Is Revolution The Only Viable Solution?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

1 minute ago, Swordfish said:

Yes.  There is literally nothing to see here.

I think we've reached the point where regardless what Trump says, it's going to be spun as catastrophe by many.

To be fair, he's a walking political disaster. Seems to me though his Republican support is getting more tenuous by the day, so I suppose his ability to be truly catastrophic is becoming slightly more limited.

[Swordfish]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

To be fair, he's a walking political disaster. Seems to me though his Republican support is getting more tenuous by the day, so I suppose his ability to be truly catastrophic is becoming slightly more limited.

Sure.  i don't disagree.  I think we talked about this months ago.  The party has no love for him, and sooner or later there will come a tipping point where it's no longer in their best interest to hold the line.  Once they smell blood in the water, Trump is toast.  

It certainly seems to me that we are inching closer and closer to that point.

[Kalbear]

4 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

My apologies. I stopped at his tweets, and I thought that's what he was proposing. In that case, this is something the Senate can clearly choose to do, right? Exercise the supposed nuclear option, as it's called. Whether or not they will be willing to do this in order to get legislation passed for Trump's wall or not is another thing altogether. I'm assuming that's what he's after.

No; he's after being able to fulfill all of his promises without any compromise with Democrats. I strongly suspect this is what he'll be campaigning on in 2018 - either a filibuster-proof majority or the ability to nuke it.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

7 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

No; he's after being able to fulfill all of his promises without any compromise with Democrats. I strongly suspect this is what he'll be campaigning on in 2018 - either a filibuster-proof majority or the ability to nuke it.

Sure, it just seems like THE WALL (TM)  is the one he's most desperate about.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Robin,

You might like this article.  It hits on your problems with "low information voters" and offers a novel solution to the problem:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/11/10/the-problem-with-our-government-is-democracy/?utm_term=.2fdc946124b8

From the article:

Sixty-five years ago, researchers began studying what voters know and how they think. The results are depressing. The median voter knows who the president is, but not much else. Voters don’t know which party controls Congress, who their representatives are, what new laws were passed, what the unemployment rate is or what’s happening to the economy. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, while slightly more than half of voters knew that Al Gore was more liberal than George W. Bush, they did not seem to know what the word “liberal” means. Significantly less than half knew that Gore was more supportive of abortion rights, was more supportive of welfare-state programs, favored a higher degree of aid to blacks or was more supportive of environmental regulation.

High-information voters have systematically different policy preferences from low-information voters, even controlling for whatever impacts our demographic differences have on our ideologies. For instance, as political scientist Martin Gilens found in one study, high-information Democrats are more in favor of free trade, abortion rights, civil liberties, gay rights and less hawkish foreign policy than low-information voters. Political scientist Scott Althaus and economist Bryan Caplan get the same results using different sets of data. But the American voting public as a whole shares the preferences of low-information voters, simply because there are far more of them.

When these voters do bother to seek out information, they turn to news sources and experts who share their bias. They almost never talk to the other side, whom they regard as stupid and evil. When they read material that suggests they’re mistaken, they dig in their heels and conclude they’re still right.

...

Voters are badly informed because they have no incentive to be informed. Perhaps governments could do something to change that. Suppose that two weeks before the election, the government administered some sort of “basic political knowledge test” and gave anyone who passed a $500 tax credit. This would incentivize voters to learn the basic facts, though perhaps the marginal benefit would not be worth the expense.

[DMC]

22 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Robin,

You might like this article.  It hits on your problems with "low information voters" and offers a novel solution to the problem:

This is touching on the age-old debate within political behavior.  After the publishing of The American Voter (1960) and Converse's more thorough demonstration that the public lacks ideological constraint, the memory model reigned supreme for a generation, assuming the reason the public performed poorly on political knowledge survey items was simply because they were ill-informed.  Over the past quarter century, this has been challenged by the online processing model, which posits individuals internalize political information but are only able to articulate aspects that are currently at the top of their head (for whatever reason).  Given the consistent success of economic voting models, both across the world and over time, it may be that the general public is more "rational," or at least better at employing heuristics in their voting behavior, than elites - both political and intellectual alike - care to admit.

[maarsen]

I just finished reading Tides of War by Steven Pressfield. This is a fictionalized account of Athenian general Alcibiades and his role in the Peloponnesian wars. Every time I read anything on the conflicts of that period I am always reminded that human beings are the same across cultures and time. Irrationality in voting, voting against your own self interest,  voting for some one just for change, even though the change will do more harm than good, I see all of this in the histories of the Peloponnesian wars. 

I am ever so grateful that Trump does not have the charisma, or talent of Alcibiades. 

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

43 minutes ago, maarsen said:

I just finished reading Tides of War by Steven Pressfield. This is a fictionalized account of Athenian general Alcibiades and his role in the Peloponnesian wars. Every time I read anything on the conflicts of that period I am always reminded that human beings are the same across cultures and time. Irrationality in voting, voting against your own self interest,  voting for some one just for change, even though the change will do more harm than good, I see all of this in the histories of the Peloponnesian wars. 

I am ever so grateful that Trump does not have the charisma, or talent of Alcibiades. 

The amount of Brexit voters I've talked to who, who voted just because 'they wanted something.. anything different', leaves me flabbergasted at times. I know parts of the Trump vote were similarly motivated. 'It couldn't be worse' is such a silly thing to say, but you hear it.

[maarsen]

People always say that it couldn't get worse. Unfortunately things can get worse. Much worse.