My observation has been that most self-identified conservatives are reactionaries, and to a pretty radical degree (it bears pointing out that conservative and radical are mutually exclusive properties).
So, whatever other qualities they possess, it’s clear that they’re rubbish at self-identification.
Difference is, is that in order to get news then, you had to go get a paper and read it.
Today, you turn on the TV or the computer, and talking heads tell you all you need to know.
I’m a scientist. I really fucking good one, if I do say so myself. I would not have been able to go to graduate school under the GOP tax plan. I was already living in NYC on 19K per year and had the good fortune to be married to someone making a more reasonable salary; it was hard but we got through it.
Taxing me as though I was making 70K per year would have made the whole thing impossible. I would have gone to business or law school instead.
Yes, in the old days you didn’t get disinformation bombarding you constantly. “MUSLIM MAN WITH 4 WIVES AND 22 KIDS GETS $357,000 IN WELFARE!” Put it in a dishonest paper 50 years ago, and a few people see it. Put it on Facebook today, and within an hour thousands of people have shared it and hundreds of thousands have seen it. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it fits their preconceived notions and therefore they not only will swallow the lie, they will pass it on virally. Multiply that by thousands and you see how truth simply doesn’t matter in politics anymore.
Your point is well taken, but look at how we’re whistling the dark. “Well, it was this bad back in the 1950s, the 1920s, the 1850s…”
When I was a university student some 20 years ago, I always felt like looking forward to the future. Contrary to what people might assume from my writing, I haven’t always been a pessimist. I always envisioned myself looking forward to what we as a society could be come. It never really crossed my mind that as a middle-aged man, we as a country would be in the position of trying to reassure ourselves that as shitty as things have become, they could perhaps always be shittier. I was about to say that at least we’re not threatened with a mass extinction event, but come to think of it, WE ARE. And we have a president and a congress that calls people who believe in the science “snowflakes” and “buttercups” and “whiners.” How did the generation that developed the i-phone simultaneously take us back to the world of Medieval Europe?
Anyway, my point is, is this what we’re reduced to now? Trying to talk ourselves up by going back deep into our history and reassuring ourselves that we were once this unjust and barbaric and that we ‘survived’? What’s infuriating to me is that we can actually do something about this. No revolutions are required. It just requires a little compassion and some education. But we can’t even be bothered to go that far.
I think this would be seen (if they saw it) as a bonus by many repubs. Getting rid of them “smarty pants libruls telling us about global warning.”
Joining this thread late because I was finishing finals. I have a lot of hope for this country because of one reason: Millennials. They’re waking up. I spend a lot of time with a lot of Millennials, and contrary to stereotypes, they care about this country and its (their!) future. More of them are becoming politically active, and I’ll tell you, they don’t like the shit that’s been happening.
Here’s the post you responded to. I have placed emphasizing coding on the portion you quoted, and which presumably provoked your response:
So, let’s break it down. The first paragraph simply iterates the question in the thread title. Perhaps the fact that the OP felt that it was in any way appropriate to pose it that aroused your ire. If this is the case, can you elaborate on how it (or anything like it) can legitimately be characterized as “a liberal signature?”
The following sentence is merely an expression of the OP’s personal opinion. It would take imbecility in titanic quantities for someone to conclude that this opinion is shared by all liberals. While I have observed that you DO possess imbecility in those quantities, the fact that you did not end your snippet with that suggests that you take issue with the final portion, to wit:
TBH, there isn’t even anything controversial about that statement. Certainly, the ability to recognize and acknowledge that perfectly obvious fact should be regarded as a requirement for holding a position of authority, and not, as you state, a disqualification.
Feel free to try again to support your argument that Euphonious Polemic’s post is “total bullshit.”
Or don’t. Due to the fact that it’s spot-on, you’d be sure to fail just as badly.
I’m a little leery of some polls I’ve seen where democratic governments don’t rate extremely high on millennials’ lists of necessities but overall I share your optimism about that group.
And I’m generally optimistic about the future even though pulling ourselves away from the brink a few times in the past is no guarantee that we’ll always be able to do it again. I think we have deep systemic issues (an awkward constitutional structure and a mashup of outdated states’ rights values) and far too large a part of the electorate that has no desire to make things better in the future because of a mistaken belief that the past can not be surpassed.
I’m an outsider looking in (Brit) so don’t have as much knowledge of the details you guys do but in broad terms I find whats going on in USA very sinister at the moment - the devaluing of the press, the attacks on the environment and it’s protection, the idea that truth is whatever the president and the elites say it is, laws being ignored and the mob cheering for it even as their health plans are taken away from them.
it feels like the breakdown of decency - like we’ve gone beyond the point where someone would say ‘enough’. i don’t agree with republican politics generally but this force that’s been unleashed is scary - there’s nothing to hold these guys back anymore. they break all the rules they used to crucify the democrats since the 90’s but that doesn’t matter - they give a tax break to the super wealthy that is so brazen it’s breathtaking - the president is cheating lying sexual predator and it doesn’t matter.
i had hoped that the Mueller investigation would unearth the ‘smoking gun’ but now i feel that even if it does it won’t matter. power has already been transferred to a group of people who will cry fake news, ignore it and point the finger elsewhere. the revolution has already happened.
It is easy to see this as the start of Idiocracy, but I’m pretty sure we’ll push back and get the country back on track.
The most unrealistic part of that movie was that it took 500 years.
This is the end result of decades of brainwashing, propaganda and preying on people’s worst impluses (bigotry, nativism, fear, contempt, egoism) by the right to win elections.
Every since the 1960s the right has learned if they prey on people’s bigotry and racial resentment, they can win elections. Starting in the 80s they created propaganda networks that not only fed their listeners one sided stories but (much worse) made their listeners believe any media outlet than wasn’t propaganda was itself dishonest propaganda. It is Orwellian, people who get their news from dishonest propaganda think real News is dishonest propaganda. Decades of intentionally making their voters angry, bigoted, misinformed and afraid has come to this.
A lot of us here are deeply ashamed and disappointed of America and its people. Hopefully we can get back on track someday. But the world will never respect or trust us again. I don’t blame them.
70% of republicans in Alabama think all the roy Moore accusations are ‘fake’. No matter what evidence is uncovered about Trump, I bet 50-70%of Republicans will dismiss it as fake. The rest won’t care enough to change their vote.
Our best bet is to hope these people die of old age and limit the damage they can do Until that happens.
One small bit of hope, if true.
I got that from a link in the NY Post Baseball pages to the Decider. No idea if they are a worthwhile source or if Megan McCain is correct.
I can’t find too many holes in this summation. I’m definitely getting more pessimistic/concerned as time goes on. Gerrymandering and the electoral college are big concerns. Sure, the Dems also gerrymandered, but nowhere near to the fucking obscene extent that the Pubs have, and even if the Dems, say, 10-15 years from now, were to somehow benefit from the EC, I’d still advocate for its abolishment - not much use if EC members are now expected to vote along party lines, instead of providing a safeguard against ignorant, “addled” voters. 538 voters taking precedence over 300,000,000? And don’t get me started on that “voter fraud” ka-ka (an evilly fucked-up conceit resulting in voter suppression).
France’s President Emmanuel Macron was all over this last June:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51xG416_UPIThe thing about gerrymandering is that, to maximize the number of seats they take, the Republicans have shaved the anticipated margins of victory down to a level that would not be able to withstand a “wave” election. That gives me some hope that we may be able to turn this thing around. I also think that, while trump is able to rally his base very effectively, a lot of people can only be told that it’s raining so many times before realizing that they’re actually getting their heads pissed on.
…by Killary and Obummer’s legacy?
ETA: Not sure if Russian prostitutes somehow fit into this equation.
I also think this cohort is a rare source of optimism. In this context they’re significant because they are the first generation to grow up with news sources and social information, on their little hand held computers, beyond the propagandist mainstream. They see the USA in a broader, fact-based world.
A great difficulty, for me, remains city vs. country. Metro liberals have no idea, and don’t seem to care, about how much of the the country beyond their socio-political horizons is hurting badly.
This is generally not true in my experience. I think that metro liberals are indeed very much aware of things like the loss of factory jobs and the drug crises that has ravaged the heartland. They typically advocate fairer policies than the conservatives who lie to the white working class with slogans like drain the swamp and make American great again, and the hire nothing but billionaires who loot taxpayers on a daily basis. I think metro liberals understand the facts and circumstances that affect rural white American pretty well - better than the conservatives these people keep voting for.
If liberals are guilty of one thing it’s not understanding how they perceive the world. Some liberals are dismissive of their perceptions and wrote them off for failing to live up to meet their epistemic tests. They don’t understand how white folks can perceive diversity at the expense of the white working class because diversity is a liberal value. They don’t understand how people who grew up in a world without gay marriage can’t just tolerate and accept gay and lesbian couples publicly displaying their affection. So thus it begins, the clash of values, the clash of cultures. In this respect, liberals often just don’t get it. Liberals don’t have to accept the heartland’s value system, but they need to understand it and try to find ways to message around it. But ultimately, what’s really important is for liberals to turn economics and having a higher standard of living into family values.
I understand why Democrats chased the money in the 1990s and 2000s - in a relatively stable economic and political environment, the politics of centrism and compromise still prevailed. The two parties still operated conventionally as two slightly inverted versions of the same coin. Democrats felt they needed special interest money - Wall Street money in particular - to compete with their counterparts. But in doing so, the Democrats lost their edge and lost an identity in the process. They stopped associating economics and standards of living with values, and by doing that Republicans made values a debate about how people should behave in private life and what the government could do to prevent people from behaving badly in their bedrooms. That’s what “values” became, and economics just became stats and data. It’s hard to win elections that way, as the Democrats have found out. Bernie Sanders has the right idea: if Democrats are to win, they have to have a clear and loud voice in defense of economic and social justice. Without these, we’re not really a free society, let alone not a prosperous one.