US Politics: Red Whine Hangover

[Serious Callers Only]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

I'm a little confused as to why this US/Nazi argument is now about abortion.  The Republican Party has been pro-life for at least 40 years.  Now, one could argue they've been on the road to the current type of radical politics since that point, but the difference between now and Reagan, Gingrich, Bush, even Tea-Party-era GOPers is what the administration is doing and the type of politics it uses, e.g. the casual and brazen violations of law, the detention camps, the overt and violent fascist supporters, etc.  In comparison, the GOP wanting to outlaw abortion is a constant.

It's frame shifting from disingenuous regressives as usual. Abortion 'works' for their messaging (even if it shouldn't, if you're not a brainwashed science less fool), so they'll 'always' go 'but abortion', and 'but the troops' even if the subject matter which shows they are a dumpster fire is not directly related.

Though to be honest, lately they have been 'evolving' down the narcissist prayer thanks to moral hole Trump popularity. First they pulled the whataboutism but now they're often going directly to 'it's your fault'. I guess it hurts too much to have so many self inflicted wounds so the delusion must get deeper.

[Toth]

2 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Ukrainians (ethnic minority) starved in a man-made famine in Soviet Russia under Stalin then.

Lol, that's great! Just chiming in to remind everyone that we live in a time where the president of the United States, when confronted with the death toll caused by his disastrous disaster relief in Puerto Rico, claimed that these are fake deaths made up by the opposition to make him look bad. I'm thinking that Stalin would have handled the situation pretty much exactly the same, given that he repeatedly blamed dissidents and sabotage for the results of his own destructive policies.

[Serious Callers Only]

I also find it rich that that person is pulling the Ukraine soviet famines card after what his party treason partner 'did last summer'.

[DMC]

16 minutes ago, Serious Callers Only said:

It's frame shifting from disingenuous regressives as usual.

Well, if that's the case my response would simply be "who gives a shit about abortion?"

[Bonnot OG]

Crying about Stalin starving people to death, ignoring Churchill doing the same thing to people in British colonies. Also ignoring how Trump got nearly 3,000 people killed in Puerto Rico, an American colony, which Trump's and the GOP's racism no doubt played a part in.
 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

I disagree that the hyperpartisanship is at a 90/10 split, just like I disagree that it is only conservative policies that cause destruction, but you basically make my point...you see 90% of the problem is with the other side, this is the first step in dehumanizing your opponent and deciding that 'any means necessary' to defeat them is fine, because, hey they're Nazis anyway.  If this is 'both sides ism' so be it.

I agree that a 90/10 split is an exaggeration. I don't know how you'd accurately measure it, but my guess is it would be closer to a 2/3s split. I also think it's fair to argue that Democrats really ratcheted it up with the Bork hearing (though he should never have been nominated in the first place). That said, I do think we can point to what really sent things off the wheels and that's the rise of Newt Gingrich. He was a nobody back bencher until he was able to convince conservatives that going on the attack and making it personal was the best strategy to retake the House. He was the one who made things really nasty, in which the goal ceased to be to convince the other side of the rightness of your ideas and instead do your best to just humiliate them. The Republican based responded enthusiastically to this, as they still do today. 

[mormont]

4 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

I disagree that the hyperpartisanship is at a 90/10 split

OK. Cite any recent example of hyperpartisanship by the Democratic party, then. And explain why it was as serious as, for example, employing scorched-earth tactics to put in place a SC nominee that nobody pretends had any quality to recommend him other than party loyalty.

Seriously, I was being generous with the 90%.

4 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

...you see 90% of the problem is with the other side, this is the first step in dehumanizing your opponent and deciding that 'any means necessary' to defeat them is fine, because, hey they're Nazis anyway.

A slippery slope fallacy? Oh dear.

No. I did not say these things, and if you have to argue against a position you're claiming I might someday hold, it only shows you have no argument against the things I actually did say.

3 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

First, even supposing this is a fallacy some people are making it clearly hasn't been made by me in this thread. 

Unfortunately, yes it has. In order to strengthen your rhetoric about the comparison being absurd, you cited how the Nazis 'slaughtered homosexuals, the ill and the handicapped'. While it's definitely true that people died or were executed in camps pre-war, there was no policy of active slaughter (as in, deliberate killing without trial) until much later. You can argue the technicality, but there's no question that your words were deliberately invoking images of Nazi atrocities during the war.

 

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Guess that explains why abortion and homosexuality were criminalised and Ukrainians (ethnic minority) starved in a man-made famine in Soviet Russia under Stalin then.

The difference between Republican arguments against abortion and those of Communists and Fascists is that the former are premised on the need to protect innocent life, the latter aim to use female fertility to advance the aims of the state. And the difference in moral terms is as between night and day.

WHAT???????  That's what someone says who believes women have no right to their own bodies and their own lives.  BS.  BS. BS.  Especially as the crazies are crazy about making women here advance their needs by reproducing more more more white babies.

Moreover, the amount voter repression and suppression going on since the tea party is huge, by many and various means.  Remember the white supremacist crazies in Florida who stopped the count of votes by violence and threats of violence against those doing the counting in the bush-gore election?  Any and all means, including violence.  A Vermont state congress woman had to resign her seat because, as an African American, the death and rape and mutilation and torture threats against her and HER FAMILY were so graphic, so constant. Black people getting killed for doing nothing but their jobs, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of gddamned violence going on and it goes on with a lot of state support -- at least if those who commit it aren't punished.  And look at the nazi marchers in Charlottesville, where a lot of gddamned violence took place.

[Kalbear]

Sigh.

My goal of pointing out the Nazi thing was not to get into a debate into whether or not Trump is a fascist like the Nazis were (he's not, at least not yet); it was to point out that compromising with some people is not acceptable depending on what you're compromising on, and 'some genocide' is not a good choice when given the option between no genocide and genocide. That's it.

Trump isn't ;as determined to murder people, I think. He is absolutely authoritarian, and as we've seen in several democratic and formerly democratic countries in recent years, it doesn't take much to turn a country into an authoritarian state - one in which most people aren't suffering. What I was surprised about more is that not only was it Trump's goal to do this, it was the GOP's goal as well, and instead of looking at changing demographics as a requirement to change their policies, they've instead decided to go full illiberal and attempt to hold power with a minority population government - one that the US system is uniquely designed to do well at. 

We are now almost two years into the Trump admin, and what people feared would come to pass has, actually, happened. We have had concentration camps of ethnic minorities. We have had corruption at every level of government, followed by forgiveness and ignoring of said corruption when it is politically useful. We have continued to do nothing to stop foreign theft of election material and disruption, and have still encouraged it explicitly. We just had a great example of the FBI being used to further political agendas, and it went off pretty well. Do we have political violence like Weimar? No, but neither did Hungary recently, and that's not a requirement for authoritarianism. (and we still have a lot more of it than we have had in recent years). 

The abortion argument (along with the arguments about homosexuals and Nazis) are just bullshit distraction tactics. Don't even dignify them with a response. 

[Zorral]

9 minutes ago, mormont said:

OK. Cite any recent example of hyperpartisanship by the Democratic party, then. And explain why it was as serious as, for example, employing scorched-earth tactics to put in place a SC nominee that nobody pretends had any quality to recommend him other than party loyalty.

Seriously, I was being generous with the 90%.

A slippery slope fallacy? Oh dear.

No. I did not say these things, and if you have to argue against a position you're claiming I might someday hold, it only shows you have no argument against the things I actually did say.

Unfortunately, yes it has. In order to strengthen your rhetoric about the comparison being absurd, you cited how the Nazis 'slaughtered homosexuals, the ill and the handicapped'. While it's definitely true that people died or were executed in camps pre-war, there was no policy of active slaughter (as in, deliberate killing without trial) until much later. You can argue the technicality, but there's no question that your words were deliberately invoking images of Nazi atrocities during the war.

 

Also there are a lot of other ways to kill people with various conditions such as denying them the health care and support that allows them to work, getting rid of any affordable insurance and medicaid, etc. -- and tell me that these people in D.C. aren't doing their goddamned best to do that.  (This isn't addressed to Mormont or Kalbear but the smuggy-wuggys who can't even disguise their smirks as they pretend to debate.)

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

Are we seriously still pretending that Republicans give a fuck about protecting innocent life?

I mean, if they're allowed to call themselves pro-life while supporting the death penalty, wars of choice, not funding programs for said children they want to "protect," etc., yeah, we're still pretending they want to protect innocent life. 

[Cas Stark]

37 minutes ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said:

I agree that a 90/10 split is an exaggeration. I don't know how you'd accurately measure it, but my guess is it would be closer to a 2/3s split. I also think it's fair to argue that Democrats really ratcheted it up with the Bork hearing (though he should never have been nominated in the first place). That said, I do think we can point to what really sent things off the wheels and that's the rise of Newt Gingrich. He was a nobody back bencher until he was able to convince conservatives that going on the attack and making it personal was the best strategy to retake the House. He was the one who made things really nasty, in which the goal ceased to be to convince the other side of the rightness of your ideas and instead do your best to just humiliate them. The Republican based responded enthusiastically to this, as they still do today. 

I don't really know, me, I am made pretty jittery by the ideas of abolishing the electoral college, changing the senate, because 2 from every state now isn't fair to high population states, moving to a straight popular vote for president, and packing the supreme court II.  This from my perspective sounds like a desire to destroy a whole lot of American institutions in order to get power. I am sure you know, a lot of these 'checks and balances' and levels, etc. exist for exactly the reason of not having a society run by 51%.  Gerrymandering is done by both parties, so that's a draw.  I find this all very troubling, and it's weird to me coming from people who spend 24/7 in semi hysterical rants about Trump suspending elections and turning into Hitler/Stalin/Pinchochet that these ideas don't strike anyone as problematic, or that would create a negative impression for conservatives.

I would say it probably all started to go seriously downhill with Watergate, then you saw  overall belief/trust in U.S. institutions. Bork was a big turning point.  The liberals went nutty when Reagan won, and then the conservatives went just as nutty when Clinton won.  There are lot of other smaller issues, like the various tinkerings that have been done w/how Congress works starting in the 70s, that yeah, they took power away from the chairs and now nothing gets done, so was that really, in hindsight, good? or not so good.  We're in a very bad place right now on almost any form of measurement and I don't expect that to change.  Sometimes societies go crazy and ruin themselves.  It's always totally obvious who was the real 'villain' in hindsight and what were the missed chances for a correction, but that's only in hindsight.  Like I said yesterday, liberals think conservatives are evil and conservatives think the same, and no one is interested in finding a common ground.  But, I appreciate the polite exchange.

[Chaircat Meow]

20 hours ago, mormont said:

Unfortunately, yes it has. In order to strengthen your rhetoric about the comparison being absurd, you cited how the Nazis 'slaughtered homosexuals, the ill and the handicapped'. While it's definitely true that people died or were executed in camps pre-war, there was no policy of active slaughter (as in, deliberate killing without trial) until much later. You can argue the technicality, but there's no question that your words were deliberately invoking images of Nazi atrocities during the war.

 

I don't think so.

Here's what you said to begin with.

''It does appear as if large parts of that argument are based on the common fallacy though, where someone makes a comparison between the US and 1930s Germany, invoking Hitler, and this is rebutted by complaining that the comparison is faulty because the modern US isn't like 1940s Germany. The point is not whether the US is there, but whether it is moving in that direction. You have not really made any substantial argument against that latter point, preferring to make arguments against the former.''

So the fallacy is here claimed by you to be comparing Nazi Germany with the present day USA, and not taking into account the fact that the liberal thinks the USA isn't yet like Nazi Germany (of the 1940s) but is becoming so. Unfortunately, the ill-founded piece of reasoning you identify in the above quote in the text box is not the same piece of reasoning you criticised to begin with. In the above quote in the text box you claim the problem lies in comparing the possible future America of Trump to 1939-1945 Germany rather than 1933-1939 Germany, but this is a wholly different objection. Indeed, in the first objection you accepted that the comparison was to 1940s Germany. So even if this new objection is a fair objection, it does nothing to prove your point that the fallacy you originally identified can be ascribed to me.

Now, I never made any mention of a distinction between pre-war and during-the-war-Germany in my original post in this thread, I just said Nazi Germany and the possible future America of Trump. And the reason for this is simple: Browning didn't make any mention of it in the portion of the piece I quoted in order to register my objections. It was his comparison I was criticising and as he juxtaposed the Nazi assault on homosexuals, the handicapped and the unborn with the policies of the possible future America of Trump and made no distinction between pre-war and during-the-war-Germany I criticised the comparison on the basis on which he gave it.

So, that's that.

 

[Werthead]

Quote

I don't really know, me, I am made pretty jittery by the ideas of abolishing the electoral college, changing the senate, because 2 from every state now isn't fair to high population states, moving to a straight popular vote for president, and packing the supreme court II.  This from my perspective sounds like a desire to destroy a whole lot of American institutions in order to get power. I am sure you know, a lot of these 'checks and balances' and levels, etc. exist for exactly the reason of not having a society run by 51%

You're made "pretty jittery" by democracy? Interesting.

The logic of the electoral college is that it maintains the idea of the United States as a federation of quasi-autonomous states rather than a single nation-state. A semi-EU rather than a super-sized UK. However, that went out the window pretty early on and the USA is a single country, albeit with a higher degree of federalisation than some. On that basis, the continued existence of the electoral college becomes problematic because it allows people to win elections without winning over the majority of the population, hence Trump losing an election by 3 million votes and still getting into power. This is a repudiation of the democratic principle (which, as we here are discovering to our cost, is pretty much based on the idea of the "rule of the 51%").

The argument that, "well, if you don't do that then California, New York and Texas decide every election" is asinine, because in fact it just means that Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and maybe Michigan decide the elections instead, which doesn't seem to be any better, except those states have smaller populations so you end up with a tiny number of Americans deciding the election. Not to mention that the electoral college also penalises both parties: Republican voters in California are completely ignored under this system as much as Democrat voters in Texas (albeit these things can change slowly). A straight popular vote suddenly makes campaigning all over the country and to differing demographics much more sensible.

A key problem with the current US view of democracy is that it seems to be "winner takes all", so a President with a commanding majority of -3 million votes is making massively sweeping changes to the country with no regard to everyone else. In a true democracy, the winner would recognise the concerns of the people who didn't vote for them and would make concessions to that. That's a weakness of the hyperpartisanship in the USA and the fact that no-one seems particularly interested in winning back the centre ground.

[James Arryn]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Sigh.

My goal of pointing out the Nazi thing was not to get into a debate into whether or not Trump is a fascist like the Nazis were (he's not, at least not yet); it was to point out that compromising with some people is not acceptable depending on what you're compromising on, and 'some genocide' is not a good choice when given the option between no genocide and genocide. That's it.

Trump isn't ;as determined to murder people, I think. He is absolutely authoritarian, and as we've seen in several democratic and formerly democratic countries in recent years, it doesn't take much to turn a country into an authoritarian state - one in which most people aren't suffering. What I was surprised about more is that not only was it Trump's goal to do this, it was the GOP's goal as well, and instead of looking at changing demographics as a requirement to change their policies, they've instead decided to go full illiberal and attempt to hold power with a minority population government - one that the US system is uniquely designed to do well at. 

We are now almost two years into the Trump admin, and what people feared would come to pass has, actually, happened. We have had concentration camps of ethnic minorities. We have had corruption at every level of government, followed by forgiveness and ignoring of said corruption when it is politically useful. We have continued to do nothing to stop foreign theft of election material and disruption, and have still encouraged it explicitly. We just had a great example of the FBI being used to further political agendas, and it went off pretty well. Do we have political violence like Weimar? No, but neither did Hungary recently, and that's not a requirement for authoritarianism. (and we still have a lot more of it than we have had in recent years). 

The abortion argument (along with the arguments about homosexuals and Nazis) are just bullshit distraction tactics. Don't even dignify them with a response. 

It’s worth noting that even Hitler wasn’t originally ‘determined to murder’ the Jews et al. Moreso the Communists (ie he was more scorched earth on communism, which was in fact the primary antagonist to the Nazi Party).

But the Holocaust is also known as the Final Solution because it was the last in an escalating series of methods to rid Germany of Jews, which began with what we would today term ‘immigration’ tactics, ie not letting Jewish people into Germany and then ‘evacuating’ Jews, either to other countries or...this is true...an originally Nazi plan to establish the State of Israel in the Levant and repatriate Jewish people there. Most of these ended up being scrapped due to international uncooperation, cost or an increasingly militaristic atmosphere with likewise militaristic problem-solving thinking being prevalent.

So, in other words, the foothills of horror are often much more mundane in nature. 

[Bonnot OG]

Kavanaugh being a shrill partisan fuck head. Shocking.

[Martell Spy]

8 minutes ago, Bonnot OG said:

Kavanaugh being a shrill partisan fuck head. Shocking.

What did he do? ( I dread to ask)

[Martell Spy]

Gerrymanders, Part 1: Busting the both-sides-do-it myth

http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-1-busting-the-both-sides-do-it-myth/

Quote

Although both sides are potentially motivated, only one side has taken redistricting to extremes. Recent changes in partisan gerrymandering constitute one of the major crises facing our system of government(link to Mann/Ornstein book, a fellow Wonky winner).

 

[Morpheus]

3 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

What did he do? ( I dread to ask)

At the ceremonial swearing in Trump held for him tonight, he went one by one through all of the Republicans to whom he is indebted for putting him on the court.

[Martell Spy]

1 minute ago, Morpheus said:

At the ceremonial swearing in Trump held for him tonight, he went one by one through all of the Republicans to whom he is indebted for putting him on the court.

Well, at least it was not a SC voting rights decision.