"How Did We Become Bitter Political Enemies?"

Great Debates
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It was not suddenly an important issue for liberals; it was always an issue, but suddenly the protestants, who were for family planning and for use of contraception, and for abortion under certain circumstances (because they weren’t Catholics) did a sharp right turn.

Abortion was less of an issue for liberals for a long time because it was medically unsafe for a long time. It became a topic together with pills and condoms, in favour of family planning and contraception, so abortion wouldn’t be necessary for many cases.

As abortion done by doctors became medically safer than back-alley abortions or letting the pregnancy continue; and as in the 60s and 70s the next wave of feminism meant women standing up for rights to their own body, and suddenly a part of their allies turned on them, it became a battle for the “liberals” against the conservatives and the fundies.

Because “Baby-killer” for people who are pro-choice, or for women getting the Morning after-pill is a lie. And talking about “Satantic baby-killers” is also a lie made up completly. “Michelle Remembers” is not a documentary, but a lie through and through, yet enough fundies got fired up that lies about Planned Parenthood persist today.

You missed maybe the linked article. It’s not about starting with an ethical framework of doing what’s right, then looking at facts and deciding on what course achieves the best outcome.

It’s a group that thrived not on doing the right thing, but on being righteousness and telling everybody else how they were wrong, looking for a way to get on the High Horse again after being wrong, and fixing on a problem, lying about the facts, twisting established moral concepts, and the end result leading to diseases and death because e.g. conservatives have pushed through laws that make operating Planned Parenthood and safe abortion clinics difficult to impossible, leading not only again to dangerous abortions, but to many other preventable diseases being untreated (because conservatives, while claiming to care about women, don’t want to pay preventive health care for women, so PP is the only source to provide that.

But yes, both sides call names and want to be right, so it’s exactly the same. Except for how it isn’t at all.

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Actually, we thought that with the Bushes, esp. Jr. And when the Repubs. shut down the country because they wanted a different budget.

It’s painful that in comparison to Trump, Bush jr. looks sane, who was considered the worst thing back then (esp. since he was installed illegally with help from his Dad’s friends).

The damage would be fixed if you fixed your system. As long as disenfranchisement through Gerrymandering and voter suppression (and electoral college) are taken not only for granted by the population, but still touted as “US is the only real true democracy, nobody else has this great a system”; and as long as party loyalty trumps everything so that politicans can shut down the country over squibbles, nobody wants to deal with you more than necessary.

The problem isn’t Trump on his own; the problem is Trump plus the majority of Rep. in House, plus the 30% of his voters who still stick to him.

It’s over a year ago during his campaign that Trump boasted that he could shoot a man in open public in NY (I think Times Square) and his supporters would still stand with him - and nobody challenged that. Nobody from his side said “that’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed”. (He didn’t even need to invoke the myth of self-defense against a criminal black scary man - just shoot a guy for shit and giggles presumably.)

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Welcome to democracy, a magical place where, if you want a political solution, you will generally have to tailor it to win the support of a majority of the population, or at least a majority of their representatives. PROTIP: try being more persuasive.

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No, I majored in well-paying technical things. :wink:

I don’t see it as a minor point when it (the idea that It’s exclusively or mostly Republicans ignoring facts / reality) is a recurring theme in this thread.

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This is “Arson Murder and Jaywalking” false equivalency again. There’s a difference between criticiszing the current POTUS because he has to make deals you’re not satisfied with, or can’t get some things through an opposite house (e.g. Obama didn’t close Gitmo despite his promises), while acknowledging the good things he did (e.g. Obamacare) - and pointing out, during the campaign and after, that the POTUS promised either impossible or horrible things, and that everything he’s done since has been unconstitutinal (travel ban), a bad idea (Paris agreement) or both, showing the attention span of a toddler (At the NATO summit, briefings were reduced in length to accomodate his attention span), the tantrums of a toddler when somebody is mean to him on Twitter and unwillingness to learn anything about anything he has to deal with.

Don’t forget his supporters twisting things, like the NATO thing. Trump didn’t ask the other countries to step up their spending. He spewed some nonsense about the NATO members owing the US money. Bullshit, false and wrong. But his supporters like it; the NATO members ignore it.

There is a fact underneath: with Trump being completly unreliable, it would be a good idea to step up NATO funds. Only, there are practical problems in real-life: some NATO members are autocracies that democratic countries don’t really want to arm. Some are enemies, like Turkey and Greece, heating up, so more arms are dangerous. And with dozens of countries, every country buying more of their own makes for hundreds of different types of rifles, tanks, planes, which makes repairs and coordination very more expensive than standardized units. Plus, you don’t order 10 tanks from the Factory. You develop one that’s good, only that can take 20 years, and everything has changed, so you ordered 10 tanks for millions of Euros that are now obsolete. Worse with planes with so much computers inside.

But that’s complicated and hard and requires not only coordination instead of domination, but long-term commitment, so it’s difficult to pack into a soundbite of Donald being tough on the others.

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I’m not actually certain myself, but I believe you are recalling events correctly too. And yes, I’d still vote for Trump today (in the general election, assuming the same slate of candidates as last November). I’m thrilled that Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court and feeling good that Bears Ears is going to get shrunk, and still optimistic that something may be done to lower my healthcare bills. If I get a tax break out of it too, I’ll be even happier. I didn’t like the Comey firing, or the incessant tweeting.

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Welcome to democracy US style, where instead of convincing the majority of people of facts, you just need to lie and smear your opponent, and to get the majority of representatives you just need to exclude a few millions of people from voting, and keep rigged systems.

And then those representatives will do not what’s best for the country, but what’s best for their own pocketbooks (tax cuts for rich, favorus for oil industry…) and their cronies, because the voters can be distracted with hate populism about brown illegals, or how it’s all the fault of those liberals.

Then, when the Democrats try to work together for a compromise, they will get cheated on by the Repubs. (because keeping your promises is for loosers). If they stoop to lying to win (because winning is important) they will be exorcised, but if they don’t lie, people will just believe the lies against them.

See: Paris agreement. The world bends over backwards to make a wishy-washy compromise acceptable for the US hardliners, and what happens? Trump just quits anyway.

Compromise to Republicans means “You admit you were wrong, so I will do everything I want without giving an inch” as has been shown in the past decades.

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So the facts that Obamacare was good for millions of Americans getting full healthcare for the first time doesn’t matter? The fact that the Trump proposal (as much as we know since the current proposal was not publicized so it could not be criticized) will put around 28 millions of Americans out of healthcare, and cut medicaid, and cut protections to pay, but then be kicked off healthcare, -. what do you make out of these facts?

Oh sorry, I forgot a possible explanation: if your healthcare provider kicks you off your insurance, your bills will be lower. That’s what you meant, right?

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The kill us all, and the kill nearly all of us are well within the error bars of future climate modeling.

They may be unlikely, but they are not “silly hyperbole.”

At most, you can call someone pessimistic for believing these models to be accurate predictions of the future. These are realistic scenarios that have a not insignificant chance of becoming reality. Especially if we do nothing to curb CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions.

“The living will envy the dead.” probably does qualify as hyperbole, but it’s a (semi) famous quote, so qualifies as much for metaphor as for literalism.

But yeah, mass starvation of tens or hundreds of millions of people and deadly regional conflicts that will spill over into the rest of the world are a very likely scenario.

“It will all be just fine” is not within the error bars of future climate modelling.

I find those who think it’ll all be just fine if we do nothing to be far more out of touch with reality than those who are concerned about global climate change wiping us all out.

Hence one of the reasons why I find it hard to find room for compromise with my opposition on this issue. They want to do nothing, and in fact they want to enact policies that will make the situation worse. I want to do something that will prevent at least the worst case scenarios from occurring, while also looking at the practical impacts on our economy of transitioning from fossil fuel based energy to non-CO[sub]2[/sub] contributing technologies. I have already curtailed my positions to take into account the lack of desire to harm the economy in the transition, so I don’t really have much room to move towards lesser CO[sub]2[/sub] elimination in order for individual companies or people to make a greater profit. I could try taking up positions on elimination of emissions that I know would be disastrous to the economy, and try to use that as a starting point in negotiation, but as that is not something that I actually want, it seems disingenuous to do so, and also gets people saying that you are unreasonable and hyperbolic. I mean, the position of shutting off all CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions is not unreasonable from a climate change perspective. Even if we do that right now, we will still experience some fairly unpleasant effects.

So, basically, in a nutshell, if you start from a reasonable negotiating position with the opposition, they will take and take as much compromise as they can, leaving your former reasonable position as a useless gesture, and if you start from a stronger negotiating position, then you are called unreasonable and impossible to negotiate with. And all the while these games are being played, the problem is getting worse, causing more immediate negative effects, and having a higher cost for the future to deal with, both in terms of impacts to the economy and human suffering.

TL;DR:? Essentially, one side is saying, “Here’s a problem, lets work together to fix it.” And the other side is saying, “We don’t think that that is a problem that needs to be addressed at all.” Not much room for negotiation. And when you cannot negotiate with your political opponents, that makes them enemies to be defeated instead.

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See if you still feel that way in a few years.

I can understand why republicans were happy about the gorsuch nomination, and if that is all you get out of a trump admin, then it will probably be all the justification that you need.

I am not sure exactly why you are happy that we are selling national monument land to oil and gas companies. What are you getting out of this? Do you want to see further federal parks and lands sold to development? Do you even feel we have a need to hold onto any of it, or would you prefer that we sold it all?

I am glad that you are optimistic about your healthcare bills, but if you looked at the healthcare bill that the house passed, it would do nothing to address rising healthcare costs. Who knows what the senate will plop out, but I would be very surprised if they actually took your needs into account over that of the insurance lobby.

You may get a tax break, but I doubt you make enough, as pretty much all of that is going to the extremely wealthy. You may see a slight reduction in your federal tax rate, but it will be more than made up for by increased state and local taxes, fees, fines and reduction in services that are filling in the gaps the fed leaves behind.

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It’s also sometimes justified. If Person X says something derisive of the poor - not only once, but many times, comparing them to vermin - and pushes through laws that punish only poor, it’s not name-calling, but an accurate description to say that Person X hates the poor.

Likewise for blacks, women, LGBT, …

And if Person X has said something untrue not from ignorance, but by deliberately twisting things out of context, ignoring facts, and inventing new facts - and has been called out on it and pointed towards real facts - and keeps repeating the lies - then it is accurated to call him a liar.

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You haven’t adequately, or even accurately, explained positions. You’ve stood up some wildly disingenuous strawmen. Congratulations.

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ZEIT ONLINE | Lesen Sie zeit.de mit Werbung oder im PUR-Abo. Sie haben die Wahl. Ten Rules for useful discussions.

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Abortion became a big issue for me directly after the fire-bombing of a women’s clinic in San Diego.

Before that, I really didn’t care. After that, I saw that it was a major terrorist magnet, and needed the full protection of the law.

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To add to the very good post of k9bfriender, I will say that a lot of what we see today has been the result of powerful interests noticing that ignorance on Evolution and science in general matches with a lot of conservatives.

Those powerful interests do not care much about the damage it comes to society in more ways than just stopping the government from controlling pollution, they only care that the anti science crank magnetism of the ones they helped get elected also matches almost perfectly with the denial of climate science.

The powerful interests now know that they do not need to even push denial of the emissions problem because they can count on the ignorance of the politician to give them what they want: politicians that only know how to toss monkey wrenches on efforts to control the issue.
On a more meta issue:

We should not ignore that when close to 60% of the people are in disapproval of Trump it is the result of also many moderate Republicans realizing that a lot of the people that support Trump are making asinine reasons to incite people into becoming political enemies. That growing realization tells me that a lot of what we are disusing here are divisions that are really not impossible to overcome.

Of course, the point is that what I see is that while a lot of Trump supporters may want to deny it, a very significant part of the population has had a lot of second thoughts about electing Trump and having many of the very conservative positions to be rammed in.

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Nominating Gorsuch was both a fantastic idea and completely constitutional.

AFAIK, no one, not even Donald Trump, has suggested that every European country needs to build up their own domestic arms industry. We would generally like them to buy more F-35’s (or Typhoons), not try to design and manufacture their own.

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As is often the case, those who most need to read these words are not in this thread to do it.

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I feel like there’s been plenty of that going on here in this thread.

If ‘the world’ wanted an enduring agreement with the US, they should have negotiated something that could achieve ratification in the US Senate. They didn’t, and so they were left with something that was entirely at the whim of the US President, and when the President changes, those whims change.

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It was also bad for millions of Americans. It shouldn’t surprise you that those people are not big fans of the law, despite it containing benefits for some other people.

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