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Gumball Gumption posted:I honestly agree with all of that but this is also the thread where I'm repeatedly told the voters are to blame. Getting pissy at the people bailing on the Titanic is totally true and we love blaming them when they're faceless but hate it when someone points at us and points out we're also on the Titanic. this is voter fragility. criticizing voters is not criticizing you. what a terrible snipe. 
Heck Yes! Loam! fucked around with this message at 19:36 on May 3, 2022 |
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May 3, 2022 19:15
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The Shortest Path posted:Trump tried to have all of his political opposition killed via lynch mob and would have succeeded if he and his weren't astronomically incompetent. Pretending that the head of the executive branch of the government can't get some shady poo poo done via the CIA or whatever when they regularly do that kind of poo poo overseas with impunity is ridiculous. Just so you're ready, the counter-argument will be something similar to: "If Democrats effectively wield power, that makes them authoritarians and as bad as Trump; and the more effectiver they are the Trumpier it is" The liberal apparatus believes so strongly in the status quo that they won't wield power even in defense of their own skin. https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1519417080101101569?s=20&t=COXvVKAinbtP_oLYW9yisA (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 3, 2022 19:15
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Having grown up during the Cold War, the initial fight against pollution, the Reagan era, AIDS... I'm accustomed to feeling helpless. I'm accustomed to watching the system fail the vast majority of us. Accustomed to the endless vile propaganda, the glee of the worst people as they see suffering, pain and death spread across the land. I didn't think that things would get this bad again in my lifetime. It seems that every big problem, every fight is all happening at once, again, and the system rolls along, crushing most of us under the wheels. We gnaw upon one another because we are the only ones who will listen. The only ones who care.
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May 3, 2022 19:15
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TyrantWD posted:Again with the comic book thinking. Even Trump knew the most the president could do to a senator who defied him is send angry tweets. what did Joe Biden do to the man who got in a car crash with his wife. sure, the story was a lie. but he hounded that man with it until he took his own life, and then he proceeded to do a happy little dance on his grave. when you actually hurt Joe Biden, he will go to great lengths to hurt you back. meanwhile, he has given Joe Manchin everything he asked for, and Joe Manchin's response has been 'welp, still not giving you poo poo buddy.' Joe Biden is a man who is willing to go to great lengths to accomplish his goals. abortion rights are not among them.
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May 3, 2022 19:16
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Blue states like Colorado have already passed laws enshrining abortion rights into law and will act as havens for red states around them. I suspect some of them would defy a federal ban. Colorado has a precedent of that at least with weed. Nationally it is very unclear what path there is forward when the filibuster is in place. So in the national level, you agree the democrats have no plan to protect abortion rights then. Because again even if the democrats managed to get a filibuster proof majority, that means they are getting more “moderate” dem senators to make those numbers, and the democrats are officially a big tent party on abortion rights. Meanwhile,republicans are able to have substantial political power, even in purple and some blue states, despite not being a big tent party on abortion rights.
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May 3, 2022 19:17
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This man and his people are completely unfit for this moment https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1521515442262708226?s=21&t=7EirwaBb6GGGngSqIGHzmw
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May 3, 2022 19:17
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Best Friends posted:Okay, so elections have consequences and this is all “fair”. For argument’s sake I’ll take that as a given. What I am not hearing from anyone is what the electoral path forward is for protecting abortion rights, when a senator or representative is allowed to be a democrat in good standing while being pro life. same as it was for kids in cages. 'Welp, real shame that happened, guess you gotta live with it, maybe if you vote extra hard we might do something to stop them from doing the next thing.'
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May 3, 2022 19:18
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Nucleic Acids posted:People try to primary them, and then the Democrats circle the wagons to protect the incumbents. They care more about stymying the left than they do defeating the Republicans. Marie Newman is instructive here. She primaried Dan Lipinsiki, who was one of the most pro-life dems, and because of that she was redistricted into a seat she likely will lose in the new Illinois gerrymander. The dems care more for protecting incumbents and punishing primary challenges than they care about defending abortion.
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May 3, 2022 19:19
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BiggerBoat posted:I thought about this too but I doubt it. Isn't Clarence Thomas' wife white for one thing? At the same time killing off Loving will not snap the entire nation into a ban, it will just allow states to put anti race mixing laws back into place. Most of the nation got rid of them before Loving happened, it was the broad southeast that still had them on the books when the ruling came down. I believe that those laws have since been removed in all states but I could be wrong. The key there is that state politics are able to go way more insane than federal ones. A law could say that they are banning them "because of the children" and there is a chance it would actually pass in some states. As a person in a relationship that falls under Loving I'm certainly not comfortable with any contingency. If it dies there is a good chance I'll try to get Canadian citizenship.
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May 3, 2022 19:19
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Bishyaler posted:Just so you're ready, the counter-argument will be something similar to: "If Democrats effectively wield power, that makes them authoritarians and as bad as Trump; and the more effectiver they are the Trumpier it is" Yeah it sucks rear end. We are effectively at war with people in our own country who want us all dead. Absolutely loving nothing should be off the table, and yet Democratic leadership is ineffectual and useless and unwilling to do diddly squat to protect their constituents from the people trying to kill them.
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May 3, 2022 19:19
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Gumball Gumption posted:I honestly agree with all of that but this is also the thread where I'm repeatedly told the voters are to blame. Maybe engage with posts instead of "the thread" and whatever? I don't see how you get from A to B with "I don't like how people feel about voting" to "if you're not risking your job to yell at coworkers about abortion you are wasting your life"
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May 3, 2022 19:20
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selec posted:This man and his people are completely unfit for this moment joe biden fuckin sucks
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May 3, 2022 19:22
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The Shortest Path posted:Yeah it sucks rear end. We are effectively at war with people in our own country who want us all dead. Absolutely loving nothing should be off the table, and yet Democratic leadership is ineffectual and useless and unwilling to do diddly squat to protect their constituents from the people trying to kill them. Agreed. Democrats are going to get us into a civil war with conservatives because they failed to internalize some very basic Paradox of Tolerance concepts.
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May 3, 2022 19:23
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whiskey patrol posted:Marie Newman is instructive here. She primaried Dan Lipinsiki, who was one of the most pro-life dems, and because of that she was redistricted into a seat she likely will lose in the new Illinois gerrymander. The dems care more for protecting incumbents and punishing primary challenges than they care about defending abortion. Not only that, but she was redistricted into having to face off another lefty Dem, Chuy Garcia, so the U.S. House is guaranteed to have one less lefty Dem after November.
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May 3, 2022 19:24
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:chiming in to remind you that yes, by the numbers, their actions were in fact not aligned with what the people who voted for them wanted them to do If a senator is doing things that their constituents don't want, voters in their state could kick them out. Heck, a lot of them were up for re-election since confirming the Trump judges and won. Best Friends posted:Okay, so elections have consequences and this is all “fair”. For argument’s sake I’ll take that as a given. What I am not hearing from anyone is what the electoral path forward is for protecting abortion rights, when a senator or representative is allowed to be a democrat in good standing while being pro life. The Democrats have to some how get to 54-55 votes to nuke the filibuster with some allowance for people who won't go along with it, or you have to find 60 votes in the Senate. So functionally nothing can be done.That is what elections have consequences mean. A bunch of people voted for Brexit viewing it as a protest vote, but they can't undo that either. Maybe in a generation or two, if the country still exists and is functioning, you will see abortion rights become a bipartisan thing, and passed with 60 votes, but it is genuinely more likely that the world order collapses due to climate change induced conflict before anything can be done.
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May 3, 2022 19:26
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TyrantWD posted:If a senator is doing things that their constituents don't want, voters in their state could kick them out. Heck, a lot of them were up for re-election since confirming the Trump judges and won. this presumes the existence of another candidate on the ballot who does not share that position, an assumption that, again, can be shown empirically to be incorrect. it is tempting to tear at your breast and blame the perfidious voters, for failing to do what needed to be done. the Democrats had fifty years to codify this, and deliberately chose not to, on the grounds they did not want to. pretending that if only the people had been a little more virtuous this outcome could have been avoided serves, exclusively, to let the people who are happily watching it happen from their position in full control of the executive and legislative branches off the hook.
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May 3, 2022 19:30
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Eiba posted:I also feel have entered an argument I hadn't fully read or appreciated. quote:It is entirely an unprovable hypothetical, but do you really think Clinton would have lost if all the folks who voted for Stein or stayed home knew that Roe v Wade was actually going to be overturned if they didn't vote for Clinton? The Democrats are more resistant to being primaried from the left than they are to anything the Republicans want. It's a familiar cycle: when they win elections, they claim they don't need the Left. When they lose, they blame the Left. "The Left" can be defined as a tiny minority of Internet nerds not worth paying attention to, or anyone to the left of the Democratic candidate, depending on what media narrative the Party leadership (and their weird social media surrogates) is going with today. The Party's message to the Left--and here, I'm defining the Left as anyone who's not satisfied with Democratic candidates because they think those candidates are too conservative--is a very clear one: "We hate you. You're a bad person and you disgust us. Your policy goals are the selfish whims of a spoiled child. All of the Party's failures are your fault. We will never let you have any power or influence in this Party. Nonetheless, we expect you to vote for us. Because if you don't, you're a bad person. Your political behaviour should be driven entirely by the desire for our approval, even though we will always despise you and blame you for everything anyway." And the logic behind this is that the Democratic Party represents, and is the only effective way to represent, the interests of the most vulnerable people in society. People, especially young people, find that harder and harder to believe. We're told that electing more Democrats is a prerequisite to any kind of leftward movement, but the Party leaders have shown that they'll use every scrap of power we give them to, first and foremost, shore up the center-right establishment and disparage the Left. So no, we can't vote our way out of this, because the "left-wing" Party in our two-party system is primarily concerned with disciplining its own left wing and manage expectations downward. If you think the Democratic primary process in 2016 or 2020 was in any way fair, we just don't see reality the same way and I don't think there's anything for us to discuss.
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May 3, 2022 19:33
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https://twitter.com/spmaloney/status/1521476369603080193?s=21&t=EjzIavKMipUKjSpdeV4yiA Yeah, calling your potential voters stupid because they want you to do something substantive after delivering the democrats the senate, Congress, and the White House sure is a smart move
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May 3, 2022 19:33
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My point is that as long as the democrats are a big tent party on abortion rights, it’s actually impossible for dems to legislatively protect abortion rights on a national level. All those incremental senators and representatives you need will skew increasingly conservative and conservative dems are explicitly allowed to be against abortion rights while retaining party support. If you got to 60 votes, darn, 12 of these votes are anti abortion. You get to 72, darn, now about 20 are anti abortion. The more votes you need the more conservative those votes will be, and the more conservative the dem, the more against abortion rights the dem. Zenos succ The problem is that the dems are a big tent party on abortion. So long as they are, voting blue is not a vote to affirmatively protect abortion rights.
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May 3, 2022 19:34
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theCalamity posted:https://twitter.com/spmaloney/status/1521476369603080193?s=21&t=EjzIavKMipUKjSpdeV4yiA Honestly at this point I am just gonna assume that any elected official who is telling people that if they want this fixed they gotta go out and vote, doesn't actually wanna fix it. Especially considering how the midterms are likely gonna follow the usual trend and go poorly for the party in power.
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May 3, 2022 19:37
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Honest question: If a near future republican president has the same makeup of the house/senate as Biden does just flipped R/D then wouldn't they just kill the filibuster without any hesitation?
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May 3, 2022 19:37
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Charliegrs posted:Honest question: If a near future republican president has the same makeup of the house/senate as Biden does just flipped R/D then wouldn't they just kill the filibuster without any hesitation? Depends on what they would be killing it for.
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May 3, 2022 19:38
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theCalamity posted:https://twitter.com/spmaloney/status/1521476369603080193?s=21&t=EjzIavKMipUKjSpdeV4yiA The voters are stupid if they think anything substantive can be done with 50 senators, when 1 of them in Manchin.
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May 3, 2022 19:38
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https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill/status/1521481078376181760?s=20&t=4853LdjjFEPbYTYL-_pJnQ This is accurate.
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May 3, 2022 19:39
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Best Friends posted:My point is that as long as the democrats are a big tent party on abortion rights, it’s actually impossible for dems to legislatively protect abortion rights on a national level. All those incremental senators and representatives you need will skew increasingly conservative and conservative dems are explicitly allowed to be against abortion rights while retaining party support. If you got to 60 votes, darn, 12 of these votes are anti abortion. You get to 72, darn, now about 20 are anti abortion. The more votes you need the more conservative those votes will be, and the more conservative the dem, the more against abortion rights the dem. its a weird echo of the failure of reconstruction; the Republicans theoretically were the party of black rights, but they didn't actually give a poo poo in any meaningful sense. the party's goals lay elsewhere. meanwhile, the Democrats were unequivocally, frothing-at-the mouth opposed to them. and so, Jim Crow was born, from the hatred of one party and the half-hearted unwillingness to oppose that hatred of the other. from the Party of Women to the Party of 'listen, Jack, what do you expect me to do about abortion' in six short years. grim.
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May 3, 2022 19:42
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TyrantWD posted:The voters are stupid if they think anything substantive can be done with 50 senators, when 1 of them in Manchin. Yeah no. The voters may be ignorant but they aren’t stupid to think that the party that bills itself as the protector of civil rights could do stuff with 50 senators. The Dems control the senate. That’s a fact.
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May 3, 2022 19:44
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Charliegrs posted:Honest question: If a near future republican president has the same makeup of the house/senate as Biden does just flipped R/D then wouldn't they just kill the filibuster without any hesitation? they already did, it's why the Supreme Court looks like it does today
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May 3, 2022 19:45
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selec posted:This man and his people are completely unfit for this moment I especially love how the only coherent thought that emerges from that rambling is talking about how much abortion is too much
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May 3, 2022 19:48
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theCalamity posted:Yeah no. The voters may be ignorant but they aren’t stupid to think that the party that bills itself as the protector of civil rights could do stuff with 50 senators. The Dems control the senate. That’s a fact. The Democrats can't even protect their own seats because Manchin doesn't allow them to pass their agenda. Do you really think they have the power to protect others?
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May 3, 2022 19:49
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TyrantWD posted:Again with the comic book thinking. Even Trump knew the most the president could do to a senator who defied him is send angry tweets. Asking a president to use the bully pulpit is not "comic book thinking." (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 3, 2022 19:49
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Of course elections have consequences and those consequences have metastasized into a status quo where progressive goals are impossible electorally for generations.
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May 3, 2022 19:52
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TyrantWD posted:The Democrats can't even protect their own seats because Manchin doesn't allow them to pass their agenda. Do you really think they have the power to protect others? If they don’t have the power to protect others then what’s the point of voting for them?
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May 3, 2022 19:52
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theCalamity posted:Yeah no. The voters may be ignorant but they aren’t stupid to think that the party that bills itself as the protector of civil rights could do stuff with 50 senators. The Dems control the senate. That’s a fact. No matter how many times you declare it "a fact", the political reality stays the same. You're arguing about how things 'should' be, rather than looking at how things are, and going from there.
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May 3, 2022 19:52
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selec posted:I am astonished that we can single out voters, the people with the least amount of power in the situation as individuals, over much more powerful individuals. If someone only even notices politics once every four years, and just pulls the lever for whoever they see the most ads for, it's probably pretty fair to say that they don't care very much about abortion. Talking about the power of individuals is completely missing the point of politics in a country with 300+ million people and democratic governance. It's not about individuals at all, it's about movements. It's about mobilizing large numbers of people. I can't give any credit to a "coherent analysis of power" that doesn't account for that. In fact, hyperfocusing on individuals without accounting for larger movements and trends is a great way to be completely wrong about stuff. Powerful individuals are only powerful because the masses allow them to be. Best Friends posted:But that’s not happening, so those assumptions do not hold. You aren’t allowed to be a republican senator if you’re pro choice. You are allowed to be a democratic senator if you’re not pro choice. It's clearly allowed, since the GOP has a couple of pro-choice senators. Murkowski and Collins have even co-sponsored a bill to codify Roe into law, though I'll admit I didn't look closely at the text of their bill to see if there were any poison pills. And actually, they announced that bill at the end of February - two weeks after the date on that draft opinion. Wonder if they had advance warning.
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May 3, 2022 19:53
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The problem with blaming voters is that it's the ultimate copout. It's true in an extremely narrow and pointless sense. Yes, if 100% of eligible Americans voted the way I think they should vote, bad people would be out of power and good legislation would get passed. But so what? No individual or group of people in power has the ability to do that. It's the same as when conservative politicians of any stripe say "We don't need a policy to address this problem, people should just do the right thing." In the meantime, we're electing politicians in the hopes that they'll fight the Right, and they're failing if they tried at all. And we're supposed to hold "the voters" responsible and not Democratic leadership? Instead of coming to the conclusion that maybe the people we vote for don't actually work for us, even if "the voters" could change that if "the voters" all magically acted in unison. No individual can make a bloc of voters in WV do anything, but the Party leaders have tools at their disposal which I don't have. If bothering them doesn't do anything, if criticizing them is deemed crazy and foolish and "toxic," what is freaking out at random people on social media supposed to accomplish?
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May 3, 2022 19:53
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:they already did, it's why the Supreme Court looks like it does today That was a filibuster for judicial appointments. I'm talking about a filibuster for legislation which is what some Dems (but not enough) have wanted to get rid of so they can pass literally anything. What I'm wondering is if a slim republican majority would abolish it without hesitation. Because if that's the case then I don't know why any Dems are currently afraid of getting rid of it since their main point of contention seems to be "Well imagine what would happen if the Republicans have the majority again someday without a filibuster!" But it's like, who cares they will probably get rid of it anyway if they are in the same situation? Might as well get rid of it now while you can actually do some good?
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May 3, 2022 19:53
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Majorian posted:Asking a president to use the bully pulpit is not "comic book thinking." Making someone disappear in the night is not using the bully pulpit, which is what TyrantWD was responding to. selec posted:This man and his people are completely unfit for this moment I got to the part where he started invoking religion in relation to Roe and had to turn it off out of sheer embarrassment. What a loving clown. Also he starts off saying the quoted bit in the tweet which is like, if not now then when you dumb motherfucker?
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May 3, 2022 19:54
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How are u posted:No matter how many times you declare it "a fact", the political reality stays the same. You're arguing about how things 'should' be, rather than looking at how things are, and going from there. Last I checked, the Democrats are in control of the senate. The majority leader is Schumer. They run the committees. They have the senate. They have the power.
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May 3, 2022 19:55
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theCalamity posted:If they don’t have the power to protect others then what’s the point of voting for them? The hope that voting them will eventually lead to a situation where they do have power to protect others and lack of an alternative.
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May 3, 2022 19:55
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Professor Beetus posted:Making someone disappear in the night is not using the bully pulpit, which is what TyrantWD was responding to. Tell that to Vince Foster
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