Politicians and political parties that smear and lie about others find themselves in a dilemma that begins with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much electoral punishment for lying.
Medical Status Symbol
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With ACA subsidies expiring and neither party serious about creating a real medical insurance system, healthcare is becoming as much of a luxury status purchase as a Rolex or a Rolls-Royce.
Droned in the Hamptons
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The United States has used drones to assassinate political opponents overseas all around the world, including, most recently, alleged drug traffickers from Venezuela in the southern Caribbean.We get away with it now because we are a superpower. But what if, as will almost certainly happen someday, the situation is reversed?
Whole Paycheck
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A century ago, workingmen often returned to their long-suffering wives to confess that they’d blown their entire paychecks on demon rum. Now that good organic food is so extravagantly expensive — not to mention groceries in general — spending everything on booze seems like the responsible choice.
What Democracy Looks Like
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Republican leaders casually admit they undemocratically wield power by acting illegally and ensuring any court challenges come too late, while deliberately keeping voters in the dark through the collapse of the media and information suppression.
Threat Under the High Seas
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The U.S. Department of Defense has assassinated at least 87 Venezuelan nationals, alleging that they were drug traffickers, by blowing up their vessels on the high seas. In one incident, two out of eleven crew members survived the initial attack. Forty-one minutes later, U.S. forces decided to kill the survivors. The Trump administration claimed that, even though the two men were in the middle of the ocean clinging to debris and not even wearing shirts, they still posed a threat to the United States and its national security interests.
Relying on The Other
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As we’ve seen in other examples of mass disruption, there’s a general assumption by employers who fire workers en masse to replace them with automation that somehow it’ll all work out because someone else will hire the discarded workers. In a consumer-based economy, this is a dangerous assumption.
Who Will Keep the Drones Safe?
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Trump’s deployment of ICE goons into American cities feels a lot like the lore about the Bermuda Triangle, in which lost planes are searched for by more planes that also get lost, which then prompts another round of planes to look for them.
What If They Gave a War and Nobody Ever Heard About It?
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What if they gave a war and nobody ever heard about it? That’s what the Trump administration is trying to pull off in its military campaign against Venezuela. Trump has made no effort to convince the American people to support regime change. And he’s inventing a fake non-organization, like SPECTRE from the Bond films, to declare as evil terrorists.
What About?
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Especially on the Internet—but also in the real world of politics—whataboutism has become the standard approach to denigrating a valid argument or criticism. Rather than address the point head-on, people simply accuse the other side of failing to care about something the accuser claims they should have cared about but didn’t. Or, if the other side did care, the accuser just pretends they didn’t in order to prove that they’re hypocrites.
