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Eisenstein | 14 days ago
The constitution doesn't say anything about whether the government can fund media.
> And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality.
No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a good standard for a democracy. Is your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?
> So if you want to push for a more (small d) democratic government, you’re going to first have to overall the entire constitution so the largest states population’s aren’t diluted.
I don't know if that's the answer to the nation's problems, but it is worthy of consideration.
> And I posted a link earlier that the government has literally been trying to defund PBS since the 1960a and Mr. Rogers himself had to beg Congress not to defund it.
The government is not a unified monolith. The whole point of democracy is that everything is being debated all the time and sometimes people don't agree and try to stop or changes things that others did. That's a good thing.
> Right now today the federal government is erasing any signs of anything in museums and national parks that doesn’t make the US look good or admit that gay people exist. This is the government you want controlling the press?
I think that's bad, and hopefully enough other people do so that we can vote out the people who are doing that and restore things to how they were.
raw_anon_1111|14 days ago
How can the press be free of government power and funded by the government?
> your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?
So as both a student of the history of the Civil Rights movement, whose still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow South and who himself has been harassed by the police for thinking he doesn’t belong in his own neighborhood where he made twice the household income alone as the median household income in the county (which itself was the most wealthy county in the state), you’ll have to excuse me for not trusting the government.
I have never once been harassed by a private company and I’ve never had a problem getting a job in 30 years across 10 jobs because of discrimination - everything from startups to the second largest employer in the US (working remotely for that one was why I did make twice the income of the richest county in GA).
> No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a good standard for a democracy. Is your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?
Well for me, the worse thing that can happen is give a government where the states who are predominantly made up and vote for people who are hostile toward people who look like me have outsized power. Who is going to speak truth to power if the power funds the press?
> The government is not a unified monolith. The whole point of democracy is that everything is being debated all the time and sometimes people don't agree and try to stop or changes things that others did. That's a good thing.
Have you not been paying attention for the last two years?
> I think that's bad, and hopefully enough other people do so that we can vote out the people who are doing that and restore things to how they were.
You know that whole thing about what people think don’t matter between 2 senators per state and gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college? This country knew exactly what they were getting when they voted in 2024 and 40% of the people still support it.
Eisenstein|14 days ago
And there are many places in the middle between 'government always bad' and 'private always bad'. Extreme positions never get you a good version of the thing you want.