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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I've got nothing either.
Although I'll say that I am strongly in favor of voting days being mandatory holidays and other measures that increase ballot access. That's a good thing regardless of any other considerations.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 22nd 2023 at 3:13:02 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"There's countries that I think could manage it, but the negative freedom thing in the US would get in the way.
This is a country where you legitimately get people who would prefer being bankrupted by medical bills over paying slightly more in taxes for government healthcare because they genuinely loathe the idea of putting any money at all towards helping anyone else.
Fuck you got mine writ large.
But yeah, making Voting Day an official holiday and removing the pre-registration requirement and making free photo I Ds a matter of course and easy to get would be pretty reasonable steps.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 22nd 2023 at 3:14:38 PM
Well, let me say that it's not as bleak as "all Americans are assholes". That's a gross oversimplification. Rather, the US was founded by groups of people with radically opposing views on freedom and civic duty, and those groups have been at war with each other ever since, with varying degrees of détente along the way.
Large-scale cultural shifts always seem to be attached to media propaganda blitzes: rule of law, for example, was instilled by waves of Hollywood films under the Hays Code. Civic participation was an explicit objective of public schooling. Anti-war sentiment was largely a product of the (at the time) novel TV coverage of Vietnam. Popular books like Silent Spring spawned the environmental movement.
So all we need is a cultural propaganda blitz to shift everyone's opinions. Put me in charge; I'll be sure not to abuse that power.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 22nd 2023 at 3:22:28 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
With all due respect, you'd be an incredibly awful pick for that job. You're not good at recognizing how stuff comes off to groups you're not really familiar with.
Media blitzes actually do work. It's a lot of the reason queer acceptance has come such a long way since even the 90s. But most of them seem to have been at least semi-organic. Top down attempts don't usually work with the big exception of cigarette smoking becoming incredibly unpopular in the big picture.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 22nd 2023 at 3:24:36 PM
I was being sarcastic, Zendervai. I don't trust anyone with that kind of power.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Ironically, we would need a majority of people to vote in favor of making voting mandatory, at which point is the law really necessary?
Anyway, regarding the attraction of Freedom From vs Freedom To (otherwise knows as Negative and Positive Freedom), both sides have had philosophers arguing in support of one and against the other. In the US (but not only the US) there is a kind of folk libertarianism (not to be confused with the kind favored by billionaire tech-bros), in which people reject centralized coordinated efforts to solve societal problems because they do not trust the authorities. People reject government coordinated social programs, scientific evidence by experts, and the opinions of the college educated, because they believe that they have been taken advantage of in the past. I suspect that there is a cognitive effect going on as well. Some people find the world to be a very confusing and intimidating place, and their response is to try to both ignore it, and impose a simplifying belief system on it. That's where you get the conspiracy thinking.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Meanwhile, most conspiracy theories make things more complicated. Because "people are weird and sometimes selfish and corporations do shitty things and sometimes weird shit just happens" is a lot simpler than "the US and the Soviet Union and every major organization with a telescope is in on faking the moon landing and somehow a conspiracy involving millions of people has never been blown wide open because...I didn't think that far"
I guess that depends on your definition of complicated, from whose point of view. It's simpler to believe (ie, requires less cognitive effort) in malevolent intention than random chance (which a lot of people have trouble envisioning). It's a fact of our brain that we evolved as pattern recognizers who make a lot of false positives (and not, in contrast, as pattern theorizers whose first impulsive reaction to something bad happening is an attempt to gather all relevant facts and conduct a reasoned analysis of them).
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.@Medinoc Funny you should mention, someone actually did do that.
I would indeed say that there's a problem with Americans lacking a sense of civic obligation. Specifically, the idea of viewing America as a whole as "your team" that you need to promote, especially over rival teams like Russia, is kind of lost on people these days.
Leviticus 19:34Soooo, today marks the 60th Anniversary of JFK's assassination.
Biden make a statement about it
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianI went to a high school named after Kennedy. I've read his book Profiles in Courage, which was probably fair for its day, but has several chapters I strenuously disagree with. I've read a few books about specific moments of his presidency, the one about his involvement in the Ol' Miss Riot trying to keep its first Black enrollee from getting killed always stood out to me.
My idea of how he sounded is probably more influenced by the film Thirteen Days than actual recordings of his speeches.
I've always been sort of fascinated by the JFK assassination, primarily because of how many mysteries and conspiracy theories it kicked off (although in general I think it's a cut and dry "Lee Harvey Oswald shot him").
Edited by Brandon on Nov 22nd 2023 at 2:48:45 AM
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If the problem has any solution at all, it'd be a long-term one of overturning the culture of the nation as a whole.
How do we go about that?... I've got nothing.
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