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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
There was a Seventh Doctor audioplay where Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred confronted a highly racist politician who was working against civil liberties in the UK.
Ace asks why the Doctor doesn't give her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
The Doc goes, "Why bother? Twenty years ago, she was the majority. Now she's just speaking to the wind. Everything will pass...in time."
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 23rd 2019 at 11:44:03 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The talk about impeachment or not is something of a divisive topic in this thread to say the least, but yes the argument is not whether about impeachment would actually succeed or not, but whether it is worth it to do so despite the fact that it will inevitably fail. Trump is not going to get impeached.
The thing is, I feel that the reason impeachment would fail if they tried it tonight is that no one's been sufficiently rah-rah about it. The waffling makes it look like we have a losing case, which itself leads to more waffling. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But thanks for the words of encouragement, everyone. I feel marginally better.
It's going to fail because we just don't have the votes. It's got nothing to do with how strong our case is morally or legally. That's irrelevant to the process.
If we won every single seat it was possible to win in the midterms we still couldn't do it.
If we won every single seat it was possible to win in the midterms and every Republican who's voted against Trump voted to impeach him we still couldn't do it.
It's just not going to happen so we shouldn't pin our satisfaction on it happening.
Edited by LeGarcon on Jun 24th 2019 at 3:10:07 PM
Oh really when?It is in fact theoretically possible for a Republican senator to be convinced that we should impeach Trump. While they have consistently proven that they place party over... well, anything, let's not go so far as to say that it is literally impossible to impeach him based solely on a strong case.
Edited by Clarste on Jun 24th 2019 at 1:32:06 AM
The U.S. Is Purging Chinese Cancer Researchers From Top Institutions
Increasingly frosty relations between the USA and China are why. It has now gotten to the point where scientists sharing cancer research with Chinese scientists is seen as un-American. Which is kind of a problem considering that scientific research greatly benefits from this kind of globalization.
It probably doesn't help that more and more cases of Chinese people trying to steal secrets and tech from the USA are cropping up.
It should also be noted that while this has been ramping up recently, this stuff started happening before Trump's election.
Edited by M84 on Jun 24th 2019 at 6:46:22 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedI'm not terribly upset with the fact that American and Chinese relationships are getting frostier the more tyrannical and authoritarian the People's Republic is becoming but that's utterly not why any of it is happening.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
It's a direct consequence of Chinese agents stealing proprietary tech and info. So yes, the increasingly bad relations are a factor.
This is just a tad worrying for me, since I'm of Han Chinese descent as well.
This is heading into the territory of outright racial profiling, if it's not there already. And there's also the fear of Chinese-Americans being rounded up into internment camps like the Japanese-American citizens were during WWII.
And don't tell me that's an unreasonable fear. It's hopefully unlikely, but Chinese-Americans aware that this is happening can't be blamed for being concerned.
Edited by M84 on Jun 24th 2019 at 6:55:03 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedI mean, the US already has interment camps (or, concentration camps by another name) for refugees, it's not a stretch to suppose that we might get that far.
Edited by GoldenKaos on Jun 24th 2019 at 12:06:31 PM
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."In good election news, Warren wants to take on housing segregation, as related in a speech in Detroit
last week.
“We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, because it continues to have effects today," Warren said.
America needs to face the things we’ve done wrong and take steps towards making it right. My housing plan creates a first-of-its-kind down-payment assistance program to help Black and Brown families living in formerly redlined neighborhoods buy a home. pic.twitter.com/WL 9 FXFTH Lh — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 20, 2019
Warren proposes providing down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers who live in formerly segregated neighborhoods. The grants would subsidize home-ownership for low-income black families, something Warren said the federal government failed to do decades ago.
“The consequence of that: Generation after generation after generation, a lot of working white families had a chance to build wealth and a whole fewer black families had that chance,” she said.
Warren’s housing plan includes an expansive bill she reintroduced in the Senate earlier this year. It would invest $500 billion in various federal housing funds to build new affordable housing units and rehabilitate exciting units.
According to an independent analysis of the legislation by Moody’s Analytics, the bill would build or rehabilitate about 3 million housing units over the next decade, create 1.5 million new jobs and bring down rents for lower-income and middle-class families by 10%.
Warren’s American Housing and Economic Mobility Act is designed to be deficit neutral, largely paid for by reforms to the estate tax. The remainder of the cost of the legislation will be paid for by the tax revenues generated by the additional home building and other economic activity.
So yeah, definitely miles ahead of Bernie on race-related issues.
Edited by ironballs16 on Jun 24th 2019 at 9:27:01 AM
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"I just found out that Bailey has a (fan run) twitter account!
Edited by megaeliz on Jun 24th 2019 at 10:02:34 AM
So this is kind of a weird take on bothsidesism: Republicans Don’t Understand Democrats—And Democrats Don’t Understand Republicans
What is corroding American politics is, specifically, negative partisanship: Although most liberals feel conflicted about the Democratic Party, they really hate the Republican Party. And even though most conservatives feel conflicted about the Republican Party, they really hate the Democratic Party.
[...]
A new study, called “The Perception Gap,” helps provide an answer. More in Common, an advocacy organization devoted to countering extremism that previously published a viral report on America’s “hidden tribes,” set out to understand how political partisans see each other. Researchers asked Democrats to guess how Republicans would answer a range of political questions—and vice versa. (The survey was conducted among a sample of 2,100 U.S. adults the week immediately following the 2018 midterm elections.) What they found is fascinating: Americans’ mental image of the “other side” is a caricature.
According to the Democratic caricature, most Republicans stridently oppose immigration, hold deeply prejudiced views about religious minorities, and are blind to the existence of racism or sexism. Asked to guess what share of Republicans believe that immigration can strengthen America so long as it is “properly controlled,” for example, Democrats estimated about half; actually, nearly nine in 10 agreed with this sentiment.
Democrats also estimated that four in 10 Republicans believe that “many Muslims are good Americans,” and that only half recognize that “racism still exists in America.” In reality, those figures were two-thirds and four in five.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans are also prone to caricature Democrats. For example, Republicans approximated that only about half of Democrats are “proud to be American” despite the country’s problems. Actually, more than four in five Democrats said they are. Similarly, Republicans guessed that fewer than four in 10 Democrats reject the idea of open borders. Actually, seven in 10 said they do.
[...]
Unfortunately, the “Perception Gap” study suggests that neither the media nor the universities are likely to remedy Americans’ inability to hear one another: It found that the best educated and most politically interested Americans are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers.
Americans who rarely or never follow the news are surprisingly good at estimating the views of people with whom they disagree. On average, they misjudge the preferences of political adversaries by less than 10 percent. Those who follow the news most of the time, by contrast, are terrible at understanding their adversaries. On average, they believe that the share of their political adversaries who endorse extreme views is about 30 percent higher than it is in reality.
Perhaps because institutions of higher learning tend to be dominated by liberals, Republicans who have gone to college are not more likely to caricature their ideological adversaries than those who dropped out of high school. But among Democrats, education seems to make the problem much worse. Democrats who have a high-school degree suffer from a greater perception gap than those who don’t. Democrats who went to college harbor greater misunderstandings than those who didn’t. And those with a postgrad degree have a way more skewed view of Republicans than anybody else.
It is deeply worrying that Americans now have so little understanding of their political adversaries. It is downright disturbing that the very institutions that ought to help us become better informed may actually be deepening our mutual incomprehension.
Okay, so there's some things to unpack here. First off, the article makes no mention of what Republicans mean when they say "properly controlled" (, or what kind of racism still exists in America (remember that a significant number of Republicans would argue that white people are being persecuted).
Second, the article claims that people who don't watch the news just get the other side better, which to me just sounds like they subscribe to the Joe Biden brand of centrism in which they're willing to "reach across the aisle" at the cost of the human rights of disenfranchised populations. Furthermore, while it says that people who follow the news "believe that the share of their political adversaries who endorse extreme views is about 30 percent higher than it is in reality", the article never says what that percentage is.
TL;DR (read this in the whiniest voice you can imagine): "Why is everyone so mad at each otheeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrr-uh?"
i'm tired, my friendNot helpful man
I remember reading this yesterday and would be interested to see if further research backs it up
Rereading it, I can agree that the author of the article should have clarified more on the claims and wondering if the study was reworded how much would change.
Edited by vicarious on Jun 24th 2019 at 10:23:17 AM
Sorry, catching up on things from the last few days, and I saw something from a couple of pages back that I want to respond to.
Yeah, in my opinion this is an extremely doubtful outcome. I think it's far more likely Republicans will return to Obama administration tactics: obstruct everything, overuse the filibuster, let the conservative majority on the Supreme Court put the brakes on any and all leftish agenda, and force the president to rely on executive orders which can either be overturned by the next president or challenged continually on thin legal grounds in court, where Trump appointees may find a way to twist every kind of legal sense to the breaking point in the name of partisan hackery.
Unless Democrats manage to get a supermajority, (spoiler warning: they won't. It's pretty much mathematically impossible for it to happen) the Republicans will simply turn all their efforts into blocking the Democratic agenda, wait until the storm of voter anger passes, and then retake power. In 2008, Democrats had a failing war, a crashing economy, an incredibly popular and charismatic Presidential candidate going for them. 2 years later they lost the House, barely kept control of the Senate, and watched all their power effectively slip away.
Do you think Republicans can't wait two years? Do you think the average voter will remain committed to a cause and burning with anger for election after election after election? It ain't gonna happen.
There could be sea changes that I can't foresee, but I am very pessimistic about the chances of breaking the Republican hold on power in less than 20-30 years.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |![]()
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That? That right there?
That's Biden's base. Those are the people who find Biden appealing.
Those are the people more progressive voters need to convince and/or out-vote if they don't want to have to vote for Biden in the general election.
Edited by M84 on Jun 24th 2019 at 10:55:11 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedIn my experience, Biden stans bristle at the very notion that we should aspire to a better candidate/president than Biden. They're very quick to whip out the "You're just a bunch of idealistic kids who think you can have everything" card. I'm already committed to voting for whoever has the D next to their name, though, and I've seen an encouraging number of my leftier-than-thou, Bernie-or-bust friends and acquaintances say the same.
I think the odds of the Democratic base (and their begrudging allies) flat-out outvoting the rightists in the general are not too slim. I think it can be done. The turnout in last year's midterms was very encouraging. But given what zero-fucks despots Trump and his pimps have shown themselves to be, I wouldn't be surprised if they try to pull that coup they're always yammering about.

I believe it is losing and won't recover. From the perspective of someone who lives in a region full of racial violence, the violence and reactionary nature of so many places is because they are receiving such pushback. They're yelling and screaming now because people are not accepting it as normal.
One of the heartening things about the Trump administration (if not the ONLY heartening thing) is the fact that his election was celebrated as the end of the Left. Trump supporters laughed, rioted, and taunted—only to find incredibly pissed off Leftists pushing back.
It's breaking their worldview. Part of why they hate Antifa so much is not because Antifa is effective but it just isn't their worldview that social justice believers aren't weak and sincerely believe what they preach. Protestors, angry people of all colors, and bitter fury instead of ambivalence.
Before the Left was a joke to them—now they're actually scared that no one is laughing. Good Is Not Soft is something they cannot appreciate.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 23rd 2019 at 11:24:09 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.