Tired of Republicans.
- Thread starter CastletonSnob
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Maybe every voter should just have to run through Takeshi's Castle, and you get a number of votes depending on how far you managed to get. That sounds quantitatively exact yet hard to dispute. Especially since anyone who disputes it has to go for a second run.
Wasn't there a time when, if you did just a cursory study of a handful of Senators, Republicans seemed sensibly centrist and Democrats were a bunch of nutjobs?
Yeah, taking votes away from people is generally a very bad idea. You have to let "stupid" people vote, or else be prepared for the people who get to decided who is stupid getting to decide who votes.
Not totally convinced that "stupid" people shouldn't be represented either. Take away their vote, and nobody has to care what happens to them.
Not totally convinced that "stupid" people shouldn't be represented either. Take away their vote, and nobody has to care what happens to them.
You referring to the period between 1860 and the Civil Rights movement?
Look, the Democrats have a sordid history, and Lincoln is highly regarded for good reason, but in the here and now? Least from where I'm standing, the Republicans went off the deep end, while the Democrats are comparatively sane.
Yeah, I'm aware of that, but just wanted to point out that the political sensibilities of voters and party members changes over time whether we like it or not. It simply behooves people now to point to past foolishness in an effort not to repeat it. Whether or not the effort is successful, however, is another matter.
Thing is, for matters to become genuinely bipartisan and for each side to actually consider just discussing contentious issues with each other (though whether they've gone past the point of no return, I really can't say), I believe that the USA needs a legitimately threatening external competitor. Without a strong de facto foreign enemy that is recognised as such by the whole political spectrum from federal government down to grade-schooler, the greater threat will always be perceived to be internal political opposition. As a centrist, I get the feeling both parties have fallen off the deep end in their efforts to colour the other party as the nation's biggest enemy, though my inclination is to believe that the Republican party did so earlier and deeper if only because their lesser degree of in-party factionalism allowed them to do so without more severe consequences.
I'm gonna take a stab that I am the only person on this entire forum with even the slightest understanding of what a Republican is.
Also, Hoover didn't cause the Depression. He failed to fix it, and that's worth criticism, but you probably blame Bush II for wars in the Middle East rather than Obama for not cleaning up the mess, the Depression was what it was because the Federal Reserve did literal reverse quantitative easing. So aim your blame at the president that made the Fed with little economic theory to back it up other than a fetish for whatever was cool in Europe.
Also, Hoover didn't cause the Depression. He failed to fix it, and that's worth criticism, but you probably blame Bush II for wars in the Middle East rather than Obama for not cleaning up the mess, the Depression was what it was because the Federal Reserve did literal reverse quantitative easing. So aim your blame at the president that made the Fed with little economic theory to back it up other than a fetish for whatever was cool in Europe.
Um, Russia? China?
Look, I know there's debate as to how much of a competing force Russia and China are to US hegemony, but these are countries that are competing on the world stage for influence. Both of them can project their power into other countries - Russia has forces in Syria and annexed Crimea. China is occupying Tibet, is trying to claim owernship over the South China Sea, and has massive influence in Africa, including at least one military base. China is projected to surpass the US as the world's largest economy this century, while the US has had its influence greatly reduced over the last two decades or so. I'll concede that in the year 2020, the US is the world's top dog, both militarily and economically, but it's got distinct challengers on the world stage. Also, India. And it's not as if people in the US government have ignored this, since Trump and China are now throwing insults around.
There's obviously people who are far more well versed in geo-politics than I am, but at least from everything I've seen and read, China and the US are very much vying for world influence. And personally I'd say it's a tragedy, because on the issue of climate change, we need China and the US to lead the way. Something that's looking increasingly unlikely with Trump wanting to pull out of Paris, and China's Belt and Road Initiative.
According to political compass, I'm centre-left myself, so I don't know if that makes me a centrist or not. But the Republicans, to me, have been far more egregious than the Democrats.
But Vox aside, what are Republicans doing right now? Well, they're backing Trump, who's showing behaviour I wouldn't have thought possible from a stable democracy. The Republicans deny climate science. The Republicans cut taxes for the rich. The Republicans invaded Iraq, in an illegal war that if any other country did such a thing, would have been widely condemned, and rightly so. The Republicans have engaged in gerrymandering and voter suppression. The Republicans have stymied attempts at gun control. I don't doubt that Republicans exist who are genuinely good people, who do genuinely believe that small government and conservatism is the better part forward, who genuinely believe in trickle down economics, who genuinely want to help people. I could think back to Barrack Obama's time, recall seeing news reports on McCain and Romney, and reflect that while I personally didn't agree with their politics, they were at least genuine. I even believe that the Republicans could be a bit less crazy and be willing to meet the Democrats in the centre. But whatever the Republicans did in the past, in the context of what's happening right now?
I know this is making me sound like a pretentious asshole, but what's happening in the US isn't normal. Trump's behaviour isn't normal. Clinton got into a scandal with an affair. Trump? Jesus Christ...
In Oz, we have a centre-left party (Labour), and centre-right (Liberals), and whatever their differences, they've at least managed to govern. C-virus legislation was passed with bi-partisan support. In the US? Well...
No, they don't. Some rare Republicans do. Most republicans accept the science but prioritize appropriately rather than freak out and pretend the world is literally burning.
The tax reform wasn't for the rich. A lot of rich people had their taxes go up. People confuse a cut in corporate taxes as a cut in taxes for the rich, but corporate income tax isn't as progressive as personal income tax. Trying to tax the rich through corporations inevitably hurts the employees and customers of the corporations as well. It isn't just a tax on the rich. And the rules preventing write-offs from state property taxes hurt the rich more than the corporate cut helped them, and in the meantime everyone benefitted from the economy.
Both parties voted for that, dozens of other countries supported that, and 5 other countries directly supplied troops to the effort. Saying nobody else would have done it is nonsense.
Vote districting isn't as cut and dry as people make it out to be. For example: gerrymandering is traditionally pictured as taking one party and hyperconcentrating them in one district so that your party can win by a small margin in the majority of districts. African Americans vote predominantly for Democrats. Concentrating African Americans weakens the influence of the Democratic Party... but it also strengthens the influence of the black vote because they have majorities in their districts that way, and don't have to be political minorities at every level of government. And there are laws mandating such things, some people upset that Republicans supposedly gerrymander everything run into the brick wall that the law won't let them break apart majority minority districts. So what do you care about? Enabling minority representation, or beating Republicans? A lot of districts look like weird stretchy shapes because nature does that. Some of the maps that people think are obviously gerrymandered are just river valleys that keep people voting with their actual neighbors and not people on the other side of the mountain. PA made our state look blockier and people called it a victory against gerrymandering. Turns out it had zero impact on the next election, and to anyone who has traveled the state, the old districts were mostly more intuitive, they followed the rivers and the highways.
And also, Democrats do it too and worse.
And voter ID laws aren't voter suppression. Voter purges are mandated by federal law. Don't buy the propaganda.
Because the gun control often suggested is stupid and pointless. We support background checks because that makes sense. We support policies to get illegal guns off the street. We support bans on actual machine guns. The background check system misses some people, but rather than focusing on better coordinating that effort, Democrats imagine non-existent loopholes to complain about. Policies that work to get illegal guns off the street get decried as racist. And arbitrary characterisitics of guns are demonized because they look scary. Democrats aren't trying to stop gun violence, they're trying to make Republicans look bad, that's it.
No Fly, No Buy is the ultimate example. The idea being that anyone on the terrorist watch list might be prevented from flying, therefore they shouldn't be allowed to have guns either. It sounds like common sense. In practice, it isn't. The watch list isn't due process, people have ended up on tha list for entirely unjust reasons. There are, to my knowledge, no deaths that would have been prevented that way. And adding the terror watch list to gun background checks would effectively give any would-be terrorist a super easy way to check if the FBI is watching them. It's a dumb idea all around. Democrats know it is. But they've brought it up in legislation several times, because then the media can print headlines claiming Republicans want terrorists to have guns.
Basically, everything you know is wrong. The common media presentation of Republicans is even less honest than Fox is about Democrats.
To be a Republican in 2020 means something very specific. It means that you believe that putting the profits of large corporations ahead of everything else, even human life, is a sound policy. It means that you think that WASPs should be a privileged class who get to oppress whoever they want. It means regarding freedom as something that should only be available to the rich. It means supporting the right of the police to shoot more or less whoever they want. It means keeping the US prison system an inhumane legalised slave economy. It means supporting voter suppression. It means gleefully pushing the world towards irreversible climate change. It means immigration policy which treats illegal immigrants like they're barely human. No respect for the past, no redress for the present, no preparation for the future. If you don't agree with those things, then you don't really belong in the Republican party.
It is the truth. The ideology of the Republican party is based on the lie that everyone in America has the same opportunity to achieve the American dream, and that everyone who doesn't deserved to fail. The Republicans are perfectly happy making sure that the US electoral system is inadequate, and particularly inadequate in predominantly black areas. It has no respect for worker's rights, and will always be the first in line to bust unions. Long gone are the days when the Republicans were the trust busting, anti monopoly party; they love them now, and will do anything for their sugar daddies. It's got fossil fuel lobby money coming out of every orifice as we waltz ever closer to the point where we can't make the climate how it was ever again. It loves to be tough on crime, which equates to making sure that rates of recidivism are high enough to make sure there's always people the privatised prisons can use as slave labour. It strongly supports putting illegal immigrants into what can only be described as concentration camps. It values "freedom", in the sense that if you're not rich you're free to die. Every time the police arbitrarily murder someone, they will find a way to blame the victim. The conservative wing of the Democrats believe in a lot of the same things, but it really takes a Republican to boil down everything that is callous and greedy about conservatism down into one morally repugnant being. They see the world as a pyramid and will kick down anyone they think is getting too high. That's what the Republicans represent.
It is literally burning, and one of those "rare Republicans" has become the President, now undermining one of the few international accords aimed at addressing the issue.
"Prioritize appropriately" my arse. They've done absolutely nothing but undermine the (already inadequate) efforts of others, such as the Paris Accords.
I'm sure some Republicans believe the science. The Republicans, under Nixon, did a good job for the environment with the Environmental Protection Act. But right now?
Trump's promised to pull out of the Paris Accords. Trump's gutted the EPA. It was a Republican who came into Congress with a snowball, as if that proved that climate change wasn't a thing. Trump's promised to prop up coal and natural gas rather than investing in renewables, or heck, even nuclear. The Republicans have long been the party of climate denial.
And the world is burning, or certainly, large swathes of it. The Amazon is close to a tipping point where it could start transforming into savanna. We're at 420ppm of CO2 (let me remind you that 350ppm was considered the safe limit, and this is up from a pre-industrial level of 280ppm), 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial levels, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is a pipe dream, 2 degrees is a long shot, and even if all pledges are met, we're looking at 3 degrees of warming, which is going to cause untold misery. I had the joy of last summer in Sydney enjoying ash-filled skies, seeing ash fall around me, and coughing, and I was one of the lucky ones.
Now obviously the Republicans aren't the be all and end all of climate action, but they've traditionally been the party of climate denial. And right now, they're led by a man who's called global warming a Chinese hoax. The United States has one of the highest per capita emission rates in the world. If everyone lived like the US did, we'd need 4.1 Earths to sustain the human race. The United States is #1 in totality of CO2 emissions. The world needs the US to lead, but it hasn't, and a lot of that has to do with Republicans and right-wing media questioning the science.
Is everyone really benefitting? Wealth inequality has gotten worse. Millions of people are out of work. The social security net is frayed.
Are you seriously suggesting that other NATO countries would have gone into Iraq if Bush hadn't pushed for it?
Okay, fine, both parties voted for war in Iraq. Bush is still the one who led the country into the war.
Fairness?
Thomas Hofeller is credited as "the master of the gerrymander." Hoffeller worked with the Republicans. The states that had gerrymandering are predominantly located in the south, which the Republicans have dominated since the party flip/Southern Strategy. It's why Republicans can win elections while losing the popular vote.
I know Democrats have done it too, but worse? That's a stretch. Remember seeing a chart of gerrymandered states, the Republicans were in the vast majority (in terms of who controlled which state).
Okay, but who mandated the federal law? And isn't it convenient that it's minorities, people who traditionally vote Democratic, who tend to get shafted?
- May 6, 2020
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I'd say you're one of at least two or three people.
I think people should only be allowed to vote after they declare what their favorite ice cream flavor is. Anyone who says "Mint chocolate chip" gets their vote counted as double.
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Well, lets see, they are anti-tax, anti-social program, anti-regulation, anti-abortion, generally anti-sex ed, and think government should be as small as possible while the military always needs more funding. What did I miss?
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