But you admit it would be nice if Putin wanted Clinton to win.

The difference is that if you hadn't thought that, you wouldn't have thrown it out there.

It's just the most likely conclusion but I don't really care much other than all the fall narrative.

Do you play poker? lol

jfc

I don't get it. I mean, I get that Putin actually having preferred Clinton all along would be convenient for Republicans. It just makes absolutely no sense, though. Not only does nothing suggest it's more than a right-wing fever dream, here in the real world people connected to the Trump campaign are getting indicted as a result of an independent investigation.

Wookie, you've provided no basis for your belief that Putin wanted to have Clinton elected. Your argument thus far is pretty much that you know it to be true. That gives us nothing, though. You're giving us a ludicrous claim that's unsupported by facts, and the only thing for us to do is to shake our heads and deem you either misguided, unintelligent, or a troll. If you're going to discuss, please bring more than a claim. What things that you take as factual is your claim based on?

~GOP voters~

HMM.

On behalf of the State of California: we apologize for Devin Nunez.

Oh, I get it. Since Republicans are all actually Manly Men who solely drink wine from Man Cans, and since they elected Reagan who single handedly went back in time and engineered the Soviet Union's downfall by forcing everyone to lie on reports, it makes sense that Putin would fear them. Since liberal men are pussy beta cucks he could just walk all over the U.S., so really he'd prefer Clinton.

You might not be an apologist for Trump, but you lie like he does.

So, referring to the discussions from earlier, particularly what Eversor and I have been debating over, recently stumbled upon DW-NOMINATE, a platform created to analyze voting habits of representatives. I don't know so much about the statistical methods underlying it, but their results reflect one simple truth about American politics:





Basically the Republicans have been careening off the rails to the far right of the spectrum for a long time, and this is itself why I'm opposed to "centrism", i.e. compromise 50/50 with the bat**** homeless person on the street corner.

I should be clear here: you might not be, but as far as I'm concerned, what you're saying is defending Trump using crackpot conspiracy theories, so it amounts to you being a Trump apologist, even if you don't know why.

https://imgur.com/a/nh9TX

There's a funny new trend of people inventing a counter-culture by being full ship neoliberal.

Neoliberalism is great, says a neoliberal metric of an invented problem.

#moreinsufferablethantrump

Not sure what you think this has to do with me.

Maybe it doesn't, but I wanted to make it clear why I'm not a "centrist", if you agree then that's good.

Listen, just because I think you'd look good in a bow tie...

I don't remember accusing you of being a centrist (although maybe I did?). Although I know at one point you indirectly accused me of being a centrist.

Not that I care. We don't have to go through all that again, unless there's something more substantive to talk about.

I think "meeting Republicans half way" is a rather naive understanding of what centrism is. Alternatively, I think one could look at the 2016 election (and also to the 2012 election, for that matter) and see that there are certain issues that are exercising people on both the left and the right. One could notice that those issues are not currently being addressed by either party sufficiently, and that a genuine centrism would be one that addresses those issues -- yes, pragmatically, and with some ideological flexibility -- without giving in to the excesses of either the populist left or the populist right, while trying to address the grievances of each. (The two most obvious of those issues is income inequality and privacy. It doesn't seem unfair to say that the populist movements of the left and the right in the 2016 election were responding to similar economic, social and political realities, but in very different ways.) Presumably, this could be a good way to win over voters of both parties, and to enjoy some kind of electoral legitimacy. To my mind, it seems like that's the kind of politics we need right now, even if it's difficult to imagine how it could come into existence.

Macron is someone who's been referred to as a "radical centrist", but I think his radicalness consists only in that he came to power from outside of the traditional party structures of his country. He's really a neoliberal. It's too bad that he ruined that term.

The American left and right may agree that economic inequality and privacy are major issues, but they won’t agree about how to address them, or even understand the problems in those terms.

Economic inequality, for example. Republicans don’t frame the issue as a capitalism problem, they frame it as a low skill jobs shortage. Which is totally true, within the boundaries of their personal experience, but anything you did about the Republican version of the problem would end up making the problem much worse.

Another example is gun control in the US. Pretty much everybody agrees that gun violence is a problem, but there is a perception gap. Democrats think you should solve gun violence by limiting access to guns and provide better mental healthcare. Republicans think you should solve gun violence by massively increasing access to guns, so people can defend themselves better. The problem is Democrats see criminality as a mental health problem and Republicans see it as a morality problem. How can you meet in the middle on this shared issue? You can’t. Not ever.

This is the true shape of political disagreement, by the way. It’s not like progressives and conservatives live in bubbles, it’s that we understand shared issues differently. Not just how we think they should be resolved, but the actual nature of the problem. It’s easy to say that left and right wing parties should cooperate on these issues but it just can’t work that way most of the time.

Nah I'm not saying you accused me and I did accuse you, and I'm not trying to start anything. Honestly I just wanted to share that data, lol.

On many common issues, the Republicans and Democrats do meet in the middle. They do nothing.

I agree (I hate when that happens); things can't be solved by "working together" when their goals are in direct opposition but no one is willing to admit it. Take the current hot topic of gun control, again: celebrities, TV hosts, and twitter-folk are always lamenting the lack of cooperation or "willingness to compromise" by Republicans and the nutjobs at the NRA. I've never heard of a compromise that offers to give less restriction in one area in exchange for more in other. Every gun control law is more restrictive; there has never been a "common sense" compromise that loosens regulations. Why would anyone be willing to work together when they get nothing out of it? (This is usually where people chime in with "think of teh childrens!" then begin bashing gun owners as domestic terrorist militants)

Hey Jonk, I want to take your car away from you. You don't want me to take your car? Let's compromise, I'll only take it on Tuesdays, weekends, and every other Wednesday. Fine fine, how about just Saturdays and maybe Tuesdays. Still no? Why won't you compromise? I've made concessions, why won't you?

This is how it goes for just about every new proposal for gun control, climate change, taxes, budgets, transportation, whatever. This is why "meeting in the middle," "compromise," or whatever name you want to use isn't going to work. Some people will blame a two-party system; it certainly doesn't help, but it's an unavoidable flaw in a republic system.

https://www.alternet.org/economy/only-capitalists-think-poverty-down

I’m glad you agree with me, even though your examples are astoundingly poor.

What's the thing that gun proponents want but don't currently have?

Let me clarify one thing.

Goals are not the same thing as objectives. Both Republicans and Democrats share the goal of reducing gun violence. This is the common issue. The difference is that they perceive the problem in different ways, which leads them to have contradictory objectives.

Democrats will never counter-balance new gun restrictions with lifting other regulations because, to them, access to firearms is the problem. One of their objectives is to reduce the total number of firearms in circulation. To Democrats, this compromise is idempotency, an absurd notion. Perhaps Republicans would agree with it, but Democrats never would.

The problem isn’t that they want different worlds, though. Just that they think the way to achieve that world is completely backwards from each other.

Social acceptance.

My wife has been out of town for a few days, I'm glad you are able to fill the gap and provide irrelevant and unnecessary condescension while she's gone.



To be left alone. In my state, CA, millions of people went to bed Dec 31 as honest, law abiding citizens, and woke up Jan 1 as felons because some politicians passed a law banning cosmetic modifications to certain rifles. It's not just social acceptance, though that is part of it. Gun owners are constantly turned into criminals by lawmakers and pariah nutjobs by "the media."

Gatling guns.

Hey, any time.

This perception is boosted intentionally for marketing.

I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah.

Some of them own those.

http://www.gunbroker.com/Gatling-Gun/Browse.aspx?Keywords=Gatling+Gun

What centrism REALLY looks like:

Guess which site I stumbled upon not-so-recently.

You're taking the memes too far now.

But far left or far right?

Horeshoe center?

I don't wanna do your dirty work, no more.

****.

Of course, one view, the "moral problem" view, is one that has a track record of not working as a solution to getting anything done. Which is possibly why Republicans have a viscerally negative reaction to not only science, but humanities, because studies like sociology tend to be "left-wing biased" in that many of the justifications Republicans give for their views are so unrelated to reality they aren't worth bringing up. Which is of course a pretty ridiculous oversimplification of reality, but then again, look at /r/the_donald and you'd have a hard time coming away with another general impression.

That's not to say, of course, that there's not at all any left-wing ideology or bias anywhere, or that right-wing views are always wrong. But like, regardless of values on e.g. the war on drugs, anyone who claims it's accomplished what it wanted to is straight wrong, there's no serious debate to be had. And even then, most GOP voters sorta know this, but the people they elect still fight the fight because apparently Nixonite policy matters? Anyway, criminology produces some facts, and any value which claims to, you know, correspond to facts should take what it says seriously, which means being against the policies of the right generally.