Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
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GasBandit
Staff member
There were riots in the CRM, even the article you linked described it as "largely peaceful" in the first half of the 60s. I guess this time around we decided to skip all that nonsense and get straight to the looting and burning.
To be fair, not a God damn thing changed until the riots of the CRM either.
Any surprise that a Birmingham paper would run that cartoon?
Man, I am impressed by how straight the lines of handwriting are. That's, like, a vanishing art.
GasBandit
Staff member
So what you are saying is, you support violent protests and riots as a vehicle for political change? I must admit I find that somewhat surprising, given your vocation.
I didn't say I supported anything.
GasBandit
Staff member
But surely you see the cognitive dissonance here then.
There's a difference between acknowledging that things DIDN'T change until after the riots, and supporting riots as the preferred vehicle for change. No cognitive dissonance. The Salt March by itself didn't get the British to liberate India, either. Peaceful protests are easy to ignore or pay lip service to. That doesn't mean they aren't worth doing - it means that the other side should listen harder.
In Brighter news. From the Cato Institute, see how your state ranks in FREEDOM!
GasBandit
Staff member
Except the point was specifically used as a rebuttal, which lends the tactic rhetorical legitimacy.[DOUBLEPOST=1471380988,1471380932][/DOUBLEPOST]
Texas is #28. People who don't live here might be surprised, but those of us who do, know that there's no bureaucrat as meddling and entrenched as a Texas bureaucrat.
Ha. I'm not sure the Cato Institute and I agree on what "freedom" entails.
The Colorado one is hilarious to me, it kind of baffled me, until I saw it was held aloft by personal freedoms. Then I also remembered the Vaccine compliance rate in Boulder schools. :/ FREEDOM!
I could go with less "personal opinion" exemptions on vaccines if it meant giving up some freedom. Because people suck.[DOUBLEPOST=1471381233,1471381089][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, all of New York is based on the city again. Which I will begrudgingly admit is because a lot of people live there. But I guarantee the farther west you go in the state, the more freedom you have.
Florida is number 8. WOOHOO!
*looks around*
... is this supposed to make me think freedom is a bad thing? Because Florida sucks.
If you were unemployed and the one thing keeping you from homelessness was government welfare, you'd agree.
GasBandit
Staff member
That's by design. Liberal economic policy kills jobs so that liberal welfare policy can swoop in and save you so that you will be grateful and continue to vote for liberal policy and liberal politicians.
You're not truly free until you build your own home on your own land from trees you planted yourself and built your own roads so you can drive the car you built yourself to your own workplace while acting as your own police, fire department, hospital, electrician, garbageman, animal control, and plumber. Otherwise you're just suckling from the teat of Big Society.
GasBandit
Staff member
Or you know, we could just kinda start moving in the direction of freedom a little bit, just so, for a change, I don't know, for example, we make it legal for Tesla to be able to sell cars without a dealership. (Which is currently illegal even in Texas)
We hear about "common sense gun legislation" all the time, I could go for a little "common sense deregulation."
But I'm just dreaming here. The nanny-staters won with the passage of Obamacare (in the dead of the night on new year's eve with the least oversight/transparency possible). That's a barb we won't be able to rip out without bleeding to death. And it's already collapsing on itself.
Interesting... Senator Rob Portman is openly advertising as "standing against his own party" on jobs in Ohio in campaign ads. He's a Republican... which means he's ether a bold face liar like all politicians or the party fracture is hitting the Republicans at it's highest levels. Between this and Ailes jumping into the arms of Trump immediately after getting shitcanned from FoxNews, we may actually be seeing the death of the Republican Party.
You can reorder the list based on your priorities from their research.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, I think we are. So, here's to another few decades of uncontested Democrat totalitarianism as the actual conservatives and the turbochristian science-phobics go their separate ways and fight each other as much or more than the one uberparty which will slowly skid the country into balkanization.
GasBandit
Staff member
*Affordable Care Act (I assume you mean).
The Republicans are just as culpable in this abomination. Repealing it and sending that repeal to Obama to sign is folly of the highest order, barely even a symbolic gesture. They had the power to defund it in the House from the beginning and all along, but they chickened out... because they thought they had 5 justices in the supreme court to do the dirty work for them so they wouldn't have to suffer any political repercussions from telling the kids Santa Claus isn't real. But we know how that turned out, laughably enough. The mandate, which is required for the whole thing to work, was passed on the premise that it didn't constitute a tax, and then Roberts turned his coat and said it was constitutional because it was, in fact, a tax.
So yes, the blame rests just as much with the republicans for the mess we're in for their feckless, repeated instances of congressional cowardice.
When you are elected to achieve an objective, and then decide that your position is more important than your best effort to achieve that objective, you become the biggest part of "the problem."
Mark my words, in the next 10 years, single payer will be instituted, because Obamacare was designed to fail. It tried to pay for 10 years of coverage with 6 years of double-dipping from medicaid while making it untenable for any private entity involved. So the whole thing will crash to the ground and the Democrats will give their biggest shrug and say "Welp, we gave the private sector one last, best try, but there's nothing for it now but to socialize medicine completely!"
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It's still usually a case of reversing their results. For instance, they rank Ohio high in "Educational Freedom" but that's only because we allow charter schools... schools which have increasingly come under scrutiny over the past few years in Ohio as they've failed to produce results and have manipulated the system (by dissolving, reforming, and reacquiring the same assets and locations) to avoid prosecution. Even ECOT, which I used to attend (it was garbage, I got passing grades in classes I did zero work for) and was once the shining example of functional online charter schools, has come under fire.
They talk about the liberalization of fiber cable, but that only means we have 4-5 companies colluding together to drive prices up. You can't GET high speed for less than 100 bucks a month here and it's NOTHING like the speeds you can get on the West Coast.
There's also all the union busting stuff they advocate.
Don't worry. If there is one thing the Democrats are good at, it's dropping the ball. We're going to eat ourselves alive over identity politics before too long and that's only if we don't become so laissez faire about who we let into the movement. We're already seeing the Left in Canada being devoured by white nationalists/neo-nazis. They only thing keeping the Dems together is their willingness to forge a compromise, even if it's against the interests of the party as a whole.
SO MANY HIPPIESFREE COLORADO!
