Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Lunatic Republican: Automatic voter registration TAKES AWAY people's rights (???)" video.

I agree. I'm Australian but went to college in America. I was there for the 1987 campaign season and it was bonkers. Even back then there was this feeling that American politics wasn't about policy or making the country function better, it was about 1 group out screaming the other over issues that didn't matter to the bulk of the population. I had this feeling that America would seriously suffer a breakdown because of this sort of nonsense. I did engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and we used to have all sorts of discussions about the constitution. I wasn't someone who studied that stuff BUT I had studied Orwell (1984 & Animal Farm) and the one thing I used to argue was that ANY COUNTRY could fail and fall into an totalitarian dictatorship. My friends used to argue that was simply impossible in America because of how the Constitution was written and the system of checks and balances. The one thing we never actually discussed was what happens if that system breaks down and we didn't because that was inconceivable. AND THIS IS THE LESSON FOR EVERY COUNTRY. If you let people erode away your basic rights bit by bit then no matter how stable you think your system is one day you will wake up and your country will NOT be what you think it is. It will be what someone else wants it to be.
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@jimohara Yeah - I'll admit my poly-sci education is fairly limited (I'm an engineer) but the one thing I remember is that Orwell wasn't just warning about Communists he was warning about ANY Authoritarian or Totalitarian system. How's this for a quote. Its Former US Vice President Henry Wallace in he New York Times, April 9, 1944 (That's 4 years before Orwell published 1984) “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." How's that for a scary accurate prediction.
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@sisuguillam5109 Yeah I am now of the opinion that it was a good thing for me to do some non-engineering courses in college. I am now finding them useful. I am also ADAMANT that all the people getting arts degrees need to do a couple of basic engineering classes. The amount of ignorance with respect to technology is staggering and also incredibly frustrating. I am also just as ADAMANT that teaching Political-Economy has to become a core subject at high school and college. Understanding that government and economics are 2 parts of the same system is incredibly important. I think its why economists are now so out of control. In recent years I have watched an awful lot of Mark Blyth (Brown U.) who talks about Political-Economy a lot. So I checked to see if Brown has a course like Pol-Econ 101 like there's Econ 101 or Psych 101 or Sociology 101. No such course exists. Recently I stumbled onto a set of guest lectures for a class Stephanie Kelton teaches at Stonybrook HIS 396. Mark did one of the guest lectures. Stephanie Kelton stressed to Mark at one point that her students in that class were history majors NOT economics majors. I fell like our universities are teaching this highly compartmentalised set of curriculums where they have the appearance of teaching lateral thinking and being open minded and its in fact the opposite. ESPECIALLY IN ECONOMICS.
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@Mr.H-zu1jc Australia has in the past taken plenty of American ex-pats. The question is for how much longer because before to long 26 million of us will wake up to how much Washington is screwing us on military crap. I'm all for the alliance. I went to college in America and love the place and the people. How can you NOT love college sport? Even if you don't like car racing NASACR is great. I actually love NASCAR. And then there's the NFL - Go Niners. BUT YOUR POLITICS IS SO DAMN TOXIC. I watched 3 members of my immediate family go to cancer. Watching American politics is like watching a cancer patient who's coughing up blood saying its just a cold and it'll pass. When Trump said he' drain the swamp all he did was drain it and then re-stock it with even worse crap. I hate to say it, but it feels like the next POTUS will either save America from itself or oversee its destruction. By that I don't mean it will be physically destroyed it just wont be America as we know it. It will be like the break up of the Soviet Union and sort of break into a few sizeable chunks. Sad to say but there are some people down South who have wanted that since 1861. They might finally get their way.
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@jimohara thanks.
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