Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@The Smiling Pony  
You’ll have to teach me how to roll coal with a V6 gas engine.

@TheMagpulPone  
Coal is dying though.

@Mikey  
I was being sarcastic. Rolling coal is not something you can do with a gasoline engine.

@Latecomer  
I think he’s a complete retard with the moral compass a spoiled 5 year old, but I don’t think dehumanizing him is all right, and I don’t like it when people use his looks as a way to insult him.

@The Smiling Pony  
True. Makes you ahead of a lot of people.

@The Smiling Pony  

I’d honestly like to know how you even could at this point. He already behaves like a cross between a Saturday morning cartoon villain and the fevered nightmares of the world’s most obvious satirist. Not to mention that everything bad that has ever been said about him, every name he’s been called and hateful group he’s been associated with, the passage of time keeps showing seems to be pretty much accurate. So seriously, what is left? What actual human element of that walking sack of moral, social, and political corruption remains to be dehumanized? Because much as I’d like to agree, Trump has so earned every shred of scorn heaped upon him that I’m very doubtful there is anything human left to associate with him at this point.

@Background Pony #391F  
Well, he can be all sorts of morally and intellectually lacking, but the point of dehumanizing someone (or groups of someones) is generally to makes it morally OK, or even morally required, to kill them.

@AaronMk  
Here’s a video on how scummy the MPAA is.
 
So no, it’s not just a “rating” board.

@vit  
And where are Vietnam + Cuba in that process?

@CaptainXtra  

 
Man I don’t have no time for no mumble fuck.

@CaptainXtra  

 
Both are doing relatively well. Vietnam may have gone state capitalist like China, but unlike China they don’t like China. So depending on how you want to play geopolitics: they’ve gone with siding with America as a geo-strategic counterweight to the Chinese threat. Supposedly. They’d like to.
 
Cuba hasn’t had any major issues despite major US-supported sanctions and embargoes that limits how far their tiny economy can go and what luxuries they can import in. But the word on the ground information I’ve picked up is that all things considered: most people are content to complain about generally common federal shortcomings as happens anywhere else in the world. The state could do a little more X, Y, or Z but hasn’t represent a crisis among the Cuban people. Restaurant menus may vary depending on if there’s pork or ham available that day, but they can eat unlike Venezuela. And they have a lung cancer vaccine.
 
Of more interesting note is that Cuba underwent a constitutional reform this year. In the process of creating the new constitution, they set up town halls in all the towns of Cuba and sat down to hear what the Cuban people had to say to figure out the groundwork for what the people of the nation feel is best for their country’s highest law and are in the process of political reform. It’s not as extreme a right-ward shift as le enlightened liberal centrists would want, but it’s good they went to the people.

Yielding to protestors, Chile’s president Piñera lifts the transit fare hikes proposed days earlier.
 
As a refresher: the transit authority of Santiago de Chile was set to raise the fare for their subways and trains. As well, to combat fare skipping police were stationed to prevent people from simply jumping the turn styles. The move was seen as an attack by the poor majority, as the general cost of living was too high and a mass protest movement has spread out across the country lead by its students. There’s a nation-wide general strike planned. The army was called in for the first time since the American-backed Pinochet regime.

@AaronMk  
Any idea as to why North Korea hasn’t calmed the fuck down and do what Cuba and Vietnam are doing?

@CaptainXtra  
Imagine a country run by Trump, but without elections (or any elected bodies of any kind to criticize or counter him), and only one branch of government.

@CaptainXtra  

 
They won’t calm the fuck down and do what Cuba and Vietnam are doing because they have an entirely different political identity from them. They’re just a wholly different and strange beast.

@CaptainXtra  
Do you think China would let its buffer do anything they don’t want?

All the troops withdrawing from Syria are gonna be stationed to Iraq instead(Reuters)
 
So much for bringing the troops home

@The Smiling Pony  
Give it the elections, & we’ve got the US.

How much would America change if it went from a constitutional republic to an outright democracy?

@CaptainXtra  
Define the difference.

@Latecomer  
That’s why I’m asking.
 
How much more democratic would the US be if it was just a plain Democracy?

@CaptainXtra  
And I’m asking you to say what things you see in the US that are undemocratic.

@CaptainXtra  

 
You’re not really defining your parameters, since by the language of the constitution of not the founders we’re supposed to already be a democracy in the since of a Democratic-Republic, where as in modern liberal world order terminology we have elections and that just means we’re a democracy, period.
 
Define yo’ shit.

@AaronMk  
So in all practically, a constitutional republic is no different than just plain democracy?
 
Because I often hear many people say that America isn’t truly democratic since it’s a constitutional republic but if the only difference is in name then I’m guessing it’s all the same.

@CaptainXtra  

 
America being both at once a Democracy and a Republic dates back to John Adams where at least nominally it’s a democracy because it derives its mandate from a politically enfranchised class who vote on representatives who act in Congress with one another making it a Republic. The question that hangs over American history is how much of the people should be democratically enfranchised, since you can do some serious number work to prove blacks are under franchised than whites not because of legal recognition or lack there of - blacks and whites are a vote of 1 - but because of a series of interlapping conditions and institutions the practice of enfranchisement means black votes are mathematically of a lower value than the white vote. As a starting condition black Americans may not be voting as much as whites, which infers an entire series of intersecting problems related to the African-American community.
 
In a Marxist level, the issues if American democratic franchise is weakened or distorted by the relationship many people have to wealth and value generation where a business owner having more economic value has a political weight higher than anyone else, since the access to capital and wealth gives them more weight over working class majorities; they can afford the time to take off to be a part of politics. Like wise the appeals of either partys’ mainstream pillars is often to “middle class America” which can be taken to at least mean the small business owner, so by language there’s a readily apparent appeal to politics only ever being for the petite-bougousie at least, with the mandates to rule being given by the electorate at large.
 
There probably isn’t much to change about the US government itself to make it more democratic aside from unleashing the historical spectre of Revolutionary Catalonia which is still derided by people in its tradition of radical politics as having something of a structure closer to America than the supposed anti-nation it was supposed to be on the surface. What would change is the level of political access people have to American politics, and a break down and restructuring of political capital, which is related to to the economic capital of the US.