Donald Trump and US politics

What I learned from all this is that the people on r/politics who always boast about their super duper college education are literally unable to understand what perjury is. What do they learn at colleges nowadays?

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MrSmiley21 wrote:

The problem for the left is, they're not coming up with any new ideas. They're going to have to reinvent themselves like Trump made the Republican Party do.

The funny thing is, they had their chance. Instead, they decided to cheat Bernie out of the nomination.

I think 2020 is going to bring about a "fake Bernie" from the Dems. I see a Democratic Party still committed to the establishment, but they'd have to be thoroughly inept to not see the writing on the wall. It's going to be Obama all over again: a relative political outsider with empty promises of progressive change. They've tried that recently, it worked (unlike Hillary), they'll try it again. And they'll sell it hard with whatever remains of the mainstream media.

...Empty promises? You do realize that despite record-setting intransigence from the opposition, we still got:
- Good steps towards universal healthcare (which, as stated in my last post, has completely shifted the overton window on what is considered acceptable)
- Nationwide marriage equality (who saw that one coming back in 2008?)
- Steps away from the war on drugs
- Investigations of police misconduct on a never-before-seen scale
- A more than tripling of renewable energy output
- Crackdowns on the for-profit college industry
- Plans to phase out the for-profit prison industry

I could probably keep going, but I think I've made my point. I guess what I'm wondering is, what would Obama have to accomplish to have his presidency qualify as real progressive change for you? And how much of that do you think he had to votes for after 2010? This feels embarrassingly utopian to me. Particularly when you consider that when given the choice between someone willing to uphold his legacy and someone who promised to burn it all down, you seem quite eager for the latter.

Watch Trump actually implement universal health care. Would certainly blow some minds. That cuck Ryan should fuck off with his "Obamacare lite".

@bpc

Is your profession in Public Relations, by chance?

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Laurium wrote:

@bpc

Is your profession in Public Relations, by chance?

I work in the IT department of a manufacturing company. Why?

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

...Empty promises? You do realize that despite record-setting intransigence from the opposition, we still got:
- Good steps towards universal healthcare (which, as stated in my last post, has completely shifted the overton window on what is considered acceptable)
- Nationwide marriage equality (who saw that one coming back in 2008?)
- Steps away from the war on drugs
- Investigations of police misconduct on a never-before-seen scale
- A more than tripling of renewable energy output
- Crackdowns on the for-profit college industry
- Plans to phase out the for-profit prison industry

I'm not sure about single-payer healthcare. I do recognize that healthcare is a business that, by its nature, blurs or destroys the bidding principle upon which capitalism rests. It's not that it's necessary, food is necessary and capitalism works just fine for that; it's that people get knocked unconscious and wake up with a bill without the option to refuse and take their business to a competitor. Free-market insurance can solve this, but only if the insurance is adversarial to the healthcare provider — that is, seeking minimal cost and threatening going to competing providers, instead of getting cozy with providers and passing the buck on outrageous pricing to the insured through higher premiums and deductibles... and even then, the issue on pricing for those who don't purchase voluntarily insurance would remain. I'd prefer a relatively free-market solution, but I acknowledge the necessity of heavy government intervention in the industry, whether it's government-as-payer or regulatory oversight. It should be noteworthy that the situations where the healthcare recipient has the least agency are the ones that require the most intervention; for example, I'm much more likely to support "socialized" emergency rooms than routine check-ups or cancer treatments. In any case, while I don't pretend that healthcare wasn't a broken, corrupt system prior to Obamacare, I view the ACA as an expensive and ineffective attempt to fix it, not as anything even remotely resembling a step in the right direction; from the frying pan and into the fire.

Technically, I'm against government recognition of gay marriage. And straight marriage. Actually, all marriage. But technically, that would still be marriage equality. I think the validity of the statement "marriage is between a man and a woman" should depend on the religious beliefs of the couple in question. If you want to marry your cat, I wouldn't stop it... but I'd be upset if you received special privileges from government as a result.

I'm very much for the end of the war on drugs. In fact, I'm even in support of the legal basis for sanctuary cities, not because I'm for illegal immigration (I'm very much against) but because I feel it's important for municipalities and states to be able to passively "resist" federal law their constituents oppose — like marijuana illegalization.

Although I believe the extent of police misconduct is exaggerated, I think it should be prosecuted vigorously where it exists. I don't buy into the narrative that it's systemic; instead, I see it as an exception to the status quo. But a horrible anomaly worthy of our outrage.

I think global warming is massively exaggerated in terms of its threat to humanity. I'm old enough to remember claims that, by now, major cities would be underwater. Researchers are incentived to foretell doomsday scenarios for the click-bait factor alone, and "green energy" fraudsters have fleeced taxpayers for billions with these false studies. I suspect that man-made global warming is real and could eventually become a significant problem, but it's so far down on what I consider to be an objective priority list that it may as well not exist. I support Trump's expressed desire to deregulate coal.

I am not against private colleges. I feel our public colleges are in a much worse state than eight years ago. I am extremely skeptical of teacher's unions and their desire to destroy private education before it even has a chance to gain marketshare, usually with the ridiculous argument that supporting private education in any way will destroy public education.

I'm very wary of the potential for corruption within free-market systems supporting the imprisonment of criminals, but I wouldn't want it phased out completely.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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Laurium wrote:

@bpc

Is your profession in Public Relations, by chance?

I work in the IT department of a manufacturing company. Why?

Curiosity, mostly. You know, waiting for this damn countdown to reach 0.

You repeatedly list all the accomplishments, domestic and foreign, over the last 8 years. You remind everyone said accomplishments valiantly withstood unwavering hateful Republican opposition. You hang on President Obama’s outgoing approval ratings, as per “the polls”, as a sort of icing on the cake for everything else.

Just wondering how you reconcile this veritable Fort Knox vault’s worth of goodwill and success with the decimation of his corresponding party since 2010 with him as its chief...over multiple elections. Democratic change: -35% governors, -20% house/legislature, and -10% senate (numbers might not be 100% accurate, but you get the drift). Wondering why the misalignment especially when you’re quick to point out how, “by the numbers”, the last 8 years are proof-positive of effective policies and anybody that can't see is basically an idiot.

real question is why there are grown men who love My little pony cartoon

A few quick notes...

Even working from the premise that the ACA is kind of a mess, you can't deny the shift that it forced. It's almost certainly an improvement over what we had before, and the evidence for this can be found in that the republican party is currently scrambling to find a solution, rather than simply repealing it and going back to what we had before - because they know if they did, a whole lot of people would be very mad about losing their healthcare. So mess or not, it had that positive effect. We are now at a point where going back to the old system is no longer considered acceptable. Compared to where we were 8 years ago, that's pretty impressive.

Private colleges are not the same thing as for-profit colleges. The majority of private colleges are non-profit - this is a category that nobody complains about, as it includes things like Harvard, Yale, MIT, and the like. The key thing here is "for profit" - we're talking about colleges like University of Phoenix or Trump University (boy, that suddenly vanished from the public eye, didn't it?). Many of these schools are just flat-out scams. Because their primary motivation is profit, not education, they tend to cut corners wherever they can. This leads to really shitty schools. Coming down on the more predatory ones is probably a good idea.

Many of your objections are things where your thoughts and the thoughts of mainstream liberalism and progressivism diverge considerably. Global warming is a serious issue, and most people on either side of the political spectrum would agree that it is very much a "progressive" cause. Similarly, marriage equality is also a mainstream progressive issue - you can't discount it as a win for progressivism just because you don't believe in it.