Politicians and Government Cringe Thread

[Cherico]

Your first argument is "it isn't so because it isn't so", which is recursive, and as such invalid; I trust I needn't explain that to you. Your second argument assumes that because you're "old enough", duty wouldn't apply to you. In my view (as with Heinlein), we'd find something for you to do. You're free to refuse, but then.. you don't get a say, ever again. Only those who commit get to decide.

This proposal is predicated on responsibility, which is a brden, so it is anathema to the free-loaders of the world. But that is precisely why it is good, and why it should be implemented.




You keep coming back to this, and yet I want it for my country, and all my ancestors lived here many centuries before your country was even founded. Clearly I'm not some jealous immigrant, who wants this out of envy. So much for that interpretation of the motivating impulse...




You keep saying this, but repetition doesn't make it so. I don't want free-loaders having a say in my country's governance; only contributing citizens. How is that "peasant"-like? It is meritocratic. Decision-making power is 'bought', as it were, by investment into the community. "Skin in the game", you might say. Status is earned: neither a 'freebie' nor a hereditary privilege, but a fair reward for one's commitment to one's country.

(Neither is this feudalism, but I wouldn't expect you to be familiar with the finer points of that system.)




You have said dumb things about America so often that I'm confident that you know fuck-all about its true nature. (I am reminded of the adage that a mouse born in a stable is not, by virtue of his birth-place, an authority on thoroughbreds.) America is, hilariously, the most mercantile nation of Earth by all significant metrics. Only its princely nature, so to speak, is diminished by its misguided dedication to egalitarianism (which has bred most of its present ailments, in fact; including such madness as the 'woke' disease).

I am confident that your country will get over this temporary insanity, though. It only takes a bit of time. We'll all get over this together. You and I may even live to see it, although I do fear that's overly optimistic.




A legalist argument. Again, a repetition of "it isn't so because it isn't so".

Things are only thus until they are changed.

You know what if the government is willing to work with me fine a year or so of public service is fair hell might pick up some skills along the way.

 

[Blasterbot]

'Vote-buying' has always happened with democracies, and always will; even the GOP does it with their promises of tax cuts and reshoring jobs.

Or do actions that put money in people's wallets only become bad if they come from the Dems?

People voting for programs and policies that put them in better economic positions, aka 'vote buying' as you want to call it, is part of the over all democratic process in most democracies as it is, and is a feature, not a bug.

If in your mind saying "we shouldn't incentivize companies to ship jobs overseas" and "the government should take less of our money" is the exact same thing as "vote for me I will get rid of your college debt" you got a very skewed view of things.

 

[Zachowon]

I think service guarantees citizenship

 

[Skitzyfrenic]

'1 man, 1 vote' is rather explicitly not how it works in the USA anyways.

A vote out in the rural areas can be worth something 6 urban votes depending on the exact vote in question.

On purpose. Because an equally weighted vote favors population dense areas and the Tyranny of Democracy and Mob Rule. It leads to exploitation of the non-urbanites and de facto city states with even impoverished urbanites being seen as a superior social class. Since the urbanites, as a group, have political power and the non-urbanites don't.

The framers were pretty smart dudes. There are a whole bunch of reasons the USA was/nominally still is a Constitutional Republic in the vein of an indirect democracy instead of a straight democracy.

 

[Doomsought]

There is also nothing preventing a state from selecting representatives by lottery, picking people at random similar to jury duty. It would be a great way reduce the influence of the political parties.

 

[Zachowon]

To be a citizen you need to have served.
To be a congress critter you need to serve

 

[Cherico]

To be a citizen you need to have served.
To be a congress critter you need to serve

Congress critters do serve, mostly themselves but they serve.

 

[Morphic Tide]

"the government should take less of our money" is the exact same thing as "vote for me I will get rid of your college debt"

The sentiment is understood, the bizarre reality is that the second is part of the first because in the end the student's debt is actually held by the feds, and consequently such debt can be dismissed by the feds at will. It's a big part of why you can't declare bankruptcy on them.

 

[Scottty]

Something that might be relevant here - the original is paywalled, but someone copied out enough of it to be worth quoting:

I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we're the bad guys.
This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
The ideal that we're all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book "The Meritocracy Trap": "Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win."
The meritocracy isn't only a system of exclusion; it's an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word "smart" in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn't go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.
Over the last decades, we've taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out….
It's easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they've rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it's not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it's the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.
If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don't cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That's the polling story of the last six months…
But there's a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, "History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership." That is the destiny our class is now flirting with.
On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy, David Brooks, 3 August 2023

 

[Zachowon]

Congress critters do serve, mostly themselves but they serve.

Touche.
But I mean in the military

 

[Bacle]

To be a citizen you need to have served.
To be a congress critter you need to serve

Never going to fly with the US public, for reasons of both Constitutionality and common sense.

All this is, is sour grapes by DoD/gov employees who want to force others to to work for the government, instead of deride gov employees from the outside.

 

[Zachowon]

Never going to fly with the US public, for reasons of both Constitutionality and common sense.

All this is, is sour grapes by DoD/gov employees who want to force others to to work for the government, instead of deride gov employees from the outside.

So you think the people who can declare us to war, can get millions killer should not have to have put thier lives in the same boat?
I see you would gladly send me a d my brother's and sisters to die without knowing what we are dully capable of.
I am.not serius in that YOU specifically but your outlook

 

[Agent23]

I think service guarantees citizenship

Yeah, you should read the book, carefully.

Service in the Federation military was far from the only way to get citizenship, but all other avenues were just as dangerous and nasty.

To sum up SST's philosophy on the subject, "You only get to vote if you have skin in the game".

With which I agree with, but to which I am inclined to respond.
"Ah, I have no skin in the game, is that it? Well, I guess you don't need my taxes or me trying to run a business here..."

I am not against a hybrid between the Heinlein system and what I propose, aka the original system of democracy, aka only the property owners/tax payers/independent yeomenry and above gets to vote, no troglodytes or lotus eaters allowed.

 

[Zachowon]

Yeah, you should read the book, carefully.

Service in the Federation military was far from the only way to get citizenship, but all other avenues were just as dangerous and nasty.

To sum up SST's philosophy on the subject, "You only get to vote if you have skin in the game".

With which I agree with, but to which I am inclined to respond.
"Ah, I have no skin in the game, is that it? Well, I guess you don't need my taxes or me trying to run a business here..."

I am not against a hybrid between the Heinlein system and what I propose, aka the original system of democracy, aka only the property owners/tax payers/independent yeomenry and above gets to vote, no troglodytes or lotus eaters allowed.

If you live within the borders of the country. You pay taxes.
If you serve in the military you can vote and hold position of power

 

[Agent23]

If you live within the borders of the country. You pay taxes.
If you serve in the military you can vote and hold position of power

From the dialogue between Rico and his father in the book that wasn't exactly the case, or are you talking about your interpretation?

 

[Husky_Khan]

If you live within the borders of the country. You pay taxes.

Pfffbbbbtt! I'll just move to the Quarantine Zone where there's plenty of land. What now Fascist?

 

[Zachowon]

From the dialogue between Rico and his father in the book that wasn't exactly the case, or are you talking about your interpretation?

My interpretation, my bad.

Pfffbbbbtt! I'll just move to the Quarantine Zone where there's plenty of land. What now Fascist?

Is it in the borders of my nation?

 

[LordsFire]

Or do actions that put money in people's wallets only become bad if they come from the Dems?

Do you really not understand the fundamental difference between 'taking less of your money away' by cutting taxes, and 'giving you other people's money' by giving money taken from others through taxes, to someone else?

 

[Skallagrim]

From the dialogue between Rico and his father in the book that wasn't exactly the case, or are you talking about your interpretation?

Regardless of what was meant in that post: that is very much how it is in the book. Heinlein explicitly mentions that people who live there have every right that a citizen has, except the right to vote or to hold office. Citizenship is reserved to those who have served, and the franchise is exclusively reserved for citizens.

For the rights and advantages that come from simple residency (e.g. freedom of expression, right to a fair trial, use of whatever public amenities...), you pay with your taxes. For the right to vote, you pay with the service. And nobody is pressed into service. You can just refuse, lead your life, not be hindered in anyway. You just won't get the franchise, because you didn't do what it takes to earn it.

(That last bit is why all leftists hate the idea. It involves having to earn something.)

 

[Typhonis]

And because you earn it, you cherish it more.