US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9522

On December 14 2017 11:15 ShakeN_blake wrote:...
White's have indisputably created the most altruistic empires in world history.
...

On December 14 2017 10:59 LegalLord wrote:

I can definitely see how you would see it that way, but I stand by that you seeing a contradiction is a petty semantic squabble rather than a contradiction.

Position 1 as I meant it, and as it should have come off as, is “it contributes as one of the factors, but there are plenty of bad Republicans and thinking that bashing them is going to win seats is idiotic.” That message is in there. Position 2 is a follow-on to that. The rest provides a little clarification.

As for others seeing it a different way: you might have a point except those “two separate people” tend to be among the most reductionist posters around and would be the first to assume the least reasonable interpretation of any given post.

Either you should be able to figure it out, or know to ask for clarification.

Memo to the President: Your attacks on the FBI aren’t working.

President Trump has apparently decided that attacking federal law enforcement is a good defense strategy in L’Affaire Russe. Conservative media outlets have picked up the cry, devoting hours of air time to the absurd proposition that the FBI is corrupt and biased in favor of Hillary Clinton—and against the President.

The other day, curious about the impact of such attacks on public opinion, we put a very simple poll in the field using Google Surveys. It asked one question, polled between December 5-7: “How Much Confidence Do You Have in the FBI?”

The answer was striking:



The average confidence rating for the FBI in this poll measured in at 3.34. That compares favorably to any other institution we poll on, save the military, which had an average confidence score of 3.78. The question polled here is subtly different from our other polls, which measure confidence in institutions as protectors of national security. This one asks about confidence in general—on the theory that the President’s attacks on the Bureau have been general attacks, not limited to the national security function. That said, the FBI’s rating was notably higher than the next highest institution, the intelligence community more broadly, which had an average confidence measure of 3.04. Forty-seven percent of respondents give the FBI higher confidence ratings, either 4 or 5. And fully 74 percent repose at least some confidence in the Bureau—that is, give it at least a rating of 3. By contrast, only 26 percent give the FBI lower confidence ratings, that is a rating of only 1 or 2.

We don’t know what these numbers would have looked like before the President began his attacks. But support for the Bureau appears very strong. If he’s going to defend himself by tearing down the FBI, Trump has his work cut out for him.

On December 14 2017 02:54 Sermokala wrote:
The language is vauge and abstract but I think identity politics should be referred to politics that appeal to a group by putting them against another group. Ie white people are racist or black people are criminals, in more seemingly polite terms ofc.

Democrat Doug Jones’ victory in Alabama — far from settling the score between the McConnell and Bannon wings of the Republican Party — instead touched off another round of internecine GOP infighting over who’s to blame for the party's loss in one of the most conservative states in the country.

From the outset, the race served as a proxy war between the tight-lipped Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a paragon of the party establishment, and Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who has dedicated himself to disrupting everything McConnell represents.

Now, both sides are blaming the other for Tuesday’s loss, with each painting the results as a case study in the other’s political ineptitude. Bannon has argued from the outset that Republican leaders have positioned themselves against the president, determined to thwart his agenda. But McConnell and his allies are using Tuesday’s results to tell the president — whom Bannon helped to cajole into the race on Moore’s behalf — that his former chief strategist is a political liability.

Jones’ victory “unmasked Steve Bannon's incompetence,” said Josh Holmes, a former McConnell chief of staff and top political adviser. “What has been exposed here is that Steve Bannon has been the most harmful person to the Trump presidency in all of politics — Republican or Democrat.”

Karl Rove told Fox News that Bannon, despite the hype about his political genius, did little more in Alabama than rant and rave “about the so-called establishment in Washington. Not a winning message.”

Bannon, naturally, is unbowed, refusing to take any responsibility for ceding what looked like an impossible-to-lose seat in the Deep South. He has told associates that the Alabama results are a case study in McConnell’s malpractice.

“Team Mitch did everything in their power to endanger our majority in the Senate and threaten the passage of the Trump agenda by ensuring the outcome that we saw last night,” said Andy Surabian, a spokesman for Bannon, who went on to accuse the Senate majority leader of gloating “about the fact that the Republican nominee in Alabama was defeated.”

Prior to the election, McConnell told associates that he wanted to destroy Bannon politically, according to one person familiar with the Republican leader’s thinking. Their goal: to curtail his influence ahead of the 2018 midterms, in which Bannon has vowed to recruit candidates to knock off McConnell-backed incumbents.

Bannon is supporting Danny Tarkanian, who has vowed to unseat Nevada’s Republican senator, Dean Heller, as well as former New York congressman and ex-convict Michael Grimm, who is trying to recapture his old House seat.

McConnell hopes Tuesday’s outcome will put a dent in those efforts. His allies argue that Bannon is a charlatan — a man who has sold himself to the president as the guru of the Trump movement who possesses a preternatural understanding of the president’s political base only to drive the president into a ditch in Alabama.

“Bannon hurt Trump by giving him poor advice,” said Scott Reed, a political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The results in Alabama, Reed said, “hurt the Trump movement.”

The face-off over the Alabama race is the latest iteration of the bitter infighting that has dominated the Republican Party since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, and that reached an apex last year with the election of Donald Trump, a Bannon-backed outsider loathed by politicians in both parties.

Trump’s victory did little to settle the debate over who controls in the GOP. In fact, the president now appears to be caught in a tug-of-war between McConnell and his establishment allies, some of whom urged him to endorse Sen. Luther Strange in Alabama’s Republican primary, and Bannon, who eventually convinced him to intervene on Moore’s behalf.

It was an appeal from Tennessee senator Bob Corker that ultimately convinced the president to campaign in Alabama on Strange’s behalf. Trump even placed a cold call to Ward Baker, the former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, before doing so. When Baker told Trump that Strange was, in fact, in real trouble, the president decided to intervene.

But he didn’t heed the same establishment voices, including his own political advisers, who urged him to stay out of the general election after Strange’s defeat. He also rejected private appeals both from his daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who urged him to keep his distance from Moore.

That said, Bannon’s prods haven’t been siren calls for the president, either. Though he has continued to flout Republican leaders, feuding with McConnell publicly on his Twitter feed, he has also signaled that he will not join Bannon’s efforts to unseat several Senate incumbents, privately offering his support to Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, Wyoming’s John Barrasso, and Nebraska’s Deb Fischer.

Privately, Republicans on Wednesday conceded that both sides were to blame for the fiasco in Alabama. Though some Senate Republicans privately breathed a sigh of relief at Moore’s loss — few were eager to embrace him as a colleague — they also suggested that McConnell’s insistence on backing Strange, rather than popular Republican Rep. Mo Brooks, who also ran in the GOP primary, was shortsighted.

But in hidden corners of Washington, including at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Republicans were quietly celebrating Moore’s defeat — itself a sign of a party in crisis and a president unlikely to come to the rescue.

On December 14 2017 10:38 Uldridge wrote:

A lot of internal strife (continuous battles between close tribes), but mostly external factors. When suddenly Dutch, Portuguese, French, English, German and Belgian people start strong arming you because they want the largest piece of the pie or want to squeeze out every ounce of resource, you have a problem. They didn't do anything wrong per se, they just got invaded by people with superior military technology.
I mean, come on, how did the US become colonized and all the indigenous people get wiped out, except for a few token ones?

On December 14 2017 12:04 Mohdoo wrote:

If the tribes were battling and Europeans just did it way better, there's not much of an argument why these notably inferior civilizations should have been left alone.

On December 14 2017 11:26 Uldridge wrote:

You know Europe's had waves of immigration before, right? The Middle Easterners living here are quite mellow. They're kind of a hybrid people, having Western and Middle-Eastern values. We mostly leave each other alone though. I'd say it's where we failed the most: the inability to fix the problem of segregation. But integration seems like an ideal now, because people will always wander towards their ingroups.

Anyway, using the word "surrendering" and "replacing" shows how badly affected you are by right wing propaganda. What's the % of non-native people in European countries you think? And the problem you present is WAY more complex than you think. For starters, we need to deal with a starkly rising aging population, while also having to deal with middle class people not wanting to do the basic jobs (who's gonna wash the fucking dishes, or clean up your shit when every privileged child wants to go to college?). The fact is, we NEED influx, because we won't be able to sustain. The mass immigration was a disaster we couldn't foresee and handled badly, but let me ask you this: do you honestly believe that right wing people would've solved the issue better? Did they have the answers?

We let them in because they needed us. Most of them will be thankful in the future. Only a handful will try to fuck us up. And while they'll cut into us, they won't cut deep enough to hit something vital.

On December 14 2017 12:16 ShakeN_blake wrote:


Yes actually, the right-wing had the correct answers. It involved protecting our borders instead of allowing the mass influx of culturally-incompatible young men to rape our women en masse (see Cologne as just one example), while also dramatically spiking murders and terrorism. What we needed was to limit the welfare state while encouraging Europeans to boost their reproduction rates with lower taxes and an emphasis on family values instead of cancerous third-wave feminism.

Over the next decade, roughly one third of our workforce is going to be replaced by automation. Which jobs in particular? The very ones you described, but also transportation. Y'know, truck driving and other jobs that don't require high education. Why then would you support the mass importation of unskilled third world migrants if they have no job prospects and are destined to leech off the welfare state? That's what happened in Germany: 1.2 million refugees over the past two years and only 38,000 have found jobs. Automation is survival of the fittest because you cannot stop progress. Isn't that what Leftists have been trying to tell every rust-belt coal miner who voted for Trump?

Which begs the question: whose side are you really on when you claim to fight for the working class -- the people already struggling for work in Europe or the hordes of migrants eager to replace them?

Would you be content with African capital cities being flooded with White immigrants until Blacks became minorities? Based on your previous arguments regarding White Colonialism, the answer would be no. So drop your bullshit about right-wing propaganda and admit already that the reverse scenario of Europe being colonized is true. Perhaps if pressured enough, you'll concede that the West IS being conquered, but you're simply indifferent due to a pathological hatred for the White race and it's wretched "patriarchy." I've seen this pattern many times before.



You are so woefully naive. Based on our current trajectory, Western Europe and Sweden are doomed to become an Islamic Caliphate by end of the century thanks to mass migration and significant disparities in reproduction rates. This Pew Research report gives us an appropriate outlook but only scratches the surface since it doesn't account for illegal or non-white immigration in general, only legal-Islamic.

http://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/?utm_content=buffer53c40&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

On December 14 2017 08:53 TheTenthDoc wrote:


I don't think xDaunt thinks Egypt counts as Africa. That or he doesn't believe the Code of Hammurabi was a big deal.

On December 14 2017 12:20 Plansix wrote:

Oh no, they will make up a whopping 14% of the population in 30 years. Or 7%. It could go either way. Fucking crisis time. Not like Europe has been coexistening with Muslims for centuries.

On December 14 2017 12:28 IgnE wrote:


babylon isnt really in africa though?

On December 14 2017 11:23 ticklishmusic wrote:
Asia (China mostly, but also others) also "gifted" Europe with gunpowder, medicine, science and a bunch of other things. It just so happened that for a bunch of complicated historical reasons imperial China didn't bother conquering and enslaving the world, with the excepting of the Yuan dynasty. (White people feel free to say thanks any time).

The Caliphate also gifted the Europeans, who were too busy trying to kill each other, with a bajillion things as well.

On December 14 2017 12:16 ShakeN_blake wrote:
Would you be content with African capital cities being flooded with White immigrants until Blacks became minorities? Based on your previous arguments regarding White Colonialism, the answer would be no. So drop your bullshit about right-wing propaganda and admit already that the reverse scenario of Europe being colonized is true. Perhaps if pressured enough, you'll concede that the West IS being conquered, but you're simply indifferent due to a pathological hatred for the White race and it's wretched "patriarchy." I've seen this pattern many times before.