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[MetalSlimeHunt]

Modern America is none of those things, and it is churlish and disgusting to even compare them to now.

Come on, don't you see the joke? America eats and eats until it despoils the whole Earth, and then in the dust the racist suburban Karens of America say "ok fine, I'll start recycling my cans, jeez don't be so serious!". That is what we are, not the people fighting the fucking Nazis.

This is a culture of elders who can neither govern nor surrender governance paired with a culture of youths who have been completely solidified not to care or fight back. That is the perspective from which the "grand conflict" of Biden vs. Trump actually makes some sense and is predictable. Yes, I do say that it is pathetic to stake hope on one of those parties.

People who believe in grand global conspiracies and problem politicians are optimists. You can destroy a grand global conspiracy, expose its crimes or what have you. You could impeach Trump, well maybe not that given what actually happened, but the principle applies. But when the real problem is in the thoughts of the silent majority? Now there's an understanding that is pessimistic enough to potentially overcome optimism bias.

[SalmonGod]

Springboarding from that, as I've said many times before, at least a figure like Trump does something to break the deafening silence and lethargy.

I don't believe the narrative that Democrats in power, even if they're terrible, would at least provide a better position from which to fight for something more.

I'm 37.  I've seen multiple administrations come and go.  The thing that stands out strongest to me is that conservatives are always at war.  They're always energized.  Always feel like the underdog fighting like hell in a panicked frenzy for their god's will and the soul of the country.  Even when their agenda is dominating politics.

He wouldn't set everything right, but having him as a president would sure as hell be a better starting point when fighting for a better world than sulking righteously in your room and having another Trump term.

But on the other side, this has been tested over and over and over again.  It's never true.  90% of the population who isn't hardcore conservative checks out of politics almost completely if the aesthetics of the dominant party are soothing enough to their sensibilities.  When the frontman of government isn't obviously despicable or stupid, they take whatever's said at face value, and hand-wave anyone who does bother to fact-check as a conspiracy theorist.

Based on my experiences with people through the Obama-era, I 100% expect that if a perfect universal healthcare bill landed on Biden's desk and he vetoed it, that people would just believe by default that somehow Republicans were responsible.  And if I provided them links with video footage of him doing the paperwork to veto at his desk, with a dozen health insurance execs watching over his shoulder while stuffing money in his pockets, they simply wouldn't look.

Can you give me any reason to believe this time would be different?

[Karnewarrior]

No it's the opposite -- it's "if you don't stop buying lottery tickets you'll never save any money"

The difference being that here, stopping buying the lottery tickets doesn't stop us from spending the money on them, it just prevents us from reaping the collective rewards.

The whole edgy "everything's awful and nothing will ever get done" is cool and all, but it's predicated on 100% bullshit. Nothing's awful and everything will get done eventually - that's how literally the rest of human history worked, it's how it's going to work out here. You can choose to be part of building that future and possibly have a say in it, or sit and mope about the futility of it all and be forgotten in the gutter.

I'm growing rather irritated with the doom and gloom in this thread. It's entirely unwarranted. I'm not that depressed and my fucking Grandfather just died. No candidate is perfect - fucking Lincoln didn't even want to free the Slaves, it just wound up being politically expedient. Stop focusing on the negatives and discarding all the positives as inconsequential and maybe the world won't seem like such a depressing place, eh?

[dragdeler]

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[Loud Whispers]

There's an essay by Orwell titled England Your England that I think you may find interesting.

Here's an amusing excerpt, apropos of nothing:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class... ...the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England's domestic problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had happened? What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.

By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.

There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country life, due to the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited workers off the land. It explains the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered since the eighties of the last century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and again startled the world. Since the fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale...

(this was written in 1941)

It's amusing how little has changed in the realm of global finance; reach a certain level of money, and you entrench yourself as a comfortable leisure class, who makes money because they have money

[sluissa]

No it's the opposite -- it's "if you don't stop buying lottery tickets you'll never save any money"

The difference being that here, stopping buying the lottery tickets doesn't stop us from spending the money on them, it just prevents us from reaping the collective rewards.

The whole edgy "everything's awful and nothing will ever get done" is cool and all, but it's predicated on 100% bullshit. Nothing's awful and everything will get done eventually - that's how literally the rest of human history worked, it's how it's going to work out here. You can choose to be part of building that future and possibly have a say in it, or sit and mope about the futility of it all and be forgotten in the gutter.

I'm growing rather irritated with the doom and gloom in this thread. It's entirely unwarranted. I'm not that depressed and my fucking Grandfather just died. No candidate is perfect - fucking Lincoln didn't even want to free the Slaves, it just wound up being politically expedient. Stop focusing on the negatives and discarding all the positives as inconsequential and maybe the world won't seem like such a depressing place, eh?

People are less likely to get angry and try to take away what you've gained if you're forgotten in the gutter. The gutter isn't that bad of a place.

Here's the other part of the lottery metaphor, people who end up winning the lottery are quite likely to end up worse off in the end. Being very publicly successful like that generally brings a lot of undesirable attention. People often don't know how to handle that success. End up wasting it. End up right back where they started. Often it brings out the worst in the people around them, people they thought they could trust. Often that means it gets taken from them, occasionally it means they don't survive the whole experience.

My point isn't "everything is awful and nothing will ever get done" though. My point is things suck and nothing is going to change quickly. And while you wait for the coming change, you're going to have to deal with a lot of shitty choices. Sometimes there will be no good choice. But a choice still has to be made, and the consequences have to be dealt with. So you deal with them, move on, and hope the next choice is less shitty.

[Iduno]

Does anyone have a good view on where the idea that we shouldn't oppose or try to stop people from doing terrible things, only compromise with them started? It's been getting a real foothold, and is especially damaging in this last decade.

[delphonso]

I guess isolationist policies in the last 20 years. Interested to see a more educated answer, though.

[dragdeler]

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[askovdk]

Does anyone have a good view on where the idea that we shouldn't oppose or try to stop people from doing terrible things, only compromise with them started? It's been getting a real foothold, and is especially damaging in this last decade.

In short with the idea of constitutions and civil rights. 
In a barbaric society everyone can do, oppose, and stop what ever they currently have the power to do, oppose, and stop.
But (starting with the Greeks?) we now have a basic social agreement, that within certain borders we don’t stop the activities of each other, and those borders are put down with the core laws of the land.
So there may be people thinking that eating meat is a terrible thing, but as long as it’s not against the LAW, then they shouldn’t stop other people’s pursuit of happiness in eating a steak.

So yes, while I support many grassroots push for change, then "having many people agreeing with me" doesn’t give anybody the right to stop others.
Unless an outright (by definition illegal) revolution is called to change the LAW, then we all have to compromise and just influence each other.
In theory democracy should make it easier to change the LAW to match the current will of the people, but as this thread suggests, then it feels like an uphill battle.

[scriver]

 

Does anyone have a good view on where the idea that we shouldn't oppose or try to stop people from doing terrible things, only compromise with them started? It's been getting a real foothold, and is especially damaging in this last decade.

You live in this thing called a democracy where two groups of differing politic opinion are constantly exchanging authority and governance. If you want your politics to last longer than the next power shift then you have to either reach a compromise that both parties can agree to or start working to subvert the other party's chances of amassing election points.

[Iduno]

Does anyone have a good view on where the idea that we shouldn't oppose or try to stop people from doing terrible things, only compromise with them started? It's been getting a real foothold, and is especially damaging in this last decade.

You live in this thing called a democracy where two groups of differing politic opinion are constantly exchanging authority and governance. If you want your politics to last longer than the next power shift then you have to either reach a compromise that both parties can agree to or start working to subvert the other party's chances of amassing election points.

Yes, but it is possible to have compromise without entirely giving up on having opinions. "You want to kill 1 million people? How about half a million? No? Let's call it 750k." And then people applaud the bravery of standing for nothing.

[kaijyuu]

Maybe only a little bit of concentration camps is fine

A lot of things can be blamed, from citizens united to people valuing ideology over evidence. It's not likely caused by any singular thing.

[scriver]

Well if you don't want to compromise then you gotta start working to subvert the opponent. I'd recommend convincing them that your side is right, but there are other ways too.

[Egan_BW]

Compromise is finding a position in the overlap between what you and the other party find acceptable. But that's dependent on such an overlap being present. If there isn't, that less of a case of being unwilling to compromise, and more like compromise being impossible.