US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1405

On April 30 2019 12:34 Danglars wrote:
That’s the problem with journalism and fake news. When confronted with actual Democrats that Trump’s seizing on politically, you all try to deny the basic truth, then quickly scramble back to indicting the language used. When pressed on the actual bill, you spit back the Northam spin, and then clam up totally when that parts insufficient.

Trump lives only because his opponents, fairly represented here, can’t approach abortion, immigration, gun control, and the intelligence sector honestly. That’s a major mark in favor of his chances in 2020, despite all the negatives. It’s totally missing if the response was to accurately apprise and reject Northam/Tran’s bill, and fund security measures for the border crisis and visa overstays, and on down the line.

On April 30 2019 02:05 Gorsameth wrote:
Trump is smart/stupid enough to leave that up this his audience to decide based on their own position on the subject.

On April 30 2019 12:40 GreenHorizons wrote:


Luckily for those of us who think both parties are terrible the Democrats your describing (I'm not going to quibble for them) aren't getting their preference for Trumps opponent this election.

On April 30 2019 14:03 JimmiC wrote:
It is interesting how this thread mirrors real life. We have the "far left" and "the far right" agree. And then later on the facts come out and most take it as true and those other both just call it fake news for whatever reason. It is becoming very common. I thought this article about the same thing happening in regards to Syria was interesting. I think that the Russians and other far right people have realized if they blame the americans they can get the far left on board too, and keep doing their stuff.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/middle-east-news/assad-s-war-crimes-bring-far-left-and-right-together-and-putin-smiles-1.6008713

Some leftists still claim Bashar al-Assad is a champion of socialism

The party’s roots are in Pan-Arabism, non-Marxist socialism, and liberation from colonialism, imperialism and
religious sectarianism. Being secular, socialist (though diminishingly so) and dominated by a heterodox Shiite sect, the Alawi, Syria’s lead party has held no appeal for the Sunni majority, which has leaned toward the Muslim Brotherhood.

Syria’s uprising in context


Moreover, Ba’athist Syria remains an organized force against Zionism and for Palestinian national liberation, and it’s not clear that a successor government would follow the same path. Importantly, what would likely follow Assad’s ouster is hardly to be embraced: A country thrown into chaos by competing militias and warlords, where torture and the systematic extermination of the old regime’s supporters run rampant, as has characterized post-Gaddafi Libya, or the installation of a US puppet regime to facilitate the exploitation of Syria’s land, labor and resources by Western captains of industry and titans of finance. A third choice of more space for other political parties and the parliament being given new powers is academic.

The hard-core of the rebellion won’t be satisfied with anything less than the complete extirpation of the Ba’athists and what they stand for: some measure of socialism and the secular state. Neither will the United States, Britain, and France settle for the continuation in Damascus of a state committed to independent, self-directed economic development and alliance with Iran.

On April 30 2019 16:49 Nebuchad wrote:
Theories about how the far left and the far right agree fail because the agreement is always extremely superficial. We both aren't fans of liberals? Okay, that's something, and we can maybe sympathize for a while through a critic of liberal hypocrisy, but at the end of the day we still want opposite things.

It's good to go back at the basics of politics for this and think of the social hierarchy. In the liberal system, there is a hierarchy and the people at the top are the people who have earned it, there is an element of merit. In the far right system, the people at the top are "us", however "us" is defined. In the far left system, we view hierarchy as harmful and work to undermine it.

This is a typical case where the enemy of my enemy isn't my friend; because if there is less hierarchy in society, it's going to be harder for the far right to make it so that them and their friends exert power over others. And if the hierarchy is decided even more arbitrarily and rigidly than it is today, it's going to be harder for us leftists to fight against it.

Fish hook theories are better, because when liberals feel threatened by socialism they have and always will be open to a more fascist system in order to protect the social hierarchy.

On April 30 2019 13:36 Falling wrote:

Then you have a very low view of right wing voters- as though this is the very first time that they have even heard of abortion. Whereas anyone that's been in this for awhile will know what Trump is talking about is not all abortions or even very many. These are exceptional cases, but what is being argued in that speech is the slippery slope is getting more slippery in the most recent years. That's the very obvious meaning if you assume Trump's audience has more than half a brain and have lived for more than a month- it's been a consistent talking point in those circles since that Northam video and others like it came out.

Incidentally, 'not many' in third trimester equals around 5000 per year just due to how many abortions are done annually. Of those, half them are not due medical necessity, but not wanting a child with Down's syndrome.

On April 30 2019 18:21 Gorsameth wrote:
Your right, I do have a very low view of right wing voters. Based on previous evidence of caravans of refugees getting ready to invade America, military exercises in Texas being a setup for them taking away people's guns. A Clinton child sex ring in the back of a pizzeria. Or Obama not being an American citizen. ect, ect.

There is no shortage of evidence that a selection of right wing voters is really this stupid.

Donald Trump, three of his children and seven of his companies have filed a US federal lawsuit against Deutsche Bank and Capital One in an attempt to stop them complying with subpoenas investigating his financial dealings.

Filed late on Monday in a federal court in New York, the lawsuit stated that demands for records by Democrat-controlled house committees have no legitimate or lawful purpose.

“The subpoenas were issued to harass President Donald J Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses, and the private information of the president and his family,” the lawsuit said.

It also complained that the Democrats were hoping to “stumble upon something they can expose publicly and use as a political tool against the president”.

On April 30 2019 13:36 Falling wrote:

Then you have a very low view of right wing voters....

On April 30 2019 17:32 Acrofales wrote:

Mostly I agree, but you use rather sweeping terms that don't necessarily agree with what you're saying: if you define the right as fascists, then yes (and in this case the article is clearly about fascism). But anarcho-capitalists are also part of the "right" in the political spectrum. They see hierarchy as something bad, just as communists do, and organization shoul only be local and only insofar as it can be enforced.

That said, I fully agree on how the comparison obviously breaks down fast. In fascism, war crimes are justified as means to an end. The far left cannot unify war crimes with their ideology (regardless of ideology, crimes against humanity are irreconcilable with any -ism on the left). So that doesn't jive. Then there's the fact that the far right is essentially hero worshipping Putin and Assad, strong men doing what's right for their nation, whereas the far left is calling for pulling out of Syria, because it's "not our war and we only make it worse" as well as pointing out the hipocrisy in what kind of awful murderous assholes we are actually supporting there. So yes, they both want out of Syria, but for different reasons entirely.

It's a bit like how PDeCat and CUP here in Catalonia both want independence from Spain. The former want to continue running the place pretty much exactly the same as before, but want to stop sending taxes to Madrid, whereas the latter want to form an anarcho-communist Utopia. They are currently united in Parliament because the first and most pressing matter they all agree on is to somehow obtain independence, but if and when that happens the coalition will just collapse because they want diametrically opposed things once this first goal had been accomplished.

On April 30 2019 22:26 Plansix wrote:
I am now aware of accelerationists and I can now believe that character would have bought into Thanos’s really dumb plan. Because that shit was dumb, but it isn’t quite as stupid as causing global economic collapse and assuming progress will follow.