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
Ted Cruz is only "worst" in the aspect that he could potentially damage the USA longer term because he's five times smarter than Cheeto.
Trump is worse in the fact that he's going to destroy American Hegemony, and I'm not 100 percent confident he won't at least TRY to use a nuclear weapon.
Trump is an unmitigated disaster of a candidate and it finally is the proof in real world that Republicans will always ALWAYS fall in line, no matter who it is.
New Survey coming this weekend!On "Alt Facts" bullshit;
If I said the sky was red, your first reaction might be to say I'm lying, but sometimes the sky IS red during a sunset. So I wouldn't technically be wrong, sometimes. It's stuff like that that's just going to make things more difficult.
It just keeps getting more and more stupid the lengths this regime is going through to warp reality. There's zero subtlety. They can't just bend the truth, they have to try and shatter it. Trump would have been SO much better off if he had just left the crowd size thing alone, or at least just left it at lying. But no, the Trumplings are under orders to say anyone who disputes their bullshit is wrong, even on the most trivial matters.
Oh yeah, no one's really mentioned it, but you know that at least a fourth of the <200,000 people at Trump's inauguration were probably protesters, so that's even less people there who actually like the guy.
A funnote thing about the crowd size issue is that, when it became clear that Trump's inauguration had low attendance, a lot of Trump supporters came up with various reasons as to why, aside from the obvious one in that Trump is a deeply unpopular President of course.
Generally they fell into the categories of Trump supporters being too busy with work, or were prevented from reaching the mall by protesters. While I will certainly agree that low unemployment and the presence of protesters certainly didn't help inauguration attendance, even if the size of the impact is debateable, it tacitly acknowledges that the attendance was indeed low by inauguration standards.
Then Trump comes in and just starts flatly denying reality and claiming that the crowd size wasn't low at all, which means his own supporters are in the rather amusing position of implicitly calling him a liar.
I'd say it's moreso that the "conservative" (under quotes) movement in the US has basically become so twisted it's turned into a reactionary movement. Most self-titled conservatives in the US don't want to keep the status quo under Obama, they want things to go back several decades. "Proper" conservative ideology, "i.e let's maintain the current status quo and install change very gradually and meticulously" is not by definition anti-intellectual or regressive. Theoretically you should be able to be conservative and believe in evolution, LGBT rights, and maybe even support abortion in specific cases or outright. That's not really what we have in the US for the most part.
I mean Obama is probably more of a conservative than most of the people in the GOP lol, since he doesn't want to roll back things to several decades ago.
edited 22nd Jan '17 10:10:26 AM by Draghinazzo
Part of the problem is also that the American conservative ideology is wound up tightly with corporate interests. At its core, representative democracy can only function if those representatives genuinely believe they're public servants, and that they're championing what's best for everyone, or at least their constituents.
The problem is that there's no incentive system set up for that besides 'winning the election,' meaning that even if politicians royally fuck anyone who isn't their constituent, lies about it and pockets the money they get from all their rich friends, as long as they win the election, they can basically go on business as usual, because they make the same amount of money. And, more importantly, they're the ones who allocate the budget to themselves, so there's no way to legally change it.
For all that conservatives talk about giving people an incentive to work/get insurance/not be on welfare/pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they're really bad at giving themselves any incentive to do a good job aside from getting more power by winning the election.
It's a problem with the fact that there's effectively no real check on the political class in a representative democracy once they've been voted into office aside from either mounting public pressure or other organs of the same democracy being set up as a check and balance. And if they control all the other organs, well, you're basically fucked until the next election.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.![]()
![]()
By most definitions, the current bulk of Democratic leaders are 'conservative', with a solid mix of liberal and progressive ideology. Most of the current Republican party are regressive reactionaries at best, and many are straight paleo or archaic in mindset, and that is the best of them-remember there was a short lived but very real push in their camp to repeal suffrage after one poll showed the Orange One trailing drastically in the female vote. That is not an isolated incident-it is a symptom of the whole mindset-"I am right because I am right" and everyone else is an obstacle, something to be ignored or overcome on the way to what I want.
What Trump supporters have said and done makes a lot more sense viewed through that lense; to have no regard for anyone who is not them, it becomes easy to view the entire world through 'what I know is right, and everyone who stops me is a walking ghost to be ignored until they disappear.' To not see political opponents, just ambulatory obstacles worthy of no more concern than a traffic cone; to empathize, first you have to regard that person as a person. When 'minority' ceases to be 'people' and becomes 'obstacle', the whole world must look very different. And for anyone simply looking for something to blame for everything in their life they do not like, 'obstacle' sounds exactly like what you want to focus on.
edited 22nd Jan '17 10:31:57 AM by ViperMagnum357
It should be called civil rights because that's fundamentally what it is and what it always has been. If anyone has ever wondered why the term "identity politics" is typically used in a pejorative context, it's no coincidence and indeed has a historical precedent. Early 20th-century proto-Marxist theorists who emphasized class as the nucleus of inequity-based conflict had a dim view of how race, gender, etc. intersected with that conflict. Karl Marx himself was slightly better in that regard, as he aptly noted how blacks in the US and Jews in Europe were unfairly used as a scapegoat for economic instability.
I recommend reading some of Angela Davis' work if you want more information on this subject.

edited 22nd Jan '17 8:57:17 AM by IFwanderer
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV