The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(11-01-2021, 01:09 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(10-26-2021, 12:59 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(10-26-2021, 12:25 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(10-25-2021, 07:26 AM)David Horn Wrote: ...  Today's right is so fixated on individual "rights" that any talk of communal responsibity is either ignored or actively opposed.  If you read Albion's Seed, it's a problem baked into the country since its founding.  We're essentially a divided nation trying to stay together for mutual benefit.  That may end at some point.

You better pull your head out because we are in the process of ending that relationship right now. The Democratic side better figure out how they're going to afford to pay for all their shit, all their people and some how or another defend themselves without the support of most of America down the road. So, what's the benefit of sticking with today's Left? Sorry dude, America will be better off without today's Left. Can you say the same about today's Left? The Left is largely dependent and pretty needy these days. The American Right is largely independent and able to fend for itself.

You keep making these claims, but the numbers are against you.  The Blue side is still a larger percentage of the country and resides in the areas that are wealthier and frankly more strategic. "Most of America" lives Blue, not Red.

Biden is down to thirty some percent support nation wide and you're telling me the percentages are heavily in your favor. The Blue side or Progressive side only amounts to 30 some percent of the country these days. How many times have I've told you/ referred to that over the years? So, who is going to fight the Blue sides upcoming war with America? A bunch of crooked bureaucrats/politicians/political activists, ghetto slugs/hoodlums/petty thieves, urban gang banger's, pot heads/drug addicts, clueless/naive teenagers (mainly younger women), crazed/indoctrinated SJW's who have never really seen large scale violence or real warfare and single mothers/women?

Governing is messy, especially when one side frustrates everything. We all know about the American exit from Afghanistan to which President Trump committed us. Donald Trump has far more trust for rogues than is appropriate. All in all I have no problem with Nixon opening China -- but that was the one diplomatic achievement that he could make because everything went right. Of course, Donald Trump never had anyone like Henry Kissinger in his service, as Trump went through Secretaries of State like record labels go through garage bands. Joe Biden couldn't keep up the Trump work with several vile despots at once and did not try because President Biden would have gotten America and its allies burned. We are now stuck with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and mark my words: the US Armed Forces will be back in Afghanistan after some fresh outrage.

America still has a divide between a plutocratic elite that has ideas from the middle ages but a love of modern technology in communications, military prowess, surveillance, and productivity... and people fully modern in their ways. That elite is little different in values from those of the tycoons in Weimar Germany. Basically,

He who owns the gold makes the rules.

That is a corollary of the neoliberal era that believed in keeping prices low by ensuring that the majority of people could not fully participate in the consumer society although they were obliged to work long hours just to survive. When we have mass death from a viral infection we have a sudden loss of hundreds of thousands of people from the workforce, then the assumptions that lead to price stability no longer apply.

But back to the polarization. We have two Parties refusing to let the other get away with what they want. We still have political gridlock. Worse, one side just showed its contempt for the niceties that make democracy possible. Can you still see the January Putsch as an honorable way in which to do politics? Is it up to the incumbent President to decide the results of an election are to go? We have laws to establish who wins and who loses. The same rules that decided that Donald Trump could be elected President with less than a plurality in 2016 determined that he would lose in 2020.

Let a few things go right for President Biden, and his approval ratings will rise. I know that you believe that he is freakishly incompetent just as I believed (with justification) that Donald Trump was not only inept at political give-and-take built into our system but perverse in his methods.  

Quote:I'm not a Red. I'm a hardcore American.

I call BS on that. You are a true believer in Donald Trump and his agenda, and should he be no longer available you will support anyone who adopts his agenda and techniques, except that you will be delighted to have as your political idol someone even more ruthless in crushing what you consider the Left. Hard-core American? People very different from you in ethnicity and religion consider themselves just as American as you consider yourself.

David and I have taken seriously one explanation of American history that defines America regionally: Albion's Seed. I suggest that you read it some time. It can explain some political divides between and even within states. Basically there were four pre-Revolutionary mass settlements in America:

1. Aristocratic Cavaliers who settled from the Tidewater region of Chesapeake Bay down the Atlantic coast to Georgia, who sought to establish an aristocratic order of "gentleman" planters who needed to import large numbers of peasants, found to their chagrin that the peasants weren't going to take the dangerous trip across the Atlantic just to endure more of the same that they knew in southwestern England in a climate that became brutally hot and humid in the summer. Those planters then offered a deal to indentured servants: work under harsh terms for a specified time, and get a considerable grant of land. About when the planters started having to grant land to those recently-freed servants they chose to import people who would remain slaves.

2. the Puritans brought to New England the sort of world that they wanted to see form in southeastern England, something more commercial... and orderly. The Puritans came to New England with middle-class values that one still heavily associates with New England, like respect for formal education (Harvard College was formed in 1636), elected legislatures (the Massachusetts General Court, the Massachusetts state legislature today, is the oldest continuous elected body of representatives in the world), and a reliance upon courts of law to settle disputes instead of brawls, lynchings, and duels. New England had stony farmland that made large-scale agriculture impossible, and the thin soils made New Englanders turn to fishing for much of their food. There were no First Peoples to subjugate and exploit, and with few exceptions New England was ill-suited to the survival of African slaves. There were no lodes of precious metals to mine and no lucrative cash crop. New England was completely unattractive to people other than those who actually settled it.

3. The Quakers and Swiss or German Pietists found the Delaware Valley attractive. In climate, it is more similar to northern Virginia than to New England. Southeastern Pennsylvania would be extremely attractive to people of the English Midlands who were more proletarian than the Puritans. They valued toil and eschewed excess, so they had a huge gap between themselves and the Cavaliers. Quakers had much the same core beliefs in religion as the Swiss and German Mennonites

4. People of Appalachia seem to this day comparatively wild, yet politically and culturally conservative. They came from the wild far north of England and southern Scotland. Many were herdsmen, and herdsmen have livestock as their capital. (Note that "cattle" is a cognate of "capital"). It is far easier to steal livestock than to steal commercial wares, and this is where the cattle rustlers were. There is room for economic activity, but in the harsh terrain of mountain valleys such activity has often been clandestine, as in moonshine. Educational standards were (and remain) low. Xenophobia is rampant.

These basic patterns moved west. The Puritans assimilated the then-small "Dutch" settlement of New Amsterdam early; first of all, the Dutch were a minority in the population, as New Amsterdam had many French and Belgian Huguenots, religious refugees from New England, Germans whose ancestors had come over to be soldiers and Scandinavians to do the sailing, and Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish Jews in flight from the Inquisition. New York City has been cosmopolitan from the time when the Dutch settled it. Puritans moved west through the the Great Lakes region to establish cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Omaha, Denver, and Seattle and took over the small French settlement in Detroit and the Spanish mission-garrison hamlet of San Francisco. Salt Lake City and most of Utah reflects a religious tradition, Mormonism, that developed in New England and upstate New York.

Quakers moved west through the Corn Belt in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois just south of the Puritans, establishing Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Kansas City while taking over St. Louis.

Cavaliers took their plantation way of life, and their slaves, as far west as Texas. Backwoods Americans took their ways in Appalachia and imitated those in the Ozarks of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

If you don't believe me, then watch the speech patterns.

Quote:How many times have I told you or reminded you of that fact over the years? If you loose the bulk of the country, the bulk of its economy, the bulk of its military and it's tax base, what does the Blue/Progressive side have left at that point? We are stuck with the piece of shit that you and the others elected but the cool thing is that America doesn't have to stick with him and go down with him. America is free to part ways, declare its independence and reestablish itself  and begin taking the law into it's own hands. The old laurels that kept the country together no longer exist these days. The Left has pretty much destroyed them by no longer honoring them.

Plenty. We have the wealth that comes from intellectual property. We have Hollywood. We have the publishing houses of New York City. We have most of the top-notch colleges, universities, and professional schools. We are the ones who prefer rational thought to superstition. "Red America" is much poorer even if one adjusts for race and ethnicity. The states that do worst in poverty, health, crime, employment, and educational achievement are in a swath from New Mexico to South Carolina. The only "Blue" state that does so badly is New Mexico. 

Here's a video assessing the worst-rated states in America.






I've seen other videos by Briggs. He is clearly a conservative.