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

[Eric the Green]

(03-22-2018, 02:11 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(03-21-2018, 10:46 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I don't like the recent red label of using 'American' to identify their own beliefs.  I mean, I can disagree and agree with Eric, but he is no less or more American than Classic.  I prefer the conservative or progressive labels.  Especially on firearm policy, Classic will profess older values, Eric newer.  This does not mean the values are more or less American, particularly.

Liberals will bind together to form strong communities.  Conservatives will be ruggedly independent.  Is it American to embrace one trend or the other?  I think not.  In the old days loners would sit on their own land and do their thing, but some of our great and memorable achievements required teamwork.  I wouldn't care to say D-Day or the Moon Shot were not American.

Bob, we have liberal communities and conservative communities within America. As general rule, a conservative community is smaller more closely bonded and tighter knit than the liberal community because the liberal community is larger and has more people coming and going than the conservative community which is why liberals have to preach what the conservatives practice on a regular basis.

As far as Eric and I go, we don't see eye to eye on any issue that involves America or its future. I do not view Eric as being much of an America. I do not view Eric as being much of a team player as far as America goes either. I've never viewed blues as being much as far as team players either. As long as blues remain the same blues, I don't see any possibility of bridging the divide that exists between blue and red America.

Other than a few great golf shots or a few great tennis matches and Olympic records in individual sports, I can't think of a major achievement or accomplishment that didn't involve a massive amount of team work.

Reds and Blues can both be team players within a community. That's what Obama emphasized in his famous speech to the 2004 convention. But blues are more urban and reds more rural, and rural communities are more stable. Rural communities often think they can take care of themselves and don't need the government. That might often be true, but they still call on government for agricultural subsidies, flood control, and disaster relief. And the disasters are getting ever worse because of the climate change that reds have voted for.

Being a team player for blues means accepting that we need the government and the people need to do things as a team, meaning through contributing to the government as well as charity, because only the government can truly meet the needs of the people. These include education, infrastructure, research, conservation, law enforcement as well as social programs. Privatizing everything would take us back to the feudal middle ages, and slow commerce and trade to a crawl. Imagine toll roads and rivers everywhere, brigands everywhere, people impoverished all the time. That's the end result of libertarian economics and politics.

So blues want you to pay taxes. Most blues prefer a reasonable, progressive tax system that does not place too heavy a burden on the middle class, and requires the wealthy, who benefit massively from government, to pay their share-- especially more in the near future, since they have been getting massive tax breaks for the last 40 years. 

Meanwhile, reds want to take your money and use it to build armaments and use these to start wars for oil and imperial dreams, and to take American boys too and get them killed and maimed in these unnecessary wars. Neo-liberal congressmen you vote for like Paul Ryan apparently see nothing wrong with this policy, nor with the enormous national debt which this policy and their tax cuts cause. I do.

Gun regulations and bans on military weapons still keep the 2nd amendment intact. It may not be my green ideal, but it does help reduce gun violence. Fanatics who insist on keeping these military weapons are the ones taking us into a reactionary era that has never existed before, with guns that never existed before; along with your desire to get rid of taxes and business regulations and government investments. This libertarian fantasy has never been America.