People are acting like politics has always been a clean game full of integrity and all of a sudden, Republicans made it dirty.

Politics has always been dirty. It's just that dirtiness often played out behind the scenes, contained a good cover story or occurred during a time where information couldn't travel far if it could at all. With social media being everywhere and everybody being watched continuously, it's hard for people to hide what they don't want the world to see. So for the first time, we're seeing how the sausage is made in the political world in real-time. The methods might be different due to the technology but the attitudes are no different now than they were in the past.

Norms are merely a front set up by politicians for the people to cover up what happens behind the scenes. Democrats cling to them to give themselves the illusion of integrity because they have shame. Republicans don't have a shame and thus have told norms to go **** themselves. This lack of shame and regard for norms allows them to act with impunity while Democrats cower behind their norms and complain how mean the Republicans are to them.

Time for Democrats to realize that clinging to norms and civility are guaranteed recipes for finishing in 2nd once again. The dirtiness of politics is there for the world to see and it's time for Democrats to get dirty and fight.

We don't even need to venture into analogies, a guy at a bakery refused to serve Biden in 2012 and Paul Ryan subsequently brought the guy on stage at a rally to introduce him. The GOP celebrated it on their official Twitter.

And of course he did.

Ryan is sometimes forgotten but he is on par with Trump in terms of a total lack of any moral fibre.

Nobody's seriously promoting any sort of disenfranchisement though. What is being advocated by some are things like packing the courts, or agreeing with Maxine Waters and thinking spineless Schumer should stfu.

That story isn't quite the same - the guy didn't really refuse Biden service, it sounds more like they basically wanted to have a campaign stop/photo-op at the store and the owner was like "uh, no thanks". Vox describes it like so:

It's ambiguous, but "advance team" and "do a stop" suggest that it wasn't Biden just dropping by to ask if he could buy some cookies.

(not to suggest that the imperfection of this example should at all detract from the obvious fact that the GOP is full of bad faith and would never give a **** if this were reversed)

And he suffers exactly zero discomfort for it. Chuck Shumer parties in the Hamptons with deplorable .01%ers in his spare time. These *******s need to feel 1/100th of the pain their action AND inaction causes actual people.

This time in projection

Man, sometime soon the left might show up with guns at protests. Wonder what that will be like.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...s-trump-667934

no. no. no way. watching elitist pos clovis get dunked on is one of the great pleasures of this forum.

and this is the killshot.

hey Clovis (and the rest of you sam harris masturbating clowns)

get ****ed

See now that all sounds really interesting but Wooderson said this,


so I dunno.

Liberals packing heat at anti-Trump protests might be a solid way to get gun control enacted.

The fact that people like Wooderson actually think the conversation is/was about Clovis or Sam Harris is why trump won.

I'm elite enough to have realized the Harris stuff was moved about 50 posts ago. Welcome to 24 hours ago.

This isn't the the controversial part. The controversial part is giving credence to an idea that even 19th century slaveowners knew to be nonsense.

Yes, obviously. And even if all his direct attacks on other posters were not a meaningful contribution to the forum (they often are), this lurker has learned a lot more even from the rest of his body of work than from your entire posting history over the past two years.

sweet mother in heaven

lol eff precedent. and I dont think you quite understand how this whole supreme court thing works in terms of cases. like, almost never overturn something that has already been heard. like, this travel ban will be in place for a super long time and maybe forever. even if theres a liberal SC soon, they wont overrule it bc the court just never overturns stuff. so there is massive value in being the first to make the decision.

so if you can stack the court and get x number of years to set decisions, that is massively valuable.

oh man Walgreens. this is pretty great to me since I just got home from my commute where I was listening to the npr broadcast of the nyt "the daily"

it was about how walgreens (and many other companies) routinely fired workers who were pregnant.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/p...imination.html

so the juxtaposition is great. they will totally protect this guy who bc he ostensibly doesnt want this baby to die.

but if you listen to the show, this women gravely risked a miscarriage (she had a job routinely lifting 30-50lb boxes and the dr said no lifting, but she continued bc walgreens said she had to otherwise fired) for like 4months until she could no longer do her job without massive pain and bleeding and then walgreens instantly fired her.

pretty infuriating.

But how dare Chuck and Nancy suffer the horror of wondering if they might someday be asked to leave a restaurant, or something

Democratic leadership is absolutely ****ing worthless

Not very often that Matty Lice is right, but he's right. Erosion of democracy can't be fixed through further erosion of democracy. Doesn't mean nothing can be done to push back against Republicans, but you should ask yourself, are you advocating for a policy that will increase democracy or just shift more power to Democrats? If it's the former, good. If it's the latter, no. That's not just a philosophical distinction that we can suspend thanks to the current reality either. Disenfranchising voters is a terrible policy no matter who's being disenfranchised.

If the answer you're looking for is voter disenfranchisement, how exactly does "playing dirty" help? Like maybe think two steps ahead and tell us how disenfranchising Republicans or whatever dirty policy you're pushing for leads to everyone agreeing to implement automatic registration and increased access to polling stations or whatever, cause that part is kind of important.

That's not due to Republican shenanigans though, those advantages are embedded in the constitution and always have been. Not much anyone can do to fix that. The electoral college compact thing is a long shot path to patching the presidential advantage. Fixing the balance in the Senate would be even more difficult. It can't really be an issue to be preoccupied with if you're looking for realistic paths to repairing our government anytime soon.

I've gotten 7 family members to register to vote since Christmas. My one nephew has gotten his fraternity to register. What have you done? **** off with your bull**** of acting like you are better than everyone else.

Isn't it ****ING AWESOME to be on the side that shoots down their own story with "facts" and "nuance"?

(I'm not saying don't do it. Just venting.)

If you think fighting back dirty is not the answer, through what chain of events do you see any other method working?

That's the real question.

Suzzer,

Get off Facebook, man. That **** is terrible for your mental health. Spend that time volunteering for something.