cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55106076
Many experts are forecasting the end of a key provision of election law — enabling Republicans to shore up their advantage in the House, according to a new report.
Ahead of the court’s Oct. 15 rehearing of Louisiana v. Callais — a case that has major implications for the VRA — two voting rights groups are sounding the alarm, warning that eliminating Section 2, a provision that prohibits racial gerrymandering when it dilutes minority voting power, would let Republicans redraw up to 19 House seats to favor the party and crush minority representation in Congress.
Bye bye free and fair elections by the midterms! And people called me crazy for predicting this.
JFC, how much worse can life in the states get…
Significantly
Yeah, you’re right, I just cannot believe how bad things have gotten in such a short amount of time.
Long term I’m still optimistic. Most people don’t want this, they’re just not paying attention/being lied to.
We’re on the other side of, “Good times make weak people”, we’re somewhere between “Weak people make hard times”, and “Hard times make strong people”, and we all want to hurry up and get to “Strong people make good times” ASAP. But these things…they take time.
Weak people don’t make hard times.
Evil people do. (Aka Nazis/the wealthy)
You’re attributing to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. The greedy always exist. (I’m not religious so i don’t like the term “evil”, but) the “evil” always exist. But the reason those people have any power right now (and did going into the great depression, and going into the civil war, etc., etc.) is because a weak society allowed them to.
On the other end of this, the goal is to come out with a new culture that prioritizes humanity over greed. We spent so long high on good times that we forgot that was a priority (temporarily embarrassed millionaires). But in hard times, people don’t just decide to make this cultural shift, they literally have to in order to survive.
The greedy make the stupid do the things the stupid do.
They could just as easily make the stupid happy.
So, sure, we should make sure the greedy are executed immediately next time.
(Would that make us evil?)
There does need to be some immediate consequence to the willing act of wanting to make others suffer, whether directly , or by manipulating the minds of others.
Evil doesn’t necessarily have to be religious, BTW:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9567646/
How are you defining greedy?
That’s not greed to me. People would be guilty of this every time they are forced to work a double shift lol. The greedy don’t necessarily want to cause suffering, they just don’t care if they do. Their only strategy is to maximize their own utility. Which is also why I don’t think your point about them “making the stupid happy” works.
That’s not to say the two are mutually exclusive. When an economy has healthy competition everyone is acting as greedy as they are able, on the supply side, companies can only raise their prices as high as the quality of their product allows compared to other companies, and on the demand side, consumers will generally take the best deal they can find. Win/win, good times.
In the 50s, people had just come out of massive wealth inequality. They understood the value of prioritizing high corporate tax rates, strong unions, and effective anti-trust legislation. At all times, everyone, corporations to consumers, are acting as greedily as they know how. But it is exclusively the consequence of consumers losing sight of the value of this regulatory balance that corporations are allowed the opportunity to “innovate” on their ability to lobby the govt, delete regulation, and buy up competition. And as a result, we get hard times.
This is a semantic argument, which is why I didn’t let it stop the point you were making. I felt you were defining “evil” as actively malicious, but as you have pointed out, it’s ambiguous and could be interpreted to include stupidity.
I prefer the term “unethical”.
“It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.” - Edwin Way Teale
We could just… learn from history instead.
The founding fathers did, and that’s why they didn’t directly rule.
No Kings.
And if all the ants in the world suddenly decided to work together to take over the world, they just could. Unfortunately, humanity isn’t a person who can “just learn” something. It’s a complicated interaction of biology and ecology. For better and worse, “we” can’t all “just learn” something, only a person can. A person is smart, people are stupid.
The founding fathers were strong people borne of hard times, and given an opportunity to create good times.
There is always a deeper pit