Saturday, December 8, 2018

Captured Comments No.1: (from YouTube)

Omowàle Zaquir

The  trump campaign and presidency have been nothing more than a litmus test of america's morality, ethics and intelligence. Several segments of this nation have failed in all areas.

But it also brought to light just how antiquated the electoral process is and how desperately it needs to be overhauled. There's no way you should be declared the winner of an election if you lost by 3 million votes.

trump has survived in the public eye this long because he essentially existed via short soundbites and deceptive marketing. Now that he has to expound on his viewpoints and agenda, he is being exposed as the duplicitous charlatan he's always been. The fact that people, who have been adversely effected by his policies, are still steadfastly supporting him against any and all allegations is preposterous, and problematic. No matter how this presidency ends, this nation will be left with some serious issues that need to be addressed and unpacked. trump isn't the sickness, he's just a carrier of a virus that predates him by centuries.

And he may have inadvertently created a new political party, which doesn't appear to be going away any time soon

Matthew Ducker

Exactly. He's only a symptom. When he leaves office, the problems will persist nonetheless.

What are the problems? (from the perspective of a foreigner)

- A deeply flawed electoral system (FPTP voting system, electoral college, no publicly funded elections, no centralised independent election commission, very poorly implemented electronic voting, gerrymandering, etc etc etc)
- Animosity and attitudes left over from the Civil War that have festered and grown, having never been adequately dealt with in the first place, or since. Reconstruction failed.
- Anti-intellectualist philosophy
- Prosperity Gospel, Evangelical and other religious cults with extremist political views and propaganda
- Propaganda being spewed by the likes of FOX and AM radio (Limbaugh etc, plus aforementioned religious cults + nutjobs)
- Hyper-individualist attitudes leading to poor community cohesion and lack of civil duty
- Hypercapitalist ideology
- A very bad case of Not Invented Here syndrome (maybe it's possible you could learn some from how other countries do things well? But probably not if you automatically and reflexively think you're way better than them by default!)﻿

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