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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2fypCmu:unicornduke replied to your post “unicornduke replied to your post “unicornduke replied to your post…”
Ok that makes a lot more sense. There’s just so much tangled up in everything that its hard for someone recently paying attention to politics to figure out. And not any obvious ways to find things out. I only started paying attention to this stuff 2ish? years ago. I mean I didn’t even vote in the last election. I was too much in anxiety/depression hell to be able to figure out how to even vote. So the NSA, no fly lists, etc never went away even tho they were supposed to
Oh, yeah, I have never been super-involved in politics and I’m never the most well-informed person in a room, but at least I’ve always had people around me who were, and who could point me toward resources or just brief me on situations. I had a very strong background in history, both formal and informal, spent my childhood going to museums and things, grew up surrounded by books and discussions– so I just passively had all this context. I’m not much of a researcher but my mother is, that’s what she does, so even though I’m not super great at it I at least have the framework of where you start to look things up.
I don’t know where one goes to start getting involved and informed. It’s all sort of overwhelming. And it’s worst, of course, to try to get into it out of this feeling of despair, instead of just because it’s interesting. It’s very hard, even for someone pretty well-informed, to understand what kind of thing the government can just– do, and what kind of thing it requires bureaucracy to change, and so on.
I do know that the vast majority of what goes on in our government and legal system is based on precedent, on the accumulated examples of previous office holders. That’s how the Supreme Court makes decisions, by deciding how to interpret previous decisions about the laws– ostensibly, the judge’s own feelings shouldn’t come into it at all, but we all know how that works out– and that’s how much of the president’s conduct is determined, by how various situations have been handled in the past.
There were specific provisions in the PATRIOT act that Obama specifically extended, well through the next administration– not the NSA as a whole, but, like, warrantless wiretapping, forcing libraries to reveal patrons’ browsing data, that kind of thing where the government can just monitor anyone they want to for any reason without any notice. There are also uncomfortable precedents in the government forcing Internet providers to give them data without informing users, and so on. And while I say to myself, whatever, I don’t do anything illegal, I also am an unmarried childfree bisexual woman with a lot of friends who are of similar demographics, and the upcoming administration may decide that makes me suspicious. (Substitute your innocuous-but-non-”default” condition there, and start getting uncomfortable.) And once they’ve decided you’re suspicious, they can always find something, especially since they’re not really under any obligation to justify themselves. So it’s very worrying.
Obama, separately, overcame a lack of support in the legislature by issuing a lot (like, a lot a lot, an unprecedented lot of lot) of executive orders, which are easily removed and also establish a precedent of the President just– decreeing things, which could be disastrous with someone impulsive and ill-informed like Drumpf at the helm. And while we’ve pulled back from some of our military overcommitments, under Obama we’ve really kept up things like the drone attacks, which have an uncomfortable record of collateral civilian damage and not a great percentage of actually killing the targets they were intended for. So many of us who suffered through W’s administration and had really hoped Obama would point America back in a direction we could approve of, wound up pretty disappointed.
I don’t know where to start in getting informed more generally. There are probably some good overview-type books or maybe even TV shows, but where to start? Once you have an entry point, other stuff can kind of slot into place, and once you have enough context, it’s a lot more manageable. But I don’t really know where one would start.
I’d recommend picking an issue and reading the Wikipedia page about its history, and doing a good old Wikipedia spiral about the issue and the politicians and the people involved, and from that baseline, see what catches your interest. Wikipedia has its problems, sure, but from a “I don’t know anything about this, where should I start” standpoint, it’s aces– if you think the page might be biased or weird, look at the sources cited and follow links to some of them and just see what you come up with.
I will also say– AP US History review sites have a lot of information about underlying US historical issues. I personally know the dude who does HipHughes’ YouTube channel, and I haven’t watched the videos but I know he is extremely popular. He’s a Buffalo public school history teacher, and he started making videos to help his students review for the AP US History exam, and they got really really popular. I notice he has a few videos on Trump and the like. He’s political; I think he’s no longer a teacher so he doesn’t restrain himself anymore. But he also knows everything from Dredd Scott to the Constitutional Convention to Nixon’s impeachment, and people think he’s funny, so. Something like that could be a good start!
Ok that makes a lot more sense. There’s just so much tangled up in everything that its hard for someone recently paying attention to politics to figure out. And not any obvious ways to find things out. I only started paying attention to this stuff 2ish? years ago. I mean I didn’t even vote in the last election. I was too much in anxiety/depression hell to be able to figure out how to even vote. So the NSA, no fly lists, etc never went away even tho they were supposed to
Oh, yeah, I have never been super-involved in politics and I’m never the most well-informed person in a room, but at least I’ve always had people around me who were, and who could point me toward resources or just brief me on situations. I had a very strong background in history, both formal and informal, spent my childhood going to museums and things, grew up surrounded by books and discussions– so I just passively had all this context. I’m not much of a researcher but my mother is, that’s what she does, so even though I’m not super great at it I at least have the framework of where you start to look things up.
I don’t know where one goes to start getting involved and informed. It’s all sort of overwhelming. And it’s worst, of course, to try to get into it out of this feeling of despair, instead of just because it’s interesting. It’s very hard, even for someone pretty well-informed, to understand what kind of thing the government can just– do, and what kind of thing it requires bureaucracy to change, and so on.
I do know that the vast majority of what goes on in our government and legal system is based on precedent, on the accumulated examples of previous office holders. That’s how the Supreme Court makes decisions, by deciding how to interpret previous decisions about the laws– ostensibly, the judge’s own feelings shouldn’t come into it at all, but we all know how that works out– and that’s how much of the president’s conduct is determined, by how various situations have been handled in the past.
There were specific provisions in the PATRIOT act that Obama specifically extended, well through the next administration– not the NSA as a whole, but, like, warrantless wiretapping, forcing libraries to reveal patrons’ browsing data, that kind of thing where the government can just monitor anyone they want to for any reason without any notice. There are also uncomfortable precedents in the government forcing Internet providers to give them data without informing users, and so on. And while I say to myself, whatever, I don’t do anything illegal, I also am an unmarried childfree bisexual woman with a lot of friends who are of similar demographics, and the upcoming administration may decide that makes me suspicious. (Substitute your innocuous-but-non-”default” condition there, and start getting uncomfortable.) And once they’ve decided you’re suspicious, they can always find something, especially since they’re not really under any obligation to justify themselves. So it’s very worrying.
Obama, separately, overcame a lack of support in the legislature by issuing a lot (like, a lot a lot, an unprecedented lot of lot) of executive orders, which are easily removed and also establish a precedent of the President just– decreeing things, which could be disastrous with someone impulsive and ill-informed like Drumpf at the helm. And while we’ve pulled back from some of our military overcommitments, under Obama we’ve really kept up things like the drone attacks, which have an uncomfortable record of collateral civilian damage and not a great percentage of actually killing the targets they were intended for. So many of us who suffered through W’s administration and had really hoped Obama would point America back in a direction we could approve of, wound up pretty disappointed.
I don’t know where to start in getting informed more generally. There are probably some good overview-type books or maybe even TV shows, but where to start? Once you have an entry point, other stuff can kind of slot into place, and once you have enough context, it’s a lot more manageable. But I don’t really know where one would start.
I’d recommend picking an issue and reading the Wikipedia page about its history, and doing a good old Wikipedia spiral about the issue and the politicians and the people involved, and from that baseline, see what catches your interest. Wikipedia has its problems, sure, but from a “I don’t know anything about this, where should I start” standpoint, it’s aces– if you think the page might be biased or weird, look at the sources cited and follow links to some of them and just see what you come up with.
I will also say– AP US History review sites have a lot of information about underlying US historical issues. I personally know the dude who does HipHughes’ YouTube channel, and I haven’t watched the videos but I know he is extremely popular. He’s a Buffalo public school history teacher, and he started making videos to help his students review for the AP US History exam, and they got really really popular. I notice he has a few videos on Trump and the like. He’s political; I think he’s no longer a teacher so he doesn’t restrain himself anymore. But he also knows everything from Dredd Scott to the Constitutional Convention to Nixon’s impeachment, and people think he’s funny, so. Something like that could be a good start!
