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Now that we have a new thread, 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 complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
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On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On March 05 2020 03:31 LegalLord wrote:On March 05 2020 03:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't think Biden is 0.01% better than Trump lol, I think he's approximately 94.35% better. So I entirely disagree with the premise. If people think he's virtually identical then whatever, but I really don't see how they are. That argument would resonate far better with me in a Hillary vs Jeb election than a Trump vs Biden one.
Could see it for Trump vs Bloomberg tho.
I suppose it depends on what metrics you use. In terms of policy, Trump has hardly differed much from the standard Bush-style conservative approach. Where he has differed, it's mostly been things like scrapping trade deals, which for the most part is a large net positive. He certainly does come off as far more of a clown than your average candidate, but I hope that's not the supposed difference between him and someone like Jeb. And I certainly doubt you meant that Clinton and Biden are significantly different candidates, because they hardly seem to be in any meaningful sense. I'm struggling to really see what materially different things Biden is supposedly going to do that are to be cheered on. He's notionally going to be more supportive of left-leaning things like climate policy, taxing the wealthy, and civil rights, but with the exception of perhaps the latter it's mostly going to indeed just be notional. Hardly a resounding win to be cheering on - or, in fact, a deep motivator for people who actually care about these issues to be desperate to replace Trump with this other highly questionable candidate for. Frankly the argument seems to be "we need to defeat Trump at all costs" among the rank-and-file Democrats. To what end, of course, is never particularly well explained. Stop Trump now, figure out why it was such a big deal to do so later. I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency. I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period. On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent.
Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters.
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On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:
Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent.
The answer is a third Trump term.
The thing that is uniquely problematic about Trump is his sustained attack on the institutions whose role is to limit his power. Regardless of what you think about any particular issue, the person whose job is to direct and implement a country's system of laws should believe in the rule of law. It is clear that Trump does so only when those laws are convenient to him.
I can't overstate the threat posed by a president with that stance backed by a legislative and judiciary beholden to him. McConnell's accumulation of powers in the senate and the utterly dysfunctional supreme court nomination process have destroyed the two essential bulwarks against an authoritarian president. There is very little else left.
I think it is an open question whether Trump would even concede if he were to lose the 2020 election. I think it is almost certain that neither he nor his successor will concede in 2024. This is the strongest argument for voting him out that I can imagine.
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
- James Madison: Federalist No. 48, February 1, 1788
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On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On March 05 2020 03:31 LegalLord wrote:On March 05 2020 03:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't think Biden is 0.01% better than Trump lol, I think he's approximately 94.35% better. So I entirely disagree with the premise. If people think he's virtually identical then whatever, but I really don't see how they are. That argument would resonate far better with me in a Hillary vs Jeb election than a Trump vs Biden one.
Could see it for Trump vs Bloomberg tho.
I suppose it depends on what metrics you use. In terms of policy, Trump has hardly differed much from the standard Bush-style conservative approach. Where he has differed, it's mostly been things like scrapping trade deals, which for the most part is a large net positive. He certainly does come off as far more of a clown than your average candidate, but I hope that's not the supposed difference between him and someone like Jeb. And I certainly doubt you meant that Clinton and Biden are significantly different candidates, because they hardly seem to be in any meaningful sense. I'm struggling to really see what materially different things Biden is supposedly going to do that are to be cheered on. He's notionally going to be more supportive of left-leaning things like climate policy, taxing the wealthy, and civil rights, but with the exception of perhaps the latter it's mostly going to indeed just be notional. Hardly a resounding win to be cheering on - or, in fact, a deep motivator for people who actually care about these issues to be desperate to replace Trump with this other highly questionable candidate for. Frankly the argument seems to be "we need to defeat Trump at all costs" among the rank-and-file Democrats. To what end, of course, is never particularly well explained. Stop Trump now, figure out why it was such a big deal to do so later. I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency. I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period. On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters.
Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president.
Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here?
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On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On March 05 2020 03:31 LegalLord wrote:On March 05 2020 03:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't think Biden is 0.01% better than Trump lol, I think he's approximately 94.35% better. So I entirely disagree with the premise. If people think he's virtually identical then whatever, but I really don't see how they are. That argument would resonate far better with me in a Hillary vs Jeb election than a Trump vs Biden one.
Could see it for Trump vs Bloomberg tho.
I suppose it depends on what metrics you use. In terms of policy, Trump has hardly differed much from the standard Bush-style conservative approach. Where he has differed, it's mostly been things like scrapping trade deals, which for the most part is a large net positive. He certainly does come off as far more of a clown than your average candidate, but I hope that's not the supposed difference between him and someone like Jeb. And I certainly doubt you meant that Clinton and Biden are significantly different candidates, because they hardly seem to be in any meaningful sense. I'm struggling to really see what materially different things Biden is supposedly going to do that are to be cheered on. He's notionally going to be more supportive of left-leaning things like climate policy, taxing the wealthy, and civil rights, but with the exception of perhaps the latter it's mostly going to indeed just be notional. Hardly a resounding win to be cheering on - or, in fact, a deep motivator for people who actually care about these issues to be desperate to replace Trump with this other highly questionable candidate for. Frankly the argument seems to be "we need to defeat Trump at all costs" among the rank-and-file Democrats. To what end, of course, is never particularly well explained. Stop Trump now, figure out why it was such a big deal to do so later. I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency. I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period. On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here?
That both can be so bad they are unacceptable. Some people wouldn't support Trump if he put a D next to his name and Republicans nominated someone worse, but I'd argue the people that think the argument you're making is convincing probably would (what else would they do right?).
Many of the camps are from the Obama administration, the argument over sanitation is from the Obama administration, and Hillary's plan was to use their fruitless suffering/deaths to send a message to their parents. The foreign policy motivating the immigration was both perpetuated, and in cases like Honduras, directly related to his state department (Under Hillary).
Biden was VP through all of that and is more of a conservative than Obama, so it is reasonable to judge that he would likely be worse than Obama (despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, which will evaporate in a general election where he would tack right anyway).
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Canada5565 Posts
On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On March 05 2020 03:31 LegalLord wrote:On March 05 2020 03:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't think Biden is 0.01% better than Trump lol, I think he's approximately 94.35% better. So I entirely disagree with the premise. If people think he's virtually identical then whatever, but I really don't see how they are. That argument would resonate far better with me in a Hillary vs Jeb election than a Trump vs Biden one.
Could see it for Trump vs Bloomberg tho.
I suppose it depends on what metrics you use. In terms of policy, Trump has hardly differed much from the standard Bush-style conservative approach. Where he has differed, it's mostly been things like scrapping trade deals, which for the most part is a large net positive. He certainly does come off as far more of a clown than your average candidate, but I hope that's not the supposed difference between him and someone like Jeb. And I certainly doubt you meant that Clinton and Biden are significantly different candidates, because they hardly seem to be in any meaningful sense. I'm struggling to really see what materially different things Biden is supposedly going to do that are to be cheered on. He's notionally going to be more supportive of left-leaning things like climate policy, taxing the wealthy, and civil rights, but with the exception of perhaps the latter it's mostly going to indeed just be notional. Hardly a resounding win to be cheering on - or, in fact, a deep motivator for people who actually care about these issues to be desperate to replace Trump with this other highly questionable candidate for. Frankly the argument seems to be "we need to defeat Trump at all costs" among the rank-and-file Democrats. To what end, of course, is never particularly well explained. Stop Trump now, figure out why it was such a big deal to do so later. I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency. I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period. On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? I don't see how it's Trump's fault that they suffer so terribly in Mexico. Also don't see why Central Americans should travel through Mexico and try for USA asylum. Sounds a lot like what's happening in Greece. Lawless Mexico border towns, at least, present a good case for building a wall.
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On March 05 2020 13:04 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On March 05 2020 03:31 LegalLord wrote:
[quote]
I suppose it depends on what metrics you use. In terms of policy, Trump has hardly differed much from the standard Bush-style conservative approach. Where he has differed, it's mostly been things like scrapping trade deals, which for the most part is a large net positive. He certainly does come off as far more of a clown than your average candidate, but I hope that's not the supposed difference between him and someone like Jeb. And I certainly doubt you meant that Clinton and Biden are significantly different candidates, because they hardly seem to be in any meaningful sense.
I'm struggling to really see what materially different things Biden is supposedly going to do that are to be cheered on. He's notionally going to be more supportive of left-leaning things like climate policy, taxing the wealthy, and civil rights, but with the exception of perhaps the latter it's mostly going to indeed just be notional. Hardly a resounding win to be cheering on - or, in fact, a deep motivator for people who actually care about these issues to be desperate to replace Trump with this other highly questionable candidate for.
Frankly the argument seems to be "we need to defeat Trump at all costs" among the rank-and-file Democrats. To what end, of course, is never particularly well explained. Stop Trump now, figure out why it was such a big deal to do so later. I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency. I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period. On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? That both can be so bad they are unacceptable. Some people wouldn't support Trump if he put a D next to his name and Republicans nominated someone worse, but I'd argue the people that think the argument you're making is convincing probably would (what else would they do right?). Many of the camps are from the Obama administration, the argument over sanitation is from the Obama administration, and Hillary's plan was to use their fruitless suffering/deaths to send a message to their parents. The foreign policy motivating the immigration was both perpetuated, and in cases like Honduras, directly related to his state department (Under Hillary). Biden was VP through all of that and is more of a conservative than Obama, so it is reasonable to judge that he would likely be worse than Obama (despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, which will evaporate in a general election when he tacks right anyway).
“Both are so bad they’re unacceptable” is a very different argument than “they’re basically identical,” though. I figured you would (rightly) point out that for all the atrocities of the Trump administration, there have certainly been many atrocities committed by the US prior to Trump, including many that were not stopped by the Obama administration. The morality here is complex, and I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer to when it is reasonable to tolerate some atrocities in the interest of stopping others. But from where I’m sitting, it seems like anyone who doesn’t see a moral difference between the actions of Obama and Trump must be either powerfully uninformed or deeply apathetic to the suffering of other human beings.
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On March 05 2020 13:04 Xxio wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On March 05 2020 03:31 LegalLord wrote:
[quote]
I suppose it depends on what metrics you use. In terms of policy, Trump has hardly differed much from the standard Bush-style conservative approach. Where he has differed, it's mostly been things like scrapping trade deals, which for the most part is a large net positive. He certainly does come off as far more of a clown than your average candidate, but I hope that's not the supposed difference between him and someone like Jeb. And I certainly doubt you meant that Clinton and Biden are significantly different candidates, because they hardly seem to be in any meaningful sense.
I'm struggling to really see what materially different things Biden is supposedly going to do that are to be cheered on. He's notionally going to be more supportive of left-leaning things like climate policy, taxing the wealthy, and civil rights, but with the exception of perhaps the latter it's mostly going to indeed just be notional. Hardly a resounding win to be cheering on - or, in fact, a deep motivator for people who actually care about these issues to be desperate to replace Trump with this other highly questionable candidate for.
Frankly the argument seems to be "we need to defeat Trump at all costs" among the rank-and-file Democrats. To what end, of course, is never particularly well explained. Stop Trump now, figure out why it was such a big deal to do so later. I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency. I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period. On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? I don't see how it's Trump's fault that they suffer so terribly in Mexico. Also don't see why Central Americans should travel through Mexico and try for USA asylum. Sounds a lot like what's happening in Greece. Lawless Mexico border towns, at least, present a good case for building a wall.
This is a big topic, but I suppose the place to start is that treating asylum seekers in this way is almost certainly a violation of US and international law. More essentially, it’s a violation of rule of law and due process. There are applicants who won their court case seeking asylum, yet ICE still wouldn’t let them in! Absent any legal justification, they invented a future court date and told the applicants to come back on that day, but since the court date was fake, nothing will have changed when they come back.
So they wait in legal limbo, shitting in the woods and drinking contaminated water because the administration has no regard for US law if it contradicts their goals, and the courts haven’t decided what to do about it yet. They’re desperate, they’re vulnerable, and they’re there as a direct result of Trump’s policies. How is that not Trump’s fault?
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On March 05 2020 13:32 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 13:04 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency.
I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period.
On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? That both can be so bad they are unacceptable. Some people wouldn't support Trump if he put a D next to his name and Republicans nominated someone worse, but I'd argue the people that think the argument you're making is convincing probably would (what else would they do right?). Many of the camps are from the Obama administration, the argument over sanitation is from the Obama administration, and Hillary's plan was to use their fruitless suffering/deaths to send a message to their parents. The foreign policy motivating the immigration was both perpetuated, and in cases like Honduras, directly related to his state department (Under Hillary). Biden was VP through all of that and is more of a conservative than Obama, so it is reasonable to judge that he would likely be worse than Obama (despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, which will evaporate in a general election when he tacks right anyway). “Both are so bad they’re unacceptable” is a very different argument than “they’re basically identical,” though. I figured you would (rightly) point out that for all the atrocities of the Trump administration, there have certainly been many atrocities committed by the US prior to Trump, including many that were not stopped by the Obama administration. The morality here is complex, and I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer to when it is reasonable to tolerate some atrocities in the interest of stopping others. But from where I’m sitting, it seems like anyone who doesn’t see a moral difference between the actions of Obama and Trump must be either powerfully uninformed or deeply apathetic to the suffering of other human beings.
I don't think people literally see no difference, I think when people say that they are trying to express the argument I presented more or less. For many it is like choosing between drinking a shit shake with 50% shit and another with 75% shit or just taking your chances kicking the asses of the guys trying to force you to choose, even if you're outnumbered.
If you have good healthcare and dead palate maybe it's worth choking down another 50-50 shit shake to dodge the 75% one but eventually the people that always get stuck with the shit half of the shake are going to be willing to risk the 75% shake getting force fed to them to fight for no more shit shakes period.
The guys drinking the milkshake half complaining about some shit frothing up around their portion or them losing their cream above the shit layer are the people that I find to be powerfully uninformed or (as Baldwin puts it) 'moral monsters'
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On March 05 2020 13:54 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 13:32 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 13:04 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:
[quote]
This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it.
One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].”
To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind.
I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises.
This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection!
But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? That both can be so bad they are unacceptable. Some people wouldn't support Trump if he put a D next to his name and Republicans nominated someone worse, but I'd argue the people that think the argument you're making is convincing probably would (what else would they do right?). Many of the camps are from the Obama administration, the argument over sanitation is from the Obama administration, and Hillary's plan was to use their fruitless suffering/deaths to send a message to their parents. The foreign policy motivating the immigration was both perpetuated, and in cases like Honduras, directly related to his state department (Under Hillary). Biden was VP through all of that and is more of a conservative than Obama, so it is reasonable to judge that he would likely be worse than Obama (despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, which will evaporate in a general election when he tacks right anyway). “Both are so bad they’re unacceptable” is a very different argument than “they’re basically identical,” though. I figured you would (rightly) point out that for all the atrocities of the Trump administration, there have certainly been many atrocities committed by the US prior to Trump, including many that were not stopped by the Obama administration. The morality here is complex, and I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer to when it is reasonable to tolerate some atrocities in the interest of stopping others. But from where I’m sitting, it seems like anyone who doesn’t see a moral difference between the actions of Obama and Trump must be either powerfully uninformed or deeply apathetic to the suffering of other human beings. I don't think people literally see no difference, I think when people say that they are trying to express the argument I presented more or less. For many it is like choosing between drinking a shit shake with 50% shit and another with 75% shit or just taking your chances kicking the asses of the guys trying to force you to choose, even if you're outnumbered. If you have good healthcare and dead palate maybe it's worth choking down another 50-50 shit shake to dodge the 75% one but eventually the people that always get stuck with the shit half of the shake are going to be willing to risk the 75% shake getting force fed to them to fight for no more shit shakes period. The guys drinking the milkshake half complaining about some shit frothing up around their portion or them losing their cream above the shit layer are the people that I find to be powerfully uninformed or (as Baldwin puts it) 'moral monsters'
Sure, we’re all making judgments between principled and pragmatic all the time. I’ve heard a lot of metaphors on the subject (most weirdly fixated on ingesting feces for whatever reason). One issue I have with many of these metaphors is that the cost is not merely unpleasant or unhygienic, and the suffering is not just mine. Another is that I don’t actually have even a vague idea of how to address the problems other than the choices presented to me.
You linked the Letter from Birmingham Jail earlier, and I think everyone ought to reread it once in a while. I did. And I don’t know what MLK would say about the world of today. Injustice is everywhere you look. I don’t know the answers to many of these injustices - either the right policy to ameliorate them, or the right political strategy to achieve that policy, or both.
I mostly just try to improve things where I can. And there’s a lot of terrible injustices I think would be lessened by ousting Trump. There’s also a lot that wouldn’t; if I had a good idea how to improve those too, I’d pursue it. I still think a Sanders administration would be a better route, and I’m still hoping for it - of course, you’ve decided that’s still too high a fecal content for you. But what else can we do besides make things better as best we know how?
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On March 05 2020 14:24 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 13:54 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 13:32 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 13:04 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:
[quote]
I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape.
As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? That both can be so bad they are unacceptable. Some people wouldn't support Trump if he put a D next to his name and Republicans nominated someone worse, but I'd argue the people that think the argument you're making is convincing probably would (what else would they do right?). Many of the camps are from the Obama administration, the argument over sanitation is from the Obama administration, and Hillary's plan was to use their fruitless suffering/deaths to send a message to their parents. The foreign policy motivating the immigration was both perpetuated, and in cases like Honduras, directly related to his state department (Under Hillary). Biden was VP through all of that and is more of a conservative than Obama, so it is reasonable to judge that he would likely be worse than Obama (despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, which will evaporate in a general election when he tacks right anyway). “Both are so bad they’re unacceptable” is a very different argument than “they’re basically identical,” though. I figured you would (rightly) point out that for all the atrocities of the Trump administration, there have certainly been many atrocities committed by the US prior to Trump, including many that were not stopped by the Obama administration. The morality here is complex, and I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer to when it is reasonable to tolerate some atrocities in the interest of stopping others. But from where I’m sitting, it seems like anyone who doesn’t see a moral difference between the actions of Obama and Trump must be either powerfully uninformed or deeply apathetic to the suffering of other human beings. I don't think people literally see no difference, I think when people say that they are trying to express the argument I presented more or less. For many it is like choosing between drinking a shit shake with 50% shit and another with 75% shit or just taking your chances kicking the asses of the guys trying to force you to choose, even if you're outnumbered. If you have good healthcare and dead palate maybe it's worth choking down another 50-50 shit shake to dodge the 75% one but eventually the people that always get stuck with the shit half of the shake are going to be willing to risk the 75% shake getting force fed to them to fight for no more shit shakes period. The guys drinking the milkshake half complaining about some shit frothing up around their portion or them losing their cream above the shit layer are the people that I find to be powerfully uninformed or (as Baldwin puts it) 'moral monsters' Sure, we’re all making judgments between principled and pragmatic all the time. I’ve heard a lot of metaphors on the subject (most weirdly fixated on ingesting feces for whatever reason). One issue I have with many of these metaphors is that the cost is not merely unpleasant or unhygienic, and the suffering is not just mine. Another is that I don’t actually have even a vague idea of how to address the problems other than the choices presented to me. You linked the Letter from Birmingham Jail earlier, and I think everyone ought to reread it once in a while. I did. And I don’t know what MLK would say about the world of today. Injustice is everywhere you look. I don’t know the answers to many of these injustices - either the right policy to ameliorate them, or the right political strategy to achieve that policy, or both. I mostly just try to improve things where I can. And there’s a lot of terrible injustices I think would be lessened by ousting Trump. There’s also a lot that wouldn’t; if I had a good idea how to improve those too, I’d pursue it. I still think a Sanders administration would be a better route, and I’m still hoping for it - of course, you’ve decided that’s still too high a fecal content for you. But what else can we do besides make things better as best we know how?
MLK was pursuing a poor people's campaign and looking toward socialism for those answers just before the US government conspired to assassinate him. I'd start looking for answers to those questions there or grapple with the idea you may not care enough to look.
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On March 05 2020 14:27 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 14:24 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 13:54 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 13:32 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 13:04 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:
[quote]
Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned.
Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? That both can be so bad they are unacceptable. Some people wouldn't support Trump if he put a D next to his name and Republicans nominated someone worse, but I'd argue the people that think the argument you're making is convincing probably would (what else would they do right?). Many of the camps are from the Obama administration, the argument over sanitation is from the Obama administration, and Hillary's plan was to use their fruitless suffering/deaths to send a message to their parents. The foreign policy motivating the immigration was both perpetuated, and in cases like Honduras, directly related to his state department (Under Hillary). Biden was VP through all of that and is more of a conservative than Obama, so it is reasonable to judge that he would likely be worse than Obama (despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, which will evaporate in a general election when he tacks right anyway). “Both are so bad they’re unacceptable” is a very different argument than “they’re basically identical,” though. I figured you would (rightly) point out that for all the atrocities of the Trump administration, there have certainly been many atrocities committed by the US prior to Trump, including many that were not stopped by the Obama administration. The morality here is complex, and I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer to when it is reasonable to tolerate some atrocities in the interest of stopping others. But from where I’m sitting, it seems like anyone who doesn’t see a moral difference between the actions of Obama and Trump must be either powerfully uninformed or deeply apathetic to the suffering of other human beings. I don't think people literally see no difference, I think when people say that they are trying to express the argument I presented more or less. For many it is like choosing between drinking a shit shake with 50% shit and another with 75% shit or just taking your chances kicking the asses of the guys trying to force you to choose, even if you're outnumbered. If you have good healthcare and dead palate maybe it's worth choking down another 50-50 shit shake to dodge the 75% one but eventually the people that always get stuck with the shit half of the shake are going to be willing to risk the 75% shake getting force fed to them to fight for no more shit shakes period. The guys drinking the milkshake half complaining about some shit frothing up around their portion or them losing their cream above the shit layer are the people that I find to be powerfully uninformed or (as Baldwin puts it) 'moral monsters' Sure, we’re all making judgments between principled and pragmatic all the time. I’ve heard a lot of metaphors on the subject (most weirdly fixated on ingesting feces for whatever reason). One issue I have with many of these metaphors is that the cost is not merely unpleasant or unhygienic, and the suffering is not just mine. Another is that I don’t actually have even a vague idea of how to address the problems other than the choices presented to me. You linked the Letter from Birmingham Jail earlier, and I think everyone ought to reread it once in a while. I did. And I don’t know what MLK would say about the world of today. Injustice is everywhere you look. I don’t know the answers to many of these injustices - either the right policy to ameliorate them, or the right political strategy to achieve that policy, or both. I mostly just try to improve things where I can. And there’s a lot of terrible injustices I think would be lessened by ousting Trump. There’s also a lot that wouldn’t; if I had a good idea how to improve those too, I’d pursue it. I still think a Sanders administration would be a better route, and I’m still hoping for it - of course, you’ve decided that’s still too high a fecal content for you. But what else can we do besides make things better as best we know how? MLK was pursuing a poor people's campaign and looking toward socialism for those answers just before the US government conspired to assassinate him. I'd start looking for answers to those questions there or grapple with the idea you may not care enough to look.
“Government conspired to assassinate MLK” sounds like a rabbit hole we probably shouldn’t go down right now. Regarding “not caring enough,” I think I disagree with the framing. I mean, what are you suggesting exactly? Go read Marx? Fanon? Foucault? I’m not a politician, or a political scientist, or a leader of a social movement. I’m just a voter. I barely have time for books these days, and my background is in chemistry.
Do you really think educating myself on the tenets of socialism will help address global injustice? I’d be willing to give it a shot. I haven’t pursued it yet because I thought it was unlikely to yield much of use to me or anyone else, but obviously without knowing much about it I’m not in a strong position to assess how much value it would bring.
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On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:
Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump.
What I've seen from skimming through Biden's plan he plans to put the US on a course to a carbon-neutral economy by 2050, large-scale investment in public infrastructure, he obviously has more or less mainstream Democratic positions on reproductive choice, doesn't want to put kids into cages at the border, and so on. And being able to replace one or two supreme court judges seems fundamentally pivotal for lawmaking in the next few decades. If the Republicans get another seat that'd be disastrous for any Dem.
So I'm not really sure what version of the universe you're in where the environment, immigrants' rights, women's rights and everything else doesn't matter. I mean seriously how can anyone look at a Democrat like Biden who is at least running on a platform as liberal as Clinton (arguably much more to the left already) and say he isn't really different from the clown-car that is the republican party, a mix of rabid tax-cutting, evangelicalism, science denialism, and nationalism and xenophobia?
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On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 08:47 farvacola wrote:On March 05 2020 08:02 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 03:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On March 05 2020 03:31 LegalLord wrote:On March 05 2020 03:18 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't think Biden is 0.01% better than Trump lol, I think he's approximately 94.35% better. So I entirely disagree with the premise. If people think he's virtually identical then whatever, but I really don't see how they are. That argument would resonate far better with me in a Hillary vs Jeb election than a Trump vs Biden one.
Could see it for Trump vs Bloomberg tho.
I suppose it depends on what metrics you use. In terms of policy, Trump has hardly differed much from the standard Bush-style conservative approach. Where he has differed, it's mostly been things like scrapping trade deals, which for the most part is a large net positive. He certainly does come off as far more of a clown than your average candidate, but I hope that's not the supposed difference between him and someone like Jeb. And I certainly doubt you meant that Clinton and Biden are significantly different candidates, because they hardly seem to be in any meaningful sense. I'm struggling to really see what materially different things Biden is supposedly going to do that are to be cheered on. He's notionally going to be more supportive of left-leaning things like climate policy, taxing the wealthy, and civil rights, but with the exception of perhaps the latter it's mostly going to indeed just be notional. Hardly a resounding win to be cheering on - or, in fact, a deep motivator for people who actually care about these issues to be desperate to replace Trump with this other highly questionable candidate for. Frankly the argument seems to be "we need to defeat Trump at all costs" among the rank-and-file Democrats. To what end, of course, is never particularly well explained. Stop Trump now, figure out why it was such a big deal to do so later. I think Trump's relationship with concepts like 'truth' and 'facts' actually deviate a lot from the republican norm (even if I saw a lot of the same from leading players during the buildup to the Iraq war, it was never to the same magnitude or abrasiveness), I am very negative towards the war on the press, and the building of a personal cult, increasing polarization to the degree where political supporters leaning one way end up genuinely wishing ill for political supporters on the other side coupled with claims (that end up being eaten up hook line and sinker) that climate change is a hoax is truly dangerous. I know that he has tapped into something already existing within the republican base, but these areas are all areas where he differs significantly from earlier republicans assumed electable for presidency. I also do believe the clownishness is of significance, but yea it's not the main reason for fearing another period. On economic policy and packing courts they're all much the same. This is interesting to me, because as much as it’s the atmosphere around all of these discussions, I’m not sure questions like “why is Trump bad” are actually addressed directly all that much. It’s like everybody has already reached their conclusion, and figures it’s already a settled question so they might as well move on to talking about what to do about it. One frustration is that I think people tend to make arguments based on what they think will be persuasive, not on what they actually believe. When I see people on the left arguing why someone shouldn’t vote for Trump, they tend to bring up his stupid tweets or something. “You’re really gonna vote for this idiot?” is the sort of vibe I get from it. I think this leads directly to what I hear from people on the right, often something like “Listen, I know he’s bad! You don’t have to tell me! But I really favor his [tax cuts/environmental deregulation/Supreme Court picks/whatever other hobby horse issue they have].” To me, the clearest moral imperative for removing Trump, and the one people on the left seem to expect to be least persuasive, comes from his tolerance of, and in many cases enthusiastic support for, gross humanitarian abuse. There are thousands of people in nightmarish refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of his immigration policy. He frequently makes a point of putting the full weight of his administration behind defending US soldiers guilty of blatant and well-documented war crimes from getting any penalty whatsoever, when even our top military brass thinks those acts were inexcusable. If you want more domestic examples, his support for private prisons, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, banning of trans people in the military, and plenty of other examples come to mind. I think his total lawlessness competes with that for priority level. Much of his immigration policy blatantly violates US and international law, and longstanding non-political government organizations have been subjugated by political appointees to oppose the goals those organizations are meant to achieve. When the administration fires or reassigns any bureaucrat who won’t assess the conditions in Haiti as improved because they want to remove it from TPS, or an asylum seeker wins their court case for asylum but ICE still stops them at the border and gives them a fake court date months in the future, it demonstrates what we should have realized all along: whatever “legal protections” we have are just promises, and anything the government does is presumptively legal until another part of the government is willing to enforce those promises. This is where stuff like Trump’s court packing really matters: it’s not just that the courts will become more conservative, Roe v. wade might be overturned, etc. It’s that the courts are the only real barrier between Trump and the ability to basically rule by decree. If courts become willing to approve any policy he puts forward, or at least tie up challenges to it in years of appeals, it no longer matters what laws Congress passes, or what legal rights you think you have. I mean, Trump used the US foreign policy apparatus to pressure a foreign power into slandering a political opponent! He blatantly used his office to manipulate the outcome of his reelection! But I’m not sure his lawlessness is people’s real objection to Trump is either. People seem more upset by the damage to America’s dignity. He drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie! He served a bunch of McDonalds in the White House that one time! Covfefe! I don’t know if that sort of stuff is actually why liberals are most upset, but it does seem to be what they come up with when pressed for why Trump is unacceptable. I’d love to know what it is that actually offends them most about him and his presidency, because I get the feeling their arguments are usually rhetorical. I dunno man, maybe that's sometimes been the case here, but I don't think I've had a single in-person conversation about Trump where his tweets were the primary subject, and the vast majority never regarded them at all. Naturally, that likely says more about me, the people I have these conversations with, and the circumstances under which these conversations took place, but I think it goes to show that it can be difficult to get a good sense of what people are talking about as a generalized concept, particularly with the distorting influence of the (social) mediascape. As for why I'm against Trump, I more or less agree with Simberto's take, with the added sense of animosity that comes from being a part of the civil service. The damage he's doing to the background instruments of the federal government that inarguably benefit the population at large cannot be overstated. Sure, obviously my experiences with what “liberals tend to say” or “conservatives tend to say” is anecdotal. But for instance, I don’t remember the last time I saw MPP discussed in the thread. That seems like one of the larger and more blatant humanitarian atrocities this administration is unambiguously and wholly responsible for, and yet in arguing against his reelection, I hardly hear it mentioned. Perhaps it’s because liberals know Americans don’t care about the lives of immigrants, so they search for another message they think Americans care more about? Or is it because the liberals don’t care that much about the immigrants either? Or am I overstating the importance of such humanitarian abuses relative to, say, his clownish behavior or schoolyard bully-like demeanor? Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters.
That's the kind of complete and utter nonsense that those divisive, polarized primary campaigns produce. Biden is most likely gonna be quite close to Obama, which is in terms of actual policy infinitely closer to what Sanders would achieve than anything even resembling Trump.
That people reach such a level of confusion is physically painful.
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On March 05 2020 14:55 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 05 2020 14:27 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 14:24 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 13:54 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 13:32 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 13:04 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 05 2020 12:31 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 11:43 mierin wrote:On March 05 2020 11:21 ChristianS wrote:On March 05 2020 10:33 farvacola wrote:
[quote]
Shying away from the truly atrocious stuff is certainly commonplace as far as the Dem party line goes, and I think it likely relates to how little the hard "center" wants to deal with how similar its views are to the Republicans, at least far as indifference to atrocities is concerned. Sure, but I also don’t think Biden would commit many of the atrocities that Trump has, and would probably end them as president. That, to me, is the clearest rebuttal to “Trump and Biden are virtually identical.” More broadly, “how big is the difference between Biden and Trump” is surely a conversation that should be rooted in the human cost of the Trump administration compared to a hypothetical Biden one. What tends to happen instead is some abstract back-and-forth about the nature of compromise and “the lesser of two evils.” Separately I’m not sure why everyone is talking about the primary as already over. I’m still hoping Sanders can take the nomination! But if he doesn’t, and people are deciding whether to support Biden, perhaps we ought to discuss a little more specifically what it is about a second Trump term we’re trying to prevent. Unfortunately Biden is almost identical to Trump. Sure the Dems will pick up some supreme court justices if he wins but at the end of the day nothing else will change. That's unacceptable to an increasing percentage of voters. Okay, so let’s start here. There are tens of thousands of asylum seekers in some of the world’s worst refugee camps on our Southern border as a direct result of MPP. Refugees are getting diseases from sewage, because there aren’t bathroom facilities in the camps. They’re being kidnapped. They’re sending their young children over the border alone because they may have a better legal case as unaccompanied minors. This policy is a) definitely immoral, b) probably illegal, and c) unambiguously a direct result of Trump being president. Are you just figuring that’s not very important? That Biden would continue MPP? What’s your thinking here? That both can be so bad they are unacceptable. Some people wouldn't support Trump if he put a D next to his name and Republicans nominated someone worse, but I'd argue the people that think the argument you're making is convincing probably would (what else would they do right?). Many of the camps are from the Obama administration, the argument over sanitation is from the Obama administration, and Hillary's plan was to use their fruitless suffering/deaths to send a message to their parents. The foreign policy motivating the immigration was both perpetuated, and in cases like Honduras, directly related to his state department (Under Hillary). Biden was VP through all of that and is more of a conservative than Obama, so it is reasonable to judge that he would likely be worse than Obama (despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, which will evaporate in a general election when he tacks right anyway). “Both are so bad they’re unacceptable” is a very different argument than “they’re basically identical,” though. I figured you would (rightly) point out that for all the atrocities of the Trump administration, there have certainly been many atrocities committed by the US prior to Trump, including many that were not stopped by the Obama administration. The morality here is complex, and I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer to when it is reasonable to tolerate some atrocities in the interest of stopping others. But from where I’m sitting, it seems like anyone who doesn’t see a moral difference between the actions of Obama and Trump must be either powerfully uninformed or deeply apathetic to the suffering of other human beings. I don't think people literally see no difference, I think when people say that they are trying to express the argument I presented more or less. For many it is like choosing between drinking a shit shake with 50% shit and another with 75% shit or just taking your chances kicking the asses of the guys trying to force you to choose, even if you're outnumbered. If you have good healthcare and dead palate maybe it's worth choking down another 50-50 shit shake to dodge the 75% one but eventually the people that always get stuck with the shit half of the shake are going to be willing to risk the 75% shake getting force fed to them to fight for no more shit shakes period. The guys drinking the milkshake half complaining about some shit frothing up around their portion or them losing their cream above the shit layer are the people that I find to be powerfully uninformed or (as Baldwin puts it) 'moral monsters' Sure, we’re all making judgments between principled and pragmatic all the time. I’ve heard a lot of metaphors on the subject (most weirdly fixated on ingesting feces for whatever reason). One issue I have with many of these metaphors is that the cost is not merely unpleasant or unhygienic, and the suffering is not just mine. Another is that I don’t actually have even a vague idea of how to address the problems other than the choices presented to me. You linked the Letter from Birmingham Jail earlier, and I think everyone ought to reread it once in a while. I did. And I don’t know what MLK would say about the world of today. Injustice is everywhere you look. I don’t know the answers to many of these injustices - either the right policy to ameliorate them, or the right political strategy to achieve that policy, or both. I mostly just try to improve things where I can. And there’s a lot of terrible injustices I think would be lessened by ousting Trump. There’s also a lot that wouldn’t; if I had a good idea how to improve those too, I’d pursue it. I still think a Sanders administration would be a better route, and I’m still hoping for it - of course, you’ve decided that’s still too high a fecal content for you. But what else can we do besides make things better as best we know how? MLK was pursuing a poor people's campaign and looking toward socialism for those answers just before the US government conspired to assassinate him. I'd start looking for answers to those questions there or grapple with the idea you may not care enough to look. “Government conspired to assassinate MLK” sounds like a rabbit hole we probably shouldn’t go down right now. Regarding “not caring enough,” I think I disagree with the framing. I mean, what are you suggesting exactly? Go read Marx? Fanon? Foucault? I’m not a politician, or a political scientist, or a leader of a social movement. I’m just a voter. I barely have time for books these days, and my background is in chemistry. Do you really think educating myself on the tenets of socialism will help address global injustice? I’d be willing to give it a shot. I haven’t pursued it yet because I thought it was unlikely to yield much of use to me or anyone else, but obviously without knowing much about it I’m not in a strong position to assess how much value it would bring.
The US government conspired to assassinate MLK.
After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.
The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that... the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband.
thekingcenter.org
If that's not enough we know without a doubt the FBI was trying to drive him to suicide, illegally surveilling him, and so on.
As for socialism, it was critical to the civil rights movement for one. As a source of understanding, method of action, and a reason for the US government to destroy your life.
"We must mark [MLK] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security," FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief William Sullivan wrote
I recommend Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a good start but I promise being "just a voter" isn't good enough for anything more than maintaining the status quo path which promises certain doom.
So yes, I do believe you educating yourself on socialism will make you more capable of joining in solidarity with millions of people around the globe in addressing global injustices beyond voting for lesser evils.
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Crimea reaver
This might not be a place for my or your showerthought conspiracy theories, but if I were to make a debut post here I need to somehow imbue it with the attribute of being a worthwhile read, and I can't do that if I need to pretend that presidency elections (or any public declarations of intent on how to harness and utilize political power for that matter) have any sort of bearing on the real scheme of things. In the faceted and many-faced world we inhabit, the worst a politically uninformed individual can do is to parade an ability to assimilate information that is served on a lame platter by strangers, subject it to the selectivity of whether it can serve to further one's image of readiness to participate in complimenting each other on the proficiency with which one inconsequentially bends said information to best-suit the illusion of being informed as a result of supposedly having processed the information, & pretending that knowing everything that has ever been publicly stated by or with regards to an elected or elected-to-be official brings one any closer to making sense of and studying the forces to which mere mortals collectively outsource the shaping of their political reality. Furthermore I would rather not have to strain myself to maintain the motivation to fake having insider knowledge of the pseudo-political circus, which ought to inspire prioritization of my versions of bending the aforementioned information. Therefore, the only thing that remains viable is to present approaches from angles you might not have deemed relevant for consideration in your quest to politically inform yourself. Likewise I encourage you to broaden your spectrum and present things that I might have failed to connect (perhaps dismissing them as symptoms of pop-cultural superficiality), as we mustn't succumb to the degeneration of the appeal to discuss politics, which would no doubt irreversibly set in if we limit ourselves to what mainstream or even alternative media push (soap opera in politics' clothing).
+ Show Spoiler [Without further ado] + This one restores my faith in the coolness of the world (just a little bit) if it is true: Justin Timberlake's 2002-released song "Cry Me a River"'s allegedly being "inspired by Timberlake's former relationship with singer Britney Spears" is not a mere cringe-instigating continuation of the Mickey Mouse Club saga, no. More importantly it's either a front to encipher information obtained via espionage —information pertaining to a rival foreign power's military ambition to destabilize the territorial integrity of a sovereign state for personal gain— or (and I kind of like this one better) even the sounding of the call to initiate —plan, fund and rally participation and support for— such an endeavor — in order to boot Russia out of the G8 and draw UN sanctions if they act out in support of the revolution / look weak if they don't (either way Crimea isn't exactly going to be an economic powerhouse any time soon, while the geopolitically strategic value gained by incorporating the peninsula into its territory is negligible afaik) . In 2014 "the Crimean Peninsula was annexed by the Russian Federation," quoted from wikipedia.net, following "a Russian military intervention in Crimea that took place in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and was part of wider unrest across southern and eastern Ukraine", since "on 27 February, masked Russian troops without insignia took over the Supreme Council (parliament) of Crimea, and captured strategic sites across Crimea, which led to the installation of the pro-Russian Aksyonov government in Crimea, the conducting of the Crimean status referendum and the declaration of Crimea's independence on 16 March 2014. Russia formally incorporated Crimea as two federal subjects of the Russian Federation with effect from 18 March 2014. Russian troops without insignia, curious. So at the time when Timbaland was caught doing what ought to be perceived as crazytalking about opportune timings of programming children, not having to fear scrutiny or backlash because he's Timbaland, this happened under president Obama's mandate as commander in chief. In 2002, however, George W. was it, and I remember Britney Spears, of all people, having voiced strong support for the then-candidate during the presidential election which instated him into power (some might say the fact that his opponent got more votes notwithstanding), or rather the official president around the time the song/video was released. Evaluating the degree to which a theory is true or not should be of a tertiary order of business when it comes to approaching politics via the conspiracy format. As long as it might wind up sounding enjoyably plausible to someone who may or may not be in an advanced stage of inebriation, psyche degeneration (perhaps due to sleep depravation) or narcotic intoxication, I say bet your ass you should post it, here even.
User was temp banned for this post.
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Alabama is scheduled to kill a man tonight for killing cops literally no one disputes were killed by someone else who has confessed and been convicted.
Hours after a federal judge denied a stay request in the upcoming execution of Alabama prisoner Nathaniel Woods, the son of Martin Luther King Jr. released an open letter to Gov. Kay Ivey asking her to intervene in the case.
Woods is slated to be killed via lethal injection on Thursday for his capital murder convictions in the shooting deaths of three Birmingham police officers in June 2004.
By all accounts, Woods was not the shooter and did not have a gun at the time of the shooting. Woods was instead convicted of capital murder, despite personally killing no one
www.montgomeryadvertiser.com
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On March 05 2020 22:50 GreenHorizons wrote:Alabama is scheduled to kill a man tonight for killing cops literally no one disputes were killed by someone else who has confessed and been convicted. Show nested quote +Hours after a federal judge denied a stay request in the upcoming execution of Alabama prisoner Nathaniel Woods, the son of Martin Luther King Jr. released an open letter to Gov. Kay Ivey asking her to intervene in the case.
Woods is slated to be killed via lethal injection on Thursday for his capital murder convictions in the shooting deaths of three Birmingham police officers in June 2004.
By all accounts, Woods was not the shooter and did not have a gun at the time of the shooting. Woods was instead convicted of capital murder, despite personally killing no one www.montgomeryadvertiser.com
I don't understand what is going on.
This guy was found guilty by a jury, right? Was all of this known at the time? If so, why did the prosecutor continue, and why did the jury find him guilty? If not, why was his case not reopened? And if it was, why was he found guilty regardless?
I mean... at some point all of this was known, people looked at his case and said "yup, but he's still guilty of capital murder". Who were these people and what was their reasoning?
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Awful outcomes like that are a combo of medieval state court criminal processes and the decades long chipping away at the efficacy of federal habeas corpus petitions.
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EPT
