Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Is America doomed to fail, and is it near-term? I want to find a solution to this because the answer should be no, but that's not where we are headed. We must conclude that the people who disagree with us, those who voted opposite to our desires yesterday, are who they are, as a product of their environment. Their rearing, their education, their associations, and if what has been inculcated in them has been biased in the opposite of my/our own values their whole life, and if now they are part of the third and perhaps fourth generation holding the same biases down from their forefathers, never having heard anything but that bias, than we understand the unsolvable conflict ripping this country apart today.
How can we reinform those in our society who are tearing down that society? Eighty years of forced contrition? And how do we overcome the captured institutions and the corrupt politicians and unelected bureaucrats to put resolute legislation into effect? Such does not seem workable. Do we let the society crumble until violent revolution is the only alternative left beside our own contrition?
I simply posit the following: The Founders of this country formed the government of The United States and the Constitution protecting it from the best western traditions of representative government from Greece on down. They did so to guarantee that we are a constitutional republic and that we would remain that way. Therefore, no tinkering with the specificities of language or colloquial interpretations thereof, can allow for a change in that intent. I.e. The U.S. Constitution innately protects its own survival. It guarantees the right to personal property, separation of powers, the freedom of religion, the rule of law. It does not allow the substitution or adoption of any other ideology - communism, socialism, etc., to supplant it.
The Oath Clause (Article VI, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution) states: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; ..."
Attorney Generals in all 50 states whether corrupt or not, must be made to enforce this law. This law removes the likes of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, El Sayed and any others of their ilk from office and should have prevented all DSA candidates from even running. Enforcing this law is the only way we can preserve this country as intended. Enforcing it, may make you mad at me - make you hate my guts - but it does not force you to change your opinions.
The Constitution is dead. Abstract rules cannot, have not, will not constrain human will.
We cannot agree on what the laws even are, and you propose law as a solution?
Blues have spent decades building systems to divert public money to their perception-shaping apparatus. They finance their political operations out of our taxes, we finance ours out of whatever spare change is left in our pockets. We must destroy their structures and build our own. We should have done this long ago, and there certainly is no excuse for failing to do it with whatever power remains to us and with whatever power we are able to acquire in the future. This is the best use political power can be turned to in the foreseeable future; failure to do so is abdication.
Cooperation with Blues is impossible. Anything that requires cooperation with Blues to function is no longer an option, hasn't been for at least a decade; this obviously includes any foreign war. The Blues have no solutions to any of the actual problems, with one notable exception, so other than that notable exception all those problems are going to get worse. This will make people increasingly angry, increasingly policy-starved, increasingly radical. That anger can and will be harnessed, by Reds or Blues. The only viable path forward is to use that power to make things legibly better, better in terms of actual outcomes, legibly in terms of perception of those outcomes. Long term costs don't matter when there is no long term. It is still conceivably possible to secure wins through political processes, and we should secure as many of them as possible through whatever time the final breakdown of the political process affords us.
Past that time, Shai LeBeouf, Shai LeBeouf, Shai LeBeouf.
Would you be kind enough to explain this to those of us who don't want to read horrible web fiction to get the reference?
In the story,if you speak the name Shai LeBeouf aloud, Actual Cannibal Shia LeBeouf appears and kills you and many other people in the immediate vicinity. In that chapter, the antagonist exploits this fact to use the name as a cognitohazard suicide bomb.
I am using the reference as shorthand for actively working to destroy the existing sociopolitical structure in ways that are notably effective and difficult to reverse. Sociopolitical scorched earth tactics, literal scorched earth too where possible. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble; this process is information-based, and it can be manipulated purely by participating in the search in a conscious and intentional manner, thus greatly increasing information flow and search efficiency. This can be done legally, safely, covertly, a switch analogue to Blues' employment of the dial. There's at least an argument that past a certain point it should be done. We are not at that point yet, but we probably moved significantly closer last night.
If not being ruled by people who hate you is a priority, it's probably better to destroy the throne and the crown and the fields, the bridge, the mill, than to allow the other side uncontested control of them. Blues did not actually get more reasonable or moderate last night, just more powerful. Or maybe I'm wrong, and they've learned their lessons, and we're in for an era of moderate, sensible centrism, lol, lmao.
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