American Politics Discussion Thread

[darrelljs]

If you've watched the HBO documentary In the Same Breath you come away impressed with Wuhan.  It's a pretty good film, shows the good and bad of both the Chinese and US responses to the virus.

It's mind boggling the number of metropolises in China.  I guess when you urbanize nearly half your population in 20 year, big cities happen.  They have developed so many crazy civil engineering procedures, like moving an historic building:



Darrell

[greenline]

The suppressed people were the ones in Shanghai who found their day to day lives heavily curtailed by lockdowns. But China was hardly unique in this regard.

[Charr Babies]

The suppressed people were the ones in Shanghai who found their day to day lives heavily curtailed by lockdowns. But China was hardly unique in this regard.

That's entirely a different debate on the handling of the pandemic.

[darrelljs]

Interesting poll.

People who support the [Republican/Democratic] party and its ideologies have become so extreme in what they want that it is acceptable to use violence to stop them from achieving their goals.

Before looking, guess what % of self identified Trump supporters and Biden supporters agreed with this.

Biden was 41%, Trump was 38%.

Democracy can't really work when a sizable part of the population is at war with another sizable part of the population to this degree .

Darrell

[greenline]

in recent dystopian news:

oppositional effort to stop the bill enabling remote control of vehicles sold after 2026 has failed (and note the partisan split on who wanted to pass the amendment blocking these motions - https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023616). now, i was expecting that tesla owners would have to put up with that nonsense, but now it's going to be everyone. so, if the government in the near future decides it wants to do horrible things to some group of people, it won't be long before they can remotely disable any of these cars produced after that year to keep anyone from running away. i don't think even china goes that far!

[Mjmd]

Is that the right link? This is a funding bill. Shockingly Republicans included things like cuts to the IRS again and other agencies. I'm sure some news agency is spinning this in your above terms, but its important to understand what is actually in a bill before going all off the cliff over the result.

[greenline]

The funding to be cut includes the measures included for handling impaired driving, which is what the remote changes are being sold as.

I would be happy to see the IRS suffer cuts rather than have to live with a future where the government can remotely shut my car down.

[Mjmd]

I tried fast reading and I tried key word searches and I'm honestly not sure which part of the bill address this. That being said for any bill in any format for any party, if 90% of the bill is something a party opposes they probably wont' pass it for the other 10%. They may do it the other way where they want 90% and hate 10% and pass that, but in these large funding bills saying "this 1 thing is what I'm focusing on" misses a lot of politics.

I will note that both house speakers first bills included IRS funding cuts even though its a revenue winner and a way to claw back taxes from multi millionaires. Its almost as if they don't actually care about the deficit. I used to believe Republicans cared about the deficit (and I'm not saying Democrats do, but Rs usually force them to pay for a lot of it like for instance increasing IRS funding which is why I actually like this dynamic of Rs pretending to care forcing Ds to care, but I digress). Anyways things like this really make it obvious that this isn't actually Republican priority.

[greenline]

If supporting cuts in spending and general funding is what it takes to get support on not having such laws passed... again, a budget deficit (or billionaires and multi millionaires pocketing more cash) is far less a bad outcome than cars with remote control off switches.

[Mjmd]

So if Democrats put whatever piece of this legislation says that (still can't find) in a bill for green energy or health care you would expect Republicans to jump on it?

That just isn't how politics works.