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@IwantRooseveltagain
Ok, so you don’t mind a candidate who demonstrated a poor work ethic as long as they are from your tribe.
She arguably wouldn't have a poor work ethic were she a Republican. My party doesn't reward a candidate for their race or sex, so if Harris became Senator Harris in the first place, the most likely reason would be her qualifications. Either she wouldn't have become Senator in the first place or she would've earned that seat and continued to prove herself afterward.
I know Trump did the whole "I'm a charismatic firebrand politician, ignore my lack of any political accomplishments during my 100% private sector life and vote for me" shtick, but the Senate is different. That seldom works in the Senate.
You obviously don’t know how politics works. Of course people run for President to simply enhance their reputation and to develop national recognition.
Sure. I don't dispute that many people do this. But if you're ignoring your job for the sake of running for President to build your name brand, then that's not good for the country. Senator Harris could've worked diligently those 6 years, finished out her term in Jan. 2023, and then ran in 2024 after she had some actual accomplishments to boast of.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
No, I think you are biased against a black woman. Because Trump had a poor work ethic yet you support him.
If Kamala Harris was a conservative Republican and the GOP nominee, I'd be more than happy to vote for her. Her race and sex have nothing to do with it.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Is that how you would characterize every VP choice by every President in history?
I mean, unless her primary goal in running for President was to make Biden pick her as his running mate (an outcome she could not have reasonably anticipated), she was fighting an obviously uphill battle, with defeat the most likely outcome. She knew this, but she abandoned her Senate work to go do it anyway.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Ok so conversely, you forfeit the right to criticize Harris on this if you’re casting your vote for Trump.
So you admit that Trump and Harris are basically equivalent, and she has no special qualifications to hold over his head?
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@IwantRooseveltagain
His bill socialized loses for people who foolishly built in a flood zone.
You mean people who live in states situated next to the Gulf of Mexico? It's "foolish" to live your everyday life in the place where you were born and raised?
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Did Trump watch TV and play golf more than any other President? Because you are very concerned about work ethic.
He did. But if you're casting your vote for Harris then you forfeit the right to use this criticism.
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Obviously that is a poor opinion considering she ended up being Vice President and she is now officially the Democratic nominee for 2024.
Sure, because Biden was nice enough to make her his running mate. Her presidential bid itself was a disaster, which is my point. She never stood a chance against a big fish like Joe Biden. She knew he was in the running but she ditched her job and ran off to play presidential candidate instead.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
which of Kennedy’s bill are you most impressed with? What did it accomplish?
I suppose there's his 2018 and 2019 bills which extended NFIP, providing security to families in flood-prone states.
There's the 5G SALE Act (S. 2787, 118th Congress), which "required the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to release previously auctioned spectrum to expand 5G broadband access to rural communities...it temporarily granted the FCC auction authority it needed to complete spectrum transfers, which will allow broadband services to provide greater 5G network coverage to Americans in rural areas. In 2022, the FCC auctioned off roughly 8,000 licenses to grant companies access to America’s broadband spectrum. These licenses are the only way companies can legally use the radio waves that deliver 5G to customers. These wavelengths are therefore highly valuable.During the period between when companies paid for their licenses and when the FCC should have parceled the licenses out, Congress failed to reauthorize the FCC’s ability to auction off licenses altogether. The FCC left each company that bought spectrum in that auction waiting to receive its transfer. Despite payments being complete, the FCC said it no longer had the authority to grant those licenses."
I guess I'm not "proud" of (emotional about) this legislation, but the first two did a lot of good while the third was technically impressive. And then there were 13 other bills.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
So she should vote more before the campaign to compensate. I see. Does she control when and how many votes come up in the Senate?
She had three years to do her job before throwing her hat in the ring. And frankly she shouldn't have run at all.
My state Senator, John N. Kennedy, who you badmouthed the other day, entered Congress at the same time Senator Harris did. To date he's gotten 16 bills passed, or an average of 2 per year since the day he took office (and 2024 isn't over yet, so it may yet rise a little higher). Whether objectively a good or bad number, that's more than double Senator Harris's figure, and he's popular among rank and file Republicans too, but he wasn't so conceited as to run for President while he was still wet behind the ears.
Who did Senator Harris think she was? If she was unproductive because of a foolhardy Presidential campaign after 3 years on the job, doesn't she deserve to take the rap for that?
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@Sidewalker
MAGA hates that a black woman
Projecting much?
He'll be in prison squealing like a pig in 2025.
Ah yes, because Russian-style politically motivated prosecutions are what a healthy democracy looks like.
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@Sidewalker
now he's incoherently rambling about Hannibal Lecter
You're referencing what he said in his RNC speech? I actually watched it, and he was making a point about immigration: that other countries, in dumping their undesirables here (an allegation he's been making from the start), are also sending us their criminally insane. So he brought up Hannibal Lecter, and made the joke "He'd love to have you for dinner". Which would've been funny were it not a paraphrase of a quote from the original movie.
He spoke for like an hour and a half and did a solid job by Trump standards. That was two weeks ago, so there's no valid reason to think he's currently in the throes of dementia.
Kamala Harris will dropkick the blathering old fool off the stage.
We shall see. There's no point gloating until it happens for real.
MAGA is so racist and misogynistic
So racist that pre-Covid black unemployment was at a record low. So misogynistic that Trump beat the crap out of ISIS and helped the Iraqi government free the thousands of women it was holding as sex slaves.
We're putting a prosecutor in the white house
A prosecutor in a state that doesn't prosecute crime, which isn't much of a brag.
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Alright, it seems I was partially wrong. The facts stated above are true, but she did introduce a butt ton of bills which were never passed. I don't know if her office actually drafted most of those itself or if they just copied the language of bills originating in the House (as even Rep. Taylor Greene has been known to do for Senate legislation). But I'll concede that introducing bills that never pass is something. Still not an impressive record by any means, but less bad than I made it sound.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Becoming President is a crapshoot goal if there ever was one. Your average candidate will not succeed, especially someone who hasn't finished their first Senate term. If they want to basically take a year off to run, then they ought to make up for it by being productive in the years preceding. Senator Harris did not.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
So instead of Trump, you want Trump?
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@ebuc
From Jan 2017 to Jan 2021, Harris missed 398 of 1,320 roll call votes, which is 30.2%. This is much worse than the median of 2.4% among the lifetime records of senators serving in Jan 2021. The chart below reports missed votes over time.
Harris was the primary sponsor of 3 bills that were enacted:
S. 129 (116th Congress): St. Francis Dam Disaster National Memorial Act
S. 3033 (115th Congres): COUNT Victims Act
S. 729 (115th Congress): John Muir National Historic Site Expansion Act
We are talking somebody who was absent or at least tardy on the job 30 percent of the time, and who in 4 years got a total of 3 bills passed. Maybe she is intelligent, but she's definitely not motivated.
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@FLRW
I don't imagine it'll be any different than in June.
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@Sidewalker
he'd be the senile one in rapid cognitive decline that says things like the continental army won the revolutionary war by taking over the airports
You mean that thing he said like 5 years ago and is still able to debate as well as he did then? Yeah no, that's not how dementia works.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
That word lost all credibility and weight a decade ago, by virtue of being overused to death as a descriptor for everything under the sun that Democrats happen to not like (e.g. the nuclear family). Try again.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Only in your imagination pal.
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@Greyparrot
The Trump campaign pretty much shot the sails out from under Kamala by stopping the 24/7 racial pandering
Trump wasn't a panderer in the first place. He did, however, dare to lay a finger on one of their sacred cows, which was the reverence they assigned to the fact of VP Harris's race and sex. It was worth doing, but unfortunately most people have been conditioned to side with the media on this and against Trump. It's going to hurt him more than it helps.
forcing MSM to actually address the lack of policy gravitas associated with Kamala
That doesn't matter when they can just scrub the internet of evidence of her shortcomings.
For example, in March of 2021 Biden gave the following speech:
He tasked VP Harris with "lead(ing) our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border..And so, this increase has been consequential, but the Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders. We’re already talking with Mexico about that; she’s already done that. We’re going to be dealing with a full team now that we have to be able to deal with the problem here at home, but also to deal with it now in terms of in country. And I can think of nobody who — who is better qualified to do this than a former — this is a woman who ran the second-largest attorney general’s office in America — after the U.S. — after the United States Attorney General — in the state of California, and has done a great deal upholding human rights, but also fighting organized crime in the process. So it’s not her full responsibility and job, but she’s leading the effort because I think the best thing to do is to put someone who, when he or she speaks, they don’t have to wonder about is that where the President is. When she speaks, she speaks for me. Doesn’t have to check with me. She knows what she’s doing, and I hope we can move this along."
While it would be an exaggeration to say she was placed in charge of the entire border, she was given a fairly significant responsibility pertaining to it. A month afterward, Axios (a left-leaning publication) thought it reasonable to describe this appointment as making her Biden's "border czar", though the term is unofficial and subjective.
Recently Axios retracted this article and said it was a case of faulty reporting. But the mainstream media is making it sound like only Republicans were ever calling VP Harris the border czar, and doesn't want the public to know she was in fact given an appointment prominent enough for one of their own outlets to ascribe the role to her.
I managed to find this, so it wasn't truly scrubbed, but I put in more effort here than the average voter would. Most just take CNN's word for it without doing their own research.
To list another example, in 2020 govtrack gave then-Senator Harris a "report card" scoring her as the most liberal US Senator for 2019. Of 471 bills that she cosponsored, only 15% were introduced by a non-Democrat. Only 8 of her 54 bills and resolutions got a cosponsor from the other party.
All this points to her being heavily partisan and not a moderate who could unite both sides of the aisle. But since this is an inconvenient truth, just a few days ago govtrack did in fact purge the article from their servers.
Of course, they gave their excuses as to why this supposedly needed to be done, but bottom line was they didn't want evil right wingers using those pesky facts to their advantage.
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@Greyparrot
The only way to hamstring it is for their "devil" to reign. Just like Obergefell broke the back of the Christian Right. If you're an extremist who believes a world governed by politicians to the right of McCain is automatically like hell, and if said politicians do govern for prolonged periods of time and there's nothing you can do about it, then the only escape will be to find something else to believe in. And many of those who aren't too far gone will do exactly this.
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So far as I can tell, these are naturally high-testosterone "cis" (real) women. They exist. Which, granted, kind of undermines the justification for separate men's and women's sports, but there's no easy answer here. It's not like they've done anything wrong, and I doubt they're strong enough to compete with the absolute most jacked men the Olympics has to offer.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
What are you talking about? He called her a ding dong. That's like a kindergarten level insult, not some bigoted slur. Way to strawman though.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
It cracks me up how lefties, especially female lefties, flipped out and lost their cool over a gender neutral putdown roughly equivalent to doofus.
There are zero limits to what can be said about a male politician. They can find themselves randomly accused of rape at the drop of a hat. Comedians are allowed to joke on TV about beheading them. Crowds at sporting events can chant "Fuck (insert name of male politician)". But heaven forbid an insult that elementary schoolers call each other should be applied to a female politician!
Sheesh. How can she run a country when she can't be even lightly criticized without the media crying racism or sexism? Is she really that frail and in need of protecting from the political fray she willingly leapt into?
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@Greyparrot
At least in that case the American being held prisoner did something to end up there. It was an actual prisoner swap as opposed to Russia just taking hostages like al-Qaeda or ISIS.
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Yes, I'd like to congratulate Biden on his amazing leadership skills. This deal saw the release of Roman Seleznev, a Russian hacker who stole an estimated $169 million. I'm sure now that this man has been freed, he won't go on to drain the life savings of thousands of other American citizens. I'm sure he'll be satisfied with those he has victimized already.
Congrats to Biden on the release of several Russian spies, and Russian saboteurs who sought to subvert foreign elections. The West convicted these criminals of real crimes, so Russia retaliated and basically abducted several Westerners on phony charges. Biden gave in and agreed to free the criminals. I'm sure this makes the US look very strong, and I'm sure this won't embolden Putin to try this again.
Congrats to Biden on making America less safe just to win some good optics for Democrats ahead of the upcoming election.
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@TheUnderdog
So would a fetus, if you gave them a little bit of time to develop and then decide for themselves. Yet you want legal abortion on demand.
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Wipe out all the inhabitants of New York City instantaneously with a nuclear bomb and you'll be "reducing their unwanted pain". If this sounds nonsensical, that's because it is. There's more to politics than reducing pain.
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Iran was harboring the leader of the group that's making war on Israel. What did they expect was going to happen? The US invaded Afghanistan because they refused to extradite OBL, and 10/7 killed proportionately more Israelis than 9/11 did Americans.
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@Best.Korea
The kind of acceptance you're talking about is cheaply rendered, but not in the best interests of people.
Most are not driven just by their own temperament to be a better version of themselves. They require a push forward, and a sense of structure, or else they'll revert to baser modes of living. This isn't good for society, but it's also not good for the individuals in question. An ennobled soul will, in the long term, be a happier one than that of a person who spends his whole life one measly step above an animal.
For the person who is not there and has not experienced it, this fact can be understood on an intellectual level but their bodies will chafe and rage against discipline and self-denial. Hence, it'll always be easy to win an election offering "acceptance".
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Republicans cut taxes, Democrats raise spending. Both are irresponsible while the other party still exists.
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@Best.Korea
Between Q1 2021 and Q1 2024, the national debt rose by almost $6.5 trillion. And given that Q2 2024 has now passed, today it stands somewhere higher than that, though I haven't found figures for it yet. This is basically without Covid, given that deficit spending had largely tapered off by January 2021.
At the height of the pandemic Congress bipartisanly authorized a $3 trillion increase overnight, which Trump signed off on. Without Covid, the deficit for 2020 would've been a lot lower.
In fact, between Q4 2019 and Q1 2020, a period of 3 months, a "mere" $22 billion in new debt was added. Were this to hold, the whole year 2020 might've seen less than $90 billion in added debt, which by modern standards would've been simply incredible, and the Trump Administration would've seen a cumulative $3.5 trillion added in 4 years, which even in nominal (unadjusted for inflation) money would've been a lower average than Obama's. Even assuming Q1 2020 was a fluke and spending would've returned to normal in subsequent quarters, the year would've seen less than $2 trillion in new debt, or a cumulative administration total of less than $5.5 trillion. Still not great, but about 33% lower than it was with Covid.
But for the sake of argument let's say: whatever.
In reality, the Trump administration saw about $8.3 trillion in new debt added for whatever cause. There is still a good reason to think Biden's handling of the national debt has been worse. And that is this:
About a month ago, it was announced by CBO that annual interest payments on the national debt have increased by $540 billion, or an astonishing 153 percent, since President Biden took office.
Given that the debt has not literally doubled in that same period, I am at a loss for words. Anyone who thinks Biden deserves any score better than an F on this issue is delusional.
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@Moozer325
I'm mad about Trump abusing his power and appointing 3 justices
The thing is, there's nothing in the Constitution limiting how many Supreme Court justices a single president may confirm. For instance, a total of 11 were chosen by George Washington. If there's a vacancy then the President is allowed to nominate a new justice. If a majority of the Senate goes along with it, then that justice rises to the Court.
It's true that Trump appointed an abnormally high number of justices by recent standards. Reagan was the last to have more than 2, and he had two terms. But that's a matter of coincidence. There's only 9 people on the court, and average life expectancy for Americans is in the mid-70s (your average rich and well-educated person will enjoy a longer life still). So normally there's not that many instances where one dies or retires. But Trump got lucky.
Think what you want about the Senate refusing to confirm Merrick Garland (Obama's pick to replace the right-leaning Scalia) and waiting until Trump became President to let him pick someone else. It was within their legal purview to do so, and I have little doubt that Trump's picks would've been blocked by Dems had they enjoyed a Senate majority during his term.
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@Moozer325
I know I'm unlikely to convince you, but I'd like for you to consider the timing of all this.
From 1973 to 2022, Democrats and left media respected the Supreme Court. After they ruled, Dems were quick to tell us that that ruling was "the law of the land" and that the decision had to be taken as authoritative and correct. There were no accusations flying of the SCOTUS being a body rife with corruption.
This period, "coincidentally", was one where the Supreme Court was handing Democrats everything they wanted on a silver platter. It gave them Roe v. Wade.
Casey v. Planned Parenthood.
Lawrence v. Texas.
Obergefell v. Hodges.
Then, in 2022, after Republicans had managed to flip a net seat or two on the bench, the previously left-leaning Court now pivoted and returned the issue of abortion to the states without outlawing it nationwide. And then, one year later, after the 2022 midterms had given Dems a slim Senate majority, and while a Democrat president was in the White House, Dems changed their 50-year tune overnight.
Now their rallying cry was "Corruption! corRUPTiON!!!11!1! AWMAWGAHD DAH COURT IS CORRUPT FRUM TOP TO BOTTOM! We must have accountability, which per our definition means axing Thomas, Alito, and Roberts (those three specifically and none of the left-leaning justices) and replacing them with people who, just coincidentally, will favor our ideology and rule more akin to how we want them to rule! But listen guys, we definitely have no ulterior motive, you must believe us for the sake of OUR DUHMOCRACY!"
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There's a world of difference between changing the laws so these crimes carry the death penalty and killing everyone convicted of such in the past when a different penalty applied, and including those who've already served their sentences and are free.
You're talking about the latter, which is terrifying. Because if you give the state the power to extrajudicially target US citizens because some voting majority hates them, then the same could be done to any unpopular group. Any genocide would be legal if done under the guise of democracy. This society would be virtually indistinguishable from Hell.
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A humanitarian disaster for sure, but if there was no way for Hamas to wage this war on Israel without the civilians under its care being caught in the crossfire (given the extreme density of Gaza), then they just shouldn't have started it. Plain and simple.
Israel has an unconditional right to retaliate against the group that killed 1,200 of its people in cold blood, and more importantly to neutralize them so they can never do it again. That right doesn't magically disappear because they're hiding amid a sea of civilians.
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@HistoryBuff
He didn't say I go up to them and ask them if I can touch them, and once they say yes I touch them. That would be consensually touching.
Consent can be implied through things like body language and the presence of flirtatious overtones/undertones in speech. Otherwise, every husband and wife would have raped each other at some point, perhaps both at the same time, because they didn't expressly ask permission to initiate intercourse before banging.
In this hypothetical, Trump is claiming two things:
(1). He is able to read body/verbal language in these contexts; and
(2). He's attractive enough that he often gets these cues from women, or at least did back around 2005 when he was still under 60.
He said "I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,”
Wait is pretty straightforward. Usually one goes out with a woman, or at least spends some time with her, before getting sexual. Trump was claiming to skip this step, both for lack of interest in doing it and because he was getting signals that it was okay to go ahead.
And since he is a star he gets away with it.
I believe his words were that "they let me do it". This doesn't imply that he blackmailed or bribed unwilling victims into keeping silent, but that they were happy to have this celebrity touch them.
If Trump genuinely believed this to be true, then he wouldn't after the first time that he had to blackmail/bribe them, suggesting this never came up. And if Trump was lying, then we can just as well assume this whole scenario never happened in the first place and he was just trying to sound like a hypermasculine alpha in front of another guy.
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It's always a good day when Thett pops in to comment. Hopefully he'll stay a while this time.
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@badger
I read racist shit on here all the time.
What you mentioned were those who "want to lynch black people". That's a far cry from just being opposed to race-based identity politics by minority groups and thinking the black community needs to get its own act together.
Blacks, on their part, don't like race-based identity politics by whites and think whites need to "check their privilege" and challenge their supposed racist worldviews, so both are approaching the other group from some negative, accusative stance without wanting to literally murder them.
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@Savant
Do you believe that the p-zombie thought experiment has any plausibility to it?
If so, then what separates a zombie from a non-zombie is metaphysical, since both have the same bodily equipment that, to our knowledge, enables consciousness, yet one lacks a "true first person perspective" anyway. If you and I are beings who exist on a metaphysical plane, then how is this distinguishable from having a soul?
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@badger
The skin-headed tattooed lunatics that want to lynch black people are counterbalanced by Bernie Sanders. Gotcha.
Do you realize how few of them there actually are, relative to our population of 330,000,000?
And again, historical communists committed genocides of their own, and modern tankies have no problem unironically saying "The kulaks deserved it" or whatnot.
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@badger
Do you think liberals might be more agreeable on issues like the border and crime if they weren't contending with actual legitimate self-proclaimed Nazis on the right? It's a give an inch take a mile kinda thing, right? A political tug of war. If liberals leave any slack at all, they're wiped.
There is no "Nazi problem" on the right. A handful of extremists who get a disproportionate amount of media attention are neo-Nazis, the same way there are highly visible communists/socialists (historical regimes which killed just as many people) among the left.
It's because Democrats are unreasonable on issues like this that people from communities on the receiving end of crime, or people who feel anxious about a rising tide of immigration they know nothing's being done to curb, are being radicalized into the far-right. Dems could've taken the wind out of Republican sails by just enforcing the laws we have on the books from the start.
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@badger
The whole world knows its great
The whole world is filled with countries whose people live far healthier lives than the average American. They are cheap to treat, and nationalizing healthcare wouldn't do much to screw this up. If you want to approach this from a "the evidence shows X" standpoint, then what this would require is a study (or national "case study") that controls for these factors.
Also, something like 40% of Americans are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP (which gives healthcare to children). We are not as far removed policy-wise from Europe as you think. Yet, our healthcare sucks.
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@badger
Do you think if America was an ethnically homogenous country free healthcare and free college would be an easier sell?
No. The notion that "every Republican knows deep down universal healthcare would be great but he'll vote to keep himself from having it just so a random black stranger also doesn't have it" is absurd. That's not how people behave in real life.
There are legitimate reasons to be wary of universal healthcare. If you don't like the quality of healthcare you get at one hospital or clinic, you can attempt to find a better deal elsewhere. But if everything is government-run and you don't like it, then there is no escape. The quality of service should be the same everywhere. You also just have to trust that the state won't start treating healthcare as a rationed good and that it won't exclude you for some arbitrary reason, say, because they don't like your speech or you have a criminal record. Or like in real-life contemporary Canada, where people who need expensive hip replacement surgeries or a not that expensive stairlift are offered euthanasia instead to save a quick buck.
In short, Dems have a lot more trust in the goodwill and competency of the government, today and in the future, than Republicans do. The latter doesn't want to give a monopoly to a single actor on something as important as healthcare. Now, it's possible that low trust in government is a side effect of a low-trust society, which political scientist Robert Putnam largely attributes to racial diversification of previously homogenous communities. But this doesn't equal "blacks would get free healthcare, therefore free healthcare bad".
Same with free college.
From a personal anecdote, I got good grades on the ACT Test (a college entrance exam in the US) and my state government gave me a free ride to attend a college in my local area for 4 years. I picked a major haphazardly and gave no serious thought to what my career prospects would be afterwards. After I graduated, the next 5-6 years of my life weren't great. I have a decent job today, and I guess it could be considered a highly prestigious one if I simply described it without further context as to why it isn't, but in any case I'm not making a ton of money. About $40K a year, before you deduct for health, dental, and a retirement savings account.
In a free market, nobody would've lent to my dumbass 19 year old self unless they were certain I could pay off the loan afterward, meaning they were reasonably sure I'd land a job wherein I could afford to do so. I would've had to grow up and come up with an actual post-graduation plan, or delay college until this point (in hindsight I wish I would've, because I had zero maturity in college and cringe every time I think back on then). Free college would churn out a hundred million more people like me. It'd cost taxpayers a fortune and it'd be a staggering waste.
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A lot of conservative politics are predicated on ideas which, though objectively true, the left has sunk a lot of effort into making the direct communication of taboo. Hence, Republicans often have to walk around them, which can be awkward at times. Below I will break this taboo and name what these ideas are:
1. All racial groups in the United States have a positive in-group bias and a negative out-group bias, not just whites. In principle, anti-white racism is just as bad as anti-minority racism. In substance, anti-white racism is just as much a current threat to the rights of white Americans as anti-minority racism is to the rights of non-white Americans, even if the opposite was true 50+ years ago. In terms of cross-racial violent crimes, whites commit a disproportionately small number relative to their share of the population, and it plausibly might be the case that an outright majority are committed by non-white perpetrators against white victims. The occasional terror attack by a white supremacist against non-whites does not change this. For every one of these, there's a hundred or even a thousand single-victim incidents that don't make national headlines but are just as reprehensible.
2. Efforts to challenge anti-minority racism by whites are almost always undertaken in bad faith, because the anti-white biases of minority groups are not equally challenged, which makes said efforts merely a rhetorical bludgeon against whites. This is also counterproductive because it actively takes scrutiny off minority groups when it comes to their own problematic attitudes, making it less likely that they will change in the future, and it unduly fuels their sense of grievance toward whites, which can and often does translate to increased hostility and transgression.
3. A few of the demands of BLM were reasonable, such as body cams for police and being more proactive in trying officers who kill civilians under circumstances which might plausibly be murder. But the other demands were unreasonable, such as laxening our criminal code and incarcerating fewer people. It is incumbent on criminals not to break the law, and they are not entitled to have the consequences of their own crimes mitigated. If a disproportionately large number of black Americans suffer a worsened quality of life because they committed crimes, that's their problem. If disproportionately few privileged upper class whites are prosecuted for, say, recreational drug use, then the law ought to be enforced more consistently but the mere fact of said disparity does not entitled convicted criminals to get off the hook. The US may or may not laxen its drug laws in the future, whether for better or for worse, but those who knowingly break these laws while they're in effect deserve imprisonment and whatever the enduring consequences afterward. This is especially true for those who not only use but also deal drugs.
4. Too much democracy is a bad thing, because this always translates to a great many poor redistributing (i.e. stealing through "legal" means) from the rich, violating their property rights, or borrowing in the public name, which raises the national debt. It's morally justified to lessen the degree of democracy if there's nothing else that can be done to prevent this outcome, though oligarchy is also bad. Additionally, there's a de facto correlation between poverty and being part of a minority group. The more immigrants from poor countries who enter the US, the more the power of that voting bloc which would violate the property rights of the rich or raise the national debt.
5. That Asian and Jewish Americans are a "model" minority is not a racist or problematic idea. It's what every minority group in the US should've aspired to, but which many have fallen short of being. Had black Americans behaved like their Asian counterparts the last 50 years, the black-white income gap would've shrunk to less than 10% nationwide, assuming blacks didn't eventually surpass whites. Whatever the private prejudices of the capitalist class, they will in the aggregate do business with whomever it shows itself to be profitable. The reason why black Americans haven't escaped poverty is because their ancestors fell into costly behavior traps, which became intergenerational cycles. They chafe at the idea of the model minority because a large class of upper class Chinese-Americans, whose ancestors were once hated and discriminated against by whites, is a constant reminder to them that they've failed to improve their own lot.
6. If black Americans and so on wish to escape poverty, the only way out is to either escape said behavioral traps or adequately compensate for them through some virtue, like a strong entrepreneurial spirit. They vote Democrat in hopes of unmerited, harmful to others, and ultimately counterproductive to themselves shortcuts, and they resent Republicans for blocking this agenda.
7. None of the above is "bigotry". It is the plain truth, albeit a truth which most people have been cowed into silence when it comes to. Minority groups certainly will not take to heart criticisms that nobody save for avowed white supremacists are willing to tell them in the first place; since reconciliation is a two-way street that requires both parties to acknowledge what they're doing wrong, the existence of said taboo makes reconciliation impossible and will continue to perpetuate racial conflict going forward.
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Wasn't the act of voting for Biden the same as tacitly consenting to Harris as the nominee if Biden dropped out? Since, you know, she was his running mate?
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@TheUnderdog
There's a fundamental tension within libertarianism over this question: is it justified to have a powerful state to prevent rights abuses by non-state actors (such as individuals)? And in a high-crime society like the US this is no mere hypothetical.
The cheapest way to to life imprisonment is free food, healthcare, and shelter for 50 years, with expensive guards.
Not true. In an ideally just society, the convict would have to pay back society for the costs of his/her incarceration by having to work (prison food, healthcare, etc. would not be free), with mechanisms in place to prevent conflicts of interest between the courts and the entities that benefit from said labor. Prisons would have companies bid for contracts to open factories staffed by inmates, or crews of willing inmates could otherwise be shuttled to workplaces away from the prison.
The cheapest way to do the death penalty is a bullet to the head 10 minutes after a guilty conviction.
Wrongful convictions exist, though. Death row inmates should be entitled to one appeal, albeit an expedited one that doesn't take years to be resolved.
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Also, why would you say that being gay is not a trait that you are born with.
I have the capacity to spend the rest of my life screaming at the top of my lungs. That does not mean I was born a screamer. Potential to act is just that.
You were born straight I presume
Without getting into my private life, I am not a Kinsey 0, in terms of innate predisposition. Neither are most people; consider how common it is in straight porn made for a male audience for relations between a man and a woman to be depicted, as opposed to the woman being by herself or some kind of lesbian setup. The man in the photo or video contributes something to the end amount of pleasure that the male watcher gets.
If you're neither a 0 or a 6, you are potentially bisexual. If you're mostly straight, there's some hypothetical where you could find intimacy with a member of the same sex pleasurable, albeit it'd be harder to achieve. Same for the opposite sex with mostly gay people. It may be a challenge for a gay man to find sexual and romantic satisfaction in his wife, but not impossible.
And if you really are a 6, then the Christian faith has always assigned an honorable role to celibate people. The person who remains chaste and fights temptation will receive a greater reward in Heaven than the person who got married and enjoyed his relationship with his wife. Jesus even endorsed being a eunuch, albeit the church turned against castration after the first few centuries because normative "family values" took over with it becoming the state religion and all. I personally think being one sounds cool, and I wish it wasn't some taboo idea in our culture.
Okay, but you can’t deny that there are some Christians who teach that women can be any role that they want. This is strictly against the Bible, which according to them is the word of god, so I just can’t understand these people.
To my knowledge the Bible doesn't actually say women can't have careers outside the home. But if you're referring to religious ministry, you're correct. Either their options are limited or they just ignore what Paul taught, which seems to be surprisingly common in Pentecostal churches.
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@Moozer325
This is why I don’t understand Christian churches that accept gay people
This is a dishonest framing. Christianity is, for believers, a religion that centers around how they live. What their actions are. The term "gay person" only exists within the context of homosexual actions. It's not analogous to ethnicity or sex, as you are, say, black or a woman irrespective of your actions. The whole bigotry angle assumes an immutable characteristic that isn't actually there. We're speaking instead of a manner of personal conduct which the religion finds odious.
"But they're predisposed to be gay" First, there's the Kinsey Scale and almost no one is a 6. Second, humans are predisposed to find sex pleasurable and want about as much of it as they can get but we find people who spend every waking hour jerking off deplorable. Merely having a disposition does not translate to an action being inevitable and an immutable characteristic in itself.
and treat women as equals
Christianity, specifically Paul, speaks of men and women being assigned to different roles for the finite amount of time they're alive here on earth. While generally assumed that the male role is "superior", this is but one way of interpreting it. The leadership role is one of heavier responsibility, which is a burden as much as it is a privilege. Indeed, the model leader is Christ, who suffered more than any human being has ever suffered. One could argue it's not truly a privilege at all, and the man who treats it as one is an unworthy leader, as the principal qualification of the job is a willingness to self-sacrifice for his family.
But in any case, unequal roles for a temporary span do not suggest or imply the eternal souls of men and women are of unequal value. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you all are one in Christ." - Galatians 3:28
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About a minute ago, a woman took the stage at the RNC and spoke about the issue of safety in schools, endorsing School Resource Officers (cops embedded in high schools) as an invaluable tool for keeping the people and dealing with dangerous students. Detractors claim that SROs can be unnerving to students, and that they're often too trigger happy when it comes to arresting minors. And this got me thinking:
I propose that local governments dramatically increase the frequency of plainclothes officers in schools, who infiltrate classrooms at the start of a given academic semester and have long-term assignments, say, for up to a couple of months, choosing the youngest looking officers who pose as students of the oldest plausible age (i.e. seniors). To avoid the likelihood of a real student recognizing them from, say, a traffic stop, different police departments ought to swap personnel for these assignments so that they're from relatively faraway places. This would accomplish the following:
(1). Their presence would not be overt, and to students it would feel like a school instead of a prison;
(2). Whereas students would try to hide their misbehavior in the known presence of police officers, these officers being around would not cause them to alter their behavior. They could get a feel of the territory, gather human intelligence, conduct stings, and bust crimes literal seconds after they start happening. For example, a prospective dealer would be more likely to sell to somebody who they've seen around for the last 3 weeks than to an absolute stranger.
(3). The knowledge that they "only have one shot", and that making an arrest will blow their cover, will cause them to pick their battles carefully, and go after what they believe to be high-priority crimes instead of being overly confrontational.
(4). This would deter outsiders to the school from dealing to students, as they wouldn't know who's a cop and who isn't.
(5). It would signal to mass shooters that the visible absence of police officers does not equal an easy target. This might also allow schools to cut funding for School Resource Officers.
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