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

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Comments

  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Ah. Around here, we've had a change in law that allowed people to cut down trees on their property without first getting a permit from relevant service. Theoretically self-evident, in practice said property usually included, say, scenic land owned by stupid boors, or urban plots desired by unscrupulous construction companies. End result, people cut everything as fast as they could until the law got revoked.
  • edited 2019-01-21 04:44:35
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    @GMH: Why is Lindsey Graham on what seems to be a Republican Apology Tour across the Middle East?

    Meanwhile, New Congresswoman Ilhan Omar called-didn't-call-but-probably-did-call Lindsey Graham gay (how original) and now there's a whole thing about it.

    Double meanwhile, Aaron Sorkin (TV person, creator of The West Wing and other worse shows nobody cares about like The Newsroom) is mad that Ocasio-Cortez et co are young and that they espouse LGBTQ+ rights as a major part of their platforms. Also, Aaron Sorkin was on CNN as a political commentator?
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Lindsey Graham Does Strange And Probably Stupid Things is like normal Lindsey Graham behavior. He occasionally gets things right (i.e. advocates for good policy) but then just slides back into doing his own thing, probably because he's a broken clock.

    And this has nothing to do with his sexuality, which I couldn't care less about.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Why care about actual policy when we can all be distracted by 'controversy'.
    And Probably Stupid Things

    Well, he didn't significantly screw up in any of his speeches it seems so chalk this one up to a bonus strike (the clock strikes twice metaphor is hard to word with).
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Why care about actual policy when we can all be distracted by 'controversy'.
    And Probably Stupid Things

    Well, he didn't significantly screw up in any of his speeches it seems so chalk this one up to a bonus strike (the clock strikes twice metaphor is hard to word with).

    His clock moves randomly.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Dog-Stealing Florida Man Who Owns Richard Nixon Bong Arrested By FBI For Witness Tampering
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Does Roger Stone really own Richard Nixon drug paraphernalia?
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    I just now realized I should have worded it as "Florida Man Who Owns A Richard Nixon Bong Arrested By FBI For Threatening To Steal Dog".
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    I'm lost, was the dog a witness?
  • edited 2019-01-26 09:27:34
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Oh, whoops, I didn't link the article about the dog.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/25/roger-stone-loves-dogs-his-indictment-says-he-threatened-steal-one/

    TL;DR the dog is the pet of someone who might have cooperated with the investigators. Roger Stone threatened to "take that dog away from you".
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    The location of the WH.GOV logo, while not necessarily meaningful, is still funny.

  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Oops.

    By the way if a Starbucks billionaire becomes the next President of the US I will take it as confirmation that I'm just a super-bit character in a satirical novel about the actual real world.

    I know this whole thing boils down to the Democratic party being terrified of having moderate votes siphoned away from them, but what I didn't know (or like, consciously understand given certain things) was that the Democrats were pushing more leftist policies like debt-free (or just like, free) tertiary education.

    I mean, if I were looking to win a general election against certain people I'd just pick a super-centrist milquetoast anyways but what do I know.
  • edited 2019-03-09 20:56:01
    Loser
    I have no idea how the Democratic primary is going to go, but it's probably going to be kind of silly having so many candidates. Is anyone going to drop out before the first debates (I think that's in June or something like that)? I sure hope so...

    Also, although Klobuchar is really popular here in MN (she's won every general election by a ton and is probably the most popular politician in the state), I wonder if all of these reports about her being a terrible boss have already basically sunk her candidacy.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    I haven't been following news about Klobuchar, though I've heard about the allegations that she's a bad boss, but I've also heard about pushback from other employees she's had saying that she's a good boss. Do you have a better perspective on that as a local?
  • I haven't been following news about Klobuchar, though I've heard about the allegations that she's a bad boss, but I've also heard about pushback from other employees she's had saying that she's a good boss. Do you have a better perspective on that as a local?
    I honestly had heard nothing about her being a bad boss until recently. The fact that she largely hasn't denied the reports suggests to me that they're probably accurate. I haven't been impressed by her attempts to justify her behavior by saying she has "high standards" and stuff like that.
  • edited 2019-03-13 10:02:29
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    https://kdvr.com/2019/03/11/colorado-gop-puts-brakes-on-oil-and-gas-death-penalty-bills-with-reading-of-2000-page-bill/

    > opposition forces you to read unrelated gigantic bill aloud, as stalling tactic
    > bring out text-to-speech engines and crank up the speed to insane amounts

    have to admit, this is clever

    the whole thing is kinda wtf, but still amusingly clever
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Oh, in case anyone was wondering what kind of dangerous precedent this might set for future lawmaking...someone observed that this didn't even really set any new precedent anyway:
    It was with the infamous Midnight Gerrymander of 2003. The state GOP, fresh off a midterm wipeout of the Dems that gave them the statehouse trifecta, decided they could jam through an off-schedule redistricting that literally no one but them wanted.

    IIRC, the reading of the final bill featured a large group of GOP staffers each simultaneously reading one page of the redistricting bill, specifically so they could get the full reading in just under the end-of-session deadline. The normal legislative rules of order were suspended to allow this.

    Returning to the present day: Petard, meet hoist.

    source: https://www.dailykos.com/comments/1841462/73237091#comment_73237091
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    This article about how Paul Manafort relates to overall white collar crime investigations really put how terrible governments are at catching people with means who cheat the system.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Throwing the politics chat into here.

    Aside from anti-endorsing Tulsi Gabbard and probably Andrew Yang, I don't currently have an endorsement for Dem candidate for POTUS 2020.
  • "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."
    Pretty much. I will admit that some have caught my eye more than others, but on the whole? I'm fine with most of them, and the actual voting is still a year away, so I'm content to wait and see.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Yeah the main thing seems to be that everybody seems okay?

    The only thing I remember about Tulsi Gabbard is that her part of the initial "Everybody Apologizes for Everything to Get Ahead of Twitter Anger" tour was about her previous comments on LGBT rights.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I like that, for some reason, the Democratic Primary Debates included somebody who was basically Gwyneth Paltrow. Mostly because until her Netflix show starts, I'm suffering through a severe drought of Gwyneth Paltrow content.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I wonder if the Democratic party will use Donald Trump's latest [sorry I can't even explain what he did this time, it's easy enough to find elsewhere] to continue ignoring the growing rift in the party.

    In fact, oddly enough, this rift in the Democratic party seems to perfectly echo the GOP vs Tea Party thing that happened in the Republican party many presidencies ago. I'd be likely to believe that history was not repeating itself if the Democratic party hadn't seen the Republican primary of 2016 and gone "You know what that process needed? More bloating and noise!"

    One pundit I read suggested this whole thing is a result of having Congress but not the Senate, so they can't really do anything and they need somebody to blame.

    That person, unfortunately, is a fellow party member and not a Republican.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    A right-winger acquaintance recently sent me a video of Tucker Carlson. It was more like Tucker Carlson Overreacts To Things With Crazy Leaps Of Logic. Said acquaintance had been spending his time telling me how he actually knew actual facts because he checked lots of sources and thus had an unbiased view of things (lol).

    I had already commented to him, before watching it, that I tend to ignore political commentators, because a good amount of their commentary amounts to "be outraged by this!", as opposed to meaningful analysis. And sure enough, the video involved Mr. Carlson finding the wildest, most intentionally-speculative-in-a-specific-direction ways to react to the first set of recent Democratic POTUS primary debates.

    Mr. Carlson first wasted some time expressing how insane he thought the Democratic Party had gotten, and then inevitable cherry-picking started with him highlighting a line from Julian Castro suggesting that women, including transwomen, should have a legal right to abortion services. Mr. Carlson then went on a repetitive tirade about wasting taxpayer money on "men dressed as women" who "biologically" can't even get pregnant. When I pointed out that this outrage contradicted itself, since if it were a biological impossibility, then no taxpayer funds would be used anyway, said acquaintance turned to defending this by claiming that this outrage was "normal" and based on "sanity", and stuck to this reasoning despite my pointing out that this same sort of emotion-based moral panic is responsible for a thing he dislikes -- censorship of violent and sexual content in videogames.

    Mr. Carlson also made much logic-leaping hay out of a silly campaign stunt in which Cory Booker and Beto O'Rourke attempted to say stuff in Spanish, which came out with mangled grammar/pronunciation in both cases. Mr. Carlson's objection was not to the quality of Spanish-speaking, however, but he instead started strawmanning liberals as considering the English language "racist" (somehow, despite no one saying anything of that sort, and despite the debate itself being conducted in English!), and then went on to speculate about the prospect of English becoming banned one day (which of course makes no sense in any reasonably foreseeable future since English is at present the common language by which basically all business is conducted in the United States, and is spoken by the vast majority of residents, and even if it became a minority language there's still no reason to ban it). Said acquaintance went on to talk about how he felt that the United States as an English-speaking country is something that feels right to him...despite not being from or in the United States himself.

    I guess it's telling how right-wingers would ban languages they don't like, so they have this culture war delusion where others will ban things they feel are their norms -- even though no one actually would bother to ban them. (It's particularly ironic since, where I live, the Spanish literally got here before the English anyway.)

    Oh, this was in addition to Mr. Carlson characterizing Mr. Booker and Mr. O'Rourke as the "whitest" candidates, which is of course patent nonsense since Mr. Booker is (rather noticeably) black.

    (And there's more nonsense where all this came from, just that I stopped giving the guy a play-by-play analysis after a while.)

    TL;DR I've now watched Tucker Carlson and have seen first-hand the style of bullshit he peddles
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I'm frequently surprised to find out that the insane commentators are as insane as I'm told they are, but I've watched YouTube videos that were probably worse/sadder.

    I'm quite confused as to if this guy means the stuff he says or he does but in that annoying 'Oh I'm just saying words they don't mean anything' way. Both are annoying, but a lot of these claims are too out there for him to sanely mean them.

    I did hear that his wife was recently (maybe like, a few months ago?) badgered and harassed at her home by some activists. Honestly, his ideas aren't pretty, but that was way too far. I remember one of the Vox guys was all "I can't really feel sorry for her" but I think one of the most important things about modern society is allowing everybody and anybody to peddle their ideological nonsense without harm.
    Mr. Carlson characterizing Mr. Booker and Mr. O'Rourke as the "whitest" candidates

    Does Tucker Carlson really like Cory Booker but can't stand the fact that he isn't white, and has therefore done some mental ninjitsu to make himself feel better?

    Anyways this all reminded me of
    I caught that moment in Donald Trump's interview with Tucker Carlson and found it super hilarious how Tucker Carlson just called out a random country (Montenegro) and Trump was like "[hyper-sudden casual racism]" so quickly that Carlson had to be "I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST MONTENEGRINS I SWEAR".

    If Tucker Carlson can at the very least put his casual racism away, what is Donald Trump actually capa-

    Oh yeah, that thing that's going on right now. Forgot.
  • edited 2019-07-16 18:06:08
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Do you want your doublepost deleted?

    Also, badgering someone for something their spouse did seems dishonorable.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I think there's always a line with association that people don't tend to see. In this case, the media doesn't tend to help because they just tend to cross it even father.

    However, we were talking about amassing political power earlier in IRC with Naas and he wondered why people weren't concerned when political power in a non-hereditary system seemed to be spreading via hereditary lines.

    Of course, right now Donald Trump is certainly getting a bit of that, but I wouldn't say anywhere near enough. I feel like Jared Kushner, especially, is getting a lot of latitude from the media.

    My theories are:
    1. Decorum, it's impolite to comment on such things when it's between professional journalists and people tangential to their subjects
    2. Self-preservation; access to figures probably depends on how close you can be with them, and overdoing it with their loved ones can cause serious damage to professional careers
    3. Assuming the best; that this foray into politics is temporary, which tends to go on for so long that they don't notice that said person has just moved into politics permanently
    Do you want your doublepost deleted?

    Uh, yeah. I noticed the error earlier but I totally refreshed and it didn't seem to have posted before I posted again :P
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    I'm a bit late to the party, but Glenn, this acquaintance of yours is the reason when I didn't like to call myself a right-winger even at my rightest. (I still like to call myself a conservative, for trollery if nothing else.) Also, the part about him not even being from the 'States is like the icing on the cake. I mean, why?

    I don't know this Tucker guy, but by the sound of his name alone I felt I wouldn't like to have anything to do with him.
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