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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39901: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:09:12 AM

The article is light on details, but it contains a work requirement and discusses opening more immigration for "needed jobs", which I assume would include farm and construction labor. It also mentions a new "secure form" that would allow employers to verify citizenship.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Chalkos Sidequest Proliferator from The Internets Since: Oct, 2010
Sidequest Proliferator
#39902: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:10:48 AM

Pfft. Secession petitions by irate but powerless netizens about 19 states.

ninjaclown Since: May, 2009
#39903: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:10:51 AM

Why is the White House required to respond to internet petitions?

ch00beh ??? from Who Knows Where Since: Jul, 2010
???
#39904: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:12:04 AM

they're not; they made that rule up themselves in order to look like they care.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39905: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:12:07 AM

[up][up]Well, the Constitution establishes the right to petition for redress of grievances in the First Amendment, and it would appear that in the interests of transparency, the White House decided to make the process as open as possible, without passing judgement.

[up] Let's not be quite that cynical. Just because you got 150 people to sign something doesn't make it reasonable.

edited 12th Nov '12 11:12:42 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
DeMarquis (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#39906: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:18:01 AM

The link isn't working for me, why I ask.

I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39908: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:35:01 AM

He is right to be concerned. What I'm seeing and reading in some places, however, is the thought that this is cyclical. Right now, the minority groups are voting Democrat not necessarily because they're all a bunch of liberals — many come from very conservative cultural mindsets — but because the Republicans are so openly antagonistic towards them.

In a few decades, once these groups have fully integrated into society, the thought goes, they'll start to naturally adopt a more natural conservative/liberal political distribution, restoring the GOP's power.

I don't know how accurate that is, but I do know that a lot of Latinos and blacks are very religious. The GOP is looking at Whig-like irrelevancy in the next decade, but if they move to the center, they might yet save themselves.

The question now is whether that will happen. Will the party continue to double-down on reactionary conservatism? If so, I think it is truly doomed.

edited 12th Nov '12 11:36:17 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#39909: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:38:02 AM

The only one of those petitions that sounds reasonable to me are the scientific journal one, and the gluten free labelling one. A lot of them are just silly and not government things.

edited 12th Nov '12 11:39:51 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Karkadinn Karkadinn from New Orleans, Louisiana Since: Jul, 2009
Karkadinn
#39910: Nov 12th 2012 at 11:44:14 AM

How much of it is cyclical or not, I think, depends in large part on what kinds of solutions we seek to the problems we face.

For example, if we seek comprehensive immigration reform, there's no reason to think that the increased racial diversity wouldn't benefit the Democrats overall. A Republican party that could support that would be a different kind of party from the one we know today. On the other hand, if we (by which I mean the government) just put out a bandaid specifically to appeal to Hispanics as a cynical move to grab the voters, then what will happen is that the Hispanics will fully integrate and then take their turn at oppressing the next minority that is still troubled by a fundamentally dysfunctional immigration system.

What people call 'cycles' in politics look, to me, to be closer to 'old problems coming back because we did a half-assed job of fixing them the first time.'

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.
RadicalTaoist scratching at .8, just hopin' from the #GUniverse Since: Jan, 2001
DeMarquis (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#39912: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:03:10 PM

If the process is cyclical (or even "same problem, new generation") why would the Reps need to move to the center? They just need to wait. They've done that before.

I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
MidnightRambler Ich bin nicht schuld! 's ist Gottes Plan! from Germania Inferior Since: Mar, 2011
Ich bin nicht schuld! 's ist Gottes Plan!
#39913: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:04:47 PM

These petitions are hilarious. I imagined it would only be about the deep-red states in the South which actually pulled that shit before, but no: here's one from New Jersey.

I can see it now. The Independent Republic of New Jersey, with "Born To Run" as its national anthem.

Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39914: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:06:51 PM

What people call 'cycles' in politics look, to me, to be closer to 'old problems coming back because we did a half-assed job of fixing them the first time.'
Well, yes, of course. History repeats and all. Why do you think we had the Great Recession of 2008? Because politicians and economists forgot the lessons learned in the Great Depression, which gave us some of the greatest prosperity we've ever had up until 1970.

If the process is cyclical (or even "same problem, new generation") why would the Reps need to move to the center? They just need to wait. They've done that before.
The problem is that if they wait too long, they risk losing any hope of holding the White House, and therefore their backers will desert them en masse.

edited 12th Nov '12 12:13:54 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Trivialis Since: Oct, 2011
#39915: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:09:16 PM

[up]Part of that prosperity came from a very destructive war.

AceofSpades Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
#39916: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:10:25 PM

Some guy put up a petition for all of New England, on the basis that they shouldn't have to put up with every other state that appears to hate them for very little reason.

But anyway, these petitions aren't going anywhere so I don't think we should discuss them seriously. The White House is just being very open about who's complaining about what. (Which has the side effect of opening a lot of these people up to ridicule, as well as spreading their message.)

As regards "cyclical" I think it's cyclical in the sense that one of the parties has found some group to turn into the "other" that we need to fear. Kind of hard to do that now, when the "other" is a large enough part of the population to sway the vote.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39917: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:17:06 PM

Part of that prosperity came from a very destructive war.
Well, Krugman is fond of saying that World War Two was a textbook exercise in Keynesian economics. What makes it that way is that, up until WWII, the same sort of Very Serious People as we have today were insisting that the Great Depression was "structural" in nature, that we just needed to grit our teeth and ride it out, and that we could not afford all the deficit spending needed to boost us out of it.

Amazingly, as soon as they could get a good war going, all that hand-wringing over debt disappeared and we reaped the results in a regulated economy with low consumer debt and low income disparities, up until the collective memory of our politicians and economists faded and we started repeating the same mistakes as before.

It's the same story throughout human history. Massive hardship thanks to short-sightedness or plain old hidebound stupidity leads to some revolutionary development that gives us a few decades of prosperity, after which the short-sighted take over again and crash the system. I despair of us ever getting away from that cycle.

edited 12th Nov '12 12:20:36 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39919: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:23:58 PM

Krugman has argued that a fake alien invasion scare would get us back to full employment in no time flat. The point is that war is the one form of deficit spending that conservatives accept without question, so if we have a deadlocked government, one way to break that deadlock is to get a war started.

Of course, the modern military-industrial complex has seen to it that we can fight wars on the scale of Iraq and Afghanistan without putting the entire country on a wartime footing, thus having the disadvantages of deficit spending without the advantages of stimulus. It's the conservative economist's version of having one's cake and eating it too.

Also, Iraq and Afghanistan came during a boom, which meant that the deficit spending to fund them was inflationary, not stimulatory — and we lowered taxes at the same time, just to add fuel to the fire.

edited 12th Nov '12 12:28:52 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Trivialis Since: Oct, 2011
#39921: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:34:10 PM

"It's the same story throughout human history. Massive hardship thanks to short-sightedness or plain old hidebound stupidity leads to some revolutionary development that gives us a few decades of prosperity, after which the short-sighted take over again and crash the system. I despair of us ever getting away from that cycle."

That seems like a collective version of a pitfall that human nature tends to stumble on - it has nothing to do with politicians and economists.

thatguythere47 Since: Jul, 2010
#39922: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:34:25 PM

@gingrich link from earlier: I like that Newt is man enough to admit that maybe his vision of America is wrong and he should change. That's what we in the bizz call rational thought. Something that's incredibly rare in modern politics.

@fighteer: Someone incredibly savvy will eventually realize they can use all the anti-china sentiment to brew up their own cold war and both sides can massively profit from the faux-antagonism.

Speaking of which, and I know this is off-topic but I ain't crawling into the spoilerific thread; how's AC 3?

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39923: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:41:11 PM

@Trivialis: Well, it so happens that the current cycle is specifically and almost entirely the effect of conservative principles overriding hard-won common sense. I can't say that this holds true uniformly throughout history, but I can't think offhand of very many crises that were caused by liberal overreach. Before you scream "Communism", let me point out yet again that Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were authoritarians first, and Communists second.

@thatguythere: Regarding China, remember that both sides (well, all three sides if you count Russia) have nukes, and China outnumbers us by three to one. That kind of war would have all sorts of negative repercussions that wouldn't be very pleasant.

As for AC3, I'm avoiding the thread too. I'll get to play it on the 20th... eight days!

edited 12th Nov '12 12:41:35 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Trivialis Since: Oct, 2011
#39924: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:42:55 PM

The cycle I'm talking about is that hardship may cause people to wake up and try harder or think differently, while prosperity tends to bring risk of people getting complacent and letting their guard down.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#39925: Nov 12th 2012 at 12:48:47 PM

Ah, now that I will concede. Still, it makes a convincing argument that liberals bring prosperity and conservatives bring hardship. If you are the kind of person who feels that hardship is good for society, it stands to reason that you'd support these cycles. In all honesty, given human nature, I can't see a good way to continue the up-cycle without people getting lazy and complacent.

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

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