102 pts · March 12, 2017
It's a marathon, not a sprint; the system is so broken that there is no possible way to address every source of corruption at once without outright shattering it completely and starting over from scratch. Don't get too caught up on one single step - we still have a several hundred thousand to go after this one.
Also, water is wet.
The proposed ban was rejected primarily because it explicitly would not have applied to a number of very important positions, such as the president and vice-president. If it had passed in that state, it would have realistically been impossible to ever pass another to impose such restrictions on those offices.
As a German-American dual citizen living in the US, believe me when I say that the average American is kept ignorant of foreign political and societal structures to such a degree that, not only would they not believe you if you told them how things work in other places, they would subconsciously dismiss the information as irrelevant even if they did. The rest of the world has been hammered into them from birth as so fundamentally different and alien from the US that it barely seems real to them.
That is certainly essential, but even that barely makes up the first millimeter of the hundred mile journey needed to start fixing things😐
That's the thing - the majority of Americans are kept extremely insulated from knowledge about the rest of the world, not by any direct restrictions like in China or North Korea, but by generations of upbringing and education reinforcing a cultural worldview that essentially excludes anything outside of US borders. They objectively know the rest of the world exists, but, subjectively, it lacks any proper sense of reality, because they lack the tools and perspective necessary to make sense of it.
Governments of most other countries allot qualified candidates a budget for their campaign, and they are restricted from using any other funds. Nice and simple. No lobbyists, no PACs/Super-PACs, no third-party political advertisement campaigns, nand no propaganda sessions masquerading as TV appearances. The US spends more on elections in a year than the rest of the world combined does in a decade.
No lobbying, period. Not for them, and not for anyone else, either. It's with good reason that the rest of the world doesn't differentiate lobbying from attempted bribery, and most other languages don't even have a separate word for the concept.
Lobbying itself should be banned. I realize a significant percentage of people in the US are fairly (intentionally?) insulated from the goings-on of the rest of the world, but we are the ONLY developed nation where this sort of thing is even remotely legal - pretty much everywhere else, including most developing nations, they call it what it is: bribery. Related: more money is spent on elections in the US than the rest of the world, combined, by a massive margin 🤔
Couldn't find a Transformer 'Blood God' meme poster, so I made one - later found out the pic I shopped is the TF 'Lord of the Light' - oops.
I usually think of the Chaos Marines, but before I heard of them, I did too :-)
Indian street food is sooo worth it, though. Better coming back up than most food going down (The cramps and diarrhea I could skip however).
It's a marathon, not a sprint; the system is so broken that there is no possible way to address every source of corruption at once without outright shattering it completely and starting over from scratch. Don't get too caught up on one single step - we still have a several hundred thousand to go after this one.
Also, water is wet.
The proposed ban was rejected primarily because it explicitly would not have applied to a number of very important positions, such as the president and vice-president. If it had passed in that state, it would have realistically been impossible to ever pass another to impose such restrictions on those offices.
As a German-American dual citizen living in the US, believe me when I say that the average American is kept ignorant of foreign political and societal structures to such a degree that, not only would they not believe you if you told them how things work in other places, they would subconsciously dismiss the information as irrelevant even if they did. The rest of the world has been hammered into them from birth as so fundamentally different and alien from the US that it barely seems real to them.
That is certainly essential, but even that barely makes up the first millimeter of the hundred mile journey needed to start fixing things😐
That's the thing - the majority of Americans are kept extremely insulated from knowledge about the rest of the world, not by any direct restrictions like in China or North Korea, but by generations of upbringing and education reinforcing a cultural worldview that essentially excludes anything outside of US borders. They objectively know the rest of the world exists, but, subjectively, it lacks any proper sense of reality, because they lack the tools and perspective necessary to make sense of it.
Governments of most other countries allot qualified candidates a budget for their campaign, and they are restricted from using any other funds. Nice and simple. No lobbyists, no PACs/Super-PACs, no third-party political advertisement campaigns, nand no propaganda sessions masquerading as TV appearances. The US spends more on elections in a year than the rest of the world combined does in a decade.
No lobbying, period. Not for them, and not for anyone else, either. It's with good reason that the rest of the world doesn't differentiate lobbying from attempted bribery, and most other languages don't even have a separate word for the concept.
Lobbying itself should be banned. I realize a significant percentage of people in the US are fairly (intentionally?) insulated from the goings-on of the rest of the world, but we are the ONLY developed nation where this sort of thing is even remotely legal - pretty much everywhere else, including most developing nations, they call it what it is: bribery. Related: more money is spent on elections in the US than the rest of the world, combined, by a massive margin 🤔
Couldn't find a Transformer 'Blood God' meme poster, so I made one - later found out the pic I shopped is the TF 'Lord of the Light' - oops.
I usually think of the Chaos Marines, but before I heard of them, I did too :-)
Indian street food is sooo worth it, though. Better coming back up than most food going down (The cramps and diarrhea I could skip however).