Ahhh Canada, our copycat little brother. We beat everyone up for you, and then you brag to mom that your the “good one”. We are only keeping you guys around for the maple syrup and occasional musical genius...

You're welcome to visit anytime Jla.

Need to renew my passport so I can go hang out in Vancouver.

Nah, don't just stop there, keep going!

If I ever have the time.

I like Canada.

I vote that my t shirt post above be promoted to feature comment.

Agreed, but such is the case with the two-party system. I'd love to see some type of meaningful plan put forth to get rid of it. I don't even have a problem with parties as long as there are more than two dominant ones.

Point taken. However, there have long been only two (main) parties but many more policies, with some folks willing to (sometimes awkwardly) navigate toward the center. That approach seems to be on life support.

I blame the death of local news. & I blame that on the internet. Still not sure how we start to undo that damage.

Thank Bill Clinton for deregulating the FCC. Now 5 corporations own just about all of it.

Running with the life support analogy (bear with me) ... only letting two doctors in the room who can barely stop arguing long enough to acknowledge there is a patient there doesn't seem to be doing much for the patient. But getting rid of a forced dichotomy and allowing some other doctors in to see the patient might have a better success rate. It doesn't guarantee they'll stop arguing long enough to get anything done, but it at least increases the probability that they'll find some common ground rather than needing to be instantly against the other's views.

+EA

I’ll even do Gabbard / Buttigieg. He’s not bad either...

Would love her to do something unconventional though and team up with a libertarian like Johnson, but not gonna happen :(

Also really damn sick of this one-sided game of "You should reach out to the opposition" while Republicans are openly, proudly disdainful of liberals. Why should I bother to respect a bunch of people who are more than happy to see me suffer just because I have different ideas?

  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/21/why-arent-trump-republicans-pilloried-failing-reach-out/?

A democrat can't win with just the Democrat vote thanks to the electorate and gerrymandering districts. They'll have to swing Independants and make traction into the Republican moderates. Those two groups aren't liking the polarized partisan politics going on. So they might go for someone who can unify and is willing to negotiate; Hillary didn't give that impression, nor do several of the mainstream candidate front runners.

^exactly. Also, the dem party has lost support of many with all of this pc identity politics socialism talk. Many people who voted for obama, went on to vote for trump, or didn’t vote at all. I can’t overstate how many are turned off by political correctness. It’s incredibly annoying for most people to have other adults telling them how to act and speak. The natural instinct kicks in and just wants to piss them off and defy them. Especially true when asshats in Hollywood join in. It’s like when your mother or teacher told you not to do something and it made you want to do it more. This is the effect. We need a candidate brave enough to not play that game.

The presidents poll numbers where very low pre 2016 also. All the polls showed Hillary easily winning. I wouldn’t trust the polls. The media is probably manipulating them to make supporters feel like outsiders or weirdos. None of the more left candidates will beat him.

The right is obsessed with this 'PC identity politics socialism" narrative that's entirely blown out of proportion. It's a bad faith argument, where anything they want to portray as negative can be labeled Socialism or Identity Politics. Sadly, it works.

mightyaa: My point is that the independents are already anti-Trump (look at his underwater polls) and the Republicans are never going to be convinced to ditch him (because the GOP is a cult). So there's really no point in playing to a "middle" that's actually quite skewed to the right.

.

Castro’s claim that we should pay for trans women getting pretend abortions from their non-existent uteruses is not going to get anyone out to vote. That’s identity politics and it’s annoying to the vast majority of Americans...not just the “right”.

Not only is it annoying, but it shows fake ness in the candidate. Say anything to win. Beto speaking Spanish was hilarious too. Identity politics is not overblown, it’s the entire platform of the Dems and left.

This makes people want to vote in a way that makes Alyssa Milano mad because she’s an annoying person who pretends to have moral authority over the “depolorables” because she was in a few crappy movies and an 80s sitcom.

Seriously though. This crap really annoys people to the point of wanting to vote in a way that annoys it back.

From 1961: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bejdhs3jGyw They've been playing this game for a long time and the dumb electorate keeps falling for it.

“It's a bad faith argument, where anything they want to portray as negative can be labeled Socialism or Identity Politics. Sadly, it works.“

Yeah, same can be said for the left. Anything they want to portray as negative can be labeled far-right or fascist.

Or racist, sexist, privilege, etc etc etc.

Can be, but rarely is.

More importantly, you hear these kinds of appeals to racism, fascism, privilege, etc. mostly from the so-called "extremely online" left and various small time activists, with the occasional politician wading into the rhetoric. Conversely, the bad-faith accusations have been standard campaign rhetoric for the Republican establishment since Lee Atwater dredged up Willie Horton to scare the racists into voting for Bush. Yes, there is bad faith on both sides. But it's important to look at *who* is doing the talking.

Regardless, perception is reality when it comes to voting. We need someone who will unite people. The country is too divided, and both trump and the more leftist candidates will further exacerbate the problem. We need a good level headed canidate that is above the bullshit.

I like Yang, but he’s really dry. I can’t see him getting too far.

Perception is reality and one group has been disproportionately shaping perception through misinformation and lies. I don't think the way to fix this is by meeting in the middle. 

How about unity for education? Unity against propaganda? 

Why does being "above the bullshit" only seem to skew in one direction? The bullshit is not evenly distributed, and yet there seems to be a constant insistence that it be evenly called out. Which only hurts the less-bullshitty party, since the bullshitters aren't even pretending anymore.

Really what we need more than a politician who will do this is a united media voice that's willing to hold the GOP accountable for their bullshit. Not that the Democrats don't engage in bullshit, but when they do they're largely taken to task for it. The Republican party gets away with everything because no one will call them out. Start calling them out if we ever want to recover from this insanity.

Whaaat? The left msm is even worse. I don’t know how you can be so blind to that. The Dem party is super corrupt and they basically own the media. This all became obvious during the HRC campaign. The left is now spreading lies on all the bells and whistles that they are promising...regardless of how unrealistic, unconstitutional, or plain unworkable those things may be. Essentially snake oil salesmen. That’s how I see them anyway. To say the republicans get away with everything??? No way man. The left msm is a way way more pervasive and dangerous thing right now. During the bush and obama years I would have agreed with you. Things have changed though. The left msm is completely full of shit most of the time.

“Can be, but rarely is.” Lollololol. They call everything they disagree with one of those labels. there are too many examples...it’s overwhelming...Covington was in the top 10 greatest hits of the year though...

What would you consider "Left MSM"? I'm also not sure what you're referring to when you say " Covington"

*sigh* 

That Kavanaugh was confirmed and Roy Moore is still in public while Al Franken resigned is evidence of this double standard. That Ilhan Omar can't open her mouth without a shitstorm of anti-semitism accusations while those same accusers equivocate on protesters who chant "Jews will not replace us" is evidence of this double standard. That the media is losing their minds over Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez' "socialism" while heaping praise on a president who is putting all kinds of state influence on the economy through tarriffs and targeted subsidies is evidence of the double standard. That Mitch McConnell can whine about "the left’s never-ending judicial war" while being personally responsible for more than 50% of the judicial filibusters in the country's history is evidence of this double standard. I could go on. 

 [From the op-ed I posted above] "How do we explain this double standard? One explanation: Republicans don’t even bother to pretend that they care about the votes of liberal Americans, or even about their fate. Democrats try to get health insurance for people in red states and write environmental plans that include help for coal communities, but Republicans don’t ask how their policy choices might hurt people who don’t vote for them — unless it’s to figure out how they screw those voters even more. They don’t try to show “respect” for liberals, and they don’t publicly agonize about their inability to “connect” with them. 

 After a while, it stops even occurring to people in the media to ask whether Republicans need to do more “reaching out,” and they don’t chastise those Republicans for not doing it. Democrats, on the other hand, act like they have a responsibility to represent all Americans, so they're constantly told that they're falling short in fulfilling that responsibility."

Just for absolute clarity I want to emphasize that I'm not saying the Mainstream Media is *good*, I'm saying that it's not *leftist*

CNN, MSNBC, etc are exactly as left biased as FOX is right biased. That’s just tv msm, then you have VOX, buzzfeed, etc...

I’m not saying republicans are better, just saying that both parties equally suck, and the Dems are currently outdoing them on the looney metric.

I've often wondered, and have found little to try to explain it (though admittedly I haven't tried very hard), why Fox gets a pass on being mainstream when the mainstream media gets brought up. 

Also curious to hear both of you discuss the media bias chart by Vanessa Otero ... https://www.adfontesmedia.com/

"CNN, MSNBC, etc are exactly as left biased as FOX is right biased. " No they aren't.

I think the chart is a very good starting point. I could argue some things are slightly out of place (a little to the left here, a little down there) but for the most part it is a correct assessment. 

Of course, the echoed refrain of anyone who disagrees is to claim the chart itself from being biased. Which, at that point, just give up because you're never going reach common ground with that person.

That's basically my take on it as well. You might argue a little movement here or there, but overall a good starting point. But yeah, it only works as an assessment if people can agree that it is close to accurate.

The other thing I like about the chart that I think get's lost in most of the rhetoric as left vs. right is the overall news quality represented by the Y-axis.

Lmfao. CNN literally gave Hillary the questions! Get out of your bubble. CNN and MSNBC are exactly as fake as Fox News. 100% party propaganda.

Wildly misleading, ignores vast majority of media ownership by 5 corporations. Knowledge of the results of the Church Committee hearings is also helpful in understanding media. 

Required viewing, films on media: Orwell Rolls in His Grave and Spin by Brian Springer. Required reading: George Seldes.

FWIW - television cable news is a complete wasteland. If you're getting the majority of your information from television, you're simply not informed. That said - only one of the major cable networks gleefully employs white nationalists and has inspired terrorism.

jla stop telling us to get out of our bubble when your talking points are suspiciously in alignment with Fox.

Hillary Clinton is politically indistinguishable from a 1960s Republican. I mean if we're going to talk about the rightward tilt of *all* of the US - media included - let's not lose sight of that.

It’s all Biased towards the deep state. All of it. Left/right illusion is simply the mode of acquiring more power and Keeping us in fighting. Unity between “sides” which doesn’t really exist, especially in the name of peace, is the ultimate threat. Preaching peace is about as dangerous as you can get. Can’t have that shit getting in the way of the military industrial complex and John Bolton’s wet dreams of destruction.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thelibertarianrepublic.com/is-tulsi-gabbard-getting-the-ron-paul-treatment-from-the-dnc/amp/

Those debates were complete garbage.

Lose the tinfoil hat & maybe we can talk.

True story. Watch the debate and it will be obvious who they are steering towards the win.

You're not wrong in assuming all media outlets have a bias and a preference. Where you're wrong is assuming there is a single "they"

“They” refers to the DNC marketing machine.

You do know that Gabbard is the most hawkish of these, right?

What exactly does Tulsi offer beyond "war experience"?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=74ciO5JzgCk

She’s authentic. I don’t vote for policy, because policy is mostly bs. I vote for people who are genuine.

That’s a rare thing. What I mean is that Policy is not decided by the president alone. We have process. Checks and balances. I don’t necessarily agree with all of her policies,

Gabbard comes off as very well-spoken and compassionate in this interview. My biggest take-away, though, is how annoying Van Jones is. 

All that said, I take a very different view in policy vs. character. For better or worse I value people who understand systems and propose solutions, not platitudes. Here she offers mostly platitudes. Good platitudes, but kind of a simple feel-goodery nonetheless.

sameolddoctor - In what way is she hawkish? One of the few substantive things she said in that interview was that she's totally opposed to regime change wars. Might be her biggest plus, to me. I've got a lot to research, though, and lots of time to do it.

YES! I've noticed this recently - the subtle shift from saying "Democratic Party" (i.e. a group of ideas) to saying "Democrat Party" (i.e. a group of people). I first noticed it with Trump, but now I hear it from all over the right.

I wasn't sure if I was just over-analyzing. I might be, but there's definitely something telling in this simple re-branding.

Gee, that is as bad as not having fourteen different kinds of school restrooms for the fourteen different genders.

I would think a thing that is happening is more important than a thing that isn't happening.

My ignore list is tingling.

tduds, it's a tactic that is not new, but (surprise, surprise) gained a new resurgence via Tadpole Gingrich and Rush "The Human Opioid" Limbaugh.

It's funny to me how the people who are absolutely obsessed with making political affiliation into an immutable identity are also obsessed with complaining about "identity politics"

This is a neat graphic. Thanks.

The reply function really incentivizes this by using "return" to post instead of making a paragraph break.

Yes, posting from iPhone makes it difficult to write in one post, because I can’t scroll up to read what I wrote if it gets too long. Also can’t do paragraph breaks in phone :(

I thought of a cheaper way: shut them down.

I agree. Until then, they should at least have some level of transparency.

That position is easy for me though, as a libertarian, with a self regulating economy. How does a proponent of a welfare state do math? How can open borders exist in the same space as unlimited entitlements?

That only works if we have unlimited resources, which we know isn’t the case. All welfare states or socialist states are nationalist. Can you give me an example of a functional open border welfare state with substantial population and migration?

Borders are not "open" or "closed" and entitlements are not "nothing" or "unlimited." The foundational bedrock of my entire life philosophy is to reject binaries. Nothing is a silo, everything is a bell-curve. 

Somewhere between totalitarian immigration enforcement and no borders exists a sensible solution that allows immigrants seeking a better life or escaping persecution to succeed while screening for (admittedly rare) criminal elements, trafficking, and smuggling. 

Similarly, somewhere between a libertarian free market and a wholesale Maoist state exists a level of social safety net that provides those of us most in need the resources and help to remain in society. 

Do I know specifically where those solutions are? No. If I ever run for office maybe I'll get around to formulating a more specific opinion. Until then, my criteria for evaluating politicians is "Do I think this person intends to move society along the spectrum closer to or further away from a society I think is just?" It's wishy washy and circumstantial, I know. But systems are complicated, and I can be so informed before I need to make a choice.

To bring it back to the topic at hand (you sure love abstracting), I don't believe immigrant concentration camps are necessary to ensure a "secure" border. In fact, I think they're detrimental to our national security in the longer term.

"Abolish ICE" doesn't mean "Open the border." It means Abolish fucking ICE.

But what about the criminals? There are criminals at the border. The mostly people even are not coming over solo. They are being trafficked by criminals who are brutal and dangerous. Eliminating ICE is not the answer. We need border security, and also good immigration policies so that any reasonable non criminal person would legally and easily cross at a port of entry. that said, if we have free college, housing, and health care for all, we can’t have unlimited amounts of people coming over or the resources get drained. That’s common sense. This isn’t binary thinking, it’s a huge flaw in the rhetoric of the current Dem candidates. No one dares to define the line you speak of. Without the line, the math is all make believe....I’m having a pizza party...everyone deserves free pizza...but we don’t know how many pies or how many people will come...doesn’t sound like a plan, sounds like a snake oil pitch.

A libertarian free market system is self regulating. The resource space is in flux with the population and migration...like an ecosystem.

Now that’s not to say that entitlements cannot be part of that. They just need to be in flux with the flux of the market...example: a billion in federal sales tax = a billion in equally distributed entitlements in form of UBI. When that number goes up or down so does the UBI. We need to create a self regulating system to have anything remotely like an open or highly permeable border. We kinda already do have that in a sense. When our economy tanked in 08 immigration fell to net zero.

ICE is basically what INS was. We need to make a major reform of ICE. Maybe it results in yet another renaming but aspects of ICE and what they do are still critical elements of border security regarding illegal immigration. ICE existed before there was this immigration concentration camp issue. The issue is the operating policies needs to be abolished. We need to make reasonable access to law process of immigration easier with proper background checks. If someone wants a visa to enter this country, it should be overly expensive and it shouldn't take ridiculously long time and expense. We should be open to allow immigrants who want to become part of the United States. However, we need to properly vet them as well so those with nefarious backgrounds including background in terrorism is not allowed into this country. This doesn't mean a person who has been in jail for a smaller crime issue can't ever come into the country. Specifics about the individual's case should be considered including how recent the issue is. We also need to address with compassion and humanity balanced with the principle that illegal immigrants that have either overstayed their original visa or entered illegally but have been in this country as a contributing member of the communities they have been living in in our society and by large following the laws should be allowed to stay but also find a way for them to become legal residents in this country including possible naturalization. Breaking up families and other stuff that we have been seeing with Trump's administration should be grounds for us to hand Donald Trump and key people in the administration over to the international tribunal to be prosecuted by those international courts for some serious human rights violations resulting in unlawful deaths of children due to criminal negligent treatment of children illegally kidnapped from their parents and separated from them in inhumane manner.

But what about the criminals?!? 

There are criminals *inside* the United States. An overwhelming majority of them, in fact, were born in the United States. We have laws in place to handle criminals inside the United States. There's no need to criminalize additional behavior in an attempt to catch would-be criminals before they commit real crimes, especially when that added enforcement catches well-intended asylum seekers who merely seek opportunity in a new land. And *ESPECIALLY* when study after study indicates immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.

I'll be honest I didn't read past the first sentence of your first reply. 

I have trouble following your lines of argument because you switch between asking me what I think and telling me what people running for the Democratic nomination are saying, as if the difference between those things makes me wrong. I'm answering for myself and myself only.

Rejecting your "Unlimited people" argument out of hand because people are by definition finite. And because - the current humanitarian crisis aside - immigration into the US has been on a pretty consistent down-trend for the last 25 years. Immigration restriction is a solution in search of a problem (because racial quotas are out of fashion this century)

Eliminate ICE is a stupid “solution” to the problem. We need comprehensive reform. We need to make immigration cheap, easy, and fast so that no reasonable innocent person would try to cross or enter illegally. Then, the few crossing the border illegally would be obviouse criminals looking to smuggle something in or evade detection. To deny that there are actual serious criminals coming over the border, possible terrorists, human traffickers, etc is completely ridiculous. It’s also ridiculous to criminalize jaywalking and then have a crosswalk every 50 miles. That’s going to make normal people cross illegally. If there is a crosswalk every block, and someone still jaywalks, I have less sympathy. We are creating criminals by making the process near impossible.

The line of thinking that you are pretending to not follow is the contradiction between limitless immigration, and endless entitlements. The Dem candidates like Warren and Sanders are frivolously over promising things that they cannot deliver on. In architecture, that would be considered fraud or malpractice. How can you promise a plethora of specific entitlements without putting a quota on population? They are selling a fake system that has never existed. One that has the mathematical reality of a perpetual motion machine. There has never been a socialist state that has open or permeable borders. They are all highly nationalist and closed off. Bernie essentially wants to have govt run health care. He wants it for “undocumented” people. What will stop people from coming here to have medical procedures and then return home? A welfare state and liberal border policy is incompatible. My point is, the current top runners in the party are selling bullshit.

I am 100% for highly permeable borders as I stated above...but that works fine with a market economy with low-no entitlements. It’s self regulating.

Ah yes, self regulation...if only the US didn’t interfere in local politics south of the border those countries would be much better off and people would have no reason whatsoever to leave...first the US destroys their democracy and economy and then they’re surprised people need to leave.

"The line of thinking that you are pretending to not follow is the contradiction between limitless immigration, and endless entitlements." 

...no I explained in my very first reply that the ideas of "limitless" and "endless" in this context are incorrect, and any opinions drawn from those ideas are therefore incorrect. I could recount the number of other ways you've (deliberately or otherwise) mis-stated what I said back to me and then discredited what I didn't say (in this response alone!), but who has the time?

Imagine this, laxative has all the time in the world to concoct a coherent world view, and still comes up with nada. These "political" ramblings are basic as fuck, and lack the consistency of diaper doo.

Another boring post by b3. Probably home reading a gender theory book because 4th of July is sexist or something.

Ouch. I guess I touch a Randian nerve? Proves I'm correct of course. You're a one hit wonder.

What’s inconsistent?

Inconsistent with your narrow view of anyone who disagrees with you maybe.

The pivot to insult when you run out of cogent responses is weak.

The thing is, the name change also came with a change in focus, staffing, leadership, and a move from a Department of Labor position to a Department of Homeland Security position. When I say "Abolish ICE" I mean (mostly but not wholly) a return to the pre-Bush focus of INS as a largely Labor and "Naturalization" focused arm of the government, rather than the Law Enforcement focused arm it's morphed into.

When one digs into the policy decisions of politicians who've picked up the "Abolish ICE" refrain, one finds that this is quite commonly what they're advocating for.

..

Bush was actually better on immigration than his predecessor

“Abolish ICE” is more fake undeliverable rhetoric for political gains.

tduds, I don't try to read into rhetoric bullshit because its still bullshit. I do support a less law enforcement but the truth is that even before Bush Jr. (post-9/11 / "Patriot" Act non-sense), INS was already a part of national security and extends in part from our existing border patrol as well and there was a law enforcement component. I would hope we find a proper balance of the different issues. I get where you are coming from and I would support some steps back towards what used to be normality which we haven't been experiencing since 9/11 when shit when sideways and downhill (okay, my opinion). However, this doesn't mean a complete reversal of the last 19 years.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg

^an interview with them if
interested...lololol

Wish someone did an architecture version of this :)

Lol. True