Airborne_Again wrote:
It’s hard when people vote wrong, isn’t it?
What is hard is when reason and common sense starts to loose, one way or the other.
Airborne_Again wrote:
It’s hard when people vote wrong, isn’t it?
You know that democracy is in danger when it is no longer the issue which determines how a vote goes but who proposes it.
If the very same issue would be put to vote once presented by a Republican and once by a Democrat, if the reason it passes or fails only depends on who holds the majority, then you have a situation, where over the aisle politics are no longer possible. That is dangerous as it indicates, that party politics become dominant over the issues. Not that that is exactly new. And it is definitly not an American only phenomenon, it’s there almost everywhere.
Silvaire wrote:
in pushing for a CV-19 vaccine by the end of 2020, which was achieved in spite of virtually everybody
You’re not seriously suggesting the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is a Trump success? I doubt he could even spell vaccine, let alone give an unscripted reasoned opinion on the development of same.
Pfizer are pretty adamant they didn’t take a single dollar from Operation Warp Speed. The Federal Government has rather questionably stated that Pfizer is part of the programme simply because they’ve bought doses from them.
When it comes to federal politics in the US, I think money is the real problem. It simply requires too much money to have a chance to get elected.
If it didn’t cost so much, then you’d see smaller parties gradually grow with other views. Some would die off because they didn’t get enough support but some would grow sufficiently to either challenge the two big parties, or at least grow enough that they other parties would seem them as a potential challenge and modify their own positions to take back some of their support.
Graham wrote:
You’re not seriously suggesting the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is a Trump success?
No I’m not, given that I also said “notwithstanding that he’s only a talking head politician” with the specific intent of making that clear. What I am saying is that he was correct in his prediction, and that there are many tapes of notable people saying (incorrectly) that he was wrong and immoral for setting the ‘wrong’ expectation, and that his being correct in this instance probably had value in relation to helping people make related decisions.
Silvaire wrote:
What I am saying is that he was correct in his prediction,
Only just – a matter of a couple of weeks, more by luck than judgement I suspect
Airborne_Again wrote:
It’s hard when people vote wrong, isn’t it?
It is, but when the government is large and decadent enough (the latter tendency being tied to culture among other things) to use money taken from some to buy the votes of a slight majority with cash payments, that is what can happen. If it happens enough times the middle class becomes slaves, gives up except for whining for handouts and you have a stagnant society of the rich and the poor, neither of which creates new wealth, plus a ruling class of government workers. That is the kind of place where I don’t want to live (again).
Mooney_Driver wrote:
You know that democracy is in danger when it is no longer the issue which determines how a vote goes but who proposes it.
Given that Schwarzenegger was elected Governor, it seems unlikely that the proposals were voted down because he proposed them.
MedEwok wrote:
Given the overall (disastrous) performance of the Trump administration,
Can you elaborate on that? Obviously, there is no universal “quarterback rating” for a president or even an administration, but many indicators have developed quite well during this administration: GDP, unemployment (Pre-Covid), the unbelievable increase in drug overdose deaths during Obama administration has been at least stopped, etc.
I do not want to advocate for the outgoing president and by no means want to sugarcoat the harm this man has done to political style and system as whole – but if one takes measurable data at least pre covid this current administration has done quite well in many dimensions…
You know that democracy is in danger when it is no longer the issue which determines how a vote goes but who proposes it.
Has there ever been a democracy without that?
Silvaire wrote:
What I am saying is that he was correct in his prediction, and that there are many tapes of notable people saying (incorrectly) that he was wrong and immoral for setting the ‘wrong’ expectation
But that’s only right in the same way as someone who puts it all on black at the roulette wheel and gets lucky enough to win instead of, say, buying into an S&P 500 ETF instead, can be classed as “a good investor”. He just got lucky, that’s all.
