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On January 15 2018 13:24 Archeon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 13:16 Aquanim wrote:On January 15 2018 13:09 Archeon wrote:
Yeah and the USA had an economic crisis during Obama's presidency which wasn't the easiest anyways and it was close etc. But come on, she lost a presidential election against a living meme. To be clear, I'm not contending that Clinton was (personally speaking) an amazing campaigner and inspirational figure or something, because I don't think that. I just don't think that "she lost to Trump in 2016" makes her incredibly bad. I'd leave it at "below average". Whoever the Republicans nominated was always going to have a significant environmental advantage and despite Trump's boorishness and unfitness to govern from my perspective there are plenty of people in the United States to whom he is appealing. Just because Trump should not have been able to win in a sane world does not mean he was an utterly trivial opponent in the world in which we in fact live. EDIT: I think you're both still selling short on both the environmental factors and the Republicans' advantage of knowing years in advance they needed to sling mud at Clinton. As long as all we are doing is throwing contradictory opinions at one another though, I don't see much purpose to further discussion, no matter how many times LegalLord insists everybody must agree with him and that he possesses absolute knowledge and truth on this subject. I can understand that standpoint, but I think the average US-citizen is made out less sane than he actually is. I can't count how often I've read "can't I vote for a different candidate?" as a top comment on youtube on related videos. Non-major parties overall roughly tripled the amount of votes they got compared to the three elections before.
I don't know to what degree that is derived from the candidates themselves (and Clinton in particular) and how much from the candidate-independent policies of the major parties in general.
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On January 15 2018 13:24 Archeon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 13:16 Aquanim wrote:On January 15 2018 13:09 Archeon wrote:
Yeah and the USA had an economic crisis during Obama's presidency which wasn't the easiest anyways and it was close etc. But come on, she lost a presidential election against a living meme. To be clear, I'm not contending that Clinton was (personally speaking) an amazing campaigner and inspirational figure or something, because I don't think that. I just don't think that "she lost to Trump in 2016" makes her incredibly bad. I'd leave it at "below average". Whoever the Republicans nominated was always going to have a significant environmental advantage and despite Trump's boorishness and unfitness to govern from my perspective there are plenty of people in the United States to whom he is appealing. Just because Trump should not have been able to win in a sane world does not mean he was an utterly trivial opponent in the world in which we in fact live. EDIT: I think you're both still selling short on both the environmental factors and the Republicans' advantage of knowing years in advance they needed to sling mud at Clinton. As long as all we are doing is throwing contradictory opinions at one another though, I don't see much purpose to further discussion, no matter how many times LegalLord insists everybody must agree with him and that he possesses absolute knowledge and truth on this subject. I can understand that standpoint, but I think the average US-citizen is made out less sane than he actually is. I can't count how often I've read "can't I vote for a different candidate?" as a top comment on youtube on related videos. Non-major parties overall roughly tripled the amount of votes they got compared to the three elections before. And I get that the race was very tight and after GWB Hillary might have won the exact same race. But winning vs Trump isn't that great of an achievement. Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 13:24 TheLordofAwesome wrote:On January 15 2018 12:02 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 06:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 15 2018 06:29 Archeon wrote:
@zlefin:
Thank you for the summary and the clarification. Many democracies I know have direct elections of most/all members of the parliament and let the parliament vote the leading members of the government. I didn't know that the USA's vote of parliament and president are fairly independent, but the USA are one of the oldest modern democracies and afaik didn't reform their voting processes since forever, so deadlocks don't come as a complete surprise. Not that other systems are necessarily more stable or active.
So I guess Obama couldn't force reelections. I read that the reps went pretty partisan, but as mentioned before I've started to doubt most of what I read in our media about republicans. Out of curiosity, why do you doubt your media's reporting on Republicans? Because I haven't read a single bad thing about Obama except for the Snowden affair, which was downplayed and for which the media mostly held Bush responsible, despite Obama having a large influence. In the meantime pretty much every article I read in Spiegel, Focus, Welt, FAZ mentioning republicans portrays them as homophobic, racist, nationalists who are conservative enough to work for the Vatican City State. Before I started watching the original speeches I thought Hillary was a decent candidate, afterwards I deemed the crisis the democratic party is in as larger than the one our SPD is in. And our political party correlation tester tells me I should vote liberal>social>>conservative>national. The Vatican and Catholic voters are actually generally viewed in America as more aligned with the Democratic party in general. All elections in the USA happen on a fixed schedule. Presidential is every 4 years of course. All 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for reelection every 2 years. All 100 senators are up for election every 6 years. But the Senate elections are staggered, so 32 or 34 senators are up for reelection every 2 years, and each senator serves for 6 years. Interestingly, this feature of Senate elections means that the Senate can occasionally have a very distorted representation of popular sentiment relative to the House, depending on which party has more seats in play in each 2 year cycle. This is going on right now, actually, because the Republicans had a ton of seats up for reelection in 2016, which they all won, plus I think they picked up a Democratic seat or two. They also won majority in the House and won the presidency. Now popular sentiment has shifted against Trump, so the Democrats will likely retake the House. But the Senate seats that are up for reelection in 2018 are mostly Democratic (26 out of 34!), so they will have a very tough time winning a majority in the Senate. This is the reason Doug Jones's win in Alabama was such a huge deal. Even 1 more Senate seat for the Democrats right now means a lot, since the 2018 map for them is so bad. If you want to learn more about this, Nate Silver has a great article about it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-democrats-senate-chances-overrated/ Thank you, very informative  Interesting article as well, although not sure how related^^ Didn't know about the details of the senatorial elections, the more I read about the US-system the more I feel like it's designed to pick up slow on change.
Actually the funny thing is that the Vatican is in ways too progressive (climate change and evolution) and socialist (Catholicism is much more socialist leaning than American evangelicalism) for the Republican Party.
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On January 15 2018 13:27 Aquanim wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 13:24 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 13:16 Aquanim wrote:On January 15 2018 13:09 Archeon wrote:
Yeah and the USA had an economic crisis during Obama's presidency which wasn't the easiest anyways and it was close etc. But come on, she lost a presidential election against a living meme. To be clear, I'm not contending that Clinton was (personally speaking) an amazing campaigner and inspirational figure or something, because I don't think that. I just don't think that "she lost to Trump in 2016" makes her incredibly bad. I'd leave it at "below average". Whoever the Republicans nominated was always going to have a significant environmental advantage and despite Trump's boorishness and unfitness to govern from my perspective there are plenty of people in the United States to whom he is appealing. Just because Trump should not have been able to win in a sane world does not mean he was an utterly trivial opponent in the world in which we in fact live. EDIT: I think you're both still selling short on both the environmental factors and the Republicans' advantage of knowing years in advance they needed to sling mud at Clinton. As long as all we are doing is throwing contradictory opinions at one another though, I don't see much purpose to further discussion, no matter how many times LegalLord insists everybody must agree with him and that he possesses absolute knowledge and truth on this subject. I can understand that standpoint, but I think the average US-citizen is made out less sane than he actually is. I can't count how often I've read "can't I vote for a different candidate?" as a top comment on youtube on related videos. Non-major parties overall roughly tripled the amount of votes they got compared to the three elections before. I don't know to what degree that is derived from the candidates themselves (and Clinton in particular) and how much from the candidate-independent policies of the major parties in general.
Neither do I, but I'm fairly convinced that most policies get ignored and personal impressions and a few key policies win the race.
Sadly it's very hard to verify that in one or the other direction, but most platforms for information outside of the internet bottleneck the amount of policies that can be covered. TV-duels, newspaper articles, talk-shows, posters, information stands all have very limited time and are in need to keep the attention of a less interested audience. The general mudslinging also strongly points in that direction.
That being said I've read that some of Hillary's points were too "socialist" for many Americans, she had a pretty progressive program after all. I can definitely imagine Hillary winning vs Trump under better conditions or with a different program, she lost after all only because of the representative voting system.
But Trump was still a candidate that was often laughed at and whom nobody gave a chance ever. He was entertaining and dominant in terms of headlines, but not a good candidate. When he won most people I know reacted with disbelief or mockery. Hell I know a person who voted for him (to "prevent Hillary, I'll just hope Trump isn't as bad as he seems to be") who couldn't believe what was happening. Obama would have likely beaten Trump by a landslide.
On January 15 2018 14:18 levelping wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 13:24 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 13:16 Aquanim wrote:On January 15 2018 13:09 Archeon wrote:
Yeah and the USA had an economic crisis during Obama's presidency which wasn't the easiest anyways and it was close etc. But come on, she lost a presidential election against a living meme. To be clear, I'm not contending that Clinton was (personally speaking) an amazing campaigner and inspirational figure or something, because I don't think that. I just don't think that "she lost to Trump in 2016" makes her incredibly bad. I'd leave it at "below average". Whoever the Republicans nominated was always going to have a significant environmental advantage and despite Trump's boorishness and unfitness to govern from my perspective there are plenty of people in the United States to whom he is appealing. Just because Trump should not have been able to win in a sane world does not mean he was an utterly trivial opponent in the world in which we in fact live. EDIT: I think you're both still selling short on both the environmental factors and the Republicans' advantage of knowing years in advance they needed to sling mud at Clinton. As long as all we are doing is throwing contradictory opinions at one another though, I don't see much purpose to further discussion, no matter how many times LegalLord insists everybody must agree with him and that he possesses absolute knowledge and truth on this subject. I can understand that standpoint, but I think the average US-citizen is made out less sane than he actually is. I can't count how often I've read "can't I vote for a different candidate?" as a top comment on youtube on related videos. Non-major parties overall roughly tripled the amount of votes they got compared to the three elections before. And I get that the race was very tight and after GWB Hillary might have won the exact same race. But winning vs Trump isn't that great of an achievement. On January 15 2018 13:24 TheLordofAwesome wrote:On January 15 2018 12:02 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 06:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 15 2018 06:29 Archeon wrote:
@zlefin:
Thank you for the summary and the clarification. Many democracies I know have direct elections of most/all members of the parliament and let the parliament vote the leading members of the government. I didn't know that the USA's vote of parliament and president are fairly independent, but the USA are one of the oldest modern democracies and afaik didn't reform their voting processes since forever, so deadlocks don't come as a complete surprise. Not that other systems are necessarily more stable or active.
So I guess Obama couldn't force reelections. I read that the reps went pretty partisan, but as mentioned before I've started to doubt most of what I read in our media about republicans. Out of curiosity, why do you doubt your media's reporting on Republicans? Because I haven't read a single bad thing about Obama except for the Snowden affair, which was downplayed and for which the media mostly held Bush responsible, despite Obama having a large influence. In the meantime pretty much every article I read in Spiegel, Focus, Welt, FAZ mentioning republicans portrays them as homophobic, racist, nationalists who are conservative enough to work for the Vatican City State. Before I started watching the original speeches I thought Hillary was a decent candidate, afterwards I deemed the crisis the democratic party is in as larger than the one our SPD is in. And our political party correlation tester tells me I should vote liberal>social>>conservative>national. The Vatican and Catholic voters are actually generally viewed in America as more aligned with the Democratic party in general. All elections in the USA happen on a fixed schedule. Presidential is every 4 years of course. All 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for reelection every 2 years. All 100 senators are up for election every 6 years. But the Senate elections are staggered, so 32 or 34 senators are up for reelection every 2 years, and each senator serves for 6 years. Interestingly, this feature of Senate elections means that the Senate can occasionally have a very distorted representation of popular sentiment relative to the House, depending on which party has more seats in play in each 2 year cycle. This is going on right now, actually, because the Republicans had a ton of seats up for reelection in 2016, which they all won, plus I think they picked up a Democratic seat or two. They also won majority in the House and won the presidency. Now popular sentiment has shifted against Trump, so the Democrats will likely retake the House. But the Senate seats that are up for reelection in 2018 are mostly Democratic (26 out of 34!), so they will have a very tough time winning a majority in the Senate. This is the reason Doug Jones's win in Alabama was such a huge deal. Even 1 more Senate seat for the Democrats right now means a lot, since the 2018 map for them is so bad. If you want to learn more about this, Nate Silver has a great article about it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-democrats-senate-chances-overrated/ Thank you, very informative Interesting article as well, although not sure how related^^ Didn't know about the details of the senatorial elections, the more I read about the US-system the more I feel like it's designed to pick up slow on change. Actually the funny thing is that the Vatican is in ways too progressive (climate change and evolution) and socialist (Catholicism is much more socialist leaning than American evangelicalism) for the Republican Party.
That always depends a bit whether we are talking about internal structure or outside matters and who's talking. The pope doesn't seem to represent the majority of the Roman Curia atm. But yes, it's quite ironical
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On January 15 2018 14:27 Archeon wrote:That always depends a bit whether we are talking about internal structure or outside matters and who's talking. The pope doesn't seem to represent the majority of the Roman Curia atm. But yes, it's quite ironical
I think we are broadly in agreement on this but I just wanted to clarify:
On evolution the Church has said consistently (I think for the last four popes) that evolution is not inconsistent with the bible. Francis definitely is more progressive than his predecessor, but I also don't think you can say that he's an anomaly.
I actually have no idea why evolution is such a sore point for evangelicals.
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On January 15 2018 13:24 TheLordofAwesome wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 12:02 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 06:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 15 2018 06:29 Archeon wrote:
@zlefin:
Thank you for the summary and the clarification. Many democracies I know have direct elections of most/all members of the parliament and let the parliament vote the leading members of the government. I didn't know that the USA's vote of parliament and president are fairly independent, but the USA are one of the oldest modern democracies and afaik didn't reform their voting processes since forever, so deadlocks don't come as a complete surprise. Not that other systems are necessarily more stable or active.
So I guess Obama couldn't force reelections. I read that the reps went pretty partisan, but as mentioned before I've started to doubt most of what I read in our media about republicans. Out of curiosity, why do you doubt your media's reporting on Republicans? Because I haven't read a single bad thing about Obama except for the Snowden affair, which was downplayed and for which the media mostly held Bush responsible, despite Obama having a large influence. In the meantime pretty much every article I read in Spiegel, Focus, Welt, FAZ mentioning republicans portrays them as homophobic, racist, nationalists who are conservative enough to work for the Vatican City State. Before I started watching the original speeches I thought Hillary was a decent candidate, afterwards I deemed the crisis the democratic party is in as larger than the one our SPD is in. And our political party correlation tester tells me I should vote liberal>social>>conservative>national. The Vatican and Catholic voters are actually generally viewed in America as more aligned with the Democratic party in general. All elections in the USA happen on a fixed schedule. Presidential is every 4 years of course. All 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for reelection every 2 years. All 100 senators are up for election every 6 years. But the Senate elections are staggered, so 32 or 34 senators are up for reelection every 2 years, and each senator serves for 6 years. Interestingly, this feature of Senate elections means that the Senate can occasionally have a very distorted representation of popular sentiment relative to the House, depending on which party has more seats in play in each 2 year cycle. This is going on right now, actually, because the Republicans had a ton of seats up for reelection in 2016, which they all won, plus I think they picked up a Democratic seat or two. They also won majority in the House and won the presidency. Now popular sentiment has shifted against Trump, so the Democrats will likely retake the House. But the Senate seats that are up for reelection in 2018 are mostly Democratic (26 out of 34!), so they will have a very tough time winning a majority in the Senate. This is the reason Doug Jones's win in Alabama was such a huge deal. Even 1 more Senate seat for the Democrats right now means a lot, since the 2018 map for them is so bad. If you want to learn more about this, Nate Silver has a great article about it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-democrats-senate-chances-overrated/
I disagree. Many Catholics are single-issue abortion voters.
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iirc the Catholic vote goes to the winner pretty reliably. At least the white Catholic vote.
edit: actually that might be backwards. overall Catholic goes to winner, except gore/Bush and white Catholic more gop leaning.
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On January 15 2018 14:18 levelping wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 13:24 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 13:16 Aquanim wrote:On January 15 2018 13:09 Archeon wrote:
Yeah and the USA had an economic crisis during Obama's presidency which wasn't the easiest anyways and it was close etc. But come on, she lost a presidential election against a living meme. To be clear, I'm not contending that Clinton was (personally speaking) an amazing campaigner and inspirational figure or something, because I don't think that. I just don't think that "she lost to Trump in 2016" makes her incredibly bad. I'd leave it at "below average". Whoever the Republicans nominated was always going to have a significant environmental advantage and despite Trump's boorishness and unfitness to govern from my perspective there are plenty of people in the United States to whom he is appealing. Just because Trump should not have been able to win in a sane world does not mean he was an utterly trivial opponent in the world in which we in fact live. EDIT: I think you're both still selling short on both the environmental factors and the Republicans' advantage of knowing years in advance they needed to sling mud at Clinton. As long as all we are doing is throwing contradictory opinions at one another though, I don't see much purpose to further discussion, no matter how many times LegalLord insists everybody must agree with him and that he possesses absolute knowledge and truth on this subject. I can understand that standpoint, but I think the average US-citizen is made out less sane than he actually is. I can't count how often I've read "can't I vote for a different candidate?" as a top comment on youtube on related videos. Non-major parties overall roughly tripled the amount of votes they got compared to the three elections before. And I get that the race was very tight and after GWB Hillary might have won the exact same race. But winning vs Trump isn't that great of an achievement. On January 15 2018 13:24 TheLordofAwesome wrote:On January 15 2018 12:02 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 06:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 15 2018 06:29 Archeon wrote:
@zlefin:
Thank you for the summary and the clarification. Many democracies I know have direct elections of most/all members of the parliament and let the parliament vote the leading members of the government. I didn't know that the USA's vote of parliament and president are fairly independent, but the USA are one of the oldest modern democracies and afaik didn't reform their voting processes since forever, so deadlocks don't come as a complete surprise. Not that other systems are necessarily more stable or active.
So I guess Obama couldn't force reelections. I read that the reps went pretty partisan, but as mentioned before I've started to doubt most of what I read in our media about republicans. Out of curiosity, why do you doubt your media's reporting on Republicans? Because I haven't read a single bad thing about Obama except for the Snowden affair, which was downplayed and for which the media mostly held Bush responsible, despite Obama having a large influence. In the meantime pretty much every article I read in Spiegel, Focus, Welt, FAZ mentioning republicans portrays them as homophobic, racist, nationalists who are conservative enough to work for the Vatican City State. Before I started watching the original speeches I thought Hillary was a decent candidate, afterwards I deemed the crisis the democratic party is in as larger than the one our SPD is in. And our political party correlation tester tells me I should vote liberal>social>>conservative>national. The Vatican and Catholic voters are actually generally viewed in America as more aligned with the Democratic party in general. All elections in the USA happen on a fixed schedule. Presidential is every 4 years of course. All 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for reelection every 2 years. All 100 senators are up for election every 6 years. But the Senate elections are staggered, so 32 or 34 senators are up for reelection every 2 years, and each senator serves for 6 years. Interestingly, this feature of Senate elections means that the Senate can occasionally have a very distorted representation of popular sentiment relative to the House, depending on which party has more seats in play in each 2 year cycle. This is going on right now, actually, because the Republicans had a ton of seats up for reelection in 2016, which they all won, plus I think they picked up a Democratic seat or two. They also won majority in the House and won the presidency. Now popular sentiment has shifted against Trump, so the Democrats will likely retake the House. But the Senate seats that are up for reelection in 2018 are mostly Democratic (26 out of 34!), so they will have a very tough time winning a majority in the Senate. This is the reason Doug Jones's win in Alabama was such a huge deal. Even 1 more Senate seat for the Democrats right now means a lot, since the 2018 map for them is so bad. If you want to learn more about this, Nate Silver has a great article about it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-democrats-senate-chances-overrated/ Thank you, very informative Interesting article as well, although not sure how related^^ Didn't know about the details of the senatorial elections, the more I read about the US-system the more I feel like it's designed to pick up slow on change. Actually the funny thing is that the Vatican is in ways too progressive (climate change and evolution) and socialist (Catholicism is much more socialist leaning than American evangelicalism) for the Republican Party.
That just makes the point even better. In Europe, we view the Vatican as the bastion of conservativism. Even with Pope Francis, the Vatican's stance on women's rights, gay rights, drugs and most other social issues is about the same as it was in the time of Paul (or so is the image, anyway).
So you coming our and saying that actually Catholics are too progressive for the Republican party, just further emphasizes how far removed the Republican party is from mainstream European discourse.
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It's safe to say he means the pope and not the institution
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On January 15 2018 12:02 Archeon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 06:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 15 2018 06:29 Archeon wrote:
@zlefin:
Thank you for the summary and the clarification. Many democracies I know have direct elections of most/all members of the parliament and let the parliament vote the leading members of the government. I didn't know that the USA's vote of parliament and president are fairly independent, but the USA are one of the oldest modern democracies and afaik didn't reform their voting processes since forever, so deadlocks don't come as a complete surprise. Not that other systems are necessarily more stable or active.
So I guess Obama couldn't force reelections. I read that the reps went pretty partisan, but as mentioned before I've started to doubt most of what I read in our media about republicans. Out of curiosity, why do you doubt your media's reporting on Republicans? Because I haven't read a single bad thing about Obama except for the Snowden affair, which was downplayed and for which the media mostly held Bush responsible, despite Obama having a large influence. In the meantime pretty much every article I read in Spiegel, Focus, Welt, FAZ mentioning republicans portrays them as homophobic, racist, nationalists who are conservative enough to work for the Vatican City State. Before I started watching the original speeches I thought Hillary was a decent candidate, afterwards I deemed the crisis the democratic party is in as larger than the one our SPD is in. And our political party correlation tester tells me I should vote liberal>social>>conservative>national.
So look at the facts, the policies that Republicans are pushing and enacting.
Red states fighting tooth and nail against gay marriage.
The constant attempts at repression of black voters by red states.
Their tax bill full of temporary cuts for everyone to sell it and permanent cuts for the rich, complete with provisions tailored to individual congressmen to literally buy their vote.
I'm more then willing to believe the media is biased for Democrats and that they downplay some of things that happen. But you don't need to demonize Republicans to make them look bad, you just have to look at their actions for that.
Even the US conservatives in this thread don't believe there are any 'good' Republicans left. Danglers (I think it was him, my apologies if it wasn't) could only name 1 (Rand Paul) and basically considered the rest of the party to be RINO"s (Republican in name only) there to just line their own pockets.
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I like Elizabeth Bruenig's columns, she's a catholic who supports leftwing economic policy. I'm not religious, and usually religious people get on my nerves, but I think there is a lot of value in the Christian belief system. These notions of meritocracy are so ingrained in the USA, and you hear so often about people who are deserving and hardworking. It infects the debate on immigration too, we should protect the Dreamers because they are all good citizens who have done nothing wrong, meanwhile deporting people with minor criminal records to El Salvador is perfectly acceptable as a compromise. I find it very refreshing to actually hear people say that we are all equal before God, and we are all equally (un)deserving, -- even if God is a human invention.
example column
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This is where our political system is at, well we had a semi good run...
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On January 15 2018 13:00 Archeon wrote:
alright, I take it back, a poor chance then xD
But damn, she lost against Trump, that basically says everything you need to know.
Ofc there are factors like providing/gathering funding, image creation, tour planning and execution etc. I get that my post above was oversimplifying the matter a lot. But generally leaving a bad impression is something that makes winning an election very hard.
keep in mind - the entire republican primary field also lost to trump. (16 other candidates, some of whom were rather weak ofc, but some of whom were people you'd reasonably expect to be candidates)
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On January 15 2018 21:34 Grumbels wrote:I like Elizabeth Bruenig's columns, she's a catholic who supports leftwing economic policy. I'm not religious, and usually religious people get on my nerves, but I think there is a lot of value in the Christian belief system. These notions of meritocracy are so ingrained in the USA, and you hear so often about people who are deserving and hardworking. It infects the debate on immigration too, we should protect the Dreamers because they are all good citizens who have done nothing wrong, meanwhile deporting people with minor criminal records to El Salvador is perfectly acceptable as a compromise. I find it very refreshing to actually hear people say that we are all equal before God, and we are all equally (un)deserving, -- even if God is a human invention. example column
I think Catholics in general are very much more supportive of leftwing economic policy. Catholic mass always talks about the virtue of the poor, how being rich is bad, etc..
As I understand all this gets a bit lost in protestant, and especially prosperity gospel communities.
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On January 15 2018 21:34 Grumbels wrote:I like Elizabeth Bruenig's columns, she's a catholic who supports leftwing economic policy. I'm not religious, and usually religious people get on my nerves, but I think there is a lot of value in the Christian belief system. These notions of meritocracy are so ingrained in the USA, and you hear so often about people who are deserving and hardworking. It infects the debate on immigration too, we should protect the Dreamers because they are all good citizens who have done nothing wrong, meanwhile deporting people with minor criminal records to El Salvador is perfectly acceptable as a compromise. I find it very refreshing to actually hear people say that we are all equal before God, and we are all equally (un)deserving, -- even if God is a human invention. example column
The notion of meritocracy is ingrained, its the American Dream after all.
However reality may well be different. Last time I checked the US didn't do all that well on social mobility.
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On January 15 2018 13:02 Aquanim wrote:
She lost against Trump after eight years of Democratic presidency. Context matters. Historically parties have found it difficult to retain control of the White House after two terms, independent of the quality of candidates presented.
EDIT: As a thought exercise, picture a theoretical HRC vs Trump general election in 2008 after the GWB presidency.
It's interesting to think about but Trump also knows the game and always wanted to run as the opposition/change candidate and would've run as a Democrat in 2008 and in that case probably not gotten through Obama in the primaries either (as HRC didn't).
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Edit: nevermind, I didnt see the embedded tweet
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On January 15 2018 19:51 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 12:02 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 06:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 15 2018 06:29 Archeon wrote:
@zlefin:
Thank you for the summary and the clarification. Many democracies I know have direct elections of most/all members of the parliament and let the parliament vote the leading members of the government. I didn't know that the USA's vote of parliament and president are fairly independent, but the USA are one of the oldest modern democracies and afaik didn't reform their voting processes since forever, so deadlocks don't come as a complete surprise. Not that other systems are necessarily more stable or active.
So I guess Obama couldn't force reelections. I read that the reps went pretty partisan, but as mentioned before I've started to doubt most of what I read in our media about republicans. Out of curiosity, why do you doubt your media's reporting on Republicans? Because I haven't read a single bad thing about Obama except for the Snowden affair, which was downplayed and for which the media mostly held Bush responsible, despite Obama having a large influence. In the meantime pretty much every article I read in Spiegel, Focus, Welt, FAZ mentioning republicans portrays them as homophobic, racist, nationalists who are conservative enough to work for the Vatican City State. Before I started watching the original speeches I thought Hillary was a decent candidate, afterwards I deemed the crisis the democratic party is in as larger than the one our SPD is in. And our political party correlation tester tells me I should vote liberal>social>>conservative>national. So look at the facts, the policies that Republicans are pushing and enacting. Red states fighting tooth and nail against gay marriage. The constant attempts at repression of black voters by red states. Their tax bill full of temporary cuts for everyone to sell it and permanent cuts for the rich, complete with provisions tailored to individual congressmen to literally buy their vote. I'm more then willing to believe the media is biased for Democrats and that they downplay some of things that happen. But you don't need to demonize Republicans to make them look bad, you just have to look at their actions for that. Even the US conservatives in this thread don't believe there are any 'good' Republicans left. Danglers (I think it was him, my apologies if it wasn't) could only name 1 (Rand Paul) and basically considered the rest of the party to be RINO"s (Republican in name only) there to just line their own pockets.
No, that was not me.
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On January 15 2018 15:26 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2018 13:24 TheLordofAwesome wrote:On January 15 2018 12:02 Archeon wrote:On January 15 2018 06:36 Gorsameth wrote:On January 15 2018 06:29 Archeon wrote:
@zlefin:
Thank you for the summary and the clarification. Many democracies I know have direct elections of most/all members of the parliament and let the parliament vote the leading members of the government. I didn't know that the USA's vote of parliament and president are fairly independent, but the USA are one of the oldest modern democracies and afaik didn't reform their voting processes since forever, so deadlocks don't come as a complete surprise. Not that other systems are necessarily more stable or active.
So I guess Obama couldn't force reelections. I read that the reps went pretty partisan, but as mentioned before I've started to doubt most of what I read in our media about republicans. Out of curiosity, why do you doubt your media's reporting on Republicans? Because I haven't read a single bad thing about Obama except for the Snowden affair, which was downplayed and for which the media mostly held Bush responsible, despite Obama having a large influence. In the meantime pretty much every article I read in Spiegel, Focus, Welt, FAZ mentioning republicans portrays them as homophobic, racist, nationalists who are conservative enough to work for the Vatican City State. Before I started watching the original speeches I thought Hillary was a decent candidate, afterwards I deemed the crisis the democratic party is in as larger than the one our SPD is in. And our political party correlation tester tells me I should vote liberal>social>>conservative>national. The Vatican and Catholic voters are actually generally viewed in America as more aligned with the Democratic party in general. All elections in the USA happen on a fixed schedule. Presidential is every 4 years of course. All 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for reelection every 2 years. All 100 senators are up for election every 6 years. But the Senate elections are staggered, so 32 or 34 senators are up for reelection every 2 years, and each senator serves for 6 years. Interestingly, this feature of Senate elections means that the Senate can occasionally have a very distorted representation of popular sentiment relative to the House, depending on which party has more seats in play in each 2 year cycle. This is going on right now, actually, because the Republicans had a ton of seats up for reelection in 2016, which they all won, plus I think they picked up a Democratic seat or two. They also won majority in the House and won the presidency. Now popular sentiment has shifted against Trump, so the Democrats will likely retake the House. But the Senate seats that are up for reelection in 2018 are mostly Democratic (26 out of 34!), so they will have a very tough time winning a majority in the Senate. This is the reason Doug Jones's win in Alabama was such a huge deal. Even 1 more Senate seat for the Democrats right now means a lot, since the 2018 map for them is so bad. If you want to learn more about this, Nate Silver has a great article about it: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-democrats-senate-chances-overrated/ I disagree. Many Catholics are single-issue abortion voters.
Which, up until the 2016 election, caused Democrats to grant pro-life concessions in the party platform.
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That sounds like an oversimplification of something I would've said because I get mistaken for a conservative and Rand Paul is my favorite and I don't like all that many others.
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On January 15 2018 23:39 oBlade wrote:
That sounds like an oversimplification of something I would've said because I get mistaken for a conservative and Rand Paul is my favorite and I don't like all that many others.
Would you consider yourself a libertarian then?
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EPT
