technically it's all about who was more unscrupulous about making promises they have no intention on keeping.

Democrats can blame the DNC that thought that Hillary was electable (clearly she wasn't). Media also had a lot to do with it as they reported Hillary with an insurmountable lead because of superdelegates who hadn't even voted yet.

That wasn't universally the case, as it pretty much was in 2008. There were some media that only reported pledged delegates. The DNC asked the media to only report on pledged delegates and not include superdelegates - there definitely were some media outlets that didn't abide by this, but many did.

I'm starting to think cooperation is completely dead between the parties, and we need to just have 2 Americas.

Honestly this is a better idea.

Yes that happens when entire cities are fed media BS down their throats and end up resorting to violent riots to preserve their "feelings". Sort of hard to cooperate. Personally I think pulling funding from schools like Berkeley would be a great step towards cooperation. A lot of social justice nonsense seems to swarm around that area of California as if it were a sustaining hub.

Wow. Authoritarian much?

I can get behind the spirit here so long as the law is well-measured and specific; and where its case-by-case application goes through the courts.

e.g. Make a law where schools whose leadership fail to make a good faith effort to reduce violence, discrimination, or attempts to block the free exchange of ideas can have their funding withheld.

I gather Californians don't feel that threatened by a lack of federal funds though, so I'm not sure what the effectiveness of simply withholding federal funds would be.

Reducing violence is easiest achieved by applying discrimination and blocking the free exchange of ideas. Things like blocking races and religions known for violence from entering an area is common sense.

Perhaps; I'd love a longer analysis on the subject and I don't accept it as common sense. Not that there aren't cases where certain individuals entering an area could clearly lead to imminent violence, like where gangs or militant groups have already taken root, but as applied in more moderate and lawful areas like college campuses or as applied to refugees to the U.S. who have undergone pretty extreme vetting.

Long term moves like banning races and religions from an area would mean less Positive Contact and a mode of operation where we treat the symptoms rather than the problem.

Short term we risk making members of such racial and religious groups easier targets for radicalization and less willing to cooperate against more radical members of their respective groups.

In any case, it's my view that that's not the sort of society we should be striving for. We should push all three principles to their limits and strive to build the most accepting, peaceful and open society that we reasonably can, at a reasonably safe tempo; not suppress contact and conversation for short-term safety or an illusory sense thereof.

I also respect Brandenburg v. Ohio and don't disagree if your point is blocking speech likely to cause imminent lawless action can increase safety.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Feb 13 2017, 3:34 am by jjf28.

There are more cases of banning/blocking races and religions helping than not. It's sad, but you have to remember that was the norm and socially acceptable thing to do in the US like 40 years ago. In many countries today, it still is, and if not was more recently than only 40 years.

Now you are right that it is not a society we should be striving for, but just saying sad truths. Many people are still racists to this day, they would just never publicly admit it.

I've already said I don't accept it as common sense and provided a broad sketch of a case against it; please levy some statistics or apply some reasoning or at least sketch an intuitive case. Saying it was normal in the past (lots of misguided things were normal) or noting that lots of people have suppressed racism (to which I agree but doesn't have explicit relevance) doesn't support the general helpfulness of banning races/religions from areas.

The US government pays a lot in tax money to these state schools. The US government is also responsible for upholding and enforcing the first amendment. The idea is if a particular state funded program is actively denying US citizens their first amendment rights a proper response would be to pull funding. Whether or not this is "authoritarian" can be debated. For example, I would debate that faculty and students of a government funded program who authoritatively deny others their constitutional rights is highly authoritarian and un-American.

It's short sighted common sense. I agree with you on everything except for my opinion that it's common sense.

My reasoning is fairly simple. I wouldn't allow someone from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant into the USA, regardless of the crimes they had committed. They have a proven track record of being openly hostile, and we can be considered to be at war with them. In wars, it was common practice to isolate or detain members originating from the opposing side in order to limit access to spies which would lead to increased information being given to the enemy. So if we know that there are certain markers that make a person more likely to do something illegal, generally we should take steps to identify the problem and isolate it.

Pulling funding from a single corporation won't do anything, it's like trying to stamp out the puddle on the floor to kill the cockroach flood surrounding it. If you want to get rid of domestic terrorism you need to be way more heavy handed than that.

Yeah, that seems to happen quite a lot recently.

I hope that I can help you find an optimistic outlook again. I'll start with the basics: we live in literally the best time period known to man. We have amazing things like the internet, advanced health care, the ability to travel across the world in a matter of hours. Today the question is no longer "what can we do?" in regards to things like creating change or saving lives, but rather "what should we do?" and "who is going to pay for it?" This is the problem with my party - the Republican party - is that most of my fellow republicans don't want to pay for anything. They argue that no one is entitled to the fruits of their labor, and for the most part, I agree with them. What I think we as a party need to recognize is that often we benefit from others' labor, through everything from smartphone communications, grocery stores, vehicle transportation, to advanced mining techniques and beyond. I think this is where the impetus for people who voted for Trump came from - not some sort of racist homophobic hatred, but a desire for the government to take less of their stuff. This applies to the rich and the poor - the poor who are struggling to get by need the government to take less of their stuff, and the rich who are creating new things with their business and wealth want the returns on investment they feel they deserve, since, after all, they pay for their smartphones and cars and investments and the other infrastructure they use. They disagree with the liberals who want to make them pay for other people's healthcare, because while of course everyone deserves healthcare, but they don't deserve to pay for it from my pocket.

In my personal opinion, this is not a binary issue but a spectrum. As a republican I will always lean towards lower-taxes, less government interference and such, but I cannot deny that so many things would not even be possible if it were not for the labor of the other folks in my country. Though I have paid my fair price to own my Samsung smartphone, my $800 would be otherwise useless if thousands of people had not done thousands of hours of work to make it possible, work that other people paid for and other people deserve compensation for. So I get called a moderate, for seeing both sides of the issue. The problem with moderates like me of course, is that as long as the law lies somewhere in the middle path, I'm OK with it. Maybe I think a 40% tax is a little too low or a little too high, but chances are good that no one's going to win my vote with a 2% tax raise/cut.

A political extremist, in contrast, is likely to be galvanized by such an idea, however small. If a moderate proposes 2%, they propose 20% so that maybe they can walk away with 7%. The extremists are what I believe to be the cause of the real evil in our political system. The extremists will be motivated by any small injustice, by a 2% change that went opposite to what they believe, and they will be satisfied by any small, however meaningless change, in the direction they desire. For a politician, these people are the tools to running the campaigns. Someone like Trump can say "Build a wall" and set these folks into a frenzy. The good news is that these people are relatively sparse compared to the general population.

The bad news is that we are not responsible internet users. The same self-centeredness which I believe characterizes many of my fellow republican's stances on monetary issues was widely prevalent in democratic supporters this election. With millions of Americans interconnected via sites like facebook, and of course more traditional television news sources, any mention of a republican position was immediately turned into flame war by oppositional democrats. The problem here is not merely that democrats opposed the ideas, but that they opposed the ideas for no reason besides the identity of the person who spoke it, and they opposed the people behind the ideas. And when you sink from arguing against an idea to arguing against a person, you create an extremist, no matter how moderate that person was to begin with. Moderate republicans felt threatened to even speak about supporting Trump - and when your reaction is based in fear, there is no hope of cooperation. The resentment will fester and grow, and there is no longer any room for changing viewpoints. While of course, it would be great if all of my fellow republicans could have "risen above" the vitriol and opened their minds to the needs of their democratic brothers and sisters, I believe a healthy portion of the blame for Trump's election rests on the shoulders of the democrats. At a time when all they had to do was sympathize with the moderate republicans who actively disliked Trump, (especially this election since there was a huge republican backlash against Trump), they instead chose to attack the people who could have handed them the election. Note that I'm not giving my republican party a free pass here, I'm just saying two wrongs don't make a right.

So all this is mostly human nature. We need more moderates in politics, the extremists are crazy, yadda yadda, etc. The good news, is that this is not the worst election in history. Trump is not the craziest president we've ever had (does anyone even remember Nixon?). Trump couldn't give less of a shit about social issues, though it's true that the republican congress does. The other good news is that human nature is the same now as it was 200 years ago when the U.S. constitution was drafted. The system is designed to be slow. Create consensus over a 10-15 year period, and we can have change pretty easily. But while Trump & Co are trying to pass Obamacare repeal, there are good folks out there working on exactly the opposite, and in 2 years Trump might lose his Republican congress. It's true that it would do some damage - maybe we lose 2, 4, or even 8 years of progress while Trump is in office, but you can sure expect that that will galvanize the other side into action, and when the tide flips back in favor of the Democrats we will have a resurgence of opposite policy.

So what can be done in the meantime? Well if we are to learn anything from this election, I think it's that we have to learn to educate each other, and resist the temptation to fight. Calling someone a racist because they don't believe affirmative action is helping the country is not productive. Equally unproductive are positions many Republicans hold which fail to recognize the spectrum of interdependence in our society. Making political memes which oversimplify, create straw-man arguments, and are based in angry reactionism is not the way to go. However, the internet, which I feel was vastly abused this election, can also be our most powerful tool for progressive change. The internet is all about widespread information dissemination. Anyone with access to the internet can learn the real information if they choose. Strict religious parents will have their narrow worldviews undermined when their children discover wikipedia. Liberals who try to cultivate the expression of choice before reality will be undermined by facts as well.

The system will force change to be slow, so that we have enough time to educate each other. Because of that I have hope. We can stop comparing Trump to Hitler, and maybe the Republicans will reform Obamacare for the better. As long as we can acknowledge that our political opponents also want what is best for the country, even if we disagree on how to achieve it, there is hope.

I also believe this idea deserves special mention, as it is a prime example of the creation of an extremist position. Your justification is inconsistent, as making a morally poor choice is separate from making a bad choice. A morally poor choice invites the idea that the chooser is fully aware that what they are doing is wrong and still desires that action. Generalizing this property to the entire group of "racist SJWs" is inconsistent with your statement that "I believe in morality", as no one who is moral would attempt to generalize such negative attributes to people who unintentionally cause harm with the intention of doing good. Note that I do believe you are moral, or are trying to be, so your inconsistency here is obviously the result of a bad choice, not a moral choice. Having been served this notice, I expect that in good conscience you will from here on attempt to improve upon your previous inconsistencies in order to better uphold the standard of morality.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 14 2017, 6:06 pm by Vrael.

Goddamn Vrael!

Your post is so huge! I mean holy shit!

That's not a bad thing, I just didn't know what to say after reading it because I fell asleep somewhere in the middle and my eyes were strained, so I had to take a break anyway.

The political process is a complex beast. As much as I try to be succinct whenever I write, I didn't feel I could support my ideas without starting relatively deep into the fundamental divide between our political parties. I believe our biggest problems are a sort of snowball effect from relatively simple, manageable disagreements, and if we untangle the mess we can find hope at the core. Sorry for the essay, but clearly you were not around in the days when Serious Discussion was an active forum. This last post is nothing