641–650 of 1001 posts
Only after reading about this did I realise that RBG was Catholic. There would have been a lot of familiarity of thought and philosophy in their backgrounds. In some part, it makes it easier to disagree. Some of the arguments have been going on for centuries.
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> He ideally should be able to, as long as the correct procedures are followed. Part of that procedure is having your party in charge of the Senate at the time of said nomination. Obama did nominate someone, he simply could not get him confirmed. That's on Obama (and Democrats more generally). Trump will also nominate someone, and because his party has a majority in the Senate, that nominee will likely be confirmed w…
McConnel had serious doubts that Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, would _fail_ to get a majority in the senate, so he forbade the nomination to come to a vote. So it’s a little different than you pose: you a pretending that Obama’s nomination came to a vote and lost (which would be entirely legitimate). The majority leader prevented that from even happening.
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> He ideally should be able to, as long as the correct procedures are followed. Part of that procedure is having your party in charge of the Senate at the time of said nomination. Obama did nominate someone, he simply could not get him confirmed. That's on Obama (and Democrats more generally). Trump will also nominate someone, and because his party has a majority in the Senate, that nominee will likely be confirmed w…
> he simply could not get him confirmed That's hardly the whole truth. McConnell refused to even hold hearings.
"Elections have consequences" and all that.
Absolutely. My family is feverishly working on how to leave this hellscape of a country we’re in. The United States is dead.
I’m sad to say you may find the grass is always greener on the other side - government corruption exists everywhere that government exists.
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He ideally should be able to, as long as the correct procedures are followed. Republicans, however, set the precedent by not allowing Obama to appoint one in his last year in office. My money, however, is on them ramming someone through anyways.
But that was a republican senate that had the power to confirm or not. Now you have a republican president and senate so if they want to ram somebody through they can do that.
Remove the Publicly visible Like Count and those kind of conversations and connections are easy. The Like count makes people defensive or aggressive especially when they are called out in public leading to never ending reaction and counter reaction cycles. Without that dumb random signal interfering in conversations all kinds of strange connections are possible. I see it at work meetings between highly competitive pe…
Things like mods (most people don't have the time commitment), voting (terminally online people will be able to vote earlier and more often, driving the conversation), front page thresholds (a small group of people acting as filters for new submissions), and time limited submissions (the longer you wait to comment the more likely the conversation will have died) just skews things even more.
For all the discussion about the low quality of online conversations, there seems to be very little discussion about the environments we've created and what kind of discussion these environments encourage.
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Theres a sliding scale of it though. The disinformation and anti-intellectual campaigns are generally weaker in mainland Europe and as a consequence the governments are less broken. The US is at the point where 30-40% of the country would drink bleach and shoot their neighbor at the presidents command while probably similar numbers are functionally illiterate. Not to say the democracy has been functioning, but you ca…
There's a tendency to overstate the popularity of our politicians. The President received 46% of the vote with 56% turnout, which means only 26% of the eligible vote. And many of those voters "plugged their nose" at the polls (though they may do it again). We have minority rule in this country, and many people don't realize how small the minority is. Both political parties are hugely unpopular (even with their own me…
I've said, and I'll say it again, from 1776 to 2020, the US was never really a democracy. The power was not in the hands of the people.
For those so certain that the Republican Senate is going to ram though someone, there are a few moderates left, and they've already decided thing can wait until after the election: "So far the following GOP Senators have pledged that they will not consider a Supreme Court appointment until after the next inauguration. Susan Collins Chuck Grassley Lisa Murkowski" [0]: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1307115333669580…
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You’re doing exactly what the Republicans want: they don’t need you to support them as long as you don’t get in their way. Unless you share their goals, you might want to reconsider this strategy.
I'm sorry but how exactly did they democrats get in the way last time when Obama was president? Rolling over and saying whats suppose to happen doesn't qualify as anything meaningful as far as I am concerned. If the democrats want support, they need to grow a fucking backbone and show us they deserve it.
That’s a great example of WHY you need to vote in every election: it’s not enough to get a narrow win, you need a margin to get much done. If you want candidates more to your liking, you need to start organizing at the local level and building a movement: politics go to people who show up. The GOP has minority approval for most of their positions but is in power because their voters show up at every election.
In the United States, one especially important thing to focus on is electoral reform. Currently, most voters have a binary choice where not voting for the Republican candidate is effectively the same as voting for the Democrat or vice versa. The best long term thing we could see would be more ranked or run-off voting so it’s viable to run multiple candidates.
Due to a really old technicality in our electoral system, we keep putting people in the presidency that the American people didn't actually vote for. Both Bush and Trump were not elected by a popular vote. The majority of American are being held hostage by a minority of voters with a disproportionate amount of political power. These un-elected presidents have had such incredibly far-reaching influences on the America…
> Both Bush and Trump were not elected by a popular vote. Neither was Clinton. Sometimes it goes your direction, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidentia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidentia...
If you're talking about Hilary, the majority of Americans did vote for her, not Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
Edit: As erichocean pointed out, I am incorrect. Although Hilary received the most votes of any candidate, the majority of Americans did not vote for her. I think that my point still stands, however.