courts / SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time.
The don't forget about congress. 216 GOP congressional reps voted to handicap congress's ability to halt tariffs. For much of the current session of congress, their calendar wasn't counting days.
This is a tactic I'm seeing more in politics. When it's in the interests of a group for something to pass, but they don't want the blame, they can abstain or defer. It still goes through and if it goes wrong they can argue it's not their fault. Win/win for them.
It is sad how little U.S. voters seem to care about anyone but themselves. Near everything the Finns are dong could be done in here, but too many voices would complain about the cost, the paternalism, or how they might be slightly inconvenienced.
Those seem like harder challenges then the changes themselves.
When I was 12, I watched a redneck in a pickup truck try to race the light rail downtown and cut across the road in front of it, only to get T-boned by the railcar against a nearby station. It was the middle of the day and the guy was definitely sober.
People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently, and as a result I think are unfortunately immune to a lot of the subtle forces that generally help to improve safety in other civilized societies.
People? You mentioned one person (who won a Darwin Award--hopefully he hadn't already bred).
P.S.
As for the absurd response, the assertion was
> People in the U.S. are simply constructed differently
and a handwaving reference to an intercity train system from someone who can't even be bothered to make any sort of argument does not establish the point.
I don't doubt that US voters won't want to limit speeds to 18mph and fill our roads with speed cameras to enforce it.
I'm guessing that if average commute time in Helsinki was anywhere near what it is in the US they'd probably want to get to their destinations a little faster.
We could probably get away with it if we also redesigned every city and suburb and invested massive amounts of money into public transportation to get something comparable and after all of that I'm sure that many people would probably be happy with what we ended up with, but the disruption of every person's lives in the process would be extremely painful.
We're better off focusing on making sure that new developments are better designed than bulldozing over people's homes and businesses in order to redesign everything we already have.
I find it amusing that people will quote the "Greed is Good" speech by Gordon Gecko, and they will do it unironically, I guess forgetting that he's the villain in that movie. You're not supposed to agree with him.
Every death under socialism is attributed to socialism. Every death under capitalism is attributed to individual failing or inevitability. Please follow the rules.
You mean the National Socialist party? Heh, no I don't think that Nazis were Socialists, but NSDAP certainly used socialist rhetoric to broaden the appeal of their party. In fact in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes the argument that Marxists merely hijacked Socialism and corrupted it.
In any case, I don't want to entertain horseshit. It turns out that if a significant part of your political ideology is about elevating one group of people at the expense of another, mass starvation and mass murder is an inevitable consequence.
The whole point about spotlighting catastrophically bad ideas is that hopefully nobody gets the stupid idea to try that shit again. Except here we are.
I'd argue that the way that socialist Russia turned out was very specifically because of very greedy people, so not negating my point. Stalin basically appointed himself kings while using anti-king rhetoric to take down the Romanovs.
I think a lot of the awfulness that has come out of the implementations of socialism has come from greed.
North Korea’s awfulness came because Kim Il Sung decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution. Cuba’s awfulness came because Castro decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution.
I could keep going, but my point is, and call their surrounding system whatever you want, these things are still a consequence of immense greed.
ETA:
You keep trying to turn what I said into some anti-socialist thing, which seems to imply that you think I am a socialist. I am not.
I think that a lot of the biggest issues with socialism come from greed. Greed is not good. Greed is bad. It’s bad when it’s in a capitalist context, it’s bad when it’s in a socialist context. It’s bad in every context. You can keep going on about how horrible you think socialism is if you want but that’s orthogonal to what I was saying.
I don't think greed really has much of anything to do with the Great Leap Forward and the mass famine that was a direct result of some of those policies.
I don't see how greed plays into telling farmers they need to stop farming and melt down all of their tools to make shitty pig iron that isn't worth a damn and then starve to death because they didn't grow any food. Or to stop long-established working farming practices in favor of the unproven ideas of some dumbass who thought they were smarter than simple farmers and had never done it.
We've banned this account. HN is not the place for this kind of rhetoric, and looking down your comment history, there is a recurring pattern of this kind of comments that we can't allow to continue.
The same should apply to all the laws ICE 'agents' are breaking in their "enforcement".
What, do you think they should not be punished, or should be immune from following the law? The laws passed by the representatives and president of the democracy you're so keen on?
If you think they are following the law, you sound crazy, because you are.
There's such a long list of things one could say that about.
In this instance the "representation matters" thought process seems to bear out.
Folks talk about aspiring to role models who look like them. People also react strongly when this sort of thing happens to someone who looks like them.
The problem is that you can slice representation every which way. It could be "I only identify with 6'3" males who live in Idaho and like trains", or it could be "I identify with humans".
The fact that US culture chooses to identify with people of the same colour is telling, though I don't know, maybe that's a human thing and my country is too homogeneous for me to think otherwise.
I debated asking, but I talk to him only a few times a year and we both work really hard to avoid politics. I realize it is my responsibility if I want to see change, but I just lack the skills.
I’ve read lots of books on psychotherapy, and the verdict is a hard disagree on that. The idea of positive relationships to parents is a toxic one, and leads to more transgenerational suffering. It’s good to process the past sufficiently to hold no grudge, but it’s still necessary for mental hygiene to set and enforce boundaries. The most important element of this is grief. Like other posters replied, it is not necessary nor healthy to suppress and wait with anger and grief processing till after their death, and plenty of opportunity to work through unfinished business with them ever after their passing (eg with representatives in constellations work).
Unless a Parent/Child was physically or mentally abused (by clinical standards) then I confident that stopping interacting with them over politics alone is foolish.
Maybe, but also maybe politics can be a reflection of a person’s actions in a broader sense, for which it is perfectly reasonable to disengage from them when those actions have a negative impact.
Yeah, I don’t see why one should wait until after the abuse occurs (“by clinical standards”, above commenter says) to begin defending oneself. As you say, politics isn’t divorced from the rest of their psyche.
It’s predictable that a person who e.g. yells slurs and threatens violence against (whoever they perceive as) gay people on TV is going to progress to actual violence against the gay people in their life, more often than not.
This parental situation is sadly repeated endlessly in the US. My dad is a wealthy retired tech executive whose mind was seemingly taken over by Fox News. He's kind of now in an anti democratic cult and he gets angry if he is even exposed to other news sources.
I will feel sad when he passes and I already feel the loss of being able to talk to him about anything. My brother says the same thing. He doesn't even talk to his grandkids much. I think this is sadly common.
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