Rattrap
Doesn't feed trolls and would appreciate it if you
Yeah, you probably read the news already. And now you're reading this thread title and getting ready for a good ol' fashioned partisan rant and romp. But that's not what you're going to get, at least in the OP.
Here's the Democrats complaining
Here's a nice perspective on what the amount of money the Koch brothers are planning to spend compared with the history of American politics
Now I know a couple of you already have 'Soros' in your head as the standard partisan pavlovian response. You can save it, because I'm not here to argue that the Koch brothers are a problem. Well, they are a problem, but they aren't the problem. It's like...AIDs. You don't die from AIDs. You die from the common cold after getting AIDs. The Kochs, Soros, and the like - they're the colds. Symptom-causing symptoms of a deeper problem. For the AIDs, you have to look a little closer to home.
You can see several examples on this very board. In another thread quite recently, a few of our fellow members (as if the pool of us was big enough to cast any illusion that not everyone knows exactly who I'm talking about) went to town on each other like 8th graders picking their favorite sports teams. Now, I've studied psychology enough to know why someone defends an organization that doesn't give a flying fuck about you - I just wonder why you've made that organization a part of your sense of self.
In other threads, we have people building up their favored candidates, all of whom come from an authoritarian-right*, big-government-married-to-corporations party. The two biggest of these parties are known as the Republicans and the Democrats.
Make no mistake; while the Republicans 'talk' small government, they've always delivered bigger government. While Democrats 'talk' tough against corporate power, they're the ones signing us things like NAFTA, the Monsanto bill, and my recent favorite, the next free trade bill (I've forgotten what it's called) that allows corporations to sue countries when said countries do basically anything except open up wide for them.
These parties do not represent you.
The bickering that goes between the supporters of these two parties, the national debates that surround silly political talking points - well, this is where I'd love Rey to pop in and give a lecture about a time when bread and circuses were a thing. I feel like we'd find a lot of similarities.
But I don't want to meander too far: AIDs. The majority (sometimes vast majority) of elections are won by whoever spends the most money. This is again not the problem, but a symptom.
The problem is us.
The problem is a population who, 95% of those who choose to vote, largely fall into "they're my team, like my football team" camp, the "I'm falling for the lesser of two evils false dilemma trap" camp, or the "I can't be arsed to educate myself, so I'm going to vote for whoever I see on TV most often" camp. I can set that last one aside for now, although they're likely largely to blame for the statistics in the link above. But they're also certainly not the ones spending time on forum to talk politics, i.e., certainly not you.
Do you know what the Koch bros' money would buy if the majority of voters didn't fall into those camps? Fuck all. And herein is why I say they aren't the problem. We are. Congress maintains approval ratings inversely proportional to their reelection numbers. This is ridiculous.
To bring this meandering to a close, I can boil everything down to a question whose answer seems to be more difficult than it should be: Are you happy with the state of the government? Whatever your answer is, you've got three options where the ballotbox is concerned: disapproval, explicit approval, and implicit approval. Those who stay home are giving their implicit approval. Those who vote to stay on course with R and D politicians are giving their explicit approval. These two groups perplex me, because as I mentioned before, Congress maintains an approval rating in the teens, yet at the ballotbox has a 95% approval rating. The office of the President isn't much better.
I don't understand the disconnect.
Most of the time this has been brought up, most of you argue that the disapproval option - voting for someone else - is a waste of a vote. So you'd rather tell the parties to go for it instead? It's pissing in the wind, you might say, but I'll say that's preferable to getting pissed on. More importantly, if one argues that voting for someone else is a waste, they're effectively saying voting is a sham and a waste of time, given that the only two options they're considering are effectively the same.
But hey, as long as one thinks that, he's making it true.
Here's the Democrats complaining
Here's a nice perspective on what the amount of money the Koch brothers are planning to spend compared with the history of American politics
Now I know a couple of you already have 'Soros' in your head as the standard partisan pavlovian response. You can save it, because I'm not here to argue that the Koch brothers are a problem. Well, they are a problem, but they aren't the problem. It's like...AIDs. You don't die from AIDs. You die from the common cold after getting AIDs. The Kochs, Soros, and the like - they're the colds. Symptom-causing symptoms of a deeper problem. For the AIDs, you have to look a little closer to home.
You can see several examples on this very board. In another thread quite recently, a few of our fellow members (as if the pool of us was big enough to cast any illusion that not everyone knows exactly who I'm talking about) went to town on each other like 8th graders picking their favorite sports teams. Now, I've studied psychology enough to know why someone defends an organization that doesn't give a flying fuck about you - I just wonder why you've made that organization a part of your sense of self.
In other threads, we have people building up their favored candidates, all of whom come from an authoritarian-right*, big-government-married-to-corporations party. The two biggest of these parties are known as the Republicans and the Democrats.
Make no mistake; while the Republicans 'talk' small government, they've always delivered bigger government. While Democrats 'talk' tough against corporate power, they're the ones signing us things like NAFTA, the Monsanto bill, and my recent favorite, the next free trade bill (I've forgotten what it's called) that allows corporations to sue countries when said countries do basically anything except open up wide for them.
These parties do not represent you.
The bickering that goes between the supporters of these two parties, the national debates that surround silly political talking points - well, this is where I'd love Rey to pop in and give a lecture about a time when bread and circuses were a thing. I feel like we'd find a lot of similarities.
But I don't want to meander too far: AIDs. The majority (sometimes vast majority) of elections are won by whoever spends the most money. This is again not the problem, but a symptom.
The problem is us.
The problem is a population who, 95% of those who choose to vote, largely fall into "they're my team, like my football team" camp, the "I'm falling for the lesser of two evils false dilemma trap" camp, or the "I can't be arsed to educate myself, so I'm going to vote for whoever I see on TV most often" camp. I can set that last one aside for now, although they're likely largely to blame for the statistics in the link above. But they're also certainly not the ones spending time on forum to talk politics, i.e., certainly not you.
Do you know what the Koch bros' money would buy if the majority of voters didn't fall into those camps? Fuck all. And herein is why I say they aren't the problem. We are. Congress maintains approval ratings inversely proportional to their reelection numbers. This is ridiculous.
To bring this meandering to a close, I can boil everything down to a question whose answer seems to be more difficult than it should be: Are you happy with the state of the government? Whatever your answer is, you've got three options where the ballotbox is concerned: disapproval, explicit approval, and implicit approval. Those who stay home are giving their implicit approval. Those who vote to stay on course with R and D politicians are giving their explicit approval. These two groups perplex me, because as I mentioned before, Congress maintains an approval rating in the teens, yet at the ballotbox has a 95% approval rating. The office of the President isn't much better.
I don't understand the disconnect.
Most of the time this has been brought up, most of you argue that the disapproval option - voting for someone else - is a waste of a vote. So you'd rather tell the parties to go for it instead? It's pissing in the wind, you might say, but I'll say that's preferable to getting pissed on. More importantly, if one argues that voting for someone else is a waste, they're effectively saying voting is a sham and a waste of time, given that the only two options they're considering are effectively the same.
But hey, as long as one thinks that, he's making it true.
