No, elites are still moaning that Brexit has scuttled the economy and made a laughingstock of the culture while selling out the future prospects of the young for the nostalgic dreams of older Little Englanders.
If they didn’t want to obey democracy, they’d be doing more than moaning.
Direct democracy doesn’t scale to those levels, especially in a society where a good portion of the electorate is poorly educated and bases their ballot decisions on bad media sources. That’s before you get to bad actors writing misleading or over-simplified plebiscite questions on complex issues, a regular occurrence everywhere they’re tried. And the regrets, oh the regrets!
[I’ll assume that you support Scotland’s and N. Ireland’s rights to separate from the U.K. if post-Brexit referendums come out in their favour. The City or city of London, too, while we’re at it. I’m all for Scotland to give it another go, just to see the hypocritical sputtering of the pro-Brexit camp.]
Not inheriting all debts sounds fine on the surface, but in practise gets a lot more complicated. For example, congratulations, you’ve inherited a house … but it’s mortgaged. You could try to eliminate inheritance of assets along with liabilities, I suppose. Good luck selling that one to people who don’t understand the concept of a balance sheet or the legal function and status of an estate.
The U.S. system takes a more focused approach, with the estate paying off things like consumer and tax and medical debt (some states do transfer part of the last type of debt to the heir if the estate has insufficient funds to cover it – that is wrong but as big not an issue in the UK). In the case of the inherited home, the burden of paying the mortgage debt is transferred to the heir along with the deed.
Reading the original post made my blood run cold, but then I stumbled across this today. Every single point on this list is crucial. The only way out is through. Meanwhile, I’m lighting up the switchboard of my reps every. single. day.
Year 1 Under Authoritarianism - What to Expect:
Exactly. This was the play. The ban is a smokescreen to divert attention away from the fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence are now optional members of the NSC. Bannon is a permanent member. This was the play.
Just presenting the facts without directly accusing the Trump supporters appears to be having some effect.
Pointing out that this ban as it is breaks promises made to Iraqi translators who risked their lives to save our soldiers’ lives is pretty hard to excuse or get around. Also pointing out there are no judges anywhere who think this is good.
Can’t change minds overnight, just have to present the facts and also keep our actions in line with our own principles, that includes helping the helpless even if that might mean offending others.
I’m leaning toward @JamesBean on this one. I’m not saying that the situation isn’t deadly serious, and that Trump & co aren’t willing and able to carry out a coup, but as I read articles like these, I’m reminded of Hanlon’s Law: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
There’s a tendency to interpret each of Trump’s plays in the most diabolical, ingenious light. Was he shrewdly testing Spicer’s loyalty by asking him to lie to the press about the inauguration crowds…or did he just get feelings hurt and decide to lash out? I wouldn’t by any means underestimate Trump and Bannon, but they’re amateurs at this game. They’re not the three-dimensional chess players we’re making them out to be.
What makes them dangerous nonetheless is that 1.) they’re going to learn fast and 2.) our democracy has been left extremely vulnerable (as Lessig points out) by partisanship. They’re less Hitler and more LulzSec, gleefully exploiting the holes that decades of irresponsible governance have left open to them.
Their early mistakes are opportunities for us to strangle them in the cradle.
Is anyone else deeply suspicious of that twitter account? It reads like liberal dread fulfillment and afaik has yet to provide any sort of evidence it it what it says it is.
Not that that exact thought hasn’t occurred to me. Because it has. Only a little darker.
My guess is, it is largely in anticipation of Russian military moves, that we simply will not respond to in the way a “normal” administration might. Although considering Obama basically just let Russia annex Crimea, the bar is already set way too damn low…
Not just deeply suspicious, but totally so. They are sewing the seeds of confusion by mimicking other “real” rogue Twitter accounts. If Twitter had a spine they would ban Trump’s account right away, he violates the terms of service constantly.
Can I ask you why you have such faith in a two-word phrase called “Hanlon’s Law?” I mean, is it a law of physics? Has it been proven by the social sciences? No, it’s just a dumb phrase that makes people feel better about being manipulated. Assume the worst, doing anything other than that essentially means you’re bad at game theory as far as I can tell.
I agree in that incompetence could be responsible for a large part of this.
However, I also think that these larger possibilities are worth considering, just for their potential predictive power. It would be good to be able to stay a step ahead.
That said, this sort of analysis shouldn’t take the place of responsive action and proactive institution-building and buttressing.
It reflects my experience. People are constantly looking for patterns in the noise, asking themselves how seemingly disconnected or random events might form part of diabolical master plan, but genius, by definition, is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time an apparent fuck-up is an actual fuck-up because most human beings mostly fuck-up.
I wholeheartedly believe in preparing for the worst at all times, but overestimating you opponent can be just as deadly as underestimating your opponent. In a fencing match against an unknown competitor, the first thing you do is sound out their skill level and calibrate your responses such that they’re one step deeper than what your adversary can anticipate.
Assuming maximum genius blinds you to your opponent’s vulnerabilities. Alexander had but one army to pit against a succession of vastly superior Persian armies, but he figured out that if he personally attacked Darius, Darius would run away, and his army with him. If we ascribe all of Trump’s mistakes to a deeper genius, we miss the opportunity to strike his weak spots.
Frog #1: Okay, this water definitely feels hotter than it was a week ago. Frog #2: It does. Frog #1: What the hell’s going on? Frog #2: Well, according to the temperature readings it’s hard to say. There is a general upward trend but notice the variance over the last five days. It’s plausible that the apparent overall increase is itself a fluctua– Frog #3: EVERYONE THE FUCK OUT NOW
