Are any two governments identical? What is the value in categorizing them? If we can see the problems with our current system, does the fact that we’re a whatevercracy help us solve those problems?
This is a distraction.
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What you said is definitely true, but I could not help but notice what you wrote worked in another sense with just a few edits
The Oligarchists are one of the anti-democratic groups, along with tyranny/autocracy. They blur the distinction in your sense to gain power for themselves, and blur it in my sense so they don’t lose it.
There is also some debate as to whether Anarchism is a form of Democracy, or outside the system because the ancient Greeks could not comprehend the ideas behind it at the time. I’ll leave that debate for another time.
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Nixon’s Southern Strategy was based on white supremacy, but it originated with Goldwater.
Reagan was fond of dog whistles, [welfare queens!] as was Bush the Elder [Willie Horton!].
White supremacy has been an underlayment in the ‘GOP’ for decades. You Know Who merely made it acceptable [if not a prerequisite] in those circles.
Perhaps so, but it was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine that led directly to the likes of El Rushbo becoming the 900 pound jackass of talk radio. that was, and is, rampant on AM radio which is licensed by the FCC.
I would posit that, without the example of the cash cow that was El Rushbo, the likes of Rupert Murdoch might never have gained a foothold here with FOX ‘News’. It at least might have delayed the present political divisions in this country.
That depends on the pollster, and who is paying for the poll.
I worked part-time for a pollster in a former life, & learned not to trust any poll unless:
I could read all the questions that were asked, and there was information on the sample size & demographics of those polled.
Political candidate polls are especially suspect…
They are gathering, even as we speak, in order to figure out what deprivations to visit upon their enemies. Cornyn was roundly booed when he appeared, so any hope of anything resembling sanity resulting from the proceedings can be dispensed with.
I think it kinda depends where you are located in the U.S., as to what modifiers apply.
Here in Texas, autocratic, theocratic, kleptocratic oligarchy would seem to apply. Might be others, & might not be in that particular order, but those would do for starters.
_
As far as the topic is concerned, what most people think of ‘democracy’ in this country is in deep trouble; we are all familiar with the usual suspects tilting the scales in their favor: gerrymandering, voter supression, etc.
If the FDC has its way, we can kiss democracy goodbye for a long time.
For some people, the Civil War never ended… the shooting stopped, but that was all.
Now, those people seem to be coming out of the woodwork, aching for hostilities to resume.
We need to remember that they are outnumbered, but we need to act as if we are.
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“About the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.”
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If worse comes to worst, we may do well to remember the words of someone who had Been There:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: “What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?”
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…
We didn’t love freedom enough.
And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation….We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
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^^^
And that’s why we are armed at our house. Not to form our own militia, not to be the “good guys with guns”, but only for the future possibility of the Klan/GravySeals/OathKeepers/MAGA ppl rolling up on us in the middle of the night.
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This is why I don’t understand why BoingBoing keeps making posts about poll results. Everyone here knows all the reasons why they suck and it’s been discussed many times, yet they keep posting them and then we mostly talk about it as though it were real.
I feel like all the civil war talk is largely like the phenomenon by which people will drive towards something they are trying to avoid because we tend to go towards where we’re looking.
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Well, right wing politics is literally about restricting the possibility space…
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Same here.
After all, they have repeatedly proven they don’t have peaceful intentions.
It would be good if a link to the poll being cited is provided, but from what I’ve seen many other sites neglect to do so as well.
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I don’t entirely disagree- the percentage of non-voters alone certainly confirms that a lot of people aren’t involved on even the most basic level. But active, attentive involvement in government requires some level of security. Going to meetings, volunteering, canvassing and researching issues requires time that most people simply don’t have as they struggle to get by on starvation wages, and the worst off may not even be able to vote if their state doesn’t have mail-in ballots. Never mind actually running for an elected office…
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Weird how the people that have the most to gain by voting for progressive policies have the most difficulty voting, isn’t it? Oh well, moving on /s
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Well, polls that seem to give results that confirm things that people here generally believe are posted. It’s a thing every community with a political bent does, I’m afraid. I’m not trying to “both sides” anything here, but every pop culture site I frequent does this. For example, pop science sites post every shitty small-N selection-biased psychology poll about “here’s why humans do X!!” It’s tiresome but at least on BB there is always someone pointing out that polls are all bullshit.
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Can I see the study that you did to back up this assertion? I am not going to simply accept your anecdote as data.
Frequently that person is a jerk (I am basing this on a study with a population of one, pulled from this post)
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Yes, but there is a big conceptual difference between regulated and licensed. Regulations tell you what you can’t do, but licenses tell you what you are permitted to do.* The FCC permits broadcast stations to operate under the condition that the operate “in the public interest.” That is a rather nebulous standard, but it gives the FCC much broader authority over broadcast stations than it has over cable channels. In practice, they don’t actually DO that much with that authority, but the threat of revoking a stations license is essentially a death penalty threat to the individual stations.
- of course it is more nuanced than this, but a station without a license is just a bunch of electronic equipment.
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There is a big conceptual difference between “regulated” and “not regulated”
People act like neither Congress nor the FCC has the authority to deal with an openly corrupt conspiracy to drown out legitimate discourse just enough that the next Nixon can get away with the next Watergate and the next Trump can get away with the next coup attempt
The Constitution, as they say, is not a suicide pact
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and states were for along time only admitted as pairs to protect against the ending of slavery 
it’s always weird for me remembering the mid west belt of red states didn’t exist until later: nebraska, the dakotas, montana, idaho, wyoming, utah, etc
but still the boundaries were all political in nature. and largely about giving white settlers more political power. ( and anyone who pretends that south dakota was an intentional decision by the founders is off their rocker )
even today the main thing holding the senate back is racism. otherwise, puerto rico and dc would be states
that’s not the constitution. that’s just a made up rule of the senate.
Originally, the possibility to filibuster was accidentally introduced as a side effect of an 1806 rule change which eliminated the ability to end debate in the Senate by a simple majority vote. Thus, the minority could extend debate on a bill indefinitely by holding the floor of the Senate, preventing the bill from coming to a vote. However, the filibuster was used relatively rarely until the civil rights era
it’s especially bad since the 70s because they don’t even have to actually hold the floor. any senator can anonymously hold up a vote for any reason
that’s nothing any rational governing body should allow
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It is very important to constantly drive home that the filibuster is NOT a sacred tradition - it’s a clerical error that should have been fixed when it was discovered, but turned out to be useful to the southern states in their attempts to retain as much racism as they could
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A Serbian friend said exactly this, but in the past tense.
He also guessed it was a minority - less than 10% - who genuinely wanted a civil war. But they were very, very determined.
But the majority wanting peace was also helpful, a bit, in the mess that exploded in Yugoslavia. He was out of the country when the war started. His wife is Bosnian. She was home with the kids. She grabbed them and ran in the middle of the night, and was given shelter and hidden by a Serbian family. He said this often surprises people who weren’t there, but everyone who lived through it just nods. They all know someone with a story like that.
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