Donald Trump and US politics

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diablofdb wrote:

I don't say all liberals as individuals I say the liberal progressive as a political movement. It baffle me how people just sit there and just insult everyone. How do you think people react inside when you call them fascist just for disagreeing with you. Do you think it help to progress the conversation.

I don't consider the kind of asshats who would burn Berkeley down to prevent Milo from speaking to be liberals. I get that they pose as liberals, try to blend in with liberals, want you to think they're liberals... but they're not. They're fascists — the real ones.

The problem with the contemporary Left is not that liberalism has become a fascist ideology which has abandoned arguments in favor of insult and violence. The problem with the contemporary Left is that it has been infested with corruption. Major portions of the Democratic Party are loyal to Wall Street and war profiteers, not the people; they offer their liberal constituency nothing but empty words. Such practices cannot persist in the light of truth and require an environment of illusion; therefore, they seek to replace thoughts with feelings, debate with intimidation, information with indoctrination, issues with identity. But even as these traitors act upon the Left (and, make no mistake, the Right as well), they are separate from it; imposters, not the real deal.

As an abstract ideology, liberalism is just as strong as it's ever been. As a real-life movement, the so-called Left is plagued by fascist posers. When you see someone like Rubin talking about leaving the Left, it's very clear that he's still a liberal, that he personally hasn't shifted right; instead, his entire argument is that his so-called allies on the Left have become something else, something which he can no longer in good conscience stand with.

We are approaching a moment where both the Left and the Right call the Republican Party home, and all that remains of the Democrats is cancer. That party will die off unless it cleanses itself of its disease (as the Justice Democrats hope and plan), but ideological liberalism most certainly shall not perish, regardless.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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diablofdb wrote:

Obama made 3 big promise for his 8 years:

1. getting out of Irak and Afghanistan
2. Creating job and giving a boost to the economy
3. Giving an affordable healthcare for everyone



1. He ended up going at war with 7+ countries for his 8 years making him the president who was the most at war for the entire history of the USA. Isis is litteraly his creation.

This is nonsense. ISIS is a result of the instability in Iraq caused by us bombing the place back into the stone age. Blaming Obama for that simply because he couldn't fix the mess Bush caused is kind of obscene. There was no winning strategy in Iraq, and cutting our losses was probably not a bad move.

And just counting "who did we engage in war with" is an absurdly incomplete story. At least two out of those seven were wars he inherited from someone else; Libya was a NATO campaign backed by the international community in an attempt to oust a violent dictator. It's a little absurd to first complain about airstrikes against ISIS targets in 7 countries, then complain that "ISIS is litteraly[sic] his creation".

I agree that the creation of Daesh was something Obama couldn't have prevented. However, the arming of Daesh, via Syrian rebels, made them rich, powerful, relevant. They would probably have been destroyed already if it wasn't for Obama's policies in Syria.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

the unemployment rate has been slowly dropping and the economy has been recovering pretty much nonstop during his presidency. Perhaps slower than desired, but he never was able to pass that second jobs package.

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3. Obamacare made it even harder for people to get access to a doctor and made things worse for everyone.

Bullshit. Citation needed. What we have now is far more people who, for the first time, can actually afford the healthcare they need. The number of uninsured Americans is lower than ever before. The idea that as a result of this, accessibility has fallen kind of boggles the mind - where did you get that idea?

The income gap has grown despite unemployment going down. What does this mean, logically? It means the new jobs are shitty, part-time work.

Similarly, yes, more people are insured than ever before. But insurance is shittier than ever before, and now mandatory. I mean, seriously, if you make a law forcing people to do something, else stiff fines, you need to do better than point to statistics saying "hey, they're doing it now" to claim the situation has improved.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

The reason conservatives tend to admit that Bush was a bad president is that with the benefit of hindsight, you'd have to be deaf, blind, and stupid to miss out on that fact. The reason liberals refuse to admit the same about Obama is because Obama wasn't a bad president. There's a reason he was more popular when he left office than any candidate running.

ROFL

Yeah, there's a reason; it's briefly covered in my post right above this one. The corrupt faux-left loves itself some anti-white racism, and it's been working hard on it in the past eight.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

This is nonsense. ISIS is a result of the instability in Iraq caused by us bombing the place back into the stone age. Blaming Obama for that simply because he couldn't fix the mess Bush caused is kind of obscene.

ISIS was an "underground" movement in Iraq, thanks to Bush yes, but it is because of the war in Syria that they managed to take over the region. They have first built up a force in Syria in 2012 & 2013 and only then used this foothold to conquer northern Iraq in 2014.

If it wasn't for Obama & Hillary destroying Lybia (where weapons & jihadists came from) and destabilizing Syria, by supporting islamists there, ISIS would probably not be able to gather their forces so efficiently and conquer the region. ISIS in Syria was still collaborating with the so called "moderate FSA islamists" in 2013, the ones that were on Obama payroll.

Bush fucked up and Obama doubled it. They were both destructive neocons, as far as foreign policy goes.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I agree that the creation of Daesh was something Obama couldn't have prevented. However, the arming of Daesh, via Syrian rebels, made them rich, powerful, relevant. They would probably have been destroyed already if it wasn't for Obama's policies in Syria.

Welcome to the great middle-eastern clusterfuck, I suppose. This is a much more fair criticism, although I'm curious to what degree this could have been reasonably ascertained up front. Outcomes are more important, obviously, but the way people talk about it, it's as though Obama personally said, "You guys need to start a new terrorist organization, and I'll be glad to fund you and give you weapons".

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

the unemployment rate has been slowly dropping and the economy has been recovering pretty much nonstop during his presidency. Perhaps slower than desired, but he never was able to pass that second jobs package.

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3. Obamacare made it even harder for people to get access to a doctor and made things worse for everyone.

Bullshit. Citation needed. What we have now is far more people who, for the first time, can actually afford the healthcare they need. The number of uninsured Americans is lower than ever before. The idea that as a result of this, accessibility has fallen kind of boggles the mind - where did you get that idea?

The income gap has grown despite unemployment going down. What does this mean, logically? It means the new jobs are shitty, part-time work.

The income gap has grown fairly consistently since the 90s. In 2016, we actually saw a mild reversal of the trend, and median real wages have gone up since 2012. I wish I could find that chart showing wage growth per percentile, because this is not just a matter of the rich getting richer - the lower and middle class are seeing actual gains, but without a cite I don't expect you to take my word for it, and I can't find the damn graph at the moment. But 2015 was definitely a really good year, and I think the case is likely a little more complex than just "new jobs are mostly shit".

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Similarly, yes, more people are insured than ever before. But insurance is shittier than ever before, and now mandatory. I mean, seriously, if you make a law forcing people to do something, else stiff fines, you need to do better than point to statistics saying "hey, they're doing it now" to claim the situation has improved.

It's not just "you have to buy insurance". It's also the case that a large number of people who couldn't get health insurance before at all, regardless of the price, due to pre-existing conditions, are now able to get health insurance. Or those who simply did not have the money for health insurance before. According to the Heritage Foundation, the vast majority of new enrollments are from the medicaid expansion. It's not a bunch of people who otherwise didn't bother with healthcare buying it now; rather, it's a whole bunch of people who either couldn't afford it or couldn't get it period who now are able to acquire health care. And if the purpose of a law is to ensure that everyone has X, it's entirely valid to point to the number of people who have X, regardless of whether or not that law forces people to have X.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

The reason conservatives tend to admit that Bush was a bad president is that with the benefit of hindsight, you'd have to be deaf, blind, and stupid to miss out on that fact. The reason liberals refuse to admit the same about Obama is because Obama wasn't a bad president. There's a reason he was more popular when he left office than any candidate running.

ROFL

Yeah, there's a reason; it's briefly covered in my post right above this one. The corrupt faux-left loves itself some anti-white racism, and it's been working hard on it in the past eight.

I'm just gonna pretend this part doesn't exist and act like your entire post was made up of reasonable arguments, if that's perfectly all right with you.

Also, on the subject of Rubin, I find this Cracked article a particularly worthy response. He seems to be inflating really quite minor issues into this huge, movement-defining thing. Not only that, but he fails to recognize the purpose or merit behind such things (like his bizarre strawman of intersectionality as "oppression olympics", when it is in fact a concept which exists almost exclusively as a response to the entirely reasonable critique of, "Hey, I'm a white guy living in a trailer park, you really think Oprah has bigger problems than me?") and paints them in simplistic and absurd terms based on the furthest outliers. It's really a very basic and typical "anti-PC" playbook. Just to quote the conclusion real quick, in case you folks don't want to read through the whole article:

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Look, you're probably going to be able to find one or two people online who are saying the kind of outrageous stuff that Rubin is talking, because the world is teeming with dummies. But the overwhelming majority of progressives actually have far more nuanced and complicated opinions that were developed very carefully over years of thought, because they're fully functioning people who care about being good people and not just winning arguments and scoring points. I hate Rubin's video because it isn't about understanding "progressives" or even proving them wrong -- it's actually encouraging you to be lazy by promising that the American left is so stupid, so hopelessly out of touch, and so obviously wrong that it's not even worth your time to listen to them. That's quite the accusation to throw at half the freaking country.

The bare minimum anyone can do in a debate is try to actually to understand what their opponent's viewpoint is. Until you do that, you're just arguing with shadows.

FWIW I don't know a single liberal who supports the actions of those fascists at UC Berkeley. I don't, despite my fairly extreme belief that the world would be a better place if nobody had ever heard of Milo Yiannopolous, or if he suddenly stopped existing tomorrow. But it's easy to point to a few isolated incidents like that an build a simplistic narrative, and that's more or less exactly what Rubin did.

https://twitter.com/voiceofchid/status/827212375522701312

I wouldn't say that the only reason Trump is popular is because he "annoys the left", I mean, he promised lots of things that did appeal to conservatives, and that plays a large role in why people like him, but it's kind obvious that his supporters love when he attacks the left or anything mildly related to the left, maybe that played a role just as big as the promises he made.

Now about Milo, man, it just seems awfully easy to become a popular among the new wave of conservatives
we can see that this is true if we take in consideration the ascension of Tomi Lahren, for real, she didn't need to do much to become popular, her opinions aren't much different from what we might find on the comments section of a conservative video on youtube(in the sense that they are simple), and besides her now there is also that Joy Villa

For all we know she could have voted for Hillary, and now she could be using the lack of celebrities supporting Trump to make money, who knows.

The point is, when it comes to using politics to become a celebrity it seems to be way easier now if you try aiming to Trump supporters as public. If I had to make a metaphor is like Trump supporters just broke up with their SO, and now any player has higher chances on making a move on them.

It's like the power vacuum on Iraq, but that makes me wonder, who before held the seats that now belong to Milo, Lahren and etc?

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soneka101 wrote:

https://twitter.com/voiceofchid/status/827212375522701312

I don't know enough about Lahren or "Joy Villa" to agree on them, but holy shit I agree 100% on Milo. The man is a troll. Not even a good troll, the kind of obnoxious chantard who thinks it's funny that people gets mad when they say hateful, offensive things. His "ideas" are, to the extent that they're even fucking coherent, things that haven't been worthy of debate for ages. What exciting, interesting new ideas does Milo bring to the table that a thousand other people haven't articulated better? And that aren't stupid? Transwomen are more prevalent in sexual assault cases, therefore we should exclude them from women's bathrooms? (The problem here being that it's more prevalent because they're so often the victims.) You shouldn't hire gay people because they're unreliable due to doing too many drugs and having too much sex? (Although to his credit, he does clarify that they aren't as bad as women. Wait, I'm sorry, that makes it worse, not better.) That absolutely nothing he says is worth taking seriously, because he does it all to "trigger" people? I wish his fucking fanboys would pay attention to that one, because boy would it make twitter a nicer place to be.

The world would be a better place if he didn't exist in it. The least we can do is stop giving the fucker a platform. But for some reason, being a professional troll is enough to earn one a book deal and invitations to speak on HBO, CNBC, and more. Normally I wouldn't say anything along the lines of "X makes gays look bad", but Milo actually does makes gays look bad.

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It's like the power vacuum on Iraq, but that makes me wonder, who before held the seats that now belong to Milo, Lahren and etc?

I don't think there's a power vacuum, the older versions of this kind of crap haven't gone anywhere. With the exception of Glenn Beck, who has become slightly less unhinged in the wake of Trump. You still have Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. You still have Ann Coulter. Hell, even Pat Robertson is still around.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I don't consider the kind of asshats who would burn Berkeley down to prevent Milo from speaking to be liberals. I get that they pose as liberals, try to blend in with liberals, want you to think they're liberals... but they're not. They're fascists — the real ones.

The problem with the contemporary Left is not that liberalism has become a fascist ideology which has abandoned arguments in favor of insult and violence. The problem with the contemporary Left is that it has been infested with corruption. Major portions of the Democratic Party are loyal to Wall Street and war profiteers, not the people; they offer their liberal constituency nothing but empty words. Such practices cannot persist in the light of truth and require an environment of illusion; therefore, they seek to replace thoughts with feelings, debate with intimidation, information with indoctrination, issues with identity. But even as these traitors act upon the Left (and, make no mistake, the Right as well), they are separate from it; imposters, not the real deal.

As an abstract ideology, liberalism is just as strong as it's ever been. As a real-life movement, the so-called Left is plagued by fascist posers. When you see someone like Rubin talking about leaving the Left, it's very clear that he's still a liberal, that he personally hasn't shifted right; instead, his entire argument is that his so-called allies on the Left have become something else, something which he can no longer in good conscience stand with.

We are approaching a moment where both the Left and the Right call the Republican Party home, and all that remains of the Democrats is cancer. That party will die off unless it cleanses itself of its disease (as the Justice Democrats hope and plan), but ideological liberalism most certainly shall not perish, regardless.

I agree with that, people who riot like that in the streets are the real fascists, but I think it go further than just that. I think there is a real radicalisation in the left. I used to be a liberal progressive, I always voted for the liberals in Canada. But one thing that turn me off and many other is the extreme mesures they are now taking. I do not recognize myself in the liberals anymore, I think the left has became so hostile to anyone who slightly disagree with them, it just turn of many of their moderate followers. Calling names and labeling anyone who have a different set of ideas is wrong. I know many people who have voted twice for Obama and now ended up voting for Trump.

I think the left has to stop what they are doing and think. Reform their ideas and go back to what they used to be.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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It's like the power vacuum on Iraq, but that makes me wonder, who before held the seats that now belong to Milo, Lahren and etc?

I don't think there's a power vacuum, the older versions of this kind of crap haven't gone anywhere. With the exception of Glenn Beck, who has become slightly less unhinged in the wake of Trump. You still have Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. You still have Ann Coulter. Hell, even Pat Robertson is still around.

Maybe is just that, they got old and lost touch with young conservatives...

I guess this will pose as a problem for republicans, since from now on if they don't act angry/agressive towards the media/the left, they might lose votes from their younger base to a third party that does that.

EDIT: whoops, double post

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diablofdb wrote:

I think there is a real radicalisation in the left. I used to be a liberal progressive, I always voted for the liberals in Canada. But one thing that turn me off and many other is the extreme mesures they are now taking. I do not recognize myself in the liberals anymore, I think the left has became so hostile to anyone who slightly disagree with them, it just turn of many of their moderate followers. Calling names and labeling anyone who have a different set of ideas is wrong. I know many people who have voted twice for Obama and now ended up voting for Trump.

I think the left has to stop what they are doing and think. Reform their ideas and go back to what they used to be.

I'm curious, did you see the same from the right at all? Because I recall, back in 2010, it wasn't just people being "called names" and "labeled" (although there certainly was a lot of that); anyone who didn't pass ideological purity tests got primaried, including the house majority leader, Eric Cantor, in 2014. Many of them were replaced by more ideologically pure hardliners.

Meanwhile, having spent quite a bit of time on forums with a large population of right-wingers, I see quite a bit of the right being hostile to anyone who slightly disagrees with them. Maybe it's just accepted at this point that if you support abortion in any way, you're a child murderer, or if you support progressive taxation you're a communist, or if you support trans rights you're a danger to children. Show any sign of anger or outrage at hateful or bigoted statements, or any form of respect to women, and you're a "beta cuck". And that's not even getting into the really nasty shit you see swirling around the alt-right.

It's pretty easy to nutpick both sides, and name-calling is by far one of the mildest things to come out of this. If I call you an anti-intellectual moron, what does that actually do? Hell, at this point I doubt it even makes you feel bad. You don't care. Meanwhile, Milo Yiannopolous calls out an actress and she gets harassed by a fairly massive group of racist, misogynist trolls. But whatever, the issue is, it's really hard to call out the left in particular for this when it's clear both sides do it. We have the tumblr set, you have the chantard and gamergate set. And while I will admit that our group is an annoyance and a hindrance to progressive discussion, perhaps it would be better to remove the shiny golden tower with 68 floors from your eye before you criticize the mote in ours. Address the rational content, not the insane demands of a tiny minority of loonies.

Or, to put it another way... Our last president explicitly called out the people you're complaining about. Meanwhile, your president's top advisor is pretty much the leader of the alt-right.