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
We need reasonably experienced politicians, but generally speaking, provided the candidate had at least a few years of experience with high-level elected offices (governors, senators, and so on), experience has historically not really correlated with a President's effectiveness at all
. In fact, there's a slight negative correlation, and it's understandable why; a veteran politician's image and their political network is more or less set in stone
Yet again you're showing your concept of the Libyan people by declaring that you and not the people of a country get to choose who is and is not their legitimate leader. I'd also note that Gadaffi was not the recognised leader of Libya by many countries during 2011, the recognised leaders were the NTC asking for an intervention.
Only if you ignore the fact that the US signed a treaty to protect Ukraine's sovreignty. Which you have done, presumably because that fact is inconvenient to you.
Again you are arbitrarily deciding who gets to be the leader of other people, do you just consider Arabs to stupid to choose their own leaders?
Nothing when they're not being an asshole about it, but when they are there's a problem because they're being an asshole and fucking others over.
Not wars of aggression there haven't.
So you admit that it's immoral and you're just trying to find a legal argument to defend Assad because you're a support of him?
You didn't, however you have vocally defended the country you support (Russia) forming alliances with brutal dictators. The fact that you're advocating for Russia to ally with dictators instead of the us doesn't make you any less of an advocate of alliances with dictators.
Are you a scholar of international law? Because Bosnia and Kosovo were ruled legal after the fact, Libya was legal, Afganistan was legal due to self defence, East Timor was legal, Somalia was legal under the UN mandate, Kuwait was legal under a UN mandate, Syria is of disputable legality due to the conflicting points of national sovereignty, local sovereignty, separatist sovereignty, self defence against ISIS and Responsability to Protect.
The only clearly illegal war was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which nobody here is defending.
Wait what?! Why would we want geocidal nutjobs?
edited 21st Sep '16 8:24:41 AM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThe scrutiny that the security organizations get, while necessary to transparency and such, is given a vastly inflated importance in our political dialogue. Quite frankly, the important issues — our economic future, our climate policy, our state government, our civil rights, and so on — are almost completely unaffected by NSA surveillance or CIA torture programs. It's a lot of sound and fury signifying little but that the person yelling about it holds their privacy in some kind of religious regard that is vastly out of proportion to its significance. Even Guantanamo Bay, while a stain on our national soul, has affected at net the lives of a few hundred people. More people than that die of police brutality every year, and orders of magnitude more die of poverty-related causes.
Now, domestic surveillance might become an issue in a hypothetical Trump administration, when he starts using the security apparatus to round up dissidents. But that's just another argument to vote for Clinton, because at least I trust her not to abuse the power of the executive branch to abrogate the rights of American citizens — never mind those of other countries.
"Young agitators" are important to any functioning democracy, but they should not go directly to power without passing through a maturation process wherein they learn to temper their enthusiasm with a dose of practicality.
edited 21st Sep '16 8:35:40 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Your Protest Vote Only Hurts Others
. Sad how many people can't figure that out.
@Silas
I'll just second everything you said here. I mean, not to invoke Godwin's Law, but Hitler was the legally recognized—and democratically elected!—leader of Nazi Germany. Somehow I don't see this guy saying that getting rid of him was a bad thing.
edited 21st Sep '16 8:35:35 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
"Young turks" are probably a bad term to use for the up-and-coming. Apart from being coined from the name of a right-wing political faction, it implies that you're putting grasping, inexperienced Small Name, Big Ego young guns in charge — which is something that should be avoided.
Honestly, I'm not so worried about a lack of young people in politics (40-somethings are usually the young guns in government, anyway), but a trend where young voters are simultaneously in the limelight, but also pushed further into the political margin because our habit of chasing the next big political fad means that no established political platform will cater to us in a sustained fashion. Millennials aren't stupid, but most of us have political ADD; the everyday banality of government never catches our attention. It's why lunatic right-wing local politicians coast into office on the votes of octogenarians in states without a progressive supermajority — what twenty-something votes for a candidate based on their promises to keep sidewalks better maintained?
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."@ CrimsonZephyr:
Quite — how can one push the progressive cause with highways maintenance?
A little quiz question for you: When and who authorised Crimea to become part of the Ukraine?
edited 21st Sep '16 9:22:31 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnAnd you doesn't understand how no matter how much they claim to be non interventionists, their views are isolationists and at this point I am sure you're misunderstanding the stances of US libertarians as non interventionists on purpose.
In that context so is Hillary and Hillary admitted publicly that the Iraq War was a great mistake.
Saudi Arabia and Israel don't have anything to do with Muammar Gaddafi violent suppression of the Arab Spring protests in his country. He lost legitimacy and recognition during the revolt. Also he wasn't elected he was a dictator.
News flash, the Cold War ended USSR lost, they can't force ex-sov block republics into their sphere against their will no more. Ukraine is comfortably close to the EU and it was up to Ukraine to decide with whom they are going to ally to, not Russia.
Since when?
If they wanted to, they could have filled a voting session on the Ukraine parliament to regularize their secession. Also the issue of them wanting to join Russia wasn't a problem until the Russians invaded and it doesn't matter how much you claim they wanted to join Russia. The Crimean take over wasn't legal, wasn't right and wasn't moral no matter how you'd like to paint it.
Not for the lack of trying, the PRC realized they wouldn't be able to use direct military action against its neighbors without triggering the US support for one of them or without making former US enemies, US allies. Guess what? Vietnam is seeking US support because it is afraid of China.
It pretty much means it makes him stop being the leader of a pretty large chunk of the country.
There was a reduction in military support for Israel as a consequence and even then the Palestinian-Israeli conflict isn't entirely on Israel either.
When their goals is to oppress people they don't like and prevent the government from doing anything about along making sure their business are free to screw over everyone as they please you really don't want libertarians taking the shots.
No one is arguing against that.
Yeah, the Russo-Georgian war. You also need to look the difference between intervention and war.
Not really. there are more countries recognizing the Syrian National Council than countries recognizing the Assad's government.
And that still a major stain in the US records.
Because you have been defending dictators like Assad and Gaddafi as legitimate rulers despite everyone else disagreeing.
This shit is moving in circles harder than a damn NASCAR tournament.
edited 21st Sep '16 10:24:49 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesThis. So very much this. When half the country is in revolt you can't claim that the government holds much in the way of legitimacy. Not to mention that said governments were totalitarian dictatorships to start with. Qaddafi came to power in a military coup when, as a captain, he overthrew the sitting government. Assad inherited his position from his father, who had taken power across a series of political and military coups. If that's a "legitimate" government, then Pinochet and The Process were the legitimate governments of Chile and Argentina.
I don't normally use Samuel Warde as a source, since they're heavily biased to the left, but I hadn't been able to find a similar article elsewhere and I thought it was interesting. It details some of the old school journalists' (specifically Tom Browkaw, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, and Carl Bernstein) disdain for Trump and the current press over the last year to as recently as last Friday.
http://samuel-warde.com/2016/09/news-legends-call-media-hold-donald-trump-accountable-lies/
I mean I agreed with the article overall but this made my eyes want to roll 720 degrees.
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.edited 21st Sep '16 9:45:36 AM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.The constant references to participation trophies in anti-millennial media — a genre of its own at this point — perplexes me. I mean, I get that "we're all winners!" is an asinine statement (even though the concept of mutual benefit isn't talked about nearly enough in our politics), but why do middle-aged people think millennials crave participation trophies, or that we receive so many of them? I received like, two or three when I was five, but they're dinky, plastic pieces of crap and always a product of mollifying enraged Baby Boomer parents who live vicariously through their childrens' achievements.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."@139439
: Wow. That's incredibly condescending, and entirely uncalled for. If you have any substantive criticism on my post, please say so. But if you assume that anyone who voices criticism on the Democratic Party is an ignorant sheep who is brainwashed by Republican propaganda (never mind the fact that Republicans never mentioned superdelegates at all), I don't think you're interested to engage in a debate.
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Superdelegates can (or more precisely, could) effectively override a 17% win margin - that's rather big, especially since establishment candidates are favoured in other ways as well. And they don't solely have an effect if they are used to override the popular vote, as I argued in my post.
Anyway, as I said - you only have two candidates to vote for. Do you really think it can be justified that two tiny groups of people can be trusted to make the best decision for the rest of America who these candidates are going to be? If so, I think we have a fundamental disagreement. At any rate, the influence of the superdelegates is being reduced, so they might not have such a large effect in the future anyway.
With regards to the racism part - a party can also simply refuse to appeal to racist sentiment so that such a candidate never gets nominated in the first place. Donald Trump would never have survived for this reason in the Democratic primaries, for instance.
![]()
No, it's completely called for, especially since I didn't specify Republican propaganda; it comes from the left way more than it comes from the right. It's part of the "sore loser" club, who wish to pin their defeat on anything other than the failings of their ideology. In that, it does sharply mirror right-wing politics.
Every time a Democratic candidate loses a presidential primary, their side screams foul at the superdelegate system, ignoring the fact that superdelegates have never overridden the committed delegates, and the fact that, as mentioned below, one of their major roles is precisely to stop a really bad candidate who happens to be popular from getting the nomination.
edited 21st Sep '16 12:53:09 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"edited 21st Sep '16 11:43:31 AM by nervmeister
So it's a choice between letting racists win and causing racists to have hurt feelings about being cheated of a win? I'll pick door number 2, Monty.
