The General US Politics Thread

I liked this thread more before it became the "argue with Capsase" thread. We've had these conversations with him before. He refuses to change his views at all despite anything and everything that's said to him. That's fine — he's entitled to his views, after all — but it means that discussing it with him is pointless. So why do we keep doing it every few days?

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

@Capsase: "Their activist groups are astroturfed, but our activist groups are the real thing." See how that argument can be wielded by both sides?

Also, I agree with Jovian. This topic is becoming "argue with Capsase over his radical views about government". It's pointless, and the last time we went there, someone got banned. It's going to happen again shortly.

edited 29th Jun '16 1:52:00 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Best I can tell, Cap is arguing a Marxist viewpoint which presupposes that class struggle motivates people above all else. (And yes I have actually read Marx and his forced dualism is what I consider his central flaw.)

I.... thought we were all being pretty civil?

You can be civil and still detrimental to the conversation. If the thread keeps getting derailed by a single user, then it's perfectly reasonable to tell that user to stop it, even if they're being perfectly polite.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Very well then. As a closing, I'd like to point out the vast differences between the conduct of the American military during two of the great military debacles of the period following World War 2; namely the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

On the one hand you had chemical weapons, firebombing, widespread sexual assault by soldiers, and worse, and protests only took off in earnest well after the damage had already been done; which went on to be quite viciously suppressed. When the US was forced to withdraw, it did so having acomplished numerous objectives in spite of the defeat in Vietnam.

In contrast, in Iraq, the actions of the US military was far more constrained, even though under Bill Clinton the US had quietly declared itself to be above international law in that it had the authority to act and even use force unilaterally, reconciling the de jure status of the US with the reality of its conduct in foreign affairs. You also saw massive protests against the war before it even began, in spite of the casus belli the Bush administration manufactured, and the administration had to continuously give ground on major wargoals in order to sustain the effort.

This is the power of mass action; the government and the institutions did not change; what the people were willing to put up with did.

@Elle: Guilty as charged to an extent, though I'd argue the central role of class struggle in societal change is something that naturally flows from any model which assumes human beings in aggregate behave out of self interest.

edited 29th Jun '16 2:06:29 PM by CaptainCapsase

I'm midly tempted to debate you on that in PM or in the general philosophy thread but it would require scraping of 12 years of rust accumulated since my last serious jaunt in liberal arts acadamia and further procrastinating on a paid project that's already gone on longer than I'd like so I'll have to pass. :P

Human beings, in aggregate, behave on the basis of herd mentality, tribal knowledge, and what Keynes labeled "animal spirits". We're panicky, superstitious, ignorant creatures, and anyone who tries to run a system on the basis of the general populace being able to understand what's in their long-term self-interest, let alone act on it, is a fool.

However, trying to discuss this general idea in the U.S. Politics thread is a waste of everyone's time. We have a philosophy thread if it's of interest to anyone.

edited 29th Jun '16 2:20:20 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I'd very much like to debate that viewpoint on the philosophy thread; more specifically why you are not a monarchist in the vein of Thomas Hobbes.

538 (Nate Silver's website) is now officially starting to project the results of the election.

Currently the odds are 80.6% Hillary Clinton, 19.3% Donald Trump, and >0.1% Gary Johnson.

Honestly it's kind of scary that Donald Trump's chances of becoming President of the United States of America are currently better then a dice throw, but the trend lines are moving in Hillary's favor. And of course things could look very different in a month's time, let alone on election day.

It seems more like Fighteer (and Crimson Zephyr) would prefer a technocracy.

Here's a question: how could the Republican challenger in 2020 learn from Donald Trump? I've seen a few suggestions that a slightly moderated Trump could be formidable.

edited 29th Jun '16 4:50:09 PM by majoraoftime

I doubt that the RNC wants to be burned again. There's going to be a lot less challengers, and a lot more unity around a more moderate candidate (Haley, say).

Whenever I hear "challenger" I think of spaceships...

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

...exploding.

Inter arma enim silent leges

The GOP's problem at the moment is that it's reliant on the Dixiecrat's votes to stay in power, but hasn't actually done much of anything for them in decades. So when Trump shows up and starts speaking to them directly, they're fantastically loyal to him, but pretty much literally everyone else is turned off by his buffoonery.

There are two possible ways for the GOP to fix this.

First is the depressing one: find someone with Trump's ability to please Dixiecrats but without the buffoonery that turns everyone else against him, and then proceed to business as usual, except now openly racist instead of closeted racist.

Two, which is what I hope happens, they do some soul searching, look at the writing on the wall, and realize that in order to remain relevant in the long term they need to radically adjust their political course. That means disavowing the racism lingering in their party platform, adopting sane policies on things like immigration, health care, and education, and generally not deliberately alienating entire demographics like "women" and "non-Christians", and "everyone who isn't white". They'd still be able to keep many of their policy positions intact (pro-gun, pro-life, etc), but that'd have to moderate themselves on a lot of others. In effect, they'd have to become a center-right party instead of a far-right party. (That this is arguably a return to form from 20+ years ago rather than a brand new thing is largely irrelevant — whatever they were in the 80s and 90s, right now they're a far-right reactionary party.)

Three, they don't do either of the above and they collapse into irrelevancy as they keep pandering to a shrinking demographic in an increasingly futile attempt to win national elections until even their diehard voters give up on them completely and a new party rises to take their place. The effect in that case would be largely similar to what would happen if they successfully moderated themselves, except there's a chance that the new party dynamic would be far-left (new party) and center-left (democrats) instead of center-left (democrats) and center-right (republicans).

edited 29th Jun '16 5:10:07 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Is that for electoral, or popular, votes? Because if that's for the popular vote, I'm kind of surprised Johnson doesn't have a larger piece of it.^note I don't expect it to be much larger, mind, but 0.1%? With these candidates?

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

If Trump loses the RNC is going to install anti-populist/insurgent measures in their primary system that will make superdelegates look like tissue paper.

I think its winning the election/electoral college.

edited 29th Jun '16 5:14:10 PM by Rationalinsanity

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

There's a 1 in 5 chance of Trump winning? Fuck me. That is fucking terrifying.

Yeah, my connection is super-slow, so it was still loading. The link shows Johnson with ~7% of the popular vote, which is a little higher than I expected, but still not enough to win him any electoral votes.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

RNC is probably going to make their own super delegates.

Probably even half of the delegate count just to make sure a Trump can't ever happen again

New Survey coming this weekend!

Given that we have two widely disliked candidates^well... one widely disliked candidate and another widely despised candidate heading the Republican and Democratic tickets, it makes a lot of sense that 3rd party candidates would be polling higher then normal.

Not high enough to actually win of course, but apparently if Gary Johnson manages to snag 10% of the popular vote it gives the Libertarian Party automatic access to federal resources. Which is something that's well within the realm of possibility.

edited 29th Jun '16 6:16:21 PM by Falrinn

I feel like the "like/dislike" polling statistics need to be split along party lines, because it hardly matters whether committed Republican voters like Clinton or committed Democrats like Trump.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

For some shits and giggles, here is a Trump insult generator.

http://time.com/3966291/donald-trump-insult-generator/

If you enter Trump's name into the generator, everything makes perfect sense.

edited 29th Jun '16 7:56:40 PM by nightwyrm_zero

Darn, I thought it might generate insults directed at Trump himself, instead of the other way around. Oh, well...

Y'know, as simple and stupid as that machine is, it's probably smarter than the real Trump.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.

You don't need a machine to help you insult Trump.