[ExI] US politics (was: Even India and Haiti do it better)

[John Clark]

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 2:26 PM Dave Sill via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


> *> I'm not Spike, but, for me, the two major parties are more alike than
> different:- neither wants to end wars*


Everybody wants to end wars, or says they do, but to be meaningful we need
to get specific. The Republicans started the Iraq War 17 years ago and they
did so for a reason that turned out not to exist. Remember Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction?

> *- neither wants to drastically shrink the federal budget*
>

Yes, neither party is crazy enough to want to shrink the federal budget now
during the current pandemic because that would bring on a depression much
worse than any seen before in American history and cause a revolution which
would destroy the constitution and be replaced by who knows what. Most
revolutions do not end well. But the Republicans claim the deficit is an
important issue and love to complain about it, but only when the Democrats
are in power. Democrats don't publicly wail and wring their hands over it
but they've run up a smaller debt than the Republicans have.

> *- neither wants to end the drug war*
>

Unfortunately that is true, but at least one party wants to end the war
against marijuana while the other party doesn't and has an Attorney General
that says "*good people don't smoke marijuana*".


> *> - neither wants to end unwarranted surveillance*
>

Both parties claim they want to end unwarranted surveillance but they
disagree on what is warranted and what is unwarranted. One party claims
that surveillance of hostile foreign nationals and their contacts that are
colluding to interfere with our election is unwarranted because it benefits
their party. The other party thinks such surveillance is warranted.

> - neither wants to end civil asset forfeiture
>

That is indeed a bad practice, but compared with all the other evils we're
facing right now that needs fixing that one needs to stand in line, and its
small potatoes.


> *> The areas where they differ are, to me, much less important.*
>

One party thought it was a good idea to hand over the keys to a Trident
Nuclear Submarine to a ignorant imbecile who thinks he's a very stable
genius and one party didn't. That seems pretty important to me.

John K Clark
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