Hypocritter

[vraiblonde]

People, please. It was just a joke.

 

[This_person]

Just for fun, make the case for Obama and his polices and make the case against Trump and his. If you understand them, their views, then intelligence doesn't require you to believe either, but it does require you be able to explain them. Otherwise, if you can't do that, if you really don't even know your opponents positions, on what basis, other than feelings, do you oppose them or, how could you be able to persuade them otherwise?

I've done that many times on many different subjects. I am also arguing the point that there are valid points both ways. I am not sure what the fun would be.

 

[This_person]

People, please. It was just a joke.

Sure, but the ongoing conversation became interesting.

 

[vraiblonde]

Sure, but the ongoing conversation became interesting.

You're right - parts of it, anyway.

 

[SamSpade]

otherwise, if you can't do that, if you really don't even know your opponents positions, on what basis, other than feelings, do you oppose them or, how could you be able to persuade them otherwise?

*ULTIMATELY* -we generally do NOT base our positions on these things solely on facts. A lot of it has to do with whom and what we trust. If you hate cops and your experience with cops has been mostly negative - and someone says they're going to be a "law and order" candidate - you're not going to put a lot of faith in anything he does. Because in your mind, he's take a position opposing YOU.

Because of something said candidate does or implements - you or someone in your family loses their job. Not INDIRECTLY. Directly. At that point you don't care if he helps the economy or helps national security - he hurt YOU.

So - you don't trust him. YOU were a stepping stone. It doesn't matter what he plans to do from now on, he's not on YOUR side.

And - there's a lot of situations like this. Notice I was very non-partisan in my description. It could be someone on either side. If - like my niece - you *married* an illegal immigrant, you hate Trump. It really doesn't matter if for the next four to eight years, virtually everything he does helps you or agrees with your point of view - you hate him. If you know nothing about him - but all your FRIENDS hate him - you don't need to see anything he does. LIKING him costs friends. So you hate him.

What bugged me so much about Obama is something I wrote here online in - I think it was 2007, before the election - that any opposition to him for years will ALWAYS be called racist. Period. I wasn't wrong. They *STILL* call it racist. Because they have one hammer and everything is a nail.

BECAUSE - they do not think you can disagree - once the facts are laid out. Because the ONLY reason you can disagree is, you're uninformed or misinformed or have a character flaw or you're just stupid. Consider how many times people on the right were told "you're voting AGAINST your own interests".

We're tired of not only being told the biased story - we're being told what we should think, too.

 

[Larry Gude]

*ULTIMATELY* -we generally do NOT base our positions on these things solely on facts. .

My comment you referenced spoke of ones opponents 'positions', not facts. That doesn't exclude use of facts per se but I intentionally used 'positions' as opposed to facts because they become hot potatoes, instantly subjective based on the direction one approaches them from; ones positions.

So, your niece, it's easy enough to see why she hates Trump, to understand her position. Anyone pro Trump owes it to themselves to see that being an illegal does not make one an evil being. Or a rapist. So, then it becomes incumbent upon her to see why some people are concerned about illegals. Some illegals ARE hard core criminals who've caused great harm and should not have even been here in the first place. She can't be said to have reasoned opposition to Trump if her opposition is based solely on his 'rapist' comments. There is a legitimate point there. She should be able to understand that Trump, as a politician, uses 'loud' descriptions to gain attention and a Trump fan should be able to understand that opposition to him is going to be just as hyperbolic to counter him.

The conversation about immigration SHOULD be about who, how many and when and where we, as a nation want them. A little effort talking to people who really hate Trump on this issue reveals a very interesting underlying fact; what they REALLY think is that there should be no border in the first place. That could be very useful to Trumps position, or anyone who wants more border control but it gets lost in the smoke of refusal to even begin to see one anothers views.

 

[SamSpade]

She can't be said to have reasoned opposition to Trump if her opposition is based solely on his 'rapist' comments.

I think few things annoy me more regarding Trump than the misrepresentation of the meaning of his rapist remarks. It is clear from the sense of his comment that he was not saying all Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers.

It's like someone disputing that they are rapists by saying "We're not rapists - we're doctors and bankers and nurses. We are programmers and accountants."

And you know what? That statement is utterly wrong in the same way that people are saying the Trump remark. They're not ALL DOCTORS. Or ALL nurses. And so on.
But it is a construct of English to describe a generalization about some of the members of a group. If you watch TV or read the news, you will come across this usage every single day and think nothing of it.

I'm familiar with sweeping generalizations - and this kind of defense - when people insulted my religion, saying we were all a bunch of delusional morons, naive fools, uneducated nitwits.
And I might answer "uneducated? We're MIT and Harvard graduates, PhD holders and stockbrokers and lawyers". A sentence that in the meaning in every way defends and debunks what was said about us - but very obviously does NOT say we are *ALL* MIT and Harvard graduates.

The problem Trump faces is one that Newt Gingrich wrote about back during the takeover of the House - now that he was a national figure, EVERY phrase and EVERY remark *would* be parsed in a way to put him in as bad a light as possible. And he had to craft his words to be terse and either to the point - or to be innocuous.

You know, we hate how politicians speak out of both sides of their mouth, take both positions on a subject and refuse to be precise - but we force them to be that way.

 

[Larry Gude]

I think few things annoy me more regarding Trump than the misrepresentation of the meaning of his rapist remarks. It is clear from the sense of his comment that he was not saying all Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers.

It's like someone disputing that they are rapists by saying "We're not rapists - we're doctors and bankers and nurses. We are programmers and accountants."

And you know what? That statement is utterly wrong in the same way that people are saying the Trump remark. They're not ALL DOCTORS. Or ALL nurses. And so on.
But it is a construct of English to describe a generalization about some of the members of a group. If you watch TV or read the news, you will come across this usage every single day and think nothing of it.

I'm familiar with sweeping generalizations - and this kind of defense - when people insulted my religion, saying we were all a bunch of delusional morons, naive fools, uneducated nitwits.
And I might answer "uneducated? We're MIT and Harvard graduates, PhD holders and stockbrokers and lawyers". A sentence that in the meaning in every way defends and debunks what was said about us - but very obviously does NOT say we are *ALL* MIT and Harvard graduates.

The problem Trump faces is one that Newt Gingrich wrote about back during the takeover of the House - now that he was a national figure, EVERY phrase and EVERY remark *would* be parsed in a way to put him in as bad a light as possible. And he had to craft his words to be terse and either to the point - or to be innocuous.

You know, we hate how politicians speak out of both sides of their mouth, take both positions on a subject and refuse to be precise - but we force them to be that way.

It happens to everyone from Mitt's 47% to Obama's clinging to guns and bibles to Hillary's deplorables and so on. It will happen to anyone who speaks enough; they WILL say something that can be isolated and/or parsed to make news. Trump happens to do it a LOT because he's not a trained pol who spends ALL his time trying to avoid being candid or saying something that WILL be weaponized. He's a loudmouth who shoots his mouth off as a form of breathing. It's what many LOVE about the guy and what, for equal and opposite reasons, many hate and fear about the guy.

But at the end of the day, it's a distraction; Mitt didn't lose because of the 47%. He lost because he backed off his attack on the Bush/Obama shared failures and allowed Obama to recover. He took away the reason for the moderates to make a discerning choice. Hillary didn't lose because of 'deplorables'. She lost because she was sick and no on did a story on it. She lost because of the Clinton Foundation...and no press. She lost because of her server, because of Benghazi, her reset button. And, not to put too fine a point on it; Trump and Obama WON.

Any isolation by the media, by voters, is simple intellectual laziness because, at the end of the day, all we're talking about is absurdity of making more of a comment if the person loses and make even more of it if they win.

Obama won and the GOP went about the business of winning the following elections while not much disturbing the new world order of too big to fail. They won but to what effect? They ended up with Trump because their voters had had enough of them winning and doing nothing with it even though they had a central unifying issue; the ACA. Now, the D's are going about winning elections but the only unifying issue they have is Trump's mouth and trying to single out anything he says is quite the challenge.

I think if someone were to talk with Trump about seeping generalizations he'd just smile the smile of the salesman and say "Good luck. This is what I do. While they're trying to focus on the last one, I do a new one."

 

[SamSpade]

They won but to what effect? They ended up with Trump because their voters had had enough of them winning and doing nothing with it even though they had a central unifying issue; the ACA.

It's the single big thing that I wish for anything that the country could do away with - party, and the power the party holds. Stuff is done to advance the party under the delusion that the country is best served when YOUR side is in control - but once control is achieved - the only goal is to acquire more control, NOT advance the objectives that will "help the nation". This happens a lot - when you have two adversaries so diametrically opposed, they lose sight of the point of their existence and spend all their time trying to BEAT their opponent. Eventually, they will expend great effort SCREWING the people they purport to advocate for, to continue holding power.

 

[Larry Gude]

It's the single big thing that I wish for anything that the country could do away with - party, and the power the party holds. Stuff is done to advance the party under the delusion that the country is best served when YOUR side is in control - but once control is achieved - the only goal is to acquire more control, NOT advance the objectives that will "help the nation". This happens a lot - when you have two adversaries so diametrically opposed, they lose sight of the point of their existence and spend all their time trying to BEAT their opponent. Eventually, they will expend great effort SCREWING the people they purport to advocate for, to continue holding power.

Well, let's consider it our 'Manhattan' projection and figure it out.

We know human beings are predisposed, if not hard wired, for cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. They're probably biologic at core, in our DNA, evolved in order to protect our own which improves our own chances of survival. The herd, when attacked, tends to stick together rather than disperse. If we're agreed this far then we can agree that we're choosing to embark on an attempt to, basically, over come a close relative to the sex drive and self preservation.

So, now what?

 

[This_person]

Well, let's consider it our 'Manhattan' projection and figure it out.

We know human beings are predisposed, if not hard wired, for cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. They're probably biologic at core, in our DNA, evolved in order to protect our own which improves our own chances of survival. The herd, when attacked, tends to stick together rather than disperse. If we're agreed this far then we can agree that we're choosing to embark on an attempt to, basically, over come a close relative to the sex drive and self preservation.

So, now what?

Herds are fine. But, don't give two herds automatic control of all the others.

We live in a democratic republic. We need to have the same rules for all parties with respect to getting people on the ballot. As it is now, any D or R is automatically on the ballot if the media says they are (literally, in MD, the ballot is allowed to be established by media report). Change that. Not any other party gets that. Any other party has to jump through huge hoops to get on the ballot.

Level the playing field.

We, the people, can make that happen.

 

[SamSpade]

It's not JUST at the ballot. Senate and House rules decide how things are run, based on which *party* controls things. PARTIES have been running things for so long that it's hard to change.
And parties have been running things for so long, they don't realize that party control tends to supersede what is the nation's best interest.

 

[Larry Gude]

Herds are fine. But, don't give two herds automatic control of all the others.

We live in a democratic republic. We need to have the same rules for all parties with respect to getting people on the ballot. As it is now, any D or R is automatically on the ballot if the media says they are (literally, in MD, the ballot is allowed to be established by media report). Change that. Not any other party gets that. Any other party has to jump through huge hoops to get on the ballot.

Level the playing field.

We, the people, can make that happen.

That's the allure to me of politics; we CAN. But how????

If 25% of us support Hillary and 25% Trump and 50% neither, what then? Only the 50% who support neither can even begin to be said to actually want to change the thing.

 

[This_person]

It's not JUST at the ballot. Senate and House rules decide how things are run, based on which *party* controls things. PARTIES have been running things for so long that it's hard to change.
And parties have been running things for so long, they don't realize that party control tends to supersede what is the nation's best interest.

I think it's fair that the House and the Senate set their own rules on how to control themselves. But, if you start to see more parties on Congress, you'll see the A party and the B party combine on some things, the B and the C on others, and the A and the C on others still. More GOOD things should get done, less bad.

Maybe.

 

[This_person]

That's the allure to me of politics; we CAN. But how????

If 25% of us support Hillary and 25% Trump and 50% neither, what then? Only the 50% who support neither can even begin to be said to actually want to change the thing.

By getting much more involved in local politics than national. By going to county commissioner meetings, and speaking. By watching the legislature of the state, and talking about THAT at bars and on-line and at the barber shop. Drive those conversations such that your state rep starts talking with you, too, because he knows you're watching him.

 

[Larry Gude]

By getting much more involved in local politics than national. By going to county commissioner meetings, and speaking. By watching the legislature of the state, and talking about THAT at bars and on-line and at the barber shop. Drive those conversations such that your state rep starts talking with you, too, because he knows you're watching him.

So, where does the argument lie that we're not happy with our local politics? If 'going' local is where the changes are to be made, isn't that to say that local politics are already making the people happy enough?

 

[Larry Gude]

I think it's fair that the House and the Senate set their own rules on how to control themselves. .

Their rules are designed not to control themselves but to shield them from where the actual control was set up to come from; we, the people.

 

[This_person]

So, where does the argument lie that we're not happy with our local politics? If 'going' local is where the changes are to be made, isn't that to say that local politics are already making the people happy enough?

I don't think so. People don't know where the division is in terms of what impacts them on a daily basis. They also don't understand Article 5 of the Constitution that says the states own the federal government, not the other way around. The states should, without delay, repeal the 17th Amendment, and start reigning in the federal government. If the people don't advise their state legislatures to do this, why would they do it?

 

[This_person]

Their rules are designed not to control themselves but to shield them from where the actual control was set up to come from; we, the people.

Actual control was established to be we, the people in the House, and the States in the Senate. Then, all facets of the country are represented in federal government (the people in the House, the States in the Senate, the federal government in the Executive, and the Constitution in the Judiciary). The Constitution gives control of the houses of Congress to the legislators. It gives we, the people, control of the legislators through the vote.

 

[Larry Gude]

So, we agree things are pretty much as we choose?