Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Michael Hopcroft]

The Houston area has a severe shortage of construction workers at a time when they will need all of them they can get to rebuild the city. They are also short nationwide as education de-emphasizes skilled trades like carpentry, electrical, and plumbing.

 

Yet somehow Donald Trump believes that siphoning off a large portion of that forxce to build a pointless wall as a testament to his ego is somehow going to work.

[Tech priest support]

I really don't care if the right is tired of the "false equivalency" thing. It's true and I won't quit calling them out on it. Maybe Obama's followers and press did hype him as a messiah. He never did. He even joked about his father sending him to earth from krypton.

 

Trump came out and said he was the only man who could safe America. It came out right out if that ever open mouth of his.

 

Yet Obama was called "arrogant". Note that "arrogant" is newspeak for "uppity".

 

Obama never called for violence against anyone, even his enemies. Trump told his followers to "best the crap out of him" in regards to a protestor.

 

Obama never used crude or vulgar language. Trump publicly told people to "go XXXX themselves".

 

But Obama was called arrogant, power mad, hateful, etc.

 

Also right wing media has gone to extremes no major left wing media ever went to. While on fox news Glenn beck did a "comedy skit" about poisoning Nancy pelosi and otherr left wing personalities. Oh, but it was "just a joke". Can you imagine if MSNBC had done something like this?:

 

https://youtu.be/UudQuVOwSds

 

We'd have see and heard little else than outrage over that for several years.

[BoloOfEarth]

So you have been OK then, with Trump using a fork to get a slice of bread out of a toaster?

 

For some reason, I'm reminded of a comedian who talked about babysitting a kid, and saw the kid trying to stick a penny in an electrical outlet.  He said, "I told him, 'Hey, (covers mouth so voice is very muffled) you don't want to do that.'  Boy, people who say a penny doesn't go far nowadays didn't see that kid shoot across the room!"

 

I'm also reminded about another comedian saying his ex-girlfriend called him for help (after she had dumped him) because a light bulb burned out in her bathroom.  "I told her, first you need to fill your bathtub with water..."

 

We now return to your partisan bickering, already in progress.

[Tech priest support]

Guys I would have no problem with trump's stupidity hurting himself, but when someone who has control of America's nuclear arsenal stares right into an eclipse... You know,his idiocy doesn't just affect him.

[Old Man]

Come to think of it, barring any specific legislation that would negatively impact my life, this whole presidential term is kind of a wash for me. I should really focus on other pursuits anyway.

 

As a fellow long-time NGDer, I respect your opinion.  As a minority, I'm pretty disappointed, and I'm curious as to what the other pursuits are.

[Nolgroth]

As a fellow long-time NGDer, I respect your opinion.  As a minority, I'm pretty disappointed, and I'm curious as to what the other pursuits are.

 

Fair enough. Politics and I don't see eye to eye most times. Like almost everybody, I have my own bias and opinion. I also know that the boards are, proudly, Left leaning. We even had a discussion a few years back that included a "Where are you on the political spectrum" personality test. Most of our contemporaries proudly proclaimed their status as Left leaning. I am not going to change your hearts and minds and, to be quite frank, I value the opposing opinion. It keeps me honest and I respect that. For what it is worth, much of my recent opinion has been formed because I get to see the other side and that helps me pull back from the brink of my Jingoist tendencies. That doesn't mean that I won't call out something I see as outright intellectual dishonesty. Anybody here is welcome to their opinion, but when if I think it is wrong, I feel a need to say something.

 

As far as other pursuits, I mean just about anything other than politics. Like I mentioned, our political ideologies are not going to often be changed here. Especially now, division wracks our nation and people are clinging to their comfort zones with all of their might. Why would I want to bat my head against that wall? I certainly have zero loyalty to the idiot in the POTUS office. I have less for my so-called elected, Republican, representatives in Congress. When I look across the aisle, I see people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, both of whom I find detestable. Right now, all I see in the political field are enemies and very few neutrals. I don't see friendlies right now. I don't have some fanatical loyalty to anybody and the entire political scene right now is pretty soul crushing. I just think it is better to step back away from the whole Political discussion thread. It was by habit that I clicked on the link to bring me here and I have a lot of respect for you. Enough that I will not ignore a perfectly reasonable question.

 

More specifically, I had to leave a very hostile work environment without the safety net of having a new job in place. It was either that or have a meltdown and probably beat the living crap out of the people that created that environment. So now, though I am starting to come down from that angry and hostile place in my head, I need to find a new job. Also, since I have some downtime, there is a project I want to try and finish before the end of September. Depends on how successful the job hunt is during that time.

 

So without further ado, I am out. Let my twitch reflex reset itself and try to find that calm, reasonable voice again. I'll be back. I always come back. But for now I want to focus on the other topics here on the boards. 

[TheDarkness]

As far as the false equivalency thing, I do think that is a fair statement, while also recognizing that it doesn't exonerate the Democratic party of its own flaws, I just do not see strong evidence that they are wholesale the same flaws outside of those areas where elected officials' decisions are hemmed in by the structure of the state, the military, or the current states of the global balance of power.

 

Other than the beginning of Obama's presidency, left leaning publications and figureheads of the left made public statements against his policies and approaches. A simple search will show many figureheads of the left criticizing the ACA as too little, his military choices as a betrayal of his election promises, and, most especially, his actions intended to give GOP legislators room at the table that they then repeatedly chose not to take as pointless. One can find scores of articles from the mainstream press of the left on every one of these topics, and from Daily Show to Real Time, almost all those shows routinely criticized the Dems and Obama for these policies and for their seeming ineffectual actions in electioneering.

 

The difference is, the left, as far as major news sources, had and have to compete with each other, and thus have no one monolithic message that can reliably be cited without ignoring countless articles disagreeing from others on the left with equally large followers.

 

The right, conversely, has one major cable news provider, that serving a party whose political strategies are not the same as the Dems. The GOP has, for years now, based most of its actions on winning elections over establishing long-term policies that are different than the Dems. Yes, especially in regards to trade and the use of the military, both are not particularly different, but this more often than not has ties to the fact that, when dealing with the rest of the world, there are not as many options as people like to believe. North Korea and the current situation is a perfect example.

 

I happen to know one of our country's foremost experts on that topic, especially as it relates to China. There is not an expert worth dealing with on the topic that now buys into the 'crazy Kim' propaganda in the way both sides present it. North Korea has repeatedly worked on development of nukes, followed by slowing that work in response to sanctions and aid following said sanctions. While the press and leaders have repeatedly used that as evidence to prove the 'crazy Kim' thesis, neither U.S. nor Chinese experts have considered it anything other than the actions of rational actors, even if we don't like those actions. The recent attempts to change how we deal with it have only shown how thoroughly planned out those actions were compared to new attempts to stop it by way of bombast.

 

This is not to say that the Kim's are or were admirable leaders, but that they established a long term goal, and have largely completed that goal against huge resistance by meticulously sticking with a plan for specific results geared toward ensuring sovereignty even against three major powers, two sharing borders. Treating it as anything else has proven to be a recipe that pits those powers more against each other than against North Korea. But, this is the result of elected and appointed leaders buying the propaganda we ourselves put forward to our voters, and having to act as though it were all as simple as that propaganda portrays it to be.

 

You'll note that the exact same 'crazy Kim' approach was seamlessly followed from the father to the son. This policy had its virtues, but the current administration has spent a lot of the capital those virtues gave.

 

For dems, this was less of an issue, being a bigger tent party these days, there is not as often one issue, aside from equality, that all dems seem to consider deal breakers, and so playing the realpolitik of the situation was an option. For the GOP, it's become a huge issue, because, focusing on election wins more than long-term policy wins, they had to increasingly play to populist issues, and so 'we need to deal with Kim' has lead into the realization that it was never as simple as it was portrayed to be.

 

Whereas many dem voters might support increased gun control, most elected officials on that side avoided pushing that at all, while the GOP has put big dollars behind pushing forward statewide laws that they knew would not stand the constitutional test, because it played to their base, and the ability to push those messages by way of one single major cable network and smaller news sources acting as an echo chamber and source for reading the pulse of populist messages meant that there was not competition at the top to counter such policies. The RINO label is almost exclusively applied to the remnants of the camp that Buckley would most recognize, people who actually recognize politicking a two party system as being way more complex than simply always supporting one's party.

 

It is the nature of the different structures of the two parties and the press serving their views that the dems and the left leaning press outlets will have less party unity, and that the GOP with one monolithic cable presence and a focus on election wins over anything else will lean towards similar iterations of the same populist messages. The idea that these different structures yield the same uniformity of message is an uphill claim against the structural reality in place. MSNBC, for instance, tends to be less centric than CNN, whereas FOX must put it's dollars more behind the most popular view in place in the GOP, and will have less programming dedicated to programs that focus on views that may be more valid, but less popular.

 

Quite literally, in the last thirty years, the Dems have not had the capacity to have one monolithic message, the GOP has increasingly moved toward purity tests(RINO) and similar messages, and these two are the results of the goals and structures of the two parties and the media associated with them.

[megaplayboy]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/

[Tech priest support]

So we have hurricane Harvey inflict a ''once in a 500 year'' flood on Houston. Now we have hurricane Irma coming in at the most powerful levels of any measured hurricane in history. And two more hurricanes are coming in right behind it with no guarantee they won't be as bad or worse than Irma.

 

And people in America who deny man influenced climate change are blaming them on gay marriage.

 

Honestly, at times I wonder if the kind of people who think like that are literally an existential threat to humanity's future.

[Pattern Ghost]

We've got to keep up with Jupiter, you know. One day we'll have an even bigger giant red eye.

[Lucius]

We've got to keep up with Jupiter, you know. One day we'll have an even bigger giant red eye.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is actually bigger than Earth.

 

We now return to your regularly scheduled political discussion.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

And a jovial palindromedary

[Pattern Ghost]

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is actually bigger than Earth.

 

We now return to your regularly scheduled political discussion.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

And a jovial palindromedary

 

It was a post-Fact joke.

[Michael Hopcroft]

It was a post-Fact joke.

"And if they really landed on the Moon, how come they didn't bring back any cheese?"

[Cancer]

"And if they really landed on the Moon, how come they didn't bring back any cheese?"

They did! Have you ever seen six-thousand-year-old grated Parmesan?

[Michael Hopcroft]

They did! Have you ever seen six-thousand-year-old grated Parmesan?

No, nor do I wish to....

 

On a serious note, Steve Bannon showed his face for an interview on 60 Minutes last night. I avoid those things like the plague they are, but I imagine there's no way to avoid the media giving him a soapbox given his historic, albeit short-lived, time with the Trump Administration. I've only seen media reports on it. (If CBS, the Times, and all those other sources are "liberal media", then I hate to see "conservative media".

 

Bannon is so easy to loathe.

[Tech priest support]

"And if they really landed on the Moon, how come they didn't bring back any cheese?"

They had to use it as bait. http://uploadstars.com/video/18R4BUDMA36X

[Tech priest support]

We've got to keep up with Jupiter, you know. One day we'll have an even bigger giant red eye.

Um, Jupiter's red spot is an inflamed orifice, yes, but not an occular one. I will say no more on the matter.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Um, Jupiter's red spot is an inflamed orifice, yes, but not an occular one. I will say no more on the matter.

So that's where Jupiter's moons came from. 

[Michael Hopcroft]

While everyone was watching Harvey and Irma, back in Washington the Supreme Court upheld the Travel Ban. I haven;t read the report on their reasoning for the decision, but it does not bode well for the future of the Court -- or the Country. Makes me wonder what else the Court will now say is OK and what it will overturn. (The Sweet Cakes case, for example, appears to be a done deal.)

[Tech priest support]

As an add on to the above. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/09/supreme-court-gives-texas-gerrymandering-the-a-ok.html

[Old Man]

Heads up, the Senate GOP is taking another run at the ACA repeal.  This one's called "Graham-Cassidy":

 

 

Just a reminder that the last attempt fell short by only one McCain.

[Lord Liaden]

While everyone was watching Harvey and Irma, back in Washington the Supreme Court upheld the Travel Ban. I haven;t read the report on their reasoning for the decision, but it does not bode well for the future of the Court -- or the Country. Makes me wonder what else the Court will now say is OK and what it will overturn. (The Sweet Cakes case, for example, appears to be a done deal.)

 

It's a little more complicated than that. From Mark Sherman of the Associated Press, Tuesday Sept. 12:

 

The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to maintain its restrictive policy on refugees.

 

The justices on Tuesday agreed to an administration request to block a lower-court ruling that would have eased the refugee ban and allowed up to 24,000 refugees to enter the country before the end of October.

 

The order was not the court’s last word on the travel policy that U.S. President Donald Trump first rolled out in January. The justices are scheduled to hear arguments on Oct. 10 on the legality of the bans on travellers from six mostly Muslim countries and refugees anywhere in the world.

 

It’s unclear, though, what will be left for the court to decide. The 90-day travel ban lapses in late September and the 120-day refugee ban will expire a month later.

 

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday night: “We are pleased that the Supreme Court has allowed key components of the order to remain in effect. We will continue to vigorously defend the order leading up to next month’s oral argument in the Supreme Court.”

 

The administration has yet to say whether it will seek to renew the bans, make them permanent or expand the travel ban to other countries.

 

Lower courts have ruled that the bans violate the Constitution and federal immigration law. The high court has agreed to review those rulings. Its intervention so far has been to evaluate what parts of the policy can take effect in the meantime.

 

While the court's future ruling on the constitutionality of a travel ban policy won't affect the ban currently in place, it sounds like it could bear great weight regarding any future attempt by the administration to renew or extend the ban.

[Pattern Ghost]

A little levity. I ran across this when looking at Tick stuff on YouTube. I was going to put it in the random video thread, but decided to drop it here due to it being a Trump gag.

 

 

This is a short one, Serafinowicz has more on his channel.

[megaplayboy]

https://alternativeright.hopenothate.com/my-year-inside-the-international-alt-right

 

Fascinating read. Good illustration that hate groups can be silly, stupid, pathetic...and still EXTREMELY EFFING DANGEROUS.

[Old Man]

The Graham-Cassidy ACA repeal bill is coming up for a vote by the end of the week.  Among other things, this bill:

 

- Would end health insurance for 32 million Americans

- Would make private insurance more expensive for most Americans

- Removes protection for people with preexisting conditions

- Ends Medicaid as we know it

 

If any of this bothers you, please consider calling your senator Thursday at (202) 224-3121 to make your opinion heard.

 

 

(edited because there's literally too much wrong with this bill to keep track of it all)