The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[All Along The Watchtower]

If Trump doesnt open up Sports stadiums and Schools and bars, aside from clothing stores and restaurants,  Trump is destined to lose.

Voters care about sports, bars and schools the most

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Credit where credit is due

I voted Likely Pressley, but I think she is being definitely overestimated by most posters. It's correct to note that Pressley was elected against an incumbent, but the difference between her and say AOC is that while AOC was elected on a broad ideological message which, as much as I may hate, has at least some sort of appeal to extremely liberal Democrats of all stripes, Pressley won off of blatant race baiting. That may work great in the only majority minority district in the state, but it certainly won't be nearly as effective statewide (I doubt AOC could win statewide either, but conflating the two is a mistake.)

The rest of the thread literally makes clear how that particular reply lacked any quality (let alone of a 'high' variety).

People are right for the wrong reasons all the time and the post itself was spot on, the subsequent ones not so much (to put it mildly).

OP claims "Pressley won off of blatant race baiting." Subsequent replies show how neither Pressley nor her campaign engaged in anything that could even remotely constitute 'race-baiting,' thereby making clear that OP's post was neither high-quality nor something "spot on" that was "right for the wrong reasons."

You yourself are just wrong (to put it mildly).

Err...Pressley did win the primary using blatant race-baiting.  Her whole campaign could be summed up as “vote for me b/c Capuano is white and white people are teh Evulz”

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Credit where credit is due

I voted Likely Pressley, but I think she is being definitely overestimated by most posters. It's correct to note that Pressley was elected against an incumbent, but the difference between her and say AOC is that while AOC was elected on a broad ideological message which, as much as I may hate, has at least some sort of appeal to extremely liberal Democrats of all stripes, Pressley won off of blatant race baiting. That may work great in the only majority minority district in the state, but it certainly won't be nearly as effective statewide (I doubt AOC could win statewide either, but conflating the two is a mistake.)

The rest of the thread literally makes clear how that particular reply lacked any quality (let alone of a 'high' variety).

People are right for the wrong reasons all the time and the post itself was spot on, the subsequent ones not so much (to put it mildly).

OP claims "Pressley won off of blatant race baiting." Subsequent replies show how neither Pressley nor her campaign engaged in anything that could even remotely constitute 'race-baiting,' thereby making clear that OP's post was neither high-quality nor something "spot on" that was "right for the wrong reasons."

You yourself are just wrong (to put it mildly).

Err...Pressley did win the primary using blatant race-baiting.  Her whole campaign could be summed up as “vote for me b/c Capuano is white and white people are teh Evulz”

Yeah, Pressley herself said that she would not vote any differently from Capuano but would "lead differently" (i.e. not be a white guy).

Contrast that with AOC, another woman of color who beat a white male in his primary but actually ran her campaign on the issues.  Naked identity politics is an ugly way to win elections.

[Pericles]

None of these posts are high-quality. Take it somewhere else, y'all.

The post by Mr. Reactionary I originally quoted was a high quality post.  Mr. Reactionary's post belonged here. nMr. Reactionary's post was a post worthy of this forum, and for you to post what you just did puts you in the same boat with whom you're criticizing.

Here's the post that's worthy of this forum:

Because individuals rights (which inherently imply "risk") predating and enshrined in the Constitution are more important than the fearful feelings of others, especially when those feelings are motivated by on-paper hypothetical safety gains.

I mean, we literally require criminals to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt ... you really think that doesn't result in a ton of criminals going free? Warrants PRIOR to searching suspected terrorists. Assembly for ANY peaceful reason. Presumption of bail. Hell, we make prosecutors GIVE their arguments to defendants in advance.

99.9% of privately owned guns (300 MILLION+) aren't used in crimes, the idea that something with such a teeny tiny low percentage of criminal abuse is "jeopardizing the public safety" is an absolute joke unless you literally believe the dumb argument of "muh even 1 life lost is too much". If you applied that argument to literally everything we couldn't do anything. Pools, cars, sugar, salt, fat, red meat, booze, cigarettes, peanuts, eggs, airplanes, XRays, coffee, aspirin, tylenol, football, sex, hell even flippin vaccines entail a risk of death.

We dont live in a risk free society and the only way to get there is for everyone to just die. The notion that we arent allowed to assess and discount hypothetical risks in a free society is absurd, dangerous, and leads to authoritarian regimes which (surprise surprise) also present a risk of death.

So the real answer to your question is that "conservatives" usually seem to "jeopardize the safety of the public" because your personal definition of "jeopardizing the safety of the public" is so expansive as to include a ton of innocuous activities that statistically dont lead to bad outcomes the vast vast vast majority of the time.

Honestly that's an idiotic post that has no place in this thread, and Mr Reactionary is being incredibly selfish and short-sighted. Coronavirus is much worse than the flu and has to be brought under control before society can reopen, both because it is immoral to let it run amok and because it isn't even practical to try and keep an economy operating in those circumstances. And if he was implying people should have a right to risk being infected with coronavirus-no they shouldn't and that is madness because it's a contagious disease. There is no way that everyone that the selfish idiots would then infect can or would consent to getting the disease. It's time that people stop always thinking about what's good for themselves and start thinking about what is good for society, and then act on the latter.

[PragmaticPopulist]

Absolutely devastating.

it had good visuals and sentiment, but really lacked specific and substantive attacks on Trump that have consistently proven to be more persuasive. Overall good, but could be improved.

Also amazing to think that this was made by Republicans

Lmao, these people are Republicans in the way that Lincoln Chafee is a Republican

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

This thread is intended for high quality (effort)posts, people.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

None of these posts are high-quality. Take it somewhere else, y'all.

The post by Mr. Reactionary I originally quoted was a high quality post.  Mr. Reactionary's post belonged here. nMr. Reactionary's post was a post worthy of this forum, and for you to post what you just did puts you in the same boat with whom you're criticizing.

Come, now, Fuzzy. This thread is not for debating the various merits of the posts archived here, which is obviously what I was getting at. Kindly dismount thy high horse.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Context:

Because most spam/troll posts are insanely annoying to read. Even if it's easy to scroll through, it's even easier to put someone on your ignore list once and never deal with them again. I probably agree with like 30% of my ignore list but just figured they contribute absolutely nothing positive to my forum experience.

As always, the enlightened "muh debate" attitude is amazingly condescending and takes a very narrow view of what people are trying to get out of this forum.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Credit where it's due.

I'm a burgeoning student of British Monarchical history.

Given what I have read, biographies and such, I feel Henry Tudor, or Henry VII, was the best of the dynasty in terms of being an effective, generally fair, and balanced leader.

Henry took, both by popular support and force of arms, a kingdom which had been divided in successive civil wars, and helped secure it into becoming a modern state. This was a man who wasn't born knowing how to govern; he wasn't taught from a young age. Yet he took a poverty stricken and war ravaged land and in 24 years turned it into a land with a gigantic treasury.

He also did look to the poor, and in many ways crippled the power of the nobility and local lords, which allowed for a freer people and a less corrupt nation.

He didn't really engage in anything we could truly call tyranny.

He also didn't get England involved in any foreign wars.

I say he was a terrific monarch who is forgotten by many because of his more (in)famous son, and his beloved granddaughter.

Now, let's move onto Henry VIII.

Henry VIII started out a fair and just leader, like his father. But Henry also had no interest in truly governing, and left much of that to Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey did the hard work of daily governance while Henry ruled the land and played. That said, everything Wolsey did, he did with Henry's explicit approval, or with Henry coming up with the idea in the first place. Henry, for the first 20 years of his reign, was beloved by not only his people, but abroad. He was called the most beautiful Prince in Europe. He was considered kind and tolerant by others. He was said to have the 'common touch.' He was a humanist, a friend of Erasmus, a poet, songwriter, and musician. He was a rockstar, besides being King.

He also truly did love Anne Boleyn, despite what happened later. He spent 7 years in a unconsummated affair and practically tore apart his kingdom both to secure the succession (he feared civil war would resume after his death if he did not produce a male heir) and to have Anne Boleyn with him. What's not realized is everything Henry did, he did with the desire to protect England from falling back into civil war upon his death. That meant securing his dynasty, which to Henry, as far as history had shown, meant having a son. He felt that Mathilda's failure to hold power showed a woman would not be accepted as a ruler.

What people forget when they think of the obese, tyrannical, paranoid and monstrous man he became was that Henry suffered a severe head injury during a round of jousting in 1536, when he was 45 years old, almost 30 years into the reign. He was unconscious for two hours. After the incident, his personality went under a marked change that many, in and outside of his court, observed. His mood swings were wild. He became to prone to being easily angered and suffered from memory lapses. He tended toward deep sadness, weeping for hours and deep swayings of emotion. He began to binge eat, and had a painful, pus ridden ulcerated leg wound that wouldn't heal. He suffered from almost daily headaches.

With a ruined leg, and emotion fueled binge eating (he had as many as 13 meals a day and 10 pints of ale), Henry began to bloat rapidly. He developed diabetes and the complications of such. When he started his reign, the young King stood just over 6 feet tall, with a broad chest and a 29" waist and a shoulder length head of auburn hair. He was lean, healthy, and athletic, engaging in many sports. By his death, his waist was over 50" wide and he could no longer walk; he also could barely see. He was bald, and prone to illness.

Not long after the head injury in 1536, Anne Boleyn is executed. And his string of 4 more wives begins.

Henry was a man who probably suffered severe trauma to his brain in 1536, turning a just and fair king into a tyrant. But it should not be forgotten that he helped to develop Britain's modern navy - a major accomplishment.

[Sestak]

No website has done more damage to political discourse on the web more than political compass.com. Even though every person with a brain dumped its terrible analysis and quiz years ago, the idiotic idea that an absurdly arbitrary two dimensional axis somehow represents politics in a significantly meaningful way has taken root across the board.

Like this discussion about Nazis being "Auth Left" because they didn't have a modern understanding of neoliberal economics is a great example of the sort of half baked analysis it leads to: if the Nazis were Auth Left because they made a lot of infrastructure investments then so was everybody from the Porfirio Diaz regime in Mexico to the Meiji Restoration in Japan.

[Joseph Cao]

It is authoritarian types more than conservatives (unless one is using "conservatism" as a euphemism for right-wing extremism) ho believe in conspiracy theories. Extreme leftists are also prone to believing them, although with different content and sentiments.

Cranks, people resolutely wrong about certain topics, are especially prone to right-wing authoritarianism.

(T)he mathematician and popular author Martin Gardner was a study of crank beliefs, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. More recently, the mathematician Underwood Dudley has written a series of books on mathematical cranks, including The Trisectors, Mathematical Cranks, and Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought. And in a 1992 UseNet post, the mathematician John Baez humorously proposed a checklist, the Crackpot index, intended to diagnose cranky beliefs regarding contemporary physics.

According to these authors, virtually universal characteristics of cranks include:

Cranks overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and underestimate that of acknowledged experts.
Cranks insist that their alleged discoveries are urgently important.
Cranks rarely, if ever, acknowledge any error, no matter how trivial.
Cranks love to talk about their own beliefs, often in inappropriate social situations, but they tend to be bad listeners, being uninterested in anyone else's experience or opinions.
Some cranks lack academic achievement, in which case they typically assert that academic training in the subject of their crank belief is not only unnecessary for discovering the truth, but actively harmful because they believe it poisons the minds by teaching falsehoods. Others greatly exaggerate their personal achievements, and may insist that some achievement (real or alleged) in some entirely unrelated area of human endeavor implies that their cranky opinion should be taken seriously.

Some cranks claim vast knowledge of any relevant literature, while others claim that familiarity with previous work is entirely unnecessary.

In addition, the overwhelming majority of cranks:

seriously misunderstand the mainstream opinion to which they believe that they are objecting,
stress that they have been working out their ideas for many decades, and claim that this fact alone shows that their belief cannot be dismissed as resting upon some simple error,
compare themselves with luminaries in their chosen field (often Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Leonhard Euler, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein or Georg Cantor), implying that the mere unpopularity of some belief is not good reason for it to be dismissed,

claim that their ideas are being suppressed, typically backed up by conspiracy theories invoking intelligence organizations, mainstream science, powerful business interests, or other groups which, they allege, are terrified by the possibility of their revolutionary insights becoming widely known,
appear to regard themselves as persons of unique historical importance.
Cranks who contradict some mainstream opinion in some highly technical field, (e.g. mathematics, cryptography, physics) may:

exhibit a marked lack of technical ability,
misunderstand or do not use standard notation and terminology,
ignore fine distinctions which are essential to correctly understand mainstream belief.
That is, cranks tend to ignore any previous insights which have been proven by experience to facilitate discussion and analysis of the topic of their cranky claims; indeed, they often assert that these innovations obscure rather than clarify the situation.

In addition, cranky scientific theories often do not in fact qualify as theories as this term is commonly understood within science. For example, crank theories in physics typically fail to result in testable predictions, which makes them unfalsifiable and hence unscientific. Or the crank may present their ideas in such a confused, not even wrong manner that it is impossible to determine what they are actually claiming.

Perhaps surprisingly, many cranks may appear quite normal when they are not passionately expounding their cranky belief, and they may even be successful in careers unrelated to their cranky beliefs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)

So if I take note that the sum of the cubes of the the three sides of the most primitive Pythagorean triangle (3-4-5) is the cube of 6 I might just leave that as a weird coincidence. (It is so). But I know my limitations as a mathematician. I am good with numbers but not that good. I am reasonably certain that what I said about the sums of the cubes of 3, 4, and 5 is not original on my part.

I might draw some conclusions that a renowned author, even if academic, didn't quite state. But after I express such I leave it to others to to check out. My means are rarely adequate.

So what would make a crank prone to right-wing authoritarianism?

1. Distrust of rational judgment or test by others.  Science does not allow people to assert the truth of new knowledge on based on that person's authority. The crank thus prefers authority over rational test. "Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?" says the cheater.

2. Importance is to be determined by others. Had I somehow gotten a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, I would have put it up to a test I am good with number theory but not that good. So it would be with an invention. Maybe it is marketable and maybe it isn't. Academia or commerce -- it is just the same in that respect.

3. Being right or wrong is not a tangible characteristic of a person. The crank believes that his personality makes something right. Einstein had the humility to recognize that he could be wrong and that if he were wrong someone would find the error. Plenty of beliefs are just simply wrong.

4. Failure to recognize the appropriateness of discussing one's expertise, real or imagined. If I were an expert on anything not related to bird-watching I would not discuss that among fellow bird-watchers.  

5. Achievement at a high level almost never comes from outsiders. Outsiders may envy well-renowned academics; such renown comes as a result of dedicated study and work that precludes much else. Malcolm Gladwell's observation that high achievement in many things precludes much time dedicated to other activities. Thus if one is a first-rank violinist one has almost certainly not tinkered or raced motor vehicles, started a small business, or studied law or medicine. (A story on classical musicians holds that they are incredibly incompetent as a rule as lovers. Take your pick.

6. Cranks believe that insidious conspiracies intend to put them down.  There have been plenty of ill-intentioned people who have done so to promote and maintain a privileged position in economic or political life, and such is well documented. Occasionally a clerk in the Swiss patent office figures out something important first, and it checks out. This said, Einstein chose to be a clerk in the Swiss patent office because there he could contemplate the fundamental realities of space, time, and movement without having to do things that he might have done badly -- like teaching. Einstein knew what he was doing; cranks don't.

Cranks in essence fool themselves into believing expertise that they lack. But they might get the ear of someone with a suitable agenda, and political agendas often have nothing to do with reality. The more absurd the agenda the more that it attracts cranks.

Yes, Donald Trump is one of the biggest cranks in America.    

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Given the situation she was in, I'm not gonna judge her for accepting the $500,000 that she got to do this. Yes, it was a sh*tty decision, but that money had to have been literally life-changing. She's had a crazy, rough, sad life (having batsh*t crazy, alcoholic parents; being a young runaway, a closeted lesbian in the '60s forced into an abusive marriage & into having a kid at 16; her mother tricking her into signing over parental rights of one of her kids; then being thrust into the national spotlight with Roe v. Wade) which I don't envy. She just seems like somebody who had a really hard life &, as a result, made irrational decisions at times, so it's hard to fault her, especially since she came clean eventually.

If anything, we should simply be glad that, in the end, her choice was to come clean & be honest.

This is why I think the real story of Norma McCorvey is of a poor woman with little education or resources being taken advantage of, first by liberal elites and then by conservative elites. They all trotted her around like a prize pig at the fair, pulled her strings to make her say what they needed her to say, and then stuck her in the corner to gather dust once they'd gotten what they wanted out of her.

Sarah Weddington and Gloria Allred got money, power and distinction when she was Jane Roe; the conservative-industrial complex of rich, right-wing power brokers got a big win in "turning" her.

What did Norma McCorvey get? Fifteen minutes of fame from each of them, before being shoved back into a hardscrabble life of poverty and irrelevance. And like so many people from her station in life, she died before she even reached her 70th birthday.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

No, America was industrialized by men like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockerfeller. It was not land grant colleges that built the Erie Canal, or the steel mills of Pennsylvania. It was not internal subsidies (save for the selling off of land) that built the oil drills of Texas.

So does anyone else see the problem here? Just because "one" of the above listed policies didn't apply, doesn't refute the overall point. What I said was, we were industrialized under 1. Protectionism, 2. Internal Subsidies and 3. Land Grant Colleges. This is not in any way factually inaccurate, these policies existed at the time. Mistakingly drawing the lines connecting what policies benefited which development doesn't change that. Subsidies benefited railroads and thus benefited steel. Tariffs protected a range of industries from foreign competition (mainly from Britain during this period) and then of course the Land grant colleges are a more generalized impact, but education and importantly technical education were critical to the development and advancement of industry. We take this for granted in an era when computers and internet are what we think of as technology, but industrialization required a range of skills both in terms of college and non-college in origin, engineers, architects, a range of sciences, not to mention the vast growth in what we now call white collar jobs that these industries tend to create in law, finance, accounting, banking etc.

Yes entrepreneurship was important and I would be the first to point that out, but the idea that the 19th century was some kind of lassiez-faire paradise belies the reality that America was basically operating under a water down form of state capitalism for much of the second half of the 19th century and yet it was during this period that the American Economy surged past everyone else. Yes freedom and entrepreneurship were critical, but it wasn't freedom that built the Transcontinental or the Erie Canal. It was Gov't intervention (the latter being at the state level but same idea), operating under a framework of economic nationalism. The same vein of thought that Josh Hawley is operating under.

And what Josh Hawley calls for is not just protectionism. Protectionism is the governmental picking of winners and losers. It is shameful economic interference that harms consumers and businesses alike. But we have dealt with it before, and will deal with it again if it becomes an issue. Nay, the issue with Josh Hawley is that he calls for big government, and of the sort that only once in your listing of economic timeframes has ever appeared before. But now is not 1946. It is not 1947. We are not alone in the ruins of a post war world, with America alone as an economic superpower. We live in an increasingly globalized world, where Hawley's big government, just like Roosevelt's big government did with the second spike in 1938, will inevitably harm and burn our country like a chimp with a machine gun. And when they do, it remains to be seen if there is any last resistance. In the 60s, in the 70s, and the 80s, we were lucky enough to be saved by courageous conservatives, men and women like Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schafly, and Ronald Reagan. But with partisanship and demographics today, who is to say that we can pull that off a second time? If the Manchurian Candidate wins, who is to say that we will be so lucky again? Who is to say that the values our great nation was founded upon, of the right to life, of the right to liberty, of the right to property, of the right to the pursuit of happiness, will survive?

When you have a captured market to the point that you can raise prices with no natural restraints except demand dropping and in this case demand dropping meaning bodies are hitting the floor, yea I think that is a good case for price controls. That is not a free market that is functionally a monopoly where the only countervailing natural force is letting people die in the streets. Sorry that is not a recipe for a stable society, nor trust in the free market and if you want to turn America Communist, there is no greater way to provoke that than letting the desperation fester and growth, which will create pressure points for inevitable action. As people get more desperate, they will eventually just elect people who will create an NHS system that dictates prices to the market and they either take it or leave it. Don't want that to occur? Then perhaps you should listen to people like me when we tell you this is to avert that inevitability.

Whenever conservatives rest on the laurels or innate goodness of things they think are unbreakable, they will be disappointed every time. Russia was the most religious country on earth in 1917, all it took was hunger and war weariness and the despair that both created to lead them to atheistic communism. Historical lesson: Hunger and war exhaustion will overcome any historical bonds including America's "love for freedom". You can just as easily throw in lack of health care with hunger because it operates the same way.

People need food to survive, and they need health care to survive as well. Especially if they are diabetic, or have some other disease that means they need ongoing health "maintenance" to survive. You cannot say to them they need to get a job to get healthcare meanwhile their ability to work is actively being degraded by their lack of access to health care. I have seen relatives lose their ability to work because they had to work with a degenerative condition, without treatment and this took them out of the workforce years earlier than and in one case led to an early death.

You cannot treat health care like any other "market place" because the decline in demand means that behind those numbers someone is dying, someone is being made unable to work and someone is being left without a father or a mother (what was all of that stuff about single parent homes leading to worse societal outcomes? It applies here to, those rules don't magically stop applying because a medical condition took them away as opposed to a father running off to get milk and never coming back).

Natural demand thus can never restrain prices and thus companies have what I call a "captured market" and can charge whatever they want. That is not a "free" market, that is a hostage situation, especially if they hold the patent and only they can make that medicine. As far as this is concerned, I think Hawley's position is both right and get this "MORE CONSERVATIVE" then the libertarian alternative, which just will turn more people to socialism out of desperation (political reactions tend to follow Newtonian laws of physics, at least equal and opposite reaction).

Conservatism is not about smaller government (that is only part of achieving a larger objective). It is about preserving stable institutions and stable families. To the extent government is in the way, that needs to change, but the to the extent that nothing short of gov't can alter a situation, like the hostage like environment in the health care market place, they should take action.

[Fuzzy Bear]

None of these posts are high-quality. Take it somewhere else, y'all.

The post by Mr. Reactionary I originally quoted was a high quality post.  Mr. Reactionary's post belonged here. nMr. Reactionary's post was a post worthy of this forum, and for you to post what you just did puts you in the same boat with whom you're criticizing.

Come, now, Fuzzy. This thread is not for debating the various merits of the posts archived here, which is obviously what I was getting at. Kindly dismount thy high horse.

The post cited was one I saved.  Three red avatars and one blue avatars chimed in.  You, yourself, chimed in and panned the post I cited.  So don't lecture me and not expect pushback. I'm this case, your selective bias in handing out lectures is why we can't have nice things here.

[Blair]

NC maybe could be a [pickup] if Hagan runs

Um, I don't know how to tell you this.... but...

She won by over 8 points in 2008 and outperformed Obama. She barely lost in 2014, only by 1 point, despite the R wave. She's a pretty good canidate. If she were to run against Tillis in 2020, the race would be tilt if not lean D

She's dead.

Just because she hasn't been politically active for 6 years doesn't means he would be a good canidate if she came back into the public spotlight. She would be more than just a Bresden. Don't underestimaete her and call her "dead" just because she has been absent for a few years.

She literally died last October of a virus that she got from a tick bite. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/28/former-north-carolina-senator-kay-hagan-dies-060172

Oh I didn't realize she actually died that was embarrasing. She was such a great senator though.

[SevenEleven]

I feel for Harry repeating his point at people not getting it and I think he's clearly correct here.

Since people insist on getting into the tangential stuff - this isn't about the legal standard. People are entitled to not be imprisoned without a fair trial. You're not entitled to become president or a Supreme Court justice. People will have to make judgment calls about public figures on a range of issues.

The point of "believing women" is that often women get discredited with accusations even though false accusations are very rare. Given what we know about these things it is, for example, very likely Kavanaugh did it. We already know he lied during the senate hearing.

Reade on the other hand does check basically all the boxes of a false accuser and with high probability is one.

[S019]

Arguments over gun rights aside, I don't necessarily think it as helpful to have it in the constitution. I have trouble seeing the right to bear arms, if it exists, as being so important that it must be constitutionally protected while other things, like gender equality, aren't even in there. The 2nd amendment is unique to America yet I don't think we're any less susceptible to tyranny or an overreaching government when compared against the rest of the world.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Israel.  Most Americans support Israel but don't have any reason to be vocal about it since Israel is currently powerful, socially/technologically advanced, and relatively safe.  Meanwhile the small Palestinian contingent on the far-left is very loud.

Unfortunately, there's no equally loud voice to explain why they're wrong, so every college kid goes through a phase of "yeah, like, Israel is kinda bad" before they eventually learn more about the situation.

If Israel was ever actually threatened again, there would be a huge outpouring of support and the overwhelming majority of Israel supporters would make their voices heard.  For instance, maybe every other middle-eastern country could band together in one giant army to "exterminate the Jews", as happened 3 times in the last 75 years.  Fortunately, they don't seem as motivated these days.

It's just Palestine and Lebanon that are actively fighting to exterminate the Jews these days, down to the last child.

[SevenEleven]

The history of America’s policing institutions contain an important, and often overlooked, quality that inclines it to racialized police brutality. The National Law Enforcement Museum has this to say about the slave patrols that played a critical role in the development of American (especially Southern) policing institutions,

According to historian Gary Potter, slave patrols served three main functions.

“(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law.”

Having such origins without taking drastic steps to reform the institutions founded on or influenced by legally sanctioned harassment, violence, and murder of dehumanized people of color, is yielding the expected results. We have organized, state-sanctioned, and culturally normalized mass harassment, intimidation, surveillance, violence, and murder being perpetrated against one of our country’s historically most marginalized racial groups. That is what these protests, which have erupted into violence at times, are about. A violently racist police force with an institutional history of racialized slave hunting continuing to senselessly murder African American men (when they aren’t harassing or imprisoning them to work in for-profit prisons for humiliatingly little compensation as a form of constitutionally sanctioned slavery) and not have a government promptly responding to these appalling systematic civil rights violations, a culture and media that concerns itself with it only to virtue signal or gain political points, and a society that is more outraged about destroyed or stolen inanimate objects than yet another cold blooded public execution of an unarmed African American man. But, this is what our police have always done and will always do until dramatic changes are implemented.

Slave patrols were no less violent in their control of African Americans; they beat and terrorized as well. Their distinction was that they were legally compelled to do so by local authorities. In this sense, it was considered a civic duty—one that in some areas could result in a fine if avoided.

But, we can’t forget this either - the police are acting within the realm of what is deemed legally acceptable by our lawmakers. Otherwise, crimes like what these cops did would be promptly punished in all cases of police violence.

[lfromnj]

2020 is looking like the ending of the film Joker. The crowds rioting are also very multiracial and while I believe some are sympathetic to racial progress and equal justice it feels like more of a temper tantrum and backlash to everything.

Isn't it possible that some of this is being fueled by anger at the stay-at-home orders?

You will literally search for any reason for this other than decades of police brutality against black people

How dare you! I am a black person myself, and what was done to George Floyd was completely and absolutely DETESTABLE! Let me say that again, and emphasize it so that you will understand: WHAT WAS DONE TO GEORGE FLOYD WAS COMPLETELY AND ABSOLUTELY DETESTABLE! I want for the man who did this to him to be convicted in a court of law and sentenced to the maximum penalty that he can receive. I would like for the other officers involved in this to be punished as well. The observation that I was making here is that the protesters in this instance are undoubtedly angry about what happened to Floyd, but that there are other factors at play.

The tensions engendered by this horrific incident, emanating from this country's long history of discrimination and injustice, have meshed with the anger and frustrations that have arisen from weeks of lockdown. It was a boiling pot waiting to happen. I think that attention needs to be brought to light to the issue of police brutality-as a black man myself, I'm fully aware of the issue and what it has done. But I'm not ignoring the other circumstances underlying this, and I don't condone the violence which many of these protesters have inflicted upon their own communities.

Once again, how dare you!

A little bit ragey but we have seen Calthrina be very calm for the past few months and it took some random idiot for him to make an amazing post.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Now that was a great post!  Well done, Calthrina

[LimoLiberal]

I'm noticing a (sexist imo) tendency to mythologize "suburban women" and discuss them as a totum pro parte for a specific kind of casually racist middle-aged wino who's pro-choice and doesn't like seeing coarse language on the news but is also secretly pining for an excuse to go back to voting for Big Republican Daddy to lower her taxes and put the hoodlums back in their place. Of course there are plenty of women like this in middle-class suburbs, and they're some of the worst people in America along with their philistine husbands, but there are also plenty of "suburban women" these days who are downscale, racial (or sexual) minorities, or who've actually become consistently center-left over the past five years once one or a few hot-button issues lured them into Camp Non-Atlas Blue. The Romney-Clinton vote in 2016 and the "burbstomping" in 2018 weren't just the result of the parties' coalitions shifting; they were also a demonstration of how many American suburbs are simply not the same sorts of communities they were in 1968 or even 1988.

I especially don't trust any article that refers to the Iron Range, even the Trump-era Iron Range, as part of a "sea of red" to understand this.

[We Live in Black and White]

Holy s**t, Calthrina kicked ass.

[YE]

Before this week, I think Biden was open to a non-POC VP, but this will force his hand. With Demings (strong pick) and Harris (horrible pick) both having law enforcement backgrounds, even though more conventionally qualified, they're likely to see their odds drop.

This is a false argument. Firstly, Black voters (generalizing for the sake of discussion) voted for Biden in the primary because he already represents the politics that they believe in, so the ideological representation of Black voters is already on the ticket: at the top of the ticket. Secondly, the Democratic Party is more than just one African-American voting bloc. Other groups' ideological politics - young Black voters, LGBTQ+ voters, Hispanic/Latino voters, & all other voters - deserve to be represented as well by an ideologically left candidate. This isn't Harris, nor Demings, nor really anybody else but Warren.

I'd also recommend listening to 538's most recent podcast on this subject, which points out that it isn't clear from polling that a woman of color would encourage Black turnout (& it's not even a pro-Warren piece or anything). And I'll just say this: believing that the VP needs to be a woman of color in light of recent events - rather than an actual agenda for Black Americans (let alone a comprehensive & robust one) being needed - is why such an argument comes off as more-than-a-bit tokenizing. I heard somebody in an interview yesterday talking about police brutality & they mentioned Black politicians in Washington: he said that racial representation isn't enough because Black politicians have been unable to change the system that, thus far, has killed Black people. We've had a Black President, Black Attorneys General, & other Black politicians hold influential positions within government, & yet we continue to have a broken criminal justice system & still suffer from numerous civil rights issues.

So honestly, I can't see why it wouldn't be Warren, given the unfortunate state of our current affairs: Michigan is having issues with COVID-19 & the Edenville Dam's failure, so I don't see how Whitmer can help Biden's campaign there or in the Midwest if she's forced to shift focus from her gubernatorial duties to a presidential campaign. That's gonna leave a bad taste in people's mouths in that region & deter Democratic turnouts. The recent race riots have shed light on Klobuchar's prosecutorial record, specifically how she once declined to prosecute the officer responsible. That's not gonna appeal to voters of color, & may indeed discourage turnout. And should she become the VP pick, the recent police killings of unarmed Black people & the resultant race riots will force Harris' prosecutorial record into the media & voters' limelight yet again, particularly to the chargin of those on the Democratic Party's left. And of course Stacey Abrams still ain't happening for all of the reasons that have already been mentioned on here countless times: lacking relevant experience, next-to-no name-recognition at the national level, blatantly auditioning for the V.P. slot, etc.

Anybody else I'm missing? If not, then it's really just Warren who checks all of the boxes at this point.

[Sestak]

I see no evidence which suggests that both sides haven't committed their share of sins.  Yes, you can condemn the looting of (mostly minority!)-owned businesses and the destruction of buildings and think that the perps should be in jail.  You can acknowledge that institutional racism is a reality in our criminal justice system.  You can agree that the police responsible for the murder of George Floyd should all be prosecuted.

But anyone who endorses the bootlicking from the *clears throat* usual suspects wants nothing less than a police state.  You do not seek freedom.  You do not seek the liberation of man.  You seek the same violence as the rioters and looters.  The only difference is that you are endorsing state-sanctioned violence.

And no, some edgy teenager's apologism for this violence (you know who I am referring to) will not erase one iota of the damage that has already been done.

As a great man once said: "Hate begets hate; violence begets violence."  And if it's state-sanctioned chaos you want, it's state-sanctioned chaos you get.