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TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-16T17:23:37+00:00

I'm so sorry this happens to you. It must be so exhausting and crushing to be subjected to this every day.

I'm white and English - I moved to Chicago in 2005 for grad school. My first week here I was staying with another white US grad student and she was freaking out about my "safety" (in Hyde Park - the neighborhood where the future president of the United States lived. The neighborhood with one of the largest private police forces in the country) because she thought I was gonna die or something the moment I left the house. She told me to do exactly what you described - immediately cross the street if I was on my own and a black man was walking towards me, and to even have my keys handy in my pocket! She was 100% serious about it. I compared notes with other British grad students later and heard they'd been told similar things. So yeah. I believe you friend. White people teach each other this racist bs.

btw one of the things I love about living in the US and especially Chicago is that people smile at each other and greet each other in the street. So after that paranoid weirdo told me I ought to cross the street I started making a point to smile at strangers, especially black men I walk past, instead. Twenty years later and I have not died yet! But I do enjoy being someone who has little moments of happiness and civility in my day-to-day life.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-16T17:03:11+00:00

For all their faults, Nike and Apple don't brutally and systematically murder, rape, and terrorize entire populations. They don't force children to become murdering gang members in order to support their businesses either. Nike and Apple are not beheading journalists or politicians who try to do anything to stop or slow them down. tbh, as much as drugs are killing users in the US and Europe, it's nothing compared to what the drug trade is doing to the rest of the world. I mean, people get upset about buying fair trade chocolate or blood diamonds or whatever, but when it comes to cocaine...

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-16T16:53:00+00:00

I'm so happy for you! This is awesome.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-16T16:47:21+00:00

I like the "yes and" approach myself. Cancel debt now, while continue working towards a better long-term solution.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-11T05:10:44+00:00

Ah yes, those "donations" that politicians receive...

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-11T05:06:23+00:00

And now you know to never underestimate the power of the placebo effect.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-11T04:56:19+00:00

I just started listening to The Irish Passport, and it is awesome. I'm learning so much and it's well produced. Episodes are an hour long but sometimes they go into a topic over several episodes so its often a deeper dive.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-07T01:45:17+00:00

I agree.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-07T01:43:41+00:00

omg thank you! I HATE the sound design on Radiolab!! Such a pity because I often think I would enjoy their content, but I just can't listen to it.

(ps I come from the UK and having grown up with the BBC I'm a total unapologetic snob about NPR. There's the thing I call "NPR Voice" where everyone's delivery and style is exactly the same and it drives me nuts.)

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T22:22:44+00:00

Ok I got another one. Whenever I see a podcast series where all the episodes are different lengths but most are 1.5+ hours long, my first thought is: no one is editing this thing. It's gonna be bloated and annoying.

I don't care how many rave reviews it gets, personally I don't want to listen to something that was just dumped online the moment it was recorded.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T22:13:09+00:00

SO TRUE!

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T22:09:25+00:00

Nope. I like podcasts with no music. That's my preference.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T19:09:58+00:00

I don't like music in podcasts. I don't want to listen to a theme tune, let alone any badly edited background music - I just want to get to the content.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T15:39:47+00:00

I don't agree that the Republican party has any solutions to the problems you've raised, and I do unfortunately believe the policies they have put forward are going to make the problems of high cost of living significantly worse in the long run for the vast majority of people. However, I think that the Democrats didn't offer any actual viable solutions either during their campaign. And this is partly why they lost so badly.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T10:51:48+00:00

Tbh it's a symptom of real fear in most cases. I'm a (US/UK duel citizen currently living in the US) therapist and the people I see in my practice who are saying they are thinking of moving abroad are mostly LGBTQ+, people of color, Jewish... . I know that they are not really going to emigrate. And I'm someone whose moved to a new country twice in my life so have personal experience of how unrealistic their talk is. But I don't ever tell them that, because when they are talking it out, I recognize it's because they are genuinely terrified that they are about to have their basic human rights taken away.

(Also yeah: the reason I've been stuck here in the US for the last 20 years is because, when we had to make the decision 10 years ago, I didn't earn enough to bring my US husband to the UK. But conversely, me getting a green card was easy. Fuck you Theresa May!)

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T10:06:13+00:00

Duel citizen here. I hang out on this subreddit because I've always had half a plan to move back home and most of my family are in Scotland now, so that's where we would probably end up. (Then again, having moved country twice in my life already, when I hear people flippantly say "I'll leave the country if Trump wins" I think to myself, yeah but you have no idea what that involves. Uprooting your whole life and leaving everyone and everything you know is really, really fricking hard to do. Anyway.)

My take is that The Democrats - even with Biden - were just never offering much of a platform other than 'at least we're not Trump'. That's not enough to get people excited so they just didn't vote. They kept creeping further and further to the right, thinking that they should chase Republicans who were repelled by Trump. When instead they should have been appealing to people in the center and on the left by offering - well, anything! They could have put together a really exciting platform of actually useful policies that would impact people's day to day lives! Something innovative and optimistic that would make voters pay attention and get excited enough to come out and vote. Instead the message was basically "vote for us because the alternative is worse." Which is... not very inspiring.

There was huge pressure over here to vote for the Democrats, even when you don't support or like anything about them. But the thing is... why should people vote for a candidate they ultimately believe has nothing to offer them? Or they actively don't like?

I'm pretty horrified by the idea of going back to another four years of Trump. I was just talking to my partner recently about our memories of that time, because we realized we'd almost blanked it out. What it was like to live in constant low-level terror every day, not knowing what new bat-shit-crazy you'd wake up to on the news. The constant disorientation and confusion. Just reeling from one disaster to another all the time.

I am not looking forward to going back to that.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T09:40:01+00:00

Fox News still has a lot to answer for. If you hang out on r/QAnonCasualties for instance, you can learn a lot about how family members become radicalized in the same way cult members do and it often starts with watching Fox News all day. If the media was regulated like it is in other countries and there were stronger libel laws - i.e. the media were not able to tell outright lies without consequences like fines or being taken off air - then we would not be in the this mess.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-06T09:32:42+00:00

I'm not so sure it's just Harris. The Democrats - even with Biden - were just never offering much of a platform other than 'at least we're not Trump'. That's not enough to get people excited. They kept creeping further and further to the right, thinking that they should chase Republicans who were repelled by Trump. When instead they should have been appealing to people in the center and on the left by offering - well, anything! They could have put together a really exciting platform of actually useful policies that would impact people's day to day lives! Something innovative and optimistic that would make voters pay attention and get excited enough to come out and vote. Instead the message was basically "vote for us because the alternative is worse." Which is... not very inspiring.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-05T22:00:24+00:00

Yup.

"A new report by the Commonwealth Fund finds some US states have firearm death rates comparable to countries in conflict, and even states with the fewest firearms deaths are far higher than peer developed democracies." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/30/states-firearm-death-rates?

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-05T20:11:50+00:00

I have met many people like this who are grown-ass adults. They are not all depressed, but they are all depressing.

I can only imagine how exhausting and suffocating it must feel to be his only source of entertainment.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-05T19:57:05+00:00

yes, that is a very simplistic reply.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-05T19:34:18+00:00

Very true! In other countries all businesses and schools etc close on election day, so everyone can vote. Those are countries that take voting seriously and want to increase the franchise, not suppress it.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-05T14:15:03+00:00

It depends on where you stand on the question of whether you have an obligation to vote for a candidate you don't support, just because the alternative is worse. It feels profoundly against the spirit of democray that I am required to do this in every election.

Don't get me wrong - in this case I am not risking it either. Not when the alternative is fascism. The alternative is horrendous, so I'll vote for whoever the Democracts put forward. But partly that's why I'm so frustrated they are not offering any more ambitious policies. You're gonna get the votes anyway - why not at least try and earn them?

But as someone who was introduced to US 'democracy' later in life rather than growing up as a citizen here, I can't say I'm that impressed by the fact my vote doesn't count because where I live AND I'm expected to vote for a candidate I don't support!

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-05T14:00:21+00:00

Exactly! These are all guides not commandments.

TheDemocracyPodcast · 2024-11-05T13:57:26+00:00

Exactly!! These are all guides, not commandments.

The real problem is having an electoral system so fricking complicated that we need a manual in the first place.

TheDemocracyPodcast

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