Sounds delightful, before I do, I want to get one basic foundational piece out of the way. I think this is all “duh” obvious stuff, but just in case we’re seeing the world in diametrically opposite ways I want to clarify.
The way I understand this, is that the more commitments or risks, or the larger the scope of the commitments, or the more people it effects, etc, all that weighs in favor of going the treaty route. The smaller the commitments and risks, the narrower group or subset it affects, the more that would weigh in favor of an “International Agreements Other Than Treaties” (IAOTT), right?
I can tell this is going to get tedious. I’ll be brief, please don’t nitpick: More effect on state laws means more likely it should be a treaty, while lesser effect on state laws means more likely it should be an IAOTT, right?
If legislation is required, more likely it should be a treaty, if not, more likely it should be an IAOTT, right?
If past practice, in similar agreements was to treat as a treaty, then the same practice should be adhered to, if past practice was to treat similar agreements as IAOTT, then that practice should be adhered to, right?
If Congress expresses some sense on the treaty vs IAOTT point, that deserves some amount of deference, right?
More nations that treat it like a treaty = treaty, fewer nations that do = IAOTT, right?
None of these things are hard and fast rules. Your State Department link called them “factors”, I just want to make sure we agree which way those factors point, ok? Do we agree on the above?
not really the same, tho, is it? The NDP and the Conservatives had been moving apart for years and Harper was the incumbent with a long history of no confidence from the public. If Trump is still President in 4ys, continues in the direction he seems to be heading now, and the Republican party doesn’t do some major damage control and distancing (specifically: fielding a serious primary opponent); I think you’ll, then, see a sizable Republican voter defection.
mc
I’ll give you the short answer: Yes, I would. I wouldn’t consider it “turning my back on my beliefs”, I’d consider it declining to vote for a dangerous incompetent unfit to be president who wouldn’t accomplish those objectives anyway and would likely do more harm than good to my country and to my ideology. Which is exactly what rational Republicans like Sen. Ben Sasse did, frankly and openly, referring to the 2016 election as a dumpster fire and voting for Hillary as the least bad option.
I don’t happen to agree with any of your hypotheticals but I can put myself in the position of someone who does, and that’s what I’d do.
Think about it. Which of those things that you say you value have been enacted into policy? Which, in fact, are ever likely to be? Immigration was being competently handled under Obama – all that the “Muslim bans” have done is pitted the courts against the administration and overturned them as unconstitutional, and meanwhile inflamed the Muslim community, scared off foreign scientists and engineers and talented academics, and turned much of the civilized world against the US. You don’t like the ACA? No surprise – it’s almost impossible to have a workable health care policy based entirely on private insurance, but the ACA does deliver benefits to millions within those limitations, and the only thing the Republican proposals would do is return closer to the old status quo, deprive millions of health care, and literally kill people who are poor and sick while accomplishing not much else.
Let me take one of your other hypotheticals as a sort of analogy to what I’m getting at. You say about climate change that you “do not believe it’s as dire as some scientists claim, and I’m not willing to risk our economy on untested and ineffective technology shifts.” So you’re going to dismiss the conclusions of scientists who have spent their lives studying the climate system; you’re going to dismiss the urgent recommendations of distinguished scientists on every national academy of science of every major industrialized nation on earth; you’re going to dismiss it all in favor of your own gut feel and personal “beliefs”. And then you’re going to vote for an incompetent for president.
Because indeed to implement this screwball policy, which has now taken the form of making the US the one and only rogue nation in the world to pull out of the Paris climate accord, you decided that the president of your country should be someone who is so temperamentally and intellectually utterly unqualified for the job that it’s been a train wreck from day 1 and may well end in impeachment long before the term is up, and who’s appointed climate change deniers to key government positions. This does not strike me as a winning formula. Obama appointed a Nobel-winning physicist as his first energy secretary, and an MIT nuclear physicist as his second one; your guy appointed Rick “Oops” Perry, the climate denier who couldn’t remember the name of the department he now heads, and whose latest venture into fame was appearing on “Dancing with the Stars”.
Step one: make sure they actually are reasonable. Because, word of warning, they aren’t. At the very least you are drastically misinformed on climate change and health care. There is a broad scientific consensus among climatologists that climate change is real, caused by humans, and is already having drastic and negative effects on humanity. And we can talk about how “some scientists” are wrong, but there’s a broad consensus that we will see fairly extreme negative effects if temperatures rise above 2°C.
That said, one particularly interesting illustration is what happens on the other end of the bell curve. That is, if we keep going like this, there’s a chance warming will reach something like 6°C. Not a huge chance, but still something like 10% given current projections. And 6°C is… bad. Really, really, really bad. We’re talking “mass extinctions, end of agriculture as we know it, death of most ocean life” bad. The “bad stuff will happen below 2°C”? That’s the friendly end of the bell curve. The unlikely positive response.
Meanwhile, on health care, the idea that we can somehow get better health care outcomes without government intervention on a scale akin to Obamacare is simply folly, and on immigration, you seem to miss how many people Obama deported.
As a response, allow me to quote from Donald Trump’s performance at the third debate.
Well, Aleppo is a disaster. It’s a humanitarian nightmare. But it has fallen from any standpoint. I mean, what do you need, a signed document? Take a look at Aleppo. It is so sad when you see what’s happened. And a lot of this is because of Hillary Clinton. Because what has happened is by fighting Assad, who turned out to be a lot tougher than she thought, and now she is going to say, “Oh, he loves Assad.” He’s just much tougher and much smarter than her and Obama. And everyone thought he was gone two years ago, three years ago. He aligned with Russia. He now also aligned with Iran, who we made very powerful. We gave them $150 billion back. We give them $1.7 billion in cash. I mean cash, bundles of cash as big as this stage. We gave them $1.7 billion.
Now they have aligned, he has aligned with Russia and with Iran. They don’t want ISIS. But they have other things because we’re backing, we’re backing rebels. We don’t know who the rebels are. We’re giving them lots of money, lots of everything. We don’t know who the rebels are. And when and if, and it’s not going to happen because you have Russia and you have Iran now. But if they ever did overthrow Assad, you might end up as bad as Assad is, and he is a bad guy.
But you may very well end up with worse than Assad. If she did nothing, we’d be in much better shape. And this is what has caused the great migration where she has taken in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who probably in many cases, not probably, who are definitely in many cases ISIS-aligned. And we now have them in our country and wait until you see this is going to be the great Trojan horse.
And wait until you see what happens in the coming years. Lots of luck, Hillary. Thanks a lot for doing a great job.
The correct response to a nonsensical word salad like that comes from Billy Madison. If the 2020 election comes down to Mike Pence vs. a democratic Donald Trump - say, I dunno, The Rock with dementia and an inability to tell reality from fiction - I would vote for Mike Pence. Not because I like his policies, not because I think he’s a good person, not because I’m unaware of how fucking awful his policies will be for America, but because say what you want about Mike Pence, he’s not going to pull us out of fucking NATO because the prime minister of Belgium said mean things about him. He’s not an international disgrace or danger in the way Trump is, or Hypothetical Dwayne “I was never actually a wrestler, that’s all fake news and shut up before I elbow drop you” Johnson would be.
In general, yes. But you should also be careful with terminology: a commitment for example, as used in the first guideline, would tend refer to the extent to which an agreement is binding.
And I would also suggest that when you’re looking at each of these factors, first look at the UNFCC, to see what the US has already agreed to within the treaty; and then look at the Accord, which if I remember right is an appendix to that convention. You could also compare and contrast the Accord with the Kyoto Protocol as another point of comparative analysis.
Now you know why I’m not inclined to look at this carefully - too much work.
Meh, I’ll offer a partial defense on his behalf and submit that people rarely vote for the good of the country, even if they think that’s what they’re doing. I think most people (and I’m no different) are really voting for what they think is in their best interests and in the interests of their neighbors, and there’s a sliding scale to that end.
You have some voters who might understand that there is a direct consequence of their guy/gal getting elected or not. A welfare or Obamacare recipient votes out of fear that the Republicans will take away something they depend on; a Republican businessman votes because they’re afraid Democrats are going to raise business and personal income taxes and the costs of doing business. I get that, actually.
Then there are voters like me who really don’t consider themselves as directly impacted and fear that the broader implications of a republican or democrat in office will end up being felt in myriad ways that are yet unknown. I don’t know exactly how more CO2 in the environment will impact me, to what degree, and when, but I know it’s not good. I don’t know how Paul Ryan and the GOP are going to fuck up the economy and when it will happen, but I know that the policies they’re advocating have twice led to massive economic collapses and there’s no reason to expect a different outcome this time. But those are not issues with an immediate impact, and I guess that’s the challenge we face.
The challenging part for us is convincing someone who anticipates more money in his bank account and more freedom for his children to say a prayer in school that Trump is so goddamn bad that they need to vote for someone that a) they find personally distasteful and b) is going to potentially do the exact opposite of what they want. I’d like to think that if I were a Republican, I’d be concerned about the destabilization effects of Trump’s administration on economics and the rule of law. At some point, those are things that affect everyone, regardless of what specific benefits you might think you’re receiving from this administration and passing up with a vote for Hillary or Garry Johnson.
By not voting for Trump (or Michael Moore, or whatever the liberal equivalent is) I would not be turning my back on my beliefs, I would be affirming them. I would vote for whoever I thought was most fit for office, whether I found them likely to win or not.
I know this is true because I’ve done it before.
While I still don’t understand why anyone would cast a vote for Donald Trump, I have at least a couple of friends/loved ones who did, for the reasons you stated above (Trump being more in line with their policy goals.) I’m disappointed in them, but I can deal with that. What I can’t deal with are people defending him, supporting him, and otherwise turning a blind eye to all the terrible shit he’s done. That, to me, is where the lines between the candidate and the voter begin to blur.
Trump has delivered the goods for religious fundamentalists, so I get why they’re standing by him. He’s delivered the goods for Nativists, so I get why they’re defending him as well. And the intensity of the outrage among his opposition convinces these constituencies that the investigations into Trump are conspiracies to undermine him (and them).
Sure the situation wasn’t identical but the idea is the similar.
You had an opportunity to send a message to the extreme and ignorant parts of the Republican party, you can put an ignorant buffoon past the primaries, but you can’t make us vote for him. That chance to repudiate that faction of the party is lost now. If Trump had of lost hard, you’d see the GOP change the primary rules in a flash to make sure no candidate like him ever made it again.
But instead, a rather different message was sent. Trump is terrible. But this is not the last Trump you’re going to see now. Who knows maybe it’ll be Ted Nugent in 2024? Won’t that be great, President Nugent? Then know that a large section of the Republication party with vote for the R instead of the USA.
Trump is going to damage you’re country both at home and abroad but the USA can survive that as a strong nation. But the real damage is what has been done to your political system by electing him.
Voters did vote for the good of our country. You chose not to agree with the choices, decisions, reasons, and/or explanations of others. How dare they not follow the popular groupthink of your country/side/political party/whim?
It’s my guess that the reason you’re not sure what to tell people who hold opposing viewpoints is because you don’t understand what other people what/need/demand from their elected politicians. And I suspect that you have no idea how to gather that information.
There seems to be this popular misconception that just because a bunch of people have reasons for holding a bad idea as a core belief that it is somehow less of a bad idea. The whole problem with the current political environment is that people are so entrenched by their “side” that they feel justified in cherry picking which “facts” they want to keep and which ones they choose to ignore, depending on which “side” they support. That precludes any meaningful discussion or common ground.
For example, Trump is Tweeting his head off about a new Rasumussen poll that puts his approval rating at 50%. That fact, however, ignores every other poll that ranks his approval rating as the worst in recent history.
Of course Trump supporters will just call the other polls “biased” “fake news” from the “Liberal media” and conveniently disregard those facts.
As many Republican scientists showed, there are issues were it is not really group think.
As John Oliver showed, we do know that what the people wanted, needed,or demanded in the rust belt and coal country specifically. That was acknowledged with the proviso that the workers needed other kind of help rather than false promises of all the mine jobs coming back. Trump and minions won by lying and continue to lie to the American people.
So in essence, you still need to get better sources of information.
Well, for a lot of people, the reasons were completely disconnected from their vote. For example, the people who wanted cheaper health care premiums and voted republican. They believed that the republicans were going to lower their health care costs, because they were lied to. The people who wanted Trump to support coal country were, again, lied to. The people who thought the Pope had endorsed Trump, or Clinton ran a pedophile ring, or Clinton intentionally got Ambassador Stevens killed (my grandmother believes this one) or any number of other utterly insane conspiracy theories that ran around this election - they were lied to.
Look at the percent of the vote the republicans got, then look at how their policy proposals are polling right now. Clearly there’s some form of disconnect here. The problem is that people were lied to. The republicans were incredibly dishonest in how they described their goals for health care, as well as their descriptions of the current law. Trump promised to support mining communities, and instead tried to scrap the Appalachian Regional Commision. Republicans cannot honest run on the platform they want to enact, because it’s deeply unpopular. How many people honestly think that it’s good health care policy to take money out of medicaid and give it to the top 1% in tax cuts? How many people would have supported that if Republicans had been honest that that was what they were planning? How many republican voters wanted to see Clinton locked up, for fuck’s sake?
The problem is not simply “people have different values”. If that were the problem, it probably wouldn’t be this unpleasant. No, the problem is that people have different facts. And a lot of people, mostly republicans, have the wrong facts. They’ve been lied to. So don’t act like it’s just a matter of, “Oh, look at this snobby liberal who doesn’t like our conservative values and thinks we need to abandon our convictions and think just like them”. It’s not. That’s some of it (conservative values of LGBTQA+ issues are abhorrent and need to die the fuck out), but given the prevalence of fake news, insane conspiracy theories, and how utterly unprecedented Donald Trump’s lying was in this past election, you cannot ignore the fact that the republican party has a truth problem. There is significant intellectual rot in the conservative movement. The fact that your president gave a personal endorsement to ALEX JONES should be proof enough of that. Hell, the fact that your president was one of the major advocates of Birtherism should be proof enough of that.
You’ve summed up the place where I get stuck. And I have seen liberals start to succumb to this ‘‘let’s have our own set of facts’’ mentality, but it doesn’t seem to have impacted who we’ve actually voted into office (so far.) I don’t like arguments that paint ‘‘the masses’’ as dumb, but I’ve begun to rethink my position after the events of 2016 (all of them, not just the election itself.) Many people really seem to have no clear concept of critical thinking or to understand when they’re being deceived. They seem well predisposed to buy into whatever media narrative they are sold without any real interest in examining the facts that constructed that narrative. They are passive receptacles for media manipulation, and thanks to social media they now do the media’s role for them by spreading that narrative far and wide, without a hint of incredulity.
At the time I was in the thick of this manipulative media shitstorm, I was unhappy with it but I didn’t know why I was unhappy. Once I got outside of it, it became so blatantly obvious that I can never unsee it. In that regard, I am just an ordinary sinner, but some of these people seem to make it a career to believe stupid shit, and worse - the worst, in my opinion - they don’t seem concerned at all about it or interested in changing it. I could understand falling for some shit, but doing it over and over, with a blatant disregard for facts? The contempt for things like scientific evidence and reason disturbs me a lot. There is such a fundamental disconnect between what these people say they want, and what they actually vote for, that I am tempted to blame either their cognitive abilities or the quality of their education. I’m getting to the point where I honestly don’t know if most people are *capable *of critical thinking about politics. Maybe it’s not a choice at all.
Probably one of my favorite relevant quotes is, ‘‘Never try to reason a man out of a position he didn’t reason himself into.’’
This is the reality we’re living in. Most people typically only change their minds when they have a direct experience that contradicts their innately held beliefs. Someone against gun ownership having their life saved by an armed civilian, for example. People are extremely emotional creatures, whether we want to believe that or not.
I think the number of people who are open-minded enough to change their beliefs, over careful consideration of new facts, is very small. I do think I am one of those people, and I had kind of assumed everyone was, and am disappointed to find they are not. There are very, very few subjects in which I’m unwilling to consider alternative points of view. With the rifts I’ve encountered with people historically, it’s really only one subject in which I am 100% certain I am correct: overt bigotry, which includes delusional beliefs about the immorality of gay people. For the rest of it, my certainty on my own positions lies somewhere between 50% and 80%.
Which brings me to another ‘‘stuck’’ place:
[QUOTE=Settimo]
conservatives:
appear “more attuned than liberals to potential threats”
desire "stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions"
believe people should be rewarded for effort, but not expect rewards without it
value loyalty and authority
[/QUOTE]
Bolding mine. Clear answers to complicated questions don’t exist, IMO. The need to break things down into soundbites of certitude is so completely foreign to the way I look at the world that I have a real problem knowing how to confront it. Even from an academic standpoint, I can’t learn one new thing without immediately drawing connections to fifty other things I’ve learned, and that one new thing re-shapes my understanding of everything else. Everything is connected. It’s why I’m attracted to ‘‘big picture’’ concepts like psychology, politics, religion, history, sexuality, and anything else messy and mysterious. I can’t imagine living in a world of certainty because there is too damn much I don’t know, and never will know.
No, I would never support an undemocratic solution. The opportunity for abuse under authoritarian regimes is way too high. People have a right to believe whatever they do, and vote however they want, even if it’s stupid. The only place I draw the line is ‘‘tyranny of the majority’’ type shit that infringes on the rights of others. I have to think about what a good solution might be. Integrating critical thinking into schools would be a good start. Like everybody takes a class on critical thinking. I didn’t know how to think critically until I became a university student, which is sad considering I graduated at the top of my class in high school.
By sheer coincidence, I am sure, I imagine it would be pretty close to the range of incomes at which you can make significant political contributions.
You may save a few bucks on your federal taxes, but your state and local taxes will have to increase to make up for the things that the fed is no longer covering, or you will enjoy reduced services.
The fed helps subsidize education, fire, police, public health, and a myriad other little things that you never think about until they are gone.
CLimate models do not take into account the sociological issues, they just focus on climate.
So, when a climate model predicts that we will be losing around half of our arable land, and that coastal areas where hundreds of millions are currently living get inundated, that is the only prediction that that climate model is making a prediction of.
Now, if we want to assume that all those who are living in areas that will be underwater, and all those who are getting their food from a food source that will no longer be sustainable will simply stay where they are and die quietly, then that would be a terrible humanitarian crisis, but at least it will not spill over.
The disease brought by the warmer weather may not respect such boundaries. People starving from food shortages and refugees from inundated lands will probably not be so convenient to just lay down and die, and watch their families and friends perish around them. This means conflicts. This means wars.
Wars make the situation worse, by consuming resources faster, and by potentially damaging the arable lands that are being fought over.
I don’t think that we will extinct ourselves, but a massive bottleneck of wiping out over half the population through war, disease, famine, and exposure is not an unreasonably unlikely outcome. It is one we can avoid if we so choose, but staying on the path we are on is not something that is going to decrease that likelihood.
There are worse case scenarios though. There’s tons of methane locked up in the tundras and on the ocean floors that if it started getting released on a large scale would completely invalidate all the models that predict a more linear increase in greenhouse gasses. A sudden influx of methane into the atmosphere would have rather unpredictable, but unlikely to be pleasant, effects.
Now, you are calling out bloggers and children who are worried about the possible effects of climate change, and who may be taking a bit more of a pessimistic mindset towards it than most models would justify.
But you voted for a guy who says that climate change is a hoax. You are on the ideological side as the guy who says that global warming isn’t a problem because god will fix it. You call out possible exaggerations and pessimism on our side, while ignoring the completely detached from reality rhetoric coming from your side.
Yes, the effects and fallout of global climate change wiping out humanity is a pretty small possibility, but is much larger than the “everything will be fine” scenario that those on your side are going on about.
I was being simplistic there, sure, but the effects that could precipitate massive regional conflicts that escalate into global wars are well within the scenarios given by climate scientists.
Your kid you brought up earlier in the thread will likely not die due to starvation or dehydration, as he is in the US. It is much more likely that he or his children will die on the battlefield fighting over the last bits of arable land left.
We also have to look at time scales. Over the next 80 years, which is what most climate models cover, the chances of human extinction are pretty small. But you go past 2100, if you are in a scenario where CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions are still increasing, then yeah, we are talking about eventually making the earth essentially uninhabitable.
And most people think that we, as humans, will have done something to curtail the effects of climate change before it gets to that point. Even rather weak gestures will make a difference in the long run.
But, we are against people who claim that global warming is a hoax, that god will take care of it, or that you can disprove global warming by making a snowball in the winter. If we follow their path, I see eventual extinction as more of an inevitability than simply a possibility.
I agree, and I only think of an ELE as a outside possibility, assuming that we do anything to curb our emissions.
Massive suffering is definitely in the future for huge swaths of the population, so focusing on the likely hood of the worst case scenario, when the likely case scenario is pretty horrible take the hijack to another hijack.
Part of the problem is that those who need to make a change are the ones who are least likely to be affected. I live in Ohio. Other than maybe a bit warmer of summers and a little less snow in the winter, it is unlikely that global warming will massively effect me in my lifetime. Food may become a bit more expensive as global demand for food rises and our arable land is depleted, but it is unlikely to actually make me starve. I drink out of the Ohio river, which is fed from such a huge watershed that it would take truly massive amounts of weather pattern change to actually dry it up. I’m several hundred feet above sea level, so I am not too worried about sea level rise. Severe weather here is reading about tornadoes in other states.
It is mainly other people who will suffer and die, not those in the US, probably not all that many in other developed countries. It is those in the least developed countries, those who have contributed the least to the CO[sub]2[/sub] problem who will be mostly feeling the effects.
I think that last is why it is so hard to get many people on board. Why should I change my life so that someone else doesn’t have to suffer?
I understand why people voted for trump, just as I understand why people buy used cars that break down as soon as they are driven off the lot.
Trump is a very good liar; if all you ever hear are the soundbites, trump sounds better. He promises more, he promises to bring jobs back, he promised to fix the healthcare bill, he promised that we would become a leader in combating terrorism. If you believed those lies, then you should vote for him, he sounds pretty awesome. When you are in desperate situations, it is easier to believe the lies you want to hear.
So, you have low engaged voters seeing their life and livelihood seem to slipping away from them day after day, and then you have this guy that promises to fix all their problems. Maybe they didn’t believe all his lies, but they figured that if he solved any of the problems, then that would be a good thing. These people are not engaged into multiple news outlets and blogs and messageboards. They may not even have all that much facebook presence. What they do have is a checking account and basic math skills. Over the Obama admin, they could see that their finances were not improving, either at all, or as fast as they would like to catch back up to where they were in 2007 before the crash. They voted for a change in direction in their checking account balance. A change that Trump promised them that they would get.
Give it a few years. They may be able to be fooled by rhetoric or media issues, but you cannot fool their pocket. They will know when policies are better for them and their families and communities. They may not know what those policies are, but they will know when they are working. They will also know when they are not working. And after a couple years of trump, they will be looking for a new direction.
I had many acquaintances who did that in 2008 and 2010. They voted D in 2008, but after 2 years, their personal financial situation had not improved, so they voted R. They did not understand or care about the policy differences, just how it was working out for them.
I’m glad we agree on this point. If my state tries to raise my taxes, I can fight that at the state level.
Sounds like another point of agreement then.
Here I think we may just have different opinions on what’s reasonably likely, but that’s ok. I’m not terribly interested in spending time trying to persuade you away from thinking this scenario is “not an unreasonably unlikely outcome”.
I’ll take part of the blame for the confusion here. I wasn’t ‘calling out children’, but in my original post on the subject, I called him “that Democrat kid”, which probably led to this portion of your response. To be clear, I was referring to this incident (which I thought was better-known than it apparently was). HuffPo called him 'a [DNC] staffer identified only as Zach". The quote in the article is:
Zach is most likely a young adult (I try to not make a habit of ‘calling out children’). He also seems to be horribly misinformed, despite the fact that he was a DNC employee. What went wrong here? He certainly wasn’t in a Fox News bubble, and yet, he seems to sincerely believe that life expectancy is going to drop 40 years in his lifetime (no wonder he’s angry at Donna Brazille, I’d be pissed too if I believed that). Why weren’t all those fact-focused people he worked for & with able to help him get in touch with reality?
For a long time, I’ve heard leftists express frustration at Republicans for “voting against their own self-interest” (as near as I can tell, it really got started with that ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’ book). Here, you seem to be acknowledging that a vote against climate change probably is not one against their own self interest, at least if they live in the American heartland. Doesn’t your side want people to vote in their own self interest? That’s at least the impression I was left with in all those years since the book came out.
The problem is that these traits sound dangerously close to “paranoid fascist simpleton.” At the very least, it describes an extreme rigidity and resistance to change where any perceived deviation from the status quo is considered a “potential threat” to be met with the un-nuanced answer of “guns”.
