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Trump's claim Nato troops avoided Afghanistan front line sparks outrage in UK (www.bbc.co.uk)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/uk_politics@feddit.uk
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[–] 5 points 9 months ago (11 children)

If you come down of your high horse for a moment you'll realise the person you replied to is talking about how if a single person can take America from a broadly functioning society to having jack booted thugs murdering people on the streets and deploying the army to quell dissent and alienating the entirety of their network of alliances and trade partners in the space of two weeks something in the vaunted "checks and balances" has gone wrong.

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  • [–] -2 points 9 months ago (10 children)

    As if we all aren’t painfully aware of what that thing is and how it has almost nothing to do with the “system” being shit upon.

    No governmental system, real or imagined, is going to work that well when led by a demented, sociopathic, pathological lying rapist felon, backed by a thoroughly brainwashed cult and the entirety of the largest fucking industries on the planet.

    So, sure The Constitution was deliberately written in such a way as to allow that, as one of our commenters would have it. Bullshit. It’s not “the system”, as in the Constitution. It’s a lot of things, but it’s not that.

    This is a nation under unceasing attack by known psychological warfare methods for a decade at least, and rupert murdoch for thirty years. You’re pissing on the wrong thing. Wrongly.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    Refusing to acknowledge any potential structural problems at the heart of American democracy and blaming everything on outside forces is naive beyond belief.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Name the structural problem.

    I'll wait.

    Are you talking about aging infrastructure? Perhaps infant health? An unhealthy gun culture? No? Then name the fucking structural problem you think you know about.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (5 children)

    Jesus christ. Just off the top of my head: 2 party duopoly, corporate & lobbying influence, the electoral college, corporate personhood, lack of term limits for everyone except the president, gerrymandering, the supreme court (and the political appointees), lack of true representation in either the house or Senate.

    Or are we just ignoring all of those?

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    Okay, let’s look inside:

    • 2 party duopoly,
      The constitution says President is determined by who gets the most votes. Tell me what the structural problem is with that. Yes, it has become a duopoly despite the warning from George Washington in his farewell address to not let it get that way. And it wasn’t that way for fairly large periods of time. It’s not structural, is what I’m saying.

    • corporate & lobbying influence
      Agreed it’s a problem, tell me why the structure doesn’t allow us to fix it.

    • the electoral college,
      Well, yeah. This was an amendment forced through by the pre-republicans (a.k.a. The Slave States) and meets the criteria of a structural problem. 150 years is a long time in the US but it’s still possible to unfuck ourselves based on the structure of the government. It requires thoughtful, selfless leadership. You see the problem. And it’s one of our own - much later - design.

    • corporate personhood,
      Is bullshit. The corrupt SCOTUS (which took decades to create) interpreted the structure to allow this. It doesn’t. They’re “wrong”. (And evil, and idiots, but I digress). Not structural. Corruption.

    • lack of term limits for everyone except the president,
      Yes and no. Term limits for representatives and senators exist. But they can be elected as many tines as they choose to run. That’s kind of structural, but only because the voting public are such pithed cult members.

    • gerrymandering,
      Not structural. A corruption of the structure that persists. It should be specifically prevented, but they hadn’t gotten that far in 1789. 200 years later, yes conditions had changed.

    • the supreme court (and the political appointees),
      What about them? That they’re appointed by the government? You’d prefer popular elections for Secretary of Labor? I dunno.

    • lack of true representation in either the house or Senate
      is this separate from the Slaver’s College or something else?

    All of them are fair points for things that need improvement, but the structure allows for that improvement, it doesn’t prevent it. The constant omnipresent methods for subverting that structure (i.e. propaganda) and naked corruption are present everywhere in the world and are not unique to the US.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Fine, I take it all back, the US is a perfect democracy with literally no problems whatsoever.

    Unless, as I suspect, we're arguing over the semantics of the word structural.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Unless, as I suspect, we're arguing over the semantics of the word structural.

    That’s my point, yes. Our friend up there was quick to agree the governmental structures were put in place deliberately to prevent progress and to foster fascist autocracy. And that’s just bullshit. A very common bullshit notion in many corners of the Lemmy political threads.

    It’s a form of defeatism that encourages non-action, it’s a significant hinderance to fixing these problems and it’s got the backing of many who consider themselves “leftist” and also foreign state actors.

    The structure is sound. Fixing all this broken shit doesn;t mean destroying the structure of government. That’s just idiocy.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I guess I just see things like FPTP vs proportional representation as a structural issue, but again this is just an argument over the meaning of the word rather than us actually disagreeing over anything.

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