Outlaw83
4mo ago
I mean, I get not liking it, but a coalition that gets 50% of the seats and around ~50% of the votes is not anti-democratic.
If the people who voted for those parties don't like the fact they made a grand coalition, they can vote for other parties who won't do that, until the far-right gains enough support a grand coalition isn't possible.
Outlaw83
5mo ago
I'm also unafraid of lawfare, because the vast, vast, vast majority of Democrat's have not committed anything close to Trump, and even the most wacky Trump +80 rural county in the middle of Texas or Oklahoma actually will have issues finding 12 jurors (that any Biden/Hillary/Obama/etc. defense team will basically six of) to convict random Democratic officials of whatever crimes people want to charge them with.
Like, there are actual laws about classifield documents or falsifying business records, regardless of your belief of Trump's guilt or innocence. There's not the laws on the books for the random stuff the Right is upset over - and hey, as with good ole' Gold Bars Menendez, if there are actually corrupt Democrat's so be it - as a left-wing social democrat, the more corrupt ones are usually more moderate. Menendez is being replaced with a much more progressive nice Asian-American 41 year old who will be in that seat for the next 30 years.
Outlaw83
5mo ago
I doubt part of the job description of a party leader is make unilateral decisions over alliances for the party with zero discussion.
Outlaw83
5mo ago
Because it's much simpler to primary people - like, in a parliamentary system, yes, Trump would've created the America First Party and gotten 21% in the parliamentary elections, and maybe gotten a coalition with the Mitt Romney-led Republican's, etc.
Also, here's the thing, yes, a lot of people are upset with the current parties, but nobody agrees that much - some people think both parties are too left-wing, some parties thing both parties are too right-wing, some parties think they're too war-mongering, others think they're too soft, etc., and so on.
The Whig's had also been falling apart for basically 20 years over splits over slavery, and the reality is, there is no issue in America today - even abortion, immigration, etc. that comes close to what slavery was in America in the 20 years in the lead-up to the Civil War, so there was that. Also, whether you think the Democrat's or Republican's are weak, they're both getting 45-50% of the vote every national election - a party would have a chance if say, the GOP was losing 60-40 every time, because hey, why not try if we're losing anyway. But, since both sides believe that defecting means the side they agree with even less could win and install a lot of terrible policies, you stay as a good soldier and try to win the next primary.
Outlaw83
5mo ago
Most of the forgiveness is coming from a change in how the rules around repayment. The biggest shift is the terms of repayment - both parties when they've been in power have introduced various forms of repayment plans based on income, ability to pay, whatever, the normal administrative stuff.
The shift Biden's done is the newest plan drops the term to when previously, under certain plans, if you paid for 20 years, even if you didn't pay it off, the loan was forgiven (this was true under prior admins as well), they changed the terms to 10 years, and then, basically, anybody who has paid for 10 or more years now is getting their loan forgiven.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
No, it's because almost every woman who of even moderate attractiveness has dealt with weirdness from a decent amount of men, from a pretty young age, and it turns out, they don't like it very much.
This isn't a political, ideological, or social thing, as seen by the almost regular stories of pastors and priests doing things people claim people preforming at DQSH do, and by the same token, the stories of creepy men in various liberal-coded spheres.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
"Both single men and single women lived under the surveillance and control of their social circle to a degree."
Yet, somehow, prostitutes continued to be healthily employed in every major and probably minor European city even during the most buttoned up times. Which proves the feminists point - there was never actually true equality, even in repression.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
As a leftie, there was no way to get Medicare for All from Pelosi, because not only does M4A not have the 218 votes you need in the House, it'd die on the Senate. All that would result of such a vote is a bunch of terrible primary challenges that would fail, because the median Democrat, while preferring Medicare for All, it's not a support it or else issue. Stuff like abortion, gay rights, thinking Trump is bad, those are actually support or else issues to the Democratic base of African-American women, suburban Mom's and so on.
Plus, in the long run, Biden did far more of what lefties expected economically. Unfortunately, some of the dumber ones are now upset about that full employment and higher wages means higher prices for Chipotle or Doordash.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
Again, because Biden, Pence, and other politicians when informed immediately returned some documents. The problem isn't having the documents. It's an expectation that in a world where there are 9 trillion documents, some classifield ones will get moved, not out of malice or illegal acts.
If Trump had done what Biden, Pence, and others did, there would be no case.
But, when you refuse to work with the agency tasked to get these records, show said records to other people and talk about how they're classifield, and more, yeah, that's worse.
It's the difference between accidentally forgetting you put a candy bar in your pocket and running out with a shopping cart full of electronics.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
Normal parties don't renominate corrupt, criminal losers who tried a coup.
Like, the Right had this same argument about Brett Kavanaugh - "see, you'll try to take out any Republican nominee with lies and false allegations.'
Except it didn't happen with Neil Gorsuch, who had much the same background and views. Sure, people attacked his judicial views, but in the way both sides do. There were no allegations of him being a rapist or even some lesser crime, because he hadn't possibly done criminal things.
Don't nominate the corrupt former New York real estate guy who tried to overturn an election and you'll be all clear. Yes, we'll say mean things about him if you nominate say, Greg Abbott, but for what I know, he's done no crimes. He's allied with somebody even conservative Republicans think has done cirmes (Ken Paxton), but Abbott himself is just a right-winger.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
The part about Boebert is what your described is an underlying reason why we're seeing such shifts in college educated suburbs outside of the other more obvious factors.
Like, I'm sure there have been a lot of right-wing representatives in the past who actually worried about constituent needs - one example off hand is Thad Cochoran of Mississippi didn't need a single black vote to win easily in the state, but nonetheless, he was well known for having good constuent services, even in overwhelmingly black areas of the state, and not surprisingly, while he didn't do fantastic in the black belt regions, he did much better than Trent Lott did who was the other Senator at the time, even pre-Strom Thurmond praise.
Hell, Brian Kemp has passed a fairly strict abortion ban, passed trans laws close to Florida, passed a strict voter ID law, passed the usual tax cuts, and done a lot of stuff I don't like as a left-wing social democrat, but he has a 65% approval rating in Georgia because he said, "nah, Biden won, you weirdos," then he and his Secretary of State easily curbstomped a primary challenge.
The problem for the modern hard-right/far-right/dissident right, whatever people want to call themselves is that there's zero appeal unless you're either a partisan Republican or you're obsessed with the the Culture War issues of the day, but if you're even a somewhat serious person, they all seem like weirdos. Again, I know some won't like this, but look up how AOC questions people in Congressional panels versus Freedom Caucus types. You don't have to like her questions, or agree with her premises even, but she's well prepared and has follow up questions.
Obviously, not every member of the Squad is like that, but the median member of the Progressive Caucus is more serious about actually doing the work of legislating as opposed to trying to get a hit on Fox News or Newsmax than the median member of the Freedom Caucus, and in the long run, swing voters given the choice of having to use certain genders they don't get and some more immigrants speaking Spanish but actually getting stuff done versus chaos, abortion bans, and weird obsessions with issues they've never heard about, they'll back the woke side, even if they heavily disagree.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
I'd make the argument that there 3rd generation woke immigrants and 3rd generation far-right immigrants proof that Americanization still works, just not the same way it worked in 1959.
Basically every Muslim politician of note in the US is uniformly left-wing on social issues. Sounds like those people are assimilating into society just fine.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
But simply having too many cultures, too many languages, religions, ethnicities in a country (to the point they, put together, outnumber the former dominant group) is bound to make it weaker, IMO, because there will no longer be a consensus on values.
I mean, this has been the reality in American urban areas for the past 150 years at a minimum.
Also, "consensus on values" happen after lots of arguing and sometimes blood over what that consensus actually is. Go ask a WASP on the Upper East Side and and a Italian in Brooklyn in 1869 if there's a consensus on values in New York City.
If that makes America corpse of a country, it's been one since the 1850s
Now I know the response to this from some is, "well, we stopped immigration for forty years," but I don't think that's the reason for what people think happened. If there was truly this massive assimilation, it's more due to the Depression followed up by World War II than a lack of new immigrants from Eastern Europe or China showing up in 1934.
Outlaw83
6mo ago
Even before Swift, Kelce was more famous than even a very good football player that he was due to his podcast with his brother, and that unlike many football players, who can be shockingly uncharismatic and boring, they're actually funny, interesting, and such together.
I can sort of see the conspiracy argument if it was truly random TE or LB, but if you actually know the NFL, you know Kelce isn't a random player, even if TE isn't usually a sexy position.
Outlaw83
7mo ago
It's really not that complicated - they agree with the Democratic Party and think their anti-vaccine kook of a brother/uncle/etc. would be a terrible choice to be President?
Outlaw83
7mo ago
That's the other thing - the most movement is among basically, the exact profile of people most likely to not vote.
As I said, according to Catalist, which is the best voter database showed Biden got 62% in 2020 and Democratic candidates got 62% in 2022 among Hispanics - if that number is 55% or 57% in 2024, would not be a huge shock. I just don't think the polling showing Trump winning Hispanics by 15 or 20 pass the smell test.
But, as been pointed out by many, because of the actual demographic makeup of voters, if Biden does a point better among white voters because college educated whites move even more in his favor as a result of Dobbs and Trump focusing on 1/6 and 2020, that basically evens out, and ironically, probably helps Biden more in the blue wall states of WI, MI, and PA.
Outlaw83
7mo ago
I think the number of women and doctors who would both agree to say, in week 38, to randomly decide to do an abortion is basically zero, and basically all Republican-led abortion restrictions put far too many hoops in front of couples in the middle of the worst moments of their lives, just because of a lack of trust of women, doctors, and random religious beliefs.
As I think I've said before, actual European abortion laws (appx. 15-weeks plus exceptions you can drive a truck through) would probably be fine with a mass majority of the voting public. But, Republican's even when they claim they are, don't actually put forth France-style or German-style abortion laws, so that's led to a massive reversal in support for said 15-week abortion bans (they're now underwater in the US), and much increased support, with 55% noow believe women should be able to get an abortion if the woman wants it for any reason, up from 38% in 2006.
If there was some indication of some large numbers of women having abortions at 37 weeks willy-nilly, my view might be shifted, but even the case people like to trot out - Kermis Gosnell - was mainly women who only went to him, because of restrictions put upon earlier abortions that made it harder for those women to get them then. Obviously, still terrible what he did, but these women were not coming to him at week 37 going, "y'know, baby seems kind of a drag now."
There's a reason 90-something percent of abortion are in the first trimester, and even then, most of those in the 2nd trimester are more, "I didn't have enough money/time to wait out the state-mandated waiting period/etc." than "I decided 4 months in babies are no fun."
Outlaw83
7mo ago
I mean, I think it's fine to have open discussion, but not everywhere has to be an open discussion. If you have a forum with lots of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, and don't want to deal with people asking about IQ, Jew's, or the 2020 election.
Now, sure, actual prominent people should know right-wing arguments and be able to push back against them (Mayor Pete is actually really good at this), but I don't really care if the forum x that happens to have a politics section doesn't want a long argument about whether the Civil Rights Act was good or not. The other reality is most arguments in reality are both people with actually bad arguments with incorrect information - which is fine, mostly, because an argument on Facebook or your cousin's BBQ is not the end of the world.
Again, I'm fair about this - if some pro-life Facebook group doesn't want pro-choice people arguing in the comments, that's A-OK.
I'd also point out when you see people make better arguments than you can on topics, and nothing shifts, there's no reason to further argue. So, when the people with the 93 annotated links and actual statements from various court decisions can't push away somebody from various ideas about 2020, what am I going to do?
Outlaw83
7mo ago
It's easy to say that when you know you'll always be on the side of the 20:1.
Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."
No, I think it's because most people here are right-wing. Which is fine to have solid views - God could come down from Earth, say, "actually, all abortion is evil according to your Creator, and all aborted babies end up in Limbo forever" and I'd say, "cool, I don't care. Sounds like you have a shitty ideology." But just admit that, instead of just being, "well, I've heard all the arguments and mine were the most logical and true."
That's the reason I only comment here to put forth the actual left-wing view on stuff, instead of the imagined one, to push back against obviously incorrect stuff, and stuff like this, where it's not really a political issue mostly,
Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.
I know the response will be 4chan and it's antecedents, but 4chan was always the place for edgy losers who couldn't follow the relatively loose standards of the Internet, and the fact the young Right is basically all 4-chan adjacent is probably why all decent youth polling still shows them as overwhelmingly left-leaning, because the alternative is the people who were seen as edgy weirdos in 2004, let alone 2024.
That's why even though I dislike it, I'm fine with Elon changing the rules on Twitter/X. Now, he's currently paying the price for it, because it turns out people don't like 'nudes in bio' bot responses, and all the other stuff that has bubbled up, but it's his house, his rules, as long as he's not breaking any other laws. Now, the way he has happily limited the free speech rights of certain groups when certain governments come calling makes him a hypocrite, but that's another story.
Outlaw83
7mo ago
If you don't think there's any anxiety in intra-left/center-left arguments about health care, I guess you weren't around those arguments in the mid-to-late 2000s.
But regardless, the issues you care about are real and true and matter, while yours are fake and just surface level.
Now, it is true that no, if you truly think we need to limit women's ability to get a college education/heavily tax childless people or think it was a bad idea to let the Irish or Italian's in, or the only people correct about the 2020 election are people who support Donald Trump, then yeah, I don't want to argue with you about this. But, I do actually wish those people had louder voices, because as we're seeing with abortion, the actual right-wing view on these issues - not even the Trump view, but the actual hard-right view is highly unpopular amongst normie people. It's why for example, in states where even the GOP did well, pro-"2020 was a stolen election" candidates for offices like Secretary of State ran behind basically all other GOP candidates.
Sometimes, the best argument is just letting people put forth their actual views, and letting other people react accordingly.
Outlaw83
7mo ago
I don't think it's always duplicitous, but I think anybody who seriously thinks the reason why this place is more right-leaning is some belief that in a free and open debate with nobody limiting it, the right-leaning argument wins is kind of lying to themselves, when in reality, the way the right wins these supposedly open spaces is saying enough things that trigger basically the fight or flight part of people's minds.
I'm a nearing middle-aged white guy, so the silly to frankly, terrible things said in this forum brush off my back, but a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc. So yeah, I can see why many people if in a community where what they think is open racism/sexism/bigotry against them is accepted, they say bye, and leave that community. Some people will hang around and still fight, but the reality is, most black people in 1960's America didn't have to argue about whether they deserved to use the same bathrooms as white people, and likely would've left any group arguing that. Obviously, not zero, but most people aren't argumentative weirdos like we are.
So yeah, the general tilt of any community will eventually become more of that, one way or the other. Also, in many cases (this isn't true here), there's a silent majority that's not as extreme, but also are effected by the community. YT comments section are kind of a perfect example - in a lot of cases, they're utterly rancid, no matter the topic, even when a creator doesn't want that. Because somebody whose basic belief about a YT video is, "that was all right," isn't going to post.
Outlaw83
7mo ago
"In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded."
Again, as I said downthread, this is only true if the only issues you care about are right-wing.
So yes, it'll seem left-leaning people aren't interested in talking about 'issues' if the issues you're concerned about are proving specific racial groups are less intelligent so we can spend as little on them as possible and make it OK to discriminate them again as been stated by multiple people here, how best to limit women so their only option is to have babies as multiple people have stated here, how everyone who doesn't believe the election was stolen from Trump is part of the Deep State, a RINO, or some other insultincluding Trump-appointed judges or people in the Trump WH who supported him 100% until the 2020 election, with perfect right-wing opinions otherwise, or how transgender people are discussed here, which is a lot of the basic "issues" brought up here, then yeah, you're not going to get a lot of arguments from even normie centrist people - they'll just think you're a weirdo.
Honestly, this is the reverse of some of the very left-wing friends who think 90% of the American population is fascist because they don't want to abolish all police, start bombing Israel (and I say that as somebody who wouldn't mind actually sanctioning Israel), banning cars, stopping fossil fuel extraction, and so on.
Outlaw83
7mo ago
Yeah - like, there's an argument on this thread about leftists not wanting to argue.
But, this isn't true - go to a Democratic/left-leaning well-educated group of political types and ask them about health care, taxes, etc. and they'll be a bunch of different ideas thrown around.
It's just yes, I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.
Note, even controversial stuff is fine if it's based in actual reality - if somebody wants to argue we should stay out of Ukraine because America shouldn't involve itself in European power politics or something like that, OK. But, if it's arguing about how America helped an illegal coup in 2014, and Ukraine is full of Nazi's, then yeah, there's not much to talk about.
Same thing on immigration - if you want to talk about economics versus culture, or criminal rates or whatever, again, we'll probably disagree heavily, but there's something there. If your belief is well, immigration has basically been too high since anywhere from 1830 to 1970 depending on the poster, and our racial mix has been terrible since then, then there's not much to talk about.
In general, when I try to get involved here is when something is insanely wrong on a basic thing, when I think the actual left-wing view is being wrongly thought out, or something like that. But in general, this place is less interesting, not because it's more right-wing, but I already know the responses to anything the moment an issue or story gets brought up.
Which, I'm sure one could say about left-leaning forums or arguments, but y'know, we're right and you're wrong. More seriously though, on the issues I care about and don't have 100% firm opinions on, like health care, taxes, spending, foreign policy, and so on, there are plenty of conversations going on in left-wing, center-left, and centrist spaces. But, if you're only interest is proving social freedom of women has gone too far and we need to IQ test everybody to put them in their proper place in society, then yeah, left-leaning spaces probably do similar.
Outlaw83
7mo ago
Let's be honest here - nobody is censored here, but it turns out, people don't like arguing 20-on-1 anywhere in society, regardless of ideology. Which is true of left-leaning spaces as well, for conservatives. But, well, those spaces don't do the whole "we're not censoring viewpoints" thing, they just say forthrightly, 'yeah, this is a place for people who agree on x, y, and z. Like it or leave.'
I mean, here's the issue for the far-right - there is majority support for their harsh treatment of immigrants (and I say that openly as a dirty soft hearted liberal), but even in Europe, the far-right is dominated by weirdoes and people with reactionary social views people don't want to vote for.
An actual successful anti-immigration party would be basically be moderate to center-left or center-right on most issues, while also being wildly far-right on immigration, but of course, most of the people who deeply care about immigration are also right-wing on other issues.
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