US Politics: Make Thread Titles Great Again

[mormont]

15 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I dunno if I personally think that, but I've met quite a few people who do, especially on the left as regard religion. Saying people are "lesser humans" is a bit strong, but there are plenty of people who will say that believing in God in 2019 means you're a bit dumb and/or compare faith-inspired policies to very bad stuff.

So, again, this is agreeing with me that there is no evidence of the left regarding religious people as 'lesser humans'. 

I don't know why people keep doing this: saying 'no, left-wing people don't regard religious people as lesser humans but they do a completely different thing, which I'm going to pretend is on the same spectrum or something'. Looking down on someone's beliefs is not regarding them as a 'lesser human'.

It's reasonable to say that adherents of some religions - definitely not Christianity, but other religions - have been or do get looked down on as 'lesser humans': heck, that's what the Holocaust was about. But in the modern US left, it is so rare as to be not worth mentioning, and not remotely comparable to the very active forms of discrimination on the right - including, yes, against religions other than Christianity. The OP was, to use a Scots word, blethers. Nonsense. A fevered imagining. 

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Looking down on someone's beliefs is not regarding them as a 'lesser human'.

We're talking about belief systems that are quite often strongly linked to one's sense of morality and identity, not to mention -for many- how they spend a significant amount of their time.
It's pretty damn hard to look down on all that without looking down on the person, and claiming otherwise seems to me rather disingenuous.

[mormont]

13 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

We're talking about belief systems that are quite often strongly linked to one's sense of morality and identity, not to mention -for many- how they spend a significant amount of their time.
It's pretty damn hard to look down on all that without looking down on the person, and claiming otherwise seems to me rather disingenuous.

Looking down on a person is, yet again, not the same thing, nor even on the same spectrum, as regarding them as a 'lesser human'. This is not a difficult point to grasp, and frankly, if you can't see the difference, that is worrying.

Here's the difference. To a white supremacist, it does not matter what a black person believes, what church they go to, or anything else. They can change all of those things. They can change their job, improve their social status, do anything at all. The white supremacist will still believe they are a 'lesser human'. Even if the black person completely agrees with the white supremacist! Nothing can change that and none of it matters to the white supremacist's view of the black person as inherently less human and undeserving of human rights.

This does not accurately describe the views of the left in the US towards people who hold particular political views because of their religion, with the possible exception of a handful of random idiots on Twitter or whatever. As much as their views and their reasons for holding them or methods of promoting them might provoke scorn, that is not the same thing nor on the same spectrum as regarding them as inherently less than human. Not unless you want to claim that any difference of opinion is to some degree regarding the other person as subhuman. 

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

President Donald Trump is on the verge of a bipartisan rejection of his emergency declaration at the border in what would be an embarrassing rebuke by a Congress opposed to his immigration agenda.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Monday night said he would join Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, along with 47 Senate Democrats to block Trump’s attempts to secure billions for his border wall after lawmakers effectively stiffed him. Now just one more GOP senator’s support for a resolution to block Trump's bid would send the measure to Trump’s desk and force a veto.

“Conservatives rightfully cried foul when President Barack Obama used executive action to completely bypass Congress,” Tillis said in a Washington Post op-ed on Monday night. “There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that there’s an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach — that it’s acceptable for my party but not thy party.”

Still, there is clear reluctance in the GOP to bucking Trump.

 

Trump on brink of defeat on border emergency
Just one more Senate Republican is needed to block Trump’s emergency declaration, though even critics are reluctant to buck the president.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/25/trump-national-emergency-congress-1185589

[Maithanet]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

Trump on brink of defeat on border emergency
Just one more Senate Republican is needed to block Trump’s emergency declaration, though even critics are reluctant to buck the president.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/25/trump-national-emergency-congress-1185589

Such an overstated headline.  Trump is not "on the verge of defeat", he's on the verge of having to issue his first veto, something I'm sure he'll happily do to show he's "standing up to the swamp". 

I hope they can find another Republican to vote against this, but it barely matters.  It's a question of whether Trump gets a mild rebuke in the face of trampling the constitution or no rebuke at all. 

[Ormond]

4 hours ago, mormont said:

It's reasonable to say that adherents of some religions - definitely not Christianity, but other religions - have been or do get looked down on as 'lesser humans': heck, that's what the Holocaust was about. But in the modern US left, it is so rare as to be not worth mentioning, and not remotely comparable to the very active forms of discrimination on the right - including, yes, against religions other than Christianity. The OP was, to use a Scots word, blethers. Nonsense. A fevered imagining. 

I think I'd like to point out that the Holocaust was really NOT about persecuting Jews because of their religious beliefs, but was a racial ideology just as you yourself so well described in your description of White supremacists. The Nazis thought of Jewishness as a racial characteristic and being an atheist or even a Christian did not save you if you had Jewish ancestry. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 hours ago, DMC said:

Because the only way to do it is with unified government, and unified government is not that frequent for either party.

There's a difference between norms and archaic parliamentary tactics to delay votes allowed in the Senate.  Those delays are as much about fucking around in committees and even floor tactics as they are the blue slip.

Where does it end though? And who is more likely to push it to the extremes? I’m genuinely surprised you’re taking the side that you are because you have to foresee how this ends, and news alert, our side will take a massive L. The short term gratification simply isn’t worth it.

[mormont]

2 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I think I'd like to point out that the Holocaust was really NOT about persecuting Jews because of their religious beliefs, but was a racial ideology just as you yourself so well described in your description of White supremacists. The Nazis thought of Jewishness as a racial characteristic and being an atheist or even a Christian did not save you if you had Jewish ancestry. 

Oh, absolutely.  I meant to acknowledge that as a caveat, but forgot to do so. 

[Zorral]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/nyregion/manafort-pardon-trump.html

A point-by-point consideration of what happens to the NY State charges against Manafort -- if the cancerous orange wart squatting in the oval office issues him a federal pardon.

The most interesting discussion is around the point of NY state regs on double jeopardy:

Quote

 

....New York State law provides even stronger protections against double jeopardy. But some exceptions exist. Double jeopardy applies once a jury is sworn in a criminal case, whether the defendant is convicted or acquitted. However, juries sometimes cannot decide on a verdict on a particular charge, which is what happened with several counts in Mr. Manafort’s federal case in Virginia. That could leave the door open for Mr. Vance’s office to pursue state charges — such as falsifying business records or mortgage fraud — in those instances.

“I don’t imagine when presented with someone whose career is alleged to have been as varied and crooked as Manafort’s, the D.A.’s office would have to stretch itself to find conduct that could be charged without violating New York’s double jeopardy provisions,” said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia Law School professor....

 

 

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

This does not accurately describe the views of the left in the US towards people who hold particular political views because of their religion, with the possible exception of a handful of random idiots on Twitter or whatever. As much as their views and their reasons for holding them or methods of promoting them might provoke scorn, that is not the same thing nor on the same spectrum as regarding them as inherently less than human. Not unless you want to claim that any difference of opinion is to some degree regarding the other person as subhuman. 

Ok. I get what you're saying. I can't help thinking this is a subtlety that can easily be lost in a conversation about politics though.

It's kind of difficult telling someone you completely reject, and possibly despise, their worldview, while at the same time convincing them that you still value them as a human being. Especially if there's scorn in there somewhere.

Also:

Quote

Here's the difference. To a white supremacist, it does not matter what a black person believes, what church they go to, or anything else. They can change all of those things. They can change their job, improve their social status, do anything at all. The white supremacist will still believe they are a 'lesser human'. Even if the black person completely agrees with the white supremacist! Nothing can change that and none of it matters to the white supremacist's view of the black person as inherently less human and undeserving of human rights.

How true is this today though? With the new versions of white supremacy / ethno-nationalism that we're dealing with, you're going to find *a lot* of people who'll argue this is not their position. In fact, the alt-right is pretty much all about claiming that this is *not* their position...
And then there are those who may actually believe it. People are so careful not to express the brutal, overt racism you're describing, that quite a few people come to believe in their own convoluted arguments.

I'm not trying to take the piss, I'm genuinely trying to see how your line of argumentation could fly with a bona fide conservative. And struggling.
 

[Ice Queen]

14 hours ago, Altherion said:

Isn't it nice when you ask for something and an example is provided for you almost immediately? In case you missed it, I'm quoting Ice Queen's post below. It not only occurs here (and this is hardly an extreme rationalist atheist community), but it's tolerated: imagine what would happen if somebody wrote "Maybe they should be regarded as subhuman" meaning practically any one of the groups favored by the left...

Next time the issue of the Second Amendment comes up and people are asking why we need such a thing at all, remember this post and also remember the fact that the people being regarded know you feel this way.

Oh please. I didn't say kill people, I said treat them as subhuman. You know, the same way they treat people who look differently than they do, act differently, and worship differently. I'm an atheist with a slew of fire and brimstone preachers and born again Christians in my family--and believe you me, to them I am not really human, I have no soul, and I'm going straight to hell. They could use some of their own medicine.

How many people have been killed in the name of religion? Millions upon millions. How many multitudes did the Israelites kill when they entered Canaan? The Crusades? The Inquisition? The Salem Witch Trials? The list goes on. 

But by all means, stay on your high horse and try to preach from a position of moral superiority even as American Christians have given up their right to claim the moral high ground. 

[lokisnow]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Where does it end though? And who is more likely to push it to the extremes? I’m genuinely surprised you’re taking the side that you are because you have to foresee how this ends, and news alert, our side will take a massive L. The short term gratification simply isn’t worth it.

For me at least there’s two things:

doing nothing results in more bad outcomes than intervention (more dangerous)—and those bad outcomes are guarantees rather then the probabilistic bad outcomes of intervention.

 and doing nothing is also morally wrong.

But the concrete reality of the bad outcomes from trumps tyrant judges has to be addressed rather than doing nothing because of nebulous probable future retaliation.

Mitch McConnell pulled the nuclear option on the Supreme Court and absolutely nothing happened. No one cared. Nothing in the court of public opinion changed. The nuclear option that democrats strategists and staffers had been pissing themselves in abject terror over for twenty years resulted in a big fizzle—meaning all of those policy makers and strategists and staffers were proven definitively to be incredibly fucking wrong, for over twenty years, and we should not listen to their forecasts of cowardice or heed their exhortations of the virtues of a status quo that inflicts harm on their own electorate.

If we don’t expand the courts and trumps judges systematically delay or destroy all intervention in climate change we will have murdered the planet because we chose to do nothing.

accepting and being content with the status quo is a problem when our society is being constantly attacked by their judicial tyranny. Acceding to their total rule because that’s the way it’s always been and we always have forty more years to make incremental changes is a fatal strategic error.

the moral arc of the universe may be long but the arc of human life on earth is crashing to an end within the next couple decades, the MLK option of waiting passively for a bend towards justice in another hundred years has expired.

[Kalbear]

So remember when I painted a picture of Russian interference in elections and it didn't occur, and y'all thought 'oh that crazy Kalbear, always worrying about things' - well, it turns out there's a likely reason that it didn't happen, and it's that the US actually stepped up its game.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-cyber-command-operation-disrupted-internet-access-of-russian-troll-factory-on-day-of-2018-midterms/2019/02/26/1827fc9e-36d6-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html?utm_term=.af2f3dd89ef2

Quote

 

The U.S. military blocked Internet access to an infamous Russian entity seeking to sow discord among Americans during the 2018 midterms, several U.S. officials said, a warning that the group’s operations against the United States are not cost-free.

The strike on the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, a company underwritten by an oligarch close to President Vladi­mir Putin, was part of the first offensive cyber campaign against Russia designed to thwart attempts to interfere with a U.S. election, the officials said.

“They basically took the IRA offline,” according to one individual familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information. “They shut ‘em down.”

 

 

[Cas Stark]

Another hate crime that wasn't, I guess this person thought that killing their own pets would make it more realistic. 

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/02/25/gay-rights-leader-accused-burning-down-home/2816523002/

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Ok. I get what you're saying. I can't help thinking this is a subtlety that can easily be lost in a conversation about politics though.

It's kind of difficult telling someone you completely reject, and possibly despise, their worldview, while at the same time convincing them that you still value them as a human being. Especially if there's scorn in there somewhere.

Also:

How true is this today though? With the new versions of white supremacy / ethno-nationalism that we're dealing with, you're going to find *a lot* of people who'll argue this is not their position. In fact, the alt-right is pretty much all about claiming that this is *not* their position...
And then there are those who may actually believe it. People are so careful not to express the brutal, overt racism you're describing, that quite a few people come to believe in their own convoluted arguments.

I'm not trying to take the piss, I'm genuinely trying to see how your line of argumentation could fly with a bona fide conservative. And struggling.
 

This sounds remarkably similar to religious people who believe that anyone of a different faith is damned or a savage heathen.  It's remarkably different from the 95% plus portion of the left that simply wants to maintain the separation of church and state.  There's also a world of difference between condemning someone's ideas versus condemning them as a person.  

Seems like a dangerous false equivalence to suggest that the left's scorn for religion is akin to racism or bigotry.   There's also a substantial difference in the objective body count of these two tendencies.  

Eta: re: the alt right: the idea that "I'm not racist, I just support positions that happen to be very racist" has been in the white supremacists handbook since they first stepped foot on American soil.  

[Week]

37 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Another hate crime that wasn't, I guess this person thought that killing their own pets would make it more realistic. 

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/02/25/gay-rights-leader-accused-burning-down-home/2816523002/

 

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/02/26/unreported-hate-crimes-not-hoaxes-are-real-cause-concern

Quote

We know that hate crimes are severely underreported and that the Department of Justice Bureau of Statistics estimates that an average of 250,000 people are victimizedby hate crimes every single year.

We also know that false reports are extremely rare and make up a tiny number compared with the many thousands of hate crimes that the federal government says go unreported.

The fact that false reports typically generate sensational headlines should not distract from the level of hate violence in the U.S and we shouldn’t let the far right use these few examples to undermine the real issue — that the hate crimes reported by the FBI have shown a disturbing uptick in hate crimes being reported across the country, which is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

So, what point are you trying to make with this shit? What should the rest of us think of you and your opinion as a result of posting this kind of bullshit? 

[Darth Richard II]

10 minutes ago, Week said:

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/02/26/unreported-hate-crimes-not-hoaxes-are-real-cause-concern

 

So, what point are you trying to make with this shit? What should the rest of us think of you and your opinion as a result of posting this kind of bullshit? 

Thank you.

[Cas Stark]

6 minutes ago, Week said:

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/02/26/unreported-hate-crimes-not-hoaxes-are-real-cause-concern

 

So, what point are you trying to make with this shit? What should the rest of us think of you and your opinion as a result of posting this kind of bullshit? 

I don't expect anyone on here to ever let go of the narrative that the 21st century is just like the 1920's-1950s for marginalized groups, which is exactly how this thread comes off, but every once in a while I choose to post a few facts, here and there, just for sport, I don't expect the ever growing list of hate crimes that were perpetrated by the victims to change anyone's mind and get them to agree with McWhorter.

[Zorral]

I'm hiding nothing.  I totally despise the cancerous orange wart squatting in the oval office.  I totally despise him and consider him a lesser form of human bean.  I totally despise all his enablers, criminal cronies, cohorts, family, donors and those who work for him, and who vote for him.  I consider them lesser forms of human beans as well.  I do not separate sexist white supremacist ignorant criminal traitors' positions from their persons.  They are all actively doing harm to everything that is valuable: rationality, education and intelligence financial, environmental and civic -- and actively wish to do even more harm.  They all belong in hell right now.

[The Anti-Targ]

17 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I don't expect anyone on here to ever let go of the narrative that the 21st century is just like the 1920's-1950s for marginalized groups, which is exactly how this thread comes off, but every once in a while I choose to post a few facts, here and there, just for sport, I don't expect the ever growing list of hate crimes that were perpetrated by the victims to change anyone's mind and get them to agree with McWhorter.

I guess, if certain segments of the mostly racist / misogynistic population stopped hearkening back to the 1950s as the good old days and lamenting that the country can't return to those glory days and those social traditions, other people might stop thinking that much hasn't really changed.

If your mind thinks of the past as how things should be, then your words and actions will reflect that.