Perhaps today’s conservatives can explain something that we libs just don’t understand: how can you be willing to accept a bigoted and racist President yet not be willing to suffer the criticism for doing so? This seems to be a fundamental disconnect; liberals like me will not allow any policy considerations to sway me from opposing a man so devoid of the fundamental American values of equality and justice for all.
Maybe I’m assuming too much but it appears that the argument about the President’s racism and bigotry is over.
Aside from your personal opinion that the President is bigoted and racist (which I won’t even try to deny) what policies do you think he put in place to further those causes?
Kearsen1, surely you’ve heard of the wall, or the Muslim immigration ban (in its various versions)? How about separating Hispanic families and caging their kids? Do those policies answer your question? Come on, dude.
But thanks for pulling this thread back from *The **Scylla *Show.
Elvis, indeed I have heard of them. The Muslim ban, I will grant you, even though I can certainly see that he was trying to limit his own version of ‘terroristic’ threat. He should probably have identified countries that they thought were a threat and limit immigration from them.
The separation of families, can (and still should) be changed with legislation. It isn’t something new that he came up with, it predated him. The wall isn’t necessarily bigoted or racist, he is doing what he thinks he needs to do to protect the border. We do have a large immigration problem from our southern neighbors.
Immigration from Mexico is one of those things I think that no one wants to actually solve. For all the hand wringing and shouting about it, a good amount of Americans rely on that labor but it always seems to be a popular talking point.
Immigration is indeed an important issue to many (not so much to me) and reasonable debate can be had. Our president started off the debate, however, by calling Mexicans “rapists” and has never stepped back from that overall stance. So, again, I ask how Trump supporters can value “policy” over non-bigotry.
In other words, conservatives want the government to do things that they think ought to be done, no matter how expensive or personally intrusive they are; and want the government not to do things they think ought not to be done.
Liberals, and for that matter pretty much everybody else, also want the government to do things they think ought to be done, and not to do things they think ought not to be done. It’s not a “limited government” value. It’s an “enforce what I think should be enforced value”. A bit more honesty about that would be welcome.
I actually agree with that last line, and think I’ve more or less said so previously in this thread.
The problem is, that when you actually look hard and seriously about why some of our fences exist, sometimes (not always) the answer really is ‘because they were deliberately enforcing racism, sexism, and/or religious bigotry.’ And sometimes (not always) the answer is ‘because the people who built them were carelessly making assumptions that, even if they weren’t intended to do so, have the effect of enforcing racism, sexism, and/or religious bigotry.’ And sometimes (not always) the answer is ‘because the fence looked like a good idea for good reasons at the time; but we’ve discovered new information on the subject which means that it’s not a good idea, and/or we’ve discovered that – hey, law of unintended consequences! – it’s producing bad results.’
Yes, before you tear a fence down, you should know why it was put up. But you have to actually look at why it was put up, with as clear eyes and as much information as possible, and then be willing to remove it or modify it if the original reasons don’t stand up well. Just saying ‘we should keep it because we’re used to it and there’s probably a reason it’s there in the first place’ isn’t sufficient.
Would you care to expand on which particular cases you think should be excluded?
If you’d actually read the cite you’re refusing to read, you’d see that it agrees with you about the meaning of bipartisan. It disagrees with you about whether the issue in question actually had bipartisan support, and brings evidence to show that it did.
I agree that the title of the thread is somewhat problematic. I disagree that no one in the thread has, other than in one post, attempted to identify conservative values not founded on bigotry, or to discuss them in good faith.
Which policies of the Trump administration are you so strongly in favor of? And which proposed policies of the Democratic Party are you so strongly opposed to? (Policies reasonably mainstream within the party, please; not just suggestions made by one or two members. It’s true Trump is only one person, but as the Republicans have mostly been either voting in lockstep with his policies or refusing to vote on them at all, I think that at this point it’s fair to hold the party in general responsible for them.)
– my, the thread’s moved on while I typed. Think I’ll leave it there for now, though.
A cut that gives the richest 20% 60% of the benefit is not progressive, as I said the majority of the benefit percentage-wise goes to the richest segment of the population. Trying to redefine a tax cut that benefits the richest 20% vastly more than the other 80% as ‘progressive’ is absurd. Not going to apologize for obstinately sticking to actual facts.
IMHO the conclusion of that article applies to what Democrats don’t know about the Republican rank and file beliefs, on some issues they are ignorant, but that comes from the Democrats looking at the highly reported news coming from the Republicans that are in power. The Democrats are mostly correct on that.
Look for example at the issue of climate change that is mentioned in that article, while I was aware already that most Republicans report that we should be doing something about climate, most if not all of the Republicans in congress and the president show to be inside an even more extremist information bubble.
That does distort the survey in a key way, many Democrats are then just aware that the Republicans in congress are disconnected from reality and are also aware about what Republicans in congress are not doing about the issue, but this is where the conclusion of the article is an incomplete one:
The propaganda that is directed towards the Republicans in power (Lobbies and Newt Gingrich can be blamed for this) is not letting the Republicans that would want to do something about the issue to have a voice. More than once in the past I made notice of that disconnect; that most Republicans that are not politicians are not being aware much about the gross incompetency or most of the inaction that their representatives are allowing (and this is also the fault of the poisonous right wing sources of information). The Democrats in this case would have trouble, like the survey reported, in realizing the actual number of Republican outside congress that want to do something about the issue, but what shows in their radar are the actions of Republican representatives *that in reality also do not care about what their constituents do think regarding this dangerous issue.
*
And on this tread, as I remember most of the conservatives in the SDMB, most are also not aware or dismiss that most Republicans are listening to the climate scientists, the current Republicans in congress and the president that do not are the weakest link in dealing with the issue.
Rank and file republicans can state that they believe things that make them feel sophisticated and decent when they answer a survey, but if they don’t engage in real-world behavior consistent with those claimed beliefs, I don’t see how the survey answers convey any real information. If you claim to believe that forcing an 11-year old to carry her rapists baby to term is completely wrong, but also vote for the people who vote for the law, then your theoretical beliefs are irrelevant as your practical actions produce the result you claim not to want. If you claim that you’re not homophobic, but do vote for the people that want to deny LGBT people human rights, then the fact that you’re in theory in favor of equality doesn’t matter since in practice you’re opposed to it.
Also, relevant to this thread: When directly asked on this board for what ‘conservative values’ they hold that aren’t based on bigotry, conservatives listed a scarce few things that aren’t very complimentary in themselves, claimed values that are directly contradicted by conservative actions, and outright bigotry with defenses like ‘is not treating the gays as human really bigotry’ and ‘basing opinions on facts and observation is the real bigotry’.
There’s this idea that one’s right to swing one’s fist ends at the tip of of the other guy’s nose.
Litterers hurt other people by making the world dirty.
Pedophiles hurt children by taking advantage of them sexually.
Gay marriage doesn’t hurt you or anybody else.
Transwomen using the bathroom doesn’t hurt you or anybody else.
This is one way in which opposition to an idea is bigotry, where it simply doesn’t impact you in any way, yet you demand restrictions be placed on others for whom it does matter.
No, when you have a party that generally does not even bother to condemn or tell the president in the open to stop the bigotry they are aiding in normalizing that bigotry, and the claim that Trump is the lesser of two evils rings even more hollow.