General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)

lrdgck

This is unrelated, but after reading the "running against anti-gay discrimination" part, I needed a second to figure out whether he's against gay bashing, or against the opposition to gay bashing.

Apart from that, interesting stuff.

Bee

Saw this, thought of you guys.

glennmagusharvey

So apparently there's something about Jeb Bush claiming that his comment
about "anchor babies" refers not to Hispanics but rather to Asians.

I hate to break it to you, Jeb, but you're still being an offensive jerk.

Bee

Because apparently it's only racist if you hate Asians.

Wait, what?

glennmagusharvey

2:10 PM PT (Stephen Wolf): Gerrymandering:
Normally gerrymandering in a medium-sized town that doesn't even
pertain to city council elections would be too down-in-the-weeds, but this story from the Columbia Tribune
is too funny to ignore. Self-interested business owners successfully
petitioned the Columbia, Missouri, city council to create a local
Community Improvement District, which would have the authority to impose
a half-cent sales tax increase with voter approval. However, the
district lines were drawn in a manner that attempted to avoid containing
any eligible voters, meaning that property-owners themselves would get
to decide on the sales tax increase as a way to avoid further property
taxes to pay for improvements.

Unfortunately for them, things didn't exactly go according to plan.
It soon became known that a single voter, University of Missouri student
Jen Henderson, was registered to vote in the new CID. That means that
she alone will get to decide whether or not to approve the sales tax
increase. The CID has already gone into debt to finance planned
improvements and was counting on the increased revenue from the sales
tax increase.

Predictably, Henderson is not pleased with how manipulative this
process has been. She was even asked to de-register so that the vote
would revert to property owners. While Henderson hasn't publicly stated
which way she plans to vote, she sounded skeptical of the proposed sales
tax increase and rightfully pointed out how it is regressive in nature
while the benefits accrue mainly to incumbent businesses.

In a delicious twist of irony, if Henderson votes against the sales
tax increase or the vote is called off entirely, the only way for the
CID to pay off its debts will be to levy further taxes on property,
which is exactly what these businesses were trying to avoid. Most of
the time gerrymandering is successful and unfair, but instances like
this show it can sometimes backfire spectacularly.

...heh.

Bee

NICE

lrdgck

This is pretty much the Olsen's Gang of political machinations.

glennmagusharvey

Let's take a trip back in time for a bit.

Sooners is the name given to settlers from the Southern United States who entered the Unassigned Lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma before President Grover Cleveland officially proclaimed them open to settlement on March 2, 1889 with the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889.
The name derived from the "sooner clause" of the act, which stated that
anyone who entered and occupied the land prior to the opening time
would be denied the right to claim land.^[1]

Obnoxiously stupid land-claiming policy was obnoxiously stupid.

Bee

It always bugged me that Oklahoma named their football team after the Sooners.  Like, you thought Redskins was bad?  This team named themselves after a group of people who were so eager to displace natives that they didn't even wait for the racist government to let them.  It's like naming yourselves the Atlanta Klansmen or something.

lrdgck

Nah. Oklahoma is still in large part Cherokee, right? (Jackson didn't bother to kill all of them.) You name your team a derogatory term for us? So we'll name ours a derogatory term for you, dicks. Oklahoma, dunno, Crackers would be better but eh, close enough.

glennmagusharvey

lrdgck wrote: »

Nah. Oklahoma is still in large part Cherokee, right? (Jackson didn't bother to kill all of them.) You name your team a derogatory term for us? So we'll name ours a derogatory term for you, dicks. Oklahoma, dunno, Crackers would be better but eh, close enough.

Oklahoma racial breakdown of population

[hide]Racial composition	1970[75]	1990[75]	2000[76]	2010[77]
White	89.1%	82.1%	76.2%	72.2%
Native	3.8%	8.0%	7.9%	8.6%
Black	6.7%	7.4%	7.6%	7.4%
Asian	0.1%	1.1%	1.4%	1.7%
Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander	–	–	0.1%	0.1%
Other race	0.2%	1.3%	2.4%	4.1%
Two or more races	–	–	4.5%	5.9%

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma

The total population is about 3.8 million; the Native American population is about 395,000.

Blueeyedrat

It's like naming yourselves the Atlanta Klansmen or something.

Reminds me of an anecdote from one of the universities in my area; their team name is the Clan, and once or twice they received an uncomfortably warm reception when they traveled southeast for a tournament.

KilgoreTrout

This isn't election-related, really, but it seems like this U.S. politics thread is the best place to post it.

I had been pondering this a couple of days ago and began writing a post, but had trouble articulating my thoughts. Hopefully I'll have better luck now.

Okay: U.S. foreign policy.

For the longest time, regardless of who has been in the White House or in Congress, the United States has gotten involved in a lot of...I don't want to say disputes because it's more than just that, but the U.S. just gets involved in a lot of things around the world, and a lot of the time that involvement has been military in nature.

The Iraq War is probably the most infamous example of this. The thing that occurred to me recently is that if you just look at the amount of civilian lives lost in any given conflict over the last few decades, most of the other wars--the ones that some people look back on and think "Oh, that wasn't so bad. And what's more, we stopped bad people who needed to be stopped, unlike in Iraq in 2003!"--have equally horrifying civilian body counts. The Gulf War, for example, resulted in the deaths of anywhere from 100 000 to 200 000 Iraqi civilians according to this BBC story. But when I was growing up during the time it was happening and in the aftermath, nobody talked about that, at all. All that I heard was, to paraphrase, "Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because he is a megalomaniac. We had to stop him because you can't just go around invading other countries whenever you feel like it. We beat him and we hardly lost anybody doing it, so it was a victory for the forces of good!"

These days I know better than to believe stuff like that. There's no such thing as a war that doesn't kill civilians. So every time the U.S. or another country uses its military to solve a real or perceived problem, the decision-makers have decided that the inevitable deaths of civilians on the other side are worth it.

Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama have all decided killing civilians was worth it at different times.

Right now, the U.S. is still in the process of fighting its "war on terror". Using drones reduces the risk to U.S. soldiers, true, but U.S. soldiers are not the only people whose lives matter. People are still dying, a great many of whom have committed no crime. It's "collateral damage" when a wedding party is slaughtered (to use one of the more well-known examples), and the U.S. goes "Oops, our bad, we'll try to be more careful in the future, promise."

But they aren't more careful. It just keeps on happening.

And THAT is why I believe there is so much anti-American sentiment and why there are so many people out there who are not only willing, but eager, to step up and take the places of dead members of al-Qaeda or dead ISIS members or whoever. If, in the process of hutning down every last terrorist, you kill innocent people, then the survivors will hate you for doing that and some of them will want to fight you and get revenge, which creates more terrorists, which means more people for you to kill if your policy is "kill all the terrorists", which means more innocents will die at your hands, which means more survivors will want revenge, which creates more terrorists, and on and on and on ad nauseum.

I started to write about America's habit of often jumping into wars it hadn't previously been involved in and how that probably made a lot of people hate America as well, but I can't think of a good way of going into that in detail or while using the right words. It doesn't help that I don't know a ton about all of the conflicts America got involved in and the rationales for each one.

At this point I'm thinking that America ought to adopt a more isolationist foreign policy. I don't mean "Ignore absolutely everything happening in the world and do absolutely nothing about anything, ever", but more like "Cut back on military spending, keep the military at home unless it is ABSOLUTELY 100% NECESSARY TO THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNITED STATES somehow, don't take sides in disputes between anybody if that isn't absolutely 100% necessary to the survival of the United States somehow, and basically mind your own business while keeping your nose out of everybody else's."

It's just...it seems like military intervention usually does more harm than good. It either fails to fix the problem, or it creates a whole new problem--possibly a worse problem--in the process of fixing the initial one. Obviously you can point to World War II as an example of the military actually accomplishing a lot of good by stopping Hitler, but I think WWII was the exception. Since the end of WWII, have the stakes every been anywhere remotely near as high as they were back then? Has the fate of an entire continent and possibly the entire world ever hung in the balance since then?

Anyway, I guess I'm done. I think America has a big hammer and treats far too many problems like nails. It's upsetting, depressing, frustrating, and just generally makes me feel like crap whenever I spend too much time thinking about it or reading about the results of it.

Noimporta

The total population is about 3.8 million; the Native American population is about 395,000.

That jump from 1970 to 1990...

fourteenwings

Has the fate of an entire continent and possibly the entire world ever hung in the balance since then?

Probably not, and I don't think it'd be easy to recreate that scenario (in broad terms) now because every country's concerns seem to have solidified (well aside from the U.S. obviously) and that means a lot of social antipathy (if we talk about the big powers, it's obvious from the upheaval in South America and the Middle East is still very much alive but they don't have the resources).

I think America has a big hammer and treats far too many problems like nails.

To build on your WWII thing; a bunch of the historians I've read are of the line that once America proved it's "might" in WWII it thought of itself as a beacon to the world and for a while because of it's economic prowess it was seen as such as well. Of course, now the world is different, but America still doesn't let go.

The latest economic meltdown might stem from China, cementing it's status as usurping the U.S. in terms of being the largest functional economy (of course, China's market will always lag behind but even there I'd bet the real functional market hub is London no matter how many times Wall Street is used in every single sentence related to markets).

But now there is a massive industry that has it's claws very deep in the American system (sorry really long documentary I know) overall and war is like, insanely wonderful PR for some unknown reason. And obviously, the PR line remains that America is our overlord (it's entirely possible that if enough records from this era were lost the people of the future would think exactly that).

It either fails to fix the problem, or it creates a whole new problem

The thing is that military forces are not equipped to create or stabilize states (for whatever reason), they're based entirely on how equipped and skilled they are at combat so for them it's like a video game; you defeat the main boss, you leave because everything's fixed. The logic being that if something else pops up you just missed the actual main boss last time.

It's much harder to bring warring factions to sit together and talk than to pick the side you like least and kill them all, but that just means now you've opened the stage for the side you liked to fragment even further since all you've ever shown them is extremism.

glennmagusharvey

Do remember also that there's the problem that once the U.S. became a superpower -- and especially after a few such "interventions" -- there are some people abroad who practically expect the U.S. to help them out when they get into binds.  See, for example, Libyans and Syrians openly appealing for U.S. military assistance in their uprisings (early on, at least, in the case of Syria) against their governments.

Furthermore, the U.S. has a number of existing agreements with various countries for military defense and/or to help preserve some sort of balance of power (regardless of whether said balance is misguided).  Even if the U.S. stops making new agreements today, existing arrangements will still persist.  Now, some of them are relatively noncontroversial (e.g. with Costa Rica), but some have larger and possibly more controversial implications (e.g. membership in NATO).

It could be nice to just become isolationist, but then you'd have the people who argue that the U.S. with its military and financial resources should be helping less fortunate people in the rest of the world.

It's hard to be a superpower.

Noimporta

Yeah, people forget that the last 60 or so years have been unprecedentedly peaceful, in no small part because all large scale military action carries the threat of reprisal by the US.

Even now, countries like Russia or China are far less expansionist than they'd want to be because of US pressure.

glennmagusharvey

I'm not saying it's actually effective.

It probably is under certain circumstances and/or for certain measures of effectiveness, though to be honest, it's not like anyone else has a great track record as far as the success of military interventions either.

KilgoreTrout

fourteenwings wrote: »

To build on your WWII thing; a bunch of the historians I've read are of the line that once America proved it's "might" in WWII it thought of itself as a beacon to the world and for a while because of it's economic prowess it was seen as such as well. Of course, now the world is different, but America still doesn't let go.

The latest economic meltdown might stem from China, cementing it's status as usurping the U.S. in terms of being the largest functional economy (of course, China's market will always lag behind but even there I'd bet the real functional market hub is London no matter how many times Wall Street is used in every single sentence related to markets).

But now there is a massive industry that has it's claws very deep in the American system (sorry really long documentary I know) overall and war is like, insanely wonderful PR for some unknown reason. And obviously, the PR line remains that America is our overlord (it's entirely possible that if enough records from this era were lost the people of the future would think exactly that).

I do remember that Eisenhower warned people that the military-industrial complex was getting out of control. I'll definitely watch that doc soon.

The only reason I can think of why war might be good PR is because people like to feel like winners. And in war, somebody is eventually declared the winner. If you don't lose too many of your own people and if you can convince a majority of the American people that the war needed to be fought for noble reasons, then they can feel like winners. (That's dependent on them not looking too closely at what it was like for the people who actually lived through it, on both sides and both civilian and military, of course.)

The thing is that military forces are not equipped to create or stabilize states (for whatever reason), they're based entirely on how equipped and skilled they are at combat so for them it's like a video game; you defeat the main boss, you leave because everything's fixed. The logic being that if something else pops up you just missed the actual main boss last time.

It's much harder to bring warring factions to sit together and talk than to pick the side you like least and kill them all, but that just means now you've opened the stage for the side you liked to fragment even further since all you've ever shown them is extremism.

Sounds about right. And unfortunately I think it might become easy for military personnel to think of it as just a video game if they don't actually see the results of what they do up close. Drone pilots don't have to look at it up close.

I remember seeing an episode of M*A*S*H once where there was this bomber pilot who was in the hospital because he needed treatment for something or other, and he was pretty much like "It sure is a lot of fun bombing those North Korean motherfuckers!" Later on in the episode, he saw some wounded who were brought in for life-saving surgery. I forget whether it was American troops or Korean (either South or North), but when he saw it up close he was horrified. After that he was a lot less enthusiastic about his job.

I suppose a lot of people who get into politics and military leadership still think "Picking one side and killing them until they were beaten worked out fine in World War II, and today Germany and Japan are our allies, so surely it'll work out fine if we do it again here, or here, or here."

glennmagusharvey wrote: »

Do remember also that there's the problem that once the U.S. became a superpower -- and especially after a few such "interventions" -- there are some people abroad who practically expect the U.S. to help them out when they get into binds.  See, for example, Libyans and Syrians openly appealing for U.S. military assistance in their uprisings (early on, at least, in the case of Syria) against their governments.

Furthermore, the U.S. has a number of existing agreements with various countries for military defense and/or to help preserve some sort of balance of power (regardless of whether said balance is misguided).  Even if the U.S. stops making new agreements today, existing arrangements will still persist.  Now, some of them are relatively noncontroversial (e.g. with Costa Rica), but some have larger and possibly more controversial implications (e.g. membership in NATO).

It could be nice to just become isolationist, but then you'd have the people who argue that the U.S. with its military and financial resources should be helping less fortunate people in the rest of the world.

It's hard to be a superpower.

Getting out of those agreements does sound very tricky. I think it might still be the lesser evil, though. If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

As far as Syria is concerned right now, the U.S. could do a lot of good by helping the refugees who have left. (Every country could, for that matter, and I don't want to seem like I'm saying only America has an obligation to take them in. Just that it's a way for America to make things better without the use of lethal violence.) It doesn't solve the problems inside Syria, of course, but if all diplomatic options are eventually exhausted and the only choices left are "do nothing" or "attack the country to get rid of Assad", then America (or whoever) could easily kill the very people it's trying to save, as was the case in Iraq. It could also result in a greater number of people dying than would have otherwise, as was also the case in Iraq.

Noimporta wrote: »

Yeah, people forget that the last 60 or so years have been unprecedentedly peaceful, in no small part because all large scale military action carries the threat of reprisal by the US.

Even now, countries like Russia or China are far less expansionist than they'd want to be because of US pressure.

I know it's all relative, but "peaceful" is not how I see the world today. People get slaughtered all the time. There isn't as much country vs. country stuff going on, but that doesn't necessarily translate to people being safer.

Also, if I had to guess I would say that this has more to do with the fact that the majority of nations possess some kind of nuclear arsenal than because they're all cowed into behaving themselves by the prospect of American reprisal. I mean, if North Korea, for example, was about to be conquered by somebody, I imagine it would be awful tempting for Kim Jong Un to press the button. And who wants to risk that?

Noimporta

>I know it's all relative, but "peaceful" is not how I see the world today.

Well, yes, it is relative, and we're relative much more peaceful.

 

>People get slaughtered all the time. There isn't as much country vs. country stuff going on, but that doesn't necessarily translate to people being safer.

People have been being slaughtered throughout the thousands of years of history of human civilization, we're most definitely safer.

>Also, if I had to guess I would say that this has more to do with the fact that the majority of nations possess some kind of nuclear arsenal

The majority of Nations do not, in fact, have a nuclear arsenal.

lrdgck

One thing I've read is that USA and its allies (because the cases media tend to speak of almost always involve the US) keep committing a kind of the Golden Mean fallacy. Leaving Syria or Lybia or Iraq alone would mean there's still a brutal dick in charge, but the least the brutal dick did was keeping shit stable. Invading in full military force with a free rein would also work (sort of - Iraq is a pretty arguable case in this regard), as the brutal dick would be supplanted with a brutal occupation force. But the way it's done, is that the brutal dick is removed, then everybody pats each other's back, and the locals are left to their own devices - or worse, devices imposed by the dick's removers - and that just invites chaos we're watching right now.

The reasons for this, if I remember correctly, stem from an interaction between a deep belief in own righteousness, and the popularity concerns. The latter is kind of simple, sure, a war might be unpopular, but it's still a faraway conflict waged with professional soldiers you can wave miniature flags at, or even better, airplanes and remote control drones (multiply this by 9001 a big number if you're an European country). The former is, well, take Iraq. Show up, establish democracy, and everyone is happy and fine and joyfully votes in free, undisturbed elections. Suddenly it turned out that showing up and "hey, you there, you're a democracy now" doesn't work as well as it should. Or take Lybia - turned out the democratic opposition to Many Spellings isn't strong enough to establish itself over the country as Many Spellings's did with his enforcers.

I've got a feeling this is a topic that can be dragged on and on, but I gotta stop at some point, so I guess that's all for the moment.

KilgoreTrout

Noimporta wrote: »

>

The majority of Nations do not, in fact, have a nuclear arsenal.

Really? Huh, it sure seemed that way to me, but I haven't done extensive reading on the subject.

*checks*

Well damn, that's WAY less than I thought.

I think what happened was that I'd heard of countries like Pakistan and India possessing them, which you don't typically think of when you hear the word "superpower", and figured that anybody could acquire them, and that blocking a particular country from even seeming to take baby steps toward it (like with Iran) was the exception rather than the rule.

People have been being slaughtered throughout the thousands of years of history of human civilization, we're most definitely safer.

Well, define "we". I may have gotten facts about nuclear weapons wrong, but I feel pretty confident in stating that there are a lot of places in the world which are significantly less safe today than they were before 2001. Yemen sure didn't seem very safe, last I heard.

lrdgck wrote: »

Leaving Syria or Lybia or Iraq alone would mean there's still a brutal dick in charge, but the least the brutal dick did was keeping shit stable.

True, and intervention either makes things better or makes things worse when it's all said and done. If it makes things worse, then the people who suffer because of that will hate you for intervening. If you do nothing, on the other hand, they will only hate the brutal dick. Well, maybe; GMH pointed out that sometimes people ask the U.S. to do something, and in that case I suppose they might end up hating you if you stayed out of it. Can't please everybody all the time, perhaps.

My belief--could be wrong or could be right, I have no way of knowing--is that keeping to yourself causes you to have fewer enemies than repeatedly taking an active role.

Noimporta

>I think what happened was that I'd heard of countries like Pakistan and India possessing them, which you don't typically think of when you hear the word "superpower"

Yeah, Pakistan and India are not super developed, but they are huge countries. As such, they have stuff you wouldn't expect them to from looking at an average picture of an average street in an average city.

>Well, define "we".

The world in general. At the expense of Americans, mostly, you guys would certainly be better off as "isolationists".

glennmagusharvey

Proper response to libertarianism.

Extra points for the thrown object being a teapot.

Stormtroper

It's not a teapot, it's a sugar container (look at the cubes).

lrdgck

Was it white sugar or brown sugar?

Bee

Brown sugar doesn't usually come in cubes.  Molasses doesn't work well for that.

Interestingly, in the early 1900s (not long before that comic came out), there was a HUGE Coke vs Pepsi style thing going on between white and brown sugar industries, to the point that the white sugar refiners mounted a long pseudoscience smear campaign against brown sugar.

glennmagusharvey

> pseudoscience smear

There was supposed to be a documentary showing of Merchants of Doubt yesterday evening but apparently it got cancelled.  Sucks.

KilgoreTrout

About libertarianism: I once read a post by a libertarian where he said this thing I've seen many other places since (it's either a quote or a saying, I suppose), which went something like "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face."

I think the libertarian point of view includes a lot of flaws--for example, I am not going to just turn a blind eye to those less fortunate than myself, because being successful or even making ends meet is not easy--but that statement makes sense to me. Like "People should be free to do whatever they want, unless they are having a negative effect on other people by doing it." With the negative effect being, in this case, the smoke.

If a libertarian tried to argue in favour of people being able to smoke wherever they wanted to me, I would respond by saying that thing about fists and faces.

glennmagusharvey

Generally speaking, if you talk to a libertarian, they'll agree on that.  Though usually they follow that by opining that situations like these should be resolved by you and them talking it out on an individual basis rather than having a government make rules about smoking in public.  Often without much regard to the transaction costs of everyone talking everything out with everyone on an individual basis.