Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

Sounds like your kind of guy.

The **** we import called reality TV? You guys deserve those in return.

That seems incredibly short sighted though. Whenever someone says "it can't get any worse", they are usually proved wrong.

Ok. Let me put my total conservative tinfoil hat on here and present the world that could be if folks like Bernie Sanders were running it.

You wont be able to get a job on your own, but you wont have to because the government will assign you one, which will be determined based on a battery of tests you will undergo to determine how you can best contribute to society. You will not be paid for this because that might allow for inequality. Instead, the government will provide you with a standard government issue apartment, in a government issued tenement building, with government issued food and government issued clothing. You'll have a government issued TV on your wall, which provides you with government approved/censored/issued educational and entertainment programs designed to ensure that you are never exposed to dangerous ideas or have non pro-government thoughts. These things are dangerous and might lead to a less peaceful and cooperative society. Of course, for your safety you will be monitored 24 hours a day by the government. You will be allowed to go places when and where the government tells you to do so, and may only engage in approved activities that the government has decided are healthy and safe. In short, it'll be paradise, right?

And that's not even the scariest future I could think of. You do get that the kind of classic socialism that Sanders follows used to be quite openly discussed in the early 20th century, and advocates had no qualms about the need to eliminate the less productive members of society, for the "good of the whole". That's socialism. There's a reason why it's despised. Now, modern socialists have backed away from that language and attempt to paint a much nicer picture, focusing entirely on the positive benefits for the poor and working classes and pretending that there's no cost for all of this, but there's nothing in the ideology of socialism that doesn't preclude the possibility that once your usefulness fades to a low enough degree (or never exceeds some degree), society might find you are more valuable reporting to the Soylent factory than consuming resources walking around and breathing.

That is the possible future when a society adopts the idea that the individual rights its citizens are less important than the good of the society as a whole. And that's fundamentally the underlying ideology of socialism. Do I think Sanders is itching to send people to the Soylent factories? No, of course not. But his ideology is one that could make decisions like that at some point in the future, and I'd prefer we don't go remotely in that direction. Long before we might get to such a horrific end, we'll already have lost so many rights and freedoms that it's a bad idea anyway.

You aren't really being promised prosperity. You're being promised a cage. The cake is a lie.



Edited, Feb 5th 2016 2:18pm by gbaji

Yeah, I'm not actually going to debate your delusional boogeymen with you.

As opposed to a GOP dominated government rounding up the gehys, non-Christians and pro-choice advocates, executing them and confiscating their property, right?





My strawman can beat up your strawman.

I'm going to assume that you're white.

As for the wars, people don't like talking about them, but they are part of reality. You don't have to support it, but you need to know what's going on, because you WILL have a part in it regardless.


If you don't think the GOP doesn't have a ton of material lined up to attack against a socialist with pie in the sky ideas with no actual plan or possibility of becoming true, you're sadly mistaken. There's a reason why the GOP isn't attacking Bernie, it's because he's a much easier opponent.


There's a reason why you can count all of his congressional/ gubernatorial support on one hand, it's because his ideas are unrealistic. We barely passed the ACA, which is a GOP concept, how do you expect the congress to even think about single payer system.

If they hadn't died, then the threat posed by Islamic terrorists would still be hypothetical. Um... But they did. So it's not. See how that works?

You seem to be expecting much of Carson's voters. And that is apart from our current culture of... oh shiny!

And this **** is everywhere. Just yesterday, I found out that strategic planning at a company is now, at most, and even that is considered too long a horizon, one year. And that is a business with people who typically know what they are doing. And you expect longer attention span from a voter?

Edited, Feb 5th 2016 9:09pm by angrymnk

As if a federal law to BAN same sex marriage isn't a giant hammer. Are you fucking stupid?


Those were conservatives. Are you fucking stupid?

Like conservatives trying to quash abortion.. Are you fucking stupid?


HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA
HAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH
AHAHHAHAHA. Are you fucking stupid?


Yep..rock fucking stupid.


For the millionth time, read some actual history for once, Bill "Malmedy" O'Reilly.

The GOP has never passed a law banning same sex marriage.

Once again, you fail to grasp the difference between banning a behavior and failing to reward it.



No. I'm not. I'm also not ignorant of history. The Democrats created segregation in the south. This is not speculation. It's historical fact.



Again, no. I'm also not failing to see key differences in how/why decisions are made, which I thought I already explained. Abortion is an action, not a group of people. See. This is exactly what I was talking about. Liberals make decisions based on the groups that are benefited or harmed. Conservatives make decisions based on the morality of the action in question. In this case, they oppose abortion because they believe that the act of aborting a fetus is wrong. It's not about liking or disliking women.



Again, no. Do you see how opposing abortion is about the act of abortion? Creating incentives for couples who may produce children to marry prior to doing so isn't about the identity of the couple, but about the consequences of their actions within or without the institution of marriage. It's you liberals who view and define everything through the lens of identity. It's how you guys do things like insisting that a drug should not be penalized based on the relative harm of the drug in question in the quantities in question, but rather based on which racial group is more likely to use one drug over another. It's how you guys decide to skew college admissions processes, not to ensure that the process is fair based on the academic qualifications of the students, but with the goal of making the student body more racially similar to the overall population. It's how you guys consistently judge, not the actions of the police, but the impact of those actions on a population based on the relative racial makeup. So it doesn't matter that Michael Brown robbed a liquor store and attacked a police officer. All that matters is that he was black, and black people get shot more often relatively speaking than white. It doesn't matter that Martin was straddling Zimmerman and punching him in the face when Zimmerman shot him. All that mattered was that he was black and Zimmerman looked white. It doesn't matter that a kid brought a clock to school that he had disassembled and placed into a metal case in a manner likely to be mistaken for a bomb. All that mattered is that he's a Muslim.


This is you guys looking at things this way. And what's funny is that you insist that we conservatives must view things the same way. And then you conclude that we're evil, or bigoted, or stupid, because we don't arrive at the same conclusions that you do. Um... It's not for those reasons. It's because we are actually making our decisions based on a completely different set of criteria than you are.

Seriously. Stop making assumptions based on your own viewpoint. Just for one minute accept that what I say is correct. Then go back, one issue at a time, and look at the actions and positions of conservatives through our lens instead of your own. You'll find that we are very very consistent. We judge the actions of people, not their identity. You guys are the ones who obsess over identity and make decisions based on how the results will statistically affect those groups of people.

Stop projecting your methodology on us. It might just help you to understand things a bit more clearly.



I'm sorry. Could you name for me the only president in the last century who locked an entire set of people up in camps based purely on membership in an identity group? Can you name his political party? Um... He was also a "Democratic Socialist" btw. You know, the whole "new deal" thing? Social Security? Ring any bells? WTF!? And you're calling me stupid.



Maybe you should be reading history?

Edited, Feb 5th 2016 7:17pm by gbaji

No, there is no such assumption. These are actually the issues that are cared about, and thus, shockingly, people vote based on those issues. Those other issues are largely the concern of elites, as they care about them and sometimes understand them.



No. I said what I mean and meant what I said. The US is not fighting an existential threat. I did not mean an exigent threat or I would have said so. Examples of Existential threats the US has faced: The British Empire, the Confederacy, and the Soviet Union.




These problems don't go away, these groups generally go bother whoever is their current enemy at the time. Terrorism isn't perpetrated without reason, it's a response to a set of actions or policies. Regardless, terrorism, despite all the coverage it receives, kills a very small percentage of Americans. There are roughly 200-250 terrorism related deaths per year in the US. Gun suicides, which make up less than 1% of all deaths in the US per year, claim ~20000. As frustrating, upsetting, and generally shitty terrorism related deaths are, it is annoyance level threat. If it is the President's job to protect Americans from dying, HHS does far more than random bombings of people we don't like.



Usually it isn't. the public can generally be mugged a few times without it impacting electability (a definite feature of a choice limiting FPTP voting system) as there are a lot of other issues they care about.



I disagree. His unwillingness to address such things is going to hurt him. Once people start looking at him as a potential candidate to vote for and not just a name to repeat in a poll that they heard about on TV maybe, they'll see that he's not a great choice.[/quote]

He has a platform for all these issue. He doesn't campaign on them because that's not what people care about, and shockingly during a campaign you give speeches about things people care about. I, for example, disagree with his trade policy. I will still be voting for him in the primary.