zoogs

5 minutes ago, Comfortably Numb said:

First things first...I do not identify with Democrats or liberals or Republicans. At all. But since I am still fiscally conservative I voted in the conservative section. However I don't think it correct to lump Repubs and conservatives together, not anymore.

 

I guess my only comment is a couple questions for @zoogs, I guess I can sort of see the concern with banning gun sales to all persons designated mentally ill. That could be a pretty wide ranging category but surely you would be for it with some stipulations and in the right circumstances, right?  But the one that really caught me off guard...those on the no fly list. Please tell me you're against this only because the no fly list is terribly mismanaged. Surely you would be for it if the list was actually only dangerous people that our government has determined to be extreme risks, right?

So my position is most easily described as bigly anti-gun, bigly pro-civil liberties. It's not so much the idea that the present government is doing a poor job of deciding who is on the list and who is not, it's that I am highly skeptical of giving our government the power to arbitrate who gets what we consider to be their natural rights protected, and who loses these protections. "Dangerous people don't deserve rights; who's dangerous? Whomever the government tells you is" is this really scary idea to me, not least because it actually seems bipartisan.

It's the same way with mental illness, which does not make a dangerous person (they have rights, too, which are often neglected by public consideration. Or worse, as in this case, they're harmed by the vilification). 

Guns are the problem. Ergo, we have to decide that because guns are a problem they must be restricted in all these ways, and you have to (for example) demonstrate that you should be allowed to use a gun. We require licenses for operating motor vehicles! When what we have instead is certain people are dangerous, dangerous enough that they have access to a receding set of protections of their civil liberties, this is a problem. 

I’m among those who strongly disagree that we can decide what are legitimate reasons and what are not. We’d get into the territory of women having to prove they were legitimately raped, for example, and that isn’t nearly as clear cut as it might seem. And it’s selectively punitive of the decision to have sex, in general. If you aren’t trying to conceive, you’re not consenting to a pregnancy, at least, this mindset should not be mandatory.

This is among the reasons anti-abortion dovetails so nicely with strict, moralizing, and regressive attitudes towards sex. There is a deep, deep undecurrent of suspicion that the women who choose to get abortions are careless, frivolous, slutty women who deserve moral condemnation and eternal shame.

China's providing a blueprint for Trump, no question. He is a blatant authoritarian who admires men like these. The Duterte example is a great one to bring up.

We are at a national crossroads here. As a country, we are looking at all the worst and the most illiberal of impulses around the world and asking ourselves, "why not?" If the answer is clear, so, too, should our feelings about those presently in power. They aspire to these ends! Fortunately, we still have a democracy, flawed though it may be. And if we can recognize the issue so clearly, we have the ability to use our voice to do something about it. At least to try.

Preventing the mentally ill -- strongly oppose
Expanding the BoR deprivation of those on no-fly lists -- strongly oppose
Background checks -- strongly support
Assault weapons ban -- support
Federal database -- strongly support
High-capacity mags ban -- support
Concealed carry -- oppose
Guns in schools -- uh, STRONGLY oppose
Shorten waiting periods -- strongly oppose
Concealed carry without a permit -- you're kidding, right? 

For everything I do support: as you all know, I want the contemporary interpretation of the 2A overturned, if not the amendment in its entirety. So long as it stands, it's in the Bill of Rights, and restrictions on any of those should be met with suspicion. How do you justify it? I mean, technically, laws in any of these areas I do support... if they are allowed to stand, the 2A is being rather generally trampled upon. It's a good result. But it bears treading carefully. 

For example, something not mentioned here is a gun license requirement. I support that end result, but the thought that citizens should have to actively prove themselves to the government to be worthy of their basic rights is downright dystopian. There's no way forward, IMO, that doesn't at least casually (or maybe overtly) treat the right to bear arms as not a real right. Which, naturally, I don't think it should be!

I am so sad that wasn't a Frost quote. "Be the Corn" would have been such a powerful rallying cry.

Other than his total lack of qualifications and his many questionable activities, it's probably his mounting and massive piles of debt.

But let's step back from the more highly charged aspects of this debate for a moment. 

Almost all abortions occur before 21 weeks. The ones that occur after are vanishingly rare and typically under extraordinary circumstances. I think it'd be fair to say that, from a medical or practical standpoint, there's often not much choice even involved there. 

And that shouldn't be surprising. Nobody wants to wait this long, ideally. Nobody even wants to be in a position where they are pregnant but didn't want to be! But for many reasons, sometimes that happens, and for many reasons, sometimes it can't happen early enough. Among the more common reasons, by the way, include the inability to access care or the inability to get to it in a timely manner. These are the straightforward consequences of, among other things, reducing the number of clinics available in each state.

There are, fair enough, complex and maybe philosophical questions surrounding this debate. But why do the bad outcomes named above occur? Whose direct advocacy is responsible for these effects? Where do those people want to go? There is a simple answer here. It is no mystery.

1 hour ago, RedDenver said:

The hyperbole is in statements like the bolded. Removing a woman's autonomy in it's entirety would be to fully control (or proscribe) every aspect of her life. Literally no one is advocating that.

Wait, what? This is not a reasonable reading of our discussion. Every invocation of autonomy in this topic refers, plainly, to the choice regarding her pregnancy. That involves quite a lot! It's permanent, life-changing, and a complete reshaping of one's life.  And when that choice removed, it's fully removed. It's not a little bit removed. It's not the woman and the state meeting in the middle to vote or negotiate about it (that would also be absurd).

I don't think you are intentionally misunderstanding this. But just to be absolutely clear, telling women what movies to watch or what color to wear was never even implied in this discussion. Though, again, choosing to carry a pregnancy to term isn't some one off, one small corner of all the aspects of one's life, either. It comes with a large set of other necessary decisions, in every area of her life, and not merely for the duration of the pregnancy.

Also, proscribe means to prohibit.

Not necessarily. The President has the authority, for example to show the daily briefing (Top Secret, a designation Kushner temporarily no longer has, and this is an actual “temporarily”) to anyone he wishes. 

The modern-era history of deregulatory efforts (and let's decouple this from "Republican", for a moment, if that would make it more palatable) is not a pretty one, and it's not one to which it is sensible to ascribe benevolent motivations, or good-faith intentions.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/world/asia/china-xi-jinping.html

2. https://www.ft.com/content/fbc63376-1ab2-11e8-aaca-4574d7dabfb6

Xi Jinping -- General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the Peoples's Republic, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, "Core" Leader, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Grass Sea, First of His Name -- has been consolidating power for years, ever since his ascendancy in 2013 in a 99.86% vote. The Party now intends to do away with the shackling term limits via Constitutional amendment that would have deprived China of his indefinite, glorious leadership as soon as....*squints* 2023. And for the good of the nation, any inappropriately skeptical or unrest-promoting public reactions must be "managed".

I mean, what are those things and why don't they happen?

I'm aware that this is the reason why people feel choice must be restricted. Again -- you are free to argue that it's a good reason. That, because of this, there is no permissible use of one's body other than going through with the pregnancy, once you are in that situation.

It's important to clarify the grounds on which the disagreement exists. It would be strange for the pro-choice side to argue that they are all about considering and protecting a potential child's rights, for example. The position and the advocacy is explicitly that the only person who should be given consideration here is the pregnant woman. Likewise, when choice is completely forbidden, there is zero extent to which the will of the woman is being considered. It is all about defining a set of circumstances where we as a society decide, for whatever reasons the worthiness of which may be debated, the free exercise of that will must not be permitted, and a certain course of action on the part of the pregnant individual must be compelled.

This doesn't sound as nice for either side when you put it in these terms, but these are the accurate terms and they describe the consequences.

There is no hyperbole there. We're even saying the same thing.

One perspective is that there is only the woman's autonomy to consider and that it must be left alone. The other's is precisely that sometimes, this autonomy must be proscribed. Not rendered "partial". Removed in its entirety. It can be argued that this restriction is just, logical, or reasonable, but it is what it is.

This is always what republicans have meant by “government waste.”

We need to save that tax money to hand out as incentives to very large corporations who don’t accede to social demands and sever ties with the NRA.

The White House has considerable discretion in directing the priorities of federal government. Not nothing is being done, but not enough is being done. This wouldn’t be true if the president had an interest. No system can be totally insulated from this and we are paying the price for electing this guy president.

I would like to see a sustained effort in holding Trump accountable for these numerous allegations. It isn’t happening and we’re seeing that. 

Errata: the basketball game attending kids at Madison, who, owing to their range of socioeconomic backgrounds about which distribution it is unknowable if it skews higher on average than Flint, were wholly justified in their disdain of the opposing ball player as a cheat.

What on god's green earth are we doing?

Dismantle ICE.

Florida gets it: 

Here's Andrew Gillum, Democrat mayor of Tallahassee and candidate for Governor:

His campaign platform? Medicare for all, higher corporate taxes with gains to be directed towards public education, and a $15 minimum wage. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-florida-governor-campaign-issues-scott-maxwell-20180202-story.html 

Among Republican candidates:

Quote

On guns, Putnam said he already helped Florida become first in the nation for concealed-carry permits by cutting costs and the “red tape.” He vowed to “make Florida the first in the nation for law-abiding citizens to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.”

You can do this, Florida. 

You'd think that the blatantness of this all gave the game away. It's possible that there is no way they can actually accomplish this (I hope -- it'd be much scarier if they could), but did it anyway to make a useful cultural statement.

The correct and maybe only real recourse is to vote these people out of office. This is the State Senate and the State Legislature there. It's not just the national elections that matter, and it's one reason why the remarkable year Democrats have had at the state level in special elections, etc, is noteworthy.

knapp's post is the one I wish I had thought of. It's the perfect unpopular opinion for our forum, and it's so very spot on. There was this (journalist, I think?) who I agreed with on a lot -- very anti-Trump, quite liberal views, etc, etc. He cracked once that if Trump could deliver us our NCAA games back again he'd change his tune. What messed up priorities! And the thing is,  to be serious for a moment, this is exactly the kind of thing he would do, and it would actually earn him a great deal of enthusiastic applause.

Sam Keller is not one of my favorite Husker QBs to have ever watched, to say the least. The lawsuit to which he gave his name righted a wrong. And the s#!t he gets for that is wrong.

Oh, my god. It was somehow lost on me that this was more than some dangerous hypothetical. Concretely, the GA Senate is agitating to strip Delta of an already-passed $50M tax incentive unless the airline company, to quote the Lt. Gov again, "fully reinstate its relationship with the NRA."
 
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-02-26/georgia-senate-moves-to-punish-delta-for-cutting-ties-with-nra 
 
The GA State Senate is the same body that made news in recent days for passing a measure allowing adoption agencies to ban gay couples. It is a 56-seat legislative body with 37 Republicans and 19 Democrats. Are you very proud, Georgia?
 

This ... is not a very dark green map.

12/50 states >= 50%

(Way to go, Nebraska!) 

Also, look at this data on Texas early voting: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018-elections/2018/02/21/fueled-democratic-surge-texans-turn-force-first-day-early-voting We can do this, guys. Turn Texas blue. Do not make this a normal midterm year. Turn out to the polls, across the country. All the money in the world can't buy a lot of people who already see the obvious and then vote accordingly.

4 hours ago, RedSavage said:

I like The Doors.  The Beatles on the other hand, are the most overrated band of all time.

 

*Ducks for cover*

You'd better duck!

California style is the best kind of pizza.