Ask me some questions about the political system and see how informed or not informed I am. I'd like to be proven wrong on some stuff. I actually like learning.

EDIT: And I completely agree about how the political system is built. Which is why the system can't tolerate a long term political war where both sides demonize one another. It makes it nearly impossible to get anything done before the toilet finishes flushing.

I've provided lots of workable ideas on this forum. In particular I think I'm a very strong poster on business, negotiation, and healthcare policy.

I also think my criticism of the Democratic Party has been spot on. It's not a fun topic, but it's one that needs a ton of discussion if we want to stop losing all the damn time. Anyone who isn't advocating for a ton of soul searching after losing to the worst Presidential Candidate in history is part of the problem and probably should be purged from any meaningful role in the party.

So answer Zikzak's question to you BS if you really are a strong poster on business and negotiation.

Odd conclusion. The whole point is that I don't assume I'm right about everything, but I don't cop out by acting like seeing through the game is the same thing as winning the game because I'm afraid of being wrong.

There is going to be coalition building in any government. I'd argue that allowing an election to be won with a plurality is the biggest problem in the present system. If by some sort of runoff system we required a majority vote to win, the two party system wouldn't be as entrenched because the "wasted vote" problem goes out the window.

As an european i think i can add something to the topic of american tribalism.

It seems like tribalism emerged somewhat recently. It seems like democrats and republicans are as far as ever, hate each others much more than in the past, and the issue is aggravating every year.

This seems true, and seems to have overall bad consequences for the USA.

BUT. As an european, it seems to me that most americans have always been tribalists. Most american always live by the ingroup-outgroup ideology. Only , in the past the outgroup was composed mostly of a large majority of the rest of the human population.

Americans raped many other countries, waged war on ideologies, and where as far from centrism in international politics as possible for decades. When the external enemies died off, the mental machine of americans was still wired to see the whole of life as a struggle against specific human enemies.

So the fairly obvious next level was to find those enemies at home. Not that they hadn't tried before. American indians, blacks, comunists, chinese immigrants, irish immigrants, catholics... the list of domestic (ie currently residing within the us) enemies has never been short. But the presence of foreign enemies was enough to spend most hatred outside the borders and not inside.

You tried with terrorism to wrap the whole country again against a foreign enemy, surpassing domestic differences. For a little while it worked.

But even 9/11 wasn't close enough to the apocalypse of ww2 in europe or japan to have the american mind learn that living with hatred of the eneny as the motivating principle of life is suboptimal.

So you get a whole population that is wired to see existance as a constant violent struggle in which they are supposed to prevail annihilating the opposition (and it works for the better for them, and they have past proof of that), that has run off of external targets for this wholeconsuming hatred and it's now directing it to their own neighbours.

The situation isn't dissimilar from the old roman republic. A whole society built on conquer runs out of thing to conquer and the well-oliated and extremely efficient cultural supports to violence become the instrument for civil war.

I don't see an happy ending here, or some catartic moment that could spin things around.

This is a good post and I agree with pretty much all of it. It also fits in well with the Paranoid Style. But I don't see Euros faring much better what with Brexit and 60k far right Poles in the streets and all that. We're all going down together imo.

IDK dude Europe calling out the US on our violence is pretty lol. You guys have only been peaceful for the last 72 years because your neighbors have nukes and the last time you had a shooting war like 80 million people died.

You're also the root cause (the french specifically) of us feeling the need to go into Vietnam, and you're not exactly being enlightened about the incoming wave of immigrants. Not that you necessarily should be (reasonable minds can disagree about immigration) but blaming us for not internalizing the lessons your countries had to lose tens of millions of people to learn is a little ridiculous.

Notice something though- I'm not dismissing the legit criticisms you've made about my country, merely pointed out you're a hypocrite. Hypocrites are right sometimes. We really are violent, we really did genocide all over the people who used to own the land I'm sitting on right now, and we really did enslave a bunch of people so we're far from clean historically. I just think saying we're a society built on conquering is a little rich when we probably pay 50% of the country you're sitting in's defense budget. My tax dollars are being spent to protect you (whether this is effective or not is up for massive debate. I would argue that we should stop doing it... But that's me) so being told I'm a bloodthirsty conqueror is pretty obnoxious.

Almost everywhere in the world where health care is reasonably well administered and reasonably equitably distributed and accessible, it is run almost wholly by the government. Not sure if the US is one of those places, and the basic problem is that the government is insufficiently involved in the direct administration of health care.

In some areas the profit motive necessarily leads to suboptimal outcomes.

On this we agree. Where we don't agree is in the details of how our healthcare system is run. In our country there are basically no waiting lists for old people who want expensive surgeries that will add low single digit %'s to their one year survival rate and exactly nothing for their 5 year survival rate (still 0% unless misdiagnosed). In the rest of the world that person goes on a waiting list and dies there.

Which despite sounding terrible is actually a good outcome. Asking a drowning person to make rational decisions is pretty dumb. Asking them to make rational decisions with someone else's money is even dumber.

I dont see UK as "euro". But yes they are not in a good position.

I disagree with poland though. And most of all france italy germany and japan with all their problems are showing the world that there are social constructs very different from the american one compatible with high quality of life with less domestic hatred.

Not to mention denmark, norway, switzerland and singapore, but i accept that those could be "exceptional and unique" in several ways so i won't model the non-american civilization stuff on them.

Of course yes europe and japan would suffer terribly in case of an american domestic full-scale implosion, but i don't see the same pattern 30 years forward from now, and i don't see the same risks socially-wise.

I see what you're doing wrong. You're comparing homogeneous Euro countries with the US. The more social/ethnic groups you have in a country the more bitter people become about public benefits. Nobody complains when a subsidy is going to someone who looks and acts like them, but the second you try to help someone who doesn't they become very irate about their tax dollars being spent in that manner.

For proof see the entire EU's reaction to migration in the last few years. Even countries that did the right thing are having massive amounts of internal strife about it.

Just social psychology at work.

No, the right in this country is even wrong about that, because their argument is not, as yours seems to imply, that government could be doing things better, it’s that the government is inherently incapable of doing anything right and this it should be doing little, if anything. Such a view is obviously wrong if you take one minute to think about what it is we expect the government to do.

Republicans point to government inefficiency as proof positive that their position is right, yet their argument is crippled by their myopic focus on market efficiency as the one true metric for determining how well a service is being provided. We expect our government to promote and uphold the rule of law and provide for a society that protects certain rights. To do this we give the government an incredible amount of authority, such as the ability to put people in prison and to take their property or otherwise restrain their liberties. That authority comes with some important restraints/ guiding principles, such as due process and equal protections. Before the government can take away your liberty or property, we have rightfully imposed processes and tests that the government must meet. This creates much (all?) of the inefficiency that conservatives lament, but it is inherently a good thing!

This is true of the administrative, ie, regulatory, process, too. For instance, we have realized that unchecked development can harm the environment in a way that permanently damages or destroys important ecosystem functions that we all depend on, so we have gradually created all kinds of regulatory restrictions—that the right decries universally as overly burdensome without even acknowledging, much less understanding their greater value—in an attempt to protect these valuable functions. Like, you can’t fill in wetlands whenever you want or put up a factory that releases harmful pollutants into the environment. The permitting process, too, is filled with checks and safeguards to get public input and that force the government to consider certain things, that add time and cost to the process, yes, but ithat serve a very important function that forces the government to look at these big-picture concerns and at least attempts to protect the rights of stakeholders that have valuable interests that should be considered, and, most importantly, slows the government down before it can exercise the immense authority we have granted it.

The Republican Party is currently filled with and led by a bunch of people who do not understand this, or they do not care, or both. It’s basically lorded over by business owners who are angry about the fact that they had to spend $10,000 in costs related to permitting to get a new multimillion dollar car dealership built or that they may have had to spend a couple hundred thousand to mitigate impacts to wetlands so they could build their development in the location of their choosing, or maybe their bottom line has been hurt because they had to provide healthcare to their employees or build handicapped access to their business. Their concerns do not extend beyond their ability maximize their personal wealth.

The Republican Party has learned that it needs to express its anger as a concern that this inefficiency, which is fundamentally necessary and good, is harming our society. That’s where we get trickle down economics and all the related arguments. But their chief concern has always been for the ownership class, to everyone else’s detriment. That’s why we cannot have a good-faith discussion about policy with Republicans who see no inherent value in government and don’t appreciate universal application of the rule of law and concepts like due process and equal protection. So until that changes, **** ‘em.

Oh **** that's the same guy? Incredible. I remember those posts well.

We have been peaceful because ww2 was so destructive that we actually learned something from our awful past mistakes.

There is no hypocrisy there. An example? the italian constitution prohibits war.

It could be argued that something similar domestically happened to you after your civil war (tribalism again).

But maybe you simply unlearned those lessons. That could happen to us in 50-60 years when there will be almost nobody alive who had a direct relative telling them real life stories about eating cats to survive or seeing their friends dying in troves.

Your think america isn't built on conquering? with like 99% of the land conquered from their previous occupiers in only a few centuries? lol.

Btw your tax dollars are currently spent to help the most dangerous man of the world and enemy of western civilization and direct threat to my fellow baltic europeans, mr. putin, so please avoid remining me of that thx.

Regarding vietnam, it's a little off topic, but no, the only reason for you going there was the shockingly wrong "domino theory".

ye swizterland has 4 official languages.

Italy and germany when you founded the USA were divided in a lot of different states.

Should i remind you that depending where from italy people were coming from, you labeled them white or brown? the supposed homogeinity of european populations is a myth (france excluded i guess).

Nobody mentioned "public benefits". You have denmark and switzerland at the opposite spectrum of the welfare mentality and they both go on fine.

The "immigration strife" is an example of extremely succesful propaganda by some incredibily good propagandists, not an example of "massive domestic strife" as you currently have in the usa, where half the people say that if their children would marry some1 from the opposite party they would stop talking to them.

The Yugoslavian area was one of the most bloody places not that long ago. Europe has a rising problem with nationalists idiots almost everywhere on your continent. Your problem itt is your critical of the US, which is perfectly fine, I get it, US has operated poorly. But your continent has similar problems. In fact the entire world has problems with factional fighting.

Factional problems are omnipresent in complex human societies, nevertheless, the american situation is imho so far worse than that of other western civilized societies and that's because of the life-on-hatred mentality i described above.

btw jugoslavia is geographically europe, but i thought we were talking about societies that were among 1st world countries since at least 50 years ago.

I am also not saying america has "operated poorly". It worked pretty well for a while. World hegemony, unprecedented per capita gdp in a big country, etc etc. I am just saying that many of the things that allowed america to be really number 1 for a good chunck of time are now behind america's problems.

republicans != conservatism

republicans are pure evil and their policies are all based primarily on redistributing money from the poor and middle class to the rich. they are backed by a bunch of sociopath billionaires and they themselves are pure con artists.

this makes all negotiation difficult and general false equivocating nauseating.

I don't disagree about the GOP being way way out of line. I see the role of government thusly:

1) The governments first role is to the as close to a total monopoly on violence as possible. It should tolerate no violence not explicitly sanctioned by the legal system. Failure to protect this monopoly has terrible consequences as demonstrated by every country with poor governmental control on planet earth. (Mexico, all of Central America, most of Africa, Italy, and quite a few others)

2) Tragedy of the commons situations. In these situations it does society a lot of good to block people from doing the bad behavior. Everyone benefits from this, and private enterprise doesn't (and shouldn't) have the power to enforce these codes. This is where your environmental regs land btw. We're on the same page here.

3) Monopoly prevention. Any project that is so large that it is inconceivable that anyone would ever build two of them is going to be a huge problem if run for profit and should probably be built by the government and run at cost. Monopolies in general should be ruthlessly put down by government as they have a habit of infiltrating government and corrupting it from within and doing horribly anti competitive stuff that damages the free market. Protection of the free market from monopolies is one of the governments most important roles. All systems have diseases that they are prone to, and capitalism's big weak point is that in real life all business people are striving for a monopoly. This is just the nature of the game. When one group wins too hard the government has to come in and break them up into multiple competing factions instead of one monolithic entity that has price control and the crazy profits (and massive inefficiency) that come with it. With those crazy profits come people who are effectively rent seekers whose business depends on the government not doing it's job. They inevitably corrupt the government to stop that from happening.

4) Doing stuff that is way too risky for business. Basic research falls into this category. So is building roads and infrastructure for stuff that doesn't exist yet. Schools are also something that naturally falls under the governments purview because they have more incentive to build schools and raise the basic education level of the population than anyone else. Education= success in modern life and success in modern life= tax revenue. Investing in education is one of the most obvious things for the government to do. If I got to own 25% of people's income for life I'd pay for their college out of pocket without blinking. Particularly if I had to pay for them if they failed at life. Society needs to think the same way. We should be subsidizing any measure that produces decent results in improving the average economic quality of the citizenry.

Yeah I'm not defending the GOP. They are probably in the process of dying as a political party. The only way they ever earn my vote is if they rise from the ashes in a totally different form. Their current form is pretty much a rotting corpse. Yes they won the last election, but I suspect this is the victory in battle that ends up costing them the whole war.

They are facing a demographic disaster. The Democrats being completely incompetent hasn't changed that. I'm hopeful that this latest bout of incompetence inside the Democratic party will cause them to vomit up and **** out the people involved with it. Seriously anyone who worked on the HRC campaign should probably not put that on their Resume. We need a full blood transfusion at this point. The GOP isn't sick, they are actually intellectually dead. Trump is the maggots feeding on the corpse.

EDIT: I also think that letting the GOP be the voice that criticizes the government is a terrible idea. Since the GOP isn't doing their job (basically they are the quality control for the pie-in-the-sky political proposals liberals come up with) someone else has to do it. The Democrats haven't had anyone credible calling them on their **** in a long time. And there is a substantial amount of BS with liberals these days.

Okay, how is what happened in Poland with the Nationalist march any better or worse than what happens in the US? By my estimation that crowd is thousands of times bigger than any Nazi/Racist rally here since ~100 years ago. Maybe I'm forgetting something.

My point is whatever problems there are here they exist everywhere else to some degree.

conservatives dont have any good ideas anymore. their entire ideology is based on pissing off liberals.

ya bolded is just completely false and there are tons of stats and studies that show it.

the vast majority of people on welfare need it and deserve it and are not taking advantage of the situation as you imply.

heres one program, likely the most maligned.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017...administration

lolol such a freakin snowflake

ya the GOP is a dying party. sure dude. they control all both houses and the presidency. they have 34 governors. they control 32 state legislatures vs 12. they control 26 state govs vs 6.

I mean, I know you think you are the smartest guy here. but just bc you feel something is true, that is not a substitute for the actual facts and numbers.