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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Haha that is pretty awesome. Although if RICO ever had a good chance at applying, it's now.
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On November 05 2017 14:07 Danglars wrote:
Tell me why I have to show ID for driving my car, booking a flight, entering many federal buildings, but don’t need to show one to participate in the most important step of democracy? I’ve routinely called for state-sponsored free photo IDs, with paid couriers and assistance proving your identity. I call it absolutely stupid to make the relatively unimportant parts of life require these proofs but the big ones be who cares?
That's actually what most countries around the world do. The problem with America is the free photo ID aspect. Most of the time is isn't free, from both a time and financial perspective. Its a larger roadblock for poorer people than richer people unfortunately.
The electoral system in the US is amazingly broken.
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On November 05 2017 14:07 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 05 2017 12:13 Kyadytim wrote:On November 05 2017 10:28 Danglars wrote:On November 05 2017 10:14 Kyadytim wrote:On November 05 2017 06:36 Danglars wrote:On November 05 2017 05:39 Liquid`Drone wrote:
China is obviously worse than the US by 'objective standards' of human rights abuse. But Trump is a more offensive character than Xi Jinping, and this matters. Trump makes former american allies cheer for american failure, because he is such a viscerally offensive character. It's not rational - but nor was the foundation for Trump winning, and this is how his desire for 'reciprocality' is actually going to play out, people end up more willing to work with China than with the US, because the concept of Trump winning and succeeding makes people feel worse than they do about actual human rights abuse. On the international stage, him being such a complete buffoon really, really hurts the standing of the US, and I don't think most Trump supporters fully understand the extent of this.
And it can rationally be explained in ways like, at least they're not gonna semi-randomly withdraw from international treaties every 4 years Likewise, the rest of the world and most of the United States doesn't grasp what the US would be if political business-as-usual continued. Trump is a tragedy. Calling Trump a white supremacist as with his voters and half the country is Act 1 & 2. I really hope we can resolve the Republican interparty issues and Republican vs Democrat political rancor sooner rather than later. It doesn't please me to see a buffoon on the world stage, however much people leap to use it to justify Chinese international benevolence vs sinister American white supremacy. If wish you could see that the foundation for Trump winning was an inherently rational process. oBlade detailed the rational reasons why. The Flight 93 election, which is really mandatory reading for understanding conservatism vs Trump/Trumpism, is a very rational thought process. You might not see it for a number of years. I want American success and longevity, but that doesn't work with a disconnected Washington elite, unrepresentative Republican party, or radically racialized political atmosphere. Trump's properly seen as the symptom to a problem that maybe a Norwegian like yourself wouldn't recognize. For all his chaos, he might even been step one to the solution. I looked up that Flight 93 election essay. There's a terrifying element to the urgent " we are headed off a cliff message". If someone believes that liberalism is bad for America and liberals are either blindly or intentionally destroying America, and "charging the cockpit" (electing Donald Trump) is a bad idea but the only possible means of survival, basically anything can be justified in the name of trying to pull the country back from disaster. This is the sort of mentality that lead to people cheering as Julius and Augustus transformed Rome from a republic into an empire. You should focus in on the conservative thought process. + Show Spoiler +But let us back up. One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.
Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?
If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff. There's a lead up to that conclusion: that we're actually in some dire times. The political system is corrupt. The left has been ascendant culturally for around 70 years. Conservatives haven't gotten anything accomplished politically since the Gingrich Revolution. Their job historically has been to show up and lose. Stand in front of the train yelling stop. Hillary represented a big push of the progressive agenda, with a huge mandate after Obama's 8 years (but slower and more corrupt than Bernie). The pace of mass immigration is awful, and probably leads to a loss of Texas and other Republican strongholds crucial to bringing the country back in the future. It's literally twelve paragraphs of lead-up to the conclusion. It wasn't time to wait until 2020/2024 to put a stop to the progressive agenda. It was time to take a break from pushing this agenda first, before working to a real conservative candidate in the future (and the party has a terrible time fielding conservatives that fight for principle and can articulate it). A great many things can be justified after accepting conservative philosophy says the country is headed off a cliff, or can't claw its way back from a hole after 4 years/8 years of Clinton. All that's called for is pausing the descent, quite raucously, to give us a shot at retaking institutions and renewing the culture. Conservatives, after all, do believe in the rule of law and constitutional government ... not Caesar-like revolution Trump lifetime dictator shit. EDIT: oBlade's phrase of discount version of Democrats comes to mind on this topic. Trump didn't try to say the right things and cave upon election, he said all the wrong things and showed people you can toss the Dem bullshit right back at them (however poorly he identifies and executes). There's a couple of assumptions that are being made. First is that the left is culturally ascendant. Second is that the left being culturally ascendant means dire times. Remember, this article was written concerning the general election. This wasn't a "We're doomed if we don't pull conservatism from it's defeatist path" article. It was a "We're doomed if we don't stop liberalism, and it's therefore worth any risk to stop it," article. I'm not saying that I don't understand the chain of logic presented. Using a Russian Roulette analogy like the article (which is kind of accidentally extra appropriate), Trump is a revolver pointed at the stability and rule of law of this country, and for the sake of stopping liberalism, the risk of destroying America itself is acceptable. I disagree with basically everything Republicans stand for, but I don't treat conservatism itself as something that threatens the very existence of the country(1). How do I, as a liberal, attempt to have any sort of productive discourse or even negotiate a state of mutual tolerance when interacting with people who hate and/or fear the things I believe are good for America with such a passion that they would rather see America destroyed than see my ideals realized? This is why I found that essay terrifying. I know a number of conservatives treat liberals as an enemy. Some liberals treat conservatives as an enemy. But an enemy can be negotiated with. An uneasy peace can be found with an enemy. But if liberalism is a threat of guaranteed doom that must be stopped at any cost, even if the solution risks the same doom? For a liberal, there's no negotiating or settling into a ceasefire with people holding that attitude. I do not view conservatives as enemies, but the "Stop liberalism at all costs" attitude is going to force me to act that way regardless of my views. How can I offer compromise, seek common ground, or even ignore conservative ideas that I find distasteful when every hesitation or peace offering on my part is simply taken as a weakness to be exploited on the charge to seize the cockpit? (1) I do believe that gerrymandering is working its way towards being an existential threat to the US democracy. Taking Wisconsin as an example of where gerrymandering is headed, I believe that if left unchecked politicians will be able to entrench their side in power regardless what voters desire unless a huge shift in the electorate occurs. I don't think gerrymandering is a partisan issue. Democrats do it too when they're in power, and it really needs to stop. + Show Spoiler +Somewhat related, I look at the Republican push for stricter voting requirements as a way to suppress Democratic votes. To elaborate on why, I believe that a law that prevents one fraudulent vote at the cost of causing 100 legitimate voters to decide voting isn't worth the trouble to have a larger impact on the legitimacy of the elections than a that single fraudulent vote. It’s easily seen that the left was culturally ascendent, at least until the era of Trump. Now it’s kind of figuring out what to do about the “right side of history” narrative. The audience for the article is conservatives that haven’t seen a lick of their policy goals be implemented by Republican and Democrat presidents for the last 30-odd years. The same ideology that believes expansive, intrusive government hurts societal cohesion and national prosperity. It’s written to an audience that knows American liberals don’t care about the evils of progressivism. The article states that still opposing Trump after he won the primary doesn’t give you another real shot in four or eight years. So you missed the thrust and writer-reader context of the article. Clinton is the loaded six shooter, Trump has one bullet. You spin the revolver. Maybe Trump gets the portion of his policies through that conservatives believe are destructive. Maybe he gets nothing through. Every single one of Clinton’s expected actions is destructive. Very apt comparison. And you prove it even more apt. Finishing your diatribe about conservatives and their cliff analogy, you say Trump is against stability and the rule of law ... risks destroying America itself ... hate/fears things? Wait, remind me again why I should take you seriously? Hate and fear the things I hate and fear, but not the things you hate and fear. Very persuasive. Stop talking about the cliff, it can justify all sorts of bad ... talk about Trump’s cliff? Breathtakingly ignorant. Also, you’re very little in the mood to compromise. You haven’t seen how unstable America currently is and how divided it is. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: your kind is all about ignoring the state of the country as long as orator Obama is talking in beautiful prose. Never mind his pen and phone executive overreach or scandal-ridden legacy, no none of that. Close your eyes to history and call Trump the beginning of something new and something bad. It’s politics and you’re pretending to have an enlightened view and it’s dead wrong. Sorry. I also hate to say it, but liberalism has done a very poor job at portraying itself as something other than an ideology attempting to crush its enemy. It calls people racists, asks for restrictions on free speech, sues nuns, and scraps due process on universities. I’m thinking you’re in the blissful ignorance phase of your political development, but all you’re asking for is universal disarmament in a political war. You’ll be peaceful overlords, I guess? I don’t really know what’s recommending that policy. Tell me why I have to show ID for driving my car, booking a flight, entering many federal buildings, but don’t need to show one to participate in the most important step of democracy? I’ve routinely called for state-sponsored free photo IDs, with paid couriers and assistance proving your identity. I call it absolutely stupid to make the relatively unimportant parts of life require these proofs but the big ones be who cares?
Wow. Nice jump from polite discourse into ad hominem. Breathtakingly ignorant is a new one.
1) The article is what called Trump the revolver with a bullet in it. I didn't say he was a fully loaded revolver. I certainly implied he wasn't by mentioning russian roulette.
2) I never talked about Trump being against stability and the rule of law. I literally did not talk about Trump being bad except in the context of the article implying that Trump is potentially as bad as the continued liberal dominance it talks about.
3) Regarding the rule of law, I talked about how this essay pushes an frame that would lead to people accepting if not cheering if Trump did cause a break down in the rule of law.
Breathtakingly bad reading comprehension.
3) I'm not really sure what you're talking about regarding compromise. Obama spent basically his entire first term offering compromises to Republicans, which they would then treat as his initial offer and try to negotiate him even farther right. My politically active social circle at the time talked about it constantly. Even the libertarians among us conceded that Obama was getting taken advantage of and needed to start with harder left positions. In the meantime, Republicans started running on just saying no to Obama on things.
4) Obama is probably the least scandal-ridden president in decades. He's not scandal free, but not bad. There's a nice wikipedia article listing scandals. You might find it informative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scandals_in_the_United_States
5) I'd call George W. Bush's administration the start of the bad things that Obama's administration got flack for. Most of it was just continuing post-9/11 stuff that started under Bush.
6) What's this about not having seen how unstable and divided this country is and being in the blissful ignorance phase of my political development? Nice assumptions, mostly wrong.
Breathtakingly ignorant.
Anyway, the thrust of my comment was that the essay pushes a no compromise attitude that surpasses ideological differences and instead treats liberalism and by extension liberals as an existential threat to the country.
Did the insults help get my point across, or I can skip typing them next time? Also, wtf is "your kind?" Am I part of some sort of separate species or something?
I don't disagree with anything you said in your closing paragraph about ID, though, so that's something?
P.S. Surprisingly, Bill Clinton's administration was rather scandal free except for his personal indiscretions and everything that followed from it.
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So, Danglars, you wanted to talk about how fucked this country is? The electoral college and Senate are both inherently undemocratic in terms of giving the same power to any individual's vote. Both strongly favor less populated states. The House also has problems, but not if the Supreme Court overturns gerrymandering, they're not an imminent problem. More important is that the United States population is slowly concentrating itself into fewer states. The tl;dr here is that in 40 to 50 years, we're probably going to be looking at a situation where around 30 percent of the country controls a majority of the electoral college and a supermajority of the senate.
http://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-the-us-population-lives-in-just-9-states-2016-6
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/11/presidential_election_a_map_showing_the_vote_power_of_all_50_states.html
To make matters worse, the states with the disproportionate power will be the rural states, which tend to receive more money from the federal government than the more populous states. The more populous states unsurprisingly contribute to most of the country's GDP. Actually, cities are responsible for most of the GDP, they just tend to also be in the most populous states.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-24/map-shows-how-just-6-cities-are-responsible-quarter-americas-economy
So anyway, if demographic and economic trends don't change, by 2100 this country is probably going to have a clear majority of people with little to no say in how the country is run being taxed to support the minority whose individual votes have far more power.
To put this in terms regarding the current political schism, if economic and demographic trends don't change, in less than a century we're probably going to have a conservative minority running the federal government and using it to funnel tax revenue from strongly liberal areas with high GDP to their low GDP states. I really don't want to see people marching on Washington with the slogan "No taxation without representation," but it's fairly likely going to happen in my lifetime.
Add that on top of the current political schism where the son of the president calls Democrats "not even people," and conservatives believe they're being treated like Nazis. Yeah, this country is pretty fucked.
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See you should have gotten off the taking danglers seriously when he said.the.left has.been culturally ascendant for 70 years. Like the post world war world was some werid pro left attitude in the western world.
The right has been culturally ascendant for.a good 40 years from the age of nixon onward. Reactionaries have never been culturally ascendant and never should. Thats how you get shit shows like trump.
Your daily reminder that things arnt that bad and predicting or advocating for.revolution is.bad and you should feel bad for.seriously sharing that.
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I don't understand this "culturally ascendent" business. Is it an American political code word for something?
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Its kinda hard to have a political discourse in a country when one side believes the doomsday clock is at 5 minutes to midnight and all means are acceptable to stop further progress.
If you can look at America and come to that conclusion then I don't know the reality you live in. (Granted that has been apparent for some time).
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On November 05 2017 20:42 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
I don't understand this "culturally ascendent" business. Is it an American political code word for something?
it's not a code word in itself, it relates to longstanding claims made.
some on the right feel they've been fighting a culture war, and have been losing for decades; they feel like they're losing the heart and soul of america. Changes like gay marriage, and a whole bunch of other social issues, have been going against them.
it's a narrative that some among them have been pushing since the early 90's.
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If you make the whole debate about culture you also avoid talking about egregious economic ideology l.
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On November 05 2017 22:18 Nebuchad wrote:
Why am I evil, Danglars?
Did he call you evil?
I thought he said that there were evils in progressivism, which is a criticism of an ideology and holds no implicit equivalence or criticism of those who adhere to the ideology.
We should be able to criticize an ideological stance without people feeling personally insulted by it.
Unless he did call you evil and I missed it on the page.
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On November 05 2017 22:30 Jockmcplop wrote:Did he call you evil? I thought he said that there were evils in progressivism, which is a criticism of an ideology and holds no implicit equivalence or criticism of those who adhere to the ideology. We should be able to criticize an ideological stance without people feeling personally insulted by it. Unless he did call you evil and I missed it on the page.
Fair;
Which of my positions are evil, Danglars?
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You're linking to an article about millennial antifa rejecting the jacket.
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This helps me see the indictments I posted last night in a new light.
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On November 06 2017 02:05 Nebuchad wrote:You're linking to an article about millennial antifa rejecting the jacket.
It's like if somebody started a political Hot Topic.
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On November 05 2017 15:32 Kyadytim wrote:Show nested quote +On November 05 2017 14:07 Danglars wrote:On November 05 2017 12:13 Kyadytim wrote:On November 05 2017 10:28 Danglars wrote:On November 05 2017 10:14 Kyadytim wrote:On November 05 2017 06:36 Danglars wrote:On November 05 2017 05:39 Liquid`Drone wrote:
China is obviously worse than the US by 'objective standards' of human rights abuse. But Trump is a more offensive character than Xi Jinping, and this matters. Trump makes former american allies cheer for american failure, because he is such a viscerally offensive character. It's not rational - but nor was the foundation for Trump winning, and this is how his desire for 'reciprocality' is actually going to play out, people end up more willing to work with China than with the US, because the concept of Trump winning and succeeding makes people feel worse than they do about actual human rights abuse. On the international stage, him being such a complete buffoon really, really hurts the standing of the US, and I don't think most Trump supporters fully understand the extent of this.
And it can rationally be explained in ways like, at least they're not gonna semi-randomly withdraw from international treaties every 4 years Likewise, the rest of the world and most of the United States doesn't grasp what the US would be if political business-as-usual continued. Trump is a tragedy. Calling Trump a white supremacist as with his voters and half the country is Act 1 & 2. I really hope we can resolve the Republican interparty issues and Republican vs Democrat political rancor sooner rather than later. It doesn't please me to see a buffoon on the world stage, however much people leap to use it to justify Chinese international benevolence vs sinister American white supremacy. If wish you could see that the foundation for Trump winning was an inherently rational process. oBlade detailed the rational reasons why. The Flight 93 election, which is really mandatory reading for understanding conservatism vs Trump/Trumpism, is a very rational thought process. You might not see it for a number of years. I want American success and longevity, but that doesn't work with a disconnected Washington elite, unrepresentative Republican party, or radically racialized political atmosphere. Trump's properly seen as the symptom to a problem that maybe a Norwegian like yourself wouldn't recognize. For all his chaos, he might even been step one to the solution. I looked up that Flight 93 election essay. There's a terrifying element to the urgent " we are headed off a cliff message". If someone believes that liberalism is bad for America and liberals are either blindly or intentionally destroying America, and "charging the cockpit" (electing Donald Trump) is a bad idea but the only possible means of survival, basically anything can be justified in the name of trying to pull the country back from disaster. This is the sort of mentality that lead to people cheering as Julius and Augustus transformed Rome from a republic into an empire. You should focus in on the conservative thought process. + Show Spoiler +But let us back up. One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.
Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?
If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff. There's a lead up to that conclusion: that we're actually in some dire times. The political system is corrupt. The left has been ascendant culturally for around 70 years. Conservatives haven't gotten anything accomplished politically since the Gingrich Revolution. Their job historically has been to show up and lose. Stand in front of the train yelling stop. Hillary represented a big push of the progressive agenda, with a huge mandate after Obama's 8 years (but slower and more corrupt than Bernie). The pace of mass immigration is awful, and probably leads to a loss of Texas and other Republican strongholds crucial to bringing the country back in the future. It's literally twelve paragraphs of lead-up to the conclusion. It wasn't time to wait until 2020/2024 to put a stop to the progressive agenda. It was time to take a break from pushing this agenda first, before working to a real conservative candidate in the future (and the party has a terrible time fielding conservatives that fight for principle and can articulate it). A great many things can be justified after accepting conservative philosophy says the country is headed off a cliff, or can't claw its way back from a hole after 4 years/8 years of Clinton. All that's called for is pausing the descent, quite raucously, to give us a shot at retaking institutions and renewing the culture. Conservatives, after all, do believe in the rule of law and constitutional government ... not Caesar-like revolution Trump lifetime dictator shit. EDIT: oBlade's phrase of discount version of Democrats comes to mind on this topic. Trump didn't try to say the right things and cave upon election, he said all the wrong things and showed people you can toss the Dem bullshit right back at them (however poorly he identifies and executes). There's a couple of assumptions that are being made. First is that the left is culturally ascendant. Second is that the left being culturally ascendant means dire times. Remember, this article was written concerning the general election. This wasn't a "We're doomed if we don't pull conservatism from it's defeatist path" article. It was a "We're doomed if we don't stop liberalism, and it's therefore worth any risk to stop it," article. I'm not saying that I don't understand the chain of logic presented. Using a Russian Roulette analogy like the article (which is kind of accidentally extra appropriate), Trump is a revolver pointed at the stability and rule of law of this country, and for the sake of stopping liberalism, the risk of destroying America itself is acceptable. I disagree with basically everything Republicans stand for, but I don't treat conservatism itself as something that threatens the very existence of the country(1). How do I, as a liberal, attempt to have any sort of productive discourse or even negotiate a state of mutual tolerance when interacting with people who hate and/or fear the things I believe are good for America with such a passion that they would rather see America destroyed than see my ideals realized? This is why I found that essay terrifying. I know a number of conservatives treat liberals as an enemy. Some liberals treat conservatives as an enemy. But an enemy can be negotiated with. An uneasy peace can be found with an enemy. But if liberalism is a threat of guaranteed doom that must be stopped at any cost, even if the solution risks the same doom? For a liberal, there's no negotiating or settling into a ceasefire with people holding that attitude. I do not view conservatives as enemies, but the "Stop liberalism at all costs" attitude is going to force me to act that way regardless of my views. How can I offer compromise, seek common ground, or even ignore conservative ideas that I find distasteful when every hesitation or peace offering on my part is simply taken as a weakness to be exploited on the charge to seize the cockpit? (1) I do believe that gerrymandering is working its way towards being an existential threat to the US democracy. Taking Wisconsin as an example of where gerrymandering is headed, I believe that if left unchecked politicians will be able to entrench their side in power regardless what voters desire unless a huge shift in the electorate occurs. I don't think gerrymandering is a partisan issue. Democrats do it too when they're in power, and it really needs to stop. + Show Spoiler +Somewhat related, I look at the Republican push for stricter voting requirements as a way to suppress Democratic votes. To elaborate on why, I believe that a law that prevents one fraudulent vote at the cost of causing 100 legitimate voters to decide voting isn't worth the trouble to have a larger impact on the legitimacy of the elections than a that single fraudulent vote. It’s easily seen that the left was culturally ascendent, at least until the era of Trump. Now it’s kind of figuring out what to do about the “right side of history” narrative. The audience for the article is conservatives that haven’t seen a lick of their policy goals be implemented by Republican and Democrat presidents for the last 30-odd years. The same ideology that believes expansive, intrusive government hurts societal cohesion and national prosperity. It’s written to an audience that knows American liberals don’t care about the evils of progressivism. The article states that still opposing Trump after he won the primary doesn’t give you another real shot in four or eight years. So you missed the thrust and writer-reader context of the article. Clinton is the loaded six shooter, Trump has one bullet. You spin the revolver. Maybe Trump gets the portion of his policies through that conservatives believe are destructive. Maybe he gets nothing through. Every single one of Clinton’s expected actions is destructive. Very apt comparison. And you prove it even more apt. Finishing your diatribe about conservatives and their cliff analogy, you say Trump is against stability and the rule of law ... risks destroying America itself ... hate/fears things? Wait, remind me again why I should take you seriously? Hate and fear the things I hate and fear, but not the things you hate and fear. Very persuasive. Stop talking about the cliff, it can justify all sorts of bad ... talk about Trump’s cliff? Breathtakingly ignorant. Also, you’re very little in the mood to compromise. You haven’t seen how unstable America currently is and how divided it is. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: your kind is all about ignoring the state of the country as long as orator Obama is talking in beautiful prose. Never mind his pen and phone executive overreach or scandal-ridden legacy, no none of that. Close your eyes to history and call Trump the beginning of something new and something bad. It’s politics and you’re pretending to have an enlightened view and it’s dead wrong. Sorry. I also hate to say it, but liberalism has done a very poor job at portraying itself as something other than an ideology attempting to crush its enemy. It calls people racists, asks for restrictions on free speech, sues nuns, and scraps due process on universities. I’m thinking you’re in the blissful ignorance phase of your political development, but all you’re asking for is universal disarmament in a political war. You’ll be peaceful overlords, I guess? I don’t really know what’s recommending that policy. Tell me why I have to show ID for driving my car, booking a flight, entering many federal buildings, but don’t need to show one to participate in the most important step of democracy? I’ve routinely called for state-sponsored free photo IDs, with paid couriers and assistance proving your identity. I call it absolutely stupid to make the relatively unimportant parts of life require these proofs but the big ones be who cares? Wow. Nice jump from polite discourse into ad hominem. Breathtakingly ignorant is a new one. 1) The article is what called Trump the revolver with a bullet in it. I didn't say he was a fully loaded revolver. I certainly implied he wasn't by mentioning russian roulette. 2) I never talked about Trump being against stability and the rule of law. I literally did not talk about Trump being bad except in the context of the article implying that Trump is potentially as bad as the continued liberal dominance it talks about. 3) Regarding the rule of law, I talked about how this essay pushes an frame that would lead to people accepting if not cheering if Trump did cause a break down in the rule of law. Breathtakingly bad reading comprehension. 3) I'm not really sure what you're talking about regarding compromise. Obama spent basically his entire first term offering compromises to Republicans, which they would then treat as his initial offer and try to negotiate him even farther right. My politically active social circle at the time talked about it constantly. Even the libertarians among us conceded that Obama was getting taken advantage of and needed to start with harder left positions. In the meantime, Republicans started running on just saying no to Obama on things. 4) Obama is probably the least scandal-ridden president in decades. He's not scandal free, but not bad. There's a nice wikipedia article listing scandals. You might find it informative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scandals_in_the_United_States5) I'd call George W. Bush's administration the start of the bad things that Obama's administration got flack for. Most of it was just continuing post-9/11 stuff that started under Bush. 6) What's this about not having seen how unstable and divided this country is and being in the blissful ignorance phase of my political development? Nice assumptions, mostly wrong. Breathtakingly ignorant. Anyway, the thrust of my comment was that the essay pushes a no compromise attitude that surpasses ideological differences and instead treats liberalism and by extension liberals as an existential threat to the country. Did the insults help get my point across, or I can skip typing them next time? Also, wtf is "your kind?" Am I part of some sort of separate species or something? I don't disagree with anything you said in your closing paragraph about ID, though, so that's something? P.S. Surprisingly, Bill Clinton's administration was rather scandal free except for his personal indiscretions and everything that followed from it.
Most of these I already answered. Conservatives think a certain way about the world and liberals think mostly opposite. So, these crazy dangers and not going to be shared. I’d rather have a revolver spun with one bullet rather than six ... and that was the real choice between Trump and Clinton. Stop the progressive slide for one election, so you can fight again in four years. Side benefits for exposing how craven the Republican polical class is. You all get reassuring blocking action by constitutional limits, the Democratic party’s intrangidence, and the divided Republican coalition. Not bad for political upheavals if you ask me.
We’re probably not coming closer on scandals and political division. Give it another ten or twenty years where it’s less than recent history and can be more objectively seen. Even Hillary’s issues have so many shills right now, and she wasn’t even elected.
There really is no other way to understand the demand to care about my side’s dangers and not care about the others. It’s an ignorant view. We’re not really going to have a come together moment with it.
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On November 05 2017 22:35 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On November 05 2017 22:30 Jockmcplop wrote:On November 05 2017 22:18 Nebuchad wrote:
Why am I evil, Danglars? Did he call you evil? I thought he said that there were evils in progressivism, which is a criticism of an ideology and holds no implicit equivalence or criticism of those who adhere to the ideology. We should be able to criticize an ideological stance without people feeling personally insulted by it. Unless he did call you evil and I missed it on the page. Fair; Which of my positions are evil, Danglars?
Find some context, troll. I don’t read minds.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/J8S7IvN.jpg)
