“ Desiree, I feel your pain. I myself am philosophically and policy-wise, more aligned with Bernie Sanders and the Social Democrats. Unfortunately, until we change the way we vote so that we could, for instance, vote for an independent and not throw the election to the platform we despise (in my case the republican (progressives have to see the Democrats as the lesser of 2 evils. And with deep regret, I see Hillary as our our best option. And as far as Obamacare: we voted the man in because we thought he was the one that would stand up against producer/consumer Capitalism. But for all the republican shrieks concerning socialism, Obamacare fell far short of giving us what we thought he would. It was basically a fold to corporate interests. Still, the man did what he could with what he had. He, at least, did something.” –Me
““Best option” is being misused.
Most viable option under the context of a badly flawed representative democracy model and a two party system whuch further perverts it, might be more accurate.
Still a bad reason to prop up such a flawed model instead of pointing out that it is a farce.” –Phil Cumiskey
First of all, nobody here is propping up a flawed model. Everyone knows it is flawed. And you might note here how I pointed out how we need to change the way we vote: i.e. we need some kind of runoff system.
Secondly, and more importantly, I don’t think resorting to the same kind of solipsistic paranoid conspiracy models that the right does is really helping our situation: these notions of ambitious politicians sitting around and twiddling their fingers and croaking to themselves:
“First I’m going to tell everyone what they want to hear; then, when I get in, I’m going to do what I please even if means fucking them over. Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey-y-y-!-!-!”
Our present model of Democracy may be flawed. But your model is equally flawed: a rather superficial understanding of what is actually going on, a cartoon portrait of diabolical figures seeking power for power’s sake. In other words: fancy with a complete lack of imagination as Coleridge would diagnose it.
We’re pissed. I get that. But we can’t let that pervert our understanding of why it is fucked. At some point we have to consider the possibility that politicians and corporate CEOs (as well as lawyers (are people just like us who went into what they did because they thought they could help, but found themselves succumbing to systematic imperatives. Once again, I was not a big fan of Obamacare as compared to the public option I wanted. But the man was working with a senate that was neither filibuster-proof nor immune to the influence of corporate financing. Still, he did something. And there is nothing I have seen in him that leads me to doubt his desire to help.
And as Naomi Klein pointed out in her book about climate change, there have been instances in which good policy has been laid on the table and failed due to a lack of public pressure. So maybe the problem doesn’t just lie with politicians and corporate CEOs, but also with our social and political laziness: this notion that we can just vote our problems away.
Yes, our system is flawed. But a couple of hours with FOX news will tell you how much fashionable cynicism can prop up a flawed system.
“We have become a tip society: one in which the rich escapes responsibility by leaving it up to the individual to decide what dying enterprise they want to keep alive (via donations (w/ barely enough resources for themselves. It has turned us into a country of Beggars and thugs.”
A good example of this is a radio show, Philosophy Talk, that I have grown fond of while watching it slip, increasingly, into doom. At the start, it was all free. Then Stanford University decided (probably because of decreasing state funding along with increasing corporate funding (to cut it. But then it made the compromise of offering to match every private donation with equal funding. This ignited a flurry of begging on the part of the program for donations. Now, all of a sudden, apparently even that funding from Stanford is being cut which has resulted in an increase of begging on the part of the program which pretty much means (given that most of the people into it are of limited resources (it’s doomed.
The interesting thing to note here is that the hosts are both analytic philosophers. And I can’t help but feel that the rise of the analytic method has something to do with the increasing influence of corporate funding in the universities. In other words, despite the analytic assumption that they would somehow be immune to the influence of corporate funding (being more like a science and all (they’re going down with everything else that is of no interest to corporate interests: that which doesn’t serve the tyranny of the functional.