Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[pbrower2a]

(03-13-2018, 10:50 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(03-13-2018, 05:35 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(03-13-2018, 10:27 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-11-2018, 04:29 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(03-11-2018, 10:13 AM)David Horn Wrote: Actually, voting is one area that youth are actually better prepared than their elders, because it's less emotional to begin with.  That's the point of pushing for the vote for 16 year olds.  Personally, I'm not sold on voting at 16, but I'm not totally opposed either.

Hmm. Blue voting and blue politics seem to be more driven by emotion and more reliant upon emotion. I see a lot of emotion being used in politics on the left side. I see political gatherings that remind me of pep rally's associated with my youth/ younger days. I've seen airheads and idiots who didn't seem to understand  or recognize the seriousness of the issues at hand or the issues that were at stake at the time.

The SJWs are the left's version of the Trumpists, so yes, both sides do it.  The biggest difference is centrality.  The GOP has swallowed the fear mongering and nativist nonsense from the Trump team, hook, line and sinker.  If that becomes the baseline attitude in the Democratic Party as well, then we have real troubles ahead.

FWIW, there are voices on the left fighting back against this tendency on that side.  I don't hear those voices on the right.

Trump has placed the Democratic party in a tough position. Does the Democratic party stick with American tradition or let go of it? Do you see any one affiliated with the right trashing liberal College's, burning down portions of cities, rioting with police, tearing down statues, entering political rally's and taking over the stage,  overwhelming security and chasing guest speakers off stages and so forth? You hear them because they aren't really needed on the right.

You have a point that the left fringe has a violent side.

But, with caveats. The antifa group may have broken a window or two at Berkeley and chased a racist speaker away from Cal. But they also stand up to right wing violent groups too, who start fights and who ran down a peaceful protester in VA.

Ferguson MO got burned down, but burning cities was mainly something that left radicals did when you were a baby. It's not a big deal on the left now. And when conservative police kill black people for no reason, young black people can get frustrated when not allowed justice.

I don't know if a mob has torn down a statue yet. But city and state officials have rightly removed statues memorializing racists, and the current ambassador to the UN took down a confederate flag.

The left did not have a candidate who encouraged police and followers at his rallies to beat people up. The right did, and he was elected president by the electoral college.

I think the left will adhere to American values for the most part, in the sense that most will prefer to vote Democratic or vote for some other non-GOP party rather than engage in riots.

The problem is that the Right has sold out principles for power. It used to be that conservatives showed a predictable disdain for demagoguery. Donald Trump, the consummate demagogue of American politics, puts the lie to that idea. It used to be that conservatives tolerated no violence except in repressing outright crime. Having sold out to near-fascists, that is over. They used to proceed with caution, or at least back down gingerly if something went awry. That is over.

This is a 4T, and public sentiment will congeal around one clear set of values that will become increasingly hide-bound -- and even conservative. Conservatives could see reports of racist violence by segregationists and respond with "we just don't do that" -- and end up voting for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They could recognize that liberal reforms of twenty years earlier worked well enough that promising to undo them was a sure way to electoral defeat.

Kindness, caution, and conscience as cardinal virtues that serve a polity well. Just think of a political order with none of them -- Nazi Germany. Yes, the horrid regime fought it out to the end, but a system like FDR's America does not come to an end when the President dies; Churchill could lose an election as proof that a system whose leadership needed dictatorial powers (except for any questionable right to mass murder) just to survive could show a full commitment to democracy. The July 20 Plot would have never occurred in Britain or America.

Wars come to an end when the defeated are either exterminated (which is extremely difficult or problematic as well as grossly amoral) or find that they have nothing for which to fight. If this Crisis Era culminates in a war, Donald Trump will show himself consummately inept.