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It's not current and it's not a crisis. It's working exactly how it was designed to work. We changed, not them. The Internet disrupted the popular perception of

It's not current and it's not a crisis. It's working exactly how it was designed to work. We changed, not them. The Internet disrupted the popular perception of democracy by creating a massive global communication channel that is not under the control of the people in power.

abvdasker 13y ago
No. Wrong. It is current and it is a crisis when campaign finance is essentially unlimited and politicians are more accountable to their financiers than their constituents. American politics were bad and they're getting worse post-Citizens United.
adventured 13y ago
It is fascinating how people lay blame. The most common thing I see is my fellow Americans blaming politicians, bankers, school teachers, lobbyists, cops, unions, almost anyone... except themselves. The truth is, the American people are the problem, and they've spent the last few decades doing everything possible to avoid personal responsibility for the shape of the country.
- geetee 13y ago
  Please elaborate on this statement.
- aaronem 13y ago
  > It is fascinating how people lay blame. Oh, yes, very much so! For example, you seem quite effortlessly to lay blame on three hundred or so million people, and that's only counting those alive right now, with no consideration for those who've predeceased us, at least some of whom presumably could be expected, in your formulation, to have had a hand in creating the situation you so readily decry. But laying blame, while satisfying, rarely does anything to solve a problem. In blaming "the American people" for the current state of things, you imply that they, all three hundred million or so, could have acted, and presumably could still act, to improve the situation. What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course. (For the sake of not seeing you wiggle out of the question that easily, assume in your answer that some method, not intolerable to the modern American sense of morality and ethics, exists of usefully coordinating the actions of almost half a billion human beings.)
  - mcv 13y ago
    > What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course. Vote. For for better people. That is the basis of any democracy. You don't blindly follow your leaders, and you don't blame them for their mistakes and carry on as if there's nothing you can do about it, because you can do something about it. You can vote them out, and vote better people in. The fact that those three hundred million Americans haven't done that, is entirely their own responsibility. It is the responsibility of the American people is that they allow themselves to be lied to. That you allow every single politician to break their promises, and re-elect them anyway. That you keep voting for the same two parties. And yes, of course the first-past-the-post district system makes it a lot harder to have someone else win the vote. You'll have to mobilize a lot of people. But you have to start voting for different people. People unrelated to the big two parties. People who do politics in a different way. Find them and vote them into office.
    - aaronem 13y ago
      A glib answer, to be sure. What do you recommend regarding the unelected civil service bureaucracy which has such a large hand in how the United States are administered? I can't imagine seeing any president take on the State Department, for example, but having seen at least one senator do so, I suspect I know who'd win.
      - dllthomas 13y ago
        One Senator wields 0.5% (ish) of the authority of a branch of government that State Department officials and staff don't (directly) work for. The President wields 100% of the authority of the branch of government that the State Department officials and staff work for. I think these things are different in both kind and degree.
    - collyw 13y ago
      > Vote. For better people. Obama was the best option was he not?
      - 13y ago
- ambler0 13y ago
  To be fair, the American people are and have been the most heavily propagandized people on Earth. I sympathize with your desire to tell people to step up and take personal responsibility, but the truth is that many people can't even think straight. Look at how many people consistently vote against their own interests, identify with their oppressors, etc.
  - hnisforpolitics 13y ago
    The most heavily propagandized people on Earth? How about North Koreans? How about Germans post-WW1? How about Europeans with their incredibly lax immigration policies and superiority complex? How about the Chinese? How about the various Arab peoples with their autocrats and dictators?
  - aaronem 13y ago
    > the American people are and have been the most heavily propagandized people on Earth You have heard of North Korea, I hope?
    - TelmoMenezes 13y ago
      Can you spot the irony?
      - aaronem 13y ago
        I can spot a few different things at which you might be aiming the word "irony", but I'm not sure at which one of them, if any, you actually are.
    - ambler0 13y ago
      Your point is well taken. However, propaganda in America is much more insidious than propaganda in North Korea. Don't get me wrong, North Korea is a brutal place and I thank my lucky stars I was born here and not there. In America, there is always the illusion of a raging debate, which causes people to identify with the views they are presented. In places like North Korea, the propaganda is much more heavy-handed and if you step out of line you are punished much more severely. This causes people to pay lip service to the official views, but not necessarily to believe it in their hearts. In America, stepping out of line is tolerated - to a degree. EDIT: So perhaps what I should have said originally is not that America is the most heavily propagandized population, but that Americans are the victims of the most sophisticated propaganda machine.
- skylan_q 13y ago
  Personal/Individual responsibility is a dirty word. There is no incentive for a representational democracy to create an environment that fosters the development of personal blame. It can only grow and continue if it focuses on social responsibility and blaming the other group. Like 1984's Goldstein.
- tolmasky 13y ago
  A system that relies on all of it's constituents being informed and politically active in order to be successful is structurally unsound. This in my opinion is the true problem with our representational democracy. I am wary of blaming people who have difficulty day to day making ends meet for not caring enough about spying, etc.
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago
    I'm not sure the founding fathers could have predicted what laid in store for the country or the world. We have reached the point, I believe, where it is impossible to expect the majority of the population to be knowledgeable in all the various facets of running one of the most powerful countries in the world. Economics. Cultures. Science. These are all words which could be separated into thousands of sub-topics. You're expecting somebody to be "informed" about stem-cells, the likely implications of raising the interest rate by 0.1%, the differences between computer "memory" and "storage", and the differences of bowing to or shaking the hand of another world leader. Plus somehow keeping a full-time job and raising a family. This is where media is supposed to step up, do the research, and present the facts to the populace. I believe that a few people figured out long ago that if you can control the media, you control the country. It's a big ship and it steers rather slow, but I still think it is true. Hell, we still live in a world where laws are created based on books written thousands of years ago, where people doubt global warming because "man cannot possibly change what God created" and/or because the bible doesn't mention it. The problem is the same as it's always been: Us. Asshats worm their way into the system and through fear, money, charisma, or subterfuge they subvert whatever they can modify to suit their own desires. If anything what we need is a system that can prevent this somehow, which is what the founding fathers were attempting to create. The entire western culture (likely others as well), needs to change, and I don't see that happening without something major (think The Day the Earth Stood Still type shit here) happening.
    - yuhong 13y ago
      I wonder how http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition would do.
- wylee 13y ago
  When I was born, on the day of my birth, how much personal responsibility did I have for the state of the USA and the world in general? (None) When did I start to have the even the most basic understanding of what's really going on in the world? At what point did I become culpable? At that point, what power did I have to actually influence anything (given 400+ years of policy, expansion, entrenchment, racism, etc). I agree to an extent that individuals can and should take some personal responsibility, but that doesn't address systemic effects. And the mere notion that we should take some responsibility doesn't lead to an effective course of action. Suggesting that we vote (which someone else suggested).. well, that's almost comical given the premise of the thread, which is that you can't trust politicians, no matter how progressive or sincere they might seem. As much as I do take responsibility (and feel guilty about not doing more), I still haven't figured out how to have any real influence. I've spent plenty of time complaining about other people and their lack of participation too, and I'm not sure what difference that has made. Merely pointing out the problem (or what I perceive the problem to be) doesn't change anything by itself. Edit: Added a word. Formatting.
dictum 13y ago
> a massive global communication channel that is not under the control of the people in power. They're working their hardest to correct that horrible mistake.
- joe_inferno 13y ago
  Net neutrality isn't dead because the people asked for it
  - thisiswrong 13y ago
    I'm not so worried about net neutrality. I mean it's easy enough for the average person to eventually understand the importance of all traffic being treated the same. Copyright extremism (and 'protecting' children - Firewall of Cameron) is what we should be worried about. Our rulers have chosen copyright as their 'Trojan horse' of choice [1] for regaining the arbitrary censorship powers that they once enjoyed. Sadly, most people can't come to terms with the importance of copyright reform in the digital age. They fail to understand that copyright has always been used by rulers as means of controlling the rhetoric and preventing 'non-aligned' publishers from reaching large audiences [2]. [1] http://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-monopoly-was-created-as-a-censorship-instrument-and-is-still-used-as-one-130901/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-monopoly-was-created-a... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

abvdasker 13y ago

No. Wrong. It is current and it is a crisis when campaign finance is essentially unlimited and politicians are more accountable to their financiers than their constituents. American politics were bad and they're getting worse post-Citizens United.

adventured 13y ago

It is fascinating how people lay blame. The most common thing I see is my fellow Americans blaming politicians, bankers, school teachers, lobbyists, cops, unions, almost anyone... except themselves. The truth is, the American people are the problem, and they've spent the last few decades doing everything possible to avoid personal responsibility for the shape of the country.

geetee 13y ago
Please elaborate on this statement.
aaronem 13y ago
> It is fascinating how people lay blame. Oh, yes, very much so! For example, you seem quite effortlessly to lay blame on three hundred or so million people, and that's only counting those alive right now, with no consideration for those who've predeceased us, at least some of whom presumably could be expected, in your formulation, to have had a hand in creating the situation you so readily decry. But laying blame, while satisfying, rarely does anything to solve a problem. In blaming "the American people" for the current state of things, you imply that they, all three hundred million or so, could have acted, and presumably could still act, to improve the situation. What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course. (For the sake of not seeing you wiggle out of the question that easily, assume in your answer that some method, not intolerable to the modern American sense of morality and ethics, exists of usefully coordinating the actions of almost half a billion human beings.)
- mcv 13y ago
  > What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course. Vote. For for better people. That is the basis of any democracy. You don't blindly follow your leaders, and you don't blame them for their mistakes and carry on as if there's nothing you can do about it, because you can do something about it. You can vote them out, and vote better people in. The fact that those three hundred million Americans haven't done that, is entirely their own responsibility. It is the responsibility of the American people is that they allow themselves to be lied to. That you allow every single politician to break their promises, and re-elect them anyway. That you keep voting for the same two parties. And yes, of course the first-past-the-post district system makes it a lot harder to have someone else win the vote. You'll have to mobilize a lot of people. But you have to start voting for different people. People unrelated to the big two parties. People who do politics in a different way. Find them and vote them into office.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    A glib answer, to be sure. What do you recommend regarding the unelected civil service bureaucracy which has such a large hand in how the United States are administered? I can't imagine seeing any president take on the State Department, for example, but having seen at least one senator do so, I suspect I know who'd win.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      One Senator wields 0.5% (ish) of the authority of a branch of government that State Department officials and staff don't (directly) work for. The President wields 100% of the authority of the branch of government that the State Department officials and staff work for. I think these things are different in both kind and degree.
  - collyw 13y ago
    > Vote. For better people. Obama was the best option was he not?
    - 13y ago
ambler0 13y ago
To be fair, the American people are and have been the most heavily propagandized people on Earth. I sympathize with your desire to tell people to step up and take personal responsibility, but the truth is that many people can't even think straight. Look at how many people consistently vote against their own interests, identify with their oppressors, etc.
- hnisforpolitics 13y ago
  The most heavily propagandized people on Earth? How about North Koreans? How about Germans post-WW1? How about Europeans with their incredibly lax immigration policies and superiority complex? How about the Chinese? How about the various Arab peoples with their autocrats and dictators?
- aaronem 13y ago
  > the American people are and have been the most heavily propagandized people on Earth You have heard of North Korea, I hope?
  - TelmoMenezes 13y ago
    Can you spot the irony?
    - aaronem 13y ago
      I can spot a few different things at which you might be aiming the word "irony", but I'm not sure at which one of them, if any, you actually are.
  - ambler0 13y ago
    Your point is well taken. However, propaganda in America is much more insidious than propaganda in North Korea. Don't get me wrong, North Korea is a brutal place and I thank my lucky stars I was born here and not there. In America, there is always the illusion of a raging debate, which causes people to identify with the views they are presented. In places like North Korea, the propaganda is much more heavy-handed and if you step out of line you are punished much more severely. This causes people to pay lip service to the official views, but not necessarily to believe it in their hearts. In America, stepping out of line is tolerated - to a degree. EDIT: So perhaps what I should have said originally is not that America is the most heavily propagandized population, but that Americans are the victims of the most sophisticated propaganda machine.
skylan_q 13y ago
Personal/Individual responsibility is a dirty word. There is no incentive for a representational democracy to create an environment that fosters the development of personal blame. It can only grow and continue if it focuses on social responsibility and blaming the other group. Like 1984's Goldstein.
tolmasky 13y ago
A system that relies on all of it's constituents being informed and politically active in order to be successful is structurally unsound. This in my opinion is the true problem with our representational democracy. I am wary of blaming people who have difficulty day to day making ends meet for not caring enough about spying, etc.
- TheCraiggers 13y ago
  I'm not sure the founding fathers could have predicted what laid in store for the country or the world. We have reached the point, I believe, where it is impossible to expect the majority of the population to be knowledgeable in all the various facets of running one of the most powerful countries in the world. Economics. Cultures. Science. These are all words which could be separated into thousands of sub-topics. You're expecting somebody to be "informed" about stem-cells, the likely implications of raising the interest rate by 0.1%, the differences between computer "memory" and "storage", and the differences of bowing to or shaking the hand of another world leader. Plus somehow keeping a full-time job and raising a family. This is where media is supposed to step up, do the research, and present the facts to the populace. I believe that a few people figured out long ago that if you can control the media, you control the country. It's a big ship and it steers rather slow, but I still think it is true. Hell, we still live in a world where laws are created based on books written thousands of years ago, where people doubt global warming because "man cannot possibly change what God created" and/or because the bible doesn't mention it. The problem is the same as it's always been: Us. Asshats worm their way into the system and through fear, money, charisma, or subterfuge they subvert whatever they can modify to suit their own desires. If anything what we need is a system that can prevent this somehow, which is what the founding fathers were attempting to create. The entire western culture (likely others as well), needs to change, and I don't see that happening without something major (think The Day the Earth Stood Still type shit here) happening.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    I wonder how http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition would do.
wylee 13y ago
When I was born, on the day of my birth, how much personal responsibility did I have for the state of the USA and the world in general? (None) When did I start to have the even the most basic understanding of what's really going on in the world? At what point did I become culpable? At that point, what power did I have to actually influence anything (given 400+ years of policy, expansion, entrenchment, racism, etc). I agree to an extent that individuals can and should take some personal responsibility, but that doesn't address systemic effects. And the mere notion that we should take some responsibility doesn't lead to an effective course of action. Suggesting that we vote (which someone else suggested).. well, that's almost comical given the premise of the thread, which is that you can't trust politicians, no matter how progressive or sincere they might seem. As much as I do take responsibility (and feel guilty about not doing more), I still haven't figured out how to have any real influence. I've spent plenty of time complaining about other people and their lack of participation too, and I'm not sure what difference that has made. Merely pointing out the problem (or what I perceive the problem to be) doesn't change anything by itself. Edit: Added a word. Formatting.

dictum 13y ago

> a massive global communication channel that is not under the control of the people in power. They're working their hardest to correct that horrible mistake.

joe_inferno 13y ago
Net neutrality isn't dead because the people asked for it
- thisiswrong 13y ago
  I'm not so worried about net neutrality. I mean it's easy enough for the average person to eventually understand the importance of all traffic being treated the same. Copyright extremism (and 'protecting' children - Firewall of Cameron) is what we should be worried about. Our rulers have chosen copyright as their 'Trojan horse' of choice [1] for regaining the arbitrary censorship powers that they once enjoyed. Sadly, most people can't come to terms with the importance of copyright reform in the digital age. They fail to understand that copyright has always been used by rulers as means of controlling the rhetoric and preventing 'non-aligned' publishers from reaching large audiences [2]. [1] http://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-monopoly-was-created-as-a-censorship-instrument-and-is-still-used-as-one-130901/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-monopoly-was-created-a... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]