American Politics Discussion Thread

[superdeath]

"You've talked about Trump a lot but there hasn't been anything about the other interesting person. What do you think of Sanders? Should he have been president instead of Biden?"

Instead of Biden? 100%.

Would he have been able to do any better than any other president we have had in the past X years? Probably not. Would have been nice to see something new for once though. (it was briefly nice to see something new when Trump took office, but i wasnt a big fan of the president acting the way he did via twitter/his general attitude) Anything is better than the same old life-long politicians who arent going to change their beliefs with the changing times, or only stay on certain party lines. An independent president is what i feel we NEED as a country. Well, that and an actual Independent party available as more than just a joke. Something akin to Designated Survivor happening would sadly be the most ideal scenario in my eyes as it would remove alot of the old money/corrupt politicians and someone that got hired/elected without a democrat/republican party alignment gets into office.

[Mjmd]

I don't know if Sanders would have been better than Biden, but he had a lot less chance of actually winning, which is the more important thing. Even if you don't disagree with his politics I think its pretty easy to see he has more energy and charisma than Biden though.

Biden came in to a constitutional crisis, a health crisis, and the worst international relations / situation in a long time. We needed a Lincoln / FDR figure. Biden is not that, but to be fair I'm not sure the Democrats had a better candidate. Biden is the type of president who would be "fine" in normal circumstances and we would forget about in 12 years.

I've been trying to think what more could have been done and I think Bidens mistake was not being aggressive enough early. I think he was trying to be a calming presence and to be fair he had a lot to do. I think an area he could have been more aggressive on though was vaccine misinformation. Direct call outs of "killing fellow americans" and "unpatrioic idiotism" should have been coming fast and direct to any politician or major news media source spreading vaccine misinformation right away. If you aren't going to directly attack the straw man "freedom" argument, you can at least take a hammer to vaccine misinformation. They have tried and put out a lot of information and they have done some call outs, but I would have liked to see some VERY aggressive call outs. It sadly is probably just too late for that though.

[superdeath]

It sadly is probably just too late for that though.

Right, if he were to start doing it now i feel it would be another Republican president next as the country swings full-stop the other direction.

[superdeath]

"I was interested to hear about Sanders though and in general rather than pandemic. I though he was a polarising figure like Trump but it seems he's been forgotten since both of you drifted in other directions quickly? Why do you think he would have lost to Trump if Biden won? His main agenda was health care right, and at a time when health was the top issue?"

He is branded as "radical" in what he talks about, and in general leaning towards alot more socialism. So, more moderate Republicans would vote Trump. Moderate/leaning Democrats would likely either not vote or vote Trump.

I havent voted for a couple elections now, and Sanders was probably the only one i can recall that i personally would have voted for. Just for the change/fun.

[Mjmd]

Democrats lost every branch of government after passing a version of "Romney care". The health care lobby is incredible strong. They want to keep their monopolies. Plus the older populace sees anything "socialist" in a completely different light than some in the younger generations do. Its a good lesson to remember for people who say "well if they passed such and such such they would win reelection easily".

So SD is right he is branded as "radical / crazy" and a lot of people voted for Biden because he wasn't Trump, which I'm not sure they would have if it had been Sanders.

One thing that frustrates me about Democrats is that they always campaign on issues that have either no shot of passing or even if they pass the Republicans would just weaken and rip apart the next time they were in power. Not saying they can't try to pass things like the BBB plan, but the broader large social initiatives are just ways to insure they lose power. You can argue having someone like Sanders on the ticket is good politically as long as he doesn't get the nomination. There is energy there and maybe you can slowly move national opinion, but your prime candidate should probably be more centrist.

[T-hawk]

I'm going to take the last one first, because I thought you weren't a kool aid drinker eh??? 1) You can't seriously discount all news you don't like right? I mean a lot of news exaggerates the problem, but to completely ignore the wealth / quantity of these stories is just ignorance.

CNN will mention like one or two busy hospitals per day. There are roughly 7000 hospitals in the US. If there were a systematic problem, the media would be telling you that, giving numbers aggregated over all of that or at least some regional subset. Since they aren't doing so, simple logic concludes that it's not happening.

2) I thought we had agreed some pages back that this was a profession it made a lot of sense to have vaccinated. I believe the 3 obvious fields were military, healthcare, and elder care.

I said that only for military - that's the one case where you did voluntarily cede your bodily autonomy. Health/elder care is the same as any other employer.

That said, I somewhat support the idea of health/elder care employers mandating vaccination - because I think I support the idea of any employers being able to do that. Employers can choose whom they employ - that's freedom of association, and that's a more fundamental right than someone's right to be employed. On a practical sense, let the free market sort this out - let people choose whether to be employed by such employers and let employers choose whether to enact such policies.

That said, the other side (that government should ban employer mandates) has a significant argument too. Government bans discrimination in employment all the time, for what we perceive to be good societal results. And on a practical level, I stand to gain nothing from any such mandates (I'm at zero risk from Covid and don't care if anyone else is vaccinated) and so banning them can only help me personally.

Thats right T-Hawk people are being forced to treat people in a medical capacity that they didn't even hire on for because of the unvaccinated.

So what? Every employer adjusts job duties and moves people around when they need to. It's not "forced", if you don't like it, you can choose to find other employment.

So whats more intrusive, a piece of cloth and a little shot or death for a lot of people who didn't choose that

False choice. Masks and vaccines don't stop shit, they do nothing more than temporarily lower the risks. People who are in poor enough condition to die even after being vaccinated are going to die anyway.

Again, in a perfect non political world this wouldn't be as much of a problem. Could we get an extra 20% of the populace vaccinated if it wasn't political?

You want to literally take away people's bodily rights and you think that's not political? That's the most fundamental thing a person could possibly defend against state power! How does your side not get this?

To address A) I'll just quote myself

No, seriously, I don't know what you meant by this sentence:

"A) you haven't acknowledged that Covid because political PRE freedom rhetoric and evolved from there."

That doesn't parse as a sentence, there are some words missing, if you want me to make sense of that, you'll have to clarify.

I agree with the statement US government has too much power and it has ever expanded and probably will continue to do so. In this case though, US gov has 100% had the power to quarantine from the get go and masks and vaccines are WAY less intrusive to liberty than quarantine.

You know what's even less intrusive to liberty? Not doing any of any of that, full stop.

[T-hawk]

I laughed so much at this in the Codenames game that I have to comment here just for my own amusement:

Deception (4)

There's also a pandemic raging. On that basis:

Point to DISEASE

DISEASE is gray

If the team had read Bob in this thread, they'd know that he eats up all the media disease propaganda and wouldn't associate that with deception at all.

[Jowy]

Republicans being critical of mainstream media would be fine if they didn't substitute that by unconditionally trusting every grifter and facebook poster. Republicans don't really care about the news being truthful, they care about the news siding with their worldview, and that's the real reason why they move on to extreme partisan sources.

[superdeath]

Republicans being critical of mainstream media would be fine if they didn't substitute that by unconditionally trusting every grifter and facebook poster. Republicans don't really care about the news being truthful, they care about the news siding with their worldview, and that's the real reason why they move on to extreme partisan sources.

Half agree, id say its more of everyone wanting to be right and not move from their standpoint no matter the evidence. So, they stick with whatever source is what they grew up with/were taught/learned from others and just roll with it as though its the only way things can work.

[T-hawk]

Direct call outs of "killing fellow americans" and "unpatrioic idiotism" should have been coming fast and direct to any politician or major news media source spreading vaccine misinformation right away.

If you understand anything about human psychology, you would know that this isn't going to work. Humans don't respond to threats and aggression like that. They double down with more of an instinct to fight back.

This is what Trump got right, in a sense of populism and persuasion. He never ever insulted or tried to fight the voters, the public. He'll fight other politicians all day of course, but to the public he always projected a message of "join me" rather than "fight me". That's what worked in 2016 and how he got elected then. Hillary made the opposite mistake, with the "deplorables" and "put the coal miners out of work" comments that antagonized and drove away the swing voters.

More generally, the Democrats haven't figured this out. Their entire party platform is not to convince but to coerce people to their policies, trying to forcibly implement socialism, wokeism, climateism, covidism. People in general and American patriots in particular do not respond to that. If your plan requires everybody to comply, it's a bad plan, because they won't.