Does "liberal" still actually mean nice? Are leftists still claiming to be the "nice" ones and conservatives are "mean" or what?

[BootmanLA]

Just now, KEVORKIANKEVORKIAN said:

The same way you "knew" WWIII was going to start under Trump

 

Whoops!

I never said any such thing. So I ask again, how would you know this?

[viking8x6]

Y'all are vastly off topic. At least one of you has no conceivable excuse.

[KERVORKIANjack]

Yeah you keep pestering me about something until midnight ,

it'll show how completely unimportant both me and the claim are! Totally meaningless to you aren't I, just like that "loser" (yeah right) Trump

[PozBearWI]

1 hour ago, BootmanLA said:

Granted. It also shows how things have changed; back then, the rich and powerful wanted to keep the vote for themselves. Now they're happy to share it with the Great Unwashed Morons as long as they're white and (mostly) Southern.

And of course keeping Citizens United in place....

[PozBearWI]

1 hour ago, KEVORKIANKEVORKIAN said:

so I may not be American but my parents both think Trump's an "idiot" etc, but both of them have been in hospital for being too stupid to wash themselves (in my mother's case it was life-saving and she needed major surgery)

I bet Joe Biden doesnt wash his hands after using the toilet too, that dumbass white trash piece of shit.

Sorry, that made me burst out laughing...  🙂

[PozBearWI]

Does it even matter anymore "Liberal" vs "Conservative"  Shoot the Rs don't even have a platform to publish- just a vague "whatever the orange jeezus says".  

This is more like rooting for sports teams than how our government is managed.  Utter BS

 

 

[viking8x6]

15 hours ago, PozBearWI said:

Does it even matter anymore "Liberal" vs "Conservative"  Shoot the Rs don't even have a platform to publish- just a vague "whatever the orange jeezus says".  

This is more like rooting for sports teams than how our government is managed.  Utter BS

You must have had your curmudgeon pills this morning...

I feel your pain. Perhaps both of us would do better to focus on getting laid. Or failing that, getting off? My, how my standards are slipping!

[PozBearWI]

19 minutes ago, viking8x6 said:

You must have had your curmudgeon pills this morning...

I feel your pain. Perhaps both of us would do better to focus on getting laid. Or failing that, getting off? My, how my standards are slipping!

There is that....  🙂  It would be a pleasure to flip fuck with you.

[BootmanLA]

On 4/16/2024 at 6:53 PM, DallasPozzible said:

But under electoral college, our votes don’t count equally at all.  If they did, Democrats would have won every presidential election in the last 30 years except for ‘04. 

I stumbled back across this and thought I'd throw out some more info.

Lots of people defending the Electoral College cite it as some part of a grand design by the framers of the Constitution, the way they hammered out separation of powers, the (sort of) representative House contrasted with the absolutely non representative Senate, and so forth. The truth is nothing of the kind.

The framers actually took up the issue of how to choose the chief executive (who didn't yet have the title of President) very early in the deliberations of the convention. Some thought he should be chosen by Congress. Others thought he should be chosen by a popular vote. Still others thought that the state legislatures should have the final decision, the way they chose the Senate, but in a more population-aware manner. They couldn't agree, though things weren't really acrimonious; no one really had any idea what method would be best. So they punted, and tabled that issue to come back to later; when they did, it proved to be a very contentious issue.

Contrary to myth, the framers as a group did not "fear democracy" in the sense of a popular vote for president. In fact, there was more support for a popular vote (by propertied white men, in most cases) for president than for any of the other proposals, albeit none of them at first getting a majority. And most of the states, even at that early date, elected their governors (the state-level equivalent of the president) directly; they were perfectly happy to have direct elections for the US House, the body they envisioned as the primary source of federal law. Clearly, direct election was something they understood and supported, at least some of the time.

Rather, the issue raised over a popular vote was that larger states like New York and Pennsylvania had the most voters, but slave states like Virginia had more people overall, even if most of them couldn't vote. States like Virginia wanted the influence that came from being rich and populous even if much of that population was slaves.

Letting Congress pick presented its own problems, because the House was more or less proportional to the state populations, but that meant states with few representatives would have no influence. Conversely, letting the Senate decide meant a handful of people in a small state had as much voice in choosing the president as the entirety of New York.

Letting state legislators vote meant figuring out how much weight to place on Virginia's choice vs. New York's: should we count voters, voting age population, total population, or what? Certainly you couldn't do one vote per state legislature, which had the same problem as letting the Senate decide.

The electoral college was finally chosen as a sort of a compromise nobody really liked a lot - the legislatures picked the electors, and states got as many electors as they had in both chambers of Congress. It produced the disastrous deadlock election of 1800 and the problem that the president and vice-president would likely be from opposing parties (since the electors cast votes only for president, and the second-place finisher became vice-president).

The Twelfth Amendment solved the latter problem, but the underlying undemocratic structure of the EC generated a new problem: once states began voting directly for their electors, it was possible that the popular vote could indicate one person should win, but the electoral college vote another. That happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Five times, among a total of 45 men who served as president. That's a pretty massive discrepancy.

And more to @DallasPozzible's point, not only has the Democrat gotten more votes than the Republican in every election since 1988 except 2004, we'd probably have won that one too; Bush II won his second term only because (a) he was the incumbent, thanks to an election he should have lost, and (b) we were at war and thus reluctant to change leadership at the time.

We can't know anything that didn't happen for sure, of course, but I suspect a hypothetical president Gore wouldn't have invaded Iraq as a response to 9/11, and we very well might have caught and/or killed bin Laden before the 2004 election if we hadn't been distracted by the Iraq debacle. Or we might have declared victory in Afghanistan after overthrowing the Taliban and just left, instead of losing thousands more lives over the next couple of decades trying to force democracy on a people whose social structure wasn't interested in it.

With a president Gore, we wouldn't have Alito or Roberts on the Supreme Court; and with a president Hillary Clinton, we wouldn't have Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, or Barrett, either. We wouldn't be having decision after decision gutting one protection for ordinary people after another. This is the legacy of imagining that the framers "feared" popular elections.

[AlB]

On 12/11/2023 at 12:56 PM, viking8x6 said:

I have no idea whether I'm nicer than you, harry, but I'm quite certain that I'm nicer than Trump. Frankly, I wasn't attempting to address those questions, as they weren't what your post purported to be about.

That was whether left-wing people are "nice" and conservatives are "mean". IMO neither is a valid generalization, nor are the opposites accurate.

Exactly.  And I’m not certain “nice” or “mean” have meaning (no pun intended) in the context of governance. 

[hntnhole]

11 hours ago, AlB said:

IMO neither is a valid generalization

Agreed.  If "nice" means sharing the power more liberally, and "mean" means hoarding the power for the benefit of the few, then commentary should just say that.  "Nice", "mean" have no identifiable meaning anymore; it's only the context in which they are used that carries intent or meaning.  They've simply become obtuse code-words.  In and of themselves (in a political context), they're useless, 

[PozBearWI]

On 7/1/2024 at 3:56 AM, BootmanLA said:

I stumbled back across this and thought I'd throw out some more info.

Lots of people defending the Electoral College cite it as some part of a grand design by the framers of the Constitution, the way they hammered out separation of powers, the (sort of) representative House contrasted with the absolutely non representative Senate, and so forth. The truth is nothing of the kind.

The framers actually took up the issue of how to choose the chief executive (who didn't yet have the title of President) very early in the deliberations of the convention. Some thought he should be chosen by Congress. Others thought he should be chosen by a popular vote. Still others thought that the state legislatures should have the final decision, the way they chose the Senate, but in a more population-aware manner. They couldn't agree, though things weren't really acrimonious; no one really had any idea what method would be best. So they punted, and tabled that issue to come back to later; when they did, it proved to be a very contentious issue.

Contrary to myth, the framers as a group did not "fear democracy" in the sense of a popular vote for president. In fact, there was more support for a popular vote (by propertied white men, in most cases) for president than for any of the other proposals, albeit none of them at first getting a majority. And most of the states, even at that early date, elected their governors (the state-level equivalent of the president) directly; they were perfectly happy to have direct elections for the US House, the body they envisioned as the primary source of federal law. Clearly, direct election was something they understood and supported, at least some of the time.

Rather, the issue raised over a popular vote was that larger states like New York and Pennsylvania had the most voters, but slave states like Virginia had more people overall, even if most of them couldn't vote. States like Virginia wanted the influence that came from being rich and populous even if much of that population was slaves.

Letting Congress pick presented its own problems, because the House was more or less proportional to the state populations, but that meant states with few representatives would have no influence. Conversely, letting the Senate decide meant a handful of people in a small state had as much voice in choosing the president as the entirety of New York.

Letting state legislators vote meant figuring out how much weight to place on Virginia's choice vs. New York's: should we count voters, voting age population, total population, or what? Certainly you couldn't do one vote per state legislature, which had the same problem as letting the Senate decide.

The electoral college was finally chosen as a sort of a compromise nobody really liked a lot - the legislatures picked the electors, and states got as many electors as they had in both chambers of Congress. It produced the disastrous deadlock election of 1800 and the problem that the president and vice-president would likely be from opposing parties (since the electors cast votes only for president, and the second-place finisher became vice-president).

The Twelfth Amendment solved the latter problem, but the underlying undemocratic structure of the EC generated a new problem: once states began voting directly for their electors, it was possible that the popular vote could indicate one person should win, but the electoral college vote another. That happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Five times, among a total of 45 men who served as president. That's a pretty massive discrepancy.

And more to @DallasPozzible's point, not only has the Democrat gotten more votes than the Republican in every election since 1988 except 2004, we'd probably have won that one too; Bush II won his second term only because (a) he was the incumbent, thanks to an election he should have lost, and (b) we were at war and thus reluctant to change leadership at the time.

We can't know anything that didn't happen for sure, of course, but I suspect a hypothetical president Gore wouldn't have invaded Iraq as a response to 9/11, and we very well might have caught and/or killed bin Laden before the 2004 election if we hadn't been distracted by the Iraq debacle. Or we might have declared victory in Afghanistan after overthrowing the Taliban and just left, instead of losing thousands more lives over the next couple of decades trying to force democracy on a people whose social structure wasn't interested in it.

With a president Gore, we wouldn't have Alito or Roberts on the Supreme Court; and with a president Hillary Clinton, we wouldn't have Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, or Barrett, either. We wouldn't be having decision after decision gutting one protection for ordinary people after another. This is the legacy of imagining that the framers "feared" popular elections.

Certainly a plausible speculation and everything else remained equal.  But that doesn't happen.  

I can certainly see the property owner perspective though.  The value of the community I live in is determined by the sum of the assessed value of the properties within.  Our borrowing capacity is largely determined by that value.  Non property owners are simply enjoying the benefits of that value.  True though; they are paying rent on whatever contractual schedule was set and that is, in essence, paying for the property.  What I am getting at though is that property owners title to that property is given by the government.  No government, ownership is dissolved.  Marriages, Contracts of all sorts, our motorcycles and cars...  Everything is at the behess of ones government; and the extent to which other governments respect that.  With no government we don't own anything...  So ripping up the constitution, as 45 seems hell bent to do; means he gets to own everything and it is up to us to fight that within the social structure at that time.  

@BootmanLA where is your podcast???  🙂  😉  😉 

[BootmanLA]

3 hours ago, PozBearWI said:

What I am getting at though is that property owners title to that property is given by the government.  No government, ownership is dissolved.  Marriages, Contracts of all sorts, our motorcycles and cars...  Everything is at the behess of ones government; and the extent to which other governments respect that.  With no government we don't own anything

I'd very slightly amend that to say that "With no government we don't PEACEFULLY own anything." With no government, or an impotent one, might makes right, and the one with the most firepower controls things - kind of a hybrid between feudal manors and Mafia protection rackets.

[NicNorth]

On 12/11/2023 at 5:28 PM, harrysmith26 said:

Ever since about the 2nd half of 2021 I've realised both Joe Biden and his son (Hunter) look like they would kill their son on the spot if they came out as gay. Or in Joe's case he would just try to do some feeble punch or slap cause of him being an old fart.

They just look like loathsome Scranton trailer trash who would do that, basically. 

Trump voiced his support for gay rights at the 2016 Republican convention, he had no plans to try and undo gay marriage, and all criticisms of him are ancient shit he said in the 1970s, or talking about his VP Mike Pence, who fulfilled a ceremonial role.

It's easy for Joe to say he's "pro-gay" that's just another policy and having a pride event at the White House - that's just "another event". After all there is no known member of the Biden family who is LGBT. I'm sure we can come back to the topic of how someone can say they support something in public but be different in private.

All I see on social media is lefties saying "i'm loving seeing Trump supporters crying" and "i love the taste of your tears" ... etc. So horrendous - I wasn't one of the ones who said stupid shit like "liberal tears". In 2016 when all those Hilary supporters were uh... you know, actually crying on election night, I just looked at them with a mild bemusement and some pity, then I moved on.

If you agree with all my assessments, please indicate by calling this a "screeeeed" or something predictable like that. Thanks!

It depends on our definition of ‘nice’ which  will vary according to who is asked.  Political discourse has become polarised and more angry than I’ve ever remembered and I hope we can all row back from that.  Nice (what ever it does mean) might not even be that hot for many - this is a LGBTQ site after all.
 

Personally I have found the most aggression comes from ends of the political spectrum & where our community has suffered the most.  That puts me in the middle but I would suggest the middle is where the most progress is achieved quietly and gradually.
 

I would say that when we put political leaders in the balance we have to look at the whole picture both behaviour and policies.  When we challenge the bad stuff we don’t have to play their game either.  Our  community has been good at being creative when fighting for our rights.

 

Im sure I’ve not directly answered your question but a binary response may not be the most helpful one.  If not actually nice let's all be respectful.

 

 

[NEDenver]

I’ll pull back when my shitty Republican family members apologize for telling me that I’m the enemy of America.  It won’t happen.  To Republicans, civility is something that is owed them, never the reverse.  The ones who invent that frame are the evil ones.  The ones that believe it are the stupid ones.  There’s no other choice.