a construction "party politics", it functions _like_ an adjective, but it remains a noun. Similarly, "computer" in "computer games" is a noun that modifies the meaning of the following noun. Modifying nouns like this always are in singular.
      • deaux 8mo ago
• eggy 8mo ago
  A lot of effort under Biden was to make diinformation a big push and they offloaded work to third parties, so I'd be curious to know how many of the firings or resignations came from the government being pulled away from censorship in league with social media as opposed to losing harscore cybersecurity professionals. Makes me want to jump back on the cybersecurity bandwagon. I think the the CISA and NSA mandate for memory-safe software roadmap is good. I'm more of a SPARK 2014 fan than Rust, but I think by 2027, I'll shift to 30% focus on Rust and see where the government contracts go. I'm building a high-integrity secure, mostly formally verified automation and controls software for a state-of-the-art portable hoist able to function in aerospace that I am also co-engineering with my partner inventor.
  • trollbridge 8mo ago
    The last government contracting I observed was in Swift and TypeScript, of all things.
  • smallmancontrov 8mo ago
    > the government being pulled away from censorship in league with social media The right sure said that a lot, but it repeatedly failed to materialize. The twitter files were especially embarrassing, where Elon alleged government censorship but his "detective" was forced to admit that it didn't exist. Oops! > [@mtaibbi] Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem... Contrast this to "we can do it the easy way or the hard way" from the current administration. Yikes!
• esseph 8mo ago
  > I get the army drilled this stance into you Nah, this didn't come from there.
• deleted 8mo ago
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