I’m not sure how you feel you haven’t been treated civilly or as an adult, or why you think your friend wouldn’t be. It seems most conversation has been pretty fact-based. If your friend had unfounded opinions, he’d likely get called out, with citations. That’s not incivility.
Maybe someone would show up and be “mean.” That’s not on everyone here, though they’d likely get called out for it.
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Close enough to reality. In fact, 45 restricted firearms more than Obama. Only two firearms laws passed Congress during Obama’s terms in office, and neither one tightened restrictions. The only thing he did was to require the Social Security Administration to pass information on mental illness to the FBI’s background check system. Meanwhile, 45 banned bump stocks.
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The Dems don’t need to extend a hand, their policies have always been clear, it’s just that politics get muddied by propagandists on the right who paint everything as ‘radical’ and ‘communist.’ Any reasonable conservative should have voted Biden at this point anyway.
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Um, so is proclaiming that ALL Democrats spend their time calling ALL republicans racist hicks? WTF?
That’s bullshit and you know it. We don’t stand for trollies and we’re generally strong in advocating for our positions here, but good faith arguments are met with good faith arguments, and when it’s not, people get their posts flagged and taken down.
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My father loves me more than life itself, he would absolutely take a bullet for me. He’s known me my whole life and loved my extremely dedicated Democratic grandmother, thought she was the greatest and credited her with always believing in him even after everything that happened between him and my mother.
Guess what, he still thinks Obama was Satan and generally demonizes the Democratic Party. I have heard him defend some Louisiana Democratic politicians but they were the extremely corrupt ones I hate the most.
I would be very afraid that in a fascist take over he would end up reporting me to the authorities convinced they were going to “save me from myself”
I don’t trust my dad at all despite how much I believe he loves me.
How would a new friend who votes for Democrats help him, he already has a number of them? Or a documentary you couldn’t pay him to watch?
How would Republican friends help me? I’ve had them but I generally stop talking to them when they defend extrajudicial murders or when they start spouting race realist theory. Or they drift left and we stay friends. I don’t need a documentary to tell me they are human, I’m well aware that they are just folks as varied as any group of folks.
The policies of the Republic party are very bad though. Humanizing their voters doesn’t reduce the harm of those policies. I’m not going to pretend those policies aren’t heinous to protect the feelings of people who vote for them.
And I dislike most Democratic policies as well because they are not far left enough. People who criticize them from the right want them to get more harmful to the general public. They are criticizing them for not hurting people enough.
My Dad has broken his back, literally, doing physical labor all his life. It will not recover at his age. And he keeps supporting the people who want to cut the benefits that he, my mother, my brother, and a number of their friends depend on for basic support and health care. When ever the government denies him money or health care it’s Obama’s fault.
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My father was a life long Republican of the fiscal conservative/social liberal type. Something easy to do in suburban Northeast. Something you could have gotten by with up to GWB.
Being a civil servant he never particularly cared (or bothered to learn) about healthcare issues or corporate excess. It never affected him.
It wasn’t until Trump started openly supporting neo Nazis that made him change his mind. (My family is mixed in ways that are unappealing to bigots of various stripes). It was getting personal.
Added to that the mishandling of the Covid plague. My mother has COPD making her extra vulnerable to it.
The “I’ve got mine” narrative couldn’t keep going in light of concentration camps for kids, spreading plague and palling around people who would gladly kill his family in the name of social purity. It was the last straw. He was enthusiastic about getting rid of Trump.
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Wow, you father is one of the almost-mythical republicans with both a conscience and the integrity to follow it.
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Basically all of Oregon is rural, except maybe downtown Portland
The intersection I live on has an elementary school on one side and a gravel road on the other
Our neighbors raise chickens
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He was always more of a “I’ve got mine, F you” type. But now that is inexorably linked to the “white power” types. It’s more personal than conscience.
Remember, in addition to being a flaming bigot, Trump considers competent, educated civil servants who take professional ethical duties seriously, “The Deep State”, the enemy. People like my parents.
Trump and his cronies endanger them in ways no prior Republicans have. Plus the whole bigots Trump loves would probably want to murder the the entire family.
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Trump is such a piece of shit, in so many different ways
Gee, four more years of literal Nazis ignoring a literal pandemic, led by the guy who said he was gonna bring back torture? Also some of them are Russian spies? THIS SHOULD NOT BE A HARD DECISION
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Because America may have been founded on stolen land and stolen labor, with a democracy weighted to make sure the slave states had their say,
And when the slaves were freed one of the world’s longest running terrorist organizations may have been founded to keep those people in their place, supported by men like the current president’s father,
And segregation may have ended only half a century ago,
And the prisons may still be crowded with black people, and cops may shoot them without even a semblance of a cause so often it’s hardly even news unless there’s a running camera,
And the Natives may still never see their treaties properly honored, but for instance will have their land casually taken for pipelines and have dogs sent at them should they protest,
And when a hurricane hits, you may be able to guess with great accuracy how much support the government will give based on whether it is primarily whites or blacks or Hispanics it lands on,
And a presidential candidate may run on a platform of little more than building a wall to keep the Mexicans out of his country, calling them criminals and animals, and win,
And there may be concentration camps where the children of Hispanic people are taken from their parents and forgotten, kept in conditions unsuitable for animals even before the cameras were removed,
And so many other things I could say of that nature,
But how dare anyone ever suggest that racism is an important factor in American politics. Clearly saying so makes you the bad guy, and is the real cause of all the division in the country.
For what is there that could possibly earn someone such cruelty as hearing that word?
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Or little things like putting schools right next to ammonium nitrate fertilizer plants. The “shed” thing is just another example of how the Republicans just say things, without them really meaning what they seem to say, if they mean anything at all.
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Like all the gun control arguments in this thread, that’s highly debatable, and I think outright wrong. But I’m not the one to make that argument. Would be interesting to see it refuted by someone knowledgeable about the issue though! And those people are plentiful if you’d like to hear their perspective. I’m sure I could provide a few in the interests of cultural exchange.
Well let’s see. For starters I can’t actually post to this discussion freely, most of my posts are held for moderation. They’ve all been approved without edits, but always after several hours. I’m not complaining that the delay is long, I know it’s a weekend and probably staffed by volunteers, but I’m wondering why my posts are being held at all. Sure looks like suppressing a dissenting voice to me. But maybe I’m being paranoid. @orenwolf, are the posts from any other posters in this discussion being held?
Posts held for moderation have 100% to do with content and 0% to do with users. We approve them as quickly as possible and there will be false positives from time to time. Sensitive topics are more likely to be held.
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Can you point to a single prominent member of the Republican Party or the NRA who publicly spoke up on behalf of Philando Castile or Jemel Robertson or Emantic Bradford Jr. or any other Black man killed for legally possessing a firearm?
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Let’s go back to 1967, when the GOP of your state (led by Ronald Reagan) was perfectly happy to go along with the Second Amendment as (mis)interpreted by the NRA (a decade pre-coup, but still seemingly obstinate in that). But wait, what’s that, Black people walking around with weapons claiming self-defense from the government, you say?
Usually, they don’t make the double standard @ClutchLinkey described so obvious, but it’s been there since at least the days of Reconstruction (when the Dems were the party of white supremacy) right through the shift to the Southern Strategy and still present today if you’re actually willing to look.
When I responded to you yesterday quoting a term that auto-holds comments (“L-bt-ards”, I assume) my comment was held. So yes, you’re being paranoid. Sort of like the rural GOP voters who’ve been convinced that the libruls are coming to get their gunz.
[not that your baseless claims of persecution by the mods and the community here in response to “unpopular” views are anything new]
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I haven’t believed that since 2016. When that many people vote for someone who’s famous mainly for being a grifter there’s something very wrong with at least a quarter of the electorate. Their behaviour over intervening four years have only confirmed the perception.
It’s another BS narrative. It’s not like county officials are driving around and risking being shot for trespassing looking for shed violations. 9 times out of 10, a (probably equally conservative) neighbour with a grudge noticed and called the inspectors, who are doing their job under the law – a law that, for some reason, has not been abolished by the local GOP officials elected by these freedom-loving rural folk.
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Saying something is debatable isn’t the same as actually debating it. If you can’t actually bring any facts to bear, you’re basically just saying you don’t like the facts that have been presented and choose to ignore reality. I was vague in my original post, but @gracchus and @Brainspore have filled in the details. I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that you are not here in good faith…
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The largest issue here is that the GOP has done a master level of PR to make the Democratic party look like the second coming of Satan. Even when a Democratic candidate talks farm politics to the T the rural voters will largely assume they’re lying even if their track record is more friendly to rural and farm voters. This has been one thing the Democratic party has failed hard on for decades. Hell, look at how Hillary Clinton’s reputation has been poisoned since she was the first lady (Limbaugh did a huge number on her). This stuff will take years to unwind but the first step for the Democratic party is to stop sucking up to the technocratic elite in the big cities. The whole “New Democrat” line of Raum Emmanuel and company needs to be dropped hard but I don’t seeing that happening anytime soon.
As for the Republicans changing, that too has a slim chance of happening. Most likely the GOP will eventually fragment and I think we’re already seeing it now with many Never Trumpers actually abandoning their party as we speak. But this kind of deterioration is not safe either. If you think Trump was bad wait until we get a fascist bonafide in Congress. I’m serious, that’s the likely next step.
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You raise a point that’s been bothering me for decades. We’ve repeatedly seen elected members of the GOP creating problems so they can blame the results on the opposition, complain about the measures needed to correct them, and put themselves back in power just in time to take credit for resolving them. Is there a term for political Munchausen syndrome by proxy?
I lost all respect for a former GOP governor of my state because of that terrible tactic. He seemed to be an upstanding, fiscally responsible public servant concerned for the welfare of his constituents during two terms in office. Toward the end of his second term, it became clear that the Democratic challenger was doing better in the polls that the person chosen by his party to succeed him. So, they started spending like crazy - turning a budget surplus into a huge deficit.
The new Democratic governor was forced to balance the budget by law, and after making cuts and raising taxes members of the GOP immediately started using their old “tax and spend liberal” cries. This led to the rise of the Tea Party in my state, and I cannot help but notice how quiet those hypocrites have been since 2016. They only seem to believe budgets, spending, and deficits are a problem when “the other side” is in office.
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