So, this Merrick Garland guy, that Obama put forth, he’s totally a raving anarcho-syndicalist Commie that had to be stopped, regardless? But whoever Trump puts forth now, given his depth of legal scholarship, he should be confirmed, because elections have consequences, and the people have spoken?
In March of this year, after the President nominated Garland, I said he should be confirmed, and drew flack from the right for it:
And the answer was: because elections have consequences. Garland was not my cup o’ tea, but Obama was entitled to deference in his picks.
My principles are unchanged now.
Yes, Bricker, you have your moments. They are but moments. And fleeting.
And, just by the way, not every post I make is directly concerning you. I have other thoughts.
Simply because a peckerwood from Waco says something after you does not mean he is directly responding to you. What’s that, post hick ergo propter hick?
Yes and no. You select what threads you want to look at. There may be some confirmation bias.
Since Cecil Adams got his start publishing in urban weeklies, probably a lot of people live in bigger centres. Probably more educated people are drawn to this blog, or pedantic people like myself.
I would guess their are more Dems than Cons here, but don’t really know. I think everyone was surprised at the election results.
After the election I’m prepared to admit that I live in my own personal echo chamber. Half of America voted for a racist-friendly candidate but I’m not prepared to believe that half of America are racist in any conscious or intentional way. I’ve been reading a lot of think-pieces and trying to get into their heads. Have to, because a lot of these people are friends and neighbors, but also crucially voters who we’ll need in our coalition if we want to get anywhere.
I think I’m not the only liberal here at the SDMB reconsidering my political understanding after the election. Now contrast this to the conservative population… Roll back to the 2008 or 2012 election and see how many conservatives reconsidered anything at all. Not many, I’m betting. We have lots of dissenting viewpoints freely flying around here. Conservatives are outnumbered, sure, but their views are heard, considered, occasionally respected, sometimes even accepted. There aren’t many places where multiple points of view co-exist as they do. So I think the echo-chamber label is a bit misapplied here.
Credit is due the administrator and moderators. Not necessarily those who make up the echo chamber and are kept in check by a decent rule set and decent moderators.
Nice try, but no administrator nor moderator can be credited with someone saying “I changed my mind.” Yet if you still credit the board moderators for keeping things moderate, then there’s not much left of your “echo chamber” theory.
I think it depends on the topic. Sure, the board is liberal, but we’ve had plenty of threads full of disagreement on topics with classic left/right “sides”, as well as other topics without them that are nonetheless contentious. I’m thinking of unions, trade barriers, immigration, minimum wage, foreign intervention, middle east, guns, education, nuclear power, and that vet who shot the cat with an arrow.
If I ever get around to writing an OP (unlikely this calendar year), I’d like to have a thread on science funding policy. I fully expect to get a variety of opinions.
And then there are some topics where we have much more agreement. There are a very few lonely voices on one side of topics such as voter suppression efforts, certain law-enforcement encounters, vaccines, etc. I daresay we’re pretty echoey on handshake rape or paper towel tubes.
Not that I’m equating all those topics.
The membership of the Apathy Party fluctuates, but “half of America” has never voted for anything, at any time. Just a tiny bit less than half of those who did vote voted for the candidate endorsed by the Klan.
Your cheerful thought of the day from Mr Sunshine.
What? Who said they were.
Yep, it has. And it ignored the polls that came from sources not deemed ideologically acceptable.
You’ve got to be kidding. You really don’t see a difference?. One is simply short for the word and the other one isn’t. Though I do agree it seems it’s mostly right wing people who use “dems” and “libs”. But not necessarily always.
What is a peckerwood? I’m from Waco … does that make me a peckerwood 
Not really, no. When I went to look up information on the IBD poll that showed Trump way ahead (a poll which, by the way, did not get the actual popular vote margin right - Clinton won the popular vote by a fairly substantial margin), you know what I found? Articles from places like the Washington Post, explaining why the poll was an outlier. And it wasn’t “polls”. It was maybe one or two polls, which were correctly seen as statistical outliers using different models. The only polls being “ignored” were the unscientific, anonymous polls, because we know for a fact that Reddit and 4Chan were involved in tweaking those.
The peckerwood is a subset of what you might call the “redneck culture”. Much like thier cousins, the cracker and the hillbilly, but more culturally advanced and intellectually oriented. Comparatively. You can do field studies at Cameron Park.
Waco, even more so than Texas in general, is a wonderful place to be from.
Ugh. I never thought this thread would need a bump, but here we are, again, and for the same reason.
I think people here took the threat of Trump winning seriously. I think the people who thought Harris would win thought that losing was always a possibility, not something completely unexpected. I think any actual Trumpers are going to have a tough time here because he was a horrible president the first time and is planning on being a horrible president again. I don’t know big picture what we’re missing here. American politics is genuinely dumb enough that it’s kind of futile to hear all sides of the story. One of the sides is just wrong.
Putting high tariffs on goods imported from China will promote the inflation Trump promised to end.
A forum has two choices: Let the far right drive out everyone else, or drive them out.
I do think we haven’t been very welcoming to those of a rightward tilt. I do think it’s a bit of an echo chamber here, but having a partisan hangout doesn’t mean one is in an echo chamber- if one seeks out information from other places.
I’m not shocked that Trump won. I understand exactly why people voted for him, and I’ve tried to explain it here a few times (not that I think my explanation is anything extraordinary). What I don’t understand about Trump supporters is their willingness to ignore his most crass, base, nasty elements. Lots of people in lots of countries don’t want large numbers of immigrants. Lots of people in lots of countries romanticize those amazing factory jobs of the past. Lots of people in lots of countries think there’s a rich, global cabal who push whatever they want on the regular folk. None of that is even really reprehensible.
Until you put it in a Trump wrapper. And that’s the part I don’t get.
I think it is a bit of an echo chamber but also I’m not sure how it could be any other way.
A lot of the talking points that MAGA is based on are misconceptions if not outright lies. And I am not saying that because I am partisan; I’ve worked within the Conservative party in the UK. It’s just a fact of the current right-wing movement in the US that it is based on deceiving people (very successfully it turns out).
The straight dope is a community of people who were originally interested in fact-checking something, and the tone remains that we care about factual accuracy. That doesn’t make it a comfortable home for a MAGA proponent. For the same reason, I don’t encounter many Trump supporters on forums aimed at people interested in science or the law.