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rebeccmeisterFor those who pay slightly more attention to politics/law than I do, what your thoughts are in response to the ideas laid out in this episode of Last Week Tonight, the show with John Oliver:
https://youtu.be/pkpfFuiZkcs
(also, where did Oliver come from? I remain TV-illiterate and have only noticed that he seems to have showed up sometime in the last couple of years)
https://youtu.be/pkpfFuiZkcs
(also, where did Oliver come from? I remain TV-illiterate and have only noticed that he seems to have showed up sometime in the last couple of years)
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Date: 2020-09-29 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-29 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-29 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-12 03:26 pm (UTC)https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=171
And crazy awesome other people too.
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Date: 2020-09-29 08:26 pm (UTC)Now, let's forget the fox urine and "fight mule piss with mule piss."
John Oliver for President!
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Date: 2020-09-29 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-29 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-30 01:11 am (UTC)margincomment is too narrow to contain. :)but seriously, a sensible answer is rather long. yes on some, no on others, he's missing the point on the ones that are left.
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Date: 2020-09-30 09:39 am (UTC)Are there other specific information sources that you've found useful for developing your own reasoning around some of the topics discussed?
Right now a good friend of mine is doing a great job of talking about how much nonsense to expect on some of the other social media-type websites I frequent, due to the runup to the election. It's one thing to be aware of the nonsense, but it's a different thing to have well-developed strategies to actually be informed. I'll admit to relying heavily on the NYTimes, in spite of a lot of things they write that make me raise my eyebrows, and I'm always curious to hear about other endorsements.
Oh, and the local paper here, which is at least better than the local paper where I lived in Texas (although sometimes not better by much!).
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Date: 2020-09-30 01:40 pm (UTC)Are there other specific information sources that you've found useful for developing your own reasoning around some of the topics discussed?
Seriously? There's a lot of them. Start with James Madison's notes on the debates from the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution is far from perfect, but the guys who hashed it out and wrote it down had perfectly understandable reasons for what they did, and many of them still apply. Without an understanding of why the US government is set up the way it is, it's hard to make sense of where to go from here.
I'd also recommend reading up on the history of American politics since about 1960.
OK, I know you don't have time for that, so I guess you'll have to wait for my ravings. ;)
As for current news sources, I read or at least skim all three wire services (AP, UPI, and Reuters), a couple of TV network sites, and the sites for four major US dailies (NYT, WaPo, ChiTrib, and the LAT), one weekly (The Economist), and a major political blog (Politico). That's a lot of coverage and opinion.
I don't pretend to read every word of all of it, and often I read little more than headlines and lead grafs. But it does mean I see a lot of different things, so individual sources' biases tend to ... well, not cancel out, but become obvious.
Expect lots of nonsense about the upcoming election. :(
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Date: 2020-10-12 04:02 pm (UTC)Dems circled the wagons around Amy McGarth to block a popular progressive and outspent him by about 100 to 1, in the Dem challenge against McConnell. Amy McGarth is down an absolutely astonishing number of points in that race now. I don't know how much of that is because her own base abandoned her when she started campaigning for Trump (remember, she's the Dem nominee) or the stuff people hated her for before the election but it's a reminder that losing high profile races against hated villians doesn't come cheap.
I appreciate Colbert ragging on some of these people, but if that leaves you with a sense that there's more to the story... you're so right.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/politics/clarence-thomas-abortion-dissent/index.html ... another thing that could be mentioned is while some of these issues are hanging by a thread, Dem appointments are voting Republican. Thomas is against Roe v Wade abortion rights protections. Instead of a contrast between Dem/Repub, it kind of looks more like a line between old judges and newer judges. Both parties have moved right in contrast to who used to be appointed.
All of this garbage is filled with foils. Repubs used Dems as a foil. Dems use Repubs as a foil. But the foils can't account for how much either are often trash completely on their own.
On the talk about voter mandate, representational democracy is an enormous compromise over direct democracy even when it works, and at least one study is finding no correlation at all between voter's positions on issues and how our representatives vote, and essentially complete correlation between their voters and lobby groups, so representative democracy isn't work. That's a representative democracy that's now mired in unlimited corporate money, which is a supreme court decision we were making a huge deal out of for a reason. Add in gerrymandering and voter suppression and an extremely upsetting record from the politically aligned, private companies that control voting machines, and I think there are enough layers of bias stacked on top of each other that "voter mandate" is not a thing that any longer exists.
Got ahead of him there... he is talking on the "will of the people" thing, but so far nerfed. But Puerto Rico and racial representative is good stuff.
Really appreciate the bit about "no, Americans do not want Dems who enable Republicans, that's dumb".
Discussion on statehood is good.
Obviously the electoral college discussion is good.
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Date: 2020-10-12 05:29 pm (UTC)