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"Would this committee come up with a good answer in a fair way? I’m skeptical and always ready to be pleasantly surprised, but today seems like more of the same."

Politicians gonna politic. Film at 11.

As for two political parties, there are two for the exact same reasons that wars end up as Us vs Them. Politics is war by other means. It keeps the carnage confined until the issue is too fundamental, like slavery vs freedom. Then you have a civil war. Better pick an army.

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Thanks for the optimism. The following may complement what you have said. Marshall McLuhan said that generally speaking we drive into the future looking in the rear view mirror. But more particularly he asserted that each new advance in media technology disrupts our assumptions of how the world works and numbs us to the immediate implications of new technology and ultimately transforms the way our senses and brains function. He argued in the Gutenberg Galaxy that the printing press increased emphasis on the sense of sight and lessened the previous focus on hearing and produced more linear logical thinking. He made similar arguments about TV disrupting that linear print based world view with a simultaneously experienced mosaic like, low resolution way of experiencing the world through TV and saw that computers would, in turn, overthrow that previous stage. But he died, before you and many of us experienced the emergence of the first wave of "Twitter and Meta and several dozen other TikToky toys". So I would say: If we don't just remain reactive and unconscious of the media environment then, damn right, we can do better!

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