The best example of this for me is playing drums. It's a very physical thing to do and extremely easy to get caught up in the fun of it. You find yourself playing very hard with a lot of tension everywhere. The problem is that it's very difficult to do this for long periods and if you want to play a series of fast notes accurately, it's counterproductive. So, I'm constantly telling myself to play as soft and loose as possible until one day it hopefully becomes automatic.
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
Unfortunately, my (Republican) senator doesn't seem to agree with me (a Democrat) on even the smaller issues. Yet he theoretically represents every resident of this state in the Senate, including the ones that didn't vote for him.
It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)
I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.
Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
> I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work... Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
I'd argue that time to do free work, and especially the ability to do is legal drafting, is something that the upper classes have a lot more access to than others.
Some school district and property tax measures. That’s why I vote (and just for the general principle of it). Even my state and local reps are gerrymandered into lifelong stability.
They win with 80+% margins. They don’t even bother campaigning themselves and delegate it to their staff. The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges.
I have better things to do with my time than charge at windmills.
Civic engagement when the deck is stacked that bad against you is just pissing your time away. We only have so much time in this earth to accomplish things.
That is an issue, but it's important to signal to those paying attention that the resistance is there and to not give up.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
The military preemptively deployed to multiple US cities isn't a great sign.
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
Well, the President of the Heritage Foundation (the ones behind Project 2025, which is the playbook they're following) has said: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Driving has been reduced to an ordeal to be ensured with as little interaction with the vehicle as possible.
Let's hope that trend continues, ideally to the point that humans need to do nothing besides specify where they want to go. We're too careless to be trusted with the responsibility.
Immortality is not just another technological advancement. It entrenches power permanently and creates a world of slaves who will never escape the grip of their masters. Democracy would permanently die and the rule of law would be whatever the overlords decide. Imagine an immortal Caligula. Do you want Elmo to be your permanent master, for example?
Dude, let's not jump the gun here. If a fear of an entrenched immortal oligarchy is your justification for the idea of forbidding billionaires from funding medical innovations that extend life and health-span, you're being a huge bit too optimistic, to the point of absurdity.
We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.
That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.
What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.
People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.
Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.
Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.
Well, putting any kind of smoke in your lungs is bad.
The difference between vaping and smoking dwarfs the relative rounding error between tobacco vs marijuana in terms of direct health effects.
(There are indirect health effects, of course. Marijuana is more likely to give you the munchies. Tobacco is more likely to help you with weight loss, if anything.)
I'd like to hear how internet advocates address child pornography without deploying a fallacy. The internet makes child pornography possible, without the former, the latter cannot thrive. The defenses I usually hear come in the form of "CD ROMs facilitate bad stuff, too," which is a fact, but doesn't absolve the internet's central role in child porn. As the article states, there is simply no way to attain child porn without the internet. Maybe they could do DVD or CD ROM, but that would be sooooo slow (but not impossible?)
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