The idea that things haven’t been getting worse while things have been getting better is incomplete and considering you’re accusing people of not paying attention it’s poor form for you to present as it makes it clear that you’re view is fairly myopic.
Now I feel like you’re smart enough to know that some things can get better while other things get worse. And that at that point it has to be determined what is causing what to change. Why are things getting better for the LGBT community? Politicians codified some changes in to law. What was that? Was it social pressure from the electorate? Of course it was. But if a different candidate had been in office does that mean the electorate wouldn’t have pushed progress? No. That’s an idiotic argument. The electorate pushes the social agenda of the nation and the electorate is gradually becoming less bigoted.
Where things have continued to get worse for EVERYONE is in the realm of economic disparity. People with money and power are not interested in social politics beyond using them to placate you or manipulate you. You get marriage equity to distract you from $$$.
Clinton is the candidate that wants to perpetuate that system.
A democracy is only as strong as its institutions. It isn’t totally implausible that a ‘conspiracy’ of judges could be ginned up, causing a couple of them to be arrested. And who is going to stand up and stop that? Protesters in their free speech kettle zones?
There really are a lot of points of failure in any functioning democracy that are exploitable by one or more sufficiently ruthless sociopaths.
It does not help to have a culture of intense triumphalism about just how splendiferous your freedoms are either. Because if you believe hard enough it can be very hard to notice when you become wrong.
It’s hard, being the one who feels they’re shattering someone’s idealism, knowing that it’s even harder for the other person. But ideals are one thing. Idealism is another.
Only the most precocious youth will understand this. For everyone else, it’s perhaps easier to explain in terms of what they know, like multiple-choice tests. Some multiple-choice tests instruct you to choose the correct answer. The harder ones, however, will instruct you to choose the best answer.
And that, like it or not, exemplifies many real-life choices—especially when it comes to politics.
We tried to tell you, or at least I did. Molly Ivins fought the good fight better than anyone. But it didn’t work, since the corporate media was too busy fawning over Bush’s beer-drinking-partner-worthiness while criticizing Gore’s aloofness in his brown suit. Jesus H was that a horror show.
I’ve never understood the hatred that some people have for Hillary Clinton. With Republicans it seems like something a religion professor once told me about cults, that they “didn’t need to have any clear conception of god, but they had to have a devil”-- it’s like a shark swimming, and if the GOP didn’t have someone to hate they would drown. They will hate whatever Democrat is in the White House, but with Hillary it’s like some kind of conservative sociopathic defect-- I had a neighbor who used to have her photo stuck on his dartboard all the time.
But this hatred for her from liberals is equally confusing. I too wanted Bernie to win, and I am disgusted by evidence the DNC pulled strings for her, but I still think she is a competent public official (at least compared to an awful lot of other politicians-- look at the GOP primaries.) I recognize her faults, but goddam if Trump’s faults don’t make her look like a Nobel Prize winner. I will have no problem voting for her.
Would liberals be so anti-Hillary if Bernie didn’t even run for President this year, and the choice was between her and a bunch of other typical white male, stuffed-shirt politicians?
When you grow up you learn the painful lesson that there are no moral choices that are black and white, that harm reduction is sometimes a better choice than demanding moral purity from people, that demanding perfection can create more damage than accepting a possibility that’s good enough, and that sometimes it’s your responsibility to make shitty choices (among many other moral challenges that make being an adult a center of angst). We don’t tell kids about this, they aren’t mature enough to process it, but it is part of being an adult, and we shouldn’t hold adults to the moral standards we teach kids since there’s a lot of moral reasoning that kids aren’t mature enough to be able to process.
I don’t think so, but that’s what dreaming for something better does - it makes you less satisfied with your current situation.
But why are people so mad at Clinton? I really don’t like Clinton, but I also hate pretty much everyone else in proportion to the power they have. People here hate Clinton because they are consistently anti-war, consistently anti-corporatism, consistently for equality. Lots of good reasons for thoughtful people with certain principles to dislike her.
But when I look at how much people in general dislike Clinton, yeah, it’s hugely about misogyny. I mean, if you hate Clinton but you don’t hate George W. Bush?
And? The draw parallels of that kind seems as silly to me as the tin foilers who think Obama will declare Martial Law and cancel the election.
Yeah, but theoretically couldn’t any president with a majority base in the legislature have done this in the past? I mean theoretically they could order a nuclear strike against Iran or NK too. Obama could be like, “Fuck it, I am going out with a bang! I know what my commemorative stamp will say now!” Hell we COULD just have a good ol’ fashioned Military Coup. But I don’t see those things as likely to happen.
I dunno. As awful as Trump is a person, and as unqualified as he is, I don’t buy the doomsday stuff. This goes the same with the crap I hear about Hillary. But it wouldn’t be an election cycle with out mass hysteria.
Well, whether you buy the doomsday stuff or not is a separate question. My point is that if/when a dictator does come along, the balance of powers isn’t going to protect the country. A dictator will arrive because a plurality of American citizens want that dictator.
Honestly, Kasich’s recent comments about being approached to be part of the Trump administration make me think that maybe Trump will just be a do-nothing president, which would be kind of a best-case scenario for a Trump presidency. America descending into isolationism isn’t immediately catastrophic for the rest of the world, although assuming it further depresses the economy in the short run, it might enable a more dangerous person with plans to get power after Trump (though “depressed economy letting a dangerous person get power” has pretty much been the slogan of America for a decade, so, no change there).
The real problem with Trump is that he simply wants to be a figurehead. He doesn’t actually care about any policies, or what happens to “other people” if he were to win. He’d simply “be president” and let someone else do the work.
Isolationism = no need to travel or talk to people over policy stuff
Don’t tax the rich = no need to meet/talk with people who could actually afford to meet/talk with you
All his general policy stuff = he has already said he just wants his VP to control domestic and international policy. He simply wants to be a personality. It’s surprisingly candid of him, since that’s truthfully all that he is. There’s no substance there.
The biggest risk with a Trump presidency is that we get a guy who doesn’t care about the country and the people within it. He’s running for president to “be president,” and that’s it.
And we’d have been a lot better off if the response was ‘try harder because evidence supports this’ instead of ‘let’s give up and give the insurance companies a guaranteed pot of money that should go to taking care of people’
You don’t have to use Weimar as example - a few hours ago the Polish parliament (with a majority of PiS members, currently the governing party) passed a bill that more or less paralyzes and disempowers the supreme court.
In march the same supreme court ordered that an earlier “reform” of the court is unconstitutional - the government decided to ignore the verdict.
