Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
But Christianity fills all the requirements of being a religion. It is a philosophy, but in addition to being a religion. So is Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Shinto, Buddhism (That I could see the argument being used against), Zoroastrianism and so on.
Essentially, he's saying religions don't exist, but I don't think he's smart enough to realize that.
edited 26th Jan '13 3:57:44 PM by Zendervai
I don't care what it actually is. All I know is that he just justified taxing it. Since religious exemptions cost the government about 71 billion dollars a year this would be a pretty good chunk of change to take in and he couldn't even complain without being a hypocrite.
edited 26th Jan '13 4:00:02 PM by Kostya
O'Reily is a very intelligent, if modestly despicable, man who royally put his foot in his mouth. He's not stupid. He made a pretty serious mistake, though, and left the door open for months of mockery that hasn't really been as prominent as it could.
"The marvel is not that the Bear posts well, but that the Bear posts at all."![]()
I should have heard about that sooner. It surprises me no one seized on that to make a point.
Obviously it would only tax income above a certain amount. Still, I'm sure we could get a decent amount of money from that. Probably even more if we ended exemptions for Temples and Mosques.
edited 26th Jan '13 4:05:11 PM by Kostya
It was on The Daily Show pretty damn quick and then sort of faded.
Not real sure why.
"The marvel is not that the Bear posts well, but that the Bear posts at all."Bloomberg pledges $350 million to Johns Hopkins University
Nats will name William Howard Taft new racing president
Governor Rick Scott Praised By 'Satanists'
O'Reilly backtracked a week later, and stated the Christianity is both a religion and a philosophy.
edited 26th Jan '13 4:49:40 PM by DeviantBraeburn
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016![]()
Speaking of that ban:
NAACP and Hispanic Federation join lawsuit to sink Mayor Bloomberg’s soda restrictions
edited 26th Jan '13 4:58:56 PM by DeviantBraeburn
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016For every big news item, smaller items tend to fall through the cracks. If you didn't hear about it, it wasn't publicized enough to catch your attention. There's always stories like that.
(If you watch the Daily Show, Jon Stewart routinely brings it up when he mentions New York politics)
Glove and Boots is good for Blog!Independents aren't actually independent, you know. There's only a very small number of people, ten to fifteen percent, who qualify as truly undecided. All the rest lean toward one party or another strongly enough not to switch over. That's an empirically verified fact, accepted by the vast majority of Political Scientists.
We already have mechanisms for the creation of third parties; It's just that the third parties we do have are too niche and lack enough popular support, and the nature of our system favors the consolidation of many competing factions into two parties. As a matter of fact, multi-party, proportional representation systems tend toward empowering radical factions. In contrast, our system favors moderation and gradual reform, as the Framers intended - although the GOP leadership is gumming up the gears by treating it like a Parliamentary system, as I mentioned earlier.
The Democratic Party instituting multiparty reforms - if voters would even be willing to accept that, which I highly doubt - would be the equivalent of slitting its own throat, because the Democratic base has historically been much less united than the Republican base. Hence, with the splintering of the Democrats, the Republicans would have no need to reform themselves after all, because they could still manage to win a plurality of the vote. Oops.
And by the way, party strength is far from superfluous, nor is the only reason for having it to push back against another party. The entire idea of having a party in the first place is to get people elected and thereby attempt to pass laws that favor one's ideological bent. Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties exist solely for the purpose of opposing one another, but rather for the sake of pursuing their favored reforms, reforms which are increasingly at odds.
The plurality wouldn't mean much if the splintered Democrats could manage to hold a coalition. Just because Republicans have the most members doesn't mean it gets what it wants.
I just think that Democrats, by trying to have simplicity and some gain in front of them, are missing out on more long-term benefits. We can see from former single-party states that, the party pushing for democratic reforms gets remembered as the one who served the people's interests. Sometimes the former party in control itself does this, and remained as one of the major parties after that (see Kuomintang in Taiwan). They traded their own party strength for genuine democratic support. Likewise, Democrats could vindicate themselves by accepting that role; if they actively suppress democracy, they're wasting an opportunity to truly stand out as a progressive, populous, democratic party in contrast to the Republicans.
The third parties, like Libertarians and Greens, generally support multiparty systems. Would the Libertarians emphasize this, and then abandon those reforms if they replace the Republicans? That would make them unpopular for being hypocritical.
I support having multiparty reforms for this reason. Instead of struggling to be the lesser of two evils in a flawed system, being the party that tries to fix the system itself would make the Democrats shine as the truly good party. It represents the people better, and it makes the party more popular and respected.
edited 26th Jan '13 5:38:19 PM by Trivialis
This is a real thing?
◊ How does anybody take this fucking paper seriously? It depresses me that my dad reads it.
I know currently Democrats are not really considering it. I'm saying that that's not a wise thing to do.
Many people are still iffy in the Democrat-Republican block (if you count people not really voting or participating in politics, they would just shrug it off). They're still divided in issues like having better governmental support vs having more economic freedom. But directly pointing out, say, the unpopularity of the 112th Congress, and promising to change the structural flaws? Promising a better representative democracy is easy for the layperson to understand. Focusing on electoral reform would go hand-in-hand with the grassroots movements that want the government fixed.
@Tomu: Point conceded. In this case, I think it's roughly comparable to the disconnect between Catholicism and Catholic voters. Nobody pays any attention to the Pope or to the Ayn Rand Institute anymore; the difference being that people have a lot fewer qualms about waving Ayn Rand's name (without Leonard Peikoff's consent) in favor of modern libertarianism than they do about using the Pope to (for example) justify abortion.
The devil's in the details. To address your longer post (
x6), however:
It's probably a bad idea to go too far into the specifics of hypotheticals, and it's really not relevant to the point, but I'll address this first. If the Democrats splintered at all, they obviously wouldn't be able to hold a coalition, because a political party is already the optimal form for a political coalition, and if they had to splinter in the first place then there would surely be enough bad blood among them to prevent them from cooperating. Besides, the plurality matters most on the level of district. We have single-member districts, meaning only one member is elected from any one district, by the plurality of votes. Hence, practically the entire Senate would be made up of Republicans, as would most of the House, and the Presidency would probably be Republican as well, considering the nature of the electoral college.
Are you calling what we have now an active suppression of democracy? It's not. Having a functional democracy does not inherently require that we have as many parties as possible. The reason we don't have viable third parties is that the existing parties already encompass what the voting public wants to see, and existing third parties don't encompass enough of it. Otherwise, voters would be moving away from the Republicans and Democrats and moving toward the Libertarians and Greens.
Any and all systems are flawed. You will not find a perfect system, nor will you be able to fix a flawed system into a perfect one. It will merely be flawed in a different way, though perhaps marginally less flawed. Electoral reforms sound great on paper, and we could use some, but it's when you get to the specifics that any coalition you may have built will fall apart like a house of cards. I'd like to lower the vote threshold required for third parties to get on the ballot, and I'd like campaign finance reform and to impose term limits on Congress, and that's about it, though the last one would probably require a Constitutional amendment. Then, if We The People really want a third party to win, we'll vote for them and/or start a movement behind them.
In any case, I don't feel like this is such an essential issue that the Democrats ought to abandon the rest of their policy agenda and potentially destroy themselves for the sake of it. And that's exactly what would happen if they tried it, because the amount of political capital required would be astronomical. I might be of a different opinion if wholesale electoral reform had actually been something that the Democrats had campaigned on, because then it would be the will of the people.
edited 26th Jan '13 7:53:09 PM by darksidevoid
GM: AGOG S4 & F/WC RP; Co-GM: TABA, SOTR, UUA RP; Sub-GM: TTS RP. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new Empire.Well for one, we have plenty of active suppression of democracy. Look at the Voter ID laws, voter intimidation, trying to kick poor people off the voting rolls via "clerical errors", several cases of election fraud.
Not true. The reason we don't have viable third parties is mainly because of polarization. People are less concerned with putting the right person in power, and more concerned with making sure "the bad guy" doesn't win. This results in people getting cowed out of voting for third parties out of fear that the big party closer to them will lose critical votes and let the other big party in. Most of the people I know that voted for a third party this last cycle were people who were nearly as disgusted with Obama's more subtle shenanigans as they were with Romney being a flagrant corporate shill and thought they were both horrible.
In places that have implemented instant-runoff voting, which circumvents that fear, third parties actually win seats rather often.
edited 26th Jan '13 8:12:14 PM by Pykrete

I want to say that is a Sam And Max refference, but I'm not sure...
Yu hav nat sein bod speeling unntil know. (cacke four undersandig tis)the cake is a lie!