"It's always too soon to talk about gun control"

[Dartz]

The ballot box is a wonderful thing and is used on a regular basis here, however ever hear of mob rule? It doesn't mean the mafia have taken control, let me tell you. You see sometimes with pure democracies, that the people who shape public opinion manage to take control with very few people realizing it, or as they say, the tail wags the dog.

Allow only one side of a story to be told, and spread it wide and that is all people will believe. Even when shown proof to the contrary.  Don't believe me? Look at the coverage of Trump versus the coverage of Obama.

It's about striking the right level of balance. None of which involves aiming rifles at your politicians.

Have you heard of Sinclair media group? Or the Internet Research Agency? Or pretty much everything going on about Facebook at the moment. Newspapers using their reach to inform their own political agenda isn't a new thing, either. Or for that matter, communications operators.

There are no objective news sources anymore. People only want to read the things they agree with and validate their feelings.  One thing about the State broadcaster here is that, while it does tend to be fairly stolid, dull and useless, it's news programming is fairly effective at being factual. It doesn't have to meet a shareholder agenda, or, for that matter, follow the government agenda. It just broadcasts the news.

People think it's useless, but at the same time, nobody quite wants rid of it. They just want it to be better.

I do recall quite a lot of howling at 'Obummer' from certain circles too. By no means was he given a f ree pass. Although I will say that a security failure does seem to pale into insignificance with the possibility that sitting politicians actively colluded with an 'adversary' nation in order to achieve their positions. How is that even possible?


Not to mention that your politics have become ludicrously toxic.

I had a conversation with a Republican congressman in a bar in DC and we both disagreed, politely on everything but there was still a level of mutual respect there like 'Yeah, I get 'why' you think that' even if I never could.  But you can't fucking do that anymore because if you don't agree with the most extreme people, you're not one of us and god help you if you get caught on social media.... 

As for why FPTP is borken, let me introduce votetown again. Two kinds of people live there. The Greens in the West, and the Orange in the east. We have one district that's always going to vote green, one that'll always vote orange and one that could go either way.... 




Which one do you think the politicians will pour all their campaigning and money into. It's not the 'safe' seats, that's for sure. It'll be the swing area that actually decides the election. Redistrict, and now look what happens.



 We have 2 districts that're majority orange and will always vote orange - therefore the orange government never needs to invest anything in there - just kepr blaming the greens for their problems. And one district that will only ever vote green, so doesn't get any investment because it's not necessary. The will of the electorate has basically been districted out of the process to produce a locked government.

Democracy is now broken. Legally. And everyone thinks it's working normally. Gerrymandering. Gotta love it. It's why giving the government the power to define districts is an incredibly dumb idea, especially if it's a FPTP system. The government now doesn't have to give two fucks about what the people want. It's gone beyond your ability to control except by direct action (and even then)


STV makes gerrymandering so much harder andis based on the simple assumption that while 40% of people might've voted in favour of a candidate, 60% voted against them.

None of which has anything to do with causing mass shootings, but may well be the reason why nothing is still being done about it.


You so you have your guns 'to keep the government inline'. But that's only the illusion they give you to make you think your government is still under your control when, quite clearly, it fucking isn't if it's able to do things like that without anyone being able to stop it.