Thank you for answering for me. Meant non-ironically, as especially the second paragraph mirrors what I would’ve said near perfectly. I might have added a “fuck you” to Czarcasm, for the “keeping your hands clean” comment, and the sad worldview which would give rise to such a comment.
Here’s the thing: When Trump’s followers are so divorced from reality that they believe there is significant “anti-Christian-ism” in America, there’s no way that they will deal with actual facts. The sort of ‘persecution’ that Christians complain about is that they can’t put up monuments to their religion on government buildings without letting other religions put them up, can’t force kids in school to pray to their religion, can’t put up ‘no gays’ or ‘no blacks’ signs anymore (at least in some areas), can’t refuse to provide lifesaving care to queer people if they’re a medical provider, sometimes megachurches get forced to follow tax laws, and so on. Christians aren’t stopped from practicing their religion, having their holy books banned or restricted, getting harassed for wearing religious symbols or garb, and the like. But they define ‘not being allowed to oppress others as much any more’ as some kind of horrible discrimination, and turn to the likes of Trump.
I just want to be clear: i am 100% a full throated liberal. I guess I’d describe myself as maybe not so much a “dyed in the wool” liberal as a “cloaked in the wool as it is the best option to stay warm” liberal. Because if a better, warmer more comfortsble choice becomes available, i will be ready and able to shed that wool in favor of the better option.
Do you know what a sad worldview is? Thinking that you are keeping your hands clean by stepping back and letting come what may because you just couldn’t engage the old braincells enough to figure out that one side was most definitely worse than the other and that, if you couldn’t find it in yourself to go for one candidate, you might at the very least fight against the other. I’ve got no more patience for conservatives that having nothing to say but “Don’t blame us” when the shit is hitting the fan.
I don’t care for the term “hive mind” very much. But istm that one doesn’t need to be a radical reactionary to have an interest in the SDMB NOT being an echo chamber.
So that is an incredibly difficult question. The easy answer is the one about not arguing the hypothetical. But that is a cop out (this time, anyway). I like to think that not voting when neither option is acceptable, could send a message to one or either party that there are a lot of votes to be had by adjusting the platform, ideally towards the center. But the actions on both sides don’t especially make that a thought keeping me warm at night. So, the answer is: I might. Knowing what I know now, I might. But despite knowing how incredibly destructive Trump has been, I can’t be sure. That’s the best answer I can give. In 2020, I won’t vote Trump. I most likely won’t vote Pence. I might vote for the Democratic candidate, depending on who they are and what the platform is. Or I might again decide that in the polarized political landscape we have now, my voice gets lost. And that is fairly ironic: because when I first came to the US (from a multi-party constitutional monarchy, with parties ranging from neo-fascist to communist, with some single issue parties thrown in) I found the distinction between Democrats and Republicans largely artificial and not dissimilar to a taste test between Coke and Pepsi. My frame of reference has changed pretty significantly.
That said, have you noticed yet that this is a counter-productive move to make? The name of the game (at this point in history, at least) is to prevent the worst candidate from achieving the office, and NOT to install the one that “represent[s] me.”
Mostly FALSE, apparently. The law did mandate treating all fetal tissue as “deceased human remains” rather than as medical waste (irrespective of whether the tissue was generated by an abortion or a miscarriage), but the burden of paying for the cremation or burial was to fall upon the facility that provided the abortion (or treated the woman who had miscarried).
And in the case of miscarriage, the parents were given the choice* of holding, at their own expense, funeral services (apparently based on the presumption that, at least sometimes, the parents had wanted to bring this pregnancy to term and raise a child).
*It often appears that many people (on both sides) either overlook or downplay the fact that having a baby is also a choice.
But this polarization is almost entirely due to the Republicans. First because they’ve moved to the right far more than the Democrats have moved to the left. Secondly because they don’t give any reason to work with the other side because they don’t cooperate at all (while of course projecting this intransigence onto the Democrats.) Thirdly because of their gerrymandering, those seats the Democrats do hold are quite safe and so there is no reason to pander to the center.
In the past couple years there has been some movement to the left that cannot be entirely explained by these factors, but since the Democrats don’t currently have power to accomplish their agenda and the GOP will not work with them, it doesn’t make a difference how far to the left they are: the first thing we need to do is sweep the GOP out of office.
Ok. Thanks for the informative answer. I wanted to address one or two things. Maybe im failing to grasp some important abstract pronciple here or something but i am aghast that after living thru the past three years of Trump sinhlehandedly transforming America into the world’s bratty 8 year old kid who still breast feeds and shits his pants, a citizen of this country could be indecisive as to whether, if given another chance, they would give zero votes to Trump or 0.5 votes. What are you debating in your head?
You seem to be disappointingly resorting to the old tired Republican tactic of false equivalency. No, there is no room at the responsible adults table for suggestions that a Hillary Clinton Presidency would have somehow interchangeable in terms of the corruption, incompetence and utter thumbing of noses to institutional mores and customs. You say such things, you should get laughed out of the discussion.
And you still arent sure whether you’ll give a half of a vote to Trumps reelection or not? What am i missing here? How could you be so seemingly blase about such a historic institutional threat like a Donald Trump second term? How could you be debating the merits of being a potential ally or not?
I dont mean to spund like im coming down so hard on you. Ive always respected you as a poster, even if half the time we’re on opposite sides of an issue. You usually have reasons that make sense for why you hold the pisitions you hold. So im not rushing to the judgment that you are necessarily uninterested or blase about the threat of a Trump re-election. Im going to assume that you are fully informed of these threats. I just dont see a path i can follow from that knowledge to your words here. So i assume i must be missing something pr misunderstanding part of your post.
The impression I get is that the anger stems from a perception that there is a “punch-up vs. punch-down” double standard. For instance, if a politician or Hollywood celebrity were to make fun of Christianity, there are few, if any consequences that such a person would suffer - but if that same politician or celebrity were to make fun of Islam, they’d be instantly lambasted as “Islamophobic.”
The easy answer would’ve been that I would vote for Hillary. But unlike some (many) I believe voting for someone is an expression of agreement with them as a person and (much of) the platform they run on. And at the time, Hillary didn’t clear that bar for me. So then it becomes deciding between the concept of needing to agree to a decent extent with the person you vote for, or some strategy to minimize damage. Fortunately, in this country I can still, for now, make that determination and act on it as I see fit. In this particular (still hypothetical) example, going back with hindsight, I’m saying I don’t know. If you were to ask me to choose between eating a shit sandwich and being castrated with a rusty chainsaw, I’d probabl give the same answer, even if one of them has fewer long-term consequences and is at first sight less severe.
