Nope.

the senate has been an undemocratic institution since way before gorsuck. 586,000 wyoming residents are represented by 2 senators while the 672,000 residents of washington d.c. get zero. what is the conservative defense for maintaining this undemocratic system?

the first part of your post is some reflections that are unnecessary. we have two sides of american politics, if you understand that the alt-right is the radicals of the right side, then you might infer that the alt-left would be the radical of the left wing. doesnt necessarily have to be about economic politics as in socialism, it can be about all the examples that i mentioned; demonizing the other side, basically, like the alt-right does.


and the GOP doesnt want people to die. if you walk around believing such things you will never understand the difference between up and down. and i would say that if you walk around believing such things you need to update your world views by reading psychology.

if someone performs some action or utters some statement, those are facts. when you infer that GOP wants to kill people from these facts, that is your problem. a good idea if you want to relate to other people in a honest way is to not claim that your conclusions are equivalent to the facts.

Forum def has a liberal bias but comparing alt-right to radical left isn't really a fair comparison. Lunatics on the alt-right fringe aren't really fringe these days, they are basically the mainstream GOP. The equivalent fringe on the left has no political power even if a few spout ridiculous ideas sometimes. The alt-right controls our govt.

Uh sorry but this is nonsense. The US is just as isolated as Canada when it comes to direct threat of invasion by a hostile force -- possibly even more so when you consider that it really has only one coastline to defend, since any forces that landed a beachhead on the Pacific would still have to cross easily defended mountain ranges and the entire Great Plains and all its rivers to get at the American command and control structure on the east coast. The notion of the Russians landing a huge force in Alaska or the Yukon and just marching across thousands of miles of mountains, forest, rivers, and tundra with no supply routes and tenuous air support is pretty much totally preposterous too.

And while it's true that the US does have a massive and powerful military the thing most Americans seem to fail to realize is that they only have this because they've made a choice to spend a large chunk of their GDP on it. If other large nations made a similar choice they'd also have large militaries that would rival the US in terms of their capabilities.

In fact, they don't even need large militaries as it turns out. In its last conflicts in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan it's not like the US forces achieved decisive victories -- in half of them they got flat out beat and in the other half they basically fought to a draw. War is a complicated thing, and plenty of other nations are really good at it.

i dont know, there might not even be any defence.

there is a difference between claiming that a broken system needs to be fixed and declaring that the senate is illegitimate. we try to work with the other side until we cant anymore, and when the system is too unjust you might declare that you arent part of this anymore.

If there's smoking gun proof of Trump collusion with Russia and the GOP doesn't impeach, there will be a million people each in the streets of NYC, DC, LA, Chicago, etc. They'll have to do it.

I give the GOP very little credit for having any sort of a backbone with Trump, but if there's smoking gun proof of collusion with a hostile foreign country, I do think they'll impeach. The ramifications of not doing it would be even more catastrophic to their party.

I don't think you and I are defining 'alt-right' in the same way. As I see it, the regular right does plenty of demonising of the other side. The alt-right is noteworthy in that it is more overtly fascistic and less deferential to long-standing norms.

If you're prepared to accept that the alt-right is relatively new, the observation that the ostensible alt-left is also new shouldn't strike you as superfluous. Try taking 'Yes, maybe' for an answer.

For one thing, the key word in my post is 'functionally'. For another, you're doing enough claiming that your conclusions are equivalent to the facts for me to be ready to stop bothering to reply to your posts PDQ. We can exchange opinions if you want. I'm not here for self-contradictory lectures and ill-founded condescension, thanks much.

CNN's response to this is petty and pathetic.

Are they going to start allocating people to hunt down trolls who hurt their feelings? Don't they understand how the internet works?

Flame, there are so, so many actual policy arguments where the GOP is fine having people die. This isn't some huge revelation.

I legitimately think they won't do anything. I really hope that I'm wrong and you're right.

Aflametotheground's post demonstrates what I think is the key fallacy of our time, and maybe of all time, at least since written language was invented.

Whenever one group criticizes another, the other will say that, "No, you do it too" or "You did it first." Like Kathy Griffen posts her dumb pic, is widely condemned and fired from CNN, but now whenever someone complains about Trump and the alt right promoting violence, it's suddenly, "Well, you do it too." The thing is, hypocrisy is a powerful and often relevant charge, but people making the charge should be held to a high standard. Trump lies like it's his job, and this is deflected with "CNN is fake news!"

This natural human reaction is behind the false equivalency of the right and the left or the GOP and the DEMs. "Well, DEMs also take corporate money too!" "You're just as bad!" "Look at Corey Booker, he's owned by Big Pharma!" and masks the fact that one of the major political parties basically has almost no desire to establish positive public policy and only serves the interests of its narrow, unpopular constituents while gaining election by stoking conspiracies and resentment of out groups.

I'm definitely liberal, and in some ways leftish, but I think, e.g., Einbert's posts are mainly inflammatory and unhelpful, but I think his heart is in the right place and realize that he must feel under siege in Alabama or wherever.

Newton's Principia just turned 330 years old. From then to now is like half the length of the Roman Empire and we've basically created 1000s of miracles in those 330 years. We may kill ourselves as a species, which is unfortunate, but the progress we've made in the promotion of truth, justice, and human flourishing is historically unprecedented. There may be much more to do, and there is always tons to complain about, but we shouldn't completely lose perspective.

They're in the cross hairs of the Right Wing Smear Machine right now. Literally everything and anything they do is going to be attacked.

While this is true, the post you responded too gives us a great look into the American mind. So many Americans see the rest of the world and think "you're only free because of us."

In the end, though, we must not lose sight of the fact that it all comes down to ethics in gaming journalism.

no, im not doing that fallacy. you probably just know of this random fallacy and want to tell us about it.

i have given specific examples of where ppl on the left demonize, condemn and prejudice groups in society that are our political opponents. these are not violence promoting claims, so they are not as extreme as the alt right, but they are still highly radical positions. are you unable to see that these positions are floating around, its not that hard.

to be honest you sound like a 1st year college student that thinks hes cool. and threathening me with your potential withdrawal from the discussion is not a big threat. i do actively dislike if i were to get filtered by debatants that are very solid or have alot of insight or have clever views. but you are just a boyscout so i dont care what you do.

LOL mmkay bye

This is a great post. Bolded is key to me and I think explains a lot about what has changed in the past several years compared to, say, the previous 30 years.

In the past, enough people who were otherwise morally corrupt idiots with terrible views decided that they needed to go along with the elite consensus -- the trusted evening news anchor, political leaders, etc.

If everyone on TV agreed, they must be right. Maybe these people worried about being ostracized if they allowed their gut feelings to be known. Maybe they simply weren't exposed to their own gut ideas in a coherent manner by others, so they didn't share, assuming they were in the minority.

To a large extent, elites in the media had control. It's not really that these elites were purposefully manipulating idiots into obeying norms, it's that the vast majority of people who made up the professional media class were highly educated and so they already agreed on norms. And they repeated them on TV and in newspapers and so it filtered through the population.

But then the internet and the fragmenting of the media allowed more viewpoints to be heard. Soon the aforementioned depraved idiots were seeing other depraved idiots saying the things they always kinda believed and always kinda wanted to say. And then you get a presidential candidate saying those things, the ultimate affirmation.

The proposition is attaching this mans name to his own words. What makes it seem like an outragous punishment is his words are horrible. He love the n word and demonizes jews. Yes, pulling his white hood off and running his name & pic will cause him real harm. Lots of people will rightly shun him. So what cause is furthered by protecting his privacy again? He's national news.

Like if you can go back in time and run a newspaper when lynchings were common, wouldn't features on the every day people participating in lynch mobs be appropriate and newsworthy?

I have no fear of the flip side. Getting shunned for having political opinions a la Colin Kapernick is the price of free speech.

Redditor WhiteGenocide_Chewbacca apologizes for writing most recent draft of Senate healthcare bill.

https://twitter.com/AlwaysWinning1/s...71838215335937

This voter fraud fraud is impossible. We lost.

CNN just clarified that the 46 states opposed are the ones who won't fully comply. They said the majority of states are willing to turn over publicly available data in some form.

Before you stop to think how that might be okay, it's not. It's really not.

Am I missing some sense of 'publicly available', or is this whole dispute a question of how much legwork the administration can outsource to the states?

Could not have said this better myself.

It's also worth mentioning that we don't need to defend ourselves from everyone because we don't, decade after decade, invade and meddle in other countries and start wars. It's so frustrating to hear Americans talk about the world hating them "for their freedom" as if they don't have a century of policy which has driven The world's opinion.

America has never defended Canada in any military conflict largely because we don't start military conflicts. We have, however, joined America in their conflicts many times.

America chooses to be involved in war after war, decade after decade, just as they choose to spend spend more on their military than the next ten countries COMBINED and single handedly represent 36% of global military spending.

You don't have universal health care, in part, because you can't stop starting wars and you choose to spend money on your military instead.

It's all playing out yet again with NK.

The GOP doesn't want people to die, the GOP simply prioritizes other things over preventing avoidable deaths... To them, a tax cut to the 1% is more important than avoiding 15,000 to 20,000 deaths per year. To them, keeping military spending high to benefit defense contractors is worth the deaths caused by the ongoing conflicts they must stoke to keep that machine churning. To them, the people that suffer in poverty and perhaps die younger because they don't make a living wage are simply not as important as the aforementioned tax cuts and preserving bigger profits for businesses by letting them pay their workers less.

I am sure that if the GOP could have its cake and eat it too, it wouldn't want those people to die. But, that's not the way the world works... and their priorities are clear.

Yeah, well said. The GOP crushes Democrats on this messaging. Military spending is basically untouchable politically, because the GOP wins those debates by framing Democrats as soft lefty wimps who aren't able to be strong and protect America. In reality, the GOP elites are just worried about keeping up defense spending to line the pockets of the military industrial complex, and the best way to do that is to always have a conflict raging or on the horizon.

Democrats have figured out that attacking this issue is a loser for them, so we're basically mired in constant conflict and that's pretty bad for us economically. That said, attacking Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has always been a loser for Republicans and their going full steam ahead on that stuff... Or trying to. So maybe it's time for Democrats to wake the eff up, think outside the box and really start attacking the issues of our time.