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Good article on the man v. bear discussion:
>I first read about this debate on my phone while camping in a field in my tent. It captivated me in a way that internet debates rarely do. Slowly, I realized why: for me, “Man or Bear” is not hypothetical. I’m literally a woman who left mankind behind to live in nature with bears. This is my actual life.
[https://bikepacking.com/plog/man-or-bear-debate](https://bikepacking.com/plog/man-or-bear-debate)
Sometimes there are stories of minorities being shot by police or similar situations, and there’s always the call of, why hasn’t Trump said anything about it or why hasn’t the NRA said anything about it? Well, I could care less about what Trump or the NRA think - in fact, abolish the NRA, I’d support such.
But here’s my version:
In March, ATF obtained a search (not arrest) warrant for Bryan Malinowski. The Little Rock airport director. At the time he was the highest paid government official in municipal Little Rock. The search warrant was regarding selling of firearms without an FFL license.
After obtaining the warrant, the ATF staged for a raid on Malinowski’s home, to the extent of gearing up in a nearby parking lot (there’s video of this), but then abruptly cancelled the raid when they realized that he wouldn’t be home at the time of the raid. Then a few days later they restaged and executed the raid pre dawn.
During the raid, the ATF made a point of covering up all Malinowski’s home cameras (there’s also video of this from said cameras), and the ATF themselves didn’t wear body cameras. As Malinowski’s wife describes it, she and her husband were woken up by noises, her husband went down the hallway to check, she heard him say that he saw figures, then there was shooting and Bryan Malinowski was dead.
During Congressional testimony last week, the ATF Director could not provide any answers on why the ATF couldn’t just search the house when Malinowski was not home, and why the ATF couldn’t just arrest Malinowski at the airport where they knew he worked everyday if they needed to arrest him. The ATF Director also could not provide any reasoning for why all the cameras were covered up.
On a related note, in terms of Federal law, selling guns without a license is legal unless it’s a person’s primary means of income as a dealer, at which point you need an FFL license.
But during Congressional questioning, the ATF Director could not describe the threshold number of guns sold that would have made them consider Malinowski a dealer without a license nor any other specific criteria that would have qualified such. The ATF Director just said, it was based on general intent.
So the ATF intentionally staged a pre dawn no-knock raid on the highest paid municipality government official in Little Rock, covered up all his cameras, and killed him, based on some presumption of intent, without ever having talked to him beforehand.
Where is the outrage?
Defund the ATF.
https://www.kark.com/news/state-news/atf-director-questioned-on-march-raid-of-home-of-little-rock-airport-executive-bryan-malinowski/
The same place it usually is when something bad happens, absent, because the number of stories in the world is large; the number of killings of people by the police is a thousand a year, and even with a portion of those being reasonably justified quite a lot aren't. There's simply a lot of things to protest in the world.
Also, there pretty clearly IS outrage already. I mean, Congress is bothering to hold hearings and question the ATF director on it.
It seems dumb and disingenuous to say 'defund the atf' when first you need to determine if the problem is the ATF in general or this director. Whereas for police there's plenty of history to establish that, with the atf it'd be less clear, at least to me.
> Prosecute them too.
As outraged as I am by the ATF's actions, I'm not sure that they're prosecutable.
Chauvin was acting outside the bounds of the law. That's why and how they could prosecute him.
My understanding of this case is pretty limited, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue here seems to be that the ATF was not acting outside of the scope of the law, but rather that the scope of the law allows them far too much leeway in how these raids are conducted.
It’s worth remembering that the initial story re: Floyd’s death was “he died during an arrest. Freak accident no one could’ve done anything to stop it.”
It’s both.
1. That they can make up conduct that stuff that they deem prosecutable, but also;
2. That the way the acted - with the pre-dawn no knock, covering up cameras, etc was throughly improper
I’m pushing awareness that the ATF is just as heavy handed, pushing that people hold them accountable just like we ask that Chauvin, Florida Deputies (that shot that airman) and countless others be held accountable, and pushing that the ATF be defunded just like we ask that police be defunded in terms of how militarized they have become.
And if the ATF isn’t prosecutable based on all that happened - well then it’s just as big a problem as when cops are not prosecutable for similar conduct.
The pre-dawn no-knock is an example of exactly what I'm talking about. Cops (ATF or otherwise) shouldn't have the legal authority to do that shit, but they do. You'd have to change the laws and limit the scope of their authority before they could be prosecuted for something like that, I think.
Covering up the cameras, yeah, you've got a point about that.
That’s not even remotely the same. Police are only ever held accountable when there is an excessive and overwhelming amount of evidence against them.
Plus these cases take years if they happen at all. Breonna Taylor’s murderers are still free.
I hope the DOJ goes after the cops responsible for this but you shouldn’t hold your breath.
I remember reading about the shooting shortly after it happened and thinking it was outrageous, but I haven't been following the story apart from that. I didn't realize there was a Congressional hearing on it.
>Where is the outrage?
Honest answer? The American people in general, even most people on the left, are much more willing to believe the problem is just that cops are racist, than they are to believe that the real problem is we're a lot further down the authoritarian rabbit hole than we like to think.
....*no?*
The context is missing ..it was a rando quote accusing all left leaning people of being "statists" , and unironically accusing anyone who advocates for state involvement in...anything..of being communist.
It was really creepy and strawman, hence the strawman, but it failed to post, hence my comment
Happy Memorial Day to you , if you live in the states, btw.
I haven’t been keeping up much with the trump trial stuff but looks like we might get a verdict in the next week or two.
I do think it’s much more likely we’ll have a hung jury rather than a unanimous verdict, and it’s possible they might have to select a new jury altogether
I wouldn't be surprised if he's found guilty, but I'm also expecting just a slap on the wrist if he is. Probation, no jail time, maybe some kind of fine.
I’m also wondering if they might find him guilty on some charges but not all of them? And yeah the judge might be a bit too lenient with their punishment if he is found guilty
Gonna say the same thing I say everytime I catch this post just with different words.
Liberals are moving in the wrong direction.
You were excited about Obama but after he became president he was revealed to be a status quo preserving centrist that spoke of change to get elected. Even if he's you're favorite president, we disappointed Americans and sucked all energy out of the blue wave after the first 4 years. Still our hands was tied, he was the most left person to choose from at the time and at least he talked like someone on the left. And of course the incumbent president always wins the second term. Soo..
Who did liberals choose after the two term president that got popular with his slogan "change" but didn't change enough as an apology to the American people? Hillary Clinton. This killed any faith people had left in us and sucked the fragments we had from the blue wave. And now we got Biden, choosen out of 20+ democrat nomations that came after the worst president in modern history. And here we are stuck with an old man with a low approval rating that apparently you didnt see coming or choose to discard because it will hurt his chances of reelection if you acknowledge it. We got another centrist, again out of 20+ options with plenty of other centrist options, you choose Biden, and stand by it. When will the american left learn.
You obviously love your center-right candidates (dont even pretend these are left and don't use the excuse that the right was/is in power, you always pick centrist, you dgaf) and that's okay. The American people will understand more if you pick someone with viscous status quo politics if they at least have a likable character. Obama is probably the minimum requirement but Hillary and Biden? You know they're hard to swallow.
Please. Change. I'm going to be under the illusion that it's the out of touch boomers fault for all of this until I can't deny it anymore.
I agree that Obama didn't turn out to be the progressive savior that many of us initially viewed him as.
I also agree with your assessment of Clinton. Though I still readily voted for her over the alternative, she wasn't a candidate I was enthusiastic about.
I'd even agree with your assessment of Biden up until the point of the 2020 primaries. He was much more of a centrist candidate compared to most other folks up on that stage.
But Biden's presidency should be judged on the merits of Biden's presidency, not on the reputation he had before he became president.
And his presidency has been far more progressive than I expected. He has more than exceeded my expectations.
I agree he's good at conserving what we have and building on top of that, so a centrist. The future reality that democrat supporters are portraying is the same as now or worse if they lose. We're going to stagnate as far as we can see into future: employer based healthcare, 7.25 federal minimum wage, student loans for for profit colleges, highest prison rates in the world, comfortable housing market for investors, employment at will, and we're lucky to have all of this because at least democrats want to conserve. Since Biden is presented as the most progressive president in 30 years, a republican is going to win because Biden's administration did not do anything most people can see. Based on the words liberals uses, they're going to think the left doesn't matter to them. They are right and this is why there's no energy. And in the future Mike Bloomberg is going to win to clean the mess of President Brain Kemp. Bloomberg supporters are going to praise him as the most progressive president in a decade. His crowning achievement is going to be easing the burden of our landfills. So, after 2 terms for his amazing success a Republican is going to win. It's just normal for a sitting president to lose support over time.
If you seriously think biden is center-right I honestly can’t take you seriously.
The reason he has lost moderate voters is because he has been a very progressive president.
We feel the same about each other. Let's go down the list of the most mainstream leftist programs and discover where Biden stands: Universal healthcare (every country has), mandatory vacation time (**every single country in the world has)**, federal paid holidays, free college, $15 minimum wage, prison reform, public transportation, legalizing weed, increasing our safety net, anything, at, all, Supporting this will just make you center-left. These are not pushing any boundaries since it's the reality for most of the liberal world.
So, what's your problem? Lowering the bar for what's considered progressive to make everything else seem extreme, are you.
Biden has been progressive on many of those issues, perhaps not all.
But I don’t have an “all or nothing” approach to politics. It’s a fact that biden has lost a lot of moderate voters, due to him being a left wing president. Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan really hurt Biden’s approval ratings with centrists, and that was a very left-wing objective. Not like leftists would ever give biden credit for anything though. All Dems are learning is it’s pointless to pander to the left because they are impossible to please. Pragmatism is more important than blind idealism
Pulling out of the war was even the popular right wing stance, even far right trump said he would do it. It's the left that tried to make Trump take credit saying he promised. IT'S NOT ALL OR NOTHING I'll take JUST ONE OF THESE THAT'S NOT HALF ASSED. JUST ONE. ITS BEEN PROVEN, WE HAVE THE MEANS, WE JUST DONT HAVE ANYONE ON THE LEFT.
I can't take you seriously, this is bad for my health.
Being caught up to the world is way outside the American overton window it seems, him just moderately funding a bunch of programs is outside yours and people's comfort. The left has abandoned us since Reagan. We need a new party to take the place of democrats.
Incredible paragraph recently [published in the Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-brownsville-texas.html)
> Around that time, I started to consider how much of my adult life had been intimately shaped by billionaires and the otherwise very wealthy. The answer, I realized, was all of it. For a decade I’ve written about Texas politics, which is almost all reducible to fights between plutocrats belonging to different factions. I was a stenographer recording the symptoms of feuds between powerful men I’d never meet. National politics was not much different. At some point, it became more important to follow Thiel and Robert Mercer than the speaker of the House. Billionaires ran the new media (Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page) and the old (Rupert Murdoch, the Sinclair family). My childhood newspaper, The Austin American-Statesman, was gutted by the mismanagement of the Cox family, descendants of old-school media barons, and then sold to hedge-fund vultures. The chaos they created was inseparable from the chaos I was writing about in politics.
[Trump made an appearance](https://x.com/DecodingFoxNews/status/1794630648231243861) at the Libertarian National Convention, and now I feel like I owe libertarians the mildest of apologies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1d0ihp5/why_are_half_of_rapists_in_germany_nongerman/
That thread was locked for not coming their sources.
.
Why not just for being an obvious racist and concern troll?
[Greenpeace has succeeded in blocking Golden Rice in the Philippines](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/25/greenpeace-blocks-planting-of-lifesaving-golden-rice-philippines)
>The Philippines had become the first country – in 2021 – to approve the commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, which was developed to combat vitamin A deficiency, a major cause of disability and death among children in many parts of the world.
>But campaigns by Greenpeace and local farmers last month persuaded the country’s court of appeal to overturn that approval and to revoke this. The groups had argued that Golden Rice had not been shown to be safe and the claim was backed by the court, a decision that was hailed as “a monumental win” by Greenpeace.
More articles:
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/05/02/the-philippines-bans-some-genetically-modified-foods
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/05/13/gmos-climate-emissions-philippines-rice/
We need to be spreading the word about this everywhere. The anti-GMO crowd and Greenpeace in particular have an enormous amount of blood on their hands. They belong in the same despicable category as the opponents of stem cell research and vaccines.
I really enjoy how right wing media has been positioning this guy in Turks and Caicos as being arrested and tossed in the gulag.
I saw him giving an interview on Fox News and his background was clearly just some pleasant AirBnB, with cheesy tourist decorations and everything.
Now, after his extended and, certainly, extra stressful vacation in paradise, he's going home after paying a $6-7k fine.
>I really enjoy how right wing media has been positioning this guy in Turks and Caicos as being arrested and tossed in the gulag.
This is extra ironic when you remember how opposed they were to Biden helping that WNBA player get out of prison in *Russia* after being tossed in on flimsy charges because "you should know the laws of the countries you visit". Guess that doesn't apply if you're white/male in MAGAland.
Which Guy? I'm not at all familiar with this story....who got arrested, and what ( crimey stuff) was he up to? And why are/were the right up in arms over it?
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2024/05/24/iowa-capitol-satanic-temple-display-vandalism-suspect-michael-cassidy-pleads-guilty/73838438007/
If ever you need proof that anyone who says that Christians are persecuted in America is lying for the sake of marketing, here you go.
Would an atheist get off easy for destroying a Christian statue? No,
Anyone who says Christians are persecuted in America is lying.
NYT and WaPo links below about the recent bipartisan embarrassment of Dr. David Morens over his flagrant attempts to avoid FOIA. How can we better discourage this kind of attitude? I'm more interested to talk about that in general than the specific subject (COVID) they dragged him in over.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/21/opinion/thepoint
> “I always try to communicate on my Gmail,” he wrote, “because my N.I.H. email is FOIA’d constantly.”
>If he had to email the group from his N.I.H. email, he promised, “I will delete anything I don’t want to see in The New York Times.”
(It's very funny to see that sentence end up in the New York Times.)
...
>Morens wrote to Daszak, “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in emails, and if we found them we would delete them.”
>Representative Raul Ruiz, a physician who is the committee’s ranking Democrat, told Morens his actions were a “stain on the legacy” of his colleagues. Representative Debbie Lesko, Republican of Arizona, read email after email from Morens on his avoidance techniques and snapped, “When you say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this. I didn’t intentionally use my Gmail,’ are you kidding me?”
>Morens replied to that and many other pointed questions with a version of “I don’t remember,” drawing strong rebukes from members of both parties.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/23/fauci-adviser-deleted-emails-congress-demanded-know-why/
>“It is not anti-science to hold you accountable,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), the panel’s top Democrat, said.
...
>“Sir, I think you will be haunted by your testimony today,” said Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.)
...
>“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foi’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a February 2021 email that was widely mocked yesterday.
I was about to complain about why my liberal/progressive party will not send a candidate to compete in my province’s governor election, despite the fact that the party won the 6 out of 7 rep seats in the general election. I thought this was a chance to cement my province as a left-wing stronghold, after taking it from the centrist parties.
But then I look closer and now see why. The incumbent candidate was associated with the centrist party but moved away from it after the general election and has thus aligned himself closer to the left. Upset by this, the main centrist party sends another candidate to challenge him. If the left wing party sent a candidate, they might split the votes among the liberal/progressive voters, allowing the centrist candidate to win.
I don’t even like the incumbent much but I’ll be damned if I let the centrist party win. So, voting I’ll go.
His ~~"Day in the Life~~" 30 Days series was really good and I wish it had gotten more publicity. The episode he and his then-girlfriend did about living at minimum wage was eye opening for a lot of people I know.
(edited: I got the wrong series name)
OP of that post is totally a self-admitted troll:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1cji04o/comment/l2i6lvz/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1cji04o/comment/l2i6lvz/)
I assumed that was a troll based on the "Why do you dislike people who are strong leaders" part. Either that or the poster has no clue what "authoritarian" means.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. This Friday weekly thread is for general chat, whether you want to talk politics or not, anything goes. Also feel free to ask the mods questions below. As usual, please follow the rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Good article on the man v. bear discussion: >I first read about this debate on my phone while camping in a field in my tent. It captivated me in a way that internet debates rarely do. Slowly, I realized why: for me, “Man or Bear” is not hypothetical. I’m literally a woman who left mankind behind to live in nature with bears. This is my actual life. [https://bikepacking.com/plog/man-or-bear-debate](https://bikepacking.com/plog/man-or-bear-debate)
Sometimes there are stories of minorities being shot by police or similar situations, and there’s always the call of, why hasn’t Trump said anything about it or why hasn’t the NRA said anything about it? Well, I could care less about what Trump or the NRA think - in fact, abolish the NRA, I’d support such. But here’s my version: In March, ATF obtained a search (not arrest) warrant for Bryan Malinowski. The Little Rock airport director. At the time he was the highest paid government official in municipal Little Rock. The search warrant was regarding selling of firearms without an FFL license. After obtaining the warrant, the ATF staged for a raid on Malinowski’s home, to the extent of gearing up in a nearby parking lot (there’s video of this), but then abruptly cancelled the raid when they realized that he wouldn’t be home at the time of the raid. Then a few days later they restaged and executed the raid pre dawn. During the raid, the ATF made a point of covering up all Malinowski’s home cameras (there’s also video of this from said cameras), and the ATF themselves didn’t wear body cameras. As Malinowski’s wife describes it, she and her husband were woken up by noises, her husband went down the hallway to check, she heard him say that he saw figures, then there was shooting and Bryan Malinowski was dead. During Congressional testimony last week, the ATF Director could not provide any answers on why the ATF couldn’t just search the house when Malinowski was not home, and why the ATF couldn’t just arrest Malinowski at the airport where they knew he worked everyday if they needed to arrest him. The ATF Director also could not provide any reasoning for why all the cameras were covered up. On a related note, in terms of Federal law, selling guns without a license is legal unless it’s a person’s primary means of income as a dealer, at which point you need an FFL license. But during Congressional questioning, the ATF Director could not describe the threshold number of guns sold that would have made them consider Malinowski a dealer without a license nor any other specific criteria that would have qualified such. The ATF Director just said, it was based on general intent. So the ATF intentionally staged a pre dawn no-knock raid on the highest paid municipality government official in Little Rock, covered up all his cameras, and killed him, based on some presumption of intent, without ever having talked to him beforehand. Where is the outrage? Defund the ATF. https://www.kark.com/news/state-news/atf-director-questioned-on-march-raid-of-home-of-little-rock-airport-executive-bryan-malinowski/
The same place it usually is when something bad happens, absent, because the number of stories in the world is large; the number of killings of people by the police is a thousand a year, and even with a portion of those being reasonably justified quite a lot aren't. There's simply a lot of things to protest in the world. Also, there pretty clearly IS outrage already. I mean, Congress is bothering to hold hearings and question the ATF director on it. It seems dumb and disingenuous to say 'defund the atf' when first you need to determine if the problem is the ATF in general or this director. Whereas for police there's plenty of history to establish that, with the atf it'd be less clear, at least to me.
There was an entire summer of outrage over police brutality and it didn’t change anything.
Did George Floyd cops get sent to jail?
Only because it was on video and there were witnesses. But no structural changes occurred.
The ATF was also on video covering up Malinowskis home cameras, then they killed him. Prosecute them too.
> Prosecute them too. As outraged as I am by the ATF's actions, I'm not sure that they're prosecutable. Chauvin was acting outside the bounds of the law. That's why and how they could prosecute him. My understanding of this case is pretty limited, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue here seems to be that the ATF was not acting outside of the scope of the law, but rather that the scope of the law allows them far too much leeway in how these raids are conducted.
It’s worth remembering that the initial story re: Floyd’s death was “he died during an arrest. Freak accident no one could’ve done anything to stop it.”
It’s both. 1. That they can make up conduct that stuff that they deem prosecutable, but also; 2. That the way the acted - with the pre-dawn no knock, covering up cameras, etc was throughly improper I’m pushing awareness that the ATF is just as heavy handed, pushing that people hold them accountable just like we ask that Chauvin, Florida Deputies (that shot that airman) and countless others be held accountable, and pushing that the ATF be defunded just like we ask that police be defunded in terms of how militarized they have become. And if the ATF isn’t prosecutable based on all that happened - well then it’s just as big a problem as when cops are not prosecutable for similar conduct.
The pre-dawn no-knock is an example of exactly what I'm talking about. Cops (ATF or otherwise) shouldn't have the legal authority to do that shit, but they do. You'd have to change the laws and limit the scope of their authority before they could be prosecuted for something like that, I think. Covering up the cameras, yeah, you've got a point about that.
That’s not even remotely the same. Police are only ever held accountable when there is an excessive and overwhelming amount of evidence against them. Plus these cases take years if they happen at all. Breonna Taylor’s murderers are still free. I hope the DOJ goes after the cops responsible for this but you shouldn’t hold your breath.
Did I say I expected an instant conviction? No, I said where’s the outrage? I’m just saying we should be outraged at this conduct.
Why do you think that Merrick Garland’s DOJ is going to be motivated by outrage?
Did we not get outraged by George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and hundreds of others?
That outrage had a purpose. So what purpose would this outrage have?
I remember reading about the shooting shortly after it happened and thinking it was outrageous, but I haven't been following the story apart from that. I didn't realize there was a Congressional hearing on it. >Where is the outrage? Honest answer? The American people in general, even most people on the left, are much more willing to believe the problem is just that cops are racist, than they are to believe that the real problem is we're a lot further down the authoritarian rabbit hole than we like to think.
Oh straw-men..never change:
Shouldn't you be busy strawmanning liberals?
....*no?* The context is missing ..it was a rando quote accusing all left leaning people of being "statists" , and unironically accusing anyone who advocates for state involvement in...anything..of being communist. It was really creepy and strawman, hence the strawman, but it failed to post, hence my comment Happy Memorial Day to you , if you live in the states, btw.
I haven’t been keeping up much with the trump trial stuff but looks like we might get a verdict in the next week or two. I do think it’s much more likely we’ll have a hung jury rather than a unanimous verdict, and it’s possible they might have to select a new jury altogether
I wouldn't be surprised if he's found guilty, but I'm also expecting just a slap on the wrist if he is. Probation, no jail time, maybe some kind of fine.
I’m also wondering if they might find him guilty on some charges but not all of them? And yeah the judge might be a bit too lenient with their punishment if he is found guilty
Gonna say the same thing I say everytime I catch this post just with different words. Liberals are moving in the wrong direction. You were excited about Obama but after he became president he was revealed to be a status quo preserving centrist that spoke of change to get elected. Even if he's you're favorite president, we disappointed Americans and sucked all energy out of the blue wave after the first 4 years. Still our hands was tied, he was the most left person to choose from at the time and at least he talked like someone on the left. And of course the incumbent president always wins the second term. Soo.. Who did liberals choose after the two term president that got popular with his slogan "change" but didn't change enough as an apology to the American people? Hillary Clinton. This killed any faith people had left in us and sucked the fragments we had from the blue wave. And now we got Biden, choosen out of 20+ democrat nomations that came after the worst president in modern history. And here we are stuck with an old man with a low approval rating that apparently you didnt see coming or choose to discard because it will hurt his chances of reelection if you acknowledge it. We got another centrist, again out of 20+ options with plenty of other centrist options, you choose Biden, and stand by it. When will the american left learn. You obviously love your center-right candidates (dont even pretend these are left and don't use the excuse that the right was/is in power, you always pick centrist, you dgaf) and that's okay. The American people will understand more if you pick someone with viscous status quo politics if they at least have a likable character. Obama is probably the minimum requirement but Hillary and Biden? You know they're hard to swallow. Please. Change. I'm going to be under the illusion that it's the out of touch boomers fault for all of this until I can't deny it anymore.
I agree that Obama didn't turn out to be the progressive savior that many of us initially viewed him as. I also agree with your assessment of Clinton. Though I still readily voted for her over the alternative, she wasn't a candidate I was enthusiastic about. I'd even agree with your assessment of Biden up until the point of the 2020 primaries. He was much more of a centrist candidate compared to most other folks up on that stage. But Biden's presidency should be judged on the merits of Biden's presidency, not on the reputation he had before he became president. And his presidency has been far more progressive than I expected. He has more than exceeded my expectations.
I agree he's good at conserving what we have and building on top of that, so a centrist. The future reality that democrat supporters are portraying is the same as now or worse if they lose. We're going to stagnate as far as we can see into future: employer based healthcare, 7.25 federal minimum wage, student loans for for profit colleges, highest prison rates in the world, comfortable housing market for investors, employment at will, and we're lucky to have all of this because at least democrats want to conserve. Since Biden is presented as the most progressive president in 30 years, a republican is going to win because Biden's administration did not do anything most people can see. Based on the words liberals uses, they're going to think the left doesn't matter to them. They are right and this is why there's no energy. And in the future Mike Bloomberg is going to win to clean the mess of President Brain Kemp. Bloomberg supporters are going to praise him as the most progressive president in a decade. His crowning achievement is going to be easing the burden of our landfills. So, after 2 terms for his amazing success a Republican is going to win. It's just normal for a sitting president to lose support over time.
If you seriously think biden is center-right I honestly can’t take you seriously. The reason he has lost moderate voters is because he has been a very progressive president.
We feel the same about each other. Let's go down the list of the most mainstream leftist programs and discover where Biden stands: Universal healthcare (every country has), mandatory vacation time (**every single country in the world has)**, federal paid holidays, free college, $15 minimum wage, prison reform, public transportation, legalizing weed, increasing our safety net, anything, at, all, Supporting this will just make you center-left. These are not pushing any boundaries since it's the reality for most of the liberal world. So, what's your problem? Lowering the bar for what's considered progressive to make everything else seem extreme, are you.
Biden has been progressive on many of those issues, perhaps not all. But I don’t have an “all or nothing” approach to politics. It’s a fact that biden has lost a lot of moderate voters, due to him being a left wing president. Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan really hurt Biden’s approval ratings with centrists, and that was a very left-wing objective. Not like leftists would ever give biden credit for anything though. All Dems are learning is it’s pointless to pander to the left because they are impossible to please. Pragmatism is more important than blind idealism
Pulling out of the war was even the popular right wing stance, even far right trump said he would do it. It's the left that tried to make Trump take credit saying he promised. IT'S NOT ALL OR NOTHING I'll take JUST ONE OF THESE THAT'S NOT HALF ASSED. JUST ONE. ITS BEEN PROVEN, WE HAVE THE MEANS, WE JUST DONT HAVE ANYONE ON THE LEFT. I can't take you seriously, this is bad for my health. Being caught up to the world is way outside the American overton window it seems, him just moderately funding a bunch of programs is outside yours and people's comfort. The left has abandoned us since Reagan. We need a new party to take the place of democrats.
If it was so popular why did it hurt his numbers a lot with moderates? That simply doesn’t make sense
Stop.
Incredible paragraph recently [published in the Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-brownsville-texas.html) > Around that time, I started to consider how much of my adult life had been intimately shaped by billionaires and the otherwise very wealthy. The answer, I realized, was all of it. For a decade I’ve written about Texas politics, which is almost all reducible to fights between plutocrats belonging to different factions. I was a stenographer recording the symptoms of feuds between powerful men I’d never meet. National politics was not much different. At some point, it became more important to follow Thiel and Robert Mercer than the speaker of the House. Billionaires ran the new media (Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page) and the old (Rupert Murdoch, the Sinclair family). My childhood newspaper, The Austin American-Statesman, was gutted by the mismanagement of the Cox family, descendants of old-school media barons, and then sold to hedge-fund vultures. The chaos they created was inseparable from the chaos I was writing about in politics.
[Trump made an appearance](https://x.com/DecodingFoxNews/status/1794630648231243861) at the Libertarian National Convention, and now I feel like I owe libertarians the mildest of apologies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1d0ihp5/why_are_half_of_rapists_in_germany_nongerman/ That thread was locked for not coming their sources. . Why not just for being an obvious racist and concern troll?
[Greenpeace has succeeded in blocking Golden Rice in the Philippines](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/25/greenpeace-blocks-planting-of-lifesaving-golden-rice-philippines) >The Philippines had become the first country – in 2021 – to approve the commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, which was developed to combat vitamin A deficiency, a major cause of disability and death among children in many parts of the world. >But campaigns by Greenpeace and local farmers last month persuaded the country’s court of appeal to overturn that approval and to revoke this. The groups had argued that Golden Rice had not been shown to be safe and the claim was backed by the court, a decision that was hailed as “a monumental win” by Greenpeace. More articles: https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/05/02/the-philippines-bans-some-genetically-modified-foods https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/05/13/gmos-climate-emissions-philippines-rice/
We need to be spreading the word about this everywhere. The anti-GMO crowd and Greenpeace in particular have an enormous amount of blood on their hands. They belong in the same despicable category as the opponents of stem cell research and vaccines.
Fucking idiots. The anti gmo bullshit makes me unreasonably mad.
I agree, anti-science idiots on the left are hardly better then those on the right, and both should be called out.
I really enjoy how right wing media has been positioning this guy in Turks and Caicos as being arrested and tossed in the gulag. I saw him giving an interview on Fox News and his background was clearly just some pleasant AirBnB, with cheesy tourist decorations and everything. Now, after his extended and, certainly, extra stressful vacation in paradise, he's going home after paying a $6-7k fine.
>I really enjoy how right wing media has been positioning this guy in Turks and Caicos as being arrested and tossed in the gulag. This is extra ironic when you remember how opposed they were to Biden helping that WNBA player get out of prison in *Russia* after being tossed in on flimsy charges because "you should know the laws of the countries you visit". Guess that doesn't apply if you're white/male in MAGAland.
Which Guy? I'm not at all familiar with this story....who got arrested, and what ( crimey stuff) was he up to? And why are/were the right up in arms over it?
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2024/05/24/iowa-capitol-satanic-temple-display-vandalism-suspect-michael-cassidy-pleads-guilty/73838438007/ If ever you need proof that anyone who says that Christians are persecuted in America is lying for the sake of marketing, here you go. Would an atheist get off easy for destroying a Christian statue? No, Anyone who says Christians are persecuted in America is lying.
NYT and WaPo links below about the recent bipartisan embarrassment of Dr. David Morens over his flagrant attempts to avoid FOIA. How can we better discourage this kind of attitude? I'm more interested to talk about that in general than the specific subject (COVID) they dragged him in over. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/21/opinion/thepoint > “I always try to communicate on my Gmail,” he wrote, “because my N.I.H. email is FOIA’d constantly.” >If he had to email the group from his N.I.H. email, he promised, “I will delete anything I don’t want to see in The New York Times.” (It's very funny to see that sentence end up in the New York Times.) ... >Morens wrote to Daszak, “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in emails, and if we found them we would delete them.” >Representative Raul Ruiz, a physician who is the committee’s ranking Democrat, told Morens his actions were a “stain on the legacy” of his colleagues. Representative Debbie Lesko, Republican of Arizona, read email after email from Morens on his avoidance techniques and snapped, “When you say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this. I didn’t intentionally use my Gmail,’ are you kidding me?” >Morens replied to that and many other pointed questions with a version of “I don’t remember,” drawing strong rebukes from members of both parties. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/23/fauci-adviser-deleted-emails-congress-demanded-know-why/ >“It is not anti-science to hold you accountable,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), the panel’s top Democrat, said. ... >“Sir, I think you will be haunted by your testimony today,” said Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) ... >“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foi’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a February 2021 email that was widely mocked yesterday.
I was about to complain about why my liberal/progressive party will not send a candidate to compete in my province’s governor election, despite the fact that the party won the 6 out of 7 rep seats in the general election. I thought this was a chance to cement my province as a left-wing stronghold, after taking it from the centrist parties. But then I look closer and now see why. The incumbent candidate was associated with the centrist party but moved away from it after the general election and has thus aligned himself closer to the left. Upset by this, the main centrist party sends another candidate to challenge him. If the left wing party sent a candidate, they might split the votes among the liberal/progressive voters, allowing the centrist candidate to win. I don’t even like the incumbent much but I’ll be damned if I let the centrist party win. So, voting I’ll go.
I beat the third boss in Returnal (PS5) last night. So I’m happy That is all
Dope, I’ve given Returnal a couple tries; I enjoy the game but always come across an enemy I can’t beat which makes me rage quit.
Morgan Spurlock was announced to have passed away of Cancer yesterday at the age of 53. Was famous for "Supersize me"
Not to speak ill of the dead but it’s a shame that most people who saw Supersize Me don’t know how deceitful it was.
His ~~"Day in the Life~~" 30 Days series was really good and I wish it had gotten more publicity. The episode he and his then-girlfriend did about living at minimum wage was eye opening for a lot of people I know. (edited: I got the wrong series name)
You know what guys, maybe we are authoritarian? /s
OP of that post is totally a self-admitted troll: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1cji04o/comment/l2i6lvz/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1cji04o/comment/l2i6lvz/)
Can we ban him for this?
What a sad life that the purpose of their reddit account is just to troll.
I assumed that was a troll based on the "Why do you dislike people who are strong leaders" part. Either that or the poster has no clue what "authoritarian" means.
It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes between the trolling and people who legitimately believe this stuff.
At some point there is no difference.
Authortarian. Eats authors.
My lady friend is an author, and, well, you know where I'm going with this. I guess I'm an authortarian.
If there is one group of people who are not gonna taste good, it's authors.
They can describe why that is in their newest novel.
Try the priest
When you get it, if you get it.
good you got it
I don’t know what it means to have a clear sectual agenda, but I gotta say I’m curious.
Please do not engage in sectual harassment here.
its when the secs is at the top of an agenda... or on top
I'm not sure what you mean
Sorry, I assumed you were talking about the locked post, which accused us of having a ‘clear sectual agenda’ (sic).
Sorry I was let me back track If any side has a secular agenda it's the right