They have shifted greatly in France too (towards the right, very unusual for France). So is this really linked with Biden or linked with the social isolation?
In my view, the issue is short term memory among voters and frustration with the political class and its inability to do do much at all. Since the other team is in office right now, people don’t like them.
One of the parties has been branded as the “Lockdown party” during covid. So long as there is a collective with the view that closing people’s businesses at any given time, indefinitely, without recourse, is acceptable - we can expect an endless stream of voters rushing to the other side of the aisle.
Speak to right wingers and you’ll find that many will tell you they weren’t convinced by some right wing youTuber. It’s often the policy or rhetoric of the left that drove them away.
A specific example in 2021, lockdown policies of the left may have had a far more profound impact on pushing people away than any random guest on Joe Rogan.
They should set up a big clock, like the national debt clock, that counts up the lives saved through various pandemic response techniques (subtracting actual from forecast deaths?).
Add lives saved by various requirements. Subtract lives from increased traffic fatalities [1]. Multiply by the number of businesses decapitated by lockdowns.
You would not literally want to multiply by the number of business but I would be open to a dollar to life conversion made on the basis that you can spend money to feed people and perform medical services.
Liberal values have been thoroughly rejected in favour of strong authoritarian measures. These policies often completely disregard decades of progressive policies. Lockdowns have definitely hurt nearly every major liberal issue and we don’t have much to show for it.
Agree, my thoughts exactly. There is something going on here related to the lockdowns/pandemic response.
Just for myself personally, while no where near enough to change political affiliation, I've gotten quite sick of what appears to be hypocrisy, arrogance, and gross incompetence from the left establishment, expressed through the popular media, government policies, and generally the "blue check Twitter" crowd. We are now living in "TSA everywhere" land with all kinds of ridiculous sanctimony.
I'm vaccinated, got a booster, caught and recovered from COVID initially and now again from omicron last month and still getting tested on a regular basis. When I go to a restaurant I have to show ID, vaccination proof, temperature check, leave a phone number, then wear a mask to walk 2 meters from the door to my table...where I can take off my mask and hang out for an hour surrounded by people doing the same...that is, unless I need to go to the bathroom. If I don't wear a mask while making the short walk from my table to the bathroom--oh my god, I'm basically single-handedly murdering old and immunocompromised people.
It is hard for people to take you seriously when you are associated with this sort of emperor's new clothes COVID theater. This is literally the modern equivalent of the "or else the terrorists win" nonsense of the Global War on Terror era.
It's not surprising in either case, you have a surgery that can be put off so as to not risk spreading a deadly virus in an environment with compromised individuals. Meanwhile the same hospital probably has a major need for staff, so your wife is allowed to continue working despite the risks because she has been trained on how to properly use PPE, and follow safety procedures where everyone else working there is doing same.
Of all the places to complain about, a hospital seems one of the least warranted
One party blows everything up. The other gets elected to fix it. That turns out to take longer than 2-4 years, especially with opposition and a thin margin in House and Senate, so the party that broke things campaigns on how bad things are now (due to their own actions).
This isn’t an accident. It’s an intentional pattern that creates a ratchet effect. Dems are quite happy to keep many things in place that they could easily reverse. Policies continuing to exist don’t get much press, so they don’t have to give the game away in getting what they want.
On a year to year basis it’s difficult to see. But look over decades: this is a party that not only failed to advance anything building on the New Deal, but failed at every step to arrest its complete demolition.
If you really believe that the reason the dems can’t accomplish anything is because of Manchin, Sinema, The Parliamentarian, or $WEEKLY_SCAPEGOAT_NAME, I’m sorry to say you’re a mark. It’s like that Key & Peele “hold me back” skit.
I mean it's great PR for the west, no doubt about it. I think the South Park episode "I'm a Little Bit Country" is very relevant here - the US is a country founded on the basis of "saying one thing and doing another".
The main difference is the DNC is mildly in favor of progressive reform, but not at the cost of their piece of the capitalist pie. They will happily take credit for anything grassroots organizers bring to the point that even the corporate donors will pretend to care. Remember that, for example, the DNC's support for marriage equality started with Biden's gaffe as VP. It was already so popular that it didn't matter whether they supported it or not, so the gaffe became platform when polls didn't shift against them.
I'll take that over the GOP wanting me, at best, crushed under a boot and subservient, but I'll still vote for just about any candidate the DSA puts up locally if they ever do. I recognize the barrier function of voting for whatever barely animate ghoul the DNC triangulates on in the primary, so I'll do that until someone figures out how to get > 50% at that level with someone I'll vote for rather than a lineholder.
I hate to say it, but that's the "with us elected" half of "everything the same but...".
The DNC's marriage track record as far as I know was the same as the RNC, the only difference is who was celebrating when the supreme court made the decision.
> Remember that, for example, the DNC's support for marriage equality started with Biden's gaffe as VP.
That's a good example of why people who think the Democratic Party is a vehicle for progressivism are wrong. In 2008, Black people--without whom Democrats would not be a viable national party--said homosexuality was morally unacceptable by more than 2:1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu.... They were as conservative on that issue as Republicans. (Even as of 2019, 45% of Black Democrats think legalizing same-sex marriage was a bad thing, compared to just 11% of white Democrats. That puts them closer to Republicans (57%) than to the white members of their party. Hispanic Democrats are also twice as likely as white Democrats to say it was a bad thing, while Hispanics overall are three times as likely. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/5-gender-fam...)
The Democratic Party is a coalition of white social liberals, who are either moderate or progressive economically, along with people of color who vary significantly in political ideology. A significant chunk of the voters who put the party over the top in places like Georgia and Arizona are the old Reagan coalition: upwardly mobile suburbanites of all races.
The DNC's support for marriage equality-- or lack thereof-- was ultimately irrelevant. The U.S. got marriage equality because the Supreme Court ruled that, no matter what you may personally think about marriage between a man and a woman, same-sex marriage is a perfectly cromulent legal fiction that people have the right to avail themselves of, if they feel like it. There's nothing wrong with that, it was a perfectly fine way to skirt the controversy about what marriage "ought" to be by pointing out that law doesn't always work that way.
> If you really believe that the reason the dems can’t accomplish anything is because of Manchin, Sinema, The Parliamentarian, or $WEEKLY_SCAPEGOAT_NAME, I’m sorry to say you’re a mark
Those are all Democrats. If those Democrats aren't the reason, who is?
> It’s like that Key & Peele “hold me back” skit.
You think some of the Dem Senators would vote differently if it weren't for the opposition? Maybe so. When everyone knows a vote will go one way, you can never tell whether people are "sincere" voters.
Still, it can't be that 49 out of 50 Senate Dems are all against the mild social democratic reforms being rejected by the 50th.
Seems like only two have backbones and the rest enjoy being corralled by the Majority Whip? Perhaps we need more individual integrity and less party politics
Progressives are beginning to sound like those "if you build it they will come" conservatives who think the Republican Party would win if they just refocus on "fundamentals," like mandating Christianity.
The "ratchet effect" arises from the fact that the United States is a moderate country. If you look at the House popular vote over the last 20 years, Republicans have won it as often as Democrats. The House popular vote is a good metric to look at because it isn't affected by gerrymandering, and Republicans have an incentive to contest every single House seat (unlike with the Presidential popular vote, where Republicans have zero incentive to schlep all over rural California, New York, Illinois, etc., scrounging up votes).
Even within the Democratic Party itself, Biden decisively won the nomination. It's wasn't because of "electability." It's because the party is entirely dependent on minorities to be a viable national party, and American racial politics means that minorities often vote Democrat even if they are moderate to conservative. My parents are the "brown people" who turned Virginia blue. They liked Biden and disliked Warren. Not because of "electability" but because they're economically moderate and socially conservative, but as immigrants from a Muslim country they don't like Trump's rhetoric. That's the Democratic coalition, and progressives need to come to terms with that.
The Republicans absolutely don't have an incentive to contest every single House seat (neither do the Democrats), and they don't. For instance, 2 cycles ago, an avowed neo-Nazi --- who literally stood on Chicago street corners in a Nazi uniform with a bullhorn --- took the GOP nomination for Lipinski's seat. That was possible because, at the time, running as a Republican against Lipinski was suicidal. The GOP did not contest that seat.
Each cycle, both parties make red-to-blue and blue-to-red lists of districts to flip, and allocate money disproportionately to them.
Even setting aside top-down party decisions, which clearly happen, seats aren't contested seriously for knock-on reasons: the best candidates won't run for hopeless seats, because the loss taints them and opens them up to carpetbagging charges when they try to contest other districts.
I don't think I disagree with your whole analysis, but the argument that "Republicans have an incentive to contest every single House seat" clearly doesn't hold.
That's fair. What I was trying to get at is that Republicans have more of an incentive to contest rural areas of blue states in House elections than in Presidential elections. There was zero Trump campaigning in my large Maryland county, even though Romney won it in 2012 and Trump came within two points in 2016.
The New Deal was a bad deal, in fact a dismal failure. Much of it was at some point rolled back by the Supreme Court, and the economy picked up hugely as a result. What brought the U.S. out of the 1930s Great Depression was devaluation of the dollar, but that could have been accomplished without the detrimental effect of everything else that was part of the New Deal.
The New Deal was a bad deal economically, but some historians think it prevented a violent socialist uprising. Of course we'll never know if that's really true.
We’re also living through a multi-year global pandemic that has made life harder and less enjoyable for basically everyone. When life is hard, people blame the current government.
Obviously political preferences over entire populations can’t be reduced to single issues. Still, I’m guessing the negative impacts of the pandemic have made a major impact. IMO they have a lot of people thinking “why didn’t you handle this better?” (with widely differing views on what constitutes “better”), and thus resenting the government, even if there’s really no silver bullet for handling something awful like a pandemic.
We've got things pretty good in the US. It's why people are trying to sneak across the border in droves-- everybody recognizes the economic opportunities.
It's true that the pendulum swings back and forth. The Democrats control things (as they do now), they make some changes to fulfill campaign promises and they over-reach in a few spots. People always want something better, so they soon vote for Republicans. Who pass things they campaigned on, roll back some Democrat over-reaches, and do a little over-reaching themselves. Then the Democrats come back into power.....
The system works. Along the way, we get social changes like gay marriage, maybe some long overdue restrictions on late-term abortions, etc. Society slowly moves forward.
I just wish there wasn't as much demonization and pot-stirring along the way. There's really no need to throw hate at people actross the aisle, because without them your party would soon run amuck and ruin everything. The system works.
The Democrats had a razor-thin majority in both House and Senate, but they tried to govern like they had a large majority. That... didn't work. And it led to people comparing what they promised (or at least tried to do) with what they delivered. From that perspective, the Democrats failed miserably.
That leads to a lot of disillusioned voters.
I don't know why the Democrats chose this route, but it was a spectacular, predictable failure. Especially, Biden should have known better. He spent a lot of years in the Senate; he should have known what couldn't be done with a 50-50 split.
In Colorado, at least, independents get to vote in primaries. In 2016, Colorado Proposition 108 passed allowing independent voters to vote in the primary elections. Now, independents can request a party’s ballot before the election. If they don’t, they’ll be mailed all parties’ ballots but are instructed to fill out just one. If they turn in more than one, their vote is invalidates for all primaries voted in.
Primaries are a unique situation. Very few people vote in primaries. In fact the people who vote in primaries care a great deal about their candidates. The people who care the most about their candidates tend to the far left/right. The end result is one of two outcomes: 1.) the voters in the main election have to pick from a list (two in the U.S.) candidates that are much more left/right wing than
the actual voter considers themselves. Or 2.) the party realizes that the candidate that is leading is not generally electable and ignores votes to find someone more appropriate.
I think that the republicans in 2020 followed (1) and the democrates followed (2). This is how we get biden. If a more progressive democrat was the candidate, would trump have won? That was the fear of the democratic party.
(I just made this up so take it for what its worth)
People who self-identify as "independent" have views that closely align with one side or the other. Lean-democrat independents believe the exact same things as self-identified democrats, and lean-republican independents believe the exact same things as actual republicans. They are just too chicken to commit.
The inflation issue - “it’s the economy, stupid” - is causing food and housing to spike. Shelves are often empty where I live for random things. This week it was chicken, next week it’s cream cheese, and so on. Very abnormal for the US and the people in power are not focusing on this.
Since I won't ever get to vote for a Pro-Choice Pro-2nd Amendment president, I guess I'll just stop watching the news, because I can not fathom how we can be skewing Republican after everything that's happened.
Undo what? The only government-controlled "left" thing that happened is adding CRT to some school curriculums. Oh, and anti-trust enforcement is ramping up again - though that seems bipartisan. "Wokeism" and other right-wing boogeymen are cultural or corporate in nature.
I think the current Democratic administration is most notable for its fecklessness and inability to get anything at all done. Maybe that's what's driving voters away.
On the federal level the biggest problem is the economy in general and inflation and jobs specifically. As the the saying goes, its the economy stupid. Whether its the big guy's fault doesn't ever matter. People will always hold the president responsible for the economy. The effects of inflation has just hit us and prices jumped. The job market is also a mess, there's the great resignation of course but I think I speaks to a larger cultural shift in American work culture that will have long term implications.
On the state and local levels there is the tug of war between governments trying to keep covid under control and those same measures being deeply unpopular. I don't know what the solution to that is but there is a sizeable enough group of voters who just want to get on with their lives that its having an effect.
I agree that the economy is probably forefront in voters' minds, but there's nothing to "undo" in this area. I guess a Republican administration could cancel the infrastructure bill? It's not like Biden passed a series of radical policies that changed how the economy works.
It's not that simple. It isn't about a particular bill. People want their lives back. They want inflation under control, they want their jobs and retirement secure. They want to be able to buy a car without having to wait a year for it to arrive. They want to go to sports games and have holidays and watch movies and all the other things we consider normal. They want to buy a house and not have speculators and investment firms jacking up prices because the rich already saw the problem with the market so they traded their cheap cash for physical assets a year ago.
As long as COVID and the economy aren't "fixed" whoever is in power will have them as major problems.
Hey man I don't make the rules. People expect leaders to come up with solutions. Obviously it doesn't always work that way but if you can't handle the criticism then don't apply for the job. Its not exactly a secret at this point that the economy is always the president's fault even when it isn't.
We give them the resources to fix it and they don't.
Fuck, there are homes everywhere, we have the ability to dig, plant, make food, we still have the ability to transport things around. I know that no one wants to work anymore - but at this point, the entire economy is a state of feeling - and that's exactly what a president (or actually all of the leaders of the world) MUST fix. The resources are ALL there, but I think everyone is just letting it all go to shit.
Can you be more specific about what things went too left since Biden was elected? It was my impression that people are more dissatisfied about their jobs and that covid is still plaguing us.
Other people are pointing to it in the thread, but it's mostly about forced vaccines and not a damn thing about getting people N95 masks - which was one of the things Biden said he would work on getting everyone access to. And nothing was said of forced vaccines in his run up. Also the inflation and crime seems to be skyrocketing and crime is often better handled by republican leadership. I mean look at Boudin in SF. Ultra LEFT news and you get break ins.
Biden specifically stated in December 2020 that he wouldn't impose a vaccine mandate. Regardless of whether such mandates are a good idea or not, I think many voters are upset that he lied about it.
You said that political party preferences have shifted in 2021 because things have gone too far left. The things you point are are unrelated.
If you had said people are moving toward the R column because Biden hasn't met his campaign promise, that would be a valid argument. There was a shortage of N95 masks under the previous administration, there continues to be a shortage, and you ascribe that to some movement toward the left. That is a non sequitur.
As for the homeless problem in SF: again, has that issue changed since Biden took office? You have cultural myopia if you think a local SF issue is causing national polling trends to shift right. SF homelessness was an issue in 2020 when Biden was elected and people voted Dem to begin with.
Nobody seems to have moved to the left though. The only significant thing that passed was an infrastructure bill, and none of the Democrats in congress seemed to have made any radical opinion shifts.
I think this was a case of playing vote chicken. There were a tiny number of democrats who were never going to vote for those bills. There are a larger group that didn't want to vote for those bills but didn't want to go against party lines. So they voted for bills knowing that they wouldn't pass. They risked nothing and still got the outcome they desired.
The summer of 2020 included a number of radical opinion shifts among politicians. Or maybe, since we can't know a person's mind and what opinions they'd previously quietly believed, more like radical shifts in publicly stated position.
Personally, I would guess it has more to do with people's attitudes shifting away from the COVID-cautious attitude the Dems staked out towards the Republicans' back-to-normal, outraged-at-restrictions stance.
I'd have agreed with you if Bernie hadn't been able to effectively voice his views during the Democratic Preaidential Debates in the 2020 election. And prior, in 2016, he was able to shift the collective viewpoint of the Democrats. I think he has had a tremendous impact, even if he wasn't able to go all the way.
Bernie Sanders won't get a serious chance to debate because his platform appeals to a small minority of Americans and most folks don't want he's selling. Democrats make up less than half of votes and progressives are a minority of Democrats.
To borrow an analogy from Jerry Garcia, Bernie Sanders is the black licorice of American politicians. Most people don't like him, but the people who like him really like him.
Something like 70% of Americans support some form of "medicare for all"[1]. And as another poster mentioned Bernie was to the right of many democrats on the second amendment. I'm not sure which unpopular issues you're referring to.
> Democrats make up less than half of votes
Not the popular vote. Even Hillary managed to win the popular vote in 2016.
I was referring to registered democrats, as I believe was the article.
Regarding Medicare for all, those numbers are misleading. It has 70% of support until you get into the actual details of implementation. It's the same when folks say "An overwhelming majority of Americans support higher taxes on the rich". Well yes, but those surveys tend to leave out the definition of rich, so people tend to interpret it as "Rich = Someone who makes more money than I do".
This is not to advocate against medicare for all, but rather to say that it's easy to garner support for something in the abstract without getting into all the messy details that reality likes to impose.
Bernie is all over the map on gun control. He's to the right of Hillary, in that he opposes mandatory buybacks. He also favors the right of permit holders to carry weapons into national parks, and he voted against requiring trigger locks on handguns. But he favors prohibition on the sale of assault weapons (including many of the most common rifles in the country) and expanded background checks. The NRA gives him an "F", but given the above that seems extreme. He does appear to be on the right of the typical Democratic candidate, but to the left of the typical GOP candidate.
He's a senator from Vermont, a constitutional carry state and one of the most pro-gun states in the country. He wouldn't have survived if he was anti-2A. His positions as you note as pretty clearly "toe the party line on the limited gun issues that democrat voters pay attention to" but pro gun on literally everything else.
The two sides of the political spectrum see very different images, and there's a very different "everything that happened" depending on which news source you see.
"Everything that happened" includes cancel culture, woke culture, etc. It includes images like Kenosha burning. If you're a poor working-class white male, it's hard to vote for the party who calls you privileged. If those are the images you're seeing, you'll vote one way. If you see images of police killing minorities, you'll vote another way.
"it's hard to vote for the party who calls you privileged."
that's very true and it goes both ways (right-to-left and left-to-right). When you call someone the enemy long enough they will eventually start to feel the same way towards you.
2A is dead. Learn to 3d print guns. It's very easy. It will get even easier. Some fine folks have even figured out how to make ammunition from unregulated components in Europe.
> 2A is dead. Learn to 3d print guns. It's very easy. It will get even easier. Some fine folks have even figured out how to make ammunition from unregulated components in Europe.
Huh? Being able to produce something illegally is in no way a substitute for having a right to possess that thing legally.
1. 3D printed guns are crap.
2. Some people would like possess a gun that isn't a "go to jail card."
3. Some people would like to be able to conventionally practice shooting their guns, without attracting "go to jail" attention.
The only thing that 3d printed guns and homemade "ammunition from unregulated components" is to how gun control to be a futile effort, because criminals will still have access to them even if law-abiding citizens are blocked. A criminal planning a crime might not mind points 2 & 3 above, but a law abiding citizen certainly will.
Hybrid like FGC-9 can be reliable for over a thousand rounds. Non-firearm parts added in US to a printed AR or glock receiver ['firearm'] can be good for several thousand.
>Huh? Being able to produce something illegally is in no way a substitute for having a right to possess that thing legally.
Aight so how do I carry a glock for defense in Hawaii? How about carrying a glock for defense in DC after catching a felony for illegally importing a lobster? Can I drill a 3rd hill in an AR without asking daddy for permission?
>3. Some people would like to be able to conventionally practice shooting their guns, without attracting "go to jail" attention.
Aight, so tell me how I could avoid being infringed while mag dumping a lightning-link.
2A is dead, we have a patchwork of [compared to rest of world] liberal gun laws that allow you to enjoy some firearms in some situations. But it's infringed to hell, particularly if you are a 'felon' [not in the sense of a felon when constitution was written -- just walking onto a prohibited water conservation area without disturbing it is a felony in my state].
The alternative is the politics of the deed, just make it.
Sure 2A would be better than mere ability to make them. But you have to live within reality. The needle isn't moving back to free of infringement.
>but a law abiding citizen certainly will
Well 2A says keeping/bearing a gun can't be illegal. Unfortunately state and federal laws say otherwise, and judges are happy to bend over and make any excuse to infringe, particularly against felons.
> Hybrid like FGC-9 can be reliable for over a thousand rounds.
Crap is relative. How good is that gun compared to one manufactured using conventional techniques?
In general, you're missing the point: the 2A isn't dead, since it's what allows people who aren't fools (i.e. people who have the sense to avoid doing things that could land them in jail even though they personally think they should be able to do those things) to own and use a gun.
Now, if you are a fool who wants to act like the law doesn't apply to you, I can see how you might think the "2A is dead," but that's just an artifact of a foolish perspective. People like that might also want to setup a GoFundMe for their commissary account.
Supposedly barrels made with ECM (which takes about $200-$400 in initial investment to make, and under $20 per barrel thereafter) are about comparable to factory made barrels in accuracy. So not going to win any marksmanship competitions, but good enough for ordinary use. The FGC-9 uses ECM to make the barrel.
20 years ago you were lucky to get ten shots. 10 years you'd have been lucky to get 100. Today depending on your print, you may be lucky to get 1000. In ten years, you'll probably be lucky to get 10k (which starts to reach life of barrel). 1k is a little low vs manufactured firearms, but then again some firearms like RAS-47 (american made shitty cast AK) often last only that long. You see where this is going? [ and most gun owners probably don't even put 1k rounds through their gun ]
>since it's what allows people who aren't fools (i.e. people who have the sense to avoid doing things that could land them in jail even though they personally think they should be able to do those things) to own and use a gun.
I don't think I'd call say someone who got caught with a scary mushroom 10 years ago a fool for wanting to be able to defend himself and his family.
> I don't think I'd call say someone who got caught with a scary mushroom 10 years ago a fool for wanting to be able to defend himself and his family.
I would. How well will he be able to defend his family from jail, after he's arrested for illegal possession of a firearm? If he decides he doesn't want to be arrested, how well will he do with his 3D printed gun in a shootout with the police? Will he do well enough to avoid jail time?
You're engaging in some weird fantasy. The world doesn't actually work the way you might wish it to, and if you pretend it does (and take action on that fantasy) you're very unlikely to do better than a sovereign citizen does in court (i.e. fail totally, with everyone shaking their head about how nuts you are).
Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six. IDK in what world you'd rather not have a gun when you need it because of some law that says you'll go to jail (in reality a large number of felon with firearm cases aren't pursued when it's legitimate self defense in home, and if they are the jail time is a lot less than years of life you'd lose if you were dead).
The whole point of 3d guns for many people is to avoid ever entering the court system, because by procuring all unregulated components and building it themselves, it's much more difficult for them to be caught.
Democrats couldn't move the needle even a tiny bit on gun control, even with nominal control of all three branches and stuff like Sandy Hook as a rallying cry. The most meaningful gun regulation at the Federal level in the past few decades was Trump banning bump stocks.
There's zero reason to believe the current court - which is likely to be around for decades - will do anything but increase gun rights.
The needle has been moved massively in NYC, California, Hawaii, all places where you need a permit just to exercise a right. The supreme court hasn't struck down the need for a permit to exercise a right (just to buy pistol in NYC or Hawaii).
Nowhere in the country can you just drill the third hole in an AR and go at it without asking for permission.
Nowhere in the country can someone with a federal felony [except some white collar trading crimes] exercise their second amendment right, even if all tehy did was illegally import a lobster.
Nowhere in the country can you saw a 16 inch barrel down one inch without asking daddy for permission.
Several states now require universal background check just to exercise a right (own a firearm). None of this has been strucken by supreme court.
2A is dead, now we just have a legacy of fairly liberal gun laws in certain circumstances and states.
Name a single place in US where you need a permit to buy a car or drive it on private property (which by the way, isn't an explicit right named in constitution as keeping and bearing arms is).
Permit for a protest is also utter horseshit on par with restrictions on 2A.
>> wait until you learn that you need permits to protest and drive.
> Name a single place in US where you need a permit to buy a car or drive it on private property
Even if you don't need a permit to back your car down your driveway (after someone with a permit has brought it to your home), you still need one to drive it anywhere anyone would actually want to go. So you effectively need a permit to drive.
You've entirely missed the point. You need a permit to drive _on public roads_. You don't need a permit to buy a car and only drive it on private property. Plenty of people have project cars that they tow to a race track / drag strip and don't need to register or license anything.
This is obviously NOT analogous to the 2A, where you need licenses and registrations just to buy a gun. In an analogous situation to cars, you would not need a license to buy a gun and shoot it at a firing range. So the low effort quip "lol what about drivers licenses" that adgjlsfhk1 and many others make is not reasonable.
And shooting on private property is what most people use their guns for. So you agree that the licensing situation for driving and shooting is different.
> And shooting on private property is what most people use their guns for. So you agree that the licensing situation for driving and shooting is different.
I agree they are not precisely the same thing in all respects. However practically, the situations don't seem very different.
>>> So the low effort quip "lol what about drivers licenses" that adgjlsfhk1 and many others make is not reasonable.
It kind of is reasonable, given this sub-thread started with some pretty unreasonable or at least weird positions (e.g. 2A is "dead" apparently b/c everyone can't get a full-auto without a permit).
2A is dead, 3d printing is an insurance policy. Full-auto is one of many infringements, but probably not the worst. Arguably a couple of the worst are permits just to buy a firearm (NYC), impossible to acquire permit to carry (Hawaii), and denial of civil rights to those who have finished the entirety of their sentences and probations.
Is it? An insurance policy isn't something that can blow up in your face, literally and figuratively.
Realistically, 3D printed guns aren't a direct solution to gun control, they're an argument for loosening it because they're proof it can't achieve some of its major aims.
> A good insurance policy won't blow up in your face, literally and figuratively.
I’ve wondered this myself. All the 3D printed things I’ve seen feel like really cheap, soft plastic. It’s hard to imagine it not exploding or at least melting from combustion like that.
Watch plastic defense [0]. 3d printed guns have come a long way.
For international crowd, something like FGC-9 is closest to reliable printed firearm they can get. It is hybrid. The barrel is created by 3d-printing jigs for electro-chemical machining a standard high-pressure pipe, yielding glock-like accuracy and durability of barrel. Bolt requires some work by hand. Rest is unregulated components and 3d printed.
In the US, the receiver ['firearm'] is the only component that looks regulated to the consumer. The UBAR for instance is a printed AR receiver reinforced with off-the-shelf U-bar that is extremely durable, and unless you're mag dumping or leave it in a hot car in the south or something should last thousands of round. The non-receiver parts can be bought without regulation in US.
Also bear in mind here, in self defense less than 15 rounds are typically fired.
>feel like really cheap, soft plastic.
FDM materials like PLA+ can be resilient when kept out of heat. Nylon-X and carbon fiber reinforced materials, depending on application, can provide even more rigidity and strength. Most of the stuff you've seen printed has probably been with cheap PLA with low in-fill (faster print time, somewhat hollow inside the shape). 3d printed guns are printed with very high 99+% infill (mostly solid inside the shape) with at least PLA+ to provide much more strength.
>you still need one to drive it anywhere anyone would actually want to go
You mean like onto a trailer, then off a trailer, then a bunch of left turns then back onto a trailer?
Because that sort of recreational use is pretty analogous to what people used to do with machine guns and mortars and stuff back in the day before they were heavily restricted.
I don't think that a dealership in California will allow you to leave the lot without an insurance. You can't test drive it without a driving license too.
If you finance a vehicle that is probably the case, as the financier/lien holder will impose these requirements when you sign to buy the car. If you own it outright (paid in full) then how would they stop you? Of course you shouldn't drive it on public road without insurance, but no one should care if you call a tow truck to take it to your private property.
A dealership tried to do this to me when I bought a truck with cash, and I told them [politely] to get fucked (I had insurance but no proof on me as I bought it over phone). Then they finally admitted since I owned the truck outright they wouldn't stop me.
> You can't test drive it without a driving license too.
When you're test driving you haven't bought the car. The dealership can refuse to let you drive their car for pretty much any non-protected reason.
1. Driving is not a Constitutional right, unlike the right to keep and bear arms.
2. While the First Amendment does protect speech, the Supreme Court has held that time/place/manner restrictions on speech can be created by the Government as long as there is a rational basis for them. Compare against content-based restrictions, which will be strictly scrutinized by the courts.
Legal analysis is complicated and actions rarely fall into black-or-white categories. Even Second Amendment law has a large number of contours.
The supreme court has also held that growing crops on your own private land to feed to your own animals is "interstate commerce." They're a laughable institution who's opinion should be promptly shit-canned.
2A is looking better than it has in awhile. Gun rights and shooting sports have both seen a resurgence in the last 20 years. SCOTUS is promising. And companies aren't bending over to the ATF's tyranny. Rarebreed is taking them to court over their extrajudicial rulings.
they are "skewing" republicans because the democrats are not doing a damn thing to help people who faced inflation, supply chain issues, higher gas prices, COVID, endless mass shootings, etc.
Biden's agenda is dead, he blown up BB spectacularly, he is limited to executive orders power but he does not seem to be willing to apply it properly(cancel the students' debt, legalize weed, use ACA to the full extent, etc)
Republicans have NOTHING to offer to people except of cultural issues, but they are winning because they are not democrats.
how can an executive order legalize weed or cancel student debt? you can't just change a law with an executive order, if so then what's the purpose of the legislature?
US weed regulation is such a confusing mess. Even if you personally think weed should be illegal, I'm not sure what political benefit there is to keeping it as Schedule I federally. Legalization is clearly popular as many states have either legalized it or are in the process of doing so.
You could have voted for Jo Jorgensen. Sure she had no chance of winning, but protest votes for third-party candidates help build momentum for the long term. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Depending on what state you live in, voting for a Democratic or Republican candidate may be more of a waste of your vote than voting for third-party presidential candidates. Given that nearly all states (excluding Maine and Nebraska) use a winner-takes-all approach when sending their delegates to the electoral college, marginal votes for Democratic or Republican candidates in states with solid Democratic or Republican majorities are largely wasted (contrary to popular belief about the opposite being true).
After receiving 5% of the national vote, third parties qualify for federal funding. After receiving 15% of the national vote, third parties qualify for participation in national debates.
Out of all the candidates on the ballot in the last election, Joe Biden was my favorite, but I didn't vote for him. I live in Massachusetts, a state which had a near-100% probability of sending all of its delegates to the electoral college in the name of Joe Biden. I voted for Jo Jorgensen, not because I support her or her party, but because she and her party had the greatest chance of hitting that 5% threshold and I personally value a chance of increasing political competition between parties over the empty virtue signalling I would have achieved by voting for Joe Biden instead.
I strongly believe that having more parties will strengthen our democracy, and by strategically voting for Jo Jorgensen, I know that I increased the impact of my vote and my likelihood of making the world a better place. Unless you live in a proportional state (e.g., Maine, Nebraska) or a swing state (e.g., Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), you are absolutely wasting your vote and your time by voting for a Democratic or Republican presidential candidate instead of a third party.
It's shocking how unaffected the graph is by who "ran" the country 2016-2020 in comparison to the other change-overs in the 90s and 00s. Is social media reinforcing echo chambers which let one have no doubt in their views? Are our areas of discourse now more one-sided? Insular subreddits, feeds that are curated by a self reinforcing algorithms to not show you what you might disagree with...
There is Hypernormalization [0] through popular/state media's simultaenous support of opposing views, i.e. disinformation through doubt and plausible deniability (perfected by world powers, particularly Soviet/Russian regimes in the modern era).
I had an argument this past weekend with one of my former best friends from high school and through 10 years of watching the TV he has become a literal walking Fox News parrot. An incredibly smart guy and all he could come up with was 'look at the Fox News polls for this issue and if you can find me a counter CNN poll, we can talk'. It feels like a lot of people have turned like this, its almost like a zombie apocalypse of the mind.
>These results are based on aggregated data from all U.S. Gallup telephone surveys in 2021, which included interviews with more than 12,000 randomly sampled U.S. adults.
I hate to be so cynical but I have no faith in these phone surveys anymore. Most adults I know avoid surveyors on principle. Even further, most adults I know won’t answer any number that isn’t already in their address book. It seems like the only type of person that a survey like this might reach is the stereotypical technology-fearing conservative.
That’s not to say that these results are inaccurate in any way. I just don’t believe the methodology backs up the results here.
A truly "randomly sampled" phone survey would skew to a very old demographic, and successfully recruiting younger generations with this tactic is a notorious challenge (online works better).
What they don't tell you though is that it's not truly random as claimed. They recruit a representative sample of respondents. So there are young people in the sample, it just takes more calls to get the data.
I'd guess this has something to do with the constant use of force.
Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you
Disagree with me politically on Twitter?
We'll look for your employer and coerce him into firing you
Stay two weeks at home, by the way stay in two more weeks and it's been two years. Some places even had curfews (but then if it's a BLM protest we'll ignore the existence of the virus)
We follow the science! (Except if the scientist disagrees with you. Check the interview with Don lemon and Sanjay Gupta when he's about to make a point about Joe Rogan. Lemon cuts him off and wont let him finish)
This. I was a lifelong Democrat, but no longer. I am still gobsmacked with how they abandoned free speech, the working class, bodily autonomy, and turned science into religion. They've been captured by the Twitter laptop class.
> Disagree with me politically on Twitter? We'll look for your employer and coerce him into firing you
It seems really weird to blame the Democratic party for this or Democrats as a whole since this is completely unrelated to the government or administration or elected Democrat officials.
Electing Republicans won't "fix" this for you at all.
> Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you
For interest's sake, are you consistent in wanting to remove all vaccine requirements, including for things like the measles vaccine?
Except that nearly 100% of political donations from Twitter employees go to Democrats, so it is Democrat-aligned people making the decision about who get silenced and who gets high visibility on Twitter, which influences the extremists that try to get people fired. Heck, Democrat politicians have directly advocated this sort of activity, including physical violence.
Electing Republicans might get Section 230 updated to require platforms to be platforms and not a mix of all the benefits of platforms and none of the downsides of being publishers that are not neutral in silencing certain perspectives.
Section 230 has nothing to do with the whole "cancellation" stuff. You still haven't mentioned anything that would result in less "cancellation" if Republicans were in power.
Also, I don't know why you are so eager to prevent platforms from performing moderation. Section 230 is quite simple, it means that social media companies can moderate without being responsible for their user's content. No free social media company can feasibly moderate all of their user's content, the math simply doesn't work out in terms of moderation effort per dollar in advertising revenue. Companies would have to stop moderating. The removal of 230 would lead to the total destruction of social media in the tech industry as consumers don't want to go on unmoderated platforms like 4chan.
A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.
> A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.
It doesn't just feel like it, Republicans passing state-level “lets try to work around 230” laws have had them enjoined on First Amendment grounds supported by their explicit statements of pretty much exactly the attitude you describe as the motivation for the laws.
> Except that nearly 100% of political donations from Twitter employees go to Democrats, so it is Democrat-aligned
Yes, because we live in a market-socialist utopia where the giant firms that dominate the economy are controlled by democratic vote of their workers, not some dystopian system, let’s call it “equitism”, where society is organized around the interests of and firms are run by equity owners who generally are not the same people as the workers.
And also in a world where campaign spending is entirely by official campaigns with disclosed donors, not by notionally independent groups spending unlimited money with no requirement for tracking and reporting expenditures or donations.
Why do people pretend that what they call "cancel culture" is new and hasn't been pushed by lots of groups for decades? The religious right used it all the time after all.
While "cancelling" as a phenomenon isn't new, the methods and scope of what constitutes modern "cancel culture" is much more vicious and far-reaching than mere ostracism or the oft-referenced "showing someone the door".
As a conservative-leaning person, I've pondered this juxtaposition before and come to the following conclusion:
The religious right says, "We don't like what Disney/Home Depot/Google/etc. are doing, and so we're telling all of our friends to boycott them if they also hold those values".
"Cancel culture" says, "We don't like what you, Joe Schmoe, are doing. As a result, we're going to tell Disney/Amazon/Google/etc. to boycott you and make you unemployable."
This doesn't seem accurate. For example, The Dixie Chick backlash involved listeners calling radio stations and telling them to blacklist their music[1]:
> The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. On May 6, Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two DJs for playing their music. WTDR-FM in Talladega, Alabama, dropped the Dixie Chicks after more than 250 listeners called on a single day to complain about Maines's comments.
That's not to mention the baying for blood that happened in the early 2000s when anyone came out against the Iraq War[2].
Yes, those events happened but that was over 20 years ago at this point. I often see people utilizing an argument that either minimizes/trivializes modern cancel culture by invoking either "conservatives did this in the past, just look at when they got mad at [x]" or "this is actually what conservatives have been doing the whole time". Yet, whenever I see examples like the one you have posted, they seem far more mild than some of the recent cancellations that seek to un-person someone.
Groups like the Family Research Council, Concerned Women of America, and others routinely call for boycotts and "canceling" of individuals they do not like.
> The religious right used it all the time after all.
I'm not sure about the accuracy of this, but it is attempting to use past bad behavior to justify current bad behavior.
You can't change the past. You can do something about what's happening right now. A lot of rational people want to cancel "cancel culture" right now because of the harm it inflicts on society.
> Why do people pretend that what they call "cancel culture" is new and hasn't been pushed by lots of groups for decades?
The whole reason the term “cancel culture” was coined was to give right-wing rants about the troubling new trend of “political correctness” a veneer of novelty; it's literally the same complaints from the Right (about things the Right does just as much, but based on different ideological orthodoxy) that have been being made since the 1980s, but with a new label swapped in to the old complaints, because complaining about a new trend for 4 decades starts to show that, whatever the basis of your complaint is, it's not a disturbing new trend.
My employer sent me an email last November that said upload proof of vaccination or your employment will be terminated. That's what people have a problem with. I'm well aware there are professions like teaching that require vaccination status as part of getting hired but you know that ahead of time.
I'm 45 and can't remember a time when the US government used private industry as a proxy to push their agenda when they knew full well it wouldn't pass through the normal law making process.
The real story here seems to be the increasing numbers of independents. We've just had a republican president fuck everything up, and now a democrat is making everything worse. No surprise people are tired of our 2 party system.
I'm quite shocked at how, after Biden decisively defeated his progressive opponents in the 2020 primary, Democrats have continued to allow themselves to be defined by their socially progressive left flank. Even my dad--a die-hard Carter fan who has voted straight-ticket blue since he became a naturalized citizen--is getting disillusioned.
I think Democratic elites have this notion that people like my parents "really wanted Warren, but voted Biden because of electability." They don't like Warren and they don't like Harris. They don't think the U.S. is a "white supremacist" country, they don't care about "voting rights," they don't think Republicans are "insurrectionists," they don't really care about climate change, etc. They didn't like how Trump talks, or his stance on COVID, and they support more funding for healthcare and education.
As an outsider, Biden decisively defeating progressive opponents seems like fiction. It appears that varying levels of progressive candidates were forced into supporting Biden instead of supporting any "not Biden." Democrats continue to force establishment candidates despite the extreme levels of anti-establishment sentiment in the country.
Biden decisively defeating progressive opponents was far from a fiction. In fact the opposite is true: the media wrote off Biden at the outset, and his campaign nearly ran out of money until key endorsements later in the process. Instead, the media propped up progressive candidates like Elizabeth Warren for most of 2019, who in retrospect were not remotely viable. The Democratic Party in America can win national elections only by getting a super-majority of Black voters in the south and Latino voters in the southwest. In Texas, Warren won just 7% of Latinos, and in Virginia she won just 7% of Black voters. Michael Bloomberg beat her for third among both groups. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, did well among Latinos. But he was a distant second to Biden among Black voters. And he alienates many among the dominant part of the Democratic coalition--affluent, highly-educated white professionals.
There is a lot of anti-establishment sentiment in the U.S., but what I think outsiders don't understand is that it's fragmented between the parties. Many anti-establishment, working class people are socially conservative as well, and vote Republican. They have no place in a party that talks more about race and sexual orientation than about immigrants taking American jobs. By the same token, many progressives are social liberals first and foremost. For them, opposing second trimester abortions is a bigger sin than working on Wall Street. That divide exists to an extent even within the Democratic Party--most of the "progressives" I know hate Sanders and think he's a "racist" and "sexist" "old white man."
This means that a key progressive premise--the idea that if the party only moved sufficiently left voters would "turn out"--is a mirage. Yes, there's a lot of anti-establishment, apathetic voters out there. There was a huge surge in turnout in 2020. But out of people who voted in 2020, but not in 2018 or 2016, fully 47% voted for Trump, versus 49% for Biden: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-biden.... There is just about zero chance that any of those Trump voters would have turned out for any of the progressives apart from Sanders. (But, as discussed above, Sanders couldn't carry the social liberal wing of the Democratic party that Biden carried.)
To add a data point that backs this up: Biden won Washtenaw County in the MI Democratic primary --- that's the University of Michigan. Besides Sanders, no other candidate cracked 3%; it wasn't a split vote. You can compare his county-by-county results in 2020 to 2016 and it's stark. The Progressives were routed in the Presidential primary.
Does it really matter who you vote for? We live in a kakistocracy where corporations run the country. I think it's safe to say we are in the 4th Turning, it likely plays out by the end of this decade.
>Independents Are Still the Largest Political Group in the U.S.
Really? I find this kind of hard to believe. I call myself an "independent", but I vote 90% of the time for one party. I wish we had metadata on voting information so we could see how many people are straight-ticket voters, because I have to imagine that it's a lot.
I think most of the election swings come from apathetic voters coming out.
I don't have hard data at hand, but I think most investigations into this phenomenon show the same pattern. People identify as independent when given the choice between that, R, or D, but in practice many of those vote almost exclusively for one party.
My recollection is that there are somewhat more people who identify as Independent who vote primarily for Republicans, but that might not be true.
You're both right. "Unaffiliated" votes are the single largest voting block in the U.S. However, the vast majority of unaffiliated votes reliably vote for the same party in each election, so while they are officially independent of a party, in practice they associate themselves with a party in the way they vote.
This discovery and the ability to quantify it was one of the breakthroughs of the Obama campaign in 2008 (the Bush campaign did this too, but the Obama folks really brought it to the next level).
I call myself an independent and used to reliably vote for a mix of both parties and third parties, particularly locally. But I'm now more or less aligned with Democrats that in many respects I don't agree with just because they aren't theocrat monarchist traitors.
Unfortunately, what the mainstream would consider non-independent is someone that would vote for one party 100% of the time even if completely uninformed. Basically, a political zealot and there are a LOT on both sides. Everyone else? Independent voter.
The question on the poll was which party the person considered themselves affiliated with, but not who they vote for. As other commenters noted, self-declared independents typically always vote for one party. If you look at the earlier questions in the article, it accounts for this by placing these "independent" voters into either the Democratic or Republican buckets.
Most independents have strong political beliefs, they just don't necessarily align neatly with the parties. Many are single issue voters or subscribe to non-centrist ideologies. The contested middle is mostly a myth. Of course there are genuinely apathetic people out there, but typically they are staying home on election day. If they do feel a civic duty to vote, they can vote third party. What shifts is the passion people have for one party or another. If you normally vote democrat but don't consider yourself a democrat, odds are you are dissatisfied in some way with the democratic platform or candidate; you're not going to vote for a republican instead, but maybe you're not going to stand in line at the polling booth for the democrat either.
At least for the past several elections, victory has come with energizing the base. In 2016, for example, there wasn't some noticeable shift to the right, Clinton only got 62000 fewer votes than Obama won with in 2012, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney did in 2012, because people who stayed home in 2012 came out in support of him in 2016. Conversely in 2020, Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016, but Biden received over 15 million more votes than Clinton. Between the changes in overall election turnout and variance in third party voting, there's been no net shifting of votes from one side to the other in between any presidential election this century. Now it's a little more complicated than just getting people to come out, getting high turnout in the right areas is critical, so that fudges things a little bit. For example in 2016 Clinton had very comparable overall numbers to Obama in 2012, but she had dramatically less support in midwestern urban centers and stronger support in the south, which is pretty useless in the electoral college. But again, its not that people in the midwestern cities were voting for trump, they were staying home while suburban midwestern blue collar workers who traditionally didn't vote turned out.
It makes me so angry that people don’t see how the current administration was given a hand grenade with the pin pulled by the previous one. Pumping the stock market at the cost of all else by unprecedented money printing, seeding incredible division into America, ignoring Covid and refusing to even wear a mask and then handing that mess off to the next guy. The American public blaming the next guy because he couldn’t put the grenade back together seems so short sighted and ignorant.
That combined with how foreign actors work to hurt Democrats through the economy.
The rise in gas prices wasn't a coincidence or due to Biden's actions. OPEC (which includes such wonderful actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia) intentionally reduced production and raised prices in part to punish Biden's admin for working against authoritarian nations.
Well Biden confidently went in front of the public and claimed he could, I thinks it's reasonable to be upset with politicians who fail to meet their promises
Nobody blamed Trump for the pandemic even after he downplayed it and referred to it as a 'democrat hoax' at a rally. Now, it seems like Biden is left holding the bag, simply because he claimed to have a plan to address it. A pandemic isn't some finite, controllable force. It adapts and mutates when given the chance to do so. And the failure of almost 40% of our highly-fractured population to accede to vaccines, masks, or lockdowns is making these mutations possible and likely. You can't just spray the air to rid the world of this virus. It has to be killed within its human hosts or blocked at points of infection.
The anti-vaccine crowd at first pointed to lacking FDA approval and once that came, refused due to possible 'long term side effects'. I'm unfamiliar with any infamy around long-term side effects of past vaccines, so I see this as something of an excuse. It's just easier to blame the President who promised to get it under control, isn't it? But is it fair?
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize his response to the pandemic without making things up.
The current thinking is that mutations are most likely to occur in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged infections. I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but vaccines are less effective in those with malfunctioning immune systems.
I'll leave you with another Biden quote from October 2020: "220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who's responsible for not taking control — in fact, not saying, I take no responsibility, initially — anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America."
We're up to 900K deaths now. Is it fair to blame Biden for failing to get it under control? Probably not, but he never hesitated to blame his predecessor. Politics is never fair.
You are certainly correct that Trump didn't refer directly to COVID as a hoax, but only in the literal sense and especially when given the chance in the following days to clean it up. However, applying literalism to Trump's words or even divining a context is a fool's errand. He so often seemed to be talking directly to his 'fifth avenue', ride-or-die supporters, hungry to depict him as a victim of the treachery of an 'angry', 'elitist', liberal Left.
One time he failed to clean it up was the very famous time he referred to getting disinfectant into the body as a COVID remedy, although he never literally said the oft-repeated phrase 'inject bleach'. After doctors were left condemning his comments, he said that he was being sarcastic, which I think is non-sensical given the subject matter (i.e., in the middle of the a pandemic, during a press conference surrounded by doctors, POTUS wants to go spit-balling on potential remedies and get all sarcastic on... disinfectants & their applicability to this virus).
As far as presidential responsibility for COVID deaths go, I think things are a bit different now owing to personal responsibility. Since we have vaccines now, should you refuse the vaccine and then die from the virus can you really blame POTUS for your death? Biden took the unusual step of reneging on his promise against vaccine mandates to do just that later once there was a new wave of deaths in August 2021. I give him credit for casting aside the obvious political implications of reneging on a promise and that of a obviously unpopular mandate, as well. To then blame this same POTUS for more deaths seems especially unfair. Biden and his medical advisors know the truth that this virus just won't 'go away' as Trump would like to say with a flick of his wrist in its early days, and that we will have to get bare-knuckled about it or suffer more deaths from evermore mutations.
So you give Biden credit for violating federal law by issuing a mandate when he lacked statutory authority? Which other federal laws do you think he should ignore?
Specifically, no, I'm not giving him credit for violating federal law and I don't dispute that the order lacked statutory authority. However, since a president is theonlyofficial tasked with protecting the country, he has certain emergency powers (e.g., the same powers Trump used to take money from the Pentagon against Congress' wishes to fund his wall construction) to ensure national defense, at a minimum. COVID is such a threat. (Was the border?)
While the Supreme Court (which isn't tasked with this same security role) decided against him on this order, as the executive it was reasonable for him to attempt to use this tool to gain control of COVID spread.
Given the divided, political state of our country and seeing that the COVID outbreak has taken an even worse upswing now, I personally feel like he did the right thing here. You'll note that I was not opining on the legal nature of the move. Other presidents have made orders without knowing their legality when the circumstances call for it. Lincoln and habeas corpus comes to mind.
There's sort of a requirement to lie/exaggerate some of the time. Voters don't want to hear that you won't be able to pass a bunch of stuff they want, because the other party has too much power in congress.
The Fed controls monetary policy, and it’s still mostly independent of the administration. Trump often seemed displeased with Fed Chair Powell. Also the bull market started before Trump’s inauguration.
I don’t think you can blame Trump for the division in the country. For exploiting it: sure. But he didn’t create it.
I think that Democrats seriously misread the temperature of the country after the 2020 election. They thought they were granted a progressive mandate when really the voters wanted stability and competence with perhaps incremental progress on certain key issues. All evidence points in this direction, starting with the 2018 midterms when a slate of moderate candidates gave them a House majority (despite all the noise about a few celebrity progressive candidates). The moderate labor Democrat Biden was the nominee over Sanders and Warren, etc.
Individual polling says that people did want a progressive mandate. The measures inside the Build Back Better bill each have 70 - 80% support when polled individually. But Build Back Better only has 40% support.
The messed up political system that forces the Dems to bundle the disparate measures together is the main culprit, and navigating that with only 50 senators is really hard.
50 senators combined with silly filibuster rules and Republican/Sinema/Manchin exploitation of the rules is the hand grenade the Dems are dealing with.
Those bills would never get through the senate, because they can't use the budget filibuster-busting process like Build Back Better does and thus would need 60 votes.
It is absolutely possible to get 60 votes on the most popular measures like increased infrastructure funding. This has been done many times. The filibusters come up when bill authors try to bundle in less popular measures and ram those through simultaneously.
Preschool can be funded at the state and local levels. There was never any need to make it a federal budget item. If voters want increased preschool subsidies (which I think is generally a good idea) then they should contact their state legislators.
I disagree with you, but it doesn't matter. You didn't falsify my point that this is one example among many in the BBB Act that a good majority of Americans support but that could never get 60 votes in the Senate.
Biden didn't do anything. No major bills passed, they didn't fight for abortion, and seems to be making the pandemic worse intentionally so voters switch from Coke to Pepsi since the only hope for change is to punish the dems. Too bad they're nearly the same as the republicans except in style and rhetoric.
When the choices are plugged in from the top, democracy is a sham. We live in an authoritarian state. We need a new republic that would do away with all the mechanisms of minoritarian rule.
While the public tended to have particular leanings, the Democrats and the GOP didn't really bother 'sorting' themselves until the Southern Strategy where the GOP went after the southern Dixiecrats:
I voted for Biden in 2020, and I have been very disappointed with his presidency. He started out saying that he wanted to unite the country and turn down the temperature, and this was exactly what I voted for. In the first 6 months of his presidency I actually thought he was doing a decent job.
However, he has really lost me in recent months. His administration spent so long trying to deny that inflation even existed, all while pushing for a gargantuan spending package. WTF? Then all this hyperbolic crap about Jan 6 started getting pushed, with the VP comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Extremely disrespectful, in my opinion. And finally, the nail in the coffin was this Voter ID nonsense. I absolutely support Voter ID, it seems like a common sense policy. And I don't support giving illegal immigrants the right to vote, like they did in NYC. But according to Biden, this makes me a racist who is on the side of Jefferson Davis. Are you freaking serious!? My response to Biden is - go fuck yourself, asshole.
In summary, he has disappointed me in many ways. The left hasn't calmed down in the slightest, and cancel culture is at an all time high. Inflation is spiking and people like me may never get to own a house. Biden is too busy calling us racists to have any chance at uniting the country. And covid is at an all time high.
Very disappointing, and I hope someone more moderate runs in 2024 for BOTH sides. Trump and Biden are clearly a bunch of old curmudgeons who can't unite shit. Let's get some moderates in there, like Manchin or Romney.
An ability to distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants as well as local and national elections is exactly the sort of thing that voters should be well-informed about.
Honestly, this lack of ability demonstrated in your comment nullifies most of the ranting you have built up afterwards. I suggest you seriously examine how much of a "pressure head" of resentment you have built up based on these equivalents of software bugs. Running a linter over your other assumptions might also help a bit.
This seems pretty condescending and disrespectful. I know the difference between illegal and legal immigrants. I don't know the exact details of the NYC law, but I don't have to, because I'm across the continent.
I'll give you a suggestion too - if you want to win independent votes, then stop insulting independents.
> This seems pretty condescending and disrespectful...I don't know the exact details of the NYC law, but I don't have to, because I'm across the continent.
I'm suggesting that you be properly informed about things that are influencing your voting. If you're irritated about the NYC law, it seems prudent to get the basic facts right about it before drawing a conclusion.
> I'll give you a suggestion too - if you want to win independent votes, then stop insulting independents.
I don't want to win anything; and I'm not part of any political campaign. I elect representatives who I generally agree with, and leave things in their hands.
If you generally want to vote to take the country in a good direction, I suggest you vote based on a complete understanding that's not influenced by loud-voiced commentators. Alternately, you can choose to be a low-information voter whose vote is easily "won" by some random person posting lies on the Internet, in which case elections turn into more of a shouting match about how much you can smear the other candidate and less about pertinent issues.
If you are wrong about one of your assumptions, it's possible you're wrong about others as well. I'm trying not to say what those are; because that just leads to more nitpicking and arguments – things that we already have way too much of on the Internet.
In summary: "Do your research before voting" is my nonpartisan and hopefully reasonable suggestion. I'm sorry it's coming across as disrespectful.
> And I don't support giving illegal immigrants the right to vote, like they did in NYC.
Just to clarify, that law only gave tax paying legal immigrants the right to vote in local elections. No taxation without representation used to be an American principle.
> I assume legal-immigrant means one has obtained citizenship.
How do you classify a non-citizen Green Card holder? Or someone here on a work visa? Legal immigrants usually don't start out as citizens from the moment they arrive. Obtaining citizenship is a long process. In the meantime they are still residents, and taxpayers, and ought to have a say in decisions which will affect them.
You can come to America (and most countries, I imagine) on a work visa, student visa, etc without becoming a citizen. These people are now able to vote in New York.
I think the confusion is around the term "immigrant". I agree that immigration implies a permanent move - i.e. you become a citizen of where you are immigrating to. However, I think most people (and media) use "immigrant" as a catch-all for someone who currently lives in country X but was not born there.
"Legal immigrant" just means you're in the country legally, which in addition to naturalized immigrants (i.e. new citizens) includes permanent residents (i.e. green card), student/work visas, spouse/fiancé visas, etc.
Just wait until everyone’s 401k loses all the gains made during the pandemic while inflation continues and job growth falters. Oh, and international turmoil and potential war following a series of diplomatic and military blunders that have weakened America’s stance abroad.
How can people not understand the reaction of moderates and independents? Perhaps they are watching propaganda that masquerades as news. The next few years will be confusing times for many. The pendulum swings as they say.
Telephone-based sampling is hardly random sampling, given that most people don't answer calls they don't recognize the caller ID for. Those who do might be pre-disposed to certain sets of political ideology. What we may be seeing is a shift of people who are willing to answer the telephone and take a survey, not a net shift in political opinion.
A practical example, given in good faith: It may be that in their "random telephone sampling" they are only connecting with older people (who are usually more likely to answer calls from an unknown number), leading to unintentional selection bias. In this example, the confounding factor is age, and as such the gallop graphs could be simply showing that younger (ostensibly left-leaning) people are growing less willing to answer the phone (as opposed to the claim that Americans are moving right, idiologically)
Seems like the polling gets spun no matter what it says
There was a lot of 'even though polls predict a certain someone is going to lose, he might still win because voters are "shy"' copy written going into 2020
I'd just like a decent candidate, please. I'm not sure I've had a single election since I was old enough to vote where I wasn't choosing the lesser of two evils... or the less stupid of the two. I'd really like to be able to vote without holding my nose.
One of the parties has been branded as the “Lockdown party” during covid. So long as there is a collective with the view that closing people’s businesses at any given time, indefinitely, without recourse, is acceptable - we can expect an endless stream of voters rushing to the other side of the aisle.
Speak to right wingers and you’ll find that many will tell you they weren’t convinced by some right wing youTuber. It’s often the policy or rhetoric of the left that drove them away.
A specific example in 2021, lockdown policies of the left may have had a far more profound impact on pushing people away than any random guest on Joe Rogan.
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[ 14.6 ms ] story [ 3905 ms ] threadSpeak to right wingers and you’ll find that many will tell you they weren’t convinced by some right wing youTuber. It’s often the policy or rhetoric of the left that drove them away.
A specific example in 2021, lockdown policies of the left may have had a far more profound impact on pushing people away than any random guest on Joe Rogan.
Add lives saved by various requirements. Subtract lives from increased traffic fatalities [1]. Multiply by the number of businesses decapitated by lockdowns.
Do you know what we gonna end up with? I don't...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
If so then put a sentry in everyone's home and keep them there forever. Think of the lives saved!
Just for myself personally, while no where near enough to change political affiliation, I've gotten quite sick of what appears to be hypocrisy, arrogance, and gross incompetence from the left establishment, expressed through the popular media, government policies, and generally the "blue check Twitter" crowd. We are now living in "TSA everywhere" land with all kinds of ridiculous sanctimony.
I'm vaccinated, got a booster, caught and recovered from COVID initially and now again from omicron last month and still getting tested on a regular basis. When I go to a restaurant I have to show ID, vaccination proof, temperature check, leave a phone number, then wear a mask to walk 2 meters from the door to my table...where I can take off my mask and hang out for an hour surrounded by people doing the same...that is, unless I need to go to the bathroom. If I don't wear a mask while making the short walk from my table to the bathroom--oh my god, I'm basically single-handedly murdering old and immunocompromised people.
It is hard for people to take you seriously when you are associated with this sort of emperor's new clothes COVID theater. This is literally the modern equivalent of the "or else the terrorists win" nonsense of the Global War on Terror era.
- me and wife got Covid but we do not have symptoms
- I have surgery (quite important and relatively urgent since it hurts) but it is delayed because I’m positive
- my wife is a nurse but she forced to go to work because she has no symptoms
Should I blame democrats on this? I do not know but they really love being “COVID police” …
Of all the places to complain about, a hospital seems one of the least warranted
Take a look what is happening in the UK (Covid policies combined with self destruction on the side of the PM):
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/148312195316683571...
One party blows everything up. The other gets elected to fix it. That turns out to take longer than 2-4 years, especially with opposition and a thin margin in House and Senate, so the party that broke things campaigns on how bad things are now (due to their own actions).
On a year to year basis it’s difficult to see. But look over decades: this is a party that not only failed to advance anything building on the New Deal, but failed at every step to arrest its complete demolition.
If you really believe that the reason the dems can’t accomplish anything is because of Manchin, Sinema, The Parliamentarian, or $WEEKLY_SCAPEGOAT_NAME, I’m sorry to say you’re a mark. It’s like that Key & Peele “hold me back” skit.
As are the Pubs. Ex. they left the ACA in place.
I'll take that over the GOP wanting me, at best, crushed under a boot and subservient, but I'll still vote for just about any candidate the DSA puts up locally if they ever do. I recognize the barrier function of voting for whatever barely animate ghoul the DNC triangulates on in the primary, so I'll do that until someone figures out how to get > 50% at that level with someone I'll vote for rather than a lineholder.
The DNC's marriage track record as far as I know was the same as the RNC, the only difference is who was celebrating when the supreme court made the decision.
That's a good example of why people who think the Democratic Party is a vehicle for progressivism are wrong. In 2008, Black people--without whom Democrats would not be a viable national party--said homosexuality was morally unacceptable by more than 2:1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu.... They were as conservative on that issue as Republicans. (Even as of 2019, 45% of Black Democrats think legalizing same-sex marriage was a bad thing, compared to just 11% of white Democrats. That puts them closer to Republicans (57%) than to the white members of their party. Hispanic Democrats are also twice as likely as white Democrats to say it was a bad thing, while Hispanics overall are three times as likely. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/5-gender-fam...)
The Democratic Party is a coalition of white social liberals, who are either moderate or progressive economically, along with people of color who vary significantly in political ideology. A significant chunk of the voters who put the party over the top in places like Georgia and Arizona are the old Reagan coalition: upwardly mobile suburbanites of all races.
Those are all Democrats. If those Democrats aren't the reason, who is?
> It’s like that Key & Peele “hold me back” skit.
You think some of the Dem Senators would vote differently if it weren't for the opposition? Maybe so. When everyone knows a vote will go one way, you can never tell whether people are "sincere" voters.
Still, it can't be that 49 out of 50 Senate Dems are all against the mild social democratic reforms being rejected by the 50th.
The "ratchet effect" arises from the fact that the United States is a moderate country. If you look at the House popular vote over the last 20 years, Republicans have won it as often as Democrats. The House popular vote is a good metric to look at because it isn't affected by gerrymandering, and Republicans have an incentive to contest every single House seat (unlike with the Presidential popular vote, where Republicans have zero incentive to schlep all over rural California, New York, Illinois, etc., scrounging up votes).
Even within the Democratic Party itself, Biden decisively won the nomination. It's wasn't because of "electability." It's because the party is entirely dependent on minorities to be a viable national party, and American racial politics means that minorities often vote Democrat even if they are moderate to conservative. My parents are the "brown people" who turned Virginia blue. They liked Biden and disliked Warren. Not because of "electability" but because they're economically moderate and socially conservative, but as immigrants from a Muslim country they don't like Trump's rhetoric. That's the Democratic coalition, and progressives need to come to terms with that.
Each cycle, both parties make red-to-blue and blue-to-red lists of districts to flip, and allocate money disproportionately to them.
Even setting aside top-down party decisions, which clearly happen, seats aren't contested seriously for knock-on reasons: the best candidates won't run for hopeless seats, because the loss taints them and opens them up to carpetbagging charges when they try to contest other districts.
I don't think I disagree with your whole analysis, but the argument that "Republicans have an incentive to contest every single House seat" clearly doesn't hold.
Obviously political preferences over entire populations can’t be reduced to single issues. Still, I’m guessing the negative impacts of the pandemic have made a major impact. IMO they have a lot of people thinking “why didn’t you handle this better?” (with widely differing views on what constitutes “better”), and thus resenting the government, even if there’s really no silver bullet for handling something awful like a pandemic.
We've got things pretty good in the US. It's why people are trying to sneak across the border in droves-- everybody recognizes the economic opportunities.
It's true that the pendulum swings back and forth. The Democrats control things (as they do now), they make some changes to fulfill campaign promises and they over-reach in a few spots. People always want something better, so they soon vote for Republicans. Who pass things they campaigned on, roll back some Democrat over-reaches, and do a little over-reaching themselves. Then the Democrats come back into power.....
The system works. Along the way, we get social changes like gay marriage, maybe some long overdue restrictions on late-term abortions, etc. Society slowly moves forward.
I just wish there wasn't as much demonization and pot-stirring along the way. There's really no need to throw hate at people actross the aisle, because without them your party would soon run amuck and ruin everything. The system works.
The Democrats had a razor-thin majority in both House and Senate, but they tried to govern like they had a large majority. That... didn't work. And it led to people comparing what they promised (or at least tried to do) with what they delivered. From that perspective, the Democrats failed miserably.
That leads to a lot of disillusioned voters.
I don't know why the Democrats chose this route, but it was a spectacular, predictable failure. Especially, Biden should have known better. He spent a lot of years in the Senate; he should have known what couldn't be done with a 50-50 split.
I was curious though, is anyone else bothered by not being able to participate in primaries and party level events and elections?
Other states could also require laws like this.
I think that the republicans in 2020 followed (1) and the democrates followed (2). This is how we get biden. If a more progressive democrat was the candidate, would trump have won? That was the fear of the democratic party.
(I just made this up so take it for what its worth)
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/15/facts-about...
Swing independents tend to be more political practical and less ideological.
I think the current Democratic administration is most notable for its fecklessness and inability to get anything at all done. Maybe that's what's driving voters away.
On the state and local levels there is the tug of war between governments trying to keep covid under control and those same measures being deeply unpopular. I don't know what the solution to that is but there is a sizeable enough group of voters who just want to get on with their lives that its having an effect.
As long as COVID and the economy aren't "fixed" whoever is in power will have them as major problems.
Fuck, there are homes everywhere, we have the ability to dig, plant, make food, we still have the ability to transport things around. I know that no one wants to work anymore - but at this point, the entire economy is a state of feeling - and that's exactly what a president (or actually all of the leaders of the world) MUST fix. The resources are ALL there, but I think everyone is just letting it all go to shit.
This says it all for me:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/san-francisco-chronicle-ripped...
I know Biden isn't responsible for this, but it's just echo chambers from the top down that causes this.
edit: @nradov, thanks for the clarity there.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-joe-biden-no-vaccines-ma...
If you had said people are moving toward the R column because Biden hasn't met his campaign promise, that would be a valid argument. There was a shortage of N95 masks under the previous administration, there continues to be a shortage, and you ascribe that to some movement toward the left. That is a non sequitur.
As for the homeless problem in SF: again, has that issue changed since Biden took office? You have cultural myopia if you think a local SF issue is causing national polling trends to shift right. SF homelessness was an issue in 2020 when Biden was elected and people voted Dem to begin with.
The American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021
To borrow an analogy from Jerry Garcia, Bernie Sanders is the black licorice of American politicians. Most people don't like him, but the people who like him really like him.
> Democrats make up less than half of votes
Not the popular vote. Even Hillary managed to win the popular vote in 2016.
[1] https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-pol...
I was referring to registered democrats, as I believe was the article.
Regarding Medicare for all, those numbers are misleading. It has 70% of support until you get into the actual details of implementation. It's the same when folks say "An overwhelming majority of Americans support higher taxes on the rich". Well yes, but those surveys tend to leave out the definition of rich, so people tend to interpret it as "Rich = Someone who makes more money than I do".
This is not to advocate against medicare for all, but rather to say that it's easy to garner support for something in the abstract without getting into all the messy details that reality likes to impose.
"Everything that happened" includes cancel culture, woke culture, etc. It includes images like Kenosha burning. If you're a poor working-class white male, it's hard to vote for the party who calls you privileged. If those are the images you're seeing, you'll vote one way. If you see images of police killing minorities, you'll vote another way.
that's very true and it goes both ways (right-to-left and left-to-right). When you call someone the enemy long enough they will eventually start to feel the same way towards you.
Huh? Being able to produce something illegally is in no way a substitute for having a right to possess that thing legally.
1. 3D printed guns are crap.
2. Some people would like possess a gun that isn't a "go to jail card."
3. Some people would like to be able to conventionally practice shooting their guns, without attracting "go to jail" attention.
The only thing that 3d printed guns and homemade "ammunition from unregulated components" is to how gun control to be a futile effort, because criminals will still have access to them even if law-abiding citizens are blocked. A criminal planning a crime might not mind points 2 & 3 above, but a law abiding citizen certainly will.
Hybrid like FGC-9 can be reliable for over a thousand rounds. Non-firearm parts added in US to a printed AR or glock receiver ['firearm'] can be good for several thousand.
>Huh? Being able to produce something illegally is in no way a substitute for having a right to possess that thing legally.
Aight so how do I carry a glock for defense in Hawaii? How about carrying a glock for defense in DC after catching a felony for illegally importing a lobster? Can I drill a 3rd hill in an AR without asking daddy for permission?
>3. Some people would like to be able to conventionally practice shooting their guns, without attracting "go to jail" attention.
Aight, so tell me how I could avoid being infringed while mag dumping a lightning-link.
2A is dead, we have a patchwork of [compared to rest of world] liberal gun laws that allow you to enjoy some firearms in some situations. But it's infringed to hell, particularly if you are a 'felon' [not in the sense of a felon when constitution was written -- just walking onto a prohibited water conservation area without disturbing it is a felony in my state].
The alternative is the politics of the deed, just make it.
Sure 2A would be better than mere ability to make them. But you have to live within reality. The needle isn't moving back to free of infringement.
>but a law abiding citizen certainly will
Well 2A says keeping/bearing a gun can't be illegal. Unfortunately state and federal laws say otherwise, and judges are happy to bend over and make any excuse to infringe, particularly against felons.
> OK, grandpa
is very much not up to par with what's expected here.
> Hybrid like FGC-9 can be reliable for over a thousand rounds.
Crap is relative. How good is that gun compared to one manufactured using conventional techniques?
In general, you're missing the point: the 2A isn't dead, since it's what allows people who aren't fools (i.e. people who have the sense to avoid doing things that could land them in jail even though they personally think they should be able to do those things) to own and use a gun.
Now, if you are a fool who wants to act like the law doesn't apply to you, I can see how you might think the "2A is dead," but that's just an artifact of a foolish perspective. People like that might also want to setup a GoFundMe for their commissary account.
>since it's what allows people who aren't fools (i.e. people who have the sense to avoid doing things that could land them in jail even though they personally think they should be able to do those things) to own and use a gun.
I don't think I'd call say someone who got caught with a scary mushroom 10 years ago a fool for wanting to be able to defend himself and his family.
I would. How well will he be able to defend his family from jail, after he's arrested for illegal possession of a firearm? If he decides he doesn't want to be arrested, how well will he do with his 3D printed gun in a shootout with the police? Will he do well enough to avoid jail time?
You're engaging in some weird fantasy. The world doesn't actually work the way you might wish it to, and if you pretend it does (and take action on that fantasy) you're very unlikely to do better than a sovereign citizen does in court (i.e. fail totally, with everyone shaking their head about how nuts you are).
The whole point of 3d guns for many people is to avoid ever entering the court system, because by procuring all unregulated components and building it themselves, it's much more difficult for them to be caught.
Huh?
Democrats couldn't move the needle even a tiny bit on gun control, even with nominal control of all three branches and stuff like Sandy Hook as a rallying cry. The most meaningful gun regulation at the Federal level in the past few decades was Trump banning bump stocks.
There's zero reason to believe the current court - which is likely to be around for decades - will do anything but increase gun rights.
Nowhere in the country can you just drill the third hole in an AR and go at it without asking for permission.
Nowhere in the country can someone with a federal felony [except some white collar trading crimes] exercise their second amendment right, even if all tehy did was illegally import a lobster.
Nowhere in the country can you saw a 16 inch barrel down one inch without asking daddy for permission.
Several states now require universal background check just to exercise a right (own a firearm). None of this has been strucken by supreme court.
2A is dead, now we just have a legacy of fairly liberal gun laws in certain circumstances and states.
Permit for a protest is also utter horseshit on par with restrictions on 2A.
> Name a single place in US where you need a permit to buy a car or drive it on private property
Even if you don't need a permit to back your car down your driveway (after someone with a permit has brought it to your home), you still need one to drive it anywhere anyone would actually want to go. So you effectively need a permit to drive.
This is obviously NOT analogous to the 2A, where you need licenses and registrations just to buy a gun. In an analogous situation to cars, you would not need a license to buy a gun and shoot it at a firing range. So the low effort quip "lol what about drivers licenses" that adgjlsfhk1 and many others make is not reasonable.
No, I haven't. Driving on public roads is what most people mean by "drive."
I agree they are not precisely the same thing in all respects. However practically, the situations don't seem very different.
>>> So the low effort quip "lol what about drivers licenses" that adgjlsfhk1 and many others make is not reasonable.
It kind of is reasonable, given this sub-thread started with some pretty unreasonable or at least weird positions (e.g. 2A is "dead" apparently b/c everyone can't get a full-auto without a permit).
You keep using that word...
> 3d printing is an insurance policy.
Is it? An insurance policy isn't something that can blow up in your face, literally and figuratively.
Realistically, 3D printed guns aren't a direct solution to gun control, they're an argument for loosening it because they're proof it can't achieve some of its major aims.
I’ve wondered this myself. All the 3D printed things I’ve seen feel like really cheap, soft plastic. It’s hard to imagine it not exploding or at least melting from combustion like that.
For international crowd, something like FGC-9 is closest to reliable printed firearm they can get. It is hybrid. The barrel is created by 3d-printing jigs for electro-chemical machining a standard high-pressure pipe, yielding glock-like accuracy and durability of barrel. Bolt requires some work by hand. Rest is unregulated components and 3d printed.
In the US, the receiver ['firearm'] is the only component that looks regulated to the consumer. The UBAR for instance is a printed AR receiver reinforced with off-the-shelf U-bar that is extremely durable, and unless you're mag dumping or leave it in a hot car in the south or something should last thousands of round. The non-receiver parts can be bought without regulation in US.
Also bear in mind here, in self defense less than 15 rounds are typically fired.
>feel like really cheap, soft plastic.
FDM materials like PLA+ can be resilient when kept out of heat. Nylon-X and carbon fiber reinforced materials, depending on application, can provide even more rigidity and strength. Most of the stuff you've seen printed has probably been with cheap PLA with low in-fill (faster print time, somewhat hollow inside the shape). 3d printed guns are printed with very high 99+% infill (mostly solid inside the shape) with at least PLA+ to provide much more strength.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlB2QV5wVxg
You mean like onto a trailer, then off a trailer, then a bunch of left turns then back onto a trailer?
Because that sort of recreational use is pretty analogous to what people used to do with machine guns and mortars and stuff back in the day before they were heavily restricted.
A dealership tried to do this to me when I bought a truck with cash, and I told them [politely] to get fucked (I had insurance but no proof on me as I bought it over phone). Then they finally admitted since I owned the truck outright they wouldn't stop me.
> You can't test drive it without a driving license too.
When you're test driving you haven't bought the car. The dealership can refuse to let you drive their car for pretty much any non-protected reason.
2. While the First Amendment does protect speech, the Supreme Court has held that time/place/manner restrictions on speech can be created by the Government as long as there is a rational basis for them. Compare against content-based restrictions, which will be strictly scrutinized by the courts.
Legal analysis is complicated and actions rarely fall into black-or-white categories. Even Second Amendment law has a large number of contours.
Biden's agenda is dead, he blown up BB spectacularly, he is limited to executive orders power but he does not seem to be willing to apply it properly(cancel the students' debt, legalize weed, use ACA to the full extent, etc)
Republicans have NOTHING to offer to people except of cultural issues, but they are winning because they are not democrats.
As for weed, he just need to remove it from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.
Keep in mind that this is what Bernie run on, so it is feasible.
But Biden has been consistently against marijuana legalization. His power to make such changes is greater than his willingness to do so.
People might not want that, and vote against it, but it's an actual policy platform they could run on
https://ballotpedia.org/Jo_Jorgensen_presidential_campaign,_...
After receiving 5% of the national vote, third parties qualify for federal funding. After receiving 15% of the national vote, third parties qualify for participation in national debates.
Out of all the candidates on the ballot in the last election, Joe Biden was my favorite, but I didn't vote for him. I live in Massachusetts, a state which had a near-100% probability of sending all of its delegates to the electoral college in the name of Joe Biden. I voted for Jo Jorgensen, not because I support her or her party, but because she and her party had the greatest chance of hitting that 5% threshold and I personally value a chance of increasing political competition between parties over the empty virtue signalling I would have achieved by voting for Joe Biden instead.
I strongly believe that having more parties will strengthen our democracy, and by strategically voting for Jo Jorgensen, I know that I increased the impact of my vote and my likelihood of making the world a better place. Unless you live in a proportional state (e.g., Maine, Nebraska) or a swing state (e.g., Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), you are absolutely wasting your vote and your time by voting for a Democratic or Republican presidential candidate instead of a third party.
There is Hypernormalization [0] through popular/state media's simultaenous support of opposing views, i.e. disinformation through doubt and plausible deniability (perfected by world powers, particularly Soviet/Russian regimes in the modern era).
[0] https://youtu.be/thLgkQBFTPw
I hate to be so cynical but I have no faith in these phone surveys anymore. Most adults I know avoid surveyors on principle. Even further, most adults I know won’t answer any number that isn’t already in their address book. It seems like the only type of person that a survey like this might reach is the stereotypical technology-fearing conservative.
That’s not to say that these results are inaccurate in any way. I just don’t believe the methodology backs up the results here.
What they don't tell you though is that it's not truly random as claimed. They recruit a representative sample of respondents. So there are young people in the sample, it just takes more calls to get the data.
Source: I run these surveys
Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you
Disagree with me politically on Twitter? We'll look for your employer and coerce him into firing you
Stay two weeks at home, by the way stay in two more weeks and it's been two years. Some places even had curfews (but then if it's a BLM protest we'll ignore the existence of the virus)
We follow the science! (Except if the scientist disagrees with you. Check the interview with Don lemon and Sanjay Gupta when he's about to make a point about Joe Rogan. Lemon cuts him off and wont let him finish)
I thought it was to discourage throwaways, but others have noted they’ve created throwaways without the “auto-dead” behavior.
It seems really weird to blame the Democratic party for this or Democrats as a whole since this is completely unrelated to the government or administration or elected Democrat officials.
Electing Republicans won't "fix" this for you at all.
> Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you
For interest's sake, are you consistent in wanting to remove all vaccine requirements, including for things like the measles vaccine?
Electing Republicans might get Section 230 updated to require platforms to be platforms and not a mix of all the benefits of platforms and none of the downsides of being publishers that are not neutral in silencing certain perspectives.
Also, I don't know why you are so eager to prevent platforms from performing moderation. Section 230 is quite simple, it means that social media companies can moderate without being responsible for their user's content. No free social media company can feasibly moderate all of their user's content, the math simply doesn't work out in terms of moderation effort per dollar in advertising revenue. Companies would have to stop moderating. The removal of 230 would lead to the total destruction of social media in the tech industry as consumers don't want to go on unmoderated platforms like 4chan.
A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.
It doesn't just feel like it, Republicans passing state-level “lets try to work around 230” laws have had them enjoined on First Amendment grounds supported by their explicit statements of pretty much exactly the attitude you describe as the motivation for the laws.
Yes, because we live in a market-socialist utopia where the giant firms that dominate the economy are controlled by democratic vote of their workers, not some dystopian system, let’s call it “equitism”, where society is organized around the interests of and firms are run by equity owners who generally are not the same people as the workers.
And also in a world where campaign spending is entirely by official campaigns with disclosed donors, not by notionally independent groups spending unlimited money with no requirement for tracking and reporting expenditures or donations.
The religious right says, "We don't like what Disney/Home Depot/Google/etc. are doing, and so we're telling all of our friends to boycott them if they also hold those values".
"Cancel culture" says, "We don't like what you, Joe Schmoe, are doing. As a result, we're going to tell Disney/Amazon/Google/etc. to boycott you and make you unemployable."
> The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. On May 6, Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two DJs for playing their music. WTDR-FM in Talladega, Alabama, dropped the Dixie Chicks after more than 250 listeners called on a single day to complain about Maines's comments.
That's not to mention the baying for blood that happened in the early 2000s when anyone came out against the Iraq War[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
[2] http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2...
The FRC once even called for a boycott of Chick-fil-A in 2019 https://townhall.com/columnists/toddstarnes/2019/11/29/famil...
They do this sort of thing often.
I'm not sure about the accuracy of this, but it is attempting to use past bad behavior to justify current bad behavior.
You can't change the past. You can do something about what's happening right now. A lot of rational people want to cancel "cancel culture" right now because of the harm it inflicts on society.
The whole reason the term “cancel culture” was coined was to give right-wing rants about the troubling new trend of “political correctness” a veneer of novelty; it's literally the same complaints from the Right (about things the Right does just as much, but based on different ideological orthodoxy) that have been being made since the 1980s, but with a new label swapped in to the old complaints, because complaining about a new trend for 4 decades starts to show that, whatever the basis of your complaint is, it's not a disturbing new trend.
I'm 45 and can't remember a time when the US government used private industry as a proxy to push their agenda when they knew full well it wouldn't pass through the normal law making process.
I'm quite shocked at how, after Biden decisively defeated his progressive opponents in the 2020 primary, Democrats have continued to allow themselves to be defined by their socially progressive left flank. Even my dad--a die-hard Carter fan who has voted straight-ticket blue since he became a naturalized citizen--is getting disillusioned.
I think Democratic elites have this notion that people like my parents "really wanted Warren, but voted Biden because of electability." They don't like Warren and they don't like Harris. They don't think the U.S. is a "white supremacist" country, they don't care about "voting rights," they don't think Republicans are "insurrectionists," they don't really care about climate change, etc. They didn't like how Trump talks, or his stance on COVID, and they support more funding for healthcare and education.
There is a lot of anti-establishment sentiment in the U.S., but what I think outsiders don't understand is that it's fragmented between the parties. Many anti-establishment, working class people are socially conservative as well, and vote Republican. They have no place in a party that talks more about race and sexual orientation than about immigrants taking American jobs. By the same token, many progressives are social liberals first and foremost. For them, opposing second trimester abortions is a bigger sin than working on Wall Street. That divide exists to an extent even within the Democratic Party--most of the "progressives" I know hate Sanders and think he's a "racist" and "sexist" "old white man."
This means that a key progressive premise--the idea that if the party only moved sufficiently left voters would "turn out"--is a mirage. Yes, there's a lot of anti-establishment, apathetic voters out there. There was a huge surge in turnout in 2020. But out of people who voted in 2020, but not in 2018 or 2016, fully 47% voted for Trump, versus 49% for Biden: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-biden.... There is just about zero chance that any of those Trump voters would have turned out for any of the progressives apart from Sanders. (But, as discussed above, Sanders couldn't carry the social liberal wing of the Democratic party that Biden carried.)
Really? I find this kind of hard to believe. I call myself an "independent", but I vote 90% of the time for one party. I wish we had metadata on voting information so we could see how many people are straight-ticket voters, because I have to imagine that it's a lot.
I think most of the election swings come from apathetic voters coming out.
My recollection is that there are somewhat more people who identify as Independent who vote primarily for Republicans, but that might not be true.
This discovery and the ability to quantify it was one of the breakthroughs of the Obama campaign in 2008 (the Bush campaign did this too, but the Obama folks really brought it to the next level).
At least for the past several elections, victory has come with energizing the base. In 2016, for example, there wasn't some noticeable shift to the right, Clinton only got 62000 fewer votes than Obama won with in 2012, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney did in 2012, because people who stayed home in 2012 came out in support of him in 2016. Conversely in 2020, Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016, but Biden received over 15 million more votes than Clinton. Between the changes in overall election turnout and variance in third party voting, there's been no net shifting of votes from one side to the other in between any presidential election this century. Now it's a little more complicated than just getting people to come out, getting high turnout in the right areas is critical, so that fudges things a little bit. For example in 2016 Clinton had very comparable overall numbers to Obama in 2012, but she had dramatically less support in midwestern urban centers and stronger support in the south, which is pretty useless in the electoral college. But again, its not that people in the midwestern cities were voting for trump, they were staying home while suburban midwestern blue collar workers who traditionally didn't vote turned out.
The rise in gas prices wasn't a coincidence or due to Biden's actions. OPEC (which includes such wonderful actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia) intentionally reduced production and raised prices in part to punish Biden's admin for working against authoritarian nations.
"We're eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump still doesn't have a plan to get this virus under control.
I do."
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1316894374500962305
The anti-vaccine crowd at first pointed to lacking FDA approval and once that came, refused due to possible 'long term side effects'. I'm unfamiliar with any infamy around long-term side effects of past vaccines, so I see this as something of an excuse. It's just easier to blame the President who promised to get it under control, isn't it? But is it fair?
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-virus-outbreak-ap-f...
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize his response to the pandemic without making things up.
The current thinking is that mutations are most likely to occur in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged infections. I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but vaccines are less effective in those with malfunctioning immune systems.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
I'll leave you with another Biden quote from October 2020: "220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who's responsible for not taking control — in fact, not saying, I take no responsibility, initially — anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America."
We're up to 900K deaths now. Is it fair to blame Biden for failing to get it under control? Probably not, but he never hesitated to blame his predecessor. Politics is never fair.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...
One time he failed to clean it up was the very famous time he referred to getting disinfectant into the body as a COVID remedy, although he never literally said the oft-repeated phrase 'inject bleach'. After doctors were left condemning his comments, he said that he was being sarcastic, which I think is non-sensical given the subject matter (i.e., in the middle of the a pandemic, during a press conference surrounded by doctors, POTUS wants to go spit-balling on potential remedies and get all sarcastic on... disinfectants & their applicability to this virus).
As far as presidential responsibility for COVID deaths go, I think things are a bit different now owing to personal responsibility. Since we have vaccines now, should you refuse the vaccine and then die from the virus can you really blame POTUS for your death? Biden took the unusual step of reneging on his promise against vaccine mandates to do just that later once there was a new wave of deaths in August 2021. I give him credit for casting aside the obvious political implications of reneging on a promise and that of a obviously unpopular mandate, as well. To then blame this same POTUS for more deaths seems especially unfair. Biden and his medical advisors know the truth that this virus just won't 'go away' as Trump would like to say with a flick of his wrist in its early days, and that we will have to get bare-knuckled about it or suffer more deaths from evermore mutations.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a244_hgci.pdf
While the Supreme Court (which isn't tasked with this same security role) decided against him on this order, as the executive it was reasonable for him to attempt to use this tool to gain control of COVID spread.
Given the divided, political state of our country and seeing that the COVID outbreak has taken an even worse upswing now, I personally feel like he did the right thing here. You'll note that I was not opining on the legal nature of the move. Other presidents have made orders without knowing their legality when the circumstances call for it. Lincoln and habeas corpus comes to mind.
What federal law did he ignore?
I don’t think you can blame Trump for the division in the country. For exploiting it: sure. But he didn’t create it.
I think that Democrats seriously misread the temperature of the country after the 2020 election. They thought they were granted a progressive mandate when really the voters wanted stability and competence with perhaps incremental progress on certain key issues. All evidence points in this direction, starting with the 2018 midterms when a slate of moderate candidates gave them a House majority (despite all the noise about a few celebrity progressive candidates). The moderate labor Democrat Biden was the nominee over Sanders and Warren, etc.
The messed up political system that forces the Dems to bundle the disparate measures together is the main culprit, and navigating that with only 50 senators is really hard.
50 senators combined with silly filibuster rules and Republican/Sinema/Manchin exploitation of the rules is the hand grenade the Dems are dealing with.
When the choices are plugged in from the top, democracy is a sham. We live in an authoritarian state. We need a new republic that would do away with all the mechanisms of minoritarian rule.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized
While the public tended to have particular leanings, the Democrats and the GOP didn't really bother 'sorting' themselves until the Southern Strategy where the GOP went after the southern Dixiecrats:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
It's worth noting that there's decent evidence that one's political leanings may also influenced by brain structure:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/853648.The_Political_Bra...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)
However, he has really lost me in recent months. His administration spent so long trying to deny that inflation even existed, all while pushing for a gargantuan spending package. WTF? Then all this hyperbolic crap about Jan 6 started getting pushed, with the VP comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Extremely disrespectful, in my opinion. And finally, the nail in the coffin was this Voter ID nonsense. I absolutely support Voter ID, it seems like a common sense policy. And I don't support giving illegal immigrants the right to vote, like they did in NYC. But according to Biden, this makes me a racist who is on the side of Jefferson Davis. Are you freaking serious!? My response to Biden is - go fuck yourself, asshole.
In summary, he has disappointed me in many ways. The left hasn't calmed down in the slightest, and cancel culture is at an all time high. Inflation is spiking and people like me may never get to own a house. Biden is too busy calling us racists to have any chance at uniting the country. And covid is at an all time high.
Very disappointing, and I hope someone more moderate runs in 2024 for BOTH sides. Trump and Biden are clearly a bunch of old curmudgeons who can't unite shit. Let's get some moderates in there, like Manchin or Romney.
Except they didn't. They changed the law to let legal immigrants vote.
Honestly, this lack of ability demonstrated in your comment nullifies most of the ranting you have built up afterwards. I suggest you seriously examine how much of a "pressure head" of resentment you have built up based on these equivalents of software bugs. Running a linter over your other assumptions might also help a bit.
I'll give you a suggestion too - if you want to win independent votes, then stop insulting independents.
I'm suggesting that you be properly informed about things that are influencing your voting. If you're irritated about the NYC law, it seems prudent to get the basic facts right about it before drawing a conclusion.
> I'll give you a suggestion too - if you want to win independent votes, then stop insulting independents.
I don't want to win anything; and I'm not part of any political campaign. I elect representatives who I generally agree with, and leave things in their hands.
If you generally want to vote to take the country in a good direction, I suggest you vote based on a complete understanding that's not influenced by loud-voiced commentators. Alternately, you can choose to be a low-information voter whose vote is easily "won" by some random person posting lies on the Internet, in which case elections turn into more of a shouting match about how much you can smear the other candidate and less about pertinent issues.
If you are wrong about one of your assumptions, it's possible you're wrong about others as well. I'm trying not to say what those are; because that just leads to more nitpicking and arguments – things that we already have way too much of on the Internet.
In summary: "Do your research before voting" is my nonpartisan and hopefully reasonable suggestion. I'm sorry it's coming across as disrespectful.
Just to clarify, that law only gave tax paying legal immigrants the right to vote in local elections. No taxation without representation used to be an American principle.
How do you classify a non-citizen Green Card holder? Or someone here on a work visa? Legal immigrants usually don't start out as citizens from the moment they arrive. Obtaining citizenship is a long process. In the meantime they are still residents, and taxpayers, and ought to have a say in decisions which will affect them.
No, noncitizens include nonimmigrants in legal status and aliens in illegal status.
> I assume legal-immigrant means one has obtained citizenship.
No, it does not. In US law an “immigrant” is an alien present in the US other than one legally admitted under a designated nonimmigrant status.
A citizen is just a citizen.
I think the confusion is around the term "immigrant". I agree that immigration implies a permanent move - i.e. you become a citizen of where you are immigrating to. However, I think most people (and media) use "immigrant" as a catch-all for someone who currently lives in country X but was not born there.
How can people not understand the reaction of moderates and independents? Perhaps they are watching propaganda that masquerades as news. The next few years will be confusing times for many. The pendulum swings as they say.
A practical example, given in good faith: It may be that in their "random telephone sampling" they are only connecting with older people (who are usually more likely to answer calls from an unknown number), leading to unintentional selection bias. In this example, the confounding factor is age, and as such the gallop graphs could be simply showing that younger (ostensibly left-leaning) people are growing less willing to answer the phone (as opposed to the claim that Americans are moving right, idiologically)
There was a lot of 'even though polls predict a certain someone is going to lose, he might still win because voters are "shy"' copy written going into 2020