US Politics/Biden Presidency (Trump-free zone)

[Elston Gunnn]

What's the big secret with the abortion/ hidden genocide post?

 

Surely, that warrants a detailed explanation once that idea has been floated.

With trepidation, I'll take a chance at giving you a serious answer about an enormously controversial issue: abortion.

 

Allow me first to refer you back to my post #518, itself a response to a couple of Mirallas's comments about the election. I myself have great difficulty thinking through the gut-wrenching issue of abortion. It is more than merely irritating that there's relatively little focus on birth control (of which abstinence "programs" should not be option # 1,2, or 3) and adoption. It's perhaps fair (again, trepuidation here) to say that a " middle" position on abortion is the phrase, "safe, legal, and rare." Pro-choice people insist especially on the "safe and legal," and generally avoid the "rare" part. The fiercest pro-life people probably utterly reject "safe, legal, and rare," suspecting that "safe and legal" means that abortion will not become rare.

 

And in any case, even "rare" is unacceptable to one who sees abortion as murder. So, as to the "big secret" of abortion as "hidden genocide," we know that many abortions are performed in many countries. One who counts a single abortion as murder will perhaps, and perhaps not reluctantly, employ the loaded word "genocide" to characterize the undeniable fact that abortions are regularly performed.

 

Although I (think I) understand the term "hidden genocide," I don't advise its use, for what must be obvious reasons. I do advise far more focus on common-sense, non-moralistic sex education, birth control, and adoption. And sex education most definitely - I would insist urgently - includes de-mythification of the misleading, unscientific phrase, "moment of conception."

[Palfy]

Protesting and fighting on American streets no sign of reconciliation for some let the Brexit voters and Trump voters live in one country and the Clinton and remain voters live in the other remain get U.K.just brought a new car and want to get some use out of it

[Palfy]

You know what wouldn't surprise me if didn't stay to see out the full term of his presidency

[MikeO]

You know what wouldn't surprise me if didn't stay to see out the full term of his presidency

 

Can anyone tell him he's fired?

[Palfy]

Yes Alan Sugar

[StevO]

Reading all of the abortion issues in the states, I'm so glad to live in the UK. And I don't mean that in a flippant way like I'm going to shag some birds get them pregnant and then just get rid. I'd rather not get into too many details here, but I know of some very difficult situations that have taken place and the women involved are some of the strongest and most caring people I know, who for their own reasons have felt they needed to take the decision to terminate a pregnancy. I for one am glad that in the U.K. They were given the choice.

[markjazzbassist]

Reading all of the abortion issues in the states, I'm so glad to live in the UK. And I don't mean that in a flippant way like I'm going to shag some birds get them pregnant and then just get rid. I'd rather not get into too many details here, but I know of some very difficult situations that have taken place and the women involved are some of the strongest and most caring people I know, who for their own reasons have felt they needed to take the decision to terminate a pregnancy. I for one am glad that in the U.K. They were given the choice.

Agree Steve, in most states it is legal and safe, the archaic ones are the only ones that get the press sadly. Trump will probably try and get the laws repealed though. Which is sad, if people don't like abortions don't get them no need to tell other people what to do with their bodies.

[MikeO]

A few hours after US President-elect Donald Trump took to the stage to make his acceptance speech, as evening fell in Berlin, small candles were quietly lit and carefully placed in front of aged, stone doorsteps and along the darkening pavements.

Berliners were marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht (when Jewish people and their businesses were violently attacked in 1938).

It was barely noted amid the febrile howl of international reaction to the US election. Neither was the 27th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which shares the same date.

But both events - and all that they represent of this country's past - explain, partially at least, why Germans were so repulsed by Donald Trump's election rhetoric and why so few (4% by one poll's reckoning) wanted him in the White House.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37936207

[Palfy]

I find it strange that we have had two life changing votes in this country one Scotland to leave the union Britain to leave the E.U both really close decisions and the losers of each decision never took to the streets rioting.

Yet in America Trump wins with a fairly big points margin and the losers are protesting.

Why do you think this is happening there and not here

[Romey 1878]

I find it strange that we have had two life changing votes in this country one Scotland to leave the union Britain to leave the E.U both really close decisions and the losers of each decision never took to the streets rioting.

Yet in America Trump wins with a fairly big points margin and the losers are protesting.

Why do you think this is happening there and not here

 

The "losers" of Brexit did protest.

[Chach]

I find it strange that we have had two life changing votes in this country one Scotland to leave the union Britain to leave the E.U both really close decisions and the losers of each decision never took to the streets rioting.

Yet in America Trump wins with a fairly big points margin and the losers are protesting.

Why do you think this is happening there and not here

 

If the presedential vote was based on the same system as the two British referendums, he would have actually lost.

[Matt]

http://cogink.com/cleese/

[Cornish Steve]

He's appointed a white supremacist sympathizer as "chief strategist". This guy once took his children out of a school because it had "too many Jews".

[MikeO]

He's appointed a white supremacist sympathizer as "chief strategist". This guy once took his children out of a school because it had "too many Jews".

 

Can you be a white supremacist "sympathiser"? Surely you either are one or you're not.

[Cornish Steve]

 

Can you be a white supremacist "sympathiser"? Surely you either are one or you're not.

 

In most reports, he's referred to as sympathetic to their cause. Strictly, that doesn't make him a white supremacist. His comments about blacks, women, and Jews, though, are in line with supremacist thinking.

[holystove]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/reporters-notebook-on-the-trail-with-donald-trump/

 

Journalist writes about what it was like to follow Trump for over a year. QI.

[MikeO]

 

In most reports, he's referred to as sympathetic to their cause. Strictly, that doesn't make him a white supremacist. His comments about blacks, women, and Jews, though, are in line with supremacist thinking.

 

I think it does, it just makes him a white supremacist who doesn't want to say it out loud because he knows it'll wreck his career.

[holystove]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/10/democrats-won-popular-vote-senate-too/93598998/

 

my question is where were these democrats during the redisctricting (if that's the word)?

[Elston Gunnn]

A good argument can be made that it took a "perfect storm" of mostly unexpected events to produce a Trump victory. I would put the factors into 3 general categories: underlying (historical/structural?), campaign (strategy and tactics), and contingent (unexpected events).

 

An example of "underlying" would be the several-decades rise (in the U.S. and worldwide) of "reactionary populism," the alienation from, fear of, and anger at many aspects of the modern world - globalization, terrorism, immigration, feminism, etc. The Clinton team never had a plan to straightforwardly contest the Trump promise of "change." She might have argued that Democrats, too, wanted change, but change looking forward to the 2020s, rather than change looking backward to the 1950s (when white men ruled the country). She talked about jobs, but too seldom directly to struggling white men. "Reactionary populism" is in a sense a primal scream against the last half-century.

 

An example of campaign strategy would be the Clinton team's reliance on the "ground game," the well-organized plans to get out "reliable" Democratic voter groups. But Team Clinton collectively had a tin ear, missed signals that no segment of the Obama coalition was as reliable for Clinton. African-American voters in several key states simply did not vote. A higher than expected % of Hispanics voted for Trump. Some educated women voted for Trump. Many Greens voted for Stein rather than Clinton, despite the fact that Trump said climate change is a hoax. Go figure.

 

Examples of the contingent, the unexpected, are many. Clinton's remark about many of Trump supporters as "deplorables" was unbelievably foolish. Broader examples of unanticipated developments would include Russian interference, Wikileaks, and FBI Director James Comey's bowing to pressure from inside the agency to imply - on the basis of no actual evidence, as he announced 10 days later - that newly discovered Clinton emails might contain prosecutable information. All of these particular unexpected developments are, going way beyond this campaign, very ominous: hackers, the highest level of tne Russian government, and the FBI interfered in American elections. Most ominous of all: roughly 50% of voters (and arguably more, as tens of miiilions of eligible voters stayed home) didn't much care.

 

Willful ignorance is dangerously stupid.

[MikeO]

The man with his finger on the button....

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38021820

[holystove]

 

I think it does, it just makes him a white supremacist who doesn't want to say it out loud because he knows it'll wreck his career.

 

Also, Bannon's appointment makes it ok for this to happen:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donald-trump.html?_r=0

 

" Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment. But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”"

[holystove]

hate to be spamming this thread but this is preposterous:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/business/with-a-meeting-trump-renewed-a-british-wind-farm-fight.html

 

anti-"wind farms" (because they ruin his view); pro-coal; appointing global-warming denier Myron Ebel head of EPA, ..

 

this affects the whole planet.

 

Can't the second amendment people do something about this guy?

[MikeO]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/opinion/donald-trump-rages-at-the-wrong-target.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

[MikeO]

Glimmer of hope?

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38069469

[Cornish Steve]

I hear a number of people suggesting already that Donald Trump will not follow through on his campaign statements, and maybe he will soften his stance on some things. One of the big lessons of history, though, is the importance of realizing that leaders, when in power, actually will do what they boasted about.

[Palfy]

Do you really think that Americans were stupid enough to believe that he would do what he said, on second thoughts don't bother to answer that question.

[Sibdane]

Do you really think that Americans were stupid enough to believe that he would do what he said, on second thoughts don't bother to answer that question.

Yes. I'm becoming more okay with him as time passes. I'm realizing now that he said anything to get votes. He always voted democratic in the past.

[Palfy]

Confused.com

[holystove]

Yes. I'm becoming more okay with him as time passes. I'm realizing now that he said anything to get votes. He always voted democratic in the past.

 

What about picking Myron Ebell (global warming is a myth) as head of EPA? What about making Steve Bannon (white supremacy) an important adviser? What about making Mike Flynn (islam = terrorism) the national security adviser? What about Mike Pompeo (torture = great) as head of CIA? Jeff Sessions (racist) as AG?

 

I'm glad you're becoming more okay with him but if you agree with the above I can't imagine what you were expecting. And nothing of what he has done so far would have been done by a democrat; so if he claims to have voted democratic in the past, it was probably just opportunism.

[Matt]

What about picking Myron Ebell (global warming is a myth) as head of EPA? What about making Steve Bannon (white supremacy) an important adviser? What about making Mike Flynn (islam = terrorism) the national security adviser? What about Mike Pompeo (torture = great) as head of CIA? Jeff Sessions (racist) as AG?

 

I'm glad you're becoming more okay with him but if you agree with the above I can't imagine what you were expecting. And nothing of what he has done so far would have been done by a democrat; so if he claims to have voted democratic in the past, it was probably just opportunism.

despite my constant and absolute distain for the wig-wearing tangerine, I always held out hope that it wouldn't be as bad as we all think, because at the end of the day the President is just a figurehead who's accountable for the actions advised by his self appointed "experts".

 

Looking at that list though...