American Politics Discussion Thread

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Good thing our democracy wasn't recently undermined in large part due to a cable network not wanting to lose ratings. In general I recommend logic. Emotion exists, but its important to know emotion vs logic.

I'll also note a large number of high school history books are compliant with the standards in states like Texas not making them not the greatest history books ever. There is definitely a balance between not telling history and over emphasizing parts of history (or making it up) like that 1619 project (from what little I've read I just heard about them today). Academia is hardly dominated by one ideology and for that matter nothing really is. Again, I think a mistake a lot of people make is assuming one group or thought represents a whole because they were told it does without actually looking around.

Recently? The entire purpose of cable news has been to serve as propaganda outlets for interest groups, since their inception.

American academia is clearly dominated by one ideology. That is the ideology that continually speaks of a need for progress, to 'decolonize' and fight the miasma of white supremacism that permeates the air, to never stop fighting for more progress. The name this ideology goes by changes constantly, but the ideas it uses do not. That it is dominating is clearly seen by how it persuades or coerces neutral parties into accepting its premises and then spreads from academia into policy, where it then becomes actual law. There are conservative academics still, but their victories in the policy world are few and far between. They are visibly a minority in the academic world just going by polls.

[Mjmd]

Good thing our democracy wasn't recently undermined in large part due to a cable network not wanting to lose ratings. In general I recommend logic. Emotion exists, but its important to know emotion vs logic.

I'll also note a large number of high school history books are compliant with the standards in states like Texas not making them not the greatest history books ever. There is definitely a balance between not telling history and over emphasizing parts of history (or making it up) like that 1619 project (from what little I've read I just heard about them today). Academia is hardly dominated by one ideology and for that matter nothing really is. Again, I think a mistake a lot of people make is assuming one group or thought represents a whole because they were told it does without actually looking around.

Recently? The entire purpose of cable news has been to serve as propaganda outlets for interest groups, since their inception.

American academia is clearly dominated by one ideology. That is the ideology that continually speaks of a need for progress, to 'decolonize' and fight the miasma of white supremacism that permeates the air, to never stop fighting for more progress. The name this ideology goes by changes constantly, but the ideas it uses do not. That it is dominating is clearly seen by how it persuades or coerces neutral parties into accepting its premises and then spreads from academia into policy, where it then becomes actual law. There are conservative academics still, but their victories in the policy world are few and far between. They are visibly a minority in the academic world just going by polls.

First sentence doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. Most of modern society is built on hard fought progress of the past. 

Again, conservative states dominate the textbook marketplace. Conservative states are FAR more intrusive in what they teach. And I also want to note the first sentence highlighted with your use of "victory". Please describe victory. If you want praise of colonization and more white supremacy than I hope 0 victories would be better.

And I agree with news. Which again is why I stress logic.

[greenline]

Conservative states make many of the high school textbooks. They still have little impact on higher education, which can be observed to be increasingly driven by ideological fanaticism. The pool of teachers who will teach the textbook is more and more full of those who think that the goal of a high school education is to eradicate white supremacism and teach children to destroy the gender binary and fight global warming. The West's answer to Red Guards.

It is an odd request to ask for a logical reason for why the news is the way it is. Logic is best applied to mathematics and analytic philosophy where it is dealing with discrete values and numbers, rather than our messy visions of the real world. But here is my answer. You complained that "a cable news channel", presumably FOX, undermined democracy by repeatedly focusing on information that put Hillary Clinton in a bad light during an election year, rather than doing their duty to some standard of impartiality. But cable news has always selected their stories and how they portray information to further causes, interest groups, and agendas. There has never been a cable news group, or any news group, that followed such an impartial standard.

[Mjmd]

I mean stop saying the quiet part out loud. You've multiple times indicated you don't like education fighting white supremacy. I don't see how this is a bad thing. Also, the global warming thing is mostly taught as "it exists", but in high school not college. Also, I will say I was never taught about white supremacy and climate change in college. You actually aren't required to take history or modern civics courses in college. Again, this is a high school thing. Which is why I'm always curious if conservatives ever do logical thought on "heh why do they say things like the above". And I certainly never got gender ideology lectures in college. Culture war BS, is a classic power grabbing fear technique.

I didn't ask for a logical reason why news is the way it is. I said you should use logic. I was specifically talking about Fox news pushing election fraud conspiracies despite knowing there was no evidence. Something someone looking at a news story should ask is "heh is there actually any evidence of this". Then of course when we get the texts and emails from Fox admitting they were pushing despite no evidence, maybe there should be some reflection in the trust you place in them. There is a large difference in between choosing news stories and pushing false ones.

[greenline]

I mean stop saying the quiet part out loud. You've multiple times indicated you don't like education fighting white supremacy. I don't see how this is a bad thing. 

In a world where the Civil Rights Act has been around for around sixty years, where the Ku Klux Klan was dismantled decades ago and now consists primarily of government agents, what does fighting 'white supremacy' end up looking like?

It looks like histrionic commissars asking for ever expanding donations for sketchy political projects. It looks like Asians being kept out of high level universities to maintain a racial status quo. It looks like a wave of district attourneys letting violent felons out and giving them slap on the wrist sentences, but handing out tenfold punishments to those who would try and defend themselves from those felons. It looks like people painting George Floyd murals in Afghanistan. It looks like officials in Maoist China warning of invisible landlords and counter-revolutionaries hiding around every corner, necessitating struggle sessions.

I don't watch Fox news. I think they choose their programming for ideological reasons. I think this also applies to every other cable news site.

[Mjmd]

Again, don't take the part as a whole. There are plenty of sketchy historical commissions trying to whitewash history and I'm sure there are some doing the opposite. Its also easy to get overblown from a couple news segments. A youtube video tells you that a bill would do X and Democrats voted against it and suddenly you think Democrats are against that thing, but in reality there is a lot more to the story. I'm saying to look at it and when you find yourself framing things in the tone of "fighting white supremacy" maybe take a step back and examine the sources and alternate points of view.

Again, there is a difference between choosing news stories, which you are correct and every news agency does. However, putting people with no evidence on for months and spending a lot of your air time to election fraud coverage without ever even putting in a disclaimer of "there is no actual evidence" is not just choosing news stories it is creating false ones. We should expect and try to see past bias and sometimes false media. We should expect our politicians to lie. Not just the other sides, but ALL. However, there are certain lies we should be especially quick to demand evidence of and if proven false push back on.

[greenline]

To give a non whitewashed view of history would require nuance. It would acknowledge that slavery has been a practice that has been endemic to human civilization for thousands of years, and that there is something far more unique about the British and American empires for seeking to end slavery rather than letting it continue. It would mean examining that the roots of the African slave trade began with Arab and Turkic empires importing slaves from Africa, and that both countries were perfectly content to keep that arrangement going until they were colonized and forced to abandon it. And many other details of this nature. Teachers who believe in earnestly fighting white supremacy or racism - or however else you would want to describe this mindset, there are many similar phrases - are not capable of this nuance. So the reaction by conservative educational boards makes sense in this context. Given that they are dealing with an onslaught of employees who wish to make the curriculum an excuse for ideologically shaming many of their students, they choose to excise nasty details of history so that it can not be read as controversial.

However, putting people with no evidence on for months and spending a lot of your air time to election fraud coverage without ever even putting in a disclaimer of "there is no actual evidence" is not just choosing news stories it is creating false ones. We should expect and try to see past bias and sometimes false media. We should expect our politicians to lie. Not just the other sides, but ALL. However, there are certain lies we should be especially quick to demand evidence of and if proven false push back on.

As far as damaging lies go, the lie that Trump could prove that there was election fraud has mainly harmed himself and some of his supporters. The lie that COVID could be contained by the amazing hammer and dance technique, or lockdowns, amounted to some billions worth of economic damage. The people who put forth those lies will never be punished. Sad, isn't it?

[Mjmd]

There is a difference between context and context. There has been slavery in multiple forms for instance with a wide divergence of rights. There is also some fairly obvious tu quo aue argument in even doing that that should probably be addressed. There is how you frame slavery. Are you framing it as a benefit to enslaved for instance? How do frame the part of slavery in the shaping of early American history and in the compromises of its founding. How do you frame in the causes of the civil war. Its not shocking that many conservative educational boards in the south seek to avoid even a fairly tame reading of such history and instead try to block or reframe it entire. There is post civil war history of racism and repression that gets skipped over in even good history textbooks due to lack of time. How do you tell history is a complex subject. Even more recently how much do housing practices and loan denials matter in the broad scheme of history. Not a ton, but should we know that it happened. A little at least; a few sentence paragraph would certainly not be too much. But that would be CRT, so how dare we include. Even though CRT is a grad level legal theory that in general is actually really interesting and can be applied to non racial situations as well. In any case its important to take a broader view and not be blind in any case.

I wish Turmps lies would harm him far more. Also, just because things didn't end badly, doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant against as it could have and may still lead to much worse. You are also trying to do the classic logical fallacy of equality. IE these are the same and that is if we assume the 2nd is a lie. I've already done extensive argument against those lies being equal to much of anything. However, masks and lockdowns work to reduce death. Not 0, but reduce. In pure human capital terms (ignoring any moral equation) while a lot of the deaths were older people, a lot weren't. How do you value years worth of human capital vs short term economic pain? You can take a look at history where even mild plagues have gone through populations, economic prosperity was not the common outcome. Was there a better way to manage it? Almost certainly. If mask wearing hadn't become a political issue could we have gotten out of lockdowns sooner and experienced less short term and long term economic issues. Sure.

[greenline]

A nuanced view of slavery would look at quotes from the founders (who predicted the Civil War, among other things), and include how Andrew Jackson nearly saw a revolt in his term due to tariffs. It would look at the reasons for why the government was set up as a republic with limited democratic elements and the philosophical reasons for supporting agrarian or urban development. Doing this level of cursory examination of topics is well beyond most current grad students who study CRT or similar topics, who seem to only be capable of repeating idiotic slogans and then demanding such things as a nationwide "Department of Antiracism". In a world where there are many college graduates who genuinely believe in phrases like "the rules-based international order", the only thing that they are qualified to teach is sanitized history.

I wish Turmps lies would harm him far more. Also, just because things didn't end badly, doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant against as it could have and may still lead to much worse. You are also trying to do the classic logical fallacy of equality. IE these are the same and that is if we assume the 2nd is a lie.

There is no equality I am searching for in just how untrue a lie may be. The harm a lie causes, and to who, seems far more important in how it should be judged. Here, the best you can say about Trump's lie is that you wish he was more harmed for saying it, because you dislike him and his political positions. The effects of the lockdowns harmed a great many more people, regardless of whether their intent was to reduce death. Well meaning lies, like the lie that masks could significantly reduce the spread of the disease, or that lockdowns that could stop the spread of the disease were practical, caused a great deal of harm.

That's just one section of well meaning lies. The far reaching effects of criminal justice reform in recent years have been a large uptick in murder and other violent crime. The people pushing this are typically trying to make things better, by spreading lies that the criminals being released were only charged with minor drug offenses and that all released felons need is a chance to get back on their feet and that they will not bother anyone else unduly. No one spreading such lies will be punished either, and they have killed far more Americans than Trump ever will.

[Mjmd]

Oh in general I think people need to look at the flawed nature of our founding. No argument. But you are right its a very complicated study. I will again say "don't take the part as a whole". I've not seen anyone campaigning or passing laws on your example. Where I've seen Republican state government campaigning and sanitizing history under the banner of preventing CRT. Again, just looking at the equality fallacy I don't see the comparison you are trying to make.

I merely disliked Trump before the 2020 election for his politics. I now hate the man for trying to overturn an election. For undermining our intuitions for years to come. For forcing out Republicans who did the right thing, spoke up, or heck just didn't do enough. Again, there is a reason there is a difference in law between murder and attempted murder, but that doesn't mean attempted murder isn't bad.

If you want some Covid argument reading go back 100 pages or so. T-Hawk and I had some lovely times. A) Government has the authority and constitution law behind it for things like quarantines for public health measures. While these do cause harm it is less than death. I will note we had an conversation about what is the "acceptable level of death" and its complicated, but suffice it to say its not millions. B) Its not a lie that masks work. They don't work as well at preventing catching as preventing spreading, which is maybe what you are referring to, but they do work to heavily reduce.

Criminal justice is complicated. Crime is complicated. Reforming systems is complicated; you can fail even if your intentions are good. I'm sure there were people released that shouldn't have been. I'm sure there were a lot of people with only minor drug charges. I am 100% positive it is more nuanced than what you have been told and believe and trying to figure out exactly which reforms you are talking about and then starting to look up crime statistics.