Politics And Current Events

[Troy Loney]

I'm genuinely intrigued what substantive policy discussion is being drowned out by Trump on here.

[Morkle]

I would maybe actually prefer a state-level government discussion thread honestly, I'd like to know and discuss why the PennDOT is allowed to operate as a money-hungry empire.

[DigitalGypsy66]

Yeah, I've been focusing more on state and local politics, none of which would interest anyone on this board. I've given up on national politics doing anything meaningful or impactful to me or my immediate family.

I highly recommend attending local school board, city councils, and town halls with state reps. Very informative, and you get to see how the sausage gets made.

[dodint]

I'm genuinely intrigued what substantive policy discussion is being drowned out by Trump on here.

The various SCOTUS discussions are generally short. Not sure if that's an interest thing or they get drowned out. I know personally if I don't check the thread every few hours it is easy to fall behind. Sometimes I quote something to reply and realize I'm four pages back and just delete the reply and move on.

Are you trying to say that this thread isn't exceedingly executive branch heavy (most of which is superfluous ramblings)? That characterization of the thread seems pretty accurate to me.

Another way of putting it: Do you read this thread and learn anything?

[count2infinity]

Another way of putting it: Do you read this thread and learn anything?

I learned on this page that you're a Trump supporter.

BOOM. Learned.
BOOM. Roasted.

[shmenguin]

as if 98% of us being anti-trump is inherently problematic. good f'ing grief. this is why some people jump to the batphone so easily. this is a black and white issue. he's unfit for office. objectively. inarguably. and this is an indictment on one person - not half the country.

@dodint is right - aside from NP, i don't think there are even any trump supporters here. sooooooo why are we arguing all the time? why is the honus on the left to dial it down when almost literally everyone here agrees he is a problem? the answer, of course, is score keeping. we fight because, in this case, the righties here don't want to lose ground - as if that's even a thing.

and why do we just bash and not talk about how to refute him? because we have no power, obviously. my vote, like always, won't even count next year. and when i vote for a democratic senator (which is really the only power i have), a score keeper chimes in with, "he too is probably a sex offender". cool. that was fun. and when we are simply asking for tax dollars to be used for better facilities for border crossers, it's met with more score keeping.

this is a dumb tangent, folks

[dodint]

Another way of putting it: Do you read this thread and learn anything?

I learned on this page that you're a Trump supporter.

BOOM. Learned.
BOOM. Roasted.

[Troy Loney]

I'm genuinely intrigued what substantive policy discussion is being drowned out by Trump on here.

The various SCOTUS discussions are generally short. Not sure if that's an interest thing or they get drowned out. I know personally if I don't check the thread every few hours it is easy to fall behind. Sometimes I quote something to reply and realize I'm four pages back and just delete the reply and move on.

Are you trying to say that this thread isn't exceedingly executive branch heavy (most of which is superfluous ramblings)? That characterization of the thread seems pretty accurate to me.

Another way of putting it: Do you read this thread and learn anything?

I definitely agree, politics has mostly devolved to the Trump show.

SCOTUS decisions that are at all interesting should probably go in the legalese thread. When SCOTUS hears a politically charged case, it generally falls on partisan lines and the only discussion there is the degradation of the court.

I think I would agree that folks are increasingly flippant on here, and that extends far beyond just Trump criticism, and I would take issue with the notion that this trend started with the "trump-haters". Some of the most dismissive and arrogant responses come from the avowed libertarians. I think unfortunately, it's that the participants all know where everyone stands on most things, so content driven discussion is gone because we pretty much know where everyone sits on the spectrum of political issues.

[dodint]

SCOTUS decisions that are at all interesting should probably go in the legalese thread. When SCOTUS hears a politically charged case, it generally falls on partisan lines and the only discussion there is the degradation of the court.

Yeah, I was thinking that after I replied. There are some threads like that legal thread which do harbor a restrained space for those discussions and that might take away from the PDT.

Shyster's campaign against the police probably wouldn't stand up against the volume of POTUS discussion in this thread, for instance.

[AuthorTony]

I just want a current events thread. One where we can discuss newsworthy items without politics/Trump. Every time I post a link to, what I think is, an interesting article, it gets overlooked because it's not political BS. There's a whole world out there that doesn't have anything to do with the dipshits in Washington D.C.

[Shyster]

Implication being that generally liberals get into a tizzy about things because of emotion while conservatives have a more balanced view.

The care/harm foundation is not necessarily based on emotion, and it's not that conservatives have a more balanced view, it's that repeated studies across countries and cultures have shown that conservatives are more likely to factor in all six of the moral foundations (i.e., care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression), while liberals are more likely to focus on the subset of care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression, with care/harm being the most important of those three; liberals are more ambivalent about the other three foundations. Indeed, the studies show that the more conservative someone is, the more likely they are to factor in all six foundations, while the more liberal someone is, the more likely they are to focus on the care/harm foundation. And people who identify as libertarian are outliers in that they almost exclusively rely on the liberty/oppression foundation, and the more libertarian they are, the more they downplay the other foundations in favor of liberty/oppression.

To be perfectly clear, the Moral Foundations Theory does not say that liberals are emotional while conservatives are not. Neither does it say that anyone's decision-making process is better than anyone else's. Everyone's decisions are assumed to be reasoned and in good faith. In fact, the whole purpose of the Theory (as well as other competing theories as to how people come to decisions) is to try to explain the phenomena of how people who are educated, reasonable, and acting in good faith can come to widely disparate views on a given topic. It's very tempting for people to want to believe that the reason for the different views is because their side is smart while the other side is stupid, or their side is educated while the other side is ignorant, or their side is righteous while the other side is acting in bad faith. But while that can indeed sometimes be the case, that's not always true. To the contrary, all sides are making decisions based on the same moral principles; they just weigh those moral principles differently than each other, and consequently they come to different conclusions based on the same inputs.

[Willie Kool]

The accepted 'moral' sides of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation are religion-perpetuated slave thinking that directly contradict liberty/oppression.

[Shyster]

The accepted 'moral' sides of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation are religion-perpetuated slave thinking that directly contradict liberty/oppression.

While conservatives are on average more religious, they aren't blinded by religion any more than liberals are blinded by all of the blood spewing out of their bleeding hearts. And while the sanctity/degradation foundation does have a lot to do with religion, the other foundations are not necessarily based on any religious beliefs.

I just found that Chapter 7 of The Righteous Mind, which describes the foundations, is available online. One can read it here:

https://www.righteousmind.com/wp-conten ... final_.pdf

[shmenguin]

While conservatives are on average more religious, they aren't blinded by religion any more than liberals are blinded by all of the blood spewing out of their bleeding hearts

Peace and suffering are foundational to the human condition. Religion is an artificial construct. Equating the 2 like this is why people lose patience with you more easily than you expect.

[Lemon Berry Lobster]

It is odd being conservative and non-religious ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[shmenguin]

It is odd being conservative and non-religious ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Read the studies, LBL. It’s all there.

[shafnutz05]

I just want a current events thread. One where we can discuss newsworthy items without politics/Trump. Every time I post a link to, what I think is, an interesting article, it gets overlooked because it's not political BS. There's a whole world out there that doesn't have anything to do with the dipshits in Washington D.C.

That's a great idea. I love following world news but it definitely would get drowned out quickly in here. I think I'm going to split the threads up and create a "Politics" and a "Local, State, and World Events" thread (or something similar) . How does that sound to everyone?

[AuthorTony]

That's a great idea. I love following world news but it definitely would get drowned out quickly in here. I think I'm going to split the threads up and create a "Politics" and a "Local, State, and World Events" thread (or something similar) . How does that sound to everyone?

I certainly approve.

[dodint]

Sprinkle in some Tales from Fayettenam, too.

[shmenguin]

“Non Federal Government News”, basically.

[Lemon Berry Lobster]

It is odd being conservative and non-religious ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Read the studies, LBL. It’s all there.

Send me the 'right' ones...

[tifosi77]

I think the other Bluenames should make it so Shaf can read only this thread until after the election.

[Shyster]

Peace and suffering are foundational to the human condition. Religion is an artificial construct. Equating the 2 like this is why people lose patience with you more easily than you expect.

You believe they are not equivalent. Millions of other people would disagree. Why? Because they place different weight on their moral foundations than you do. And many of those millions of other people would likely be outright offended by your assertion that peace and suffering are less important than religion (let alone your assertion that religion is artificial), which many would view as more important than anything else.

I'm not saying that either side is correct, and I don't expect you or anyone else to change your views. The Moral Foundations Theory does not exist so that any one of any political persuasion can claim superiority over anyone else. It exists in order to provide a theory as to why certain people believe the things they do—to answer the question "Why do they believe that?" And in most cases, it's not because they are blinded, stupid, ignorant, or any of the other easy (but wrong) explanations.

To me, understanding why people believe what they do is incredibly valuable, even if I completely disagree with them. Debate and compromise require understanding of your opponent's positions, and even if you want to oppose what someone else is doing, it is necessary to understand where they are coming from in order to properly frame your arguments in opposition. But in order to obtain that understanding, one must first accept the idea that the people who disagree with you are (for the most part, but not always) not blinded, stupid, ignorant, or evil. To the contrary, they are making decisions on their own moral matrix to the exact same extent as everyone else. The matrix is just different.

The point I'm trying to make is that different people think differently, and those differences in thinking happen to align in many cases with political leanings. People of all political leanings are making decisions based on their own blend of the moral foundations, and if person A of political persuasion X has any interest in understanding how person B of persuasion Y arrives at their positions, then person A can do so (or at least try) by understanding person B's underlying moral foundations and how they differ.

[MWB]

The morality discussion is both interesting and an exercise in common sense. A good friend of mine is conservative and a Trump supporter. I am, according to him, a bleeding heart liberal. Yet we can discuss politics reasonably and learn from each other. Why? Because we respect each other. That’s what any good faith discussion boils down to. I get the authors point, but also think it’s a bit silly to boil down morality to specific pillars when they’re all so ambiguous, just like morality itself. Some people in this thread make a good faith effort to understand where specific posters are coming from and attempt to engage. Others simply generalize and make no effort other than to “win points.” Generalizing is lazy and insulting, which seems to be one point from the book. I feel like it’s not that hard to have a good feel for, and a good understanding of the perspective of most regular posters here.

[count2infinity]

So that Trump guy, eh?