lame

I'm sure you don't but you left yourself a nice little out there, didn't you? Anyway, I found Donald Trump so highly offensive as a candidate that I could not in good conscience vote for him. His behavior during the primary, as well as much of his life, I find deplorable. Once he became the presumptive nominee my position on voting for Donald Trump became, he has four years to demonstrate why I should vote for him in 2020.

That's pretty sad actually. He literally wrote the progressive playbook that today's Democrat Socialists operate from and you're probably right. They probably don't even know it.

Since I called you brainwashed, it's only fair for me to suggest that the assumption now worth discussing is whether or not Saul Alinsky really is a pivotal figure underlying political activism on the left today. Would the left be the same even without Saul Alinsky? Since Jon`C is Canadian, and seems to have come to his own conclusions apart from American politics, I am going to assume yes. Although perhaps American politics have influenced political activism on the left beyond its borders.

(I still am operating on the assumption that the spectre of Saul Alinsky is a figment of the conservative movement's imagination, but I could be wrong.)

Obviously not.

This is word salad. I actually have no idea what you're criticizing here. Did you mean Social Democrats, like Bernie Sanders? Democratic Socialists, like me? Did you mean this to imply that democrats are socialists (they aren't) or that socialists are democrats (they cannot be, by definition)?

Did you actually mean anything, or are you just rattling off words you think are insulting because you don't know what they mean and insults are the only context you've encountered them?

I mean, to be fair, I've accused you guys of executing on Mein Kampf and not even knowing it. Well played.

Whatever. He certainly was influential on some big Democrat names like HRC and basset hound orphans. Thinking a little more about Jon's post reminded me of how the Democrats viewed Cruz compared to Trump.

Calling Wookie06 brainwashed is too charitable because it implies that at least one person spent effort developing his political identity.

Ted Cruz is a politician from Calgary. I don't need a Republican bugbear to know he's cancer.

Just to put things in perspective, here's an actual book published by a conservative writer:



That image is from this Vox article on the topic (written from a decisively leftist point of view, as you'd expect from Vox).

Notably, the article claims that Alinksy is the "Father of community organizing", here defined by a young Barack Obama:

[quote=Barack Obama]
Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and the money [they raise] around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership—and not one or two charismatic leaders—can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions [and "grassroots" people].
[/quote]

Now, that sounds pretty innocuous to me! Are conservatives really up in arms about the means, or the ends of the movement started by Alinksy?

This, kind of. I mean, come on, I'm only human. This is the new term for all the so called rising stars in the Democrat Party. You can only take it so literally and I didn't coin it for this minor troll.

For an umbrella term, just say "the left", it's much less confusing. It's quite a heterogeneous group actually.

I don't know man. I've kind of checked out until some of the dust settles. I was just wondering, with all of the leftist success here politically, at what point will they start to turn on each other. I mean you have Democrats hailing from old school racist roots aligned with minority activists, among other dichotomies. At some point these factions are going to turn on one another.

That's the other thing about the left, the constant in-fighting. I kind of prefer it though to slavish acquiescence.

Yeah, that would really suck.

"The black church was asking for it." -- Wookie06

Are you tired or something or do you just consider me worthy of a nonsensical troll?

Wookie's stupid, sure, but you've got to give him this: He's also vicious.

I guess it's unsurprising, since you're pretending to be unaware of right-wing terrorism in general, that you're also pretending to be unaware of the specific incidents.

Dude, I'm like the easiest person in the world to get along with. I don't really know why we became so adversarial. To me it seems that your aversion to my opinions led to condescending comments which led to me not caring too much about wtf you think about me. It also seems to me that we were pretty cordial a long time ago. If a comment I make seems vicious I would consider that similar to a joke I make being funny. It's based in truth.

It's not completely your fault that I've lost patience for you and people like you. Really, if I ever treated you kindly, the mistake was mine.

I'm not pretending to be unaware of anything. There are vicious attacks made by horrible people that have nothing to do with a political/ideological/religious/etc. agenda.

There are. And then there's for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#United_States

I understand. For example, I used to argue a lot of constitutional stuff here but what's the point when the "opposition" has either never read it or doesn't care what it actually says. So, yeah, I don't get too invested in discussions here anymore either.

Wow, never saw that coming.

I imagine it must seem even more pointless to you when the "opposition" has read the Constitution repeatedly and in great detail and has spent years studying the applicable case law.

And defers his own judgement and, frankly common understanding of language, to those he deems intellectually superior to himself. Sorry, man, you don't earn any respect for being told what to believe.

I think I finally understand why we keep you around. Gotta preserve the Time Cube theory of constitutional interpretation for future generations.

You claim to be easy to get along with, but claim your opposition hasn't read and seemingly can't understand the texts relevant to the debate. Do you get why these ideas don't agree?

I don't think you'd even possibly accept that someone else could be right about the Constitution, if this is how you feel.

a wookiee walks into a bar exam

Wookie these posts are priceless

Obfuscating his position is one of Wookie's favorite trolling tactics, so I'm sure he'll chime in with corrections shortly, but as far as I can tell, his position is this: The Constitution is the only relevant text, and reading case law only renders you less able to understand the plain meaning of the text. It may not have occurred to him that in many of these cases, there was robust and earnest debate between very smart people as to what the plain meaning of the text was, and in many others there was either broad agreement or at least a strong argument that the plain meaning was not sufficiently specific. In any case, I'm not especially inclined to credit the idea that I know less about a primary text than I would have if I'd not read a broad range of adversarial debates between experts about what it means.

Honestly it's pretty offensive that you demean the act of learning by reducing it to imitation.

I can barely even bring myself to respond that specific accusation because it's such a goddamned laugh. I read the dissents in law school too, you know? I agreed with some of them, even in cases that are still good law today, even when Clarence Thomas (at least once) or Antonin Scalia (frequently) wrote the dissent. And there are cases where I don't think anyone got it quite right. Ask me about the first Obamacare case, NFIB v. Sebellius, where every single justice agreed that the Tax Anti-Injunction Act didn't apply. I still think they were all wrong. I went to law school to learn to formulate and evaluate arguments about the law, not to accept and regurgitate what a court or a legislature said it was, and while obviously I've got a bias here, I think the project was a success.

tbf, one thing you don't read in law school is Wookie's dissent. Maybe try that next time :downs:

Assuming Wookie isn't a complete moron, or stubbornly arguing from a position of self-serving convenience in the extreme, I think it's fair to say that he is trolling us.

The other possibility is that Wookie doesn't realize that his own interpretation isn't the only "obvious" one. I imagine the fact that there is more than one single interpretation of any legal document is one reason law exists as a profession.

english, the only language without ambiguities or drafting errors

Clearly

yea you can tell, that's why none of the people who wrote the constitution were lawyers.

Earlier in this thread I tried to ELI5 to him that natural languages are ambiguous and any law written in such a language invites debate. Unfortunately, Wookie06 did not meet the minimum system requirements.

Well no, of course not. Republicans have no theory of mind.

I'm not joking. There was an fMRI study.

Wookie06 is possibly physically incapable of separating his beliefs from the beliefs of others.

this actually concisely summarizes what is pretty much the root problem in American politics

(edit: and it's scary)