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U.S. Politics: Who's Cohen Down?


LongRider

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44 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I believe they were asked to buy something, and they said they were waiting for a friend. Then they asked to use the washroom and were told it was for customers only. Then they were asked to leave, and they refused. Then the police were called. The store manager said they didn't expect them to be arrested. While all of it has offended many people, the calling the police part has upset folks the most. If I were asked to leave a shop, I would, but that's easy to say because it's been a long time since that ever happened, probably when  was a kid and lots of kids were in a variety store and the shopkeeper (justifiably, I think) believed light fingers were going to be at work, and cleared most of the kids out. I have noticed signs on variety stores saying only a certain number of people were allowed in the store at the same time, and I don't think it had anything to do with color, just shoplifting by teens.

I have been told once or twice by shop staff that the washrooms were for customers only, and many shops have signs to that effect. If I've gone to a coffee shop to use the bathroom, I've then bought a coffee, because I understand that it costs money to stock a bathroom and keep it clean.

Here's a story of a black man who asked to use a Starbucks restroom, only to be told it was for customers only. Fine. But then a white man who hadn't bought anything asked just a few minutes later, and got to use the bathroom.

https://www.theroot.com/watch-starbucks-involved-in-another-racist-incident-1825300042

And then there's a story of a legitimately disruptive white woman who started spewing hate speech at a couple of people in a Starbucks. This piece of trash had the cops called on her, and they "escorted her out." They didn't arrest her or put her in jail for nine hours.

https://splinternews.com/white-lady-hauled-away-by-cops-after-racist-freakout-at-1821286342

What is the common denominator in these disparate outcomes?

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16 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

RIP Barbara Bush. 92 years old. But the number that astonishes me is married for 73 years.

73 years. Just think of that. No matter what you think of their politics, they loved each other for 73 years.

Yeah I'm sure Hitler and Eva Braun loved each other very much too. :rollseyes:

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58 minutes ago, HoodedCrow said:

You might want to cut down the ageism. I’m genx/boomer but I would never vote Republican, and I was a progressive in Canada, which makes me off the charts in the US. I was really  shocked at the racism here, the misogyny, and the lack of knowledge about the political system.

That 40% of the people don’t care about lying, and will vote to perpetuate a horrible medical system, which can impoverish anyone but a US Senator, is astonishing. I can’t help but think there are religions here which encourage people not to question outrageously silly thinking, and that actually teach rich means right. Zeig Heil

The Boomer generation as a whole is flat out garbage. That is just stating a fact.

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11 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I'm sure Hitler and Eva Braun loved each other very much too. :rollseyes:

This is a site that deals with fantasies, after all. 

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6 hours ago, Fez said:

I think it's very difficult to predict the future, and also that people have a habit of thinking that the current political situation is both 1) new and 2) going to last forever. In this case, it sort of is new; polarization has been getting worse for a long time, but we're at level not seen in a hundred years. But I don't think it's going to last forever (but it will last for as long as Trump is President).

Nothing lasts forever, but why do you think the polarization and toxicity will decrease instead of increasing? We are nowhere near the upper limit...

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1 hour ago, Sword of Doom said:

The Boomer generation as a whole is flat out garbage. That is just stating a fact.

#NotAllBoomers

#AllGenerationsMatter

/le sigh ...

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Well,Sword of doom, it’s people like you that make allies like me start to rethink my long held personal egalitarianism. But maybe “sword” is one of those Russian trolls that run around trying to divide the left/center.

I don’t deny at all that young people in the US are being ripped off. The middle class and poorer people are getting ripped off. And I will march and vote at their side. There is a whole sickening religious philosophy in the States that wealth is divinely merited. It seems to go along with believing the earth is 6,000 years old. But if younger people do want to kill off older people, my support has its limits.

Trump supposedly has money but he acts like no business person I know. How to ruin your business...be known as a lier, who dumps his friends, doesn’t pay his debts, or honor his agreements. Don’t follow through on any commitments, and change your mind aggressively and erratically. Sue and slander other people, spend a lot of time in court where you lie under oath. No wonder he had to get secret deals from Russia.

Gosh, George Martin is a boomer, I suppose people here don’t like him?

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22 minutes ago, HoodedCrow said:

Well,Sword of doom, it’s people like you that make allies like me start to rethink my long held personal egalitarianism. But maybe “sword” is one of those Russian trolls that run around trying to divide the left/center.

I don’t deny at all that young people in the US are being ripped off. The middle class and poorer people are getting ripped off. And I will march and vote at their side. There is a whole sickening religious philosophy in the States that wealth is divinely merited. It seems to go along with believing the earth is 6,000 years old. But if younger people do want to kill off older people, my support has its limits.

Trump supposedly has money but he acts like no business person I know. How to ruin your business...be known as a lier, who dumps his friends, doesn’t pay his debts, or honor his agreements. Don’t follow through on any commitments, and change your mind aggressively and erratically. Sue and slander other people, spend a lot of time in court where you lie under oath. No wonder he had to get secret deals from Russia.

Gosh, George Martin is a boomer, I suppose people here don’t like him?

I am probably one of the most left leaning people on in this sub thread. 

Sorry you have a hard time dealing with the majority of your generation being utter garbage. From their bigotry all the way to their greed, they are just terrible self centered people.

We are stuck cleaning up the mess and are probably too late to fix some of their fuck ups, one of them being climate change. 


This is a good article that touches upon why that generation is terrible.
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millennials-congress-debt

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3 hours ago, Shryke said:

I can't find myself buying his argument here. Primarily because at no point does he talk about voters.

 

Quote

In response, black Northerners voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt in 1936 and stuck with the president for the rest of his time in office. This new voting bloc motivated many Democratic politicians to back civil rights.

 

Quote

By the early ’40s, Northern Democratic voters were substantially more likely to back key civil rights initiatives than were Republicans.

They didn't?

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2 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I'm sure Hitler and Eva Braun loved each other very much too. :rollseyes:

 

2 hours ago, Sword of Doom said:

The Boomer generation as a whole is flat out garbage. That is just stating a fact.

Both of these are just a little much.

On Barbara Bush: yes, she had a terrible response to the Katrina survivors in Houston. But she was a decent and positive and unpretentious First Lady. I also remember her as a big improvement over Nancy Reagan.

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1 hour ago, Sword of Doom said:

Sorry you have a hard time dealing with the majority of your generation being utter garbage. From their bigotry all the way to their greed, they are just terrible self centered people.

I thought your comments were jokes, so haven't been responding to them.

Generalisations are not especially helpful, especially negative ones. Judging somebody on their age is unfair. That's as unfair as saying that because you're alive now, you therefore support Donald Trump, Kim Jon-Un and Assad. Because they are people who are ruling while your generation lives, and no amount of nuance can absolve you from responsibility for that.

There have been amazing people and scumbags alive at any and every point in history. Beyond their ages, they didn't have much in common. That's true of all time periods.

I think your statement is as false, as arbitrary and as discriminatory as if you'd made the same statement but replaced "generation" with "race."

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34 minutes ago, Triskele said:

To rif off of Fez's point a bit I heard on Yasha Mounck's (double SP) podcast an interview with National Review's David French who predicted that if Trump were soundly beaten in 2020 it would be unlikely the GOP would go that route again in the near future.  But I think there are reasons to doubt that given that David French is a never-Trumper and that it seems like the GOP base is just ripe for another authoritarian-ish leader to take up the mantle.  That's my fear...that even if Trump goes down we're still nowhere out of the woods because of how cult-like and authoritarian the GOP voters are.  

It seems like the best hope is some combination of:

-Trump goes down 

-next admin is able to both deliver some good, tangible stuff that gets back a few voters 

-pass some laws making it harder for a future admin to become authoritarian 

-hope the much-hyped demographic trends play out making it harder for the GOP to win the White House again in this form

But even if all of this were to transpire would it not just lead to an extremely angry minority GOP?  

Yes, it would. Also, French is probably correct in that the GOP is unlikely to go the Trump route again, but again, it can get way, way worse than Trump. If you've studied history, you've probably noticed that Trump has not even availed himself of the methods used by the more authoritarian US Presidents (e.g. his populist predecessor, Andrew Jackson) let alone the many techniques used by authoritarians around the world.

Imagine somebody relatively young (under 50), charismatic, without any of Trump's baggage, vulgarity or apparent incoherence, with much better relations with the corporate sector and the intelligence community... and who also differs from Trump in that he is willing to either arrange or at least countenance, for example, a fire or an explosion or an armed attack on an administrative center which rather fortuitously removes key opponents and provides cover for... let's call them emergency measures. Or perhaps he assembles for the party a paramilitary wing... excuse me, a Patriotic Militia.

These are arguably the most famous methods, but there's a much wider variety to choose from, especially given a substantial number of well-armed supporters. Trump has not used any of them yet and does not appear likely to do so... but as long as the underlying inequality and divide-and-conquer politics continue (and I see no reason why they would not), sooner or later we will run into somebody willing to gamble.

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2 hours ago, Triskele said:

To rif off of Fez's point a bit I heard on Yasha Mounck's (double SP) podcast an interview with National Review's David French who predicted that if Trump were soundly beaten in 2020 it would be unlikely the GOP would go that route again in the near future.  But I think there are reasons to doubt that given that David French is a never-Trumper and that it seems like the GOP base is just ripe for another authoritarian-ish leader to take up the mantle.  That's my fear...that even if Trump goes down we're still nowhere out of the woods because of how cult-like and authoritarian the GOP voters are.  

It seems like the best hope is some combination of:

-Trump goes down 

-next admin is able to both deliver some good, tangible stuff that gets back a few voters 

-pass some laws making it harder for a future admin to become authoritarian 

-hope the much-hyped demographic trends play out making it harder for the GOP to win the White House again in this form

But even if all of this were to transpire would it not just lead to an extremely angry minority GOP?  

Well remember that The worst things we blame Andrew Jackson for, like the genocide he authorized and oversaw, were carried out and perfected by van Buren his successor

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2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

They didn't?

It didn't. The article touches little on voting patterns and mostly talks about leadership (party, union, etc). And one of the interesting facets of Trump's support is increased support from union households and what seems to be somewhat of a divide between leadership and members. Which, along with similar phenomena, is one of the big parts of the story that article is purporting to debunk.

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5 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

 

Both of these are just a little much.

On Barbara Bush: yes, she had a terrible response to the Katrina survivors in Houston. But she was a decent and positive and unpretentious First Lady. I also remember her as a big improvement over Nancy Reagan.

That isn't saying much, because Nancy Reagan was as big of a piece of a shit as Ronald was.

 

4 hours ago, Yukle said:

I thought your comments were jokes, so haven't been responding to them.

Generalisations are not especially helpful, especially negative ones. Judging somebody on their age is unfair. That's as unfair as saying that because you're alive now, you therefore support Donald Trump, Kim Jon-Un and Assad. Because they are people who are ruling while your generation lives, and no amount of nuance can absolve you from responsibility for that.

There have been amazing people and scumbags alive at any and every point in history. Beyond their ages, they didn't have much in common. That's true of all time periods.

I think your statement is as false, as arbitrary and as discriminatory as if you'd made the same statement but replaced "generation" with "race."

Eh, I really am not interested in how boomers feel about being rightfuly criticized for how shit that entire generation was. If you're not a boomer that is a reason as to why that generation flat out sucks, idk why it would bother you.

They destroyed the economy, they destroyed the evniorment, and they barely got off their asses to do anything about social changes once their protesting the vietnam war stopped. Bunch of trust fund babies that were gifted every chance they could get, and the fucked the future generations with their greed, arrogance and ignorance.


You can think that all you want, but it would show how privelleged you are and how little you know about racism and how dangerous it is. 

They aren't even in the same ballpark. So attempting to relate my comments about one of the worst generations to being no different than saying something about certain races, is just pure garbage. Saying that sounds about white, and it flat out ignores the violent racist history of this country, and the violent racist present. 

We live in a white supremacist society, so yea, me criticizing a bad generation is not even in the same stratosphere as a generalization about people of color given the historical weight behind such generalizations and the violence that is perpetuated because of how those generalizations were and are used to dehumanize them.

 

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6 hours ago, Shryke said:

It didn't. The article touches little on voting patterns and mostly talks about leadership (party, union, etc). And one of the interesting facets of Trump's support is increased support from union households and what seems to be somewhat of a divide between leadership and members. Which, along with similar phenomena, is one of the big parts of the story that article is purporting to debunk.

Except the article said that northern Democratic voters were more likely to support civil rights initiatives by the early 1940s. I'm not sure why this doesn't qualify within the purview of "voting patterns". So evidently, the efforts of the Democratic Party leadership and that of the Unions was having some effect. And if you can drag voters along with you to support better racial policies and civil rights, even though they may vote primarily for other reasons, then that's a win in my book.

And its true that Trump won more union households than any Republican President since Reagan, but both still lost that vote overall. While it's certainly disheartening that Trump was able to get increased support from Union members, there is no reason to accept that as the new normal, though I'd suspect some liberals are wiling to accept that as the new normal and think the best thing for Democrats to do is hunker down on the coast and pout, and say game over man, game over, and just hope this whole thing blows over by itself. This idea is almost as bad, but not quite as bad as that of the Mark Lilla's of the world, whose advice the article is trying to refute and which is it's real main point.

And even though, Trump did get increased Union support, compared to other Republican Presidents, i'd be extremely cautious in arriving at the conclusion that Trump has broken the link between Unions and the fate of the Democratic Party.

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