USA Politics

Started by Que, June 09, 2020, 10:18:46 AM

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Todd

#60
Biden and Trump both warn the other side may 'steal' the election, as the fight over mail voting rages

Both candidates are openly using language that sets the stage for calling into question the legitimacy of the election outcome.  This is either a terrible situation, or a potentially useful one, depending on outlook.  The legitimacy of American democracy itself is under assault.

It does rather make one wonder why Europeans and others are so keen to cling to antiquated security arrangements.  Dissolving NATO and fracturing other security arrangements (a modified Five Eyes aside) would be good for the world.
The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

Karl Henning

Quote from: arpeggio on June 11, 2020, 07:44:43 PM
Really? Of course we appreciate the effect of Covid19.

And, it ain't just NeverTrumpers:

https://www.youtube.com/v/XgqOD7BECNc
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

greg

I thought I made another post yesterday? Seemed too have disappeared.

#goBaldforBLM and CHAZ are both new things that are hilarious.

There was one suggestion someone made about having a hash tag #suicideForBLM. Lol.  :P

Mainly waiting to see just how ironic that CHAZ can possibly get.
Wagie wagie get back in the cagie

arpeggio

If Trumpsters still support him after the virus waiver, they are a lost cause.

arpeggio

A few weeks ago in another thread I expressed my concerns that if Trump lost the election he would refuse to leave office and we would not have a peaceful transition.

One of the defenders of Trump accused me of being paranoid.

greg

Quote from: arpeggio on June 12, 2020, 07:32:43 AM
A few weeks ago in another thread I expressed my concerns that if Trump lost the election he would refuse to leave office and we would not have a peaceful transition.

One of the defenders of Trump accused me of being paranoid.
Doesn't sound paranoid at all.
Wagie wagie get back in the cagie

drogulus

#66

Quote from: Dowder on June 11, 2020, 06:05:09 PM

So much for non-partisan international organizations, who are too scared to stand up to a corrupt aggressor nation, let a virus spread, people die. I'm sure it's more comforting to blame the "evangelical twerp" instead of the "Chinese with socialistic characteristics."

     The weakness of the WHO is not a matter of political partisanship. It's designed to serve sovereign governments the way it does, while attempting to halt the virus spread.

     It's understood what China did initially and how they fought the virus with socialistic characteristics after. I don't know how you come to a different conclusion. Even if they have not entirely come clean on the numbers they report, the response of the national government has been far more effective that the US response with Trumpist characteristics.

     Start there, with how the Chinese effort compares not just with Trump but with other autocratic governments. How did they recover from their initial mistakes? Somehow they allowed information to flow up and sane directives to flow down in a way that Trumpists and autocrats all over the world did not.

     Perhaps you know how that happened. Tell us how China doesn't have millions of cases and the US does.
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JBS

1) China is totalitarian. If they tell their subjects to not leave home, their subjects are not going to leave home.

2) There is no reason to believe China is honest with its statistics. It's merely a case of guessing how dishonest they are.

Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

drogulus

Quote from: JBS on June 12, 2020, 08:34:40 AM
1) China is totalitarian. If they tell their subjects to not leave home, their subjects are not going to leave home.

2) There is no reason to believe China is honest with its statistics. It's merely a case of guessing how dishonest they are.

     Totalitarianism isn't a good explanation. It neither requires nor forbids an effective response. A more democratic Chinese government would probably have acted in a similar fashion, without the propaganda but the same kind of restrictions to combat the virus spread. If you want to contrast what China did with what the US did, it's the US that departed from sound practice, not China.

     I make allowance for Chinese data manipulation. It no longer matters because we know too much about the scale of the outbreak there. Just as in the US, we'll discover errors, deliberate and not, in how cases and deaths are recorded.

     The essential point remains, the China "whattabout" is founded on an exclusive focus on the initial coverup and the dubious influence of socialistic characteristics. If socialist somethings are an explanation of success and failure wherever found, I think it isn't really explaining anything.
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JBS

Quote from: drogulus on June 12, 2020, 09:12:47 AM
     Totalitarianism isn't a good explanation. It neither requires nor forbids an effective response. A more democratic Chinese government would probably have acted in a similar fashion, without the propaganda but the same kind of restrictions to combat the virus spread. If you want to contrast what China did with what the US did, it's the US that departed from sound practice, not China.

     I make allowance for Chinese data manipulation. It no longer matters because we know too much about the scale of the outbreak there. Just as in the US, we'll discover errors, deliberate and not, in how cases and deaths are recorded.

     The essential point remains, the China "whattabout" is founded on an exclusive focus on the initial coverup and the dubious influence of socialistic characteristics. If socialist somethings are an explanation of success and failure wherever found, I think it isn't really explaining anything.

In China if you broke lockdown you could go to jail

In the US if you broke lockdown you could end up being featured on Fox.

It's a fundamental difference.

And we actually don't know the scale of the outbreak there, since all the data is controlled by a government that has every incentive to manipulate the data.

Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

drogulus

#70
Quote from: JBS on June 12, 2020, 09:53:01 AM
In China if you broke lockdown you could go to jail

In the US if you broke lockdown you could end up being featured on Fox.

It's a fundamental difference.

And we actually don't know the scale of the outbreak there, since all the data is controlled by a government that has every incentive to manipulate the data.

     It hasn't turned out to be a fundamental difference between countries with strict lockdowns. It would have to be or the factor can be ignored, so I do. This has nothing to do with how you feel about totalitarians. If you work back from results to reasons for getting them the jail factor isn't much help.

     If we had followed the pandemic rulebook as early in the outbreak as China did we probably could have done as well. Our failure is that we didn't. China delayed reporting the extent of the outbreak for days. I think the local government hid information from national leaders for some time.
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Karl Henning

Quote from: drogulus on June 12, 2020, 10:39:31 AM
     It hasn't turned out to be a fundamental difference between countries with strict lockdowns. It would have to be or the factor can be ignored, so I do. This has nothing to do with how you feel about totalitarians. If you work back from results to reasons for getting them the jail factor isn't much help.

     If we had followed the pandemic rulebook as early in the outbreak as China did we probably could have done as well. Our failure is that we didn't. China delayed reporting the extent of the outbreak for days. I think the local government hid information from national leaders for some time.

Nor did it help that Presiddent Feed-My-Ego refused to take the threat seriously for as long as he did.

Of course, with his eageerness to hold rallies, it hardly seems he hss learnt to take it with any seriousness at all.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

JBS

Quote from: drogulus on June 12, 2020, 10:39:31 AM
     It hasn't turned out to be a fundamental difference between countries with strict lockdowns. It would have to be or the factor can be ignored, so I do. This has nothing to do with how you feel about totalitarians. If you work back from results to reasons for getting them the jail factor isn't much help.

     If we had followed the pandemic rulebook as early in the outbreak as China did we probably could have done as well. Our failure is that we didn't. China delayed reporting the extent of the outbreak for days. I think the local government hid information from national leaders for some time.

Ironic. You make the same mistake as Trump. You are not nearly as skeptical of China as you ought to be.

Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

arpeggio

The fact that China is a whatever, evil empire does not absolve Trump from his mismanagement of the situation.

Karl Henning

Quote from: arpeggio on June 12, 2020, 12:58:59 PM
The fact that China is a whatever, evil empire does not absolve Trump from his mismanagement of the situation.

Seems obvious, doth it not?
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

drogulus

#75
Quote from: JBS on June 12, 2020, 10:57:09 AM
Ironic. You make the same mistake as Trump. You are not nearly as skeptical of China as you ought to be.

     You aren't being skeptical about China and neither am I. You are skeptical about the size of the Chinese outbreak as determined by all of the measures available to health officials and intelligence experts. You think China has powers of concealment it doesn't have. That's a lack of skepticism, not far from conspiracy thinking, though not quite as extravagant as some of that is.

Quote from: Dowder on June 12, 2020, 11:23:55 AM
He's too busy passing all the blame off on to the "evangelical twerps" while extenuating the godless totalitarians.

     The US case total is over 2 million right now, far higher than China and it's very likely China will never catch up. Supposing they are undercounting cases at a higher rate than we are, their case total is somewhere over a hundred thousand, more than Massachusetts and less than New York state.

     Who I prefer doesn't matter. I don't hate Trump into 10,000,000 more cases, so I won't hate China into 50,000,000 more cases.

     
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drogulus

Quote from: arpeggio on June 12, 2020, 12:58:59 PM
The fact that China is a whatever, evil empire does not absolve Trump from his mismanagement of the situation.

     We can judge the performance of different countries without applying junk theories about concealment superpowers.

     The kind of opaqueness misattributed to the heathen Chinese exists in N. Korea. We don't know how many cases they have. China is a model of transparency in comparison, and I'm sure this gives their government a headache.
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greg

lack of skepticism and conspiracy thinking... It's more complex than that. Though this could be applicable to the very low IQ type of conspiracy theorist.
Wagie wagie get back in the cagie

drogulus

Quote from: greg on June 12, 2020, 02:52:58 PM
lack of skepticism and conspiracy thinking... It's more complex than that. Though this could be applicable to the very low IQ type of conspiracy theorist.

     Skepticism should be balanced so that you don't go too far in the other direction. In China many provinces have had tiny outbreaks with deaths in the single digits. That's consistent with the story of Chinese success in limiting the outbreak after the initial missteps. It's wildly improbable that the many health officials who have helped us get a true picture of what's happening in the country have just gone silent. If they have, where are we getting information which could be used to counter suspicious Chinese claims?

     The ChiCom perfidy narrative doesn't hold up, and it's not because the Chinese are not perfidious. It's because it has no foundation.
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SimonNZ

Georgia Republican and QAnon believer favored to win U.S. House seat

"Republican candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, a professed believer in the fringe conspiracy-theorist group known as QAnon, is probably headed to Congress after her strong finish in the Georgia primary.

House Republican leaders were silent Thursday about the likelihood that their caucus may soon include someone affiliated with a group that the FBI has flagged as a potential domestic terrorist threat.

None of the top three House Republicans, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) or Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (Wyo.), responded to questions about Greene's candidacy and possible place within their ranks.

Greene finished first in Tuesday's primary with 41 percent of the vote in the strongly Republican district in northwest Georgia but was shy of the majority of the vote. She will face a runoff Aug. 11 against physician John Cowan, who trailed her by 20 percentage points.

As long as Greene's support holds and she wins that race, she should easily win the House seat in November and replace retiring Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.). In 2016, Georgia's 14th Congressional District elected Donald Trump with 75 percent of the vote.

Greene would become the first member of Congress to have publicly espoused the views of QAnon, the extremist group that believes President Trump is quietly leading a revolution against the "deep state." It maintains a baseless conspiracy theory that there is a secret pedophile operation run by the nation's most prominent people, particularly those within the Democratic Party.

"The Chinese propagandists at the Washington Post are attacking me the same way they attack Donald Trump, and other conservatives," Greene said in an emailed statement. "Northwest Georgians are proud, conservative America-loving patriots. ... I won't let them be bullied by the hate America leftists at the Washington Post."

Greene's campaign did not answer questions about her support for QAnon, but in a lengthy response attacked Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

Greene has posted videos lifting QAnon conspiracy theories and praising its anonymous leader, "Q."

"Q is a patriot. He is someone that very much loves his country, and he's on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump," she said in a 2017 video posted to YouTube. In the video, she talks about an "awakening" that will expose deep corruption and unite Americans behind Trump.

"I'm very excited about that now there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it," she said."[...]

-

A serious question: what kind of self-policing can or does exist at a local level as to whether a candidate wishing to stand as a "Republican" actually expresses their party's broader view and whether same candidate would bring embarrassment to the party? What kind of vetting?

Or is it a simple "can they get votes and we don't care how: yes/no"?

Yes, I know the question sounds massively naive in the post-Palin age, but really: how does this play out at the local level?