2001

What Jason said. Democratic idiocy has blown me right past anger and into despair.

2002

The question of “what to do about it” is very interesting to me, as I don’t see that disillusioned Democrats have many choices. They’re sort of in the same boat as economically conservative, socially moderate Republicans in that they have no party they can eagerly support anymore. Will all this disillusionment lead toward the formation of a third (and possibly fourth?) party that is a legitimate threat to the dominance of the established parties? Or is the US government so hopelessly broken, and the formation of new parties so impossibly difficult, that disillusioned people will have nowhere to turn (assuming revolution/civil war is never a serious possibility)?

Deal with the one-third of the country that’s crazy first?

How do you “deal” with one-third of the population of a country as large as the US? I don’t think there’s any changing it, personally, unless you think that things will change over the next fifty years as people become more informed through avenues like the internet. I think that’s pretty unlikely to happen, though that’s just a hunch on my part.

2003

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020403698.html?nav=hcmodule&sid=ST2010020403858

2004

Ah, that.

I have a condescending attitude toward this op-ed. Of course I think my views are correct and based on fact and reason. If I thought my views weren’t correct and based on fact and reason, I would adopt different views—correct fact-and-reason based ones. Does Alexander really think that conservatives don’t think their views are correct? Does Alexander not think his own views are correct? Not based on fact? Not based on reason? I’m not sure it’s possible to be condescending enough to this op-ed.

Crispus, as to the crazification factor, it’s that I really cannot figure out what features of modern life have driven a substantial number of people off the deep end. The US government is designed to make it really hard to change anything in the first place; combine that with the recent innovations in obstructionism, and the choices appear to be “do what crazy people want” or “do nothing” because the crazy minority on the right can block anything. Christ, even in the 1930s the continuing feature of American politics were a substantial number of people appear to be insane was channeled into comparatively harmless things like loony share the wealth plans or something. Huey Long never made it out of Louisiana. And the crazy minority of unknown size on the left, by contrast, appears to have dropped out of society entirely and is living in rural CA getting baked; fat lot of good they’re doing anyone.

If we had the far-right of Europe, for example, our supermajority system wouldn’t matter as much; they’re far more moderate, even given that the left end is farther left; there’s much less divergence between the far left and right. If we didn’t have a milquetoast “rest of the country”, it wouldn’t matter. If we didn’t have a supermajority system, it wouldn’t matter. If we didn’t have enormous impending problems, it wouldn’t matter.

Combine all of that, though? There’s basically nothing at all that can be done barring a major crisis, because it apparently takes a completely unobtainable majority to outweigh them. And apparently the biggest recession and financial panic since the Great Depression still isn’t a big enough crisis. And any bigger crisis would have a significant chance of resulting in a dictatorship, so the marxian approach isn’t going to work. So one idea would be to figure out what in the living hell has made about a third of the population want to live in a bankrupt, theocratic police state permanently at war, to crassly summarize their views and the current situation.

It pretty much breaks the political system, too. One group of people does whatever they want, completely fucks everything up, they correctly get voted out of power. The other group of people comes in…and can’t actually do what they want, much less see if it works for the public to judge. Then they lose anyway. So the group that fucked up is back in power. How, exactly, is the low-information public supposed to get their usual method of “vote out incumbents until everything gets better” to work in this situation?

It’d be one thing if this was limited to just health care; it’s not like that’s the only area where the US is uniquely willing to inflict suffering on its citizens. But everything? At a bare absolute minimum, we need to do something about climate change, of some variety, but that’s virtually impossible to pass.

2005

Some day you will grow up enough to realize that adults will have conversations where they at times will have differing points of view and opinions. Such things are not trolling, but as I said one day when you grow up you will understand that.

2006

Shut up troll.

2007

Why are you here? Seriously? You’ve posted in what… 1 thread that wasn’t in P&R? You obviously sit on your ass playing WoW all day, since you’ve shown that you know enough about the end-game to be a catass.

You must honestly believe that you’re doing some Mavericky commentary in an attempt to offset the liberal bias that you perceive here. You’ve defended Palin, FOX News, and Rush motherfucking Limbaugh of all people. Your views are not respected. Nobody actually cares. You haven’t refuted a single point ever made, because you’re out of your league, but you already know that because when your words get shoved back into that chasm of rhetoric you call a mouth, you just ignore it. This thread has a whole bunch of opposing viewpoints going to the core of the debate, not the gotcha one-liner stories posted by the “liberal” media that “we” follow.

But hey man, maybe this is just what you do.

You thrive on this shit, it’s so transparent it’s not even funny. Like when you think the “media” is liberal, which is a great marketing campaign by FOX’s pundits to get people to listen to their lies instead, you don’t even realize you’re being played by them, the same fucking corporation that sucked Bush’s dick as he lied through his teeth getting the country to go to war and accept that infringing on the constitution via warrantless wiretaps was for the safety of everyone.

2008

During the campaign, when people doubted that Obama could change Washington, they were accused of being cynical and not having enough faith. And now, when those same people ask why Obama didn’t work harder to unite the parties, they are accused of being unrealistic.

2009

See EE thread, “Avoiding the passive voice”. When people (who?) did X, they were accused of Y (by who?). There seems to be an intimation of hypocrisy here, but we have one nebulous group of “people” and two nebulous groups of “accusers” and no way of connecting any of it to reality.

In the post above where you said you don’t have to footnote everything, I thought… that’s true, but it only carries so far. If we both agree that certain things are facts and we’re just arguing about the interpretation of them, or the proper response to them, research would be superfluous. But if you say the moon is made of rock and I say it’s made of cheese, it’s silly to just leave it there and say, “well, there’s a diversity of opinion on that question.” On questions of fact, if one of us can find better evidence for our view than the other can, then pending any evidential response, that view is more credible.

2010

Gloom, despair and agony on all of us. What a useless bunch of shitheads.

2011

Errrrrr…not quite. “Crazy minority on the left” doesn’t just include insane communists who want to give everybody a big lovey hug. The right has Brit Hume, the left has Rachel Maddow. The right has Glenn Beck, the left has any number of people on DailyKOS. From PETA to Greenpeace to raw foodists to those communists that still exist, there’s still more than enough crazy people to screw up the discourse pretty effectively, particularly in the giant echo chamber of the internet, where you can basically hang out all the time with those five guys that you knew back when you were in college when you were all convinced that the real path to world peace was forcing every citizen to build a windmill. The left, for whatever reason, has proven themselves utterly incompetent at generating headlines and interest, but it’s not for lack of trying. One of the bigger problems today is the fact that both wings have been taken over by crazies and the wings are responsible for putting forward candidates for the majority of people who don’t give a crap. The primary system encourages both left and right wing candidates to play to crazy people so that they can get the money to run the campaign that the normal people would pay attention to.

2012

Andy - here is Ezra Klein pointing out that the current healthcare bill contains pretty much every idea from the GOP’s healthcare plank.

2013

Television journalists aren’t a political movement; neither are narrowly focused interested groups.

The Democratic primary being driven by far-left crazies is a howler though. Gosh, Obama has been so liberal!

2014

If you’re excluding interest groups, talking heads, journalists, bloggers, and anybody with an opinion you pretty much just tossed out your entire primary constituency. Obama WAS so liberal during the campaign. He made a lot of promises along those lines. I seem to recall quite a few people here wailing and beating their breasts because he hadn’t done all the stuff he said he would. That he hasn’t followed through with them is as much a symptom of the party’s out-of-step rhetoric as anything. I don’t doubt that leaders from either party ultimately end up doing reasonable things (if we’re lucky - we’ve seen what happens when you try to override reality with nothing but ideology and fiat), but I thought we were talking about what they said and how they shaped their platforms.

2015

As we all know, there are many different approaches to solving problems. Just because the current healthcare bill has similarities with the Republicans’ healthcare ideas, that doesn’t mean they are the same. In fact, some of Klein’s points are factually incorrect. And even if the healthcare bill may cover (in broad strokes) the same things that Republicans want, it also includes huge new taxes and spending increases.

You also have the quotes from the President that he eventually wants to get to single payer at some point in the future, or from Harry Reid saying that this will just be a framework that further revisions are built upon. I think that’s what most conservatives are worried about.

2016

Yes, it is true, there are many different approaches to solving problems. There are also different approaches to what is a problem.

The Republicans’ problem is that the public occasionally votes them out of office. They have hit upon the proper approach to solving this problem: complete obstruction of the legislative system and then blaming everything on the Democrats.

Your problem, on the other hand, is that you’re a twit or a troll, which causes annoyance. My approach to solving this problem is to make fun of you. This works precisely as well as the Republicans’ approach to fucking over the Democrats; great for the person doing it, shitty for everyone else.

2017

Jesus christ. Are you seriously going to keep claiming that it is entirely the Democrats’ fault that no one in the GOP will support the bill? Even in the face of this evidence? What the hell is wrong with you?

In fact, some of Klein’s points are factually incorrect.
Such as?
And even if the healthcare bill may cover (in broad strokes) the same things that Republicans want,
Correction: the things they said they wanted, but won’t actually vote for when the Democrats give it to them. Again: this is not good faith bargaining.
it also includes huge new taxes and spending increases.
This is in dispute. There is plenty of stuff out there indicating the bill will reduce the deficit.

You also have the quotes from the President that he eventually wants to get to single payer at some point in the future, or from Harry Reid saying that this will just be a framework that further revisions are built upon. I think that’s what most conservatives are worried about.
This is a completely bullshit justification. What in god’s green earth does this have to do with the current bill? It doesn’t include single payer. It does include many reforms that the Republicans have said they wanted. But they won’t follow through, which leads me to suspect that they are simply being obstructionist for its own sake - they may in fact support health care reform in theory, but in practice they will not support it unless it is a Republican-led effort. It’s destructive partisanship at its worst. And idiots like you eat it up. Bravo.

2018

So if you say to someone you want 10 bucks, and that person agrees to give you the 10 bucks, but only if you sign over your house, car and other worldly possessions to them would that be a good thing for you to agree to? I wouldnt think so, but by the logic some here are spouting since you got the 10 bucks you wanted, nothing else thats included in getting it should matter at all.

Getting a few bones tossed at them while the rest of the bill is full of things they cannot support isnt a way to get any political parties support for something.

2019

Hawkeye Fierce covered things, but I wanted to add two specific questions:

  1. What points of Ezra’s are factually incorrect?
  2. What are the new taxes? In absolute dollar terms, how big are they? How many people will be subject to them?
2020

No, my problem is that you jump in with your two cents, without contributing anything significant to the discussion. At least Hawkeye thinks things out before responding.