American Politics Discussion Thread

[Mjmd]

Its one of the obvious consequences of Trump / others during 2020 not receiving push back from voters. I mean yes random people crying "fraud" with no proof is bad; don't get me wrong. Anyone doing so should never get another vote again. The danger of course is when people who already have power do so, and then use their power to pressure action based on the "fraud".

My vague probably unfounded hope is it galvanizes more people from all over the political spectrum to realize what a big issue this is.

[Brian Shanahan]

I mean, id like to see a massive reduction in military spending and have that money go towards healthcare/education..

So would the Chinese.

I'd like to see taxes go up and that money go towards healthcare and education and deficit reduction.

Darrell

Quite a significant chunk of the USs military spending is pure wastage. I would say if proper auditing was imposed to stop pork barrel, overspend, misspend and corruption the budget would be halve and not lose anything other than projects that shouldn't have been greenlit. And if stuff like top heavy rank systems were looked at too more money would be saved.

Oh and if Trump isn't a racist then why is he the leader of an openly racist party and why did he spend so much time* after being installed as president working to make that party's more racist policies worse? By their acts you shall judge them.

*Relatively speaking, given Trump's work output ran to about an hour a month.

[Brian Shanahan]

Its one of the obvious consequences of Trump / others during 2020 not receiving push back from voters. I mean yes random people crying "fraud" with no proof is bad; don't get me wrong. Anyone doing so should never get another vote again. The danger of course is when people who already have power do so, and then use their power to pressure action based on the "fraud".

My vague probably unfounded hope is it galvanizes more people from all over the political spectrum to realize what a big issue this is.

Gore's team in 2000 brought their weakest case to the Supreme Court in 2000, the one they should have known would lead to a loss. If they' d gone with the 80,000 and more US citizens illegally disenfranchised in Florida, at the very least a re-run would have had to be called. And it was well documented even before polling day that tens of thousands of citizens had been purged from the polling registers illegally. And by not doing that it emboldened the party of treason to take these tactics nationwide to an extent that by 2016 Hilary Clinton started the election at -10,000,000 votes.

[T-hawk]

Oh and if Trump isn't a racist then why is he the leader of an openly racist party and why did he spend so much time* after being installed as president working to make that party's more racist policies worse? By their acts you shall judge them.

Where do you get this? Can you name a single policy or action that Trump or his administration or his party ever enacted that involves race in any way?

Immigrant is not a race. Nationality is not a race. Even nationality that correlates with religion is not a race.

There may exist racists that side with the party, but it's hallucinating to think that somehow makes the party racist.

[Mjmd]

Do you rely on mainly white male voters? Do you garner a majority of votes in southern states? Do you think that policies discriminating against multiple non white demographics are perfectly fine?

You may be the party of racists.

Edit: the confederate and nazi flags at rallys are kind of a dead giveaway too....

[Mjmd]

I have to admit racism isn't as blatantly advertised. You have to try a very minimal amount by looking at someone saying people coming up through the southern border are all shit while saying you want immigrants from Norway....

You could also easily draw historic racist anti immigrant parallels from any of the prior groups Americans have happily hated, then those who were hated forget they were hated, and they then hate anew!!!!

[Amicalola]

I went to find some articles to post here in response to T-Hawk's ridiculous comment before realising I was falling back into the 'Wasting My Time On T-Hawk' trap. He is not going to be convinced by anything, no matter how accurate, damning, or well-reported it is. He is here only to parrot his own worldview, by which I mean regurgitate talking points from Ben Shapiro, or whatever new grifter he's found since then. I only post this here to remind Mjmd (and some of the other more earnest posters) of this trap's existence.

I remind you also that this is a man for whom liberty is supposedly the greatest political issue, but for whom the criminalisation of abortion is a minor quibble.

[Mjmd]

I will try to just stick to worrying about the overthrow of our democracy. That I will never back down from however.

[T-hawk]

Actually I mostly gave up on following Shapiro. He's just an outrage machine, same as everything from the left, and isn't really productive for anything.

I'm libertarian, not exactly conservative or Republican. I end up siding with them because their areas of overlap are the ones that affect me personally (taxes, medical prejudice, business overregulation, states vs federalism) while the libertarian-Democrat areas of overlap (drugs, abortion, LGBT, immigration) don't.

I'm also not exactly a Trumpist. I actually hope he doesn't run in 2024 to clear the way for DeSantis or maybe Ted Cruz; either would be similarly effective enough on policy with a lot less circus and baggage.

You have to try a very minimal amount by looking at someone saying people coming up through the southern border are all shit while saying you want immigrants from Norway....

Southern is not a race. Norway is not a race. It's becoming increasingly hilarious watching you struggle to attach the racist label to all these things that aren't a race.

I will try to just stick to worrying about the overthrow of our democracy. That I will never back down from however.

And I will continue to remind you that the overthrow was Democrats cheating the rules to favor their side.

Can you answer this question? If your side really thought that Trump was Literally Evil Racist Genocidal Hitler or whatever, wouldn't you do everything you could to cheat him out of votes?

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Oh and if Trump isn't a racist then why is he the leader of an openly racist party and why did he spend so much time* after being installed as president working to make that party's more racist policies worse?  By their acts you shall judge them.

Where do you get this?  Can you name a single policy or action that Trump or his administration or his party ever enacted that involves race in any way?

Immigrant is not a race.  Nationality is not a race.  Even nationality that correlates with religion is not a race.

There may exist racists that side with the party, but it's hallucinating to think that somehow makes the party racist.

Oh come on, don't pretend like you don't know exactly what Trump is saying when he's talking about "bad hombres" south of the border, not to mention any of his other dogwhistles. His immigration policies were enacted in a way that purposefully targeted Latinos. Without a smidgen of a doubt, you would be ranting about how Literacy Tests or Poll Taxes aren't racially motivated, had you lived back in the 50's.

For my own sanity, I'll pretend your statements are but an attempt at trolling your conversation partner. Speaking of whom...


Come on MJMD.

Do you rely on mainly white male voters? Do you garner a majority of votes in southern states?

Ok, and the implications of you saying this are not much better? Why /ascribe inherent qualities to people who live somewhere or are of a certain color of skin/gender? This is lazy, dangerous reasoning that totally derails your argumentation. Starting from nothing, we know there's many factors that affect how people vote. Unless you conduct the multiple regression and determine the unique affect race has on voting, this is an irrelevant point. And I suspect when you do run those statistics, you will find it as or less significant than any one of income, parental voting patterns, religion, etc. But this preface to your argument rightfully makes people ignore whatever you're attempting to articulate.

And just to add some more food for thought for you -- Democrats garnered significant amounts of poor, white, southern voters until ~2000, when they lost West Virginia. 30 years after civil rights, they were still garnering significant support from this part of the population. The tendency isn't that "muh racist southerners saw republicans racist and liked that more", the tendency is dominated by the shift of rural voters in ALL locations away from the democrats, and by the fact that income has eroded as the defining line between the two parties (with this peaking in 2016).

You may be the party of racists.

Some statistics most will find surprising.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/0...ight-ideas

When polled with negative/non-traditional question phrasing, you'll find plenty of younger dems who easily fall for racialized dogwhistles. And we don't have to rewind that far back to remember HRC talking about "superpredators". So MJMD, you should be more careful when making blanket claims. Dems might not be the ones that are sharing a table with a couple of neo-Nazis at CPAC, but that doesn't absolve them of their own problems.