Certainly. But first I’m having a bit of a problem. When I go back to try to find the specific post where I said that politicians legislated them, I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Perhaps you could assist?
Yes, indeed; what could Trump’s racist, nutbar ex-butler possibly have to do with the subject of this thread? It’s a conundrum.
Oops. Same thing here. All I can find is that I said Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was a nutbar.
And please don’t ask for a cite as to her nutbariness. The interweb is full of 'em. 
It’s not a conundrum if you’re not trying to contend that one man’s behavior is reflective of approximately a third to a half of the country’s Republican voters.
Heh sorry, but freedom of religion doesn’t include the right to force your religious views on anyone else, or to discriminate against people you don’t like based on those religious views. Or perhaps there was more than that which you’re implying. As vague as you’re being, it’s tough to tell.
I’m the wrong person to argue the 2nd with. My views tend toward supporting it, with common-sense limitations, like not letting any nutjob be able to buy an assault weapon.
As for the 10th, if you’re claiming that that evil DOJ is fighting HB 2, you forget that states’ rights do not include those rights afforded to the federal government. Once again, I’m left having to guess.
This is your problem man. This particular *leitmotif *of your posting is you repeatedly presenting as though the society somehow directly traded progress in civil rights for crime and incivility as a package deal, and that the rest of us don’t regret that enough.
[minor rant]
Maybe, perhaps maybe, if the respectable and serious pillars of society in the 50s and 60s had EMBRACED equality and liberation as part of hometown American values, we could today have both a freer AND “nicer” society. (And BTW like hell it was a “nice” society if you were the wrong kind of person and did not know your place, c’mon…). It would have been lovely to get a Norman Rockwell-painting society* with *desegregation, liberated women, reproductive freedom, LGBT rights and cultural diversity. But that was denied and resisted because all those things were “subversive”. Or else those affected were asked to wait for some “right time” possibly after their own lifetimes. Sorry, not acceptable. A world where we do have desegregation, liberated women, LGBT rights, and cultural diversity, but the lifestyle has become ruled by “New York Values”, is far, far better than one that is without those things but it looks like the Norman Rockwell painting/Hays Code movie. It doesn’t mean you are evil but if you insist on sitting under the willows crying for what was lost you will sound like you want the whole package to come back, and that’s just wrong.
[/minor rant]
She’s an apparatchik, not a nutbar.
Correct. And I do actually hope she loses to her primary challenger, but she’s not a nutbar.
No Republican is in any way responsible for Trump. Unless he votes for Trump. And mostly, they did.
See, I have a big problem with this. Why is it that to criticize things that are bad today which wouldn’t be bad if certain good values from pre-counterculture America which were the baby thrown out with the bath water in favor of societal change were to be applied to them it automatically equates to a desire to see all the bad things return? It doesn’t make sense and usually strikes me as deliberately dishonest combined with a determination to keep the blinders on and see things continue on as they are.
Take for example the couple of times I’ve suggested that people today would be a lot better off to take an example from the 50s and early 60s and be taught to develop a better ability to cope with things. Both times I was immediately harangued not only for wanting a return to racism and the days when women allegedly couldn’t have their own checks (which is b.s. btw), but for suggesting people should ever have to cope with anything in the first place. The attitude seemed to be that in a properly functioning society anything and everything that might cause someone unhappiness or frustration should have been driven out thanks to our ever growing cadre of social justice warriors.
More rational minds recognize that this is impossible. There are far too many people with far too many different ways of looking at things for there to ever be such uniformity of thought and behavior, and that the best thing to do is work on the major one and learn to cope with the others. But we have so many would-be SJWs at work whinging over everything anyone doesn’t like for some reason that the entire country is at each other’s throats.
Back in the day when people were taught coping skills instead of having been convinced of their own victimhood, schoolboys weren’t shooting up schools and theaters and young girls weren’t committing suicide because someone said something bad about them at school.
There is simply no way to eliminate everything that has the potential to make somebody feel bad about themselves. People aren’t as good-looking as they’d like. Or as tall. Or as athletic. Or they can’t have the romantic relationship they want. And they’d be a lot better off and would live happier lives if instead of being groomed by society to see themselves as victims they learned to cope with these aspects of life that aren’t the way they want them to be, put it behind them, and get on with their lives.
But no, we can’t encourage coping skills because racism. :rolleyes: It’s ridiculous.
If that’s what you got out of my post then you read it wrong. I gave the example of McCain, who on most issues was a respectable moderate, responsible for such things as the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Act. Much the same could be said for Romney, who was unfortunately forced by the political climate to pretend to be an extremist. Without that influence he has been a reasonable politician. And if you go farther back in time, one finds even more reasonable leaders. Even Nixon, who was a deeply flawed man in a tragic Shakespearean sense, left a legacy of both commendable achievements and well-intentioned efforts that look downright progressive by today’s standards.
But I make no apologies for stating as I have in the past that the Republican Party has lurched to the far right in recent decades – by any measure – or for implying that the likes of Sarah Palin or Donald Trump are irrational and dangerous idiots. As in your point #1, I am only concerned with honestly stating things as I see them.
You have a problem with “the people” having the power of self-determination? Really?
The funny thing isn’t so much that it defies the principle of democracy, the funny thing is that it’s the diametric opposite of what conservatives are always spouting about money and speech in politics and recent court rulings like Citizens United and McCutcheon and half a dozen others. You’re not following the Republican playbook. You’re supposed to say that the voters are so gosh-darned smart that they are immune to influence by all this political spending and propagandizing, and will always make wonderfully wise decisions.
The truth is that the general population is neither stupid nor wise, but by definition average. And a substantial segment have been led by the nose for years into voting against their own interests and supporting dysfunctional governments that blatantly cater to the wealthy plutocracy. Neither the Republican establishment nor the plutocracy wanted Trump, it’s just an unintended consequence of the fact that they have been sowing the seeds of discontent for years, and now the chickens have come home to roost. The Donald just happened to be in the right place at the right time, saying the right things to a disgruntled mob. The fact that Trump himself is an eccentric and incompetent billionaire and the beneficiary of inherited wealth and privilege just makes his appeal to blue-collar bigots that much more comical.
And I’d be interested to know what “interesting left-wing politicians” you can name who are successfully running for president in the capacity of ignorant bigoted demagogues.
Two points on this: first, these are far different times. For one thing, Internet/cell phones. But more than just that, it’s a faster, more instant-gratification world. Transplant someone from the '50’s or '60’s to this day and age and I’ll bet you wouldn’t find them any better able to cope at all.
Second, suicide rates from the 2000’s are actually lower than in either the '50’s or '60’s.
Death Rates for Suicide, 1950-2010
Male, all ages, suicide rate per 100K: 1950: 21.2 1960: 20.0 1970: 19.8 … 2010: 19.8
Female, all ages, suicide rate per 100K: 1950: 5.6 1960: 5.6 1970: 7.4 … 2010: 5.0
So much for coping.
And the average appears to be woefully uneducated. This is a 6-month-old Fairleigh Dickinson University poll that asked three questions, and also some demographic information (link at the bottom):
- Do you happen to know any of the three branches of government? (repeated as necessary)
- Just your best guess… do you know which party controls the House of Representatives?
- And again, just your best guess, can you tell me who the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is?
Of 824 registered voters:
30% couldn’t name one branch of government; 34% knew all three.
69% of respondents knew who controlled the House.
21% knew it’s John Roberts, 66% couldn’t even come up with a guess.
That’s just sad.
National Poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Examines the “Clueless Factor”
Republicans did best.
Hahaha Trump’s full of it (again, as usual). That is totally his voice on the tape. Can’t they simply compare waveforms between the tape and a current speech? Or even one closer to the time the conversation occurred? Meanwhile Kayleigh Mc-inane-y tries to deflect attention away from Trump to Hillary…
How? How did we do it? America is basically a conservative, center-right country (which is a true fact that everybody knows, and nobody has to prove it because everybody knows it…) and yet the leftie/liberal juggernaut just rolled right on ahead, crushing them beneath its treads…
How? Criminal coddling judges wouldn’t get elected, nor would they get appointed by conservative governors and Presidents, and yet…there they were! Coddling like a motherfuck! Was it Eisenhower, who installed the hidden and invisible gears that make it seem like Kennedy won a close election, rather than the truth, which is that he was totally crushed by Nixon?
Don’t ask me, I don’t friggin’ know! Been a member of the lefty dirty fucking hippy movement for years and years, and not one damn memo! Must have been a plan, a damned good plan, to accomplish all of this against a solid majority of conservative Americans.
So what was it?
Well, then, you need to do something about the people on your side of the aisle who have caused the two to become conflated by dismissing complaints about racism and sexism as ginned-up complaints from “professional protestors”.
It was Papa Joe. He ‘helped’ turnout. Otherwise the holy warriors would’ve won again.
Now, this is just sad:
It’s even funnier when you hear him testily denying it to the hosts of the Today show this morning.