US election 2020
Users browsing this topic:0 Registered, 0 Hidden and 0 Guests Registered Users: None |
|
View previous topic :: View next topic |
Who do you hope wins the US Election? |
Trump |
|
39% |
[ 9 ] |
Biden |
|
39% |
[ 9 ] |
Don't Care |
|
21% |
[ 5 ] |
|
Total Votes : 23 |
|
Author |
Message |
Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
Post subject: | |
|
A few would, anyone who's old enough to remember the Cold War would generally see socialism as undesirable and Trump is closer to a being a Centrist Democrat than Bernie is. I'd be more inclined to think they'd stay home and the "Orange man bad" crowd would hold their nose. Thing is the Republican Never Trumpers would probably throw a vote to Biden but never to Warren or Sanders. |
|
|
|
|
stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
|
Post subject: | |
|
If sanders gets elected POTUS I'll donate the $100 that 3.141etc will owe me after Trumps impeachment fails to the CFMEU Climate Change fundraiser _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
|
Post subject: | |
|
I’ve just put $40 on Biden to get the nomination at $3 and $10 on Warren at $7. So it’s a win-win-win for me whoever takes it out. _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
|
stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
|
Post subject: | |
|
Hah, good luck with that. Whoever gets the nomination will lose. _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
|
Post subject: | |
|
I wouldn’t be so sure about that, though that’s one outcome I certainly won’t be betting on (particularly after last time)!
In the meantime, CNN’s, uh, “performance” has not gone unnoticed:
https://www.thenation.com/article/sanders-warren-cnn-debate/ _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
|
roar
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
|
Post subject: | |
|
Oh, you can be sure of it, David. I'm actually not sure there is anything that Trump could do to lose the election. _________________ kill for collingwood! |
|
|
|
|
Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
|
|
|
|
think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Location: somewhere
|
Post subject: | |
|
Interesting stuff _________________ You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
|
Post subject: | |
|
That video's a fairly shameless mixture of truth and outright propaganda. Trump is said to "support" same-sex marriage now that it's been legalised. So what? He didn't even play so much as a johnny-come-lately, tokenistic role in the campaign; when it was nationally legalised all of four and a half years ago, he stated his opposition to the judgement (see link below), and was still voicing his support for "traditional marriage" for some time afterwards, even going as far as to float the idea of repealing the judgement (since becoming president, he has offered at best begrudging support for same-sex marriage). And yet this is used as some kind of counterpoint to the claim that he is a "bigoted extremist" (his comments and policies about Muslims, transgender people, etc., are naturally ignored in the video as they would be inconvenient).
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/donald-trump-believe-candidate-stands-10-issues
Another supposed piece of evidence that he isn't a bigot is the "right-to-try" law – presented here as life-saving legislation – which is pretty obviously problematic from the moment you understand what it is: basically, a law that deregulates medicinal access so that medicines not passed as safe from the FDA can be accessed if patients choose to do so. It's not necessarily a bad law and may well cause far more good than harm, but it still obviously carries risks: the very possibility of these drugs going on to fail FDA standards due to, say, health risks means you're employing some trolley-problem logic from the get-go. But that's what happens when you go on a red-tape-cutting extravaganza; you increase efficiency in some areas but potentially at the risk of losing regulations that were there for good reason. And while I don't want to be petty about this – as I said, this may be a genuinely positive achievement from Trump's presidency – it's a bit weird to list this as counter-evidence of Trump's "bigoted extremism" when this kind of thinking derives precisely from a fundamentalist opposition to bureaucracy of the kind we saw in the Abbott government. It certainly doesn't make him less of a racist or a transphobe.
The poverty rate: rose sharply during the financial crisis, and began a slow but steady decline during Obama's second term, which has continued since Trump took office. You'll see stuff like this a lot in pro-Trump propaganda, telling a lie – either explicitly or subtly through omission – that Obama's presidency was bad for the economy and Trump has been the sole reason for its improvement, as if the GFC (which happened under Bush's watch but Obama mostly got saddled with) never happened. Same goes for the economy's expansion, etc.
One thing I'll grant Trump, and the makers of this video, was that claims by Mitt Romney and others about Trump destroying or even significantly damaging the US economy through his protectionist agenda haven't panned out, at least so far as I can tell. And that's not exactly a niche concern, so Trump's critics have to wear that.
Here's something else that's true: Trump slashing the corporate and individual tax rates. The problem is that (as is always the case with tax cuts) this is at the expense of an already terribly underserved public sector, money that could be going to healthcare, education, infrastructure, welfare, sustainable energy transition, etc. We don't really need to go too deep into this one; we already know what people from each side of politics think of policies like these. Personally, I think it's one of the worst things he's done, and wish that the mainstream media had been more critical of this and focused less on stupid beat-ups like Russiagate.
Unemployment: see poverty rate and economic growth above, though with a caveat: the official unemployment rate is often criticised as inaccurate (I wrote more on this in this thread previously, I think). And the funniest thing is that one of the biggest critics of official unemployment figures was ... Trump himself, when he was running for president. Now he and his supporters claim the absurdly low reported figures as a victory.
Back to the shameless dishonesty: "I was told Trump was an environmental vandal for taking America out of the Paris climate agreement." Um, yeah, the decision of a global superpower to renege on the world's piss-weak carbon-reduction agreement sounds kind of like vandalism to me. So what's the case against this? That emissions have fallen under Trump and that the EPA cleaned up more toxic-waste sites in 2018 than they had for 13 years.
Where do you even start with this? Emission reduction has been primarily industry-led as part of the shift towards renewables, and the EPA – the funding to which Trump attempted to cut by 25%, and would have if congress hadn't stopped him – has been very much doing their job despite him. At this point you have to wonder whether the people making this video genuinely believe what they're saying or are just trying to play devil's advocate; surely they can't be unaware of the hostility of the Trump administration to any and all environmental policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Donald_Trump_administration
So to sift through that and pick out two factoids that sound positive is extraordinarily manipulative.
The First Step Act: here's something I'll give Trump genuine kudos for. It's a good policy and one that he deserves credit for implementing. Is it churlish to note, though, that it could be a lot better than it is, and that any Democratic candidate is offering far more radical proposals on criminal justice reform?
Maybe we can put that minor gripe to one side, though, because some serious bullshit is coming up: Trump's supposed support for free speech. What's the evidence for this? A policy to improve freedom of speech on university campuses, one of those issues that is hyped up and mostly irrelevant in the real world, but people from a certain political vantage point obsess over. This is a culture war move, no more and no less (meanwhile, a genuine campus freedom-of-speech issue, the right to criticise and call for boycotts of Israel, has been criminalised in an increasing number of states over the course of the Trump administration). In the meantime, in case anyone hasn't noticed my avatar lately, his administration is ruthlessly pursuing a guy who publicised evidence of American lies and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan – something the US public, in particular, had a right to know. So yeah, forgive me if I'm not exactly optimistic about Trump's commitment to freedom of speech.
I don't say all this because I think the New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN offer an unbiased appraisal of Trump's presidency or don't sometimes downplay his rare positive achievements in favour of beating up irrelevancies. Indeed, I find their anti-Trump obsession so grating and all-encompassing that I can barely even read the first two publications any more, and I certainly don't trust them to provide balanced coverage (I think even less of the cable-news networks). So the video is right in one way – we are getting a somewhat skewed image of Trump's presidency from the mainstream media, and stuff like the First Step Act is getting unfairly buried. But the answer to that isn't more propaganda, and unfortunately that's all this video offers. And it's even worse than the bias shown by the mainstream media, in my view, because, even if they're blinkered and overzealous, at least they're holding the world's most powerful leader to account. Trump's propagandists, on the other hand, are merely providing the administration's political spin uncritically. It'd be nice if the liberal capitalist media stopped giving them ammunition, but let's not forget that, if the choice is giving the government of the day a hard time and being a propaganda mouthpiece for them, the former is operating much closer to the democratic ideals of the fourth estate than the latter. |
|
|
|
|
stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
|
Post subject: | |
|
I'm not going to try to pick all that apart, some of the critisism if fair, some harsh.
On the unemployment rate, I trust those figures as much as I'd trust a Guardian article. Every government of all colours tweaks the criteria to try to make themselves look good. To my mind, a far better measure would be "employment rate". You could potentially draw on tax data to measure who is earning enough to pay tax, that's just off the top of my head and there may be valid reasons why a different or combined data set would be needed.
So using Hispanics as an example, many of whom won't be registered for any kind of benefit so I have NFI how they know how many are unemployed, but they'd have an idea how many are in the country and measuring how many are employed would be a truer stat.
Having said that, assuming the way the data is collected and measured hasn't fundamentally changed, that's still a big improvement in Hispanic and Black employment, GFC not withstanding _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
|
|
|
|
Jezza
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010 Location: Ponsford End
|
Post subject: | |
|
Tucker nails the situation with the Sanders-Warren feud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj-h_wQpalA _________________ | 1902 | 1903 | 1910 | 1917 | 1919 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1935 | 1936 | 1953 | 1958 | 1990 | 2010 | 2023 | |
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
|
Post subject: | |
|
I wouldn’t mark him down for that one, given that downplaying the injuries may well have kept the war hounds at bay for long enough to avert disaster. _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
|
stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
|
Post subject: | |
|
hang on a freaking second, what lies or did I miss something?
No casualties is true.
No service people were hurt would also be true.
If they gave a statement that said "11 people were treated for symptoms of concussion, but no one was injured" would that suffice?
Now, if they said no one was injured then came out later and said 11 people had been treated for symptoms of death and/or dismemberment I might give it some credence. _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
|
|
|
|
Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
Post subject: | |
|
Concussion?
More like why are none of us caring. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
|
|