Country is 36 % Conservative 26% Liberal

The BBQ Pit
41

I don’t even know what half of this means, and the rest is all nonsense.

They’re teaching gay history in California? What does that even mean? That the teacher has to put on a foppish accent while speaking? That the lesson involves things that happened in history involving gay people without minimizing the fact they were gay or erasing the events altogether? Please, by all means, explain what you’re talking about.

Transgender people are allowed to use the bathroom they identify with. Yeah. Because, you know, god forbid this person be allowed to use the women’s bathroom. Or this person be allowed to use the men’s bathroom. It’s a matter of basic decency - forcing these people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their birth sex rather than their gender refuses to acknowledge their transition, causes and exacerbates real mental harm, exposes them to extremely elevated rates of assault… Yeah, basically it’s a shitshow. Allowing them to use the bathroom that corresponds to who they are is the only rational thing to do. If 96% of the population is against that, it still doesn’t make it right in any sense. Of course, the actual number is closer to 37%, because most people aren’t stupid.

Meanwhile, oversaturation in media is a really straightforward problem to fix: just don’t consume that media. Don’t support that media. Sure, you’ll come off as a nasty bigot whenever someone says, “hey, wanna watch <insert virtually any mainstream TV show here> with me” and you respond by saying, “Nah, I think gays are overrepresented in the media, so I’m boycotting media with gay people in it”, but if stories with gay people in them stopped making money, people would probably stop producing them.

And yeah, I said “bigot”. Because that’s what this is. Bigotry. I’m not forcing you to like gay people. You can gladly have the opinion that being gay is somehow immoral. But I am entirely within my rights to point out that you are a bigot, and to think less of you, refuse you goods and services, and recommend that others do the same. Kind of like I would do if you told me you thought black people were inferior. You can have that opinion if you want, but if you hold it, I will gladly call you an asshole and make that abundantly clear at every turn. You asshole. A big, creamy, santorum-filled asshole.

Meanwhile, on the topic of the OP, I think Don’s just gloating here. “Look at how many more conservatives there are than liberals, this means I’m justified in my stupid asshole positions!”

Except that this surface-level reading is obscenely stupid. “Liberal” has become a bad word in much of American parlance, much like “radical right-wing” has become a black mark on German political parties. But when you drill down to what people actually believe, you’ll find that while more people identify as conservative, when asked about actual policy details, they’re really quite liberal.

Maybe it’s just a matter of not understanding what those terms mean. I don’t know. But the idea that America is somehow overwhelmingly conservative is just bullshit.

42

Such a debate premise may be simplistic, if not invalid.

*"There’s no sign of much of a change in the percentage of self-identified conservatives since the George W. Bush administration. In Kaiser’s 2015 surveys, 35.3 percent of respondents identified as conservative. That’s about the same as the 34.7 percent average from 2007 to 2014.

The Kaiser poll does show that more people identified as liberal this year than in any other year since 2007. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found the same thing. In the Kaiser data, this seems to continue a trend from 2014, which also found a higher percentage of liberals than in previous years.

How are liberals rising without conservatives falling? Liberals seem to be taking over for moderates. In both 2014 and 2015, less than 35 percent of Americans identified as moderates in the Kaiser data, compared with 38 percent or higher from 2007 to 2010.

The Kaiser data tracks fairly well with what Gallup has shown from 1992 to 2014. When looking at self-identified ideology overall,1 Gallup hasn’t found any decline in the percentage of conservatives2 while showing moderates at an all-time low and liberals at an all-time high.

Perhaps most importantly, the reason that liberal identification has been up according to Gallup is because of Democrats. The Democratic base is more liberal, but there has been zero movement toward liberalism among independents or Republicans. In other words, the left is more liberal, but the median voter is not."*

If the best you can say is that you’ve mobilized more of your party base leftwards while a sizable majority of voters remains antipathetic (or apathetic) towards you, then there’s not much cause for anticipatory celebration.

43

Which is a condemnation of America, not of liberals. “Conservative” is simply a euphemistic way of saying that someone is dedicated to bigotry, cruelty, irrationality and ignorance. As you demonstrate in this thread:

44

Same goes to some extent for the other side of the coin, reining in spending and reducing debt are popular in the absence of specifying how, in detail. Similarly the common poll finding that most people think the maximum fair tax rate is lower than the actual max (alongside polls showing support for ‘taxing the rich’).

All in all IMO the argument ‘but the people agree with us on the issues’ is even less meaningful than quibbling about who calls themselves conservative or liberal. It’s not that issues aren’t important, but polls and discussions based on them tend to leave out the key factor, insofar as winning elections, of who cares most on which side of which issues, as well as just ‘who cares?’ (issue polls typically include the almost 1/2 the eligible population that doesn’t bother to vote). Then there’s the semi-arbitrary way in which the poll taker or pundit (pro or amateur like on a web board) can assign relative importance to the issues. I might myself attach great importance to the grim long term fiscal outlook in the US IMO, it doesn’t mean that’s moving as many voters as issues I think are much less important, or even trivial.

45

Radicals hack out the trail and clear the site, progressives build the cabins and the fire places, the liberals show up when the hot showers are installed.

46

Cite for a ‘gay history’ class being taught…anywhere?

Media and pop culture? Heaven forfend! swoons

YOU were not forced to accept, because you obviously have not.

MY morality has not degraded at all. Yours seems to have evaporated, if it ever existed at all. All you got is hate.

47

Basically yes. I think obviously so if you remove and/or don’t react to any moral implication of ‘free stuff’. You can have a system where private insurance co’s can price for risk, and decline high risks. Then the cost of insurance for most people is lower, and there needs to be some societal decision/action what to do with people who don’t qualify. One whole approach is to have govt just get involved with subsidizing a ‘high risk pool’ of people not covered by employer plans and who can’t get private insurance, not change everything else. Under the ACA we chose much broader change; yet another approach would have been a wholly govt system we also didn’t choose.

But the cost of high risk individuals has to go somewhere. You may well realize but IMO a lot of people clearly don’t. They seem to think a system with insurers allowed to price for risk would have just as high premiums as a gteed issue system, except some ins go guys in big top hats would twirl their mustaches a few more times at the extra profits. :slight_smile:

Actually this was well demonstrated by differing state policies pre-ACA. My state NJ had gteed issue pre ACA. Rates on individual policies were 3-4 times as high as PA or DE which didn’t. That wasn’t of course just spreading the cost of high risk individuals over the the whole population of potential buyers of private insurance, it included the effect of high rates driving healthy people to forego ins in NJ who would have bought it in PA or DE, the adverse selection death spiral the ACA is entering in various places around the country. NJ had no mandate or subsidies, the ACA does, but they are not enough to prevent the death spiral from the ‘free’ benefit of just telling insurance co’s they can’t price for risk.

48

Whats to stop them from selling a policy that self-destructs when the customer tries to use it? Did it for years, got clean away with it.

49

GAY history?! Are you serious? They’re teaching GAY history? GAY? Is that an acronym or something? Fucking moron.

50

I think what Donpeyote is upset about is probably some Foxified pearl-clutching version of this news story:

Presumably Donpeyote thinks that historical facts about civil rights social movements should just be left out of the curriculum entirely. Hey, if selective right-wing propaganda is good enough for Fox News, it should be good enough for the California school system! :rolleyes:

51

If x is 100 and dx/dt is 0 you are still ahead of z at 50 and dz/dt at 1.

52

Do you think the VA is efficient?

53

It’s more efficient than the managed private system most of us are under.

54

Hell, the UK NHS is a giant bureaucracy - it’s the biggest employer in the country and it constantly struggles with underfunding and overdemand…

…and it still produces better outcomes for half the per capita cost of the US system. Because despite the right-wing assertion that the public sector is inefficient, wasteful and incompetent, when it comes to healthcare the private sector is far more inefficient and wasteful, and replaces “incompetence” with “callous greed resulting in mass death and financial ruin”.

Roll on the American exceptionalism arguments.

55

You know the whole county voted in the general election, right?

56

Well, its free stuff if you consider public education free stuff too.

The notion is that there are some goods and services that should not be distributed solely based on ability to pay. How you deal with the moral hazards is another story

57

America needs more atheism, obviously.

58

Our sublime worship of the Dollar Almighty is not under any threat.

59

There must be an immense rift between my thinking and modern American conservatism thought. I hope not, but Goddamn.

60

I say you paint with too broad a brush here. It seems clear to me that SOME “conservatives” are merely WILLING TO ACCEPT bigotry, cruelty, irrationality, and ignorance as the cost of doing business…not necessarily “dedicated” to it. So not unmitigated evil – sort of the Vichy collaborators of evil.