MSC

That still sounds like it could be about TFG! Felon-in-Chief. There, that's its new title, still begins with an F, just not the one that begins with F that it wants... FIC, can that be confused with anything else? I'll call it that if someone drives the nose of it right up his... Peepee hole.

I must have missed that executive order and it's really fucked up, that Trump is so deranged and ridiculous that if you told me he had legit signed an executive order trying to claim Obama is Kenyan, I'd probably believe it. Oh my God has he actually done that? Yeah I need to start thwarting keyword exploits now and may have to pare down my online presence and hide anything anti-TFG I've said. Still waiting for the conditions on my GC to be removed and they are demanding immigrants social media info now to apply for new GCs or to naturalise. I was going to become a citizen of the USA in a few short years from now, but with Trump in the Whitehouse and the USA going to hell, might be better to just keep my British citizenship as an exit clause. Honestly if my daughter wasn't American I'd already be gone. She and my girlfriend are all that keep me here at this point. That said, if things start to get a little to... Reich like, I'd rather be where the resistance to that needs to be, but maybe I'd send my daughter back to the UK at least. Solidaridad immigrante!

This makes me think of two scenarios that would be hilarious to see go down. Scenario one, Trump succeeds in making Canada a new US state, then with their new reps and electoral college votes, vote Republicans down into catastrophic election defeats. Scenario two, Trump succeeds in making a third presidential term legal, but then Obama beats his ass in an election. I know both of these scenarios are unlikely but yeah, those would be some good examples of critical backfires and self owns.

Seldom does having your own employees compete with each other lead to good outcomes for your business. They are supposed to compete with your competition. Right now the American governments competition is every other government and most are laughing at the USA now. Show us your news feed. Personally I'm wondering if Musk and Trump are trying to orchestrate a recession. With a recession and stock prices going down, the Trump camp, meaning the government and the business entities now supporting it are going to consolidate more economic power by taking a bigger share of the stock market. They probably believe they can tear it all down and rebuild it back up (ignoring the damage and harm this will do to people) better than before but with more control. If people don't like it and protest it too much, Trump tries to declare martial law. They are goading and provoking the American public so they can get to the next phase of installing a dictatorship, which is declaring martial law. @Trurl I don't know what propaganda you're reading but I think you need to start sharing your sources. You're being manipulated and taken advantage of when you believe this shit.

The theme I've noticed is less to do with which rights to value, but whom is more deserving of those rights. The sort of movement Trump represents is less to do with creating a just and moral society for everyone, but a comfortable and luxurious society for some people, at the cost of everyone else. Take a look at how Trump and his cronies use and abuse Judaism and have made themselves arbiters of it by determining who is and isn't a "bad jew" or a "good Jew". The whole "you're not Jewish if you vote Democrat" line is emblematic of something else; "You're not really a person if you don't support Donald Trump." And if you're not a person, why would you expect to have the sort of rights "real people" have? When it comes to the things we own and care about, we typically don't get defensive of them until they are under threat. To put it simply, the free speech rights of Trump supporters are not under threat because there is no risk associated with their use of it. I think we also have made the mistake (myself included) at times of focusing on the rich and white aspect of who Trump is out to benefit the most, when really it is himself. There are a fair amount of rich white Republican men who are still never Trumpers and there rights are under threat too. Every Trump supporter who isn't a white man, is just seen as a good servant who knows their place. Any white man against him is seen as a traitor to their race. Ultimately we are at a wall when it comes to understanding the many different kinds of people who support Trump and why, the data I lack to do deeper dives resides in their devices and news sources. For some, it will be that they are legit neo-nazis and this is all about eugenics, for others it's normally warm and kind people who are being fed lies about what Trump is doing and what the Democrats are doing. There are different levels to this and who Trump is to those people, I can't even really fathom it. All I know is that the past decade of dealing with Trump supporters has told me they are far better at mental gymnastics than I am. Note; not to say there are only two kinds of people that support Trump, everything in between those two also exists. I really want to know why some non-whites and women support him, for them it's even harder for me to understand.

My best friend of the time was cringily into him and I dunno why, something about seeing someone else fanboy or fangirl about something can kind of put me off it and the one thing about the majority of my role models in life that is the same, is they are all mostly fictional. I deeply distrust the rich and famous as a matter of personal policy. Someone needs to have been dead for awhile before I'll look up to them 😂 present company excluded.

It's the same logic wife beaters employ. "Oh if she hadn't made me mad, she wouldn't have a black eye." "Oh if you hadn't hired a black women, hadn't let in those Mexicans and not had any business dealings with Jews, I wouldn't have had to create a new Reich or enable and arm the neo Nazis!" Oh and don't forget Musk claiming "Mandela wouldn't have wanted this." In regards to their stupid claims about SA. How much reality warping are they going to employ? Now Nelson Mandela was a fascist and Hitler a communist? It would be laughable of so many people weren't eating it all up as gospel.

So how I envision it, is that the parties themselves are single issue, but voters belong to multiple parties, based on which group they feel has the best approach to the given issue. One issue, is personnel management and communication. This would make the role of president, more like that of a project manager, with a presidential roundtable council of team leads who work on the issues, independently of each other, with task forces for where issues meet and intersect. I suppose you could almost call it maintained coalition governance. I do value your feedback, even if the last batch required me to step back after a knee jerk that was completely my bad. Admittedly though, what I've described would be a headache come election time, but election time is always a headache and simpler ways don't imply better ways, people can stand to be asked to do something a bit more complex it it's only every few years.

Maybe you can help me with something; hit a wall in my research, trying to find out how the USA conducted elections pre 1796 and the normalisation of political parties via the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans.

Sidebar; funny as all hell that the slavers in the UK were too stupid to realize their funds were being attacked first, pre abolition. So maybe I'm arguing from the extreme, but I think the overall theme of diminishing party power and increasing individual accountability is achievable. I also want to make it clear that when faced with the world's current problems, I don't think there is any one strategy that will fix it all. The other ideas mentioned here, fixing campaign finance issues etc are still absolutely valid and should be followed through on. @iNow and @exchemist Sorry for how snappy my first response to you both today was. I hadn't had coffee yet and had just woken up. I appreciate you both taking the time to respond and I realize I haven't done a good job of explaining how I would envision this working, but that's mainly because some of this is still incubating and admittedly it would take some wild reformation of both the executive and legislative branches of government and changes in how elections are carried out. I was already aware that the thorniest part of it is the implications for the right to assembly. Having done more research, the forming of parties probably can't be outlawed, for the reasons @exchemist stated.. however I have come across mentions of small state and local governments around the world that have de jure non-partisan policies, where parties aren't allowed to take part in elections directly and they serve advisory roles to the executive and legislative branches instead.

Never said there was? Well then I don't know, kind of seems like how you envision this and how I envision it are very different but thanks for making it sound stupid. You were the one who said a counter cultural movement was needed and this is what I came up with. Sorry it wasn't good enough. I asked for pros and cons, all y'all did was conconcon. Not even an attempt to be open minded or creative. You want money out of politics? Dissolve multi issue parties, you want merit in politics? Single issue parties would invite it since people will actually have to know what they are talking about on a given issue. Forgive me for thinking it would be a good idea to take a cue from science and name parties based on function, not ideology and abstracting away from problems. You call it infantile, I call it breaking a problem down into smaller parts so that it can actually be solved. Where issues meet, that's something to think about yeah, but not enough to throw out an entire idea that has been completely unexplored or tested. You'd think independent representatives don't exist with reading these responses. The way I see it, it's either this or switching to a hybrid representative/direct democracy model. Yeah well, so did the people who owned slaves when they voted to abolish. Let's say there was a push to make this the 28th amendment, if enough people want it, if enough people make it clear they are only going to vote for whomever will vote in favour of the 28th, it is achievable.

It's an interesting comparison nonetheless, not the best as you say, and I don't think you'd assume every issue has the same mass or even the same density if you'll allow me to stretch it further. Euthanasia and abortion share a death theme so you could say they are a similar mass but one is denser because it draws more people into caring about the issue. Smaller groups does mean smaller funding, but with a smaller focus, you don't need as much funding. I don't know, I just feel issues themselves fighting for the spotlight would be a better status quo than Republicans vs Democrats fighting for the spotlight. But who are those representatives ultimately loyal to? The voters, financial backers or their parties? We can both agree it ought to be the voters, but with the influence of the other two, it's worse odds than a coin flip on who a given rep will ultimately serve. Yes, how you described it would be impractical, but whether or not only readily apparent issues are all that is considered come election time, would depend on implementation of the concept, not the concept itself. We also need to ask ourselves if we are not muzzling our reps by forcing them to pick between joining one of two gangs, each with their own predetermined lines of bullshit for you to sing. A blanket approach to everything, where we are always told it either has to be done the democrat way or the Republican way, but never the right way, the effective way. There is also I feel a two way insulation from consequence dynamic between rep and chosen party, wherein the rep can blame their failures on the party and the party can blame their failures on the reps. You also don't see much unity or even harmony in either of the major parties in the USA right now. If I ask you what is a Democrat and what is a Republican? Will your definition of either Include details of where they stand on every issue? One thing I'm not sure either of you are taking into account; voters are people, people are different, different people care about different things, whether they should or not, that's what they will do. You already have single issue voters and you have plenty of multi-issue voters who feel like neither party fully represents them. To me, this means the solutions lie in either diminishing/eliminating multi-issue partisanship, or changing the nature of partisanship so that it's less... Shit, for everyone.

Assuming that humans only coalesce around solving a problem when there is a flag attached to it? Sorry, I may just not understand what you mean. Might need to flesh it out more for me. The part about single issue parties being permissable is based on one issue where you have clearly identifiable groups, pro-life and pro-choice and you can break those down into subgroups as well. But you know, while we are at it, since democracy seems to be under threat, and the federal government is being cut up and reformed anyway, and since this is an issue at play in countries besides the USA; we can make this thread about creative solutions to the failings of current democracies. We don't have to look at strictly non-partisanship. Let's brainstorm.

With disaffection of both political parties in the USA at an all time high, remedying the issues created by both political parties may require a constitutional amendment and a large cultural movement amongst voters to push this issue onto future candidates, explicitly mandating them with the dissolution and abolition of all multi-issue political parties in the United States. The right to assembly is retained through the retained ability of voters to form parties around single issues, so that parties can attempt to remain solution based while focused on a singular area of governance. So, with all that said, what would the pros and cons of such a system be? With or without campaign finance reforms.

Whatever social counter movement that could work, how does it pierce through the walls around people's personal Internet domes and then also through their mental defenses? I fear that the effects of not only being in a highly polarized time, but just how long it has now been this polarized, and based on the amount of mutual trolling of the opposing sides, we are in a goading and provoking phase and I fear even more that without experiencing the acute and devastating consequences of shared personal loss over time, the sort of loss people on both sides of war experience, without that I just don't know how people can come together. Where Trump is concerned and others like him, there are probably a whole bunch of people who while against him now, are gonna become "if you can't beat em, joinem" types, out of self preservation. Some of them probably already have.

They are still alive and kicking if that's what you mean. You'll hear more from them come the midterms I reckon. As of now I think the Democrats, old guard Republicans and independents are all still reeling from Trump's win and are currently trying to latch onto several of Trump's fucked up actions since returning to office, hoping one will be the scandal that will turn Trump's support upside down. Relying on the mistakes of your enemies, to win, is a very dangerous strategy. The ghost in the machine sounds more like a poltergeist. It was actually studying this technology that led me to develop some of my own theories within philosophy and psychology. To put it simply, this technology is capable of individual contextual evaluation through dialogical psychoanalysis and developing a model of you. There is a catch though, it's psychoanalysing who you are telling it you are, not who you actually are. There is an episode of Black mirror where the protagonists fiance or boyfriend dies, and is replaced (at her ordering it) an Android that is supposed to look and think like the deceased person, based on their online profile. The android found sadistic jokes funny, when the real life person never did, they just responded "lol" to online content which made them uncomfortable. This leads us to a problem due to people's attitudes when it comes to online communication. Psychologically we don't treat it the same way as in-person communication or even writing a letter to a specific person. It lowers our inhibitions, makes us more likely to not see the humanity in other people and treat them like bots on a screen. I'd argue that for some people it may even lower their inhibitions more than if they were just drunk. This electronic output from these screens, this mix of sensory data, impacts our endocrine system in ways we don't fully comprehend. The reason for us centrist dads that are harder for the algorithm to put into a box, we are better at practicing diet control of what we consume and who we tell the system we are. I mean literally I give it five minutes after posting this for me to have ads about literal diet control for food because these things really don't understand what it means to be human or even awareness. It's flawed as we are flawed. Got more but need a break to charge phone.

You and me both, this stuff used to be communicated through artistic mediums in ways that got through, but now all art comes with running commentary, most of it worthless commentary. Like most of our discussions here we round back to social media and how badly it has fractured and divided us all from trustable information and each other, or in some cases blinded us to it and each other. I think the reps leveraged empathy too, but I think more than any human influence, people's own innate inner conflict with human nature being fueled by an unfeeling system of machines designed to keep us all focussed on a small screen, a personalized lense within which to view the world. I think if we were to account for all of human history, Carl Jung's theory of collective consciousness and the Internet as it is, if it is the reflection of the combined human psyche, should we be surprised that it is fractured, fucked up and at odds with itself, when as a species that's been our entire theme? I keep coming back to the same question in my head? What can I do? What can we do? There are people making and carrying out plans that are creating more existential threats to us all. How far does this rabbit hole of authoritarianism and dictatorship go? Will there come a time when even talking on here puts us at risk or will their be bans of what we can and can't do online? Is believing defeat is certain, a self fulfilling prophecy or common sense?

The Fukushima event is interesting in that it's one of the events that has been closely studied to put together new safeguards. I don't understand the physics behind this that much, all I learned was that the Introduction of different liquids with higher boiling points in the liquid "cooling" system is far better at containing radiation than the cooling system used in Fukushima, which when suffering a loss of power, was unable to contain the reaction.... Also not putting backup generators in dumb places helps. Me personally I'm not against nuclear energy but very against nuclear weapons. I'm a highschool drop out. For me it comes down to a very simple evaluation of the context of the world I live in. The chances of me being annihilated by a nuclear weapon are far greater than me being annihilated by a powerplants reactor going "fuck all y'all!" So long as I don't live near any nuclear powerplants. We are doing a good job of burning the world without having many many nuclear catastrophes and the scientists behind nuclear power generation are actively just trying to create something helpful and not planning ways to actively kill me... I mean some of them might be the same ones helping create nuclear weapons, but I can't stop either so I'll pick my battles and I'm a deep believer in the idea of tools just being tools and how they are used defines bad behavior, not bad tools. Nuclear energy is one such tool to me. I mean I still have a preference for renewables that lack extremely toxic waste, but I dunno, maybe the science community will develop a recycling method for it one day?

I thought it was the Trump approach to healthcare? 😂

Honestly I kind of feel like if the progressives had adopted this approach more when pushing ethically grounded legal policies, they wouldn't have alienated so many voters. Fuck Trump's face, idc about his, but moderates and reasonable skeptics deserved more patience and forgiveness when it came to convincing them out of tribal thinking to be more inclusive of others.

101 and advanced concepts in high pressure situations. Hostage situations where the perp/perps has a high level of narcissism, negotiators in those circumstances will throw out more ladders than if the perps weren't highly narcissistic. Face saving is important for de-escalation. With the $100b pledged, they could theoretically start slowly spending that to show intent to follow through, and float the possibility of more investment down the line, then just wait 3+ years saying the next check "will be here in two weeks and it'll be the most beautiful check you've ever seen!" And keep your fingers crossed that Trump's attempt at establishing his dictatorship fails in 2028. Sometimes as well this is the best strategy for encouraging behavioural change. Reflect the narcissists behavior right back at them, commit the same wrongs, but against them. I literally do the same thing with my 4 year old daughter. If she's having a particularly bad day I just start acting like a toddler "that's my toy! You can't have it! I'm tired and hungry! Feed me! Blablabla" until she says "hey stop acting like a kid". She finds it funny but it gives her some perspective too. I'm thinking about having her run for president in 2028, the bar is so low now that a toddler is probably considered qualified now right? Oh wait she won't even be a toddler then, even better!

Yeah. I mean I didn't really have a point to make by it, other than to say I don't care what most men think because the truly egoic ones have a laughable tendency to forget their own mortality and that for all their attempts to avoid it, we all go back to the dirt. I'm under no illusion that the framers were no saints, and if it would piss them off to have black folk, women, the disabled etc walking around with the same rights as white men, then I guess I'm the sort who would just want to piss them off and I'll gladly use the "all men" line as definitionally "human" if it pisses off those sorts of people.

Quite Jon Snow like, knows nothing 😂

It means "all men must die" I mean we can disagree on the details but we both agree people like Trump are a problem. I get what you're laying down, Trump is morally stupid. I'd not like to hazard a guess at how smart or dumb he may be, because all I see is a huge ego behind a camera who has the power to make all of our lives miserable. Shamelessness is probably the real reason. Enablement of people who ought to know better but... Don't. I don't know, call him what you want. He's a problem.

While I agree, when we look at the sort of results Trump has in terms of being a self serving gross weasel, to say he is unintelligent would be underestimating him and while he is definitely not a genius, he is criminally sophisticated and surrounds himself with people who are more intelligent in the ways that he needs them to be, because they are all flocking to manipulate him too. Oh I dunno, Valar Morghulles? 😂