Right-wing lawmakers are proving increasingly willing to force potentially divisive votes.
Nothing good in the history of mankind has ever come from conservatism. Nothing at all.
Conservatism is destructive and deadly and should be openly identified as such.
Fascism lite*
Impeaching Biden over nothing while at the same time censuring Schiff for impeaching Trump. Wow
consistency is not their game.
A pox upon both houses. Both sides are hypocritical as hell. And both sides fucking suck.
Unfortunately the American electorate is too afraid of change to do anything about it, and/or too lazy to vote in primaries in significant numbers, and/or the opposing party puts forward stupid candidates that have no change.
Thus Congress has like a 18% approval rating, but a 80+% re-election rate.And in most cases, I’d argue that’s because candidates insist on pushing stupid wedge issues. The Democrat down south is going to go anti-gun which makes them unelectable. The Republican up north is going to go anti-abortion or anti-LGBT which makes them unelectable in a blue state. And rather than set those wedge issues aside and recognize that there’s FAR more important things at stake, we keep squabbling over bullshit rather than actually making progress.
I agree that both sides do shitty things, but they’re no where near equivocal.
- Democrats impeached Trump for withholding aid to Ukraine in an attempt to blackmail his political opponent, and then again for inciting an insurrection when he lost the election.
- Republicans are trying to impeach Biden because he’s a Democratic, while they’re trying to normalize impeachment to downplay how serious it is so Trump’s previous impeachments don’t look so bad for the next election.
Implying that both sides suck equally is dangerous. It’d be like a kid saying “My parents made me eat my vegetables, they suck. Also the guy that broke into my house and tried to stab my family sucks. All adults suck.”
Seriously, Trump earned those impeachments.
He worked hard for them, he’s a hard worker, perhaps the hardest worker, people come up to him with tears in their eyes and ask “how did you get those impeachments?” and he says “I just worked hard”, because that’s what he does, he works hard to be impeached…
Boy do I love whether I’m allowed to exist being seen as a “stupid wedge issue.” Totally agree, we should comprise and only shoot half the LGBT people! /s
Real-talk, the solution here is to encourage more gays/queers/trans folk to run for elected positions of power to better represent their minority.
Didn’t mean to imply that LGBT is not an important issue. Not at all. Just that it’s something that one side feels more strongly about than the other.
To an Evangelical (usually conservative), persecuting LGBT people is good policy and good for the country. To a Liberal (and to many like myself, FWIW), persecuting LGBT people is a civil rights violation that makes a person unelectable.
To a Liberal, gun control is good policy that will save lives. To a gun owner (usually conservative) gun control is a civil rights violation, an unconstitutional violation of the Bill of Rights that makes a person unelectable just as much as if they suggested needing a license to exercise free speech.
So what I’m suggesting-- if the GOP stopped trying to persecute LGBT folks, or the Democrats gave up gun control, either one of them would GREATLY increase their appeal especially to moderates and people on the other side of the aisle but who are fed up with their own party.
Put differently— if a bunch of politicians came to you and said ‘we’ll stop trying to take away LGBT rights, but in exchange you stop trying to take away gun rights’, would you agree to that?
You are aware that the overwhelming majority of Americans support gun control measures, right? So LGBTQ people should die because 20% of the country has a gun fetish because they’re insecure little removed?
If I understand you correctly, your suggesting the politicians should say “We’ll stop trying to deny people the right to live and exist, in exchange for not trying to stop unstable people from easily murdering random civilians”?
also I have never seen an outright ban on guns proposed in the legislature. Limitations on ownership (drug use, mental health issues, requirement to take a course) and type/options (clips size, rate of fire, concealability, etc.)
Even if an outright ban were the goal for some incremental policy changes wouldn’t ever get there.
We already nearly all agree on and have weapons controls. There are weapons a private citizen simply cannot legally own.
We’re debating where to draw the line on who and what and when. And at this stage, all we’re asking for is to move the line a couple of inches to try and prevent the worst of the frequent, common, and unacceptable tragedies.
The gun nuts act like there’s an absolute position you can hold with no exceptions. The only way that can be true is if you believe every citizen has the right to walk into the local pharmacy and buy a yellowcake bomb and jar of weaponized smallpox any time they feel like it, and if you believe that, you are insane.
There’s no absolute position. It’s a negotiation. The conservatives refuse to engage in any negotiation whatsoever because they do not have any sincere principle they are defending on the issue.
With respect I think you haven’t spent much time listening to pro-gun people.
Different people have different opinions. Sure, there are some absolutists. But that’s not everybody.
The ‘line in the sand’ that almost ALL pro-gun people will get behind, is semi-automatic small arms- pistols and rifles and shotguns and the like, as we know them today. Not machineguns or rocket launchers or cannons. Do you see people rallying on the steps of capitol buildings demanding machineguns and rocket launchers be re-legalized? I don’t.
If you want to understand why there’s no negotiation, this comic explains the pro-gun position pretty well.
To put that in perspective, you must understand that in the early 1900s, you could order a machinegun, a fully-automatic weapon (hold down the trigger and it will rapidly and repeatedly fire), through the mail, delivered to your doorstep with no background checks or other interference. And you’d order this from a hardware catalog. There were shooting competitions in school- kids brought guns to school all the way up to the 1970s or so because shooting was a competitive school sport.So follow the history, and it’s the same thing repeated over and over. Anti-gun people want to compromise, we’ll regulate this but not that. Wait a few years and it happens again. Go through a few iterations of that and guns are now one of the most highly regulated items you can (sometimes) buy. And yet there were no school shootings in 1920, even though you could buy a VERY effective firearm for such purpose in the mail.
So I suggest instead of writing off anyone who takes a pro-gun position as a ‘gun nut’, you should try listening to those who disagree with you and try to figure out WHY they disagree.
Oh god fucking forbid we engage in the hard process of incremental policy based on changing circumstances. Cry me a goddamn river.
This isn’t a slippery slope. The argument to ban some classes of guns has to meet strict constitutional scrutiny, not just a rational basis. You have to successfully argue the harm justifies a limit on the right. Something our system is – or at least was – equipped to do. But nowadays, maybe it genuinely isn’t, with the way conservatives have spread like cancer through the court system and legislatures to fill it with stubborn no-compromise 2A rights nonsense that refuses to engage in any reform.
It is a factual reality that guns have become better machines over time. They’ve become cheaper, more available, and more dangerous. You bring up a 1900s machine gun as if this is an example of some incredibly dangerous weapon? It goddamn isn’t.
A 1900s machine gun is hardly any threat at all to modern civil society. It is large, stationary, and obvious. It is not reliable. It is not easy to use, contrary to your characterization. You cannot sneak it into a shopping mall. You cannot conceal or open carry it while out on errands. It’d be a pretty major effort to even reliably mount it in good working order to a vehicle. A modern “sport” semi-automatic rifle or even handgun offers a bigger threat than one of those things.What an utterly ridiculous argument you make, saying there were no school shootings in the 1900s when there were likely no guns CAPABLE of that kind of thing at the time, and certainly none in regular circulation.
I did not write off anyone who takes a pro-gun position as a ‘gun nut’. You cannot “respectfully” mischaracterize what I wrote in such a disingenuous way. I wrote off anyone who takes a no-compromise position as one. Want to have lots of guns in society? Do what the Swiss do. Extensive and continuing training and licensing. Universal registration. Strict rules about safe handling. And couple it all with major poverty interventions, public education, and healthcare to get rid of violence and desperation at the source. Most progressives are down for that. But instead, the gun nuts try to do the literal opposite by passing things like Constitutional Carry.
I’m not a Biden fan. I’m not anti-Biden, but I edge close to it. That said, just more dumb three ring circus antics. As P.T. Barnum noted, “There’s a sucker burn every minute.”
What about Biden don’t you like? Are you typically a left leaning voter?
I hear a lot of people saying they don’t like him, and aside from some union decisions that I wish would have gone a little better, I think he’s doing a pretty good job overall.I’m not the person you’re replying to but I don’t like Biden’s push for gun control or his inability to do anything about Healthcare. I want universal health care and an AR-15 and I’m tired of having to choose one or the other. He also hasn’t made any effort to legalize weed, though I think the pardons he handed out to non-violent marijuana offenders was a great move. I like the idea of student debt relief but it doesn’t solve the root issue of rising tuition costs and exorbitant student loans. I like his stances on most issues except for firearms, but he seems to be ineffective at getting things done.
