US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9600

On December 26 2017 08:53 farvacola wrote:

Yeah, I guess I should add that I'm generally appalled with the way that everyone behaves on public streets, cars, motorcycles, and bikes included. There are days when I cannot believe that everyone isn't dead on the side of the road.

On December 26 2017 03:35 Broetchenholer wrote:


Look, millions of flies eat shit, we should all eat shit. Just because less then half of the voters of the "greatest country" voted for a troll does not mean the positions this candidate holds are valid. It just means that there are a lot of people voting for a troll. The fact that you personally have stated over and over how stupid Trump and how bad his administration is shows how you yourself don't believe in it. We understand, there are a group of people who are too stupid to not vote for that populist and actualy believe what he is saying. That is a problem. The problem is not that Mexicans and Muslims are destroying the great USA andthat poor whites are facing racism in their own country, the problem is there are several dozen million people in the States that are too stupid to not be deplorable. And they exist in every country too. Doesn't mean you are now the only vald conservative and everybody who disagrees with you is a leftist.

On December 26 2017 08:13 farvacola wrote:
To make matters worse, many of the cyclists in the wrong I've seen then get super mad at whoever honks at them or otherwise makes it known that that shit won't fly. My two and a half years living in Seattle left a strongly negative impression in that sense.

On December 26 2017 09:04 Rebs wrote:


DC had similar issues and do does Toronto, I neither Bike nor Drive, but on the rare occasion that I do drive for work, the fact that Many (not all) Toronto cyclists dont understand that Bikes also need to obey traffic lows blows my mind..

On December 26 2017 11:42 IgnE wrote:
the one thing that some cyclists do that DOES drive me crazy is riding on sidewalks

On December 26 2017 08:51 uiCk wrote:
Not surprised about the Netherlands, since they have been at it for years.

On December 26 2017 08:35 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Yeah. Trondheim is like, not a good city for bicycles in general. It's super hilly and between October and April the roads are frequently icy. However, the past 5 years has seen a lot of infrastructure development in the sense of adding bicycle lanes (for example we made one of the most trafficked roads a tunnel and then turned one third of the overground road into a bicycle lane), and that kind of stuff makes a huge difference. Before I didn't want to use a bicycle in the more urban areas because I'd either have to use the road or sidewalk, neither of which I'm really comfortable with), but I'm expecting to do more of it the following years.

Culture of properly riding a bike takes time to develop too though. Can't stress enough how nicely bicyclists in the Netherlands behave.

On December 26 2017 20:55 levelping wrote:


Other than getting some domestic support for "yay american first", this is just going to allow China and Russia to expand their spheres of influence.

On December 26 2017 08:35 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Yeah. Trondheim is like, not a good city for bicycles in general. It's super hilly and between October and April the roads are frequently icy. However, the past 5 years has seen a lot of infrastructure development in the sense of adding bicycle lanes (for example we made one of the most trafficked roads a tunnel and then turned one third of the overground road into a bicycle lane), and that kind of stuff makes a huge difference. Before I didn't want to use a bicycle in the more urban areas because I'd either have to use the road or sidewalk, neither of which I'm really comfortable with), but I'm expecting to do more of it the following years.

Culture of properly riding a bike takes time to develop too though. Can't stress enough how nicely bicyclists in the Netherlands behave.

On December 26 2017 21:21 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Trondheim is a bit of a bicycle nightmare to begin with, that’s for sure, but even in Oslo, people don’t bike nearly as much as they could. I would be a perfect candidate for biking to work (would take me 10 minutes really) but both the temperature and the darkness make it a very unappealing option a third of the year. I would assume that this is why Norway doesn’t really have a bicycle culture the way the Netherlands have, and without it, there is no way that cyclers and pedestrians will truly learn how to behave and respect each other. In Paris, the explosion of the cycling culture have led to people to become much better behaved and much more careful.

I feel though that there is a really big political will to make it happen in Norway, at least in the capital, but I’m quite skeptical it will ever really happen.

At least four times in the past week, the Trump administration has linked financial support for the United Nations to compliance with American demands.

First President Trump and his ambassador, Nikki R. Haley, fumed that all countries with seats on the Security Council except the United States had opposed American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his decision to put the United States Embassy there.

Then Mr. Trump dared the General Assembly to follow the Security Council’s example. “Let them vote against us,” he said. “We will save a lot.”

When the General Assembly voted 128 to 9 against the Americans, Ms. Haley said she would take names and remember them the next time the United States was asked for financial help from members who disagreed with its stance on Jerusalem.

The vote against the United States, she said, would make a difference “on how we look at countries who disrespect us at the U.N.”

Then on Sunday, when United Nations members reached agreement on a 2018-2019 budget of $5.4 billion, Ms. Haley issued a statement emphasizing the American role in achieving more than $285 million in cuts, along with hints of more reductions to come.

“We will no longer let the generosity of the American people be taken advantage of or remain unchecked,” Ms. Haley said. In future negotiations, she said, “you can be sure we’ll continue to look at ways to increase the U.N.’s efficiency while protecting our interests.”

It was certainly not the first time Ms. Haley had hinted at using America’s financial leverage to get its way at the United Nations. When she first took the job last January, she warned that “you’re going to see a change in the way we do business.”

And Secretary General António Guterres has said that some parts of the organization must become more efficient.

But the link between American largess and political sympathies at the United Nations has been a recurring theme for Mr. Trump, who once described the 72-year-old organization created after World War II as a sad social club that had squandered its potential.

Many among Mr. Trump’s base of supporters regard the organization as suspiciously anti-American. When the $285 million budget cut was reported on Monday in Breitbart News, a media group that supports Mr. Trump, reader responses were ebullient, with some arguing that America’s entire contribution should be rescinded.

Critics of Mr. Trump’s approach to the United Nations argue that American coercion can work against the United States, by subverting respect for the agreed-upon protocol for financial contributions. They say Mr. Trump should not expect others to follow his lead just because the United States wields the biggest monetary cudgel.

“The hallmark of this administration is not paying attention to the benefits that the United States actually gets in a rule-bound system with international institutions,” Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said after the Jerusalem vote last Thursday. “This is not something we can treat in a purely transactional way.”

Under a formula tied to economic size and other measurements established under an article of the United Nations Charter, the United States is responsible for 22 percent of the United Nations operating budget, the largest contribution. It paid about $1.2 billion of the 2016-2017 budget of $5.4 billion.

The United States also is the largest single financial contributor, at 28.5 percent, to a separate budget for United Nations peacekeeping operations, which totals $6.8 billion in the 2017-2018 budget finalized in June.

Then, as now, Ms. Haley took credit for cuts to that budget, which she said had exceeded $500 million. “We’re only getting started,” she said at the time.

According to the United States Mission, the reductions in the budget reached on Sunday included across-the-board cuts in expenses for travel, consultants and other operating expenses. It also included tightened rules on compensation and new ways to maximize the use of United Nations headquarters in New York to reduce the need for expensive leased space.

Human rights groups reached on Monday reserved judgment on the new budget, saying they needed to see more details on how it might affect the United Nations’ ability to monitor abuses or respond to emergencies — major parts of its work.

They also did not necessarily disagree with Ms. Haley’s appraisal of the cuts. But some worried about the potential impact of future reductions.

“There’s nothing wrong with increasing efficiency and eliminating waste at the U.N.,” said Louis Charbonneau, the United Nations director at Human Rights Watch. “But it’s crucial that we don’t curtail the U.N.’s ability to monitor, investigate and expose human rights abuses or its ability to save the lives of men, women and children worldwide.”

On December 26 2017 21:54 iamthedave wrote:
To the discussion of a few pages now: As an outsider, I think part of the issue is the American left thinks it 'won' the culture war. It's a message I hear frequently, but it's not one I ever really bought. Left wing media certainly seems to dominate in conventional circles, but the American right simply re-invented itself via talk radio, and went a bit more underground. The left largely made right wing talking points into impolite public speech, and that made it harder to actually talk to them, which happened as a result of assuming they'd 'lost' and would slowly fade out over time. Even with Trump in power and an obvious right wing surge happening, that mentality remains. The left thinks it's won the larger war even if it lost this battle, and so the conversation isn't important or even relevant anymore. It's just a matter of time.

Or so I see it, anyway, from observing a lot of these arguments back and forth over the past few hundred pages. For my own money, while I'm left leaning and disagree with a lot of what Danglars/Daunt say, I don't see anything there that's impossible to talk about or even that shocking. Maybe that bit about Africa. That was a bit of a shock.

But in the UK we never had a side 'win' the culture war. The closest was probably Thatcherite Britain and then Blair Britain, where the right and left respectively had a long time in the sun. But UK politics isn't really about 'winning'. At the heart, both sides are fighting to help lead the country, not win a war of ideology. It seems to me a lot of the time that in the US your parties want to win the Presidency so they can say 'OUR IDEOLOGY IS BEST, YAY!' and give little thought to leading/running the country, hence the scorched-earth nature of your politics, where both sides paint the other as cartoon monsters, creating the impression to any sane person that your entire government is led by corrupt, self-interested arseholes. I feel if running the country effectively was really at the heart of their intention they'd be a lot more respectful about their opponents and actually consider working with them instead of both sides strategising government shutdowns, bloc-voting to block as much legislation as possible, and so on and so forth.

All of which is absurd to me. Aren't your senators - regardless of party - meant to be working mostly for the benefit of their constituents anyway?

All the relitigation of the 2016 election misses a pretty important point: While Clinton was a bad candidate, there's no guarantee Sanders would have done much better. I think Trump would have gotten under his skin a lot easier than Clinton, and in America, where the Communist has always been the bigger bogeyman than the Fascist, Sanders has a giant target on his chest, face, and back given how much further left he is than most Democratic candidates. I'm not convinced Sanders could have beat Trump, and the DNC obviously felt the same way. As much as Sanders might have motivated more left and centre people to get to the polls (and young people, obviously), it's equally possible that the threat of a communist takeover of America - which I'm 100% sure would have been the Fox spin - would have done the same thing for the GOP.

EDIT: Not trying to pedestal the UK's political situation or discourse, mind. We have plenty of problems there as well, they're just not as pronounced, in my opinion, as the ones in the US. Brexit has certainly exposed a lot of underlying issues in both parties and our national political discourse.