I think it's pretty obvious that trying to legitimize an opinion by saying that "it's obviously what an impartial, rational person would say" rather than defending it on the merits and demonstrating why it's reasonable is a pretty weak line of argumentation.

I don't disagree with this, but there's something this doesn't account for. What if your opportunity to hire someone in place of this person could expire before you could hire someone instead of this person? You have a choice: hire this person who may be flawed, or risk not being able to hire anyone and allowing your business to be hobbled.

I think if you don't account for what the GOP has to lose, your analogy isn't adequate.

Really? You've never said that before. Perhaps I should accommodate you by not believing the things I believe? /s



I don't know where you're getting this from. I've emphasized repeatedly my preference for the Democrats' position.

I mean, look, I don't disagree. If you could bracket all of the political considerations, and the fact that timing here is significant, and you could just evaluate it as a moral issue, I think the nomination should be postponed, and a more thorough investigation should take place. (I said this at the beginning of this page of the thread, after all.)

I just happen to think that that you don't get much from imagining that hypothetical. Because this issue arose within a specific context, and it's merely hypothetical to imagine some other context in which it could've arisen. It makes it pointless to imagine what an unaffiliated person would do, because we live in a world where people are driven by their political affiliations and loyalties to do ridiculous and morally dubious stuff, and, yes, that's just as true of some Democrats as of some Republicans. In a less hypothetical world, the moral considerations and the political considerations aren't so easy to distinguish, and motivated reasoning is everywhere (and more common than "bad faith"). We can agree to disagree about that if you want.

I don't think this how they're gaming it out. I think it's more like this: they know they have the votes to confirm now. They also know that they've got a good shot at keeping the senate. So they're looking at it like this: guaranteed justice now, or 1/5 chance that they lose the senate and can't confirm after the midterms. 4 to 1 is good odds (although they're not far from what 538 predicted Hillary Clinton's odds were of winning in 2016), but they're not as good as a guarantee. The choice between the possibility of having a potentially problematic justice vs the risk of having no conserative justice at all.

Thank god though this is actually an interesting thing to talk about and not "the president has a toad dick"

I think we agree mostly then. My only thing I'm not sure about now is where that cynical world view is supposed to take you. So people do have bias in how they consider these things. What do we actually do, then?

The GOP's own principles suggest now is a bad time to hire..

Right, although it's my personal opinion. I wouldn't get as far as you do and say that any person whose reasoning abilities weren't impaired by bias would agree with me, as if my view is unbiased, and every other one is. (How are "biased" and "unbiased" even a relevant categories anymore?)

Being aware that it's only my personal opinion is, to my mind, not far from the upshot: being just a little bit more self-aware that what my side does isn't have all the answers, that the idea that Democrats are special because they have "facts" on their side is more narrative than an actuality, and being skeptical of whatever other sacred cows there are about why Democrats are constitutionally better than and superior to Republicans.

Also, almost at an aesthetic level, I think it's easier to appreciate what Republicans actually think if you try to be charitable towards them rather than understand them through the caricatures about Republicans that are so prevalent on the left.

what do you mean?

Re: Jon`C's post. Republicans refused to accept an Obama SC nomination on the grounds that "you shouldn't nominate a justice on election year".

They're a bunch of hypocrites.

Boohoo? I don't know difference it makes pointing that out at this point. It's kind of like pointing out that Trump's tweets are vulgar.

Reality may have a liberal bias, but it still doesn't care about your feelings. (The laws of physics have been known to grab people by the Democrat)

Like, did anyone think for a second in 2016 that Cocaine Mitch would abide by the principle that he used to forbid Merrick Garland from being considered if the shoe was on the other foot? It's pretty clear that that dude's a massive liar, but in the same way that it's obvious that Sean Hannity is a massive liar. It's so obvious it's hardly even worth pointing out.

It just makes Democrats look like whiny cry babies and impotent, sore losers when they complain about it.

Don't fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing "hypocritical conservatives". You wouldn't conclude that a lawnmower "hates" you because you got cut while sticking your finger between its blades. Likewise, conservatives can't be "hypocritical" about something their brains can't even think about: their brain doesn't work that way.

I gotta be honest with you Eversor, this is some of the dumbest ****.

Exactly what at an aesthetic level can I appreciate about e.g. an anti-debt party that is singlehandedly responsible for a trillion dollar deficit? An anti-interventionist adventurist Party? I’m not just needling Wookie06 when I say Republicans have no principles. They clearly don’t have any.

At a certain point being "charitable" means ignoring blatant contradictions and allowing people to go unchecked. Since I'm like, a citizen, who actually cares about who is in office, I stand by myself in pointing these out and caring.

The Republican party is a coalition party. There are vast differences amongst Republicans, just as there are amongst Democrats. The Democratic party isn't fundamentally incoherent because it contains figures as diverse as Jim Webb and Elizabeth Warren. Conservatism isn't incoherent because interventionists and non-interventionists embrace the label and belong to the Republican party.

Big whoop. The GOP added to the deficit... by lowering taxes. That's pretty textbook GOP.

Your ****posting is doing a really good job keeping the GOP in check. Good job, guy.

No you don’t understand, you can’t just describe what Republicans say and do. That’s a leftist caricature.

yeah, the GOP isn’t inconsistent. They’re just a coalition of people who disagree on every issue.

Big whoop. The GOP added to the deficit... by lowering taxes. That’s pretty textbook GOP. Oh, and then they raised taxes to punish trade. And then they gave welfare to the people hurt by taxes. Whatever. That’s fine. It doesn’t matter what team red says to gain power or what they do when they have it, as long as team red has as much power as possible and team blue doesn’t have any. That’s literally the only thing that matters.

I know nothing screams strong, deeply held principles like compromising all of them for the sake of a coalition with people who disagree with me!

I guess my brain is too shallow to grasp the vast ideological array of Republican thought. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you can judge a group by the behavior that comes out regardless of individual motivations, then I don't see what his issue is. Eversor seems to think that, because the Republican Party is composed of individuals who sometimes disagree, then the macroscopic behavior has justification.

I still to this day haven't heard a comprehensible reason for the tax bill other than "enriching cronies".

There are similar ideological divides in the Democratic party, but the Democratic party is MUCH better at consolidating power within the party. The GOP leadership is fractured and ineffective, so it's (unfortunately) become a lot more democratic in it's platform. And since most people know jack **** about politics, that means it's an inconsistent, unworkable mess.

But it was important to violate their own principles in order to stop the Obamunist Takeover of America.

On the bright side, this is helpful in procuring the votes of, e.g., David Duke's followers, without ever needing to explicitly disown them. Everybody wins (except Democrats, but that's OK because they're subhuman, and probably are violating election law by trying to vote anyway).

Because cutting taxes will force employers to transition from labor market pricing to value-minus pricing, idiot. Read a book sometime.

Trump's playing chess in Hilbert space.

Congrats, this is literally the first time in history that anybody has described the political left as more consolidated than the right.

Curve. It's called a hilbert curve.

The Democrats are an alliance of progressives, social democrats, and classical liberals. The alliance is overwhelmingly dominated by the liberals. Progressive and social democratic values aren't incompatible with the liberals, only their priorities are. Despite that ideological compatibility, there is a lot of fighting among even the mainstream left, to say nothing of the socialists and communists who are wholly excluded by western left-wing parties. The greatest challenge for the liberals isn't maintaining partisan solidarity, it's encouraging left-wing people of different bents to turn out to vote for their corporate shill candidates.

The Republicans are materially different. They're an alliance of people with fundamentally incompatible beliefs, who, despite that, somehow manage to whip both their colleagues and their constituents to vote for them. Even the Republicans who fashion themselves Christian will, for example, vote for a pedophile as long as it means a Democrat doesn't get into office. That's a kind of solidarity that the left will never have. Can never have.

Actually I think this perennial disagreement between the two of you is quite simple, if I may say. In my mind it comes down to the difference between drawing a line in the sand about just how many wonkish details about political struggle / rhetoric are really worth understanding, if doing so requires us to presume a lot of crazy stuff (so that, instead of going too far down that route, we simply call out what's right and wrong--party politics aside--as best we can), versus simply perpetuating further discussion and understanding of the structure of those details, in some kind of abstract, lifeless game.

I would argue that the first tact (taken by Reid and Jon`C) is a special case of the second one (taken by Eversor, as well as myself, since I like to be a gutless and unprincipled neutral observer), since at the end of the day we still reserve the right to name and shame which side is really wrong. But... we might never get there, because playing games by getting inside the heads of insane and terribly wrong people is a never ending nightmare! But I choose it anyway, because I'm not erudite enough like Jon`C often is, and therefore can't think of a way smack down the GOP that doesn't seem awfully stale by now. So really for me the only interesting thing is the more detailed approach of Eversor (and then hearing Reid and Jon`C challenge him).

In other words, I think we already know we're the ones who are right! And we learn less, sometimes, if we jump to that conclusion too early. There's not too much we can do to change the situation we're in by repeating for the umpteenth time how nasty Republicans are, so my brain wants to forget about that and look for other details to distract itself with (for better or for worse). And I guess sometimes that means getting in the head of some nutcases....

so much room for activities

It's almost like political parties are Satan incarnate

Weird, right? Oh well. Better keep voting Democrat anyway. Can't split the vote, or one of those Republicans might start shoveling Mexicans into an oven.

(because he's actually playing 1-dimensional chess, but idiots can't tell)

Ah, I was wondering what you meant by that.