Why not be direct and advocate clearly for the position that you prefer? You don’t have agree with their position, but asking them to water down their words is weak sauce.
Oh please. Public discussion is always a balance, and to answer your question: if the content is nuanced, the title should be too.
If they mismatch some of your audience is unnecessarily put off.
Ill add: I am personally put off in the same way your parent comment is, because hard stances are usually wrong, and I like a bit of nuance in my life.
Truer words have never been spoken. Now set forth unto the world and transcend your ignorance to learn is meant by "meaningless". The discussion taking place will make more sense to you when you return.
Just yesterday, I was accosted in a public space by an individual that immediately provoked an aggressive confrontation, falsely claiming that I had invaded their personal space. After that initial accusation, they whipped out a pair of smart glasses and begin recording the conversation. It was not immediately obvious that they were recording, even though I am familiar with such devices. Their devive presumably recorded audio (otherwise what’s the point?), and that is a class A misdemeanor in my state. Of course, that presumes that the police would actually bother to enforce that law in the first place.
It seemed clear to me that the individual was trying to provoke a confrontation, as they framed it in such a way that they were justifying their actions in advance. Much like a bully will tell on onlookers lies to justify the beating they’re giving.
And that’s a problem with panoptic on surveillance, they will edit and frame footage to produce whatever narrative they want to promote. This goes for both state and individual actors. Context is King, and when only one side can provide and control the context, lies can be passed as truth with very little effort.
In which state is that a class A misdemeanor? In some states it's a crime to record phone calls or other private conversations without all-party consent, but I wasn't aware that it was a crime to record a conversation in public anywhere.
I hike in Oregon and I've seen bodycams becoming increasingly common. I don't think that's a bad thing.
They no longer believe it is worthwhile, because the landscape changed: companies found they no longer needed to treat their employees was well as they had. (Driven largely by the shift around that time toward quarterly results over long term sustainability, as I understand it.) And thus began a race to the bottom.
Globalization played (plays) a huge part in this timeline too. If I can outsource your job to a place that really does treat their employees as disposable, you should just be happy to be employed. And even if I don’t want to offshore, how does my product/service succeed or remain sustainable if my competitors are all offshoring (or indeed come from offshore)? I’m not defending this attitude just distilling and illustrating through extreme language what I see as a reality of global competition.
Post-WW2, America had a lock on global manufacturing and was like last man standing in a burned down world.
It was/is an illusion to think that could be a permanent state.
The pre-war employment situation in America looked nothing like post-war. Your race to the bottom narrative is probably better framed as reversion to a multi-polar world with bonus features of higher global prosperity and capability, lower barriers to access foreign markets (whether laborers or consumers), and mature logistics infrastructure. In short - more people than ever want YOUR job, and to live in YOUR house, and have YOUR safety net, such as it is, it’s not just some focus on quarterly reports.
Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.
Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies
How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.
I haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism.
The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.
One problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad.
Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.
I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.
> local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives
You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.
> Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up...
Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels.
I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.
In the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments.
In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).
Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.
It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.
The more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around
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