Political Roundtable Part XXVII

[I_Like_Dirt]

Adding one more thing to this - the prison industrial complex is much more expensive than any help we would give women. Just saying...

Oh, I agree. And beyond that, supporting women and families in general and encouraging them to have children is a long-term benefit to the economy. Nobody is interested in playing the long-term economic game, though, so they look to slash services now to save on tax dollars only to create a situation where there are even fewer tax dollars later because the population eventually declines or is largely from an economic standing that wasn't properly supported and isn't ideal for whatever the economy looks like at that point.

So yes, it's absolutely cutting your nose off to spite your face from an economic standpoint on multiple levels. I just didn't go there because I can get somewhat... verbose?... and so kept it to a singular point. If it wasn't going to be so tragic for absolutely everyone other than a handful of billionaires (and even then, only relatively speaking), it would be funny watching so many people who strove to establish an economy slanted towards their immediate interests at all times totally turn the tables on them as property values along with inflation wound up altering the economic landscape on them in the end regardless of their desires/intentions and the economy winds up being sold off to the hyper wealthy for an opportunity to keep their children dependent on them.

[dckingsfan]

yeah - when you talk about M4A or MFA - it needs to be nuanced. Notice that Fox only takes on the most expensive of the plans.

https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18103087/medicare-for-all-explained-single-payer-health-care-sanders-jayapal

And notice that they don't point out that the Rs have no plan. Another good reason to get rid of this current administration - they have just worsened the state of healthcare.

[montestewart]

Da1, unless Trump spilled some otherwise top secret, classified information about the the death of OBL, you have nothing to support your claim that he was executed, and nothing to contradict the official story that he was killed, in a raid intended to kill or capture an enemy of the United States, as he reached for his weapon. You have no facts, and nothing to support comparing it to the execution of Malvo, who is incarcerated.

It is this type of factually inaccurate, unreasoned, emotional splatter that makes it difficult for most posters to engage with you, as they watch liberal positions straw manned into distorted, decontextualized, or fabricated unintelligibility, see facts with links/citations blithely dismissed, contend with an erratically elastic line of emotional argument in response to traditional premise-support-conclusion interchanges. Some think you are discoursing in bad faith, expecting that your minority views be given full faith and credit while relentlessly dismissing majority views. Some think you (like STD before you) are merely posting to get a reaction, which some might characterize as baiting, or something.

Politics is hard work, it's hard work. Hard work. Some of these issues inflame deep emotions, and can bring out all manner of condescension, prejudice, and hatred. People start calling each other names. Very bad. I am a mod, and I am above such temporal temptations, but I care for all of you.

You, Da1, represent minority views that should be represented in a discussion, but unless your goal is solely to incite and inflame, you could do much better in creating a thoughtful discourse of disagreement on some of these subjects. I can't necessarily promise that Zonker or gtn will suddenly be polite to you, but you can always put them on ignore. Wizpride, Zards, dck, doc, and many others here will thoughtfully engage with people they are in disagreement with, if they feel they are part of an actual give-and-take (if they feel otherwise, they usually bow out without additional comment).

When you're an army of one, you are responding to many but the focus ends up on you. Maybe you can shift that focus from yourself to your positions, add some concrete detail to your passion, not feel like you need to respond to every opposition post, and stop combining all our positions into global liberal hegemony (we really don't all think the exact same thing), and just stick to a fast-paced, stone-faced, fact-based, cyanide-laced point-counterpoint, and I can see, in the not too distant future, Gary Owens announcing your name as Poster of the Year!

[Pointgod]

so glad that my emotional ties to this board and its members can be used as a weapon against me and thrown back in my face.

so sorry that a board that I've been a member of for over half my life is difficult for me to walk away from.

especially sorry that sh*t posting by sh*t posters that have already deadened the participation of this board, and straight up drove away posters i grew up admiring like fish and sev, and continue to alienate and chill board participation.

never mind that i have posted thousands upon thousands of words already trying to engage substantively only to be countered time and time again with accusations that i'm a baby-killing, child raping hypocrite.

never mind that posters with legitimate insights, backed by decades of training and experience like zonk have to handicap their posting style to address literal idiots.

sorry that actual debate of real issues always has to circle back to dumbsplaining topics like abortion to people that refuse to take their fingers out of their wax encrusted ears.

i may very well keep on making hollow threats of ditching this board, and that may very well make me a coward and a hypocrite but that still doesn't change the fact that this board is worse off in allowing Da1 to continue posting. Again, please just look at the past few pages of discussion. Nothing but walls of text about trans bans and abortion. No discussion about Syria, Baghdadi, Katie Hill. Go back further. Very little discussion about China and the NBA - in a politics thread on a basketball forum. Everything circles back to babykilling. I don't want to talk about abortion. There's nothing to talk about. It's settled law. But we can't get around it. We're being dragged backwards. We're allowing a single poster to weigh down discourse because he refuses to live in reality.

Don’t let the idiot get to you. The board needs thoughtful posters like you. I honestly don’t bother with his incoherent ramblings about abortion. The thing with da1 is that if you engage with him he’ll lead you on the same tangent using circular logic so just tell him to f$*k off. I agree with you though, this board needs to have better policies. STD did an insane amount of shitposting that would make a 4chan troll jealous and it took numerous attempts before he was banned. Da1 is not on the same level but there should be a point where purposeful derailment isn’t something that should be tolerated.

I know you hate me Point, the feeling is not mutual in this case. I genuinely think you're a good person despite how much we disagree. This whole chain got derailed when we were talking about the heavy violence in highly liberal concentrated areas, and for some reason someone needed to chime in with sex with animals in conservative areas, thats derailing.

But like I said, I posted about Katie Hill, no one wants to talk about her corruption. An opportunity to talk about some of the things this admin is doing right with respect to the Baghdadi raid, and again crickets.

I don’t hate you. I honestly don’t care about you enough to have an opinion. I have no problem calling out that you’re a fanatic and blatant hypocrite. I was sad to hear about your health problems and I was hoping that you’d develop empathy and compassion for other people’s situations from it but you’re back to regurgitating the same right wing talking points.

You want to talk about Katie Hill, I think it’s disgusting some right wing rag attacked her and pretty much published her nude pictures. That’s irresponsible journalism, but just another day for the right wing eco chamber. I also think that she was right to step down because you can’t have an inappropriate relationship with a staffer or use your position of power to pressure them. I also think that Republicans are pieces of trash because they don’t hold their own members(who are men) accountable for doing the same thing and support President pussy grabber and serial rapist Donald Trump. But I don’t care to have a disingenuous conversation with you on the topic so I’ll respectfully bow out.

[Zonkerbl]

I think if you use "banning abortion" as shorthand for "adoption of anti-choice agenda" which includes no contraception and only church-run women's health centers, then you can argue that abortions will increase. It's well known that the package of services that planned parenthood provides are effective at reducing abortions (compared to the anti-choice alternatives). It's highly likely that a church-run system teaching abstention, denying contraception access and generally neglecting women's health issues across the board would result in more abortions (and more dead women).

Another argument you could make about banning abortion increasing the number of abortions is that abortions now are highly regulated. If you ban abortions, the abortions that will happen now will be unregulated and therefore cheaper. That one's kind of a reach when you say it out loud though. Certainly more women will die.

[Zonkerbl]

Katie Hill hired her lesbian lover campaign staffer to work on her staff after she was elected. That's inappropriate, but also not worth losing her career over. It's a minor ethics violation compared to what the GOP are getting away with. Also the thought of all these perverted white GOP men drooling over her nude pics is really depraved and disgusting.

[daoneandonly]

Monte, it looks like its a semantics issue now, execution vs killed. Bin Laden was killed because he was responsible for many deaths and was a menace, people like Malvo deserve the same fate. The family of their victims deserve that, we as a society, deserve that. If a murderer has a shootout with police (or reaches for a weapon) and dies on the scene, he deserved it, no? So I guess I'm not understanding how him being captured instead, and just put in prison for life on tax payers dime rather than put to death themselves for the life/lives they took is a better option?

And gtn like Point may hate me, but I have no beef with him. He too seems like good ppl who just happens to see the world a lot differently than I do, I say the same for you, Ruz, the many D's of doc, dck, dob, and dirt. But there are 4 that are more Trump like than they'd ever like to admit when it comes to name calling and filled with vitriol & hatred, cakes, zonk, querdi, and j wiz.

[daoneandonly]

As was said about many others here, including Kavanaugh, those who are elected into this public servant/political positions should be held to a higher standard. Hill brought this on herself, and her being out of office was the absolute correct path

[I_Like_Dirt]

I think if you use "banning abortion" as shorthand for "adoption of anti-choice agenda" which includes no contraception and only church-run women's health centers, then you can argue that abortions will increase. It's well known that the package of services that planned parenthood provides are effective at reducing abortions (compared to the anti-choice alternatives). It's highly likely that a church-run system teaching abstention, denying contraception access and generally neglecting women's health issues across the board would result in more abortions (and more dead women).

Another argument you could make about banning abortion increasing the number of abortions is that abortions now are highly regulated. If you ban abortions, the abortions that will happen now will be unregulated and therefore cheaper. That one's kind of a reach when you say it out loud though. Certainly more women will die.

On it's own, I'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest that banning abortion would actually reduce abortions or increase them. Like I said earlier, whether it's legal or not is largely going to be a trivial factor in these decisions which are emotional, life-altering affairs.

It's really about effort, though. Banning something and policing it invariably requires a certain amount of effort and political energy. Where is that political energy going to come from is the bigger question. And beyond that, the singular focus on banning abortion really does create a logical conflict. For someone actually intent on preventing them, given the clear evidence of what is effective and what isn't, the focus would largely be put on what's effective were that the principal goal. A ban on abortion would be largely a side point and ultimately borderline irrelevant if abortions were massively reduced. When the legality of abortions is front and center, however, and it clearly is, it's not actually about abortions.

For what it's worth, I know a few people who are anti-abortion who are also more interested in the social aspect of it. They're definitely not the majority, though, and they're well aware of that, too. The discussion breaks down when things become polarized. Pro-life and pro-choice aren't actually mutually exclusive. They're framed that way for political and social reasons, however, which makes progress slower than it needs to be.

[montestewart]

Da1, I think your response to my post illustrates my post. Words matter. Facts matter. Well-reasoned and well-supported arguments matter.

Execution vs. killed is semantics? Is a police officer killing an armed suspect in self defense vs. shooting an unarmed person in her own home semantics? Is death by natural causes vs. death by medical malpractice semantics? Is 1st degree homicide vs. 3rd degree manslaughter semantics? Is killing an enemy combatant reaching for his weapon vs. killing an unarmed, incarcerated person semantics?

The things that distinguish the death of OBL with the death you want for Malvo are many, and they are plain, obvious, black-and-white. The primary thing that is identical for both is that you, Da1, think they both should dead for what they have done. If Malvo had reached for his weapon as he was being apprehended, and a police officer shot and killed him, that would be analogous to the death of OBL. Tell me you can see that Da1 (please answer yes or know).

If you want to argue that they both deserve to die, fine. Stop calling OBL's death an "execution," (that, incidentally, all liberals uniformly congratulate Obama for personally accomplishing). If you don't care to distinguish a combat death from an execution, you risk undermining your argument and your credibility.

[daoneandonly]

OBL wasn't armed

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/05/osama-bin-laden-not-armed
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/osama-bin-laden-unarmed-killed-white-house/story?id=13520152

If he truly had it within reach, sure what happened had to happen. I'm not saying this wasnt warranted, but even if captured many would be calling for his head. I would, I just think malvo should be in the same company

And yea Monte, Im aware of the difference as u highlighted it

[Zonkerbl]

As was said about many others here, including Kavanaugh, those who are elected into this public servant/political positions should be held to a higher standard. Hill brought this on herself, and her being out of office was the absolute correct path

But Trump doesn't need to be held to that standard? Do you hear yourself?

Kavanaugh WASN'T held to the same standard that Hill was. Kavanaugh RAPED a woman. He has faced ZERO consequences for it. ZERO.

[daoneandonly]

As was said about many others here, including Kavanaugh, those who are elected into this public servant/political positions should be held to a higher standard. Hill brought this on herself, and her being out of office was the absolute correct path

But Trump doesn't need to be held to that standard? Do you hear yourself?

Kavanaugh WASN'T held to the same standard that Hill was. Kavanaugh RAPED a woman. He has faced ZERO consequences for it. ZERO.

Trump should be held to the same standard, if he's guilty of any of that, give that man the boot and let a real conservative like Pence take over

And all these allegations came against Kavanaugh once we was set to join the SCOTUS, before then, not a peep, even though he was still a public, judicial figure. The cherry on top was the accuser that was a former Gaithersburg High School student (Im an alum there, so yeah I know that school and the student body all too well) hiring Michael Aventti to be her lawyer, that last piece says more than enough about her credibility and character.

Hill's actions are proof positive and have been verified

[Zonkerbl]

As was said about many others here, including Kavanaugh, those who are elected into this public servant/political positions should be held to a higher standard. Hill brought this on herself, and her being out of office was the absolute correct path

But Trump doesn't need to be held to that standard? Do you hear yourself?

Kavanaugh WASN'T held to the same standard that Hill was. Kavanaugh RAPED a woman. He has faced ZERO consequences for it. ZERO.

Trump should be held to the same standard, if he's guilty of any of that, give that man the boot and let a real conservative like Pence take over

And all these allegations came against Kavanaugh once we was set to join the SCOTUS, before then, not a peep, even though he was still a public, judicial figure. The cherry on top was the accuser that was a former Gaithersburg High School student (Im an alum there, so yeah I know that school and the student body all too well) hiring Michael Aventti to be her lawyer, that last piece says more than enough about her credibility and character.

Hill's actions are proof positive and have been verified

And among these verified truths, which are the ones that justify hounding her from office and disseminating naked pictures of her online?

Sure would love to see Trump face his accusers so that it would be possible for him to face any consequences. ANY. But people like you who gleefully spread Katie Hill porn online NEVER ONCE expend the same energy asking for accountability for Trump.

[daoneandonly]

But Trump doesn't need to be held to that standard? Do you hear yourself?

Kavanaugh WASN'T held to the same standard that Hill was. Kavanaugh RAPED a woman. He has faced ZERO consequences for it. ZERO.

Trump should be held to the same standard, if he's guilty of any of that, give that man the boot and let a real conservative like Pence take over

And all these allegations came against Kavanaugh once we was set to join the SCOTUS, before then, not a peep, even though he was still a public, judicial figure. The cherry on top was the accuser that was a former Gaithersburg High School student (Im an alum there, so yeah I know that school and the student body all too well) hiring Michael Aventti to be her lawyer, that last piece says more than enough about her credibility and character.

Hill's actions are proof positive and have been verified

And among these verified truths, which are the ones that justify hounding her from office and disseminating naked pictures of her online?

I'm not applauding those who put those pictures out there, not a classy move by any stretch. But good grief, its 2019, she got herself elected into a pretty significant position. She has to know that taking pictures like that could easily backfire in the age and world we live in, especially being a public figure. If she didn't, well then she shouldnt be in such an important role as she's just not aware. She had a relationship with a subordinate, that's a no no, in this me too world, she should have exercised better judgement, she didn't and it cost her.

[daoneandonly]

And how did I spread her porn? She took the pictures, that's her stupidity. I didnt share them nor did I look at them, or have any desire to. I would never disrespect my wife by doing so

[daoneandonly]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-says-likely-baghdadi-successor-killed-by-us-troops/ar-AAJwiI2?ocid=mailsignout

[montestewart]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-says-likely-baghdadi-successor-killed-by-us-troops/ar-AAJwiI2?ocid=mailsignout

It would be interesting to know what the military and intelligence communities think about the amount of information Trump shares on these operations via tweet. It would be interesting to know how many times a piece of secret intelligence was spontaneously declassified via tweet without discussion or forethought of potential consequences. It would be interesting to know what the military and intelligence communities think about Trump's grandstanding and claiming credit for this in a way I have never witnessed a president claim, as commander-in-chief, credit for a military operation.

[dobrojim]

Nicolle Wallace gets my kudos for the day calling Laura Ingram and J Yoo Chicken $h!t
on live TV for their over the top and beyond character assassination of Vindland
pointing out that VIndland passed a background check, unlike Ivanka and her hubby.
Hilarious.

[Pointgod]

Nicolle Wallace gets my kudos for the day calling Laura Ingram and J Yoo Chicken ****
on live TV for their over the top and beyond character assassination of Vindland
pointing out that VIndland passed a background check, unlike Ivanka and her hubby.
Hilarious.

Remember Republicans are supposed to be the party that respects the troops and vets yet their voters don’t actually care to hold them accountable for their lies and hupocrisy