In fact, when you poll actual Americans for what they want, and compare that to what congress does, then logically speaking Republicans should lose every election forevermore in nearly every district.

For instance, the Republicans are rabid climate change deniers. Compare that to literally the entire consensus of the rest of the entire world, with minor exceptions. That's a form of radical extremism that should not be compromised with. Climate change is real, it's serious, and anyone denying that is a complete radical.

For healthcare: if the Republicans were "governing", they would have come up with an answer to health care a long time ago. And that solution would be Obamacare, the right-wing, free-market solution to healthcare. But Obamacare sucks, and they have no solution, and they're going to resist giving Americans affordable healthcare. Because it will cost money, money they don't want to give up.

That's radical. Democrats have been sucked into that orbit and give way too much credence to right-wing arguments on this topic. America's healthcare problem is a problem with extremist politics. Not with a lack of moderation.

No, not at all. As I just mentioned, and have mentioned in the past, Democrats have already shut down the government once, but they have also blocked many of Trump's nominees. Democrats complain about all of the vacancies in the Trump administration, but they are, at least in part, responsible for it. My argument is based on what Democrats have already done.

Which is to say, they're borrowing from the playbook the Republicans used when they were in the opposition.

On tax policy: Republicans are again, extremist. Literally the only justifications for tax cuts have failed since 2009, and the Laffer curve's existence doesn't justify tax cuts without evidence (which, by the way, the vast majority of economists seem to think we're past the maximum). There's no way that cutting taxes right now is a good idea. The problem here isn't a lack of moderation, it's an extremist Republican party who defy reason, conversation, and expert opinion for their desire to enrich their primary donors.

During the healthcare debate, I didn't hear many voices on the left that thought they had a responsibility to present the Republican healthcare bills in as sympathetic a light as possible. Every now and then, someone would interview Avik Roy, who would present some kind of policy-based defense of the GOP's healthcare bills. But they'd also challenge his views bitterly. In fact, quite to the contrary, even wonkish, center-left news outlets would say only that the Republicans were flat-out lying when they said premiums would go down, and so on and so on.

I struggle even to know what moderation means in this context. To say that moderation is a willingness to adopt the position at the exact midpoint between position A and position B is a caricature of moderation designed to make it look absurd.

I don't get your point. Yes, Democrats sometimes stand their ground. That doesn't do anything about the thesis that the Republicans are leagues beyond more extremist in their policy and governing than Democrats.

So what you're saying is that the center-left media was honest about how the Republicans govern for once. That's good! Republicans need to be called out for being completely outside of reality when they are, which is often the case for them. Because they're such an extreme party.



Moderation has a dampening effect on discourse. Moderation doesn't allow correct or incorrect to be expressed in it's utter clarity. If we pretend the Republican health care plan is any of the lies they claim it to be, we're legitimizing their extremist and radical views on the subject.

Shootings are tragic, of course, but I really don't get the hysteria. In the US it takes about a week and a half to accumulate the same number in traffic fatalities as there has been killed in mass shooting in 50 years.

This is probably the king of false equivalence arguments with gun control. "We kill more people with cars every week, should we ban cars now?! Dur hur hur."
Cars are designed for conveyance, there is an entire infrastructure surrounding them that requires certification for ownership and operation. Depending on the state or country you live in there are yearly safety inspections your vehicle has to pass in order to be driven legally. Yes, there are a lot of vehicular fatalities every year, but the thing is they are rarely intentional, and the car isn't designed for it's efficiency at mowing people down. Aside from that, I can guarantee that if you weren't required to take a test to get a drivers license, or fulfill a certain quota of driving hours before obtaining a learner's permit, the deaths surrounding driving would go up radically. Most accidents are avoidable, but tragically despite training, and knowing how to drive a car, they still happen. These however are accidents and can be mitigated with oversight.
A school shooting isn't an accident, it is premeditated murder. Defending it, and hand-waving it away as something else entirely shows just how warped our mentality as a nation is that it cannot admit there is a problem and that fixing it isn't a win-win.

Well look at OP. The US is doing poorly in both. But congrats on the classic conservative whataboutist retort.

It's a pretty nonsensical quote which is basically what I don't get. Sure, people die every day from various reasons and perhaps other countries have found some heavy handed measures to reduce deaths whether that was the goal or not.

We pretty much already have gun control. What we don't have is an outright ban and that's not legitimately on the table. Nobody really wants to take the real steps necessary to reduce mass shootings.

There is seriously far more human tragedy in the US and world every single day than even on just one day when one of these rare shootings occur. That's not a "whataboutist retort", it's a fact and extremists that want to fundamentally transform America fervently working people up every time there is a shooting to take advantage of is obscene.

The author's point was, that among developed nations, the United States is (apparently) the most dangerous place to raise a child, and that our heavily ingrained gun culture (which, btw, won't easily change so long as people who seek to do so are brushed off as extremist activists) is a contributing factor to that distinction.

Just look at the number of child deaths resulting from firearms in this graph of fatal unintentional injuries in the US, and compare it to the other leading categories like motor vehicle accident. It's not nothing, it's not a problem that exists in other developed nations, and there certainly is something we can do about it in the long term if we can agree that doing so would be a good thing.



In a few of those age groups, death by firearm (whether or suicide or homicide) is comparable to those by motor vehicle death.

lol, the US has zero gun control.

I don't know. Those numbers seem pretty insignificant. The numbers specifically not the actual deaths. And now you're throwing in unintentional in a topic inspired by a very evil and intentional act which of course is what the OP quoted.

This thread is about the US’s anomalously high child mortality rate, not about one mass shooting in particular. Jones’s post is on topic. Your provincial ideologuing isn’t.

Well, if you read the op you saw that the topic is inspired by the shooting. My first point was just a general observation about mass shooting hysteria which is what he responded to. It's all on topic.

And the point is that instituting gun control wouldn’t only reduce intentional deaths, it would also reduce unintentional deaths. Those statistics belong together.

So, there you go. Just like the person cited in the OP you're perfectly fine with exploiting the deaths of those murdered by an evil and insane person for political gain.

You're a piece of ****, Wookie.

You’d prefer if the discussion never happened at all, so I’m not sure why anybody should pay attention to this transparently selfish and insincere deflection.

i think the goal is actually to institute a policy that leads to fewer gun deaths, because massacres like the one that happened in Florida are preventable. The goal isn't to score points. It's to stop people from dying senselessly. I don't know what political gain you're talking about.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

“A mass shooting has happened recently, so you aren’t allowed to talk about gun violence. It’s crass. We should wait until there hasn’t been a mass shooting for a while (lol)”

- someone who definitely isn’t cynically trying to achieve a political gain from an evil act

On the other hand, I had no idea that I should be more worried about accidental poisoning than car deaths. I guess Jon was right about McDonalds salads.

Regarding Wookie's fear of liberal extremists politicking based on a tragedy: I was going to link to Rahm Emanuel talking about how we should "never let a good crisis go to waste", but looking back at the Bush and Obama administration's handling of the financial crisis, this idea doesn't seem to amount to much in practice.

Actually, you know what I think this is? I think Wookie is rationalizing how conservative's dragged their feet in the aftermath of the national movement in the wake of Sandy Hook to actually do something about our gun problem. Now, they are stuck defending their obstruction on this issue, and are therefore forced to dismiss all further attempts at reform as "extremist", just to save face.

I'd laugh if it wasn't so pathetic and evil.

I think they like guns

This phrase sounds so funny in my head

I like guns. Depending on how successful the next few contracts I have are, I might buy a Colt .45 SAA, because ****ing cowboys yo.

But yeah, this country has a real issue with this stuff.

liberal extremists think facebook is a human right?

[Quote=David Foster Wallace]
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
[/Quote]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/20/fiction

[QUOTE=Marshall McLuhan]One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.[/QUOTE]

ahem

Dammit, I need to get off my ass and read the actual works of my heros and stop watching commencement speeches.

You say you like guns, but why not use the money for gambling instead?

A good connection since gambling and firearms have similar consumption curves. Both industries depend heavily on “whales”, an extreme minority of customers who are responsible for almost all of their sales. This dependence has been getting worse over time as the US becomes increasingly urbanized and gun ownership rates decline. Which is also why gun company marketing has become increasingly targeted at this market, affecting both advertising as well as firearm design (i.e. military but drunker and less responsible).

Other examples of power law consumption curves are alcohol and criminality.

Odds are really likely I won't buy one, though, so there's that. Because dropping 4 figures for a toy isn't really my style.

In that case, I guess you're probably not into this [NSFW text only] kind of thing