All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

I didn't have any facts wrong, dude and no one is arguing that 'America' is that. IT has been suggested that the American Democratic party is to the left of numerous other countries on some social issues, and that the 'democrats are a center right party' is an over simplified take that denies actual political realities in both our nation and others.

And I said

1. That suggestion wasn’t true
2. I laid out how we came up short on social issues
3. I said the best we could say is that we were roughly in line with the rest of the best on marriage equality who mostly nationalized in the mid to late 2010’s
4. You countered with Ireland who both passed a referendum to add it in their constitution before are courts nationalize it for us AND had a nation wide act giving their LGBTQ community better protections while we had states with active bans in their constitution

So you either didn’t know that your counter example wasn’t a good one in comparison to us or.... I have no idea why else you would bring that up

My point was that Darman was inaccurate in his assessment that we are superior socially and the country you brought up actually highlighted it for me.

So what’s the point? That we are better on social issue? Where? On what? Would you rather be a minority here or Europe/Canada? We disenfranchise minority voters, we are absolutely horrible on relations with the black population in regards to our history of slavery, police brutality, inequality, and the prison industrial complex (which is the largest in the world and mostly targets black). We just ejected a President who runs on vilifying Mexicans and Hispanic immigrants. Oh and the Democratic President before him was infamous for deporting and while he wasn’t as heinous as Trump, he allowed similar terrible infrastructure at the the border. On LGBTQ rights while other countries were setting up infrastructure to protect those citizens, we had a President who spent most of his first term “evolving” on same sex marriage, had Prop 8, had multiple states with bans. Oh and we needed our courts to overturn those bans while the two earliest European countries passed it outright before our first state legalized it (I should know, it was my state). And the vast majority of them either passed bills or Amendments through votes or their government around the same time we needed our courts.

So I’m failing to see where this socially progressive America exists. Especially if it being used to as a counter for why we aren’t economically progressive.

It kinda sounds like fiction. I’m imagining some kid in Denmark saying “why don’t American’s help their poor people” and some old mother saying “well they haven’t gotten there yet, but rest assured they take care of their minorities to make up for it”.


Edit: and I’m not trying to come at you specifically, but the idea that this country is some who socially progressive compared to the rest of the world is something I find infuriating. And I realize you were just going with someone else’s argument

[numberthirty]

From the "Illinois..." corner of things(and, honestly, from the outskirts of actual "News"/"Politics"...)

Lori Lightfoot was on an AM sports channel talking about the Bears quarterback situation. During the discussion of some things are, she pointed out that there are instances involving some players where you would be better off with her playing quarterback.

I've had a tough time getting that picture out of my head, and I'm really starting to like Lori Lightfoot.

[Tendrin]

Blah blah blah

You can say it all you want. What I said was accurate. Us 'coming up short' /doesn't/ change the fact that the notion that the Democrats are purely a 'center-right' party any more accurate than it was yesterday. You can equivocate about an aspect of gay rights by expanding on my extremely brief point all you want. It's just *not that simple*.

[Tendrin]

Stephen Miller has tested positive for covid-19.

Best responses:

My prayers are with COVID-19 in this trying time for it.

And

Did we already test all the people?

[SquirrelMan]

Stephen Miller has tested positive for covid-19.

Best responses:



And

I can't find a trustworthy source, I think it may have been a hoax.

Do you have a link?

[Tendrin]

I can't find a trustworthy source, I think it may have been a hoax.

Do you have a link?

Ah, it was a comedian. My bad!

[SquirrelMan]

Ah, it was a comedian. My bad!

Not adding him to my "Faces of Rona" thread then...




yet!

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Tried to say this in another post. MA had a shipment of masks that they independently secured. The feds found out and took them. They are now sitting in a stockpile not being used.

Because of that, the governor of MA needed to secure a deal with China and then get their football team to coordinate a flight under the guise of a humanitarian effort to get them without the feds seizing them. Then they coordinated with Cuomo to get some in NY.

It’s kinda weird how the state at the epicenter needs to rely on a neighbor states football team, but Desantis is apparently getting everything he wants

It's not weird at all. DeSantis is a Republican governor in a red state, the same state Trump moved to because New York became too hot for him legally, so of course Caramel Caligula would do DeSantis a solid.

[Mister Mets]

Not to mention that the only president who could have rammed it through died in his third term. And didn't our diplomats help craft a number of bulls in other countries that give people those rights?

And yes, civil rights and womens rights and equal rights are not a good trade off when most if tour country is a mixed nation and not one homogeneous group.

FDR died early in his fourth term.

Before Obama Nixon probably came the closest to universal health care.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...-care-solution

Name a Democratic leader, Presidential nominee, Speaker, Majority Leader in..... let’s go with a quarter of a century that would qualify as center left if they were in Canada or most of Europe.

I mean **** let’s just be blunt here, the person that’s considered far left in the party that they were terrified of going too far is someone that would at best be center left in Europe and would have some serious credibility issues with leftwing policy leaders on things like guns.

America is a right wing country. The Democrats are a center right Party that by virtue of a two party system has a minority wing of roughly 20% that qualifies as center left.

Most people who post in this thread would be considered right wing in Europe where

-universal healthcare is so popular that even the right wing politicians are afraid to campaign against it
-they almost all have some form of free higher education
-much stricter tax laws on the wealthy by and large
-gun rights are a mostly solved issue with strict policies. I’ve gotten in enough fights on here criticizing the Democrats for not supporting much more rigorous policies over incremental ones to know that quite a few people here would be considered fringe in Europe on that issue.

Like honestly the fact that most of these are debated on here and how far we should go on each basically tells you where we are at as a country and as a Democratic Party. In a more globalized world, that’s is even more apparent.

Even by that token calling Hillary’s platform the most progressive in history is really just a kind way of saying “the Democrats have never really had a true progressive Presidential platform by global standards since FDR and the closest was a byproduct of being the most recent and required a candidate who the party treated as fringe staying in the race and pulling it left and then by and large many people within the party scapegoated that person for that platform’s loss”.

I would also add that America being more socially progressive is not an entirely accurate framing. America has much deeper racial issues than Europe. Stemming from how much longer slavery existed here, that we fought a war over it, that a portion of the country still glamorizes the wrong side of it, and then long-standing segregation after it. Also voter disenfranchisement that is racially targeted is more of an American issue. Oh and the whole problem of police shooting unarmed black peoples is also kind of a uniquely American thing (though that problem conflates it a bit with gun policy). Now we’ve fought for some strong stances on race that aren’t as apparent in other countries, but a lot of that is reactionary to us being so god awful on it. I mean I guess we could pat ourselves on the back for being in line with the nearly the rest of the world on marriage equality when it became commonplace in the the 2010’s (though the Netherlands and Denmark were still way ahead of us). But even then you run into little snags like how a lot of our peer countries had a superior stance in people in same sex relationships and afforded them more rights even before they did eventually get marriage equality (and not for nothing it wasn’t like those countries were having entire head of state positions centered around it in 2004 like us). So really honestly your best claim from a purely policy standpoint is that on one subset of social politics we were on par with all our peers for once.....

I mean honestly I don’t even really know how true I would call the stance that America is more socially progressive tbh. Our biggest boon on that might be that we were the first of our peers to elect a minority President. But that’s a pretty low bar when most people in this thread argue he’s a moderate (which is to the right in Europe or Canada) and the fact that there was a giant racist conspiracy over his citizenship that culminated in the ring leader of it being elected the current President.

It’s more accurate to categorize the Republican Party as a hard right party with a 33% far right batshit for a modern democracy wing and the Democrats as a center right party where most of the leadership is classified as either center right or center and then they have a 20% group of younger center leftists that are largely considered baggage and targeted as unelectable on any national platform.

Now yeah we can change definitions if we only talk about America, but that’s kind of a shitty standard for the country that is supposed to be the leader of the Western World

For all the talk about Democrats being center right compared to Europe, what would be the reaction to a European party that wants to spend the same amount of money the US does per capita?

[Mister Mets]

How do people who have been denied the right to vote effectively show displeasure at the ballot box?

It's amazing that when you stop enough people who don't vote Republican from voting, Republicans keep winning. Well, more like insidious, but that's just me.

Removing someone from the ballot for the wrong reasons would tend to piss them off in future elections, and piss off their friends and family. It also leads to organized opposition.

https://www.governing.com/topics/pol...w-changes.html
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ect-elections/

Actually, none of what you said addresses the fact that Republicans routinely attempt to disenfranchise black voters and that doing so in 2000 was what likely swung Florida in their favor.

I'm not addressing what others said -- I'm addressing the fact that Republicans illegally disenfranchised black voters in Florida in 2000 by design.

There's no way of proving whether or not this helped them win the election, though the minimal margin of victory strongly suggests that it did.

More relevant to the point, you know this and still support the party, even as they continue their efforts to disenfranchise minorities in general.

"Voters in Florida have had plenty of opportunities to show that they think Republicans went too far in cleaning registration rolls."

That statement in no way addresses my point -- namely that black and brown voters are being illegally disenfranchised from voting by Republicans.

I get that you didn't address what others said. That was why your response didn't seem to match the comment.

I'm unaware that the Florida decisions were illegal.

On voter rights, this is an issue where there are legitimate arguments on both sides. Three-quarters of the population supports requiring Photo IDs to vote.

https://www.people-press.org/2018/10...ess-to-voting/

The movement to make it easier for felons to vote after their release has become mainstream relatively recently.

[Tendrin]

A lot of racism in other countries is simply down to ignorance, since they aren't as diverse and communities tend to be more self-contained so it's a bit easier to stereotype people that you don't often interact with. In America, there are huge swathes of the population who consider themselves woke on race issues and interact with minorities on a daily basis yet still manage to treat them as if they were orcs from Mordor without a hint of irony. There's a huge difference between provincial xenophobia, which is what most racism around the world is, and the colonial mentality of conquering overlords treading over their subject peoples, which is what white Americans have.

I think you're underestimating the racism that exists in other nations too. Being Muslim in France is no picnic, I assure you.

PARIS — An Algerian woman’s refusal to shake hands with male officials at a French naturalization ceremony is sufficient grounds for denying her citizenship, France’s top administrative court has ruled.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Naw, I responded because there are times I don't like to let even people I don't like slide with the continuing nonsense about the democrats being 'center-right'. You like to keep conflating 'America' and 'Democrats', when my point was that the /Democrats/ as a political party have been to the left of the political mainstream of other countries frequently, as I have had to point out over and over to you. Democrats were backing gay marriage and Obama received quite a bit of criticism on his stance in favor of civil unions as opposed to marriage during his campaign from the left. This was a more mainstream stance of the American left /as opposed to the lefts in other countries/ in many cases, including Ireland, which had, as I said, enither abortion nor gay marriage until recently. The argument that they only became legal within months of each other in reality isn't doing your own argument any favors that the Democrats are 'behind'.

Civil partnerships existed in Ireland in 2010, whereas they had been in effect in US states since 2000, a full decade earlier, and six years after Gavin Newsom started marrying gay couples in CA in 2004. The broad coalition that is the Democratic party is not 'just a center-right euro party'. This position conflates *only* economic positions as being worthy of consideration, as I've repeatedly stated while you're busy spouting off about 'America' when I'm speaking solely of the Democratic party.



Naw.




That remains why I rarely engage with your posts.



Sure, buddy.

Oh you’re not letting me slide.... that’s it......

I’m conflating America with Democrats because it’s symbiotic. America is a very right wing country and therefore their left most party is still center right on global scale.

And no you didn’t point out examples many times. You specifically pointed out Ireland, but didn’t compare it to the US which made it useless. Ireland and most of Europe was stronger on gay rights prior to a mid to late 2010’s push to nationalize same sex marriage. The earliest nations were almost a decade ahead of us and most others that nationalized around the same time had far better polls cues to protect the rights of same sex couples. The only other point you made was about Labour not coming out for transgender issues until recently (which mirrors your argument of Ireland nationalizing same sex marriage recently even though it was the same time as ours). Early this decade transgender issues were not a predominate part of the party platform besides some groupings with gay rights. It almost never discussed by the last Democratic administration except in connection to broader social issues. This recently, yeah they’ve had it right, which is kind of on par with the rest of the world. Which like I said, on social issues we lag behind on nearly everything but are on par with lgbtq issues for the most part.

Which does not make the case that we are more progressive on a social platform. It means at our best we are equal in some aspects and at our worst we are devastatingly behind.

Also you are ignoring that in addition to Obama his main primary opponent was also against gay marriage. So effectively the choices being offered were two anti gay marriages.,

You can’t use the Democratic Party being broad as an excuse. I’ve said they have a roughly 20% progressive wing. MA and CA were ahead of the game for the most part on those issues. HOWEVER and it’s a big one in 2008 in CA (a state you used as an example, I didn’t make you do that) Democrats and Obama CRUSHED the Republicans (61% to 36%) and........ Prop 8 passed. Which means a lot of Democrats in a fairly liberal state voted for it and I don’t find it that surprising that it was happening at a time when 4 years prior Democrats lost trying to prove they weren’t for gay marriage and then both major candidates for the party made it clear that they weren’t for it in the primary,

This was after all the good things you said in arguably the most liberal state in the nation where Democrats turned out like crazy. So it’s more complicated than you are describing. And that is a reflection of the Democratic Party. A progressive dream party right there.

And let’s go a step further. The courts nationalized same sex marriage. Not the Democrats. In a few states they get to say they tried and were ahead of the curve, but that was not off the keg work of that party.


The rest of your post I’m not interested in responding to because it’s just you doubling down on being wrong before. Listen if you want to have a discussion we can be polite and go back and forth. If you want to pretend you don’t care and then pop up when you think you found a good talking point, and then lose interest when it’s challenged with data, it’s just not very fruitful

[Starter Set]

I think you're underestimating the racism that exists in other nations too. Being Muslim in France is no picnic, I assure you.

Remember that not so long ago Islamic terrorism has cost the life of quite a number of people here. And yet, racist incidents after that remained extremely rare.

Antisemitism though, now that's a problem we have a tough time dealing with sadly in France. It remains strong.

[Tendrin]

Oh you’re not letting me slide.... that’s it...…

On that initial post, yes. You're nowhere near as good at this as you think you are.

I’m conflating America with Democrats because it’s symbiotic. America is a very right wing country and therefore their left most party is still center right on global scale.

And I've argued that it's far more complicated than that and necessarily ignores some things.

And no you didn’t point out examples many times. You specifically pointed out Ireland, but didn’t compare it to the US which made it useless.

I didn't say I pointed out /examples/ many times. I said I pointed out that calling the Dems a 'center-right' party ignores stances where they are left of the mainstream of other *parties* several times.

Ireland and most of Europe was stronger on gay rights prior to a mid to late 2010’s push to nationalize same sex marriage.

As I said, Ireland didn't have recognition of same-sex unions until 2010. American democrats were taking heat and fighting at the ballot box for those with some success years before.

The earliest nations were almost a decade ahead of us and most others that nationalized around the same time had far better polls cues to protect the rights of same sex couples

.

I did not say that there were /no/ nations ahead of the Democratic curve on that. I /did/ say that the Democrats were ahead of many others, which was true.

The only other point you made was about Labour not coming out for transgender issues until recently (which mirrors your argument of Ireland nationalizing same sex marriage recently even though it was the same time as ours).[/quote]

Full legalization was achieved, yes, within months of each other but that's the end goal and doesn't talk about what the position of the party was on these things. The Democrats evolved quickly from the days of DOMA and DADT in fits and starts from the 90s into the early 2000s, with same sex union being a default position for the party by 2008 election. DOMA was, let's not forget, a reaction to pressure for legalization from left-leaning groups and factions within the Democratic party in the 1990s.

Early this decade transgender issues were not a predominate part of the party platform besides some groupings with gay rights. It almost never discussed by the last Democratic administration except in connection to broader social issues. This recently, yeah they’ve had it right, which is kind of on par with the rest of the world. Which like I said, on social issues we lag behind on nearly everything but are on par with lgbtq issues for the most part.

Mostly, what applied to gay rights was applied to trans rights. In reality, trans rights were frequently ahead of the curve, in some ways, due to a perceived adherence to heteronormativity in some ways.

Which does not make the case that we are more progressive on a social platform.

On /some things/ they absolutely are. Just look at the list of abortion restrictions and reproductive rights throughout much of Europe and you'll be singing a different tune. It's not the only thing like that, either.

It means at our best we are equal in some aspects and at our worst we are devastatingly behind.

On the other hand, we're not passing laws banning the niqab on a federal level, now are we?

Also you are ignoring that in addition to Obama his main primary opponent was also against gay marriage. So effectively the choices being offered were two anti gay marriage

s.,

I actually edited that into my post since I knew you'd go there. Don't forget how much flack both candidates got for that.

You can’t use the Democratic Party being broad as an excuse.

It's not an excuse. It's a reality.

I’ve said they have a roughly 20% progressive wing. MA and CA were ahead of the game for the most part on those issues. HOWEVER and it’s a big one in 2008 in CA (a state you used as an example, I didn’t make you do that) Democrats and Obama CRUSHED the Republicans (61% to 36%) and........ Prop 8 passed. Which means a lot of Democrats in a fairly liberal state voted for it and I don’t find it that surprising that it was happening at a time when 4 years prior Democrats lost trying to prove they weren’t for gay marriage and then both major candidates for the party made it clear that they weren’t for it in the primary,

Yeah, Prop 8 winning was a real 'bad guys won' moment, but I will point out that the democratic establishment was against prop 8. They lost.

This was after all the good things you said in arguably the most liberal state in the nation where Democrats turned out like crazy. So it’s more complicated than you are describing. And that is a reflection of the Democratic Party. A progressive dream party right there.

Again: the democratic party itself fought against that and lost. I'm not sure this proves what you think it proves.

And let’s go a step further. The courts nationalized same sex marriage. Not the Democrats. In a few states they get to say they tried and were ahead of the curve, but that was not off the keg work of that party.

Hey, remind me who put the liberals judges on the court that did that?

[Tendrin]

Remember that not so long ago Islamic terrorism has cost the life of quite a number of people here. And yet, racist incidents after that remained extremely rare.

Antisemitism though, now that's a problem we have a tough time dealing with sadly in France. It remains strong.

Yeah, that's not the experience of my French Muslim friends.

And let's not even get into how the supposdly less racist governments treat the Roma or the Sami or several other groups.