I don’t see how adding a giant ass concrete wall and having the GOP in charge is going to help anything you’re talking about. I understand you want to make this all about climate change, but there is one party that’s trying and one party that’s bringing in the bulldozers, not for the houses you despite, but for everything you say you care about.
So yeah, ensuring the Democrats lose… helps no one but the GOP.
I genuinely am confused by your reply.
If I am not mistaken, your reply in keyed to Scott’s which is in response to the idea that while the Democrats are hashing out budgets, fighting against building literal concrete walls, and other horrific type GOP plans in general some members of the Democratic party who are not satisfied with ordinary wins, and long-term goals believe it’s a great idea to turn everyone in the burbs against the Democratic Party, right now, so we can endure another 4 years of GOP lead ideas which could actually bring us back to that wall everyone loves so much.
We go into it a bit more in the climate thread, where it is a better fit for the discussion. My reply here was very tangential to the ongoing discussion, so we moved our chat somewhere better.
But the summary is: policies like “stop giving people subsidies to buy giant wasteful houses out in the middle of nowhere” would be a small but necessary component of the kind of sweeping, transformative legislation required to even have a chance at preventing the currently inevitable climate disaster.
Except that the policies that might actually save the species would be so loathsome to the electorate in general that nothing short of a global totalitarian regime would have any chance of implementing them. Any party trying to do so would immediately lose every election ever.
Or, even shorter version: we’re fundamentally fucked on climate change, and People (in a global sense) are too selfish / stupid / evil to vote to undergo the necessary sacrifices to save the species.
I understand your position.
I replied here and I am keeping my reply here because I want the party that isn’t out to screw everyone and the planet they’re on to actually win. Democrats are great at setting themselves up to lose though, that’s for sure. Hell some of them can’t even recognize a win as we see right here.
I don’t think being more demanding is setting yourself up to lose. Quite the opposite. In fact, I believe one reason that the right has been so successful is that they demand so much and are not easily satisfied.
That’s not why they’re winning.
They win for the opposite reason, even.
They line up behind their guy no matter what. They’re easily motivated by not getting things. There is a reason the wall wasn’t built when the GOP controlled all of government.
And I think we should line up behind our leaders as well. That’s not the same as being easily satisfied.
Do Hannity/Limbaugh/Coulter strike you as people who are easily satisfied? I see them as constantly braying for more. Yet in the end they will line up behind Trump. Even Coulter.
Wait, who won?
I confess I don’t know what this is about.
The burbs remarks.
What they do has nothing to do with satisfaction. It’s like you’re trying to play by the GOP playbook but not really understanding that their entire playbook is not about playing at all, it’s playing everyone else.
It seems just about nobody. Lots of losers though, including the United States system of government. Well it had a good run.
This was a helluva way to cap off infrastructure week.
Rod you might of missed some of the posts above, but with the details of the agreement there isn’t going to be any wall building.
The thing that has been bugging me a lot about the media’s coverage of trump generally and this shutdown specifically is the insistence on ascribing normal political motives to him, as if building a wall is in any way a normal political agenda, one that can be haggled over like regulations or tax policy. “Compromising” with him by allowing him to build any significant portion of the wall in exchange for something else is “pragmatic and good politics.” There’s a word more apt for indulging this fascist- wannbe - and that’s appeasement. And if Magnet wants to swoop by with his air of superiority and label me dogmatic, then fine, guilty.
However with the details of the deal released, there’s almost no chance of any spurious wall building. It also clearly shows that whatever Republicans might say publicly, privately they don’t give a fuck about the wall either or they wouldn’t have struck the deal they did.
So who won? The forces of hate and xenophobia certainly didn’t, and for that everyone else did.
It’s a journalist’s job to confront the powerful about the myths they invent to justify their actions. But it seems futile to grill Trump on where he gets his facts when there’s no evidence that truth is important to him at all. Trump’s speech from the Rose Garden might have looked like a normal policy rollout, but it was about propaganda. The president has demonstrated repeatedly that his hostility to immigrants doesn’t stem from a real crisis that can be quantified with facts and figures, but from his own prejudices. The administration can direct officials to hunt around for evidence that supports his elaborate fantasies about bound women and fentanyl flowing freely across the border, but they can’t hide one small, grimy fact: the president is a bigot, and all bigots are consumed with thoughts of power. Trump’s base fears losing it, and so does he.
To decide who’s human and who’s monstrous, to distinguish a state of emergency from everyday life – these are powers craved by dictators. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” or so wrote the far-right jurist Carl Schmitt in the first line of his best-known work, Political Theology. Trump’s emergency declaration might be toothless; the ACLU has already announced that it intends to file suit over it and there are likely to be further legal challenges to the administration’s potential use of eminent domain as it pursues a border wall. Even so, Schmitt, who became an enthusiastic Nazi, might have recognized something in Trump today. Trump is a liar, but that’s not his worst characteristic. He is an ideological problem, and simply calling out his lies won’t keep him in check.
How to know when we’ve fallen through the looking glass? When Ann Coulter has the most accurate and succinct take on the situation: “The only national emergency is our idiot president.”
I don’t think Roberts will take too kindly to Trump saying that the courts are filled with his judges so it will pass.
Especially considering French’s analysis of how shoddy the lawyers were in writing the legal justification for the emergency.
Can’t just rewrite it a few times? Like the muslim ban, when one was struck down, and they wrote a new one, and that one was struck down, and they wrote a new one, and that one was struck down but that’s the one that got to the Supreme Court and Roberts said, nope, nothing wrong with this one. There’s even a non-muslim country in the ban.
Thank you! That was helpful!
