I mean I can think of one thing: tell the truth one day and a bald faced lie the next. Repeatedly propping up a regime with one hand and denigrating it with the other causes deep fractures that you can’t get from a simple one sided attack.
If you’re old enough to remember the internet as it was 15-20 years ago it’s fairly obvious. Even in the early days of social media a narrative wouldn’t spread a fraction as quickly or with as much explosive rhetoric. In a week after a major incident we might get 4 or 5 waves of conflicting or compounding narratives.
You can imagine our social discourse as a massive pool of competing ideas going back and forth; a large disruption might cause a sizable wave. You’d expect rebound waves (opposing ideas) from the opposite fringe to naturally counteract and disperse the original and each other, keeping the water choppy but level.
With a larger network (ie: Twitter in 2025 vs Twitter in 2008) you’d expect to see more inertia and more stability, the fact that we don’t is damning. Forcing the mass uniformity of rhetoric that we see these days (massive waves sweeping across hundreds of millions on multiple platforms) is not something that could be orchestrated by anything less than state actors. It takes the planning and coordination of both the initial narratives and responses.
If you poll on actual policy and don’t couch it in ideology or partisan framing, the vast majority of people agree. From basic economic policy to abortion access to housing regulations to climate action, ~70% or more are in agreement. And keep in mind this is with a constant media barrage promoting division.
In a better system we wouldn’t be bound to just D and R. It would be something to more accurately represent the nuances of the voter (probably an evolution of the coalition systems in newer Democracies). You end up those popular policies as the core of governance with the outer fringe policies on the political curve getting less sway. Compromise is a part of any system of governance except maybe despotism.
But the Constitution did set the country up for states to be like their own nations
Yes and when the Constitution was written they were basically 13 semi-sovereign states who were such nascent politicians that they couldn’t imagine a government without a king (just renamed president). The constitution should have been entirely reworked after the Civil War and probably needed more major revisions as the population, topography and demographics of the nation changed.
The state of our federal administration is fucked because the constitution is fundamentally flawed. If it was written for a modern world, the federal government would have the foundation to weather this assault and possibly the teeth to nip the rot in the bud. At the very least it wouldn’t be so rigid that people like you feel the need to cling to a centuries old piece of paper as infallible.
Using a maliciously broken system as self evidence for its abandonment and prohibition is absurd. There’s nothing inherently more oppressive or evil about a federal government than a smaller state government. If you’re not considering a restructure to address the root flaws then you’re just whinging over which boot you’d prefer to kick in your door.
Sounds like a good idea until you have a soup of 50 sovereign states who still don’t agree but are now completely wide open to international power plays and local violence. The people only have “different visions” because the rich are best served by having us divided. Caving to that pressure only makes us more vulnerable to their neo-feudal ambitions.
It’s absolutely possible to have a strong federal government without getting into the shit show we have today. The problem is when federal authority gets distilled into a handful of people and detached from popular representation or recall.
“Getting the feds to back off” has been the laughable fig leaf that the right has used to dismantle the normal operation of our government for 200+ years. Now you’re buying into balkanization when they’ve enacted their coup?
We don’t need more limits on the only structure that can mitigate/navigate climate collapse; the only thread that historically has opposed the oppression of the deep south; the only speedbump that could even moderately oppose the hegemony of the ultra wealthy.
The US constitution was designed to entrench the power of the white landowner class, and that has remained true in spite of the consistent creep of federal authority. It’s just not possible to mount any opposition to the massive weight of their capital in any other way.
So no, don’t restrict the Fed’s authority to do any of that. Just give us the tools to get real, fair representation and hold our representatives accountable. Every other needed reform and restructuring could be done with no problem once we have that.
Weird way to “listen” by suppressing their voices. Zero Covid was the “right call” in a narrow lens of limiting direct disease transmission, but it was completely untenable as a true long term strategy and had no foresight.
The protests weren’t due to solely to the restrictions on personal freedom, it was also the total lack of sane administration and fallback plans. The enforcement, quarantine logistics and vaccine rollout were entirely scattershot. The government had no realistic approach to the problem beyond rigid policing.
When their authority to enforce the policy was stretched to its limits they did an about face and pretended the problem didn’t exist, leaving their vulnerable populations in the lurch with no offramp. The core problem of inept administration was completely unaddressed. I wouldn’t give them credit for “listening to the protesters” any more than I would give Tsar Nicholas credit for listening to his striking workers.
COVID lockdowns when minor protests broke out
“Solve” is an interesting verb for suppression of legitimate mass discontent at being physically locked into their apartments. That “solution” worked so well for those “minor protests” that they decided to do a 180° turn from the Zero Covid policy to no restrictions overnight.
Truly a bastion of free speech, except for any real discontent is labeled capitalist subterfuge so we’ll just disregard that.
I have! Have you been on it in China? Have you contrasted the foreign feed to a citizen’s? Have you seen the coordinated response to genuine spreading political discontent vs mundane petty scandals? Because it kinda sounds like you haven’t if you think that’s a killer response.
Never claimed to be any kind of China expert but it’s absurd to claim “much more open discourse” if you’ve spent any appreciable amount of time in the countries being discussed. You can literally just walk + talk in public and see the difference.
Like all these asserted freedoms it just magically happens better and free’er but you definitely can’t verify it because “media”. The open political discourse I see and hear in major EU/US cities pales in comparison to the uh… hidden… open discourse in T1/T2 Chinese cities? Definitely heard some first/second hand political discourse but it was never, ever, ever a public forum.
By all means, give me evidence to the contrary. Maybe I just keep catching China with a bad case of the Mondays. Have you been? Can you point to any discourse on domestic politics? Where is the asserted diversity of opinion on hotbed issues? Can you show me any strong opposition to the party line on a public stage?
Crazy how you can literally just look this stuff up and find out what’s true instead of discarding arguments.
Independent trade unions are illegal in China. The single, state sanctioned trade union is widely criticized by international trade union orgs for not faithfully representing its workers. By most accounts it exists to funnel labor disputes through a bureaucratic meat grinder of mediation to maintain the status quo. With the exception of a handful of actions for international leverage, all strikes are wildcat.
If you’re actually interested in labor relations in China I’d recommend this article for starters. It’s older but the situation hasn’t improved under recent leadership.
Complete list of banned books in the US
Lmao what? Do you know what “banning” a book means? It’s just not on offer in schools or a library for that specific state. It’s completely normal to just buy it for yourself and there are even organizations dedicated to distributing banned books.
It’s hilarious to try and dunk on America with this of all things. Media restricted/censored in China is entirely unavailable. It’s actually very interesting how the censorship manifests in daily life, but I imagine any .ml reader will discard those anecdotes (or any verifiable reports) and try to redirect back to the West somehow.
I’ll take “things foreigners say when they’ve never been to China” for 500 Alex
Dudes probably just at a private golf outing or a child sex trafficking party or out hunting endangered animals to extinction
There’s a lot of comments about how digital devices are viable/helpful for note-taking and just as good as a pen. I think that’s missing the crucial point: virtually every device we own today is designed as a distraction machine.
A pen + paper isn’t going have any notifications or reminders or updates or emails or texts or ads or alarms or alerts. If there’s any device without those that’s as reliable and as cheap as a notebook, I’ve never heard of it.
But it’s not possible to get unbiased content on the internet. Everything exists with an agenda behind it, for the sole reason that hosting anything is going to constantly cost money.
This wasn’t a huge deal when individuals were paying to host and share content to a small audience, it was a small amount of money and you could see their motives clearly (a forum for a hobby, a passion project, an online store, etc…).
Social media is different because it presents itself as a public forum where anything can be shared and hosted (for free) to as many people as you want. But they’re still footing a very large bill and the wide net of content makes their motives completely opaque. Nobody cares that much about the headaches of maintaining a free and open public forum, and any profit motive is just another way to sell manipulation.
Fuck off with this nationalist essentialism. Germans are products of a lifetime of experiences, just like every other human being on the planet. There’s not some magic portal to the fascist plane seeping dark energy under Berlin.
You have no clue what I’m doing, and I couldn’t be making your argument because you don’t have an argument. You’re just lobbing complaints at a strawman 'Murican with no basis in reality.
I didn’t say 300 because some people did vote for him and are genuinely locked in their isolation bubble. If you think well over 50% of the population doesn’t count as a crippling general strike, I don’t know what to tell you.
And having the gall to compare a few hundred people showing up to protest a golf outing to organizing a seismic political shift in a massive country is absurd. It’s the pinnacle of throwing stones in glass houses while the UK meekly accepts digital privacy surveillance and suppression of political speech on Gaza. Where’s your fucking critique of that???
Apparently just laying out the facts of life in America is making an excuse. Nowhere did I say we should lay down and take it, but you armchair political activists aren’t happy unless you see headlines about car bombs or some shit. God forbid you adjust yourself to the context of reality, just shout loudmouth transatlantic complaints. The lack of self-awareness is incredible, you’ve become your own despised Fox News caricature.
“People aren’t calling you names”, no it’s way worse than that. They’re trying to direct how I should act in my own country about matters that, at best, only tangentially concern them. That’s why you should keep your mouth shut. Worry about how your own damn government is reacting to tariffs and NATO balancing and not how I need to fix my political nightmare for your personal peace of mind.
I’ll take a crack at it: