Not if all you cynical motherfuckers get out and VOTE! Vote in your primaries, vote for congress, vote for everything you're allowed to vote for! Your voice is loudest at the polls.
Not like it has to be one or the other, the terms have some overlap. The United States is both a representative democracy, because nearly all citizens have equal votes for representatives, and a republic.
It's a democratic republic, meaning that we choose the people who decide on laws. When they say democracy I'm sure they're referencing a true democracy, where we would all be voting on each individual law rather than leaving it up to the representatives.
I guarantee you that if it were in fact a direct democracy, things would probably be fucked up even worse. Do you actually want to place trust in the bible-belt to vote on laws? At least in a representative democracy, the votes are cast by people with an education. I'll take corruption over stupidity, thanks.
Definitely wasn't advocating for a true democracy, not sure where you got that idea from. There is no way it would work on this large scale, and politics are a lot more complicated now than in ancient Greece. I was simply explaining the different terms.
Sorry, it just came off as a little aggressive to me. But yeah I agree, true democracy would be terrible. People have issues getting to presidential elections every four years, imagine trying to get them to vote every month. Plus nobody would understand the bills, lobbying would hit a whole new scale, just terrible all throughout.
Dont confuse the poor reditors... They are a fragile bunch ...reditors believe in almost everything Rand Paul believes in but since he is a R they won't vote for him. They will vote for Hillary. Got to love the reddit generation.
I think it's funny that Iraq refused to follow our political model. I'd much rather have many political parties like England or Israel and at the end they need to form a coalition.
Look at history and the political parties used to change as the times changed. In the last hundred years people have gotten complacent with what they're used to they don't demand anything from their representatives anymore. Our Andrew Jackson who said fuck the federal bank and that was the last time America owned is own money, the day America died was when he left office.
As someone not from the US I had to google him, but if the wikipedia page on him is accurate...what are you on about?
100% pro life, same sex marriage offends him (though he wants states to decide individually, not a federal ban), no legalization of recreational drugs, opposes all forms of gun control, wants to raise the defense budget and thinks that states should not require parents to vaccinate their children.
The only things I can see that align with the average redditors views are that medical marijuana should be legal and removing mandatory minimums...
you know, until they don't do what they said they would do, and then we can always not vote for them the next time but by then it's too late because whatever they voted for that we didn't agree with is already written into law
Rand's good on this issue. Not exactly waving my pom-poms about him on essentially any other. He's still a socially conservative Christian who'll do stuff like support anti-vaxxers.
He doesn't want the government to mandate vaccinations. He's "supporting" anti-vaxxers by not forcing potentially harmful medical procedures on their children.
Not all vaccinations are safe, nor are they all unsafe. I'd rather leave it up to the parents, too.
"I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines," sounds pretty goddamn causative to me.
Rand Paul believes that it's immoral to force vaccination upon people. What if the government wanted to mandate circumcision?
Not the same thing. The government has a legitimate and compelling interest in public health as an extension of its basic function to safeguard the safety of its public. I don't think anyone would seriously take issue with quarantining someone who has smallpox against their will, for example. Vaccinations are essentially the same thing. Unvaccinated individuals are a threat to the public, not just to themselves.
If that sounds causative to you, you're part of the problem. He's clearly stating a correlation, which, while it does not indicate cause, is enough to leave it up to individuals. If he thought vaccines caused mental disorders, he wouldn't vaccinate himself.
In the case of a serious emergency, mandatory vaccination might be called for, like martial law. I wouldn't want either to be common practice.
America would have lower disease rates if everyone vaccinated. In fact, I've argued that point before on Reddit. We could also ban alcohol, cigarettes, and soda. You have to weigh individual rights against possible benefits.
The problem with that is, if the security apparatus wants a law passed they can just blackmail the legislature. Generally speaking people who can't be blackmailed don't go into politics.
Well I was too young to vote at the time, and the logic of "they won't come after me, because I don't do anything THAT bad" made sense to me then, at age 11.
It also made sense to the majority of America. Politicians were doing what we asked for. We also asked for the TSA. Now, some of that is because we were emotionally manipulated to want those things, but the blame still falls on us. If you were older at that time, chances are you would have fallen for the same reasoning.
While it's doubtful that Bush 43 actually won in 2000, many, many Americans certainly consciously voted for a moron. Many also didn't vote at all, and if they had joined in, it would have been much more difficult to perpetrate a fraud using Florida alone. Then Bush was convincingly re-elected in 2004, even taking instances of voter disenfranchisement into consideration.
Edit: also, I'm not sure 9/11 would have happened at all, because counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke wouldn't have been sidelined the way he was by the Bush Administration, until they clamored for him to come back and lead from the PEOC on 9/11. Richard Clarke would have quite possibly got the warning and acted:
A lot of people have been gerrymandered out of having enough say to make a difference. Voting may not be enough, it may take a redistribution of the population and voting before real change could ever take place.
Yeah which is why voting in the state elections is important, as they have the ability to change the districts after every census. Also if you're in a gerrymandered district, there's always the ability to try to find a candidate that better represents the whole district, and challenge the incumbent. Much more difficult, but not completely impossible, as we saw with Eric Cantor. This also works better in places with open primaries.
No, because you didn't vote for Democrats in the '10 primaries, the Democrats had no votes to accomplish anything after that. Obama cut the power of the patriot act by requiring fisa courts, a good first step in the right direction before the Democrats lost. And if you think the administration today is worse or just as bad as the Bush years then you are part of the problem.
Wait, how many Democrats are anti-PATRIOT act? How many are in favor of a sane Israel policy? How many have called Snowden anything but a traitor? Not many. The Democrats lost in 2010 because they were pathetic, they couldn't even manage to pass a decent healthcare bill (Obamacare is better than nothing, but sorry if I have trouble getting excited about "better than nothing" policies). Until the Democrats stop trying to win by acting like Republicans they can fuck themselves.
And sure, Obama is better than Bush, but Bush was better than a lot of other arbitrary people who might have become president, did you get super stoked about him because of that? Obama is just another center-right Democrat who spends half his time doing the GOP's work for them and the other half making excuses about why he can't do any better.
Your attitude that Israel is beyond legitimate criticism clearly identifies you as a mindless mainstream partisan. I mentioned a "sane Israel policy", no conspiracies, no bigotry, and you jumped right into crazy-land. You didn't even respond to anything else I said, you saw a very mild criticism of Israel and immediately rejected the entire thing. This is another reason I won't associate with your shitty party.
My attitude is that Israel has nothing to do with the NSA and spying, the fact that you bring them up shows you want to push your obviously bigoted viewpoints on here. And it is a waste of my time because you have no actual argument based on reality. Goodbye.
We aren't talking about the NSA. I also brought up healthcare. We're talking about the efficacy of voting. My argument is that it is essentially pointless (at least voting for president and, in many states, congress). Not sure how an offhand comment about our Israel policy makes me "obviously bigoted". Are you saying that anyone who doesn't love our current policy is a bigot? Then it would seem Obama himself is a bigot since he doesn't appear to love everything about US-Israel relations either...
"we" are talking about the patriot act and the Democrats. Nothing to do with lobby groups. You just want to go do a Stormfront rant because all you know are sentences full of talking points. Stop filling up my inbox.
You said, essentially, that the Democrats losing in 2010 is the problem and that if people like me had voted for them they might have won and we would be in a much better place.
Then I asked why I should believe that when so many individual Democrats have the same views on so many issues as their fucked up Republican colleagues. One of the issues I mentioned was our Israel policy that, in my view, leads to a lot of violence in the world. It was literally an example in a list of three issues on which I see very little difference between the Dems and the GOP.
The Democrats win based on excitement (remember that Democrats generally outnumber Republicans, so it is all about voter turnout, at least in cases where gerrymandering hasn't fucked the districts completely). If people on the left, like me, aren't excited, they will tend to lose. They had a solid two years to impress people and convince us that they could actually live up to their (well, Obama's, maybe that's the problem, he made promises only Congress could keep) promise, and they didn't. Why didn't they just repeal the PATRIOT act while they had a majority? Did they even seriously try? Most of them actually SUPPORT the fucking thing! Who the hell am I supposed to vote for when every candidate on the ballot supports half the stuff I oppose and opposes half the stuff I support?! Just pick one randomly? I can just not vote and get the same outcome from that.
Also, I seriously don't get the whole "stormfront" thing. Really, I honestly don't understand where that came from. Do you even know my views on Israel? Apparently "stormfront" is a white supremacist thing, how do you get from, literally, "I think our Israel policy sucks" to white supremacy? That's a pretty amazing jump, really.
But the Patriot Act is only one thing to be concerned about in the next election, and to me and probably a lot of people, it's low on the importance scale.
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u/Your_Post_Is_Metal Jun 01 '15
Not if all you cynical motherfuckers get out and VOTE! Vote in your primaries, vote for congress, vote for everything you're allowed to vote for! Your voice is loudest at the polls.