While I commend your efforts, you aren’t going to win anyone over with links to breitbart or rasmussen given they’re considered to be right-leaning (and I’m being generous here.)
The fact is the new President is polarizing and he scares the shit out of almost half of the US. I would say he scares even more than that, even some of the people that voted for him.
The president is not a dictator and never will be. Once people stop freaking out and realize that he has (powerful, but) limited influence, things will settle down and we can all go back to arguing about why unit tests suck, or the virtues of the JavaScript framework of the month.
Long message you posted, and I’m not going to try to rebut anything you say, you are entitled to your opinion and views. I spent over a decade of my life helping defend your rights. But one thing you are not entitled to do is say that you speak for the entire military or all those who have served. You continually speak as if you are speaking for everyone, i.e. “We in the military”, and I know for a fact (not an opinion here) that you don’t. Based on my own experience our military is filled with diverse views as well, and for someone to parade around pretending they represent that broad spectrum of views with their own is pretty ridiculous. Also, you seem to have quite a chip on your shoulders for having served, and that is fine, but in case anyone reading your post might think that is also the way all military vets act, it’s not. I don’t ask for anyone to hold me in any greater regard for my service than any other citizen, I volunteered, got what I wanted (an education and experience) and can say that the deal was a fair one for me. The country owes me nothing and if anything I owe it something for having given me such a great opportunity to serve and learn at the same time.
I’ve been trying to discuss this calmly, quietly with others. In response, I’ve been labeled a bigot, a Nazi, a backwards incompetent who is not in touch with the times - all while obliquely ignoring any rational facts I direct their way, any attempt to critically think through the situation. That is not a society interested in Discourse, as your product so boldly is founded on. That is a society interested in idealism, not grounded in reality and not wanting to be grounded in reality.
Look inwards before you direct your outrage outwards, please. Examine the foundations of why you believe it is wrong. Start from there, and we can discuss this together.
Jeff, it sounds like you need to take a long break from the hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle. I understand where you are coming from. The media has never hated someone as much as Trump in living memory, so it seems like there must be something wrong with him if that many people don’t like him. However the media is only representative of a small sliver of the people, and they have very selfish reasons to hate Trump.
They hate him because he hijacked their outrage machine to become popular. They hate him because he hits back and doesn’t apologize instead of meekly taking his tongue lashings like a good boy. They hate him because his Twitter account shows them their own irrelevance, as evidenced by their dwindling profits and record low trust from the American people. They hate him because he proved they were deluded for saying Hillary was a shoe-in, which is also a reason why you should be skeptical of the polls on his approval ratings. They are desperately trying to maintain their power in society, so they do what they know best, fling mud and keep screeching. The New York Times is nothing special, just a business full of people chasing power.
One final, and more glib comment: Do you think that trying to make your point with comic books and comic Jon Stewart might be evidence that you haven’t really thought enough about this to choose which political groups to support?
I feel an expansion of voting by mail (and making voting by mail much easier) is more practical than switching to a “force people to vote” model for the US. Radical change doesn’t seem possible or really even necessary here. And let us speak of voter suppression and gerrymandering…
I didn’t object to Joel’s meta post but I completely agree with one criticism, that it lacked something essential – where’s the call to action? What do you want us to do about it?
I felt the opposing candidate would make a better leader in that particular matchup. However they were perfectly reasonable candidates, unlike Trump would have made fine leaders, and in different matchups I would have voted for them. If you prefer different outcomes, perhaps give me more candidates to vote for; see below.
This is why I am calling for the formation of a third party, and I hope the turmoil around Trump allows that to happen. I don’t think Republicans or Democrats are doing a decent job right now. In 1912, the Progressive party got 27.5% of the vote for example:
That’s fine, but when what you promised on the campaign trail is fundamentally unamerican, you have no place in office. Trump also promised he’d lock up Hillary. Has he done that yet?
We have, for a week – and the results have been uniformly poor. What reason do I have to believe it will get better?
Spending $25 billion taxpayer dollars on a pointless PR stunt of a US-Mexico wall is sheer governmental waste, pure and simple. If we could turn that $25 billion into building roads, bridges, and other public infrastructure projects that would bring jobs and badly needed infrastructure improvements to the US, I’d absolutely support that.
This does not represent anything I believe in as an American and I find the statement repulsive.
Trump is a deepening of the problem, quadrupling down on making the problem much worse. Money in politics? Why not elect a billionaire who won’t even release his tax returns, and brags that he doesn’t pay taxes.
I don’t hate Trump. I think many of his policies are deeply unamerican and ultimately harmful for the reasons I explained in this blog post. Thus I am mobilizing to vote against him at every opportunity, and vote someone more reasonable into office.
Also, just a note about the discussion: any excessive vitriol or invective posted here will be deleted. Links to white nationalist site breitbart, run by Steve Bannon, will be deleted. Ditto for links to ESR who is basically a lunatic at this point.
I am not from the US, but I find what is going there at the moment incredibly sad,
I am not affected by Trumps immigration measures. I am from Northern Ireland, and in spite of my own Country’s history of terrorism, I could comfortably move there tomorrow. As could anybody from Saudi Arabia (source of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers).
This ban isn’t a ban on Muslims, it is a ban on poor Muslims. The Muslim countries that The Donald does business with are conspicuously absent.
I am hopeful by the actions of the ACLU. I am also hopeful that your House of Congress will think with their conscience and block the funding of these insane measures. After all, it was Congress which prevented Obama from carrying out some of his own executive orders, by refusing to pay for them.
Keep up the good fight! I’m not sure what I can do apart from support from you from afar.
We’re all entitled to our own beliefs as to what is or is not fundamentally American. I believe universal healthcare is fundamentally American, but up to now a majority disagrees and I have to live with it.
You’re certainly entitled to that belief. I think pissing away $25 billion dollars on a largely symbolic project like this no worse than the 400+ billion we have spent on the F-35.
I don’t follow your logic, what does lobbying/bribery have to do with Trump’s tax returns? Or his billions for that matter? So he didn’t pay taxes because he pays accountants to make sure he minimizes his tax bill. How does that make him an asshole in and of itself? Does he have any legal requirement to release his tax returns? Of course it would have hurt him in the election, which is why he didn’t release them. He set out to win, not to follow the traditions of career-politicians.
It’s your site and you can censor it as you please. Just keep in mind that if you censor it for only your side’s viewpoint, the higher the risk that it becomes an echo chamber.
We’re all Americans, we should strive to compromise and stand together. Instead we continue to sling shit at one another and blame the other side for the smell.
Jeff, Breitbart is “far-right”, but it’s not white nationalist. The (mostly) Jews who work there believe in the superiority of Western culture and ideas. They don’t care a jot for skin colour. So stop repeating the “white” nationalist thing, because it’s just not true. You would do well to force yourself to read more stuff that you disagree with, and practice coming up with logical arguments about why you disagree with it. A healthy dose of world travel to poor countries wouldn’t hurt either, to get some perspective. Get out of San Francisco. Go to Africa and Asia and the Middle East and look around. Then you might have a better idea why America is still the (second) best country in the world
By the way, I’m from New Zealand, and about 10 years ago it was obvious to us down here that Fox was the most biased American news outlet. Now all of them are biased (CNN being particularly bad), either hard-right or hard-left, mostly hard-left. It’s actually just not possible to get unbiased American news anymore. It seems every American so-called journalist is now an activist. It’s not good, and it’s global. Even in our media, instead of the passive voice of facts, it’s now always the angry voice of opinion.
I can’t upvote this enough. There’s not a single news source that attempts to be unbiased. I hate Fox and CNN. It seems that the tech world has been taken over by SJWs, so the number of blogs I subscribe to is dwindling as well.
The president’s critics will obviously interpret any action negatively. If their criticism has merit then they should not need to exaggerate or lie to make their point.
Agreed. One of the few bright points in the Trump agenda was possibly extending Medicare to all Americans. It would be so much simpler than what we have now… and the current “destroy it first, fix it later” plan is quite dangerous when it comes to people’s health.
Are we? Is firing people who disagree with you on the basis of the constitution “American”? Is threatening to imprison your political opponent “American”?
The last president to fire an AG was Nixon. I think Trump’s run is shaping up to be dramatically worse.
I would love a reduced military budget in the US. Sadly, Trump promises a massive expansion of the military and billions of dollars more spent on top of what we already do.
As an American I am proud to pay taxes – they fund schools, roads, firefighters, police, courthouses, libraries. In short, the government. To have someone run for the highest governmental office and simultaneously brag they they pay no taxes is corrupt. Fair taxes, sure. Totally. No taxes? That is undermining the very institutions you claim to stand for. It is embarrassing, and unamerican, and I am ashamed to be associated with it. I will always remember Schwarzenegger’s comment:
He fired her for refusing to do her job. It’s not her job to determine the legality of a law, that’s what the courts are for. You fire an insubordinate employee who refuses to do their job.
“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your (missing email) situation,” Trump said, “because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”
Did he say he was going to imprison her? (If he did, I couldn’t turn anything up beyond the quote above.) Did he threaten to circumvent due process? Look if you think he’s the devil incarnate, no amount of discussion will change your mind.
We can both agree that he’s an asshole and his tactics are anything but subtle.
Neither Trump or Hillary passed my beer test. I would sooner have a beer with Bill Clinton than either of them.
I fully believe republicans will screw this up. I’m counting on it actually. Screw it up so badly that we’re backed into a corner and forced to go to a single payer / universal healthcare system.
Well, maybe all the AGs in-between did they’re jobs. She could have just as easily resigned. There’s political theater on both sides. By firing her he asserts his authority. By forcing him to fire her she becomes a martyr of sorts. Besides she was only acting-AG for what another couple of weeks at most? Depending on your viewpoint it could be considered a political stunt.
I grew up in a blue-collar (dad was a GM factory worker) democratic household. To this day my dad still votes democrat no matter who’s on the ticket. If Trump had been on the democratic ticket you can bet your ass he would have voted for him. For the longest time I considered myself a democrat (but never registered as such.) As time went on I became resentful of how things were run in NY State. My taxes went up, my salary did not. Rinse, repeat. I left NY for a southern state, and I make more money, pay less taxes.
Ideally in my world we’d have a fiscally conservative, socially liberal gov’t. Neither party has a chance in hell of delivering on that. The Libertarian Party can’t gain enough traction.
So how do we move past this point in 4/8 years? That’s the conversation folks should be focusing on. If we elect a democrat or republican in the next cycle or two, we’ll get more of the same, same goes for congress. Stop voting for these assholes. Neither democrats nor republicans care about you beyond what it’s going to cost them to get you to vote for them.
Jeff, there’s nothing on that Wikipedia page that proves that the Breitbart writers are openly (or even secretly) white nationalists. I challenge you to find one single article promoting white nationalism on Breitbart. You can’t just falsely label everyone you disagree with a white nationalist, or for that matter, a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe and so on. Haven’t you realised yet that that’s part of why Donald Trump won? Political correctness and social justice warriors are preventing people from expressing their thoughts and feelings openly. To the point where an American can’t even be opposed to, say, illegal immigration without risking the wrath of the media and being called a racist. Trump said to hell with political correctness and gave those people a voice. They duly voted him in. For example, here is why Trump supporters are against open borders. Would you be happy if someone walked into your house, uninvited, and helped himself to your couch, fridge, and medicine cabinet? No? Well why would a taxpayer not be annoyed when someone from a country you just happen to share a border with just walks in, illegally, uninvited, and helps himself to welfare and other benefits, paid for with your tax dollars? You can say that illegal immigrants are great, and every single one is wonderful, but that’s just not true. Besides, it’s the principle of the thing. A nation belongs to it’s citizens. Surely the citizens should decide who joins the family?
And I wouldn’t say that nationalism, a belief in the superiority of your culture, ideas, and institutions is what you describe as far, far, farrrrr right. By that measure that’s just about every people and nation on the planet (especially the Japanese and Chinese), except Western nations controlled by a liberal elite (including you) in the last 20 years. For example, plenty of (most?) people in America and in Western countries are sceptical of multiculturalism. Hence Brexit and Trump. Why? They sense that it won’t work. In fact there is not a single historical example of it ever working. They sense that it creates tension at best, civil war (like the recent Lebanese Civil War) at worst. They know, intuitively, that if you bring other, radically different cultures into your country, they do not assimilate. Instead, they autosegregate. Proof: look at this map of London: 12 data maps that sum up London - BBC News. No one wants to let go of their own culture. And culture matters. Whenever colonists founded a new country, they created microcosms of the countries they came from, with all their institutions, laws, customs and so on. New Zealand and Australia are practically the same country because they were settled by the same culture. Jeff, the whole world would move into Western nations and go on welfare, insisting on maintaining their way of life, if they could. Do you want that? Do you really want America to become more like the rest of the world? Because if you do, and you get it wrong, and multiculturalism doesn’t pan out, and America (and the other Western nations) become averages of every other country in the world, or worse, actually suffer civil wars, then it’s basically game over for Western societies. There are 196 nations in the world. How many of those 196 would you want to live in? They formed because radically different cultures don’t get along. It’s human nature to belong to a tribe. Surely you’ve played Civ? Look at the Basque separatists in Spain, or any of the independence movements around the world. The Star Trek thing sounds great, but it just isn’t going to happen. And what you call the far, far, farrrrr right (because you disagree with them) aren’t going to allow the West to fall just to say I told you so. It still amazes me that the 20th century endured such disasters simply because of unrealistic political ideas. Take Communism. Communism was a wildly popular idea that is precluded from working due to human nature, not to mention the information distribution difficulties: The Use of Knowledge in Society - Wikipedia. Yet most of the world used to live under communist regimes, right up to the nineties. Lenin and Stalin never lived to see their failures. Nor was it they who suffered for their stupidity. This is the first time I’ve ever written anything political on the internet. Anyway, that’s how the other side feels. I hope it helps. May the best ideas win.
Now you know how half the country felt 8 years ago when an avowed socialist and community agitator took the oath of office as President of the United States. It was Obama’s policy initiatives and selective enforcement of the justice system that lead directly to the popular uprising known as the Tea Party movement. You may not hear much about that anymore, but the composition of state and Federal legislatures and state governorships is a rather powerful testimony to their effectiveness in countering Obama. And at the end of his presidency, Obama’s legacy is the election of his successor which is giving you and your ilk valuable experience as the loyal opposition. Enjoy.
Yep, relativism is great while it’s your ‘truth’ that is in the ascendant.
I think it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s a (temporary) ban on people from failed states. (I’m not going to debate how much the failure is the fault of the West or the US in particular).
This applies to all of us, I fear.
@codinghorror, back to increasing the turnout: I was surprised to discover that voting happens on a weekday in the US. Surely the easiest change would be to move it to the weekend? Or is there something I’m missing?
Actually… that isher job. She serves the constitution, not the president.
“I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right,” Yates wrote in a letter to justice department lawyers. “At present I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful.”
Few more details on Yates:
successfully prosecuted the Atlanta olympics bomber in 1994
became a US attorney in 2002 under Bush
confimed 84-12 as Deputy Attorney General in 2015
authored the policy known as the “Yates memo” prioritizing the prosecution of executives for corporate crimes
If you are equating corporations to people, which … doesn’t make sense. I do agree that corporations get away with paying too litle taxes in general.
I also loved that Bannon pulled an “all lives matter” on the Holocaust by not even mentioning Jews in the white house statement on holocaust remembrance day. That was really something. Compare the statements from the Bush and Obama administrations. Go ahead, compare.
We don’t have open borders. Read about how hard it is to get a green card. That stuff was tightened up dramatically after 9/11, as you’d expect. Spending millions, even billions of US taxpayer dollars on this to expand bureaucracy for little benefit is pure governmental waste.
There is: the United States. It’s worked for 200 years so far.
Last time I checked, the people advocating for “alternative facts” were in the Trump administration. I’m all for fact and data based decisions. For example, of the 7 countries Trump banned muslims from entering the USA on Friday, exactly zero of those countries caused domestic terrorism in the USA. That’s data. That’s facts. Not enough of it is the problem.
Personally I would say what we’re seeing now is Clinton’s legacy, not Obama’s. It was her race to lose – and everyone radically underestimated how many people, rationally or not, just hated her guts.
IRV isn’t much better than what we already have, we need something that’ll actually get third parties elected (like range voting) or this inanity will never end.
Of course, even that might not help too much if rampant voter suppression is allowed to continue…
Trump is the best that could happen to America in years. People do not want to hear about new privileges for gay and lesbian anymore, they are worried about the economy and their workplaces.
Yep, we have the same problem in Poland. The democracy is being destroyed day by day by a person similar to Trump called Kaczynski, our Constitutional Court is not independent any more and now they try to destroy our Supreme Court and change the electoral regulations. All of that is supported by a national TV’s propaganda. You better prepare for that in US and act against it!