US Election 2016: DO NOT MY FRIENDS BECOME ADDICTED TO WATER

[Paladin of Ice]

Also, wasn't the second stock market collapse supposed to happen no later than 3 years ago or so?

[LongRider]

On 5/28/2016 at 1:22 PM, Kalbear said:

 

Trump said state officials were simply denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction — or as Trump called it, "a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

“We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the campaign event.

JFC!  I've lived on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada's long enough to understand the stupid falsity of this bullshit.  I've breathed alot of smoke from forest fires for years (lack of snow pack and dead trees and very hot weather all contribute) and seen the trees die from effects of the drought.  Going over the Sierra's in February and seeing hardly any snow anywhere has nothing to do with any 'three-inch fish".   Hey Donald, sorry for the reality check, but global warming is real.

Sorry for the rant, but this kind of shit just drives me wild, and so many dumb f's just eat it up. 

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

No support is unconditional, and presidents spend a good deal of time trying to please (or pacify) this faction or that. Hillary Clinton, should she be elected, will have to do the same, regardless of how the Bernie-or-Bust people vote.

"Unconditional" was an exaggeration on my part, but the left has voted for Democrats for a long time without really getting much out of it except social issues (once there is overwhelming support for them). And she is unlikely to need to pacify too many leftists as there are very few left in government (Sanders is one of the last of his kind). Most of Congress takes its "campaign contributions" from the ruling class just as Clinton does.

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In any case, I suspect the lion's share of Sanders people will go over to Clinton once Bernie finally throws in the towel, regardless of what they are saying now.

Perhaps... and perhaps not. For example, just as the Libertarians are likely to benefit from Trump, it is possible that some other party might benefit from Clinton. There's a really nice interview here with Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee who does a great job of describing the Democrats:

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We sort of pick up where the Democrats leave off. Because while the Democrats may say the right thing on supporting working people and our right to healthcare and so on, what they do is something entirely different. You can look at how they’ve treated labor and working people and their massive bailouts for Wall Street. For example, once the White House went Democratic nearly eight years ago, who got the bailouts? Wall Street did in a way that made George W. Bush seem like a wimp. George Bush proposed $700 billion but under Barack Obama it was many trillions. We haven’t seen the end of it.

Or foreign policy. The guys running the show in the Democratic Party are basically the funders, and that’s predatory banks and fossil fuel bandits and war profiteers and the insurance companies, and that’s what we get. And with the Democratic Party, you see basically a “fake left, go right” situation, where they allow principled, inspired campaigns to stand up and be seen, but they sabotage them when push comes to shove. And that, unfortunately, is what we see going on right now with the Sanders campaign, which is making a valiant effort here to do the right thing and change the party.

...

So let me say one thing at the outset. First of all, Donald Trump is a product of Clintonism, to coin a new word. But Donald Trump is riding the wave of economic despair, all these white working people whose lives and livelihood have really been kind of raked over the coals. And it’s widely accepted that that is a major force behind the rise of Donald Trump, this economic dislocation, but where did that come from? That came from NAFTA, which sent our jobs overseas, and it came from Wall Street deregulation. So in other words, Clinton policies, passed by Bill but thoroughly supported and advocated for by Hillary, who continues to advocate for them—that’s what brought us this economic despair, which is breeding radical right-wing populism. So you put Hillary in there and you’re gonna get more of that. So this is not the solution.

And let me also point out that the lesser evil paves the way to the greater evil. That’s why we saw Congress flip after the Democratic White House basically stood up for Wall Street and threw main street to the dogs and expanded the wars and created this “all-of-the-above” policy, which is basically a “drill, baby, drill” on steroids. We have have massively escalated fossil fuel production with a smile, note you, but we’re hardly fixing that problem. So the lesser evil basically generated the backlash into the greater evil, not only in Congress, but in state after state, in legislature after legislature, and governor after governor, because you don’t come out and vote for a party that is throwing you under the bus. Even if they’re doing it a little bit less violently than the other guy might do it, the base doesn’t come out to vote. So it’s a fallacy that the lesser evil is some kind of solution. It’s only an assured stepping stone to the greater evil.

Let me just say as a bottom line: this politics of fear that tells you you have to vote against what you’re afraid of instead of for what you believe in, the politics of fear has a track record. It has delivered everything we were afraid of. All the reasons you were told you had to bite your tongue and let the lesser evil speak for you, we’ve gotten all those things by the droves—the expanding wars, the meltdown of the climate, the offshoring of our jobs, the attack on immigrants—we’ve gotten all of that. Not that there aren’t some differences between the two parties, but they’re not enough to save your life, to save your job, or to save your planet. This is a race to the bottom between the two sold-out corporate parties.

If this kind of arguments can get a bit of mainstream media attention, I would not be so sure that the Sanders supporters will vote for Clinton.

[TrackerNeil]

4 minutes ago, Altherion said:

"Unconditional" was an exaggeration on my part, but the left has voted for Democrats for a long time without really getting much out of it except social issues (once there is overwhelming support for them).

Nothing except the ARRA, the Lily Leadbetter Fair Pay Act, Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act, two Supreme Court justices and the partial repeal of the Bush tax cuts. While I concede there are liberals who dispute that any of these are progressive, those liberals are wrong.

[Bold Barry Whitebeard]

1 hour ago, LongRider said:

JFC!  I've lived on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada's long enough to understand the stupid falsity of this bullshit.  I've breathed alot of smoke from forest fires for years (lack of snow pack and dead trees and very hot weather all contribute) and seen the trees die from effects of the drought.  Going over the Sierra's in February and seeing hardly any snow anywhere has nothing to do with any 'three-inch fish".   Hey Donald, sorry for the reality check, but global warming is real.

Sorry for the rant, but this kind of shit just drives me wild, and so many dumb f's just eat it up. 

According to NASA, the California drought isn't caused by climate change/global warming.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/07feb_drought/

Also, the idea that environmental regulations are preventing California from maximizing its water goes back decades.

https://newrepublic.com/article/121605/conservatives-make-environmentalists-cause-california-drought

Nor is Trump the only one suggesting that lifting regulations could help ease the drought:

http://www.science20.com/science_20/california_government_is_the_big_water_management_problem-154625

http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_26444134/california-drought-why-doesnt-california-build-big-dams

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

On 5/28/2016 at 3:40 PM, Kalbear said:

Is this better? From the amazing tumblr Immortan Don

That is so unfair to Immortan Joe. Trump lacks both his leadership and oratory skills. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

45 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Nothing except the ARRA, the Lily Leadbetter Fair Pay Act, Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act, two Supreme Court justices and the partial repeal of the Bush tax cuts. While I concede there are liberals who dispute that any of these are progressive, those liberals are wrong.

Also, when was the last time the Left got anything out of the Republicans, except by accident a la David Souter? Earl Warren? 

(I'd also seriously question the earlier assertion that Sanders is somehow the last of his kind. The surviving Democratic rump in Congress is the most ideologically coherent the party has ever been, simply because the right-wing southern anchor is gone).

[TrackerNeil]

Ed Kilgore nailed it on the media and false equivalency:

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Yet we are drifting into a general election where important media sources seem to have decided that Clinton violating State Department email protocols and Trump openly threatening press freedoms, proudly championing war crimes, and cheerfully channeling misogyny and ethnic and racial grievances are of about the same order of magnitude.

 

[James Arryn]

13 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, I mostly agree with this. 

 

To be clear, you guys are saying you don't think this is true of other candidates, Clinton included? You think Obama would retroactively give his terms to McCain and/or Romney if he got a Dem majority in return?

 

I certainly don't.

[Bold Barry Whitebeard]

16 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Ed Kilgore nailed it on the media and false equivalency:

...cheerfully channeling misogyny and ethnic and racial grievances...

...of white males.  Cheerfully channeling the grievances of feminists, illegal immigrants, and african-americans still OK.

[TrackerNeil]

Just now, Bold Barry Whitebeard said:

...of white males.  Cheerfully channeling the grievances of feminists, illegal immigrants, and african-americans still OK.

You have thus made a meta-post, using false equivalency to criticize a critique of false equivalency. I think I glimpsed eternity...

[Bold Barry Whitebeard]

8 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

You have thus made a meta-post, using false equivalency to criticize a critique of false equivalency. I think I glimpsed eternity...

You like to wave the term 'false equivalency' around like a wand, hoping it will dismiss all opposition to your beliefs.

[TrackerNeil]

2 minutes ago, Bold Barry Whitebeard said:

You like to wave the term 'false equivalency' around like a wand, hoping it will dismiss all opposition to your beliefs.

Actually, I hope my Charm Person spell plus my devil-may-care expression accomplishes that. 

[Bold Barry Whitebeard]

2 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Actually, I hope my Charm Person spell plus my devil-may-care expression accomplishes that. 

If I ever get a PhD, my dissertation is going to be on the slippery slope fallacy as a predictor of social change.

[BloodRider]

2 minutes ago, Bold Barry Whitebeard said:

If I ever get a PhD, my dissertation is going to be on the slippery slope fallacy as a predictor of social change.

Start with the NRA then.

[TrackerNeil]

1 minute ago, Bold Barry Whitebeard said:

If I ever get a PhD, my dissertation is going to be on the slippery slope fallacy as a predictor of social change.

Make sure you take a few pages to sock it to those feminists, illegal immigrants, and African-Americans who are always going on about their grievances. 

[Bold Barry Whitebeard]

3 minutes ago, BloodRider said:

Start with the NRA then.

Well, it's going to start with the beginning of the 20th century, but I'm sure I'll get to them eventually.  I need to figure out how long after a slippery slope prediction is made does it have to come true to count as a predictor.

2 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Make sure you take a few pages to sock it to those feminists, illegal immigrants, and African-Americans who are always going on about their grievances. 

Why would I sock it to them?  I have no issue with them going on about their grievances.  What I object to is the philosophy that they are allowed to voice them but others aren't.

[Kalbear]

25 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

To be clear, you guys are saying you don't think this is true of other candidates, Clinton included? You think Obama would retroactively give his terms to McCain and/or Romney if he got a Dem majority in return?

 

I certainly don't.

I am not a "you guys" spokesperson, but I'll try and address this.

I think Obama 2008 would happily win if it meant a republican supermajority. I thing Obama 2016 would have to ask a lot more questions about it.

I think Clinton would have a tough time with it too, but would ultimately bend the knee to what was best for the party, just like she did in 2008 and largely has done throughout her career. I also think she would ask a lot of clarifying questions first - like two term, how many SC justices are around, etc. 

I think Romney would do it unabashedly without any issue.

I think McCain would too, but for different reasons - namely because he believes he can collaborate and work with the opposition. 

I think Sanders would because both Republicans and Democrats are seen as opposition.

 

 

[TrackerNeil]

Just now, Bold Barry Whitebeard said:

Why would I sock it to them?  I have no issue with them going on about their grievances.  What I object to is the philosophy that they are allowed to voice them but others aren't.

Have you ever heard a rich person complain about bills and wanted to slap the bastard? Replace "rich person" with "white dude" and "bills" with " racial injustice" and you might get the idea.

[Bold Barry Whitebeard]

2 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Have you ever heard a rich person complain about bills and wanted to slap the bastard? Replace "rich person" with "white dude" and "bills" with " racial injustice" and you might get the idea.

No I haven't.  But dismissing a racial grievance, I'm told, is a microagression and a grievance in itself.  Now you're the one making meta posts.