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6 minutes ago, Crysta said:

Not gonna lie, this feels a lot like telling someone in an abusive relationship to be careful about angering their partner because you know what they'll get hit again, instead of like... actually dealing with the abusive partner.

I don't see the metaphor as applicable at all. But for the sake of discussion I'll entertain it. 

You certainly do want to avoid angering your partner in an abusive relationship when you are in an immediate risk of danger. As confronting them when they are violent is not usually a good idea without taking steps to distance yourself first.  So better first to deescalate and get to a safe position before taking action. 

 

Unlike this metaphor though neither party in the US is a singular monolith and are instead composed of many different people with differeing opinions. And we don't have the liberty of simply divorcing the Republican party and living apart. 

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8 minutes ago, scigeek101 said:

Unlike this metaphor though neither party in the US is a singular monolith and are instead composed of many different people with differeing opinions. And we don't have the liberty of simply divorcing the Republican party and living apart. 

We do have the option of never taking them seriously again and working to ensure they don't get near the levers of power again. The solution certainly not going to great lengths to gut your own legislation just because you're afraid they're going to turn it into another wedge issue (they will turn anything into a wedge issue if people are credulous enough), and thinking that is actually progress and a way to not just ensure the cycle continues.

So yeah, it is kind of similar. 

EDIT: hell I'm not even sure if these 'wedge' issues are as effective any more: if Trump embraced facemasks and didn't needlessly kill thousands of people he'd probably would have won re-election

Edited by Crysta
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6 minutes ago, Crysta said:

We do have the option of never taking them seriously again and working to ensure they don't get near the levers of power again. The solution certainly not going to great lengths to gut your own legislation just because you're afraid they're going to turn it into another wedge issue (they will turn anything into a wedge issue if people are credulous enough), and thinking that is actually progress and a way to not just ensure the cycle continues.

So yeah, it is kind of similar. 

I disagree. Republicans still control slightly less than half of congress as well as a large proportion of the population. We simply don't have the luxury of dismissing them. 

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9 minutes ago, scigeek101 said:

I disagree. Republicans still control slightly less than half of congress as well as a large proportion of the population. We simply don't have the luxury of dismissing them. 

You haven't really tried. You've just cautioned us not to alienate them too much because they still exist and you want us to remain the center which, quite frankly, is becoming untenable when one end of the spectrum is now explicitly anti-democratic. Insisting on appealing to the voters who are somehow still on the fence on whether or not fascism is good is not a healthy strategy.

A near 50/50 split is not great for us, but they look downright ridiculous when they try to bring up their classic wedges now (illegal immigration/caravans, coastal elitists versus working class, 'cancel culture' = 1984). They still have abortion maybe but that's supported by most of the country. This is not pre-2017.

Edited by Crysta
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Yeah we're not getting sudden, sweeping radical reform aaaand historically we don't do well in the upcoming mid-terms.

But for every piece of legislation they will have to water down just to get it to pass, if they can, they should make it abundantly clear what and why Republicans are opposing it.

Edited by Crysta
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11 hours ago, eclipse said:

Actually, that's me.  Unless you're visiting my state, in which case I hope you were able to wrap your head around our testing rules.  Or are in quarantine.

You’re the earliest U.S. timezone. When it was 10 pm for me when I wrote that, it was 5 pm I think. But in my state, quarantine is on and then it gets pulled back slowly with no real rhyme or reason so when more people inevitably become sick it just goes back that way instead of staying that way the whole time.

11 hours ago, eclipse said:

Today's the first step in a new direction, and that made Fox News unhappy.

A cherry on top of a great day.

7 hours ago, Benice said:

Over these next four years, I mostly hope that America can heal itself; not just from the collateral damage from COVID, but also between the two political parties. America seems really divided right now, so it'd be great to see less hatred between the left and the right.

Yes, America is definitely very very divided right now. You said once that people always try to bring political ideas from America up to you guys, so fingers crossed that doesn’t extend to Trumpism! 🤞

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4 hours ago, scigeek101 said:

We simply don't have the luxury of dismissing them. 

Of course we do.

The question is do we have the intent to govern the way they governed when they had the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. (i.e. "We won.  You Lost. Elections have consequences--deal with it")

Edited by Shoblongoo
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...He's the only president ever to be twice-impeached

...He's the only president to attain office by a 3 million vote deficit in the popular vote and then never once in his entire presidency hit a majority approval rating

...He's the only president ever to declare himself the winner of an election that he lost and then attempt to block the lawful transition of power to his successor
___

Second-place-runner-up is still an open contest between some of the other baddies.

But all-time-worst is Trump by a mile    

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7 hours ago, scigeek101 said:

This is my opinion. What source do you want for an opinion? 

Uh, when your opinion is "anti-Trump people want to kill the pro-Trump people too" then you'd better have a source for that. That's one of the things you can't just say "it's my opinion!" and expect that to slide. If you can't find an empirical, objective source that finds a significant portion of non-Trump supporters really do feel the way you say they are, it has no business being here and sounds dangerously close to "both sides".

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1 hour ago, Sooks said:

You said once that people always try to bring political ideas from America up to you guys, so fingers crossed that doesn’t extend to Trumpism! 🤞

Ahahahahahehehahuhuehfufufuufufujhgfhsdbjnk claPIOSDUHY

A tad too late, sadly.

Nothing really terrible happened at the rally, but the Bible over Logic over Science, 100% sign made me simultaneously laugh and cry.

Still, even I though I do kinda consider Canada to be America: Northern edition, we are somewhat proud of being our own country, so it's not like we act like American politics are everything to us.

Usually.

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6 hours ago, scigeek101 said:

We simply don't have the luxury of dismissing them. 

I actually do agree with this. However, this needs to be shown through policy that assists republican voters, not uniting with literal fascists and fascist enablers, since most Republican voters are going against their own interests. The problem with the "healing" that Biden and many liberals want to commence is that Trump was not an anomaly. He and his supporters do not go away once he leaves the White House, and Biden is going to be recreating the factors that lead to him, most likely. Democrats have not made any significant attempt to reach out to Republican voters in terms of policy, local elections and cabinet positions, which will bite them in the ass later on. I don't think they'll keep control of the senate in 2022, nor the House. Even so, I'd rather the Democrats in power pushing through their policies than having it all obstructed by Republicans, because their propositions tend to be far more sensible.

And as for Trump being the worst president overall, I don't know if I'd agree with that completely. He's bad, no doubt, maybe the worst on the domestic front we've seen so far. But I think people are forgetting what George W. Bush did, and others like him.

Edited by Shipnoez
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Bernie is the chairman of the Senate Budget committee, so that's one positive.

Alongside most of what action has been taken so far, even if much of it is firefighting DonJonT Rump's 4 years.

Time to see how things settle in the next few weeks.

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7 hours ago, Shipnoez said:

But I think people are forgetting what George W. Bush did, and others like him.

What Bush did totally pales in comparison.

Bush started the War on Terror that lasted over a decade and killed about 7,000 US soldiers. Those 7,000 soldiers at least died for a cause, whether it is for America's security or getting back at the terrorists. Even if you throw in all 8,000 contractors, that is about 15,000 of our combatants that died.

On the other hand, Trump is so damned incompetent that despite the fact that he did not start any war, he still managed to kill 400,000 Americans in less than a year. Those 400,000 deaths were totally pointless and much of it could have been prevented. The death toll is like over twenty times worse.

Edited by XRay
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2 hours ago, XRay said:

What Bush did totally pales in comparison.

Bush started the War on Terror that lasted over a decade and killed about 7,000 US soldiers. Those 7,000 soldiers at least died for a cause, whether it is for America's security or getting back at the terrorists. Even if you throw in all 8,000 contractors, that is about 15,000 of our combatants that died.

On the other hand, Trump is so damned incompetent that despite the fact that he did not start any war, he still managed to kill 400,000 Americans in less than a year. Those 400,000 deaths were totally pointless and much of it could have been prevented. The death toll is like over twenty times worse.

PLEASE tell me you are joking. I really don't want to believe you would leave out the impact the war on terror has had on, you know, people in the countries we invaded? Or that the war is still going on to this day? Remember all the drone strikes Obama and Trump did to innocent civilians? The fact that George W. Bush caused ISIS to be a thing in the first place? I could go on, but you get the point. Americans aren't the only people to exist, and there is a reason why I stated Trump was worse domestically specifically.

EDIT: WAIT. I missed the part where you said this war was for our security? They never found any weapons of mass destruction in their entire time there. Where is the threat? We were the ones who invaded them first. Apologies if I come off mad, because I really am, but, wow.

Edited by Shipnoez
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1 hour ago, Shipnoez said:

PLEASE tell me you are joking. I really don't want to believe you would leave out the impact the war on terror has had on, you know, people in the countries we invaded? Or that the war is still going on to this day? Remember all the drone strikes Obama and Trump did to innocent civilians? The fact that George W. Bush caused ISIS to be a thing in the first place? I could go on, but you get the point. Americans aren't the only people to exist, and there is a reason why I stated Trump was worse domestically specifically.

In my opinion, an American president should prioritize American lives more than foreign lives, and I am going to judge them by that metric. That is not to say foreign lives are not important, but I am going to put less weight on foreign lives when judging a president that is supposed to prioritize our nation's safety. Bush fucked up, but I am much less likely to die from it than Trump's fuck up. Bush's fuck up is hardly comparable to Trump's by orders of magnitude in the cost of American lives.

You have to be joking if you think losing 400,000 American lives is better than losing 15,000 American lives, and I think most Americans rather have a president that prioritizes American lives over foreign lives. And even if you look at total lives lost world wide, Trump is still objectively worse than Bush. Due to the way the world looks to the United States for leadership, because of Trump's failure to lead America, he has also indirectly lead to the deaths of countless foreign lives. If Trump just wore a damned mask and took the threat seriously, at least some of the other far right asshole leaders would have also followed suit instead of trying to equate masklessness with manliness. The COVID death toll stands at over 2 million today over a period of about a year. The War on Terror took nearly two decades for the death toll to reach half a million in back in 2018, according to the article I linked.

1 hour ago, Shipnoez said:

EDIT: WAIT. I missed the part where you said this fucking war was for our security? They never found any weapons of mass destruction in their entire time there. Where is the threat? We were the ones who invaded them first. Apologies if I come off mad, because I really am, but, wow.

We killed Bin Laden in Afghanistan and terminated the mastermind that caused the deaths of 3,000 American lives. That is something. A lot of the credit goes to Obama, but Bush did lay the foundation.

Edited by XRay
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44 minutes ago, XRay said:

And even if you look at total lives lost world wide, Trump is still objectively worse than Bush. Due to the way the world looks to the United States for leadership, because of Trump's failure to lead America, he has also indirectly lead to the deaths of countless foreign lives. If Trump just wore a damned mask and took the threat seriously, at least some of the other far right asshole leaders would have also followed suit instead of trying to equate masklessness with manliness. The COVID death toll stands at over 2 million today over a period of about a year. The War on Terror took nearly two decades for the death toll to reach half a million in back in 2018, according to the article I linked.

Yeah, no. I know Trump's negligence ended with 400k deaths domestically, but no way in hell is he responsible for 2 million deaths. You can't just say countries look at the US for leadership and pass off an additional 1.5 million deaths on him. And you don't need to, 400k is enough. I was not talking about worldwide deaths under Bush, either. I was talking about lives lost directly because of his interference in the middle east. Trump's incompetence on covid does not even begin to match the direct military invasion of countries.

I heavily disagree with your value of American lives over foreign lives, but that is not something I can really debate besides saying that every person is worth equal. Killing Bin Laden in Afghanistan is an achievement, but the amount of pure human suffering caused by Bush's invasion is not really something this justifies. I don't know about you, but killing so many people just for the mere feeling of safety, since again they were not harbouring nuclear weapons like was claimed as the excuse to invade, is not something I particularly care about. Bush and Obama again also enabled ISIS, which we had to spend another few years fighting against. And I feel like it's a bit contradictory to say that the world looks to America for leadership and is influenced by them but invading countries because of a hunch and causing wars that last almost 20 years is a good example to follow. 

But yes, like I said originally Trump was overall worse domestically. Unfortunately that is not the only part of being the president.

EDIT: I should also mention that I feel a little more strongly on this issue now that Bush showed up to the inauguration and liberals have been praising him as competent next to Trump, which is really disgusting when you look at what he did. I don't really have much more to say on the matter, though.

Edited by Shipnoez
grammar
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39 minutes ago, Shipnoez said:

Yeah, no. I know Trump's negligence ended with 400k deaths domestically, but no way in hell is he responsible for 2 million deaths. You can't just say countries look at the US for leadership and pass off an additional 1.5 million deaths on him. And you don't need to, 400k is enough.

But the world does look to the US for leadership, especially in times of crisis. Most of the world joined the United States on the War on Terror, at least in the beginning. Our NATO allies were treaty bound to join, but the rest of the world was not. Practically the whole world at the time was like "yeah, go kick some terrorist ass!" until the fighting bogged down and it became apparent that this is not something that is easily solvable.

Other than maybe the European Union, who is our ally, America has unrivalled soft power and influence compared to our adversaries. Most of the world prefers American leadership over China's leadershipand that poll was from 2018, and Trump dragged America's reputation through the mud after his election. Russia similarly is not particularly well liked either.

Trump is so incompetent that he cannot even wear a freaking mask. There is literally nothing hard about it. Instead, he tried to be manly and save his ego for no reason.

Edited by XRay
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6 minutes ago, XRay said:

But the world does look to the US for leadership, especially in times of crisis. Most of the world joined the United States on the War on Terror, at least in the beginning. Our NATO allies were treaty bound to join, but the rest of the world was not. Practically the whole world at the time was like "yeah, go kick some terrorist ass!" until the fighting bogged down and it became apparent that this is not something that is easily solvable.

Other than maybe the European Union, who is our ally, America has unrivalled soft power and influence compared to our adversaries. Most of the world prefers American leadership over China's leadershipand that poll was from 2018, and Trump dragged America's reputation through the mud after his election. Russia similarly is not particularly well liked either.

Trump is so incompetent that he cannot even wear a freaking mask. There is literally nothing hard about it. Instead, he tried to be manly and save his ego for no reason.

I don't really disagree with this at all but I think it's a bit silly to say Trump's incompetence and America's influence is equal to 1.5 million covid deaths.

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Just now, Shipnoez said:

I don't really disagree with this at all but I think it's a bit silly to say Trump's incompetence and America's influence is equal to 1.5 million covid deaths.

Trump has big influence on right-wing leaders, and if Trump was not such a dumb fuck and trying to pass off stupidity as manliness, other idiots like Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson probably would have wore a mask too. If the manliest leader on earth is wearing a mask, that means wearing a mask is not something to be ashamed of. Protecting your nation and family is what a man would do, and wearing a mask is a thousand times easier to show off your manliness than marching off to war.

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3 minutes ago, XRay said:

Trump has big influence on right-wing leaders, and if Trump was not such a dumb fuck and trying to pass off stupidity as manliness, other idiots like Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson probably would have wore a mask too. If the manliest leader on earth is wearing a mask, that means wearing a mask is not something to be ashamed of. Protecting your nation and family is what a man would do, and wearing a mask is a thousand times easier to show off your manliness than marching off to war.

Covid has ravaged even liberal European countries. I don't think those ones are looking to Trump for his wise guidance. I'd chalk the deaths up more to neoliberal leaders being inept or valuing short term economic gains over human life, which isn't exclusive to right wing leaders who follow trump. These leaders were also inept in the first place. I don't believe Britain's covid response is going to get better because Biden is in office. Again, I don't disagree with the sentiment of what you are saying, but you can't link this to every single covid death, or even the majority of them, and I don't get why you need to. Trump causing 400k (maybe 370k technically, assuming if a more competent leader was in place that people would still probably die from covid cause they wouldn't be perfect) is horrible enough.

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1 hour ago, Shipnoez said:

Yeah, no. I know Trump's negligence ended with 400k deaths domestically, but no way in hell is he responsible for 2 million deaths. You can't just say countries look at the US for leadership and pass off an additional 1.5 million deaths on him. And you don't need to, 400k is enough. I was not talking about worldwide deaths under Bush, either. I was talking about lives lost directly because of his interference in the middle east. Trump's incompetence on covid does not even begin to match the direct military invasion of countries.

I heavily disagree with your value of American lives over foreign lives, but that is not something I can really debate besides saying that every person is worth equal. Killing Bin Laden in Afghanistan is an achievement, but the amount of pure human suffering caused by Bush's invasion is not really something this justifies. I don't know about you, but killing so many people just for the mere feeling of safety, since again they were not harbouring nuclear weapons like was claimed as the excuse to invade, is not something I particularly care about. Bush and Obama again also enabled ISIS, which we had to spend another few years fighting against. And I feel like it's a bit contradictory to say that the world looks to America for leadership and is influenced by them but invading countries because of a hunch and causing wars that last almost 20 years is a good example to follow. 

But yes, like I said originally Trump was overall worse domestically. Unfortunately that is not the only part of being the president.

EDIT: I should also mention that I feel a little more strongly on this issue now that Bush showed up to the inauguration and liberals have been praising him as competent next to Trump, which is really disgusting when you look at what he did. I don't really have much more to say on the matter, though.

And even pure mathematics of lives lost, one should also bear in mind the quality of lives that re left behind. Because Iraq and Afghanistan really aren't doing too hot after those wars. Course they were in a rather unenviable position of strict dictatorships before, but the countries are in absolute ruins now. Recovery is going to be long and hard. In addition I'd say people have some self responsibility for their situation too. Trump certainly isn't helping matters, but people who forgo mask wearing and gather in large areas are the ones to blame. And any right wing leaders that decide to follow Trump are doing so on their own free will. It's not like Trump is mind controlling people. Lastly the comparison is a bit of an apples and oranges. Bush never had to deal with a mass pandemic. If he did? Well I hope he would have handled it better than Trump. But would he handle it twice as well? Ten times as well? Almost as equally as bad? Who knows. But it's very unlikely everything would be dandy and safe under a Bush administration COVID situation. There would still be problems as the element of "Muh freedum!" isn't something that was created nor is exclusive to Trump.

Edited by Jotari
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1 minute ago, Shipnoez said:

Covid has ravaged even liberal European countries. I don't think those ones are looking to Trump for his wise guidance. I'd chalk the deaths up more to neoliberal leaders being inept or valuing short term economic gains over human life, which isn't exclusive to right wing leaders who follow trump. These leaders were also inept in the first place. I don't believe Britain's covid response is going to get better because Biden is in office. Again, I don't disagree with the sentiment of what you are saying, but you can't link this to every single covid death, or even the majority of them, and I don't get why you need to. Trump causing 400k (maybe 370k technically, assuming if a more competent leader was in place that people would still probably die from covid cause they wouldn't be perfect) is horrible enough.

You seemed to imply Bush was as bad as Trump. I disagree with that. While I do have a more favorable view of Bush than most others on this forum, I am not going to ignore his fuck ups either. Going into Iraq was stupid, but pulling out even more so as that left a power vacuum. Trump is even worse as the way he tried to pull out of the Middle East allowed Russia and Iran to step in significantly more and fill that power vacuum that we left behind.

Bush did not actually try to fellate Putin, belittle NATO, straight up abandon our allies in the Middle East, start trade wars that negatively impacted our economy, promote bigotry and hate, divide the country along partisan lines, undermined our democratic institutions, nor overtly handing out pardons like candy to his cronies.

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