Indefinite Detention? But I Have Soccer Practice at 4: U.S. Politics 2012

what do you think of the dems aero

how do you like that obama dude

staten island is a bastion of liberalism?!?

you and me, we're against the same things, I hate the cause you hate the effect

eis, staten island is a bastion of suburban conservativism that's just big enough to allow left-wing gop pols to swing some nyc elections

haha otm re: bloomberg

there is, on a day-to-day level in a major city, a lot to be said for making the trains run on time tho. (no i am not excusing his convention/ows/other behavior.)

a big problem with the gop is that they're so against the idea of government that they won't even bother administrating it.

I don't think we're actually against the same things in the sense that I don't hate everybody who's not exactly like me

Bloomie isn't 'left wing' by any standard cept conventionally pro-gay/Planned Parenthood etc (plus he's one hilarious liar on rich/poor issues: "ppl on Wall Street make $45-50 G") and he would've lost last time if the Dems hadn't nominated a nobody who was in bed with him.

or if he didn't get to spend like $400 per nyc voter on ads

but mostly, staten island

actually i think he's pissed at how close he came to losing to a nobody

bloomberg's pretty left-wing, like further than the dems on a lot of stuff w/ the exception a few 'admittedly kinda important' issues. and still woulda lost two of the three elections if staten island didn't exist.

You are totally insane, you know this right

aero you've managed to abstract your hardcore leftism into this thing where , idk, the voters and people in america really have no relation to what should and can happen, and it's just those 'not hard enough left public figures' who are the cause of all our problems. that's v. convenient, it's all due to some powerful forces and some dudes in suits on tv and the good-hearted american people are just being tricked. no - it's not the fact that a very high % of people in america believe that women should not ever be able to get an abortion, ever - no, that has no effect on american policy at all. it's the mysterious forces and sell-out dems. america is actually packed w/ good-hearted pro-choice socialists, they're just all hiding under rocks, waiting for the magic third party to appear.

bloomberg pushed for congestion pricing, very strict gun control laws, gay marriage, he's against the death penalty etc. etc.

honestly the scenario you're spinning out of air (which neither I nor anyone else believes) is still less batshit insane than "all the dumb ppl in [town/county/state/country] are the problem" - I know you can't actually imagine that even as logically possible, because you've been drunk on "the people in [region/locality] are so stupid!" for so long so there is no point in even arguing, I'm just commenting that it's fascinating, because it's so transparently a 1) foolish and 2) losing argument but it's like your absolute go-to in every scenario. the bad people from the bad places. if only we could be rid of them. <--- never ever get anywhere with that line of thinking + it's wrong in the first place but neither of these disqualifiers offset the apparent sweetness of the argt for you. it's just weird is all!

whew. i was worried for a second that this clusterfuck wasn't actually going to happen.

lol

when you call out american policy makers you are calling out the people who voted for them. you can pretend that you're not, that the senator from oklahoma really has *nothing to do* with the people and culture of oklahoma. he's just this dude, there. what an asshole, right? but you're just abstracting the issue. american politics is making a big grand compromise w/ 'the bad people in the bad places'. it sucks, we do it, that's why things are the way they are.

I know that that's what you think! it's literally insane, tossing out the many other things about American politics that don't suit your pet notion! that is what is really interesting about yr whole deal, the amount of sheer effort you have to put into your unworking, wrong, utterly ridiculous "bad people/bad places" weird post-Marxist hangover ideology!

"there's no money in politics...the electorate never shifts...if it does, thank the good people from the good places...there's literally nothing else in play besides the voters, they're really running the show...these fuckin' rubble...you can admit it or not, but they're scum...their individual donations are really the engine that drives the whole machine...gotta re-wire that machine for their own good...the days grow hot, O Babylon...'tis cool beneath thy villow trees"

tbh I do not have to put very much effort into this ideology "on the whole, people vote for politicians who represent and enact their policy beleifs"

I have some pretty crazy beliefs, no doubt, but the 'voting has something to do w/ politics' theory has many proponents

yeah dude "on the whole, voting is a complex behavior with many variables in play" would be a much safer & truer assertion

as w/ many things, it might be on an individual level, when millions of people do it they follow fairly predictable patterns

the overwhelming pattern being "they vote for someone who best represents their political beliefs"

it's crazy but I'm the one not being patronizing towards millions of people atm

aero is it mistaken to think that the voters in some states are more hostile to abortion rights than those in other states?

all those people *tricked* into being pro-life...by uh...money! ads! the machine! it's not like there are people in america w/ different beliefs than us, there are just people who were tricked. by money.

aero is it mistaken to think that the voters in some states are more hostile to abortion rights than those in other states?

this particular question seems moot to me, since the right to choose is hardly ever approachable at the voting level, unless you're tracking candidates and their positions w/the voters, which, again, is really complex: how you frame the question of abortion has as much to do with a voter's response as the issue iteself (same's true with a lot of social issues eg welfar). in iatee's world, the many people who've had abortions but still vote pro-life don't really exist, because the world is easily explained: there's good people (us, we live here) and scummy people (them, they live there). iatee will always believe this & there's no point engaging him on it at all but "staten island" was just too hilarious to ignore, I'm sure he's got a bunch of charts n stats that prove staten island really is the great satan or something tho

"iteself" seems to have borrowed an "e" from "welfar" but if it works for them who'm I to judge

I can look for one but I really don't think anyone needs a chart to prove that xp

some1 else reminded me of this /nostalker

ice cr?m it's a democracy. America votes in a guy, they not only get what they deserve, they get what they explicitly asked for. and it's not like there weren't plenty of voices around warning that the candidates were going to fuck shit up proper - this is a democracy, again! vote in somebody who's not a fucking sociopath, get a better deal imo, otherwise you get what you voted for & urged others to vote for

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, October 31, 2011 10:00 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so ppl have basically homogenous views throughout the 50 states? that doesn't seem right.

lol "the electorate gets what it votes for" is what I say. "the electorate gets what it votes for, those horrible subhumans" is your uniquely batshit variant on that

lol dude Reagan got a 2nd term. sorry to "condescend" to an asshole electorate that actually gave a guy who'd been ruining the country for four years another four years to dig the whole deeper.
― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned)

hmmmm

I'm sure he's got a bunch of charts n stats that prove staten island really is the great satan or something tho

staten island does kinda suck, though.

I went to high school in Staten Island. Prince's Bay. We hung out in New Dorp. New Doooorp. The train is free there. That's pretty cool. It smells like garbage in the summer. Less cool.

so ppl have basically homogenous views throughout the 50 states? that doesn't seem right.

oh no - they shift all the time for a lot of reasons - states go from pro-labor to anti depending on the economy, how effective the unions are in their work, clever phrasing like "right to work" (who doesn't believe in the right to work?) in ballot measures, etc., for example. states get tilted pro- or anti-choice when a Republican legislature gets out its pen and starts redistricting; this is going on now in a number of states, the one I live in included. whole educational curricula go fundamentalist when the right/wrong people end up on local schoolboards. much of this has to either with long-term regional strategies of the party that take into account local economies, movement of the population imo. It's my understanding that Thomas Frank's book about Kansas talks a lot about this sort of thing but I haven't read it so I don't know for sure

no point in drawing this out I just feel obligated to holler "bullshit" when iatee finds another neighborhood to demonize

They have houses with waterfalls where the water flows over the front of the house.

by neighborhood you mean 'another old thread where you said exactly the opposite of what you're saying now', right xp

it remains the case that the voters get what they ask for, and they're assholes if they vote in assholes. for iatee, those assholes have gotta come from places he can draw a line around & point to or all the fun goes out of stuff

I do love that you've so completely conceded the question that the best you can do is "you're inconsistent with a previous position"

no I haven't conceded the question, I just agree w/ historic you

They have houses with waterfalls where the water flows over the front of the house.

man I wish I understood this reference because it is kinda cosmic-sounding to me

chillwave moderne

no I haven't conceded the question, I just agree w/ historic you

lol I'm less inclined to flee from the argt at hand than you evidently but iirc ppl's objections there were "you realize you sound like iatee here right?" and I had to go to great pains to differentiate between wholesale cynicism (me) vs. consistent classism (you)

we're all classist to some extent. not very helpful with this discussion, though it helps me to figure out my own head wr2 politics and such.

that's the thing, you fail at being a cynic which is why it's so frustrating to watch you interact w/ politics. it's just a never-ending disillusionment. it's not in your personality tbh. morbs is a cynic and he's pretty good at it and at least his political views are consistent ("hate everybody").

if you want to be a cynic forget about ~what is good and right in the world~ when you click on the politics thread and read up on game theory and interest groups

it's not ~cynical~ to blame everything on the two party system, its lazy and simplistic. or maybe it's entry-lev cynicism, idk

it's true - cynicism isn't really native to me, I feel let down again & again + that's sort of just how I'm wired to be, that's a fair cop. I know you really really wanna tether your thread dig-up to your own consistenly pathological "these people from this place are bad, ignorant people" schtick & I also know that you're convinced of yr righteousness on that front so why bother any more than I should bother trying to convince you of its woeful ignorance

yet the very failed cynicism you cite necessitates that we'll be revisiting this argument the next time you locate a city, county, state, country or region - it won't be hard! there's only the one Paris and the one NY, minus those wicked people in Staten Island! - to make sweeping generalities about