Yeah if only Joe Biden would DO SOMETHING!

https://www.publicopiniononline.com/story/opinion/2021/10/29/joe-bidens-accomplishments-afghanistan-health-care-border-arrests/6190497001/

I can see arguments for wanting to treat organized riots as thought it were organized crime (i.e. gang activity).

We have RICO laws for that.

I would have a lot more trust if the gov were willing to review/terminate non-working programs

The civil service would be happy with this too. We actually do these review all the time, send stuff to congress and get told no. Because Congress doesn't get points for shutting stuff down.

I know I'm getting into dead horse territory, but your beef is not with "government." your beef is with Congress.

I'd be ok with this . . .
but then we'd have to do other common sense things like letting the Post Office offer basic banking services like every other developed country . . .

potentially yes. My case, however has taken many generations. In other parts of the country my understanding is many multi-generational Latin families still identify as Latin, even if they are 5th to 7th generation American citizens.

YMMV.

Yep - that's part of my central point.

That actually tracks locally - I am surrounded by folks with clearly Spanish last names (Garcia, Cuevas). They are 7 or 8 generations into being Americans, if not more, and have long since ceased to identify as Hispanic. They are also almost uniformly very light skinned. so in the 1-3 dimensions shown above. They also all vote republican.

It may be perception, but its powerful perception that no amount of statistical fact has broken. People in Ohio who lost jobs when auto plants closed prepandemic perceived that the plant's owners didn't value their labor. They perceived that the politicians they elected didn't protect their jobs. They perceived that the rest of the US shrugged at their plight. And so when Donald rump came along they jumped in whit him because they perceived that he would change all that. He didn't. But now they perceive they have no choice but to stay down the rat hole with him because they don't perceive anyone else helping them.

That still requires two willing collaborators. And the OP is right that the supply of willing collaborators on opposite sides of most issues is vanishingly small.

And FWIW - this is a really clear, not-trollish comment. Stick to this approach and you might make some headway here.

That's certainly one interpretation and that sort of trust is lacking.

I think its a large meta issue however. Lots of people no longer "trust" political or economic systems and institutions to deliver for them on things they care about. Take jobs in the US - my Boomer parents grew up in a day when we manufactured most of what we consumed, fueled by coal we mined and gas we refined. All of those things have changed in my now 50 years, and that has had devastating economic impacts on real people in real places all over the US. Political and economic systems have sped up that change because it gives a small segment of the populace outsized financial and political power gains which they believe they "deserve." But that speed and its attendant "profits" have come at a price for a lot of people and so those people are now lashing out at those systems, which they have been told in a variety of ways for 40 years not to "trust."

I think the OP is after those meta issues, and I wish him good luck getting that addressed one person at a time.

I'm just the opposite of your friend. I grew up in what passes for a big city in the south ( that's smaller then most boroughs of NYC). I was in a university sub-culture within a bigger white supremacists culture (David Duke for Governor anyone?), where my church sub-sub-culture was very activist on the left as well. So intellectually I learned early on how NOT like Friends the world was. And yet, my experience since then leads to JRs option #3 which I don't know a good way to navigate out of.

raises the question of what to do with leftists who have gone to lengths to distance themselves from liberals over the past several years.

I get into this regularly with several self-avowed leftists i know IRL. Their take - which is not wrong - is that as the Democratic Party has moved to the right chasing Republicans, "liberals" have happily moved along with them, which is why Democratic neoliberal economics is no longer union/labor economics (among many other examples they cite). That movement crates a lot of problems for folks like me - I call myself a liberal because that's a label that I still see a left side, but not as far leftists as the authoritarians form South American form the 1980's who called themselves "leftists" to get ahold of money form the Soviet Union. My policy preferences, however, are firmly left of center in both classic and modern senses.

But this is all from pre-Trump days. The appearance of MAGAs changes a lot.

Indeed it does, and it makes the analysis much much harder. The emotion driven "burn it all down" approach that MAGAs have is such anathema to the left (except for the extreme leftist anarchists) that we viscerally recoil. and thats a big contributor to why Democrats are not doing well defending institutions and norms.

I haven't had enough coffee yet to reason through all this to a recommendation, but I appreciate you playing along at home!

DO we NEED to protect voting rights? Yes we do, as they are being actively restricted across the US. Can we protect voting rights and keep the filibuster intact as a procedural move in the Senate? I doubt we can, because while the 50 Democrats in the Senate represent 41 Million more Americans then their Republican counterparts, those same Republicans are more focused on consolidating power then legislating. So there's a problem that one half of the system wants to break the system intentionally for parochial reasons and a majority of Americans expect the other half of the system to fix the system.

Really well written. Hits several nails I keep whacking at though perhaps with a different hammer then I would choose.

The loss of trust is huge, but its not a recent phenomena, nor is it by chance. There are dedicated political and economic forces who have worked hard for most of the last 40 years to break trust because they believe doing so preserves their political and economic power. They will not go quietly into the night, and so we do, in fact have to fight to get trust back in the public square.

Raise the cost of workers, and you get more robots.

We are getting more robots anyway regardless of the wage cost of workers. Its why avoiding discussing Universal Basic Income is problematic.

Can we start teaching the reasons why Hitler hated the Jews?

Sure - so long as its taught as part of why he exterminated 6 million of them. and why exterminating people is generally bad. But if its taught as an excuse - as the "Bad Jews made him do it" - then no, sorry no sale.

Much of the problem however is not an inability to restate the position of the other - its the other's willingness to accept restatement that isn't regurgitation. lack of regurgitation is NOT a lack of understanding. Lack of agreement is NOT a lack of understanding.

Both of those concepts are key reasons why person X refuses to trust person Y. Happens daily around here actually.

Its actually both in many, many cases.

Good luck with that. That's been the focus and definition of CRT since its inception . . . and yet here we are . . .

Once again we have a "Do as I say not as I do" situation with a famous person who thinks deception in service of a media image is the way to go. I shall begin popping popcorn and begin waiting for the Conservative Rage Machine run by the Party of Personal Responsibility to tear into him for this assault on the truth . . . .

Don’t the NFL protocols require vaccination?

No.

There is no vaccine mandate for NFL players, but the league has created strict guidelines surrounding the coronavirus.

As part of that same memo, the NFL spelled out rules for when players and staff can return to the team after a positive test. Vaccinated people who test positive and are asymptomatic can return after two negative tests a full day apart. Non-vaccinated persons who test positive, on the other hand, require a 10-day isolation, which is the same ruling from the league in 2020.

https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/bears/latest-nfl-rules-covid-fan-vaccinations-and-positive-cases

greater then 75% of these discussions are about morality, not measurables. Take tax cuts - for 40 years conservatives have told us that if we cut top tier income and capitol gains taxes, we will grow the economy by X percent which will overcome the cuts and make everyone's lives better. Not once has that happened. Not once. But COnservatives continue to moralize on how over burdening out tax code is to the REAL drivers of the economy - which they almost never acknowledge to be the middle class whose taxes are mostly NOT cut. Since they choose to ignore the numbers, we have to engage in the morality play.

most of the time I don't think conservatives are arguing about the thing they believe in. Take the CRT kerfuffle. CRT is about systems that create racist outcomes, not about whether an individual white person is a racist. Yet much of the school board level rhetoric being deployed by the Right focuses on how kids are allegedly being made to feel when grappling with difficult racial history (e.g. the self loathing comment made by the mother in Loudan County, VA). What that woman has a problem with is that her little girl is being confronted with uncomfortable history and she - the mom - doesn't want her to be. The only relationship that has to CRT (which is a demonstrable thing with scholarship to back it up) is that both of things are trying address the racist past and institutions of the US. What conservatives appear to want is that we don't do that publicly, particularly in educational settings. But they aren't arguing that openly.

So, Conservatives argue X about teaching our racial history to our children, when their real compliant is about Q. Liberals call them out about Q - because that's the real issue - and get pilloried because Conservatives want to argue about X.

You first.

I think you'll find you make that point to me regularly when I engage with you and your ideas and reach a different conclusion then you do.

The failure to demonstrate understanding is a roadblock.

I find the bigger roadblock to be that when I explain a persons position back to them, they refuse to believe I "understand it" if I don't use their words back to them.