You’ve deeply mis-represented my position.
IANAC, so I’ll critique both sides. But I think that was much better than the first one. If you got anything wrong, I don’t think it’s because you created a caricature intended to insult, which is the more important thing.
FREE SPPECH: Does the left really want to ban hate speech? I guess I’ll take your word for it. On the right, though, you’re expressing something that does’t really touch on the law. Frankly, I think both sides like to suppress speech that bothers them. Righties want to ban flag burning, lefties want to ban “hate speech”, which does seem to be a hot button these days.
GOVERNMENT SPENDING: I don’t think you captured the right’s view all that well, but I’m not really sure what the best way would be to summarize it in a sound bite. Maybe they just want spending to be lower (except for military spending). Or that it should be more local rather than federal.
ECONIMCS: “Corporate excesses” is a very amorphous term and could mean almost anything. I don’t think most righties want to eliminate all social safety nets, but they worry about non-needy people getting them. Righties and lefties approach this differently: Lefties worry that not enough people are getting help, and don’t care so much if that means some non-needy people get help, too. Righties are more concerned with making sure no non-needy people get help. And again, you’ll find the issue of federalism playing a role. Lefties want to federalize everything and righties want to leave it more to the states.
Actually, the statement being hashed over was, to my eyes, very carefully worded to say that, as a consequence, human extinction was POSSIBLE. Not inevitable, not necessarily likely, just possible. But apparently there’s disagreement even over that.
Which agreement(s) by the Bushes did you have in mind when you wrote this? I’m trying to think of anything done by either President Bush that even begins to approach the scope and scale of the Paris Accord that they signed onto and didn’t try to get ratified by the Senate, and I’m drawing a blank. Little help?
As a conservative, I’ll second JM’s analysis. Significantly better than the earlier list.
That’s more than I thought, but not all of those are liberals, and it’s still a minority of a single generation.
Not reasonable to call that a liberal position when most liberals don’t feel that way, any more than it would be fair to call it a conservative position because some small number might want to outlaw blasphemy.
Uuuuuugh.
Also, FYI, I used all of mssmith’s positions for the ‘‘Leftist’’ view so I wasn’t really paying attention to the ‘‘banning hate speech’’ part when I laid it out.
I am a Millennial liberal and I am opposed to the banning of any kind of speech. I actually think conservatives have kind of a point when they say they don’t want to be screamed at and shouted down and villainized for expressing an opposing view. The problem is a lot of them call this an issue of ‘‘free speech,’’ which muddies the waters, because then liberals are all, ‘‘WRONG, we’re not the government, learn to Constitution.’’ But really, the fundamental problem? It’s a real one. I’m not suggesting blanket tolerance for bigotry, but I’ve seen a lot less offensive views, say, just denying that white privilege is a thing, be considered in and of itself racial intolerance. Ignorance, maybe, but basically being lumped in with the KKK? Refusing to engage in any dialog at all? That’s a bridge too far.
I really don’t understand what’s happening with this ‘‘new generation’’ of liberals. I’m not that old, am I? My last stint in a classroom was 2011, within an extremely liberal, social-justice oriented context, and I don’t remember any of these ideas receiving credibility.
wolfpup,
I’ve quoted myself here so that you and other readers can see what you were responding to, because I don’t think “responding to” is the right word for what you did.
You said you wanted to address “the assertion that the terms of the agreement were … not achievable”. Who made this assertion? When?
As for the first point (that the terms of the agreement were arbitrary) it wasn’t my intent to claim this either. When I said “on a whim”, I meant that he entered into the agreement without submitting it to the Senate for ratification, as used to be done routinely for major international agreements. I wasn’t intending to make any comment whatsoever on “the terms of the agreement”, but the method used to signal USA’s support for it. It was a big step down from Senate ratification.
I don’t think a Senate with 51 Dems and 49 Republicans would ratify it either, but it’s largely unknowable at this point. Do you think Obama should have taken into consideration the political realities of the United States Senate (and the larger body politic) when trying to commit us to an international agreement? I do.
I don’t know. They didn’t ratify Kyoto, and they won’t ratify Paris, so maybe somethign that they feel better protects the economic interests of the United States.
This one gets my vote. Why don’t we have this kind of balance in our mass information streams? I sorely miss information outlets that represent not the right or left, but what I’ll risk calling the wisdom culture (which in my nostalgia the American press more closely represented in the past).
And from this Scientific American article on political personalities (which another poster may’ve mentioned in this thread, but trying to locate that post again, I can’t find it),
conservatives:
[ul]
[li]appear “more attuned than liberals to potential threats”[/li][li]desire “stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions”[/li][li]believe people should be rewarded for effort, but not expect rewards without it[/li][li]value loyalty and authority[/li][/ul]
liberals:
[ul]
[li]tend to be open and novelty-seeking[/li][li]tend to care for vulnerable people[/li][li]value fairness[/li][li]favor diverse ideas and diverse ways of life[/li][/ul]
The agreement with Iraq concerning the framework for negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement. Hugely more consequential in literally every respect than the Paris Accord.
Another excellent think-piece in the Sunday Times entitled I’m OK, You’re Pure Evil. Well worth your time.
Not the actual SoF agreement, but the “framework for negotiating” it? You think that was “Hugely more consequential in literally every respect than the Paris Accord”?
Well, I thank you for responding, and it’s certainly an … interesting … perspective.
As noted many times already, they are wrong.
It is clear that their decision to go for the “experts” their lobbies produced was more in tune with the fossil fuel companies that have many of those congress critters in their pockets.
I too am curious why you feel this way. How does a regional Iraqi issue rank “hugely” higher than a climate accord that affects the whole planet?
Because it contained actual commitments for each country (e.g., withdrawal of U.S. Forces in the absence of a bilaterally negotiated SOFA), as opposed to voluntary, non-binding goals; the security of Iraq and the lives of U.S. troops were at stake, as opposed to simply the reputation of the U.S. (as significant as this is); and as we all have seen, the agreement directly led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops and contributed in some form to the creation of ISIL.
There’s no question that this executive agreement had far more riding on it than the Paris Accord.
Well… Yeah. When one side is basing their views on actual scientific claims, and the other is basing their views on pseudoscience and widely discredited outliers, the solution is for the other side to capitulate, surrender, and give in. There is no way forward on that issue until that happens. On a moral level, I don’t care how polite you are, if your opinion is akin to that of the vice president, that homosexuality should be “treated” by gay conversion therapy, then I’m not going to respect your views, or treat them as worthy of respect, because they aren’t. They’re horrific and harmful and hurt people. I don’t care how polite someone is when they do it; assaulting my humanity is assaulting my humanity, whether it’s a mother saying, “Gay people make jesus cry” in a polite, worried, motherly tone, or her kid taking her at her word and bullying a gay kid until they kill themselves.
Both sides demand that the other cave in, and we’ve gotten more polarized. Hmm, I wonder if any research has been done into how and why that happened? In any case, I feel like “exhibit A” is that one party nominated a standard, normal, rational, well-informed politician, and the other party nominated a reality TV star who doesn’t know Mosul from Aleppo and who bragged about sexual assault and still won with the support of essentially every significant figure in his party. I think that should be considered a fairly substantial hint as to where the problem lies, don’t you?
Or, to put it another way:
This. All of this.
I’m sick and tired of trying to mollify the insane factions on the right wing. And by insane factions, I mean “everyone who thought voting for Donald Trump was a good idea”. These people are intellectually and morally bankrupt. Their political philosophy seems to boil down to some bizarre combination of autocratic adoration for Trump and joy that he pisses off teh librulz. This is the party of fucking Coal Rollers, after all. I will stop treating the right wing like my enemy when they start acting like rational, reasonable politicians. And I will stop treating republican voters like my enemy when they stop supporting the kind of insane, craven bullshit that the republican party pumps out on a daily basis. If you consider yourself as a sane conservative and you still support the Trump administration, then your self-identity needs to be changed to reflect the reality that you are doing something completely insane. You are a bad person, and I don’t want you in my life.
And that was back in 2012! You know, four years before Donald Fucking Trump won the republican party nomination and went on to become our 45th president.
Is your side wrong about anything? Wouldn’t the most practical way of making policy to convince the other side? How has demanding capitulation worked out for you? Is it more important to make policy or to win?
Seems to work out pretty well for the GOP. Their control is beyond the actual popularity of the party, let alone the popularity of their positions. Now, with regards to policy, the Congress isn’t currently getting its agenda accomplished (whereas Trump is, to a degree, through executive orders), but that’s far from being able to “make policy”.
Possibly. Let’s work to fix it.
At this point I’m not sure that’s more likely to succeed than collectively jumping up and down while wearing no pants and singing Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida. Have you seen the other side? Have you taken a good fucking look at them, what they believe, and how they think? “Convincing” implies a thought process that can be affected by arguments and evidence. But there’s an entire cottage industry of alternative news pushing alternative facts that shifts the conversation in ways that run directly contrary to the evidence. You know what the right-wing line was when Trump fired the director of the CIA and admitted he did it because he didn’t like the investigation he was being subjected to by said director of the FBI? “Good, he should have fired him long ago” and “LOL look at the hypocritical dems, they hated Comey when he was going after Clinton and now they love him because he was attacking Trump!” It’s insanity. How the fuck do you talk to these people? How the fuck do you reach someone whose grasp on logic is so tenuous that they think that is a good argument? It’s like trying to discuss paleoclimatology with a young earth creationist.
How well has literally anything worked? In the last election we had a well-qualified, well-informed, sane politician vs. a reality TV star who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. The sane one lost. What do you propose?