American Politics Discussion Thread

[Jowy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ma...es_in_2022

282 mass shootings in the USA this year, so far. Probably a couple more by the time you read this. Remember the Buffalo shooting a couple of weeks ago? Since then, there has been 54 new mass shootings, totaling 327 people injured or killed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2..._in_Europe

In Europe, there's been 2. And 1 of them was because guns were given out to conscripts in Ukraine.

[Boro]

it reads 3 to me. Veshkayma is still part of european russia last I checked.

[Mjmd]

Cheney has wrapped up her remarks with an admonition to her Republican colleagues, saying they are "defending the indefensible" by continuing to support Trump's election fraud claims.

Never accept the unacceptable. Even if you 100% don't like a party or person acknowledge when they do the right thing. There were a lot of Republicans that did the right thing in 2020. I fear the number willing to going forward is going to be much less. 

Lets be clear, the only hope for American democracy is the large number of people who just don't care enough to vote. The best thing for America and honestly the Republican party is if they are thoroughly crushed and are forced to leave the path they are on. I only have a little precious hope that America is capable of rising to the moment.

[BING_XI_LAO]

There is this claim that western media supporting its private interests is no different that state-owned censorship, and I really dislike the notion.

Western social media giants are effectively part of the government because they lobby it, donate to politicians, they are regulated by it, they co-operate with the White House on pushing and suppressing various narratives. They systematically ban, shadowban, demonetise, algorithmically de-rate, various points of view.
The biggest segment of right-wing cultural commentary left on youtube is now criticising Star Wars films because it's not explicitly political so it's not banned yet.

Social media tends towards natural monopoly and it is the public square where political discussion takes place. Moreover even if you do make a new forum or social media platform, you can still get banned by the web host as Amazon did to Parler. The Gab platform had to literally and physically build its own servers.

Western traditional media (newspapers and such) is monolithic in the narratives they push on a wide range of issues and they are owned by a cabal of billionaires. Youtube's recent, ~12 months ago privileging of "official media" in its algorithm wasn't to serve its specific financial interests - unless you can see some fiscal logic there? - but rather to reinforce the narrative control the overall power structure exerts.

The manipulation is so bad that some unknown proportion of content is generated by bot scripts. See the Elon Musk Twitter bot prevalence dispute, or the pseudo-news channels on youtube which appear to algorithimically generate videos - only needing an input of text and a few images to then read it out with a bot voice. These are some that I noticed because my dad was getting sent them by another equally internet-clueless octogenarian.
https://www.youtube.com/c/REPUPDATE
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsd7nPw...peeXo04_bQ
https://www.youtube.com/c/DJEltun/videos
In contrast to their pro-Ukraine content, reportedly 9,000 Russian "disinformation" channels got removed.

Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are allowed to hoover up vast amounts of attention and following because so many of their rivals within the right got banned, while they persist thanks to their connections and because they have rendered their messaging regime-compliant on several crucial topics. Meanwhile the likes of Molyneux, once as popular, languish in some forgotten corner.

The existence of hack journalism in the west doesn’t preclude good reporting and strong adversarial press from existing. And that’s the key important thing, that the free press exists. It doesn’t have to be predominant (would sure be nice...) but the key is that the information access is there in a way that is available to everyone.
Its a truism, but seems to be forgotten here:  censorial states always look better than they really are

I've seen multiple discord servers deleted by the admins, subreddits with tens of thousands of users deleted by admins, youtube channels above the 100,000 mark deleted after ToS change, twitter accounts in the hundreds of thousands eradicated, political news websites having to constantly shift to new url because the old one got banned at the national level, and so on. The Twitter censorship methods have extended to outright banning networks of users based on follows. Social media bans, bank accounts getting disabled, Nick Fuentes being put on the federal no-fly list, Michelle Malkin being banned from AirBnB, weh hosting being interrupted - that is what prevents an adversarial press from existing in the West. Also, declining testosterone is reducing Westerners' biological capability to fairly consider minority points of view. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CgFLFSm...lLSdm/view (I am not saying I am high T. I am just autistic)

[Mjmd]

Your committing some logical fallacies.

Tu Quoque - Western media has problems therefore - False equivalence - western media is just as bad as state-owned censorship.

Western media has problems yes, but it still offers the widest access to information and viewpoints in the history of mankind. It isn't anywhere NEAR state-owned censorship.

[Mjmd]

So how are people finding the hearings? I think they've been pretty well done. Lots of focus on Republican testimony. Actual narrative in a not totally boring format.

The key question obviously is will people care? I'm not talking about the people who will eat whatever lies Trump tells them. I'm talking about the Republicans who know he is lying and tried to overthrow democracy. I'm talking about independents and people who don't vote. How many will just accept the unacceptable or accept that "overthrowing Democracy" is just another political issue somehow? I don't know how people logically get there, but its honestly the sense I get.

After the civil war Republican's trying to focus on reconstruction were often derided for "waving the bloody shirt". IE bringing up the suffering and death the war caused to you know actually try to address the issue and aftermath. They failed. Reconstruction ended. Learning about the end of reconstruction I was always curious if it was just all around racism even amongst the north or if people just truly couldn't be bothered to care even after all that death and misery. Or rather that their attention span just wasn't very long. I'm kind of getting the same vibes of people just can't be bothered. Heart of Democracy on the line.... "Eh".

What are other peoples senses?

[superdeath]

I havent been watching "the hearings" i have to assume we are "finally" getting a couple of the protesters/ect on trial?

As a independent all i can hope for is both parties die overnight and are replaced with people who arent 60+.

[Mjmd]

Its been pretty well focused on lies and actions Trump was undertaking. Again a lot of it coming form Republicans. I recommend it. Its much better done than most congressional hearings (not that it takes a lot, but listen it is much better).

But yes, my point is how do we get the average American SD type person to care that Democracy is a fragile thing that needs every person to help protect it. Again, from educational point of view its never really a thing we focus on learning. Even in AP history the fact that we transfer power between parties that often hate each others guts is just taken as totally normal. I don't think most Americans really understand what a disruption to the peaceful transfer of power means or how big of a deal that is.

Edit: also people either A) believe everything "their" side says. OR B) always expect politicians to lie and again false equivalency put election lies on the same level. Edit Edit: although I still boggle that people know about fake slates of electors and they aren't getting creepy crawling tingly sensations running up and down their body.

[Ginger()]

Edit: also people either A) believe everything "their" side says. OR B) always expect politicians to lie and again false equivalency put election lies on the same level. Edit Edit: although I still boggle that people know about fake slates of electors and they aren't getting creepy crawling tingly sensations running up and down their body.

This is the conclusion I reached; either people are too desensitized to lying that this is perceived as oh just “business as usual” or “overblown hype”. There are people who’ve bought the koolaid and are sufficiently partisan to justify the attempted coup, but I think they’re comparatively few to those who try to shrug off the magnitude or intent. 

As for electors, I think most people see it as gerrymandering by another name, and thus are ambivalent or feel its “within the rules of the game”. Which I instinctively find wrong and do get the ‘creepy crawlies’, but I can’t verbalize why it’s distinct. Haven’t spent enough time thinking about it. I think its got something to do with gerrymandering being to some small extent a necessary evil (someone has to draw the maps), as opposed to fake electors being completely manufactured and injected bs.

[Mjmd]

So in a perfect world you would have a bipartisan or non partisan group making all the laws and drawing all the maps. As stated in the US democracy one of our big weaknesses is that this is not the case. Parties can try to make laws and implement election policies in a very partisan manner in many parts of the country. This is sadly all within legal norms. Its part of the rules of the game.

Sending in fake slate of electors is breaking the game board and declaring yourself the winner.