Nearly every medication changes your cognition—even OTC antihistamines.

I don’t know what it’s like in your country, but in mine depending on the level of impact it will say on the packet, and is illegal to drive while under the influence of any medication that impacts your ability to drive safely or operate heavy machinery.

I didn’t intend to imply it is the case for everyone

People should make the decisions that are best for them—know thyself.

One last time, I don’t endorse this style of living for everyone, but it works for me

Nah, this is not okay.

I do not accept this as a reasonable way to determine what we allow as societies in terms of vehicular safety. Someone’s freedom to decide for themselves what they consider to be safe, stops at everyone else’s freedom to not be run over. I very much assert what’s safe should be determined with science and enforced with regulation/laws. Not by everyone personally deciding for themselves.

You might be surprised at the sheer number of people who operate vehicles while stoned safely.

Dosing aside (I’m not making claims on what level is safe). We have a very important saying in my industry: just because a safety event hasn’t happened yet, isn’t evidence that a practice is acceptably safe. (Paraphrased). This is literally what habitual drunk drivers who aren’t that drunk when they drive tell themselves “it’s fine”, because they haven’t had a crash and are very careful. Sure, but they’re increasing the likelihood of a crash nonetheless.

There may well be people out there who have driven high without incident, my response would be 1. Let’s quantify that first before allowing it, and 2. They do this without incident, so far.

I’m sure you’re very careful, and don’t drive too high. You may never have a serious accident. But on a societal level, that’s just not an acceptable way to determine what is acceptably safe. Who are you to say that you aren’t increasing the likelihood of harm to someone else?

Wanna decide everything for yourself? Go live in the middle of nowhere, away from everyone else, where your decisions won’t impact others.

Don’t drive high unless you can back up your claims with more than “trust me bro”.

Amen to that

Are there sufficient studies out there showing fewer accidents while under the influence of weed? Or negligible effect?

Else, I’m gonna have to press X to doubt, and really would rather wait on further studies before letting you think your self-reported performance is convincing.

Weed affects your cognition, I hope we can agree on this. How adversely for driving, according to dose, that I don’t know. Though I don’t think anyone should accept people telling you “nah, it’s fine, trust me bro. I only got into an accident when I was sober!”

Cars are deadly, and you ought to be sober while operating heavy machinery.

Stop doing it until studies are done (and, they will, given how widespread it’s use is legally now), but heck, pressing all sorts of X to doubt on this turning out to be true. It affects your attention. And cars are deadly, so.

You are morally obligated to err on the side of caution here.

Stop driving high, please.

Yikes. Hecking big yikes.

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Apologies, I only took issue with downplaying being high and driving. Don’t get high and drive is all I’m saying here, and think your original comment seemed like you were saying it’s fine.

I’m totally with you on the elderly, you ought to need to renew you licence with a test when you get older. Because yeah, cars are deadly a f.

Ummm, if it can fuck with your perceptions when you’re high enough you shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a chunk of metal going a speed. Not enough data is no justification, even if it’s “not as bad”. I have, and I’m sure others also, personal experiences of being high as fuck and barely being able to experience the passage of time in a coherent way, feeling like your forgetting what happened 30 seconds earlier.

Field sobriety shenanigans aside, I really hope we’re not pretending like driving high is okay. Cars can kill, and you had better not be under the influence of anything that is a detriment to you driving safely.

Please, please, tell me you meant to write: “Drunk driving is a legitimate concern. High driving, despite the vilifying by police, simply doesn’t have even a modest fraction of the stats to back it up. And anecdotally is not remotely the same as alcohol. But you still shouldn’t drive under the influence of that either. Police should be required to administer scientifically accurate tests and acceptable blood contents be determined. Not field sobriety tests based on nothing.”

Because else, yikes.

Yeah :( Big sad, both for you as a citizen of the US (I presume), and for me, as someone under the thumb of the US’s sphere of influence.

Stay safe out there next week. I’m presume it’s gonna get wild.

Y’all need to unify your federal election into an actual federal election. Not 50 separate ones.

It would be a lot harder to pick and choose battleground states for lawsuits if you 1. Change the voting system yes, but also and importantly 2. Have consistent rules and voting infrastructure across the whole country.

Having to understand 50 separate election rules makes it way easier to sow doubt.

I am aware there are also some federal laws on voting, but still.

We’re seeing in real-time why maintaining a coherent, unified, transparent voting system and communicating how and why it’s secure against tampering is so important. It needs to be difficult to sow doubt in the election, and you can only achieve this through simple to understand and explain methods.

Because if the average person can be convinced it’s not secure and legitimate, then it doesn’t matter what the reality is.

This is why I’m so sick of people pointing out the defamation lawsuits from the voting machine companies as some kind of win for the democratic process.

Voting machines have been just one of the many ways the Republicans have sown doubt over the results. Stop using voting machines, obviously (in my opinion. There’s also 2 great videos from Tom Scott on the topic)

Important things to get right:

• functioning, reliable postal system. (Trump did a great job on undermining this)
• unified electoral communication so that every place has the same election, not bloody 50 separate ones with wildly different practices. (Well shit, constitution needs to be amended)
• a simple voting recording method anyone can understand. (Voting machines are bad, simply because they’re too much of a security risk and black box that can have doubt sown very easily)
• consistent invigilation
• courts that aren’t stacked (good luck with this one, though)

And obvious move away from FPTP, but everyone is already calling for that.

Armchair citizen under the American empire, giving you my 2¢.

I said it a bit in jest, though as explained, I think it’s still somewhat a true statement. I wouldn’t actually say this to people who don’t identify as left-leaning, because as you point out, it would be counter-productive.

I think it’s more shorthand for the fact people generally do want to take care of each other and make sure everyone has the opportunity for a happy life.

Though I suppose it is a little cheeky to say that means people are left leaning.

Reality has a left-wing bias

What I mean is a federal electoral commission that directly administers the entire election, not just sues people who do the wrong thing. We can plainly see how fragile the current arrangement is

In my view there is no argument to be made at all that the states should have any direct involvement in the running the federal election, it’s a federal election.

A federal electoral commission gives you: one consistent set of rules, consistent voting infrastructure, consistent chains of reporting, consistent invigilation and auditing. Ideally also: no politicians picking their own electorate boundaries, no voting machines (for real, please see 2020 and 2000 for how spectacularly those have caused issues, and probably other times, also), no need for as many lawsuits just to get the bare minimum in compliance.

The number of lawsuits is indicative of how badly it’s going.

One side is definitely making it harder to vote, I would definitely agree. I just feel not enough emphasis is given to voting as something that affects the entire political system, and should be the core #1 issue, including where I live in Australia (even if it’s massively in better shape here).

Again, I always feel like a bit of a clown telling someone else in another country how to run it, but US is fair game, given it’s world hegemon status.

Hope y’all can manage to get some sorely needed reform :/

Here’s the link to the actual speech from Sanders: https://youtu.be/Vf5MThSniiY

I came to the Politics community 9 hours after it was posted to find discussion. Nothing.

Personally I feel an exception should be made when the news is literally just a video, why wait for a journalist to regurgitate it in written form?

Anyway

This is very obviously easier said than done, but having mail be reliable seems like a much better way to safeguard this kind of voting, than trying to install massive security around these specialised boxes. Or even having staffed early voting centres would be better than an unattended box.

I’m just looking on (from Australia) and feeling like the way voting is managed in US federal elections is unnecessarily difficult and complicated.

Every state has its own rules, and administers its own vote for a federal election?? (I understand why historically, but this is a really dumb way to run things). Some states use electronic voting, and we have seen what a bad idea this is in terms of ability to claim voter fraud. Even if electronic voting were 100% secure, which it isn’t - it’s way more vulnerable to large scale attack, it’s simply easier to claim fraud when it’s inner-workings a black box. And early voting is done in specific unattended ballot drop boxes, which so, so obviously would become a target.

And this lack of coherent, federally managed elections, also means some states just literally provide way too few places to vote.

Y’all flying by the seat of your pants, and it’s scary, considering how much control over the world, and specifically my country, the US has.

Please advocate for voting reform, it should be the number one priority above all others, because without it, the political system in the US is going to keep being way too fragile. And again, this shit affects us all because of US imperialism.

Why not just use post boxes? Less of a concentrated target because there’ll be a whole bunch of other letters in there too. At least, I don’t believe my country uses special boxes just for votes

Journalists have ruined this word.

Another pet peeve I have of journalists in general: god-awful referencing. “A report by XYZ organisation shows…”

Gee THANKS, “a report”, that’ll help me find the source… It’s wild there aren’t minimum regulations on news referencing in most countries (at least, I’m not aware of any).

Thanks for being my 2¢ receptacle

The Commonwealth isn’t the countries with the British Monarch as head of state.

But yeah, the British Monarch is the head of state in Australia. Annoyingly

Yeah, if we can’t even manage to enshrine a bloody advisory body to parliament with no powers into the constitution, then good luck getting a republic with the conservative media grip over this country.

I’m actually astonished how left-leaning we are in general, given the situation. But yeah, the Voice to Parliament referendum gives me very little hope in people voting to become a republic.

Legal layman here, why is it I keep hearing of American companies suing regulators? I can’t recall that ever being the case in Australia, unless they’re claiming some law/regulation is unconstitutional or something.

Am I just ill informed? Seems weird.

Regulator is empowered by the law, law is made by legislators, unless it’s against the constitution of your country, surely the answer to any of these cases is: tough shit, company? No? How do they sue a regulator for regulating? Seems weird.