The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-15-2021, 04:32 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(01-14-2021, 11:03 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-13-2021, 08:04 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Once again, if you weren't so into tribal thinking and associated with a tribe and guilty of thinking in terms of us and them and being divisive, you'd have some integrity/credibility to fall back on at this point. The WEIRD might (I say might) care about values such as democracy, equality, human rights and the rule of law as they pertain to themselves and their tribe. Are the WEIRD in trouble for ignoring existing laws that equally pertain to them and crossing American boundaries that rational/sane people would never cross and placing themselves at risk being stripped of all protections right now? As I mentioned before, I'm not a member of the GOP tribe. I'm a member of the American tribe that's well over 5 times their size that tends to support them these days.

C-Xer, you seem to be determined to be obtuse.  You write about real America and the like, but never show how you arrive at your numbers. At the moment, roughly 40% of the US still believes in the irrational world created by RW media and coopted by DJT.  Note: believing something doesn't make it so.  Existing outside the truth-paradigm, preferring one created for you, doesn't produce anything but strife.  Taking one obvious point: Trump lost the election, and no mental trick can change that.  And the insurrection at the Capitol was just that.  It wasn't a righteous uprising of patriots.  Wishing other wise won't change facts.

The group that stormed the capitol was a mixed group of individuals who got involved for various reasons.

Sure -- plenty of Trump banners and at least one Confederate flag.  The insurrectionists did have US flags -- but I will have to treat that as neutral because we liberals have as much right to Old Glory as conservatives and the Hard Right did. After all, this flag:



surely delighted prisoners at Dachau and Mauthausen.

No Antifa stuff; no red flags of (Socialist) revolution.  Nobody seemed to have any Black Lives Matter paraphernalia. It did have one connection to the Far Left in its resemblance to Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. Except the fellow with the pseudo-Viking helmet who painted his face, the crowd seemed to be almost monochromatic in skin tones.

Quote:Law enforcement is in the process of apprehending them and figuring all of that out right now. I accepted Biden was going to be the next President a long time ago.

On this we agree. Law and order is the first civil right, without which all the enumerated rights of the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of the Rights of Man or its equivalents mean nothing. 

I was astonished that Trump got so close... but it is clear that he lost. It's hard for some people to believe that the order in which votes were counted mattered, and that paradoxically the earliest votes in got counted last in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The earliest votes counted showed leads for Biden in Florida, Ohio and Texas, and Biden lost all three of those states.  79 versus 85... one way or the other, Trump loses.  

Quote:I'll never give him credit for winning fair and square. I don't believe he truly  earned it or really deserves to be the President  either.

This is probably the cleanest Presidential election that was not an electoral landslide. The only odd circumstance was a pandemic. State governments decided by lawful process that to accommodate people who feared COVID-19 spreading at polling places. COVID-19 was far more of a threat to a free and fair election than armed militias at polling places. Voting by mail was already the norm in two states (Oregon and Utah) and it will become the norm in more states. It passes Constitutional muster. 

Failing to allow people to vote early or by mail (basically everyone qualifies for an absentee ballot) would have allowed COVID-19 to affect the vote in a way that looks like vote fraud.    

Quote:I think his election is going to turn out to be a major mistake/blunder since  it occurred at the wrong time in history. A pivotal time is not the time to elect an old man with dementia or a token VP or a bunch of arrogant morons who have been protected by a system with double standards for years.

Your prediction; mine is more complex. Joe Biden is about as athletic-looking a 78-year-old as I ever see. He does struggle with a stutter. So what! Once he gets going, he is as slick a speaker as anyone. This said, we should well know Donald Trump. He has huge gaps of knowledge and character. He has extremely rigid thought, which has many possible explanations. I can disclose that my therapist has seen me as having very rigid thought... that is commonplace in Asperger's. Another is dementia. Another is pathological narcissism, something that many associate with Donald Trump. 

I would be more scared of the delusional quality of Trump thought. Biden knows what happens if he starts slipping: he ends up with a Reagan-like Presidency in which the increasingly-senile President gets an increasingly ceremonial role while trusted people make the real decisions and convince the President that those are what he has always believed. The Reagan Presidency went well -- better than I could have expected. Then again, one must trust the Vice-President and have some good people like George Shulz and Caspar Weinberger. Trump has had none of those; he insists upon yes-men.      

Quote:As I've said, I'm not much of a wishful thinker or one who clings to false hopes or laurels associated with bygone eras.   I don't believe what occurred with election laws in some key battle ground states was legal.

It was completely legal. The challenges in the courts failed except for one very technical argument that was not significant enough to have decided the electoral result of any state.

Quote:If 40% equates to 70 some million Americans who ain't going to budge or concede then your in trouble when the the shit hits the fan and  it starts to really  heat up.

Trump got 46.82% of the popular vote nationwide... but on the other hand Joe Biden won 51.27% of the popular vote. Biden got a larger share of the popular vote in 2020 than Reagan did in 1980. Joe Biden does not need the support of hard-core supporters of Donald Trump. He may not have a huge margin for error, but he does have good people around him. 

I look at what can go right:

1. By summer, COVID-19 will be gone as a menace. Americans will be doing what they did before COVID-19 ravaged America, and there will be a boom in the provision of services. People will be traveling again, as they will have itchy feet; having been shut in out of fear they will have contemplated where they want to go. People will be trading in cars for newer ones. People will be moving from places that they have sickened of. The cinema will be busy, as will concert halls, opera houses, and little theater.  Sports venues will have genuine crowds

2. I look at the Skowronek cycle, and I see that the successor of a catastrophic failure as President can have more unqualified successes. A President late in the cycle, let us say Obama, faces plenty of unexpected consequences for his intended reforms.  Trump is the end of the neoliberal cycle, and the first President of the new cycle can do many daring things and get away with them because they are new, and because the realities that set in later in the cycle haven't caught up. 

3. The disruptions of life during COVID-19 have hit children hardest, and that will be over. Adults will be thankful that their kids can get the full experience of school again. Some of the usual rites of passage will simply be deferred a year or so. 

4. The clothing business will pick up. People working from home don't have to dress up; those reappearing in offices do. If you work from home nobody cares that you wore the same shirt or blouse -- or even underwear -- three consecutive days. That is a big concern in business places in which people have contact with customers and clients.

5. There is no speculative boom to go kaputt. That is the biggest threat to any economy. Speculative booms are themselves frauds, more the devouring than the creation of assets. 

6. Real wages will likely start rising again, and management-labor relations will likely be better. Many employers who had pushed their employees to the limit with crowding on the job to make assembly-line speeds faster (especially in food processing) will have learned the hard way why such is counterproductive.  

Quote:AS I mentioned, social justice is a double edged sword that cuts both ways. I've also mentioned that the left  is playing with fire and walking on thin ice and waking a  sleeping giant.

Mixed metaphor! That is good for unintended laughter in Freshman Composition!

But back to the issue of social justice: if you think "social justice" creates big trouble, then wait till you see the harm that social injustice brings. Social injustice creates dissent. It makes wildcat strikes possible. It creates poverty that weakens the consumer markets. Where social injustice is most severe it can lead to proletarian revolutions.